God’s Original Design for Family (We Got It Wrong W/Jeremy Pryor)

SPEAKER_02 0:00

And I think what we need as as men who often have been untethered from a really good fathering influence is we have to get back to first principles. We have to get back to is there divine revelation for us about the purpose of family? And this is true for everyone. If you had a if you have a dad, you still need access and you still need to build your life on these divine first principles.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

My life was just spyrolling down him, depression, alcoholism, incarceration, death by despair. One guy who showed up is just Jesus. If you can give a man clarity and community, he can start to live out his purpose.

SPEAKER_02 0:37

You can break generational curses of alcoholism.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Welcome to Dudes Without Dads, the show that trains men how to become the dads they never had. Jeremy, welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_02 0:53

Hey Joshua, thanks for having me, man.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Hey, I want to get the number one question that I'm sure you get all the time out of the way. And what is the the connection between you and Richard Pryor?

SPEAKER_02 1:08

Well, uh, there is no uh as I'm sure you're shocked to find out, an actual family connection. Um yeah, Richard is and we're not nearly as funny as he is, so we're very proud that that we share a name. But he his he came up with that name, so he took the name prior. And technically, I'm not a prior either. Um, my uh my uh great-grandfather took his stepdad's name. Um, and so the thing that's that connects me and Richard is that neither of us are related to anyone with the last name of prior.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

Oh, that's so good. Y'all are related to nobody prior. That's so, so rich. Hey, uh, thank you so much again for being uh a guest. And I've got just some quick questions to set a foundation for our conversation today. And when I look around, you know, our our city, I look around our schools, I look around our communities, it sure would appear that the idea of family is a little broken. And would you just start by helping us understand what went wrong?

SPEAKER_02 2:11

Yeah, I think so. I think it's important for everyone to have a thesis or uh some kind of idea for what they think happened, right? Um, and yeah, to your point, it's it is broken. That's not controversial. I mean, we have America just became the number one country in the world uh for single parent households. Um, our divorce rate, you know, hovers around 50%. Um, a lot of people don't know how odd that is. In India, the divorce rate's 1.1%. That's how different uh we are than these other countries. So if you look at uh times in history or countries in which family and marriage is extraordinarily stable, and it is really designed to be extraordinarily stable. Um, in most times in history, it was a very rare thing for this to fall apart. Today it's very common. Um, what happened? So, yeah, my my hypothesis is that we actually don't know what family is. Um, we are experimenting with a brand new idea in the last 150 years. We've totally redefined the family. Most of us who are listening to this today, of course, we've all been born into a culture, unless you were born in a another country that has a much more ancient idea family. You're born into a culture where this experiment uh started way before you were born. And so you're not aware that you're being you're participating in a in a very novel experiment, um, but it went way off the rails, like this idea family that we have that's very recent, um, which I think of as a springboard for individual success. That's kind of the way that our culture thinks family, that's what we think a family is. And so we don't really understand what ancient families were or what even the Bible describes family to be. Um, and this unfortunately is also true, just as true in the Christian world as in the secular world. The Christian world has fully adopted the secular ideas of family, the secular definition of family. We've held on to, you know, the Christian morals around family, but not the Christian design or the biblical design of the family. And so we are uh usually a 10 to 20 year lagging indicator on what happens in the culture, happens within the Christian community uh shortly thereafter, because this design of the family is inherently unstable and uh doesn't actually work well at all and is very unfulfilling, particularly for men. And this is why I think fathers uh bow out of family in such enormous numbers. So in these ancient cultures um and some of these older uh countries, fathers are the most likely to stay with their children. Fathers are the most likely to invest in their family, fathers are the ones who value the family the most. These fathers think about their lives in and through the family. Um, this new idea family that we have adopted and sort of created since the Industrial Revolution about 150 years ago, and it's got gotten more and more. It's a it's sort of a hyper maternal idea family. It's like the idea of the family is sort of nurturing nest, and that's why we use the word nest uh often to refer to what the family is and when people's kids leave their empty nesters. Um, this is this is just this analogy is very strange historically, but it makes a lot of sense of the way we do family today.

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Yeah, what you said makes my my brain like do a 360 or a 180. When you say that the Christian morals or the the Western view of doing family is followed by the Christian view where there's not a whole lot of difference. I'm just gonna ask you a question. Can we be Christian and Western at the same time?

SPEAKER_02 5:41

There is a uh huge um d division between what the Bible uh teaches and what sort of modern Western culture teaches. So the the most basic idea of understanding of modern Western culture is really hyper-individualism. The idea is that uh the highest value in society is the free choices of the individual. And by freedom, we often mean the freedom to indulge our impulsive um our compulsive impulses. So that's that's what freedom is almost defined by in our culture. Um I and there was a survey done where they asked people what what is an what is an American? And they sort of summarized the answer is that I get to do when I, what do I do, when I want to do it, and nobody better tell me otherwise. So it's just um, you know, we famously started through a revolution, and you know, we lionized the the um conquering of the West by the rugged individual and then the homesteader who goes out and leaves the family. And all of this was done by people leaving the old world. And so you had people that were the most individualistic, leaving other countries and coming to America, settling and uh really setting up the value structure for America. And there, I think individualism is a there is there's a time and place for it. Like there's a freedom, even the kind of freedom we celebrate as uh as a culture, there's a time and place for that within a hierarchy of values. The question is where on the hierarchy is? This is why Jesus was asked, and this is why the Pharisees and all the religious people of Jesus' day were obsessed with this question what which is the greatest commandment? Um, because they understood something that we don't understand, and that is that the the ranking of the commandments, the ranking of values is actually what's critical. It's not important for me to find out that you think that freedom is important or that you value freedom. That doesn't matter. I mean, at some level, everybody values freedom. The question is always what where does that fit in a hierarchy of values? Is there anything you value more than freedom? Right. And so that then determines and it's really that hierarchy of values that starts to start to unpack what people really believe about the reality of life. And so this there's something about the sort of extreme version of Western individualism that breaks down communities, breaks down relationships, because at some level, um, if I try to build a relationship with you and and I really want to value love or unity above individual individualism, then um if if I value individualism more than those things, then eventually I have to sacrifice love. I have to sacrifice unity for uh for my individualism. And that's considered uh in our culture today increasingly a moral virtue to put yourself first. Um David Brooks said it this way He said, When Americans become wealthy, they purchase loneliness. And so we have this loneliness epidemic, which is that we try to accumulate wealth and then we use the wealth to become as lonely as possible. And it's not obviously what we're really trying to do is just value individualism, but that's the net result.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

Wow, and so if I were to summarize what you just said, because I asked you kind of a question of you know, can you be a Christian and also Western in the way that we live out our ideals or individuality or materialism? And you said there's grace is what I heard you say, but you also you didn't leave us there. There's this idea that once we come and encounter grace, there's an expectation for for growth or birth. And so let me ask you this I'm a dude without a dad. I never met my father, he died you know before I could have a chance. Where do I begin by understanding and building the foundation of what a family is supposed to look like?

SPEAKER_02 9:26

Yeah, it's really important to start with. I think the like what was in God's heart, his mind when he first created this thing I called a family. Like we actually have this is the advantage Christians have over sort of modern secular culture, is that we have the uh an account of exactly what God was thinking when he created the first family. Like what was he thinking? What was it what was its purpose? And so we see in in Genesis 1, 26, 27, 28, if you read those passages, um, when God created the first family, he says over this family.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

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SPEAKER_02 10:43

Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule. So he created this family, created this male and female. He tells them that um that he gives them his image and then he gives them a purpose, a purpose that was not given to a corporation, a nonprofit. It was given to a family. And that family, that that purpose is a five, this five-part purpose to be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule. And what what you see in these ancient cultures, and I think what we need as as men who often have been untethered from a really good fathering influence is we have to get back to first principles. We have to get back to is there divine revelation for us about the purpose of family? And this is true for everyone. If you had a if you have a dad, you still need access and you still need to build your life on these divine first principles. And so when I look at that definition, that description of the purpose of the family, to be fruitful, multiply, fill, subdue, and rule, um, we we need to start building those kinds of families. Like we we're fruitful, that means to have children. We multiply, that means to have grandchildren. We fill, that means that there's a expansive nature to what we're doing as a family with our children and grandchildren to expand. And then we subdue, we take uh, we take uh ownership or rulership over the entities that have influence in our society. And then finally, we rule, which is that I think on this side of the cross, that really is all about making disciples who make disciples. Jesus said, Go and make disciples of all nations. This was we rule through uh giving the kingdom back to back to the king, right? We we are all about seeing people learn to obey the king. Um, but this is this is the purpose of family. It's it was designed to accomplish this five-part mission.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

Yeah, it's kind of deep, you know, because in my head I think I can kind of do whatever I want to do. What's the greatest argument to to fight that lie? Because in my head, I feel like I have the right to have as many kids as I want, and if I don't want to have any, or to kind of map out my own map. What's the greatest argument against that ideology?

SPEAKER_02 12:54

Well, I think it depends if you're a Christian or non-Christian. If you're a Christian, I think the greatest argument is that we have divine revelation directly opposing that that that ideology, that viewpoint, right? We we are told in scripture that children are a blessing, right? Um, I think that the if you're coming from more of a secular lens, I think the greatest argument is what happens to civilizations, that actually everyone puts themselves first. They implode. And that's what was starting to happen to countries all over the world. We have a situation in South Korea right now where it takes a hundred South Koreans to make four great grandchildren. That country will not exist in a hundred years at their current trajectory. And no one's ever taken a country that is below replacement rate and actually returned it back to something that's more stable. And so we're gonna see civilizations cease to exist. We're gonna see economic collapse in kinds of areas in ways that we've never seen. And it's a very sad thing to watch the complete implosion of cultures, of family lines because people want to put themselves first. It also just doesn't work in terms of mental health. It's a one of the worst things you could ever do is just design your entire life around what you want, your own happiness. We know that meaning comes from giving yourself to something bigger than yourself. And so, one of the amazing things about having kids, and just believe what the Bible says, that children are a blessing, is that when you start having children, it's God's way of discipling you immediately into an other-centered point of view. And that's one of the most important things that you can embrace. And so to say, I'm going to resist having children or I'm going to have a smaller number so that I can, I can really indulge my own selfish needs, when you do that, it's not like what you're doing is actually benefiting you in the long run. Oftentimes what it's happening is that you are putting yourself in a situation where you're you're insisting that the world orbit you. And that that is just a um that's a counterproductive way of understanding the world. And in terms of the way that your life ends up turning out over time, you begin to experience this the bleed of meaning from your life. Uh, your life becomes more and more meaningless. And if you if you struggle with finding all those little hits of happiness from entertainment or from small accomplishments, man, if that ever gets disrupted or dysregulated, then man, you're in big trouble. And that's what a lot of people hit when they hit their midlife crisis. They're just like, they don't know what to do at that point because they have had everything orbit themselves, but they it's really lacking this center of meaning. And I feel so uh unfortunate for for men and women who are getting their 50s and 60s, who have no grandchildren, who have no way of like actually valuing the future the way that we're designed to. They're not being surrounded by the family that God's given them or the spiritual family that they've made through disciple making. They just made their life all about themselves. And in doing that, they're they're living in a small, isolated in world. And we have this epidemic in our culture now of um our elders who the Bible says over and over again to honor are dying in isolated nursing homes uh with almost no human contact. Um, and that's what happens when we follow this sort of secular value set.

SPEAKER_00 15:59

Would you give me a vision for a desirable future according to original design? You know, when you think about the five pillars from a practical way of building this thing called family, would you kind of just cast a vision of what family ought to look like?

SPEAKER_02 16:16

Yeah. There's actually a whole chapter in the Bible that just is designed to answer this question, um, which is Psalm 128. And Psalm 128 starts by just saying, you know, blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways, and then it goes on to describe his life. It says that he he is like a fruitful vine, that his children are like olive shoots around her around his table, his wife is like a fruitful vine. It says, Thus is the man blessed who fears the Lord, and then it goes on at the very end to say, May you live to see your children's children. And so um, in the in biblical times and in ancient cultures, the the idea of the good life, and it's the same, by the way, in the way that the Bible, the biblical story describes the good life, right? You have in the first chapter of Genesis, um, or the first you know, couple chapters, God is walking with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day, right? He's spending time with them. You see that Jesus, right before he died, he he desperately wants to share a meal with his disciples. Like he wants to get his spiritual sons in a room and experience a meal. And when they sit down at that table, he says, I so have been longing to share this meal with you, right? Um, you see Jesus in, you know, in the in Revelation, the end of his letters to the churches, say, like, I stand at the door and knock. Like, would you please let me in so we can have a meal together? And then, of course, at the very end of Revelation, the culmination of this entire story of human history, it's a father sitting at a table, right? The wedding supper of the Lamb, feasting with his spiritual children, and that we are all part of this one household. And this is why God calls himself a father. This is why Jesus called himself a son. So this is the good life. The good life is really to saturate ourselves in sort of the goodness of the most meaningful relationships that that life that exists in life. And those are familiar relationships. And the ones that are beyond family, like our relationship with the church, other believers, our relationship with God Himself, all of those are also familial in the way that God describes them. We're adopted into God's family. He becomes our father. Jesus is a son and a brother. And then in our family, we everyone at the Shabbat table, the Sabbath table, we do a family meal every week, is a son or daughter. We want to experience our family nest. So the father sits at the head of the table, you have the mother, you have, you know, sons and daughters, grandfathers and grandmothers, aunts and uncles. So these familiar relationships are are really the place where you get the maximal meaning. But I think that what's happening in our culture in the West is that we've been so traumatized by these relationships because whether you like it or not, you have these father, mother, brother, sister-shaped holes in your heart, right? And so you need these relationships. And so somebody who underperforms or violates you in one of those relationships, it can take that place in your heart and really turn it cold. The problem with that, of course, is that you're gonna then not be able to experience that in your relationships in proper and healthy ways. And so it's really important that we restore and recover those parts of our heart through building strong family connections, through creating a spiritual family that's dynamic with fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters, through having a relationship and dynamic relationship with God as our father. And we were committed to healing those things. We can't move on to some other story. And this is unfortunately what's happening in our culture is that people are really advocating now for alternative communities and alternate alternatives to the family, right? There's been wide-scale movements to try to destroy the family and say that, look, this is an experiment that doesn't work. It's unequal. It creates so much pain in people's lives. Like we need to come up with new ways of forming human relationships. And instead of kind of humbly saying maybe we're operating through a broken blueprint of family, we're saying let's just jettison the whole thing. This entity that's been working and has worked in, you know, in many, many cultures for thousands of years, and the Bible really communicates as important that God founded himself and that the gospel itself is communicated through familial language as God is our father and the church is our brothers and sisters and Jesus is a son. Like, let's just get rid of all of that. And um, there have been experiments. There have been kind of like very progressive social experiments. And in Israel, for example, there was a kibbutz movement. I have some friends that grew up in kibbutzim in Israel. And one of the things they experimented with this is a sort of rat radical communism, where all the children are raised in a children's home. And uh it was really created in order to, it's like a radical egalitarian experiment where everyone in the community, men and women, could not have any kind of distinct relationships within the family because that destroys the perfect equality of the communist um uh collective. And so they have a community of, you know, maybe 500 people, they would raise their, you know, 150 kids in this children's home. Uh they would get to visit their kids, you know, um once a day or so. And man, uh they they were well raised, well educated. Like they did a really good job of giving those children the basics of what they need. And uh, and there's been a lot of sociologists who've gone in and done the research, and it has been an incredibly devastating for those kids. They needed a mother, they needed a father, they needed a clarity of of who their siblings were and what that family unit was. Like there is no substitute for this. We have to fight for it, we have to recover it. Uh, we can't just move on and try something new.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

Well, being a dude that never had a dad, that means I also never really had a family. And so, grandparents, uh, uncles, cousins, nothing. And so I'm interested in building a family team, you know, and a legacy. But what are the most common things that I need to stop doing? And then what are the most common things I need to start doing in order to build this legacy? Because I haven't seen the things that you're talking about.

SPEAKER_02 21:54

Yeah. Well, I would say one of the first things I think we have to stop doing is we have. Have to stop attaching our identity to other much, much less important, less valuable things. So, fathers in particular, if you want to found a strong, dynamic family, primarily thinking of yourself through your a work-based identity, for example, and then maybe encouraging your wife to do the same. This is devastating to the family. And I think it often starts with the father saying, No, look, I'm first and foremost leading this family. And when I go to work, I'm going to work hard, I'm going to try to do a great job, you know, for my employer or starting a business. As I do that, my identity is not going to shift. I'm not going to switch teams. I'm not going to primarily join that other team and try to find an identity through that and become a workaholic and indulge in some other thing. I first and foremost care about this family. I am leading this family. And when I go to work, I'm not doing it as an atomized individual to try to try to figure out who I am. I am, I know who I am. I'm the father of this family. And so I think that kind of identity clarity is so important. And so a lot of times it has to start there because if you when I if you ever try to give you know tips and tricks to mothers and fathers who want to see their family life uh improve, but they are indulging in these uh these sort of lesser identities as the primary way that they're finding their their worth and that they are even telling the story of who they are. This is going to hurt their family. It's the it's inevitable. They're going to put those things ahead of the family. The kids are going to sense that that's what's going to happen. And they're, of course, going to, by extension, encourage their children to do the same thing. You're going to have to go out and, you know, you're going to have to become a great soccer player so that you can become someone. You're not, you're not someone because you're a son in this family or a daughter, right? In this family. You need to go out and find out who you can be out there in as an individual. So that's that's kind of like I always say that's kind of one of the first things that you have to stop doing. You have to you have to understand that that that who you say you are, um, we are being taught a lie in our culture, that these other identities are more valuable. Um, and that when we get together, if we you know hang out with people outside of your family context, oftentimes family doesn't even come up. Um, you know, what do you do? You know, we tell kids when they're in school, what who do you want to be when you grow up? Um, we're we skirt around this idea of the centrality of family identity. And this is incredibly unusual historically. This is another thing I just think it's so important for people to understand. It's, you know, the Bible certainly uh speaks to this centrality of the family identity from Genesis to Revelation, but also every ancient culture um that has built a thriving civilization has also had at the center of it this kind of idea of family. And it's really it's really recent that we've started to think about what's really important is you as an individual. So I would say that's one of the first things that we should stop doing.

SPEAKER_00 24:49

Gotcha. And so when I think about, okay, I'm willing to give up whatever I've got to give up in order to have whatever God's designed for me. And so, what are some game changer behaviors, um, activities? What are some things that I can practically do tomorrow, tonight to start changing the game inside my home?

SPEAKER_02 25:11

Yeah, I would say that like my favorite place to start, and this will shift identities pretty dramatically, um, is to have a weekly multi-generational family meal. So there a lot has been said about kind of the weekday meal where families get to eat together. But oftentimes what happens in those meals is you're catching up um, you know, briefly before everyone kind of heads off into their own uh their own evening uh activities, um, which I think is so important. Those weekday uh dinners are really helpful. But um what I've noticed in ancient cultures, and this really came from our time in Israel, I I saw while we were living there, I met my wife in Israel. We were living in Jerusalem. Um, I was constantly surrounded by these incredibly strong multi-generational families. And I really tried to understand what was, what was it that they what was it that they did differently? Um, and so the one practice that was so common that was basically ubiquitous across Israel was that every single family would do this Sabbath dinner every Friday night. And so, you know, you would go to the bus station on Friday night, and all everyone would be heading to their parents' houses, even, you know, um adults in their 30s with their own small children were heading off to grandma and grandpa's house. And they were there for the entire Sabbath. Like they were gonna show up on Friday night, they were gonna have this really lengthy, beautiful meal. Um, all everything shuts down in the whole country um on the Sabbath. And then you would spend the 24 hours together as a family. It was such a beautiful picture. And of course, if you do that every single week, that is your practice where we just were together. We have this amazing meal where we get to, and it begins with the fathers blessing the sons and the mothers blessing the daughters, and the husband blessing his wife, and it's just like all of these blessings, and so you're you're sort of saturated in this sort of family language. Everyone is living out in the course of that meal, this sort of um their family identities, it's so beautiful. And I don't think you can stop a family from becoming deep and multi-generational if you have a practice like that. And that's what we just kept seeing. In fact, when uh the Jewish people, when they move to Western countries, they are maybe the most uh resistant ethnic group to adopting this modern idea of family than any other ethnic group. Usually with most immigrant groups, within two generations, they will become fully Americanized from a perspective of total individualism. But Jewish families that continue to practice the Sabbath dinner, um, the Sabbath kickoff dinner on Friday night, they tend to maintain those multi-generational connections and those family identities across generations, even for three, four, five generations living in America. And so I just I saw that as a father who is not Jewish and just thought, man, that is such an incredibly powerful tool. Uh, it's worked for thousands of years. It's the only tool I've seen that really works while people uh are fully immersed in Western civilization, Western cultures. And so we started to adopt this about 20 years ago as a family, and it totally transformed my family. And so we started training other families to do this. You know, we you don't have to call it a Shabbat or a Sabbath or whatever. You can do it on Sunday afternoon or whatever, but there's different ways to do it. But if you have this as this sort of timeless uh meal, you have this table culture that you develop as a family. And in that table culture, everyone gets to experience their familiness. You know, you're always, you're never more than six days away from a, from a having a feast with your family. And it becomes the pinnacle of the week for the children, a pinnacle of the week for the mom and dad. It's a place where the grandparents, if if they're you know connected to the family, get to also experience what that season of life is like, where just on this last Sabbath, you know, we were, it's it was Mother's Day, um, you know, this Sunday. And so on our Friday night, I just said, hey, you know, I'd love for all of y'all to to share stories of your, you know, what what what's a what's a memory or of your mother? How are you well mothered? And so, you know, my my dad told stories about, you know, my grandmother, my kids' great-grandmother. Um, my grandkids, I have my grad grandson is there now. I've got three grandkids, you know, their great great-grandmother. And so this is, and she had been at our Shabbat table um, you know, about seven years ago. She died in her 90s. And when she was sitting there at our table, she was spanning seven generations of our family. You know, she could remember three generations that had come before her, and she was seeing four generations after her. Um, and so anyway, this this kind of meal brings makes the the peak of meaning um a place that is saturated in family life. And so it becomes this incredibly beautiful uh experience that you have on a weekly basis.

SPEAKER_00 30:01

Yeah, as I'm listening, there's something within my my head and heart where I'm I'm a little bit frustrated. You know, I've worked at seven different churches, I've you know, been in this thing called discipleship or this journey for 27 years. And I have not seen this practiced inside of anybody's like if this is the way it's supposed to be, why am I not seeing people practice it? Like, shouldn't this be something I learned when I first come to know Jesus as my savior? And I start getting discipled. Um I I've not seen what you're talking about, and so there's a little bit level of frustration. Why haven't I seen it? And then where can I find so I can see this?

SPEAKER_02 30:48

Yeah. Well, there was uh a systematic purging of anything that could be considered Hebraic from the church uh in the fourth century. So a lot of people are are unaware of kind of Christian and church history, but what happened was that there was a time when Christianity became the official religion of the empire, that one of the main concerns that that they had were making sure that Jewish people, and Jews were a huge number of people in the Roman Empire, they were about 10% of the Roman Empire was Jewish. This is why where Paul could go anywhere and find a thriving Jewish community anywhere in the Roman world, they were a massive um ethnic minority. And uh they were also extremely committed to their religion. And so when Constantine and the other emperors were beginning to transition the entire empire to Christianity, they were very concerned that Jewish people would be uh feigning a conversion to Christianity. And uh, and so in in doing that, and there was enormous anti-Semitism at the time. Um, and so they the only way that they they knew to make sure that none of these Jewish people would come into the church and be sort of fake converts was to investigate their lives and ensure that they weren't they weren't importing into the church any any practices that are Hebraic. And so the Shabbat dinner was outlawed. I mean, you were not allowed to keep the Sabbath ons on in any kind of Jewish way at all. Passover, outlawed. Like you could not do it in these Christian cultures. And so you you there was a it was a very effective, complete purging of every Hebraic tradition from the church because the church, of course, started with all Jews, it was a completely Jewish movement, and uh, and Jesus and the apostles, and so you you what you wanted to see was like what the way that Paul describes it in F in Ephesians, like this beautiful one new man where where Gentiles and Jews are coming together, and there's this this beautiful um you know uh creation of of the unity between um the these these people of God, you know, his the people from from the old covenant and the people from the new covenant all coming together in Christ, right? That's what you wanted to see. But what happened in practice was that um the Gentiles were really uh oftentimes taking revenge on Jewish people. There's all there's a history to animosity that happened in the second and third century between Jews and Christians. And so when the when when the Christians ultimately were successful in sort of taking over the Roman Empire through Constantine and other emperors, um, unfortunately, the the backlash against Jewish people was significant. And that continued on throughout the the next thousand plus years of of church history. And so I think to this day, people that even hear this are primarily asking themselves, not would this meal bless my family? They're asking themselves, does this meal make me uh like Jewish? Like, do I have to be Jewish to do this? When you ask that question first, of course, then you you think you put this in an ethnic category, right? Instead of a natural family building category. And instead of honoring Jewish people who have done an incredible job of preserving this incredible uh practice of a multi-generational meal and learning from them and adopting that, we're we're basically saying, well, as long as it's not Jewish, we're gonna do something else. And so, and so anything that could possibly have that kind of um attachment to the Hebraic, we tend to have a reversion to. And I think there have been people that have gone too far as well. They're like basically uh believe that that Christianity should become uh uh completely Hebraic, um, or that we should go back to you know, keeping Old Testament laws, or that we're obligated to keep the Sabbath, all of which I don't believe. I think Paul was incredibly clear in Colossians. He said, let no one you know judge you based on any Sabbath day or any festival. Like there's no judgment. He said those things were all shadows of things to come, and their fullness is Christ himself. And so when we celebrate the Sabbath, it's completely Christ-centered. We always like, you know, talk about how Jesus is the light of the world when we light our Sabbath candle and we go over a section of the gospels to really bring the life of Christ into uh our sort of discussion as a family on the Sabbath. Um, so we see that even our ability to enter into rest comes because of the cross. Because Jesus did the hardest work that was we ever had to do, we can actually enter into not just body rest, but soul rest. I can just rest and enjoy my relationship with the Lord for 24 hours. Um, what a beautiful experience. So we we want to experience that. The early church, you know, kept the festivals and kept the Sabbaths, um, and uh, and but they were not obligated to, um, because the the the law was perfectly kept by Christ. Um and so our our means of righteousness is through faith in Christ and not through our ability to keep the law. But I think sometimes we take that to an extreme, and therefore then we think, well, we don't really need um any the I want to thank you for taking time to listen to this story.

SPEAKER_00 35:44

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SPEAKER_02 36:24

There's no there's no wisdom in in the law. Like when Jesus said, you know, to the Pharisees, the Sabbath was made to meet the the needs of people, not people to meet the needs of the Sabbath. Well, that that's the perfect articulation of how to think about this topic, which is that that the Sabbath needs you, there's something your body, your soul, your family needs from this thing called the Sabbath. Don't you don't need to serve it. You don't need to come up with a bunch of rules. You don't need to become some kind of legalist um in order to experience this. But your body, your spirit, your soul needs this. And so does your family. Um, I think. And like they need rhythms like this. It doesn't have to be, like I said, it doesn't have to be a Sabbath rhythm. It needs, but you do need it within the course of your days, your weeks, your months, you need to have rhythms where your family gets to just turn everything else off and just get to be and experience their familiness. And that's what I think this provides.

SPEAKER_00 37:18

Yeah, I love it. And I can literally talk to you forever because you know, getting into the third and fourth century, a lot of things got jacked up in the in the early church. You know, for me, the the word missionary got jacked up, you know, where it used to be meant sent by God, it ends up becoming sent by the church. And so, in order to be a missionary, you had to go uh be sent by God and be sent by the church. And if you weren't sent by the church, anyway, long conversation there. I'm gonna ask you just a blitz of questions. These are fun questions. It's to lighten things up, and then we're gonna bring the thing to the to a close uh for today. But what's one question that every dad should ask his kid every week?

SPEAKER_02 37:59

I always ask my kids like, uh, what's your high, your low in your buffalo? So, you know, what what's what's something you experienced this week that was really awesome? What's something that really has got you down this week that you're wrestling with? Just like, and I I really want to know emotionally how how are you doing? And then your buffalo, in our case, I always want to know, is there something that you've persevered through? Um, is there something that you you wanted to stop doing, but you kept going? Because like uh that's that's a character quality that every person, um, it's not an innate character quality, it's a character quality every person can develop. And so part of we we do that through celebrating that. So that's a question we ask all of our kids every week.

SPEAKER_00 38:35

Um, many homes, as you know, are broken, and dads only get maybe a few hours a week of their their kids' time. If I only had 10 minutes to connect with my kids, what should I do?

SPEAKER_02 38:50

I think you have to get close to their heart. I mean, this you have to ask uh questions about that that helps them dial in to what's going on inside. So the way I do that, and I we we do one-on-ones with our kids, like you know, on a on a weekly basis. And so, yeah, I always want to know how are you doing really? And I'll talk to them about the relationships in their life. Like, how's your relationship with your sister, with your mom, with me, with God? Um, those are the like we talked about earlier. That's the deepest parts of life. And I I really want them to open up and just honestly share with me how they're doing. But those are the kind of questions I find that really help them do that quickly.

SPEAKER_00 39:28

You know, all families have different types of cultures. Um, do you guys laugh together? Yes. What's one uh tool or one thing that you do with your your family that makes them laugh every time?

SPEAKER_02 39:43

Yeah, I I would say that probably the way that we do that is through games. So my my dad was a huge is a hugely into board games, and he he hosts a uh board game, a game night with Papa every week, and it's so loud around that table. There's so much laughter that it's it's just like it's two or three hours every week of just fun. Um, we put a pickleball court in our backyard, so we we go back there and and there's so much fun and laughter and teasing each other. And so I I find it's really helpful to have a prop, you know, like a game. Um, it could be a group game, a board game, or like a physical game. Um, but that's that's where I find it kind of starts to loosen up and unlock us a lot.

SPEAKER_00 40:24

Yeah, so good. What's one conversation every dad needs to have with their son before he turns 13?

SPEAKER_02 40:33

Yeah. I think I think that the the category that comes to mind is what does it mean to become a man? Like what is the essence of what it what is a man? Um, and so I think that that that kind of opens the door for you know the conversations around identity, you know, around um, around sexuality, around relationships, around the future, um, around all the angst, the testosterone, the feeling that you need to become someone or conquer something. Like all of those things um are desires that boys have, but I think that ordering those into a like a full uh understanding of of masculinity or manhood is is not like we're not designed to figure that out on our own. We're designed to be guided into that journey by a father.

SPEAKER_00 41:23

What's something that your kids would say that you do that you don't you wouldn't naturally tell everybody you do this, but it they really enjoy it when you do it?

SPEAKER_02 41:33

So one of the weird things I do is I try to introduce to my kids um fiction, fictional stories that move my heart. So um, so on the Sabbath, usually after we've eaten, we've you know, we've cleaned up, we've played games, I'll I'll open a book like like a Narnia book or Lord of the Rings or Win in the Willows. And there are just like passages that just completely like they they shape they shape the way I think. Um, and so I will read uh a little passage and let them experience that kind of vicariously through me. Um sometimes they'll be smoking my pipe or whatever, um, and just like relaxed and want them to, and then I want to interact with them, but but they definitely get my heart in those moments.

SPEAKER_00 42:22

That's so good. Um, where can I find more information about you? Family revision, family teams.

SPEAKER_02 42:29

Yeah. Yeah, if you guys want, so yeah, uh like Josh or we we I wrote a book called Family Revision. Um, if you're interested in kind of the big picture, um, and it has seven of our major tools. Familyteams.com is a great place to go if you want to see all the things we're doing. Um, and then I'm on all the socials. Um, love to interact uh with folks there. So we'd love to see you. And if there's anything we can do to help, um, we would love this is this is our passion is to see families uh really thrive and become teams. So if that's something that that really hits your heart, you know, we'd love to help.

SPEAKER_00 43:01

Yeah. Would you share a little bit more about what you have um inside of Family Teams? If someone's never heard of it, give a quick overview, especially um the part about encouraging, you know, families to maybe even start businesses. Would you mind sharing a little about that?

SPEAKER_02 43:18

Yeah, yeah. In addition to the books, the podcasts, um, we have something called Family Inc. So about three times a year, we open the cart, we trained about 70 or 80 families a year that are going on a journey from uh from kind of career life into a more entrepreneurial um endeavor. And I just found that that requires a lot of coaching. You know, a lot of people are asking the question Am I wired to be an entrepreneur? And about 10% of people are wired to be an entrepreneur, and they think those are the only people that ever get to own assets. Um, but there was a time, like I said, 150 years ago, everyone owned assets. They had they had land, they had trades. Um, and so we've we've created this weird career category called the entrepreneur. Um, now it is really valuable. What the entrepreneur has that's unique is they can they have creative problem solving abilities, and so what I found is a hardworking family that doesn't have creative problem solving abilities but has a coach or coaches with creative problem solving abilities can actually launch assets and build businesses, and and and so that's what we do at Family Inc. And so I love getting to do that. Joshua, what you're doing um with pressure washing, you know, you it's one of the things we do in that is we we expose uh people to other entrepreneurs that have started uh businesses, especially that might be attractive to people within the Family Inc. sphere. So um, so so Joshua's business is one of those. We have about 30 uh uh ideas in in our business library of of business ideas that are working for other family teams. Um so yeah, we love coaching family. So that that program lasts a month, a year, and you do eight coaching calls a month for it's it's a year long. You have access to the business library, to a whole course, uh video course on how to launch businesses. So yeah, we love, love getting to serve that community.

SPEAKER_00 45:02

Yeah, I love what you just said. I think there's so much value there for anybody that's listening, that's thinking about raising up a family legacy, sustainability, scalability inside of a business as mission type mindset. I love it. Final question, and it's gonna be the last thing that they ask you, and then we're gonna sign you off. What's the most exciting thing you're seeing right now as it relates to family discipleship movement?

SPEAKER_02 45:28

Hmm. The thing that's totally different that I didn't see coming is that they're this generation, I was sorry, start start starting with the millennials. The men of this generation want to spend time with their kids. And I would say from my experience with boomer parents, with even Gen X parents, there's something totally different happening with this generation. Um, and uh it's been so encouraging to me that you see this movement of dads who they want to have a connection with their kids. Now, of course, there's all kinds of exceptions to that, but that's been exciting. And I think that for us in the church to be able to really train those fathers, so a lot, a lot of dads are even coming to faith because they like they want to be good fathers for their sons and daughters. They there's something in their heart that actually cares a lot about their kids. Um, anyway, I think that's so beautiful, and um, I'm very encouraged by that.

SPEAKER_00 46:20

Yeah, it's so good. Jeremy, thank you for being a guest on the Dudes Without Dads podcast. I hope that you can be a recurring guest. You have so much wisdom. I even researched some of your books. You've got a lot to offer on Kindle and different ideas on how to get creative with your family. Thank you for the work that you're doing, and my prayers that God would just continue to bless all that He puts inside of your hands and thank you for being faithful.

SPEAKER_02 46:42

Awesome. Thanks, Joshua, for having me.

SPEAKER_00 46:48

Do you have an incredible story of overcoming the home that you were raised in? Or maybe the father wounds that were placed inside your life? If so, I want to share it with other dudes without dads. Simply go to dudeswithout dadspodcast.com and apply to be a guest on the show. The reason it's important to share your story is because when you share what God has done for you, it helps other men believe that God can do it for them and He can. To share your story, head over to Dues Without Dads Podcast today.