Talk
BRO. AUDEE VILLARAZA:
What I love about the Word of God is that you know you can open the fridge and get a snack. You can also open the Bible and get a meal. This is not dessert but the main course.
Today, we get to dine with this wonderful Bread of Life that will feed you and sustain you for the rest of your days.
For the next six Sundays, we will study a topic that is relevant for any age, gender, or nationality. We will talk about Family. Are you with your family right now? Yeah? That’s good. If not, you’ll still be blessed by this series.
Here’s something interesting. After God created Heaven and the Earth,
next, He created the first family — Adam and Eve. Because God’s modus operandi, God’s intention, was to bless the world through the family — the first family.
Unfortunately, this first family failed. A third party came between God and His children. We know the rest of that story.
But God wasn’t done yet. He would raise another family through Abraham. God said to Abraham this Word which I believe is the Word for all of us today:
“All the families of the Earth will find blessing in you.”
So, here’s the Word that I wish to profess to all who are here today: “Your family will bless other families.”
Under Different Roofs
Some of you might say, “Bro. Audee, you don’t know my family. My family is broken, my family is messed up, my family is dysfunctional.”
Yes, I know. How do I know? Because there is no such thing as a perfect family.
But despite your brokenness, I declare that God will use you to bless other families too– that He will turn every defeat in your family to use it for victory. Because what the enemy meant for evil, God can use for the good of those who love Him and for those who are called according to His purpose. I declare that your family will bless other families.
Everybody, put your hands on your chest, and just sincerely say this: “Lord, I’m right here.
I’m open. I’m available. Speak. Your servant is listening. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.’
New Talk Series
We’re starting a brand new Talk series today.
The title of our series is Under One Roof. I love the title. It speaks so much about the truth that we live under one roof – under the Roof of God. You might not have the same name as the one beside you, but deep inside, we’re all under one roof.
We’re all brothers and sisters. But take note: Not all roofs look the same– because not all families are the same. Some roofs have families there that live in the same house, but their hearts can be living in different worlds.
One person may be living on Earth while the other is on the moon, and another on Mars.
This is obvious in the living room with a television. One person wants to watch drama while the second one likes action, and the third person wants the TV off.
We can live under one roof but have different beliefs, different traditions, and priorities.
This message is important: Before God uses you and your family to bless other families, the first thing God needs to do is to bless you and your family.
You cannot give what you don’t have. How does it feel to live in your home? Does it feel like Heaven? Or like Hell on Earth?
Because again, the message is so important. Here’s the thing: God will first bless you and then bless your family. And then you can be a blessing to others.
So, the first thing that God will do is to change you. The moment you encounter God, your job now is to bring Heaven home.
Hurts and Healings in the Family
Parents, your children are looking up to you to teach them about Heaven and about Jesus. It’s possible that they’ll encounter Jesus on the other side of the world, but wouldn’t it be amazing if they encounter Jesus from you? When they have their own families, they are inspired to follow the same pattern and culture. Because it starts with you.
Put your hands on your chest and say, “It starts with me.”
I’ll teach you three powerful statements about families:
1. All families are blessed and broken at the same time. Each family has a blessing from God but isn’t it also true that each family is wrestling with something in their family? Whether it be addiction, adultery, abuse, abandonment, and the list can go on and on.
2. Families can help us the most. But at the same time, families are also the ones that can destroy us or harm us the most. Why? For two reasons:
a. Proximity: Because they’re so close, of physical closeness, there is influence and there is impact.
b. Vulnerability: When you grow up with your family, you’re young, you’re innocent and you’re naïve. So, there’s also impact and influence. And sometimes, the influence is not good. In a way, families can develop us but they can also damage us if we’re not careful.
3. If we were hurt by families, we can also be healed by families. There is a family that you were born into and it’s something that you cannot
You’re stuck with them forever. I’m sure the Lord has a purpose why He put you in that family. There is a family as well that you were not born into, but you choose to belong to. Some people call it a spiritual family, a community, or The Feast. But God calls it His church. You might have been hurt too by this family.
Another Family
When your family hurts you, there is another family that God can use to heal you.
But you might say, “Bro. Audee, I’ve also been hurt by my spiritual family.”
My answer to that is, “You may not have perfect parents or perfect church leaders but thank God that you will always have a perfect Father. He will never hurt you. If you grew up without a mother or a father, you still have a Heavenly Father. I remember when I was invited to a parenting talk.
One of the panelists asked me, “What advice would you give to somebody who at an early age got hurt because their father left them?”
I replied that there are two ways:
First, acknowledge the hurt. You cannot heal if you’re pretending that you’re not hurt.
Second, if you want to move from the hurt, you must stop being the victim.”
Because hey, you might not be responsible for your hurt but you are responsible for your healing.
In the animal kingdom, parents will take care of their newborn only for a while. Eventually, that newborn will discover its way of taking care of itself. But in the human kingdom, it’s different because humans are more complicated.
Babies need to be bathed, burped, and “babied” for a long time. There are some humans even if they’re 25 years old already still act like a baby.
My point is that God designed us to be raised in families. There is a saying, “It takes a tribe to raise a child.”
Parents’ Role
Parents, your role is not just to provide a roof over your children or to put food on their table. Your children have more than just physical needs.
They are human beings with emotional and, most important, spiritual needs. Experts believe that a child’s formative years happen from four to five years old. They are like sponges that absorb everything.
My advice to parents is to have meaningful conversations with your children.
Make mealtime the most important time for them. No gadgets. Talk to them. That’s what they will remember for the rest of their life. That’s what they’ll do when they have their own families.
The best advice I can give you now is to build a strong table for your children.
Why? So that when they grow up, they will never have to look for a seat at the table of others.
Your children can say, “At my home, I am loved. I am welcome. I can be who God called me to be.”
It’s wonderful to know that as a parent, I am the first image of God to my child. It can also be frightening. Because who I am as a parent, will also be my children’s image of God. If Daddy is always angry, then God is an angry God. If Mom is always grumpy, then God is a grumpy God.
The Father of Jesus
I noticed for a fact that Jesus had a wonderful earthly father.
How do I know that?
The Bible says that when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, Jesus said, “When you pray, say “Father.”
Jesus used the word father to represent God. That gives me the idea that He had a wonderful relationship with His Heavenly Father– because Jesus had a wonderful relationship with His Papa Joseph.
Sadly, the reality today is families are broken. We’re dysfunctional. Some people never grew up with parents. But it doesn’t remove the fact that family should be your first church.
You’re supposed to learn Two Major Points about Family:
1. Identity
This is basic. This is who you are in God. You’re a person worthy to be loved. You’re a person created by God and for God.
2. Morality
You’re supposed to learn from your family how to love God in mind, heart, and spirit and how to love your neighbor just as Jesus loves them.
Family is your first experience of God’s love.
Good News
Some families don’t understand God’s love. Why?
Because the father is narcissistic, and the mother may be excessively vain. They don’t experience the unbelievable love of God.
But hey, in case that’s your story, my Friend, the good news is that your story doesn’t have to end in brokenness, dysfunction, and defeat.
In the Bible, in the story of Adam and Eve, they had so much potential. But they failed.
Later, Abraham came but he disobeyed God too. And then came another family, and another — until Moses came.
Moses was born as a Hebrew, but he was adopted by an Egyptian family. Talk about a mixed race.
This is a picture of our society today– foster families, blended families, mixed families.
But God used Moses for a miracle – to free the nation of Israel. Moses was a picture of somebody who almost got killed (when he was a baby). At that time, the Pharaoh ordered a decree that all Hebrew babies be killed. The Pharaoh thought that the Hebrews were getting so powerful that he needed to control their population. So, every baby would be killed.
Backstory: To save Moses, his mother put him in a safe basket and laid it in the reeds by the (Nile) river’s bank. The Egyptian Pharoah’s daughter, then bathing in the river, discovered the baby in the basket and took him as her own. (Exodus 2)
This is important: Moses was a picture of somebody who was almost killed before he had the opportunity to be called by God.
I’m praising God right now for parents who see the potential in their children and the hidden significance of God’s anointing in their children– long before God will even start to use them.
Parents, don’t treat your children like a bonsai– a small plant in a container and you prune away characteristics you do not like about them.
God will use your children when they grow up. Your only job is to protect and prepare them for when that happens. God has an anointing for them. You better protect your children. You better prophesy the great situations that God will use them for.
Two Lessons from Moses’s Story
1. God can use the blessings of your family
I have been a Feast Builder for about nine years, since 2017. If you asked me nine years ago if I wanted to build a Feast, I would have said to your face, “Are you on drugs?”
The last thing I ever dreamed of was to be a preacher. I never dreamed I’d preach.
There are two situations that people fear in life. One is death and the second is public speaking. And 95% of people in this room will probably agree with me.
Let me tell you a secret. By knowing what I know now, by feeling what I feel right now, and seeing what God has done for me in the last nine years, I can tell you that the Lord has been preparing me for this role for a long time.
When I was 10 years old, my parents started teaching Catechism in our community. My parents would gather the children of the poor families near our village, and they would teach Catechism in our home at 3:00 p.m.
My job there was very simple but it was the most important job ever. And that was to prepare the sandwiches and juice to feed the children. That’s it.
In hindsight, little did I know that God was already preparing me to feed thousands of people through His Word. God is amazing.
I wonder what kind of preparation God is doing in your life right now. He might be preparing you for a greater mission that you cannot believe and that you have not seen. So, you better be ready.
Do you know God’s purpose for all of us? He wants us to enlarge our family.
Your family should not just be your immediate family.
God’s Purpose
One day, I was dreaming that I would be able to raise my kids the same way that I was raised. I grew up in a small village. My neighbors and our family were so close to one another. How close? When they come to our house, they open our fridge to get food– even without our permission.
Now, I see the fruits of that blessing. My son is six years old, and he has friends in our condo community. We’re so happy every time they come to our home and ransack our fridge.
We say, “Welcome to our home!”
That’s what life is to us. You know they’re welcome, they’re part of our kids.
One day, if it’s God’s will that my children get married and have kids of their own, I pray that the children– my grandchildren– will come to our house and they may ransack our refrigerator.
Because that is God’s purpose – that we would enlarge our family.
By the way, you, joining a Light Group, is also God’s way of enlarging your family with people you’re not even related to.
You enlarge your family when you open your door and say to your Light Group members, “Welcome to our family! Feel at home. Because this is your family now.”
Yesterday, we celebrated the 27th Founding Anniversary of The Feast.
On August 3, 1997, The Feast was launched at Camp Aguinaldo, Quezon City with young
Bo Sanchez as the preacher. A few years later, we moved to Valle Verde. After that, we moved to San Juan Arena. Three months later, on May 30, 2010, we moved to PICC.
Today, here we are at The Feast. God is good to our Community. We started with one family by the name of Sanchez who loved the Lord so much that they said, “Lord, enlarge our family.
2. God will use the brokenness of your family.
When you read the Bible, you kind of wonder why its authors put all the failures, mistakes, and dysfunctions of all the Bible heroes. They could have just removed those parts to have a happy ending.
But they wrote how Abraham disobeyed God and how King David killed the husband of the woman he wanted. So many stories of Bible heroes failing one after the other. Why would you put the failure of each Bible hero?
Because the Bible authors wanted to highlight the failure of each person simply because they also wanted to highlight the faithfulness of God — that even if we have failed, God succeeded. Even when you’re weak, God is strong. Even when you’ve sinned, God is merciful. God is faithful.
In the Bible, God used the messiest families to bless the world. I believe God is doing that to this day.
God said to Abraham: “All the families of the Earth will find blessing in you.”
Abraham’s family grew so big. He was a generational parent, and his family grew to thousands of people…
But if you follow the storyline, you’ll see that the Hebrews became slaves in Egypt for 400 years.
You kind of wonder where was the blessing that God was saying to Abraham– that all the families will find blessing in him… In the Old Testament, I don’t see the blessing happening.
The key, my Friends, is this: The blessing of God sometimes comes immediately but sometimes, it gets delayed. But it always comes.
The promise of God didn’t come in Abraham’s timeline… Until one day, it arrived in the form of a Person named Jesus Christ. He would come from the lineage of King David whose lineage came from Abraham.
The Family Secret
The promise of God to Abraham was not material. It was not an emotional blessing.
It was a blessing of a Messiah coming to bless you and He will be the One to use you to be a blessing to others too.
It’s Jesus who will be the One to use you to be a blessing to others.
How many of you want a bad family life? If you want to have a bad family life, focus on yourself.
How many want to have a good family? Focus on your spouse and your children.
But how many want to have a great family? Here’s the secret: Focus on Jesus.
When you put Jesus in the center of your life, my Friends, a bond of three is harder to break: there will be peace, joy, and love.
Through Jesus Christ, only through Jesus Christ, the Living Bread, the Manna from Heaven, He will be the One to bless not just you and your children, but your children’s children and the generations that will come after you.
Oh, my goodness! Jesus will use you because He is the Messiah. He will break every chain that has shackled you – generational sins, addictions, trauma, and hurt that have plagued your generation. The Lord will change that because He will start using you. It starts how? It starts with you.
Put your hand on your chest and say: “It starts with me.”
Let’s pray:
Lord, Thank You for this message of hope. My heart is filled with a burning hope that I know I can be blessed, and I can be a blessing to the world.
Today, I ask you to change me, to forgive me, and eventually to use me. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.
