There are five people in my family, my siblings. All five of us, with our spouses, got together today for lunch and had a wonderful time. We talked about our kids and grandkids, and I got lost in the conversation—too many names to keep track of. The five of us have 24 kids, and they are all married, with 92 grandkids and four great-grandkids. That is a total of 149 names. That is a lot of people for an old guy like me to remember. Anyway, the ladies had a good time talking about kids and grandkids, and we guys talked about an assortment of other things.

In the Bible, several chapters are just genealogies: Adam begot Seth, Seth begot Enosh, and so on. It is boring reading unless you are studying about a person and his family. When they were young, one of our kids was reading through one of the sets of genealogies, and they asked me why God put all those names in the Bible. I wasn’t sure what to answer, so I said, “Because families are important to God.”

Years ago, Edith Schaeffer wrote a classic book called “The Family.” she talked about the power of a close family to positively shape each life and the destructive power of a dysfunctional family to mess up a person’s life. Tonight, as I sat reviewing the day, I thanked the Lord for the great family I grew up in and how important those years were in making me who I am today.

God brings many people out of dysfunctional families, makes great servants of God out of them, and does amazing things through them, but they are the minority. Most of the champions of God were shaped by the love, unity, and health of a godly family.

All that is to say, be a positive force in your family, immediate and extended. Families are the environment that God uses to raise up His champions.