Don’t Ignore What’s Happening At Home

But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever. – 1 Timothy 5:8 
 
When you study David’s life, you realize that what God needed David to do before he died wasn’t to build a temple for the Lord, as we’ve talked about over the past few days. But the Lord wanted David to rebuild and fix his own house.  
 
You see, David has a son named Amnon who raped his sister Tamar. Their brother Absalom kills Amnon in revenge. And then to make matters worse, David’s son Absalom plots to kill David and usurp the throne. Clearly David has some major issues in his house. So God was basically saying, “How are you going to build a house for me when your own house is in disorder?”  
 
We can put two and two together and realize that if David had become consumed with building a temple, then he would have used his busyness as an excuse to avoid addressing the issues he had at home.  
 
Sadly, there are a lot of people who do that. They get involved in church work, or other extracurricular activities, to avoid working on the issues they have going on at home. But let’s not forget that after our relationship with the Lord, our family and our household should be our top priority. We can’t push our problems at home off to the side because we’d rather be serving elsewhere. For we are reminded over and over in Scripture that we are not only supposed to have relational harmony vertically (with God), but we are also supposed to have relational harmony horizontally (with others), and that means working things out at home.  
 
If you have been struggling with issues inside your home, but have been focusing more on serving at church and in other arenas instead, my prayer is that you would take the necessary time to invest in resolving the issues within your household instead of continuing to ignore them. Ask the Lord to help you restore peace and harmony at home and with the people around you so that you might glorify Him with your relationships, just like you want to glorify Him with your service.