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Visionary Family with Dr. Rob Rienow

By: Dr. Rob Rienow
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  • Summary

  • Visionary Family Ministries offers encouragement and support for Christian parents, couples, families, and church leaders through live conferences, books, DVD Bible Studies, and a variety of free online resources. Each year they offer more than 50 seminars and conferences in the United States and around the world. To learn more, visit: visionaryfam.com
    © 2024 Visionary Family Ministries - IL
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Episodes
  • Thriving In Faith Through College, Part 2

    Thriving In Faith Through College, Part 2
    May 25 2020
    So another action step on this and this one is huge students. Give me your full attention. Parents to get into a local church that teaches the Bible from the Bible, get into a local church that teaches the Bible from the Bible. When I was at Wheaton, lots of students stopped going to a local church. Chapel is not church. Maybe you're going to a Christian school. Chapel is a big community worship time and Bible study. That's great. Love it, but it's not a local church. Look at this scripture from Hebrews 10 is that as I was working on this message this week, lots of the scriptures I'm sharing with you are actually from from the book of Hebrews, but look at it says Hebrews 10 24 and 25 let us consider how to stir one another up to love and good works. Not neglecting to meet together as is the habit of some but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the day drawing near, look there at verse 25 let's not neglect meeting together and that is talking about the weekly corporate worship gathering of the church.It says as is the habit of some. In other words, there are some Christians who fall out of the habit of being in church. So God says, don't neglect it. Don't fall out of the habit of it all the more, as you see the day approaching. So Jesus is coming back, let's be ready for him. Full steam ahead. Parents for my two in college. So I've got two away at college. I make regular Sunday church attendance. A requirement if I'm helping to pay for school, doesn't mean yet. Like, you know, you missed a Sunday. I'm not paying, I'm not just talking about regular faithful church attendance. So if you are an independent adult, which means I don't pay for anything in your life, if you're an independent adult, you can do whatever you want. Okay? But if you're still on my dime, I get some say so I'm not willing to send you off to school if you're going to spiritually starve yourself, just not willing to do that.So first weekend you get to college, go to a church, get a ride, get an Uber, ride your bike. Find out what churches have buses or w yeah, college buses that'll pick you up. If you go and the church worships Jesus with authenticity and the preacher gets up and opens a book the Bible specifically and preaches from it, then go back to that church and try again next week or try another church. Okay. I believe in church shopping church shopping's awesome. But I also believe in church buying. So shop shop, shop, shop and then buy. Exactly. Um, one of the way I tell my kids, say by the end of first semester you should have found a church to buy for those next three plus years. Um, one more point on this before I turn to you to talk to each other. You know, for a lot of Christians we struggle when it comes to church or personal devotions cause we just don't feel like doing it.Okay. Talking about time with God in the morning when I wake up, what I feel like doing is checking my phone, scroll, scroll, scroll, check, check, check. That's kind of what I feel like doing. Or Sunday morning, man, especially in college, want to sleep in. Sometimes if we're honest, like we don't have a, you know, we're talking about eating good stuff. Sometimes we just don't have a hunger for God's word. So if you're not hungry for God's word, you might not be too inclined to go eat it. So now if a person loses their appetite physically, let's just say a person loses their appetite. All right, nurse Melissa person loses their appetite. They don't want to eat anymore. What is that a sign of? Generally speaking, not, don't give me a diagnosis, just layman's terms please. Anxiety, depression. Does it mean, is it a sign of wellness or sickness?Yeah, it's a sign of sickness. If you lose your appetite, something's wrong. Something's going on. Um, and what does the doctor say? Well, I know you're not hungry, so don't bother eating. Doctor says, no, I know you're not hungry, but you need to. You need to eat right. Your body needs the nourishment. Your body needs the strength. So Christians, we have to keep eating whether we're hungry or not. And in fact, like the, um, I just had a dear friend who passed away over Christmas. Uh, he was 75 and he was in hospice and when he stopped wanting to eat and drink, right, he just wouldn't eat and drink anymore. That's when they said, you know, he's probably only got a few days left, so he's not hungry. He won't eat. That's danger. Danger, danger, like we're really close. So whether you're hungry or not, we got to eat spiritually.All right. Questions for you to talk to each other. Parents, tell your student about your spiritual habits, your spiritual eating when you are 18 to 22 students, tell your parent one way you think you could improve or grow when it comes to increasing your spiritual food. Go. All right, let me pull you back together. I'm trying. Hopefully I'm making your conversations shorter rather than awkwardly longer. The goal is that you're actually allowed to talk about spiritual things ...
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    23 mins
  • Thriving In Faith Through College, Part 3

    Thriving In Faith Through College, Part 3
    Jun 1 2020
    I also want you to pay special attention to special friends that might come into your life. The boyfriend, the girl. I love how parents, you know, parents kind of freak out when their kids first get a boyfriend or a girlfriend. They don't want to use the word boyfriend or girlfriend. So how's your special friend doing? Because we don't, we just get too creeped out by it too soon. But that's all right, but boy, you gotta pay so much attention to this. Once you cross that phase of getting serious with a boy or a girl romantically, you absolutely have to make sure that this person is spiritually vibrant, spiritually alive, spiritually active, that it is easy to talk about Jesus with them. It is easy to talk about prayer requests with them. It is easy to say, Hey, what's God teaching you these days? It's easy to say what you know.How did you, what impact did that sermon have in your life? Something like that. If, if you're not connecting with someone, when you get to that stage of your life, when you're starting romantic relationships where you can connect easily about spiritual things, where you admire this person spiritually, when you spend time with them, like you want to be a more faithful Christian, then that is not a relationship at that point that you want to make special. Probably just a friend at that point. But once you cross that line into being serious about preparing for marriage and dating with someone, that is someone that is absolutely critical that they are walking with the Lord. One thing that I've heard about on this, this, this need to have Christian friendships, not just Christian friends, but Christian friendships. I've had some students tell me they're getting ready to go off to university of Alabama or whatever, you know, and they say, well look, you know, Jesus spent all his time with sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors.So, uh, you know, I'm going to go, you know, it'd be very missional at a this big school and you know, I'll be at all the parties and all that stuff and shining for Christ. Okay, I get it. I appreciate it. But the premise of your statement's wrong. You hear the ice thought. I saw a meme the other day, you know, Jesus spent all his time with sinners. We should do. She said it didn't spend all this time with sinners. He spent 91% of his life with his family. That's age zero to 30 and then during his ministry years, who do you spend most of his time with? With his disciples. Okay. Other people that were bumbling along seeking to follow him. And did he spend time with sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors? Absolutely. He was on mission, but his primary group. Okay. Was this family first and then secondly, those who believed in him.I'm going to close us in just a second with action 0.5 but I want to take this window right now to do some Q and a questions, comments, thoughts, disagreements. Maybe you had a question about something we've already covered some that we're not talking about. What would you like to ask? How do you know your kids are going to church every Sunday when you're away? Cause they always tell you the truth, Kristen. That's why always parents listen, none of us ever lied to our parents about anything, right? So none of our children would ever consider doing no. Um, I, I think obviously you're going to be asking straight forward questions. You're hoping for straightforward responses. And I think that over time our kids' spiritual trajectory becomes pretty plain. Um, and so over the course of a semester, if every now and then once a month, Hey, how's church going for you?Uh, you know, what do you like about this church? What's God's teaching you over time, if they are spinning things a little bit, that'll, that'll become obvious. And I'm not, I am not checking up with my two college kids on like weekly church attendance. Okay. This is a goal. Something that we talk about. They both affirm it. I just sort of noticed that it comes up in conversation with them. I, I with Lizzie in particular, she'll say, Oh I, the women's ministry did this thing the other day and I decided to go cause some college girls were going like I didn't so are you involved with women's ministry? She just volunteered that and I don't think she's so devious to be like she has a calendar. I have to plant a few lies with dad along the semester to make sure. Yeah, hopefully that's not happening.It's a good question. Somebody else. Okay. The question is we're talking about a lot of us when we appear to experience pain, suffering or we see pain suffering in the lives of people that we love. Real crisis of faith. Who has God has God there, has got good, has got powerful. We talked about wanting to create an open environment. How do we do that in the house? Um, one thing is by being vulnerable with your kids, especially as they're older about your own story and your own journey. I think it's very helpful when we're talking with our teenagers or college students to have some of ...
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    19 mins
  • Thriving In Faith Through College, Part 1

    Thriving In Faith Through College, Part 1
    May 18 2020
    The most important issue for us as we go into adulthood isn't a, do we have a good college or do we have a good job or what kind of money are we going to make? But the question is, are we going to walk with you? Are we gonna follow you throughout our lives and into eternity? So I pray you'd help us with this conversation. Pray you'd help me give me the words to say and um, as we're talking in a turning to each other at different times, Lord, I pray that the conversations would be open and honest and helpful and I pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen. All right. Thriving in your faith through college. Let me tell you why this subject is so critical. Every study that you could find every bit of research that you could find on what happens to teenagers that are raised in a Christian Church. Go to a Christian school, raised in a Christian family. What happens to them when they leave the house? 18 to 22 every single study you could find says that a very high percentage of them walk away from their faith, decline in their faith, slip in their faith. Some studies it's 50% 60% 70% 80% I won't bore you with with the details, but you can easily find them on their own and students, this window of your life that's coming up 18 to 22 is an incredibly important, uh, important window, incredibly important years. Let me give you an illustration that that might help.When it comes to faith in Jesus, faith is passed from one generation to the next. It's kind of like a Baton pass during the relay race. So parents, God willing are bumbling and stumbling along on the track, trying to follow God. All of you teenagers, all of us parents wish that we were setting a better example for you when it came to faith, but you've got what you've got. None of you are being raised by Jesus. We're all pretty messed up so we are all bumbling and stumbling along. But if you've got a parent in this room, I guarantee you that they are asking God for grace and mercy every day to run the race for Christ. They want to be faithful to him and they're falling short, but they're trying. And so what moms and dads want to do is they want to pass the Baton of faith to their sons and daughters and they want their sons and daughters to take the Baton and to run for Jesus in the next generation.Are there any track runners here? Anybody? One sorta kind of former track runner? All right. In a relay race, if things are going to go bad, when do they go? Bad? Baton pass. Okay. If you've just got the Baton and you're running by yourself, so far so good, but at a Baton pass, the first renter's gotta be running. They've got to hold out the Baton. The second runner has got to reach back for the Baton, grab the Baton, take the Baton, and then they've got to run on their own. These [inaudible], these four years, 18 to 22 this is the handoff. This is the full transition for you students between childhood and adulthood. And so these four years, this is like your spiritual trajectory going into your adult life. So what we're going to do this morning is I'm going to talk to you about five things that you can do to thrive in your faith during these critical years.And I'm going to do it by spending most of my time talking to students. Okay? So you might've thought that you're gonna sit here and I'm going to talk to your parents for a little while and you can check out. I'm going to spend most of my time talking to students. Now, a few of you are here and you don't have your son or daughter with you. That's all good because what I want to do this morning is kind of equip you with some conversations you can have with your son or daughter. I know I've got Joyce's here. Our kids are, JD and Keenan are on a mission trip to Peru right now. Uh, Sturman says you get, you just sent off Tyler to the dr. So, um, you may not be here with your student, but that's okay. You're going to get equipped with some conversations for home.We'll also put this on our podcast. So for some of you you could even go home and say, Hey, you missed this thing. Let's listen to the weird seminar with Rob and talk about it. And I'm sure your teenager will love that. And this is not going to be 90 minutes of lecture as we go through these five things at the end of each one. So they're going to be short. I'm going to talk for about 10 minutes and then I'm going to turn you to your family members or friends that are sitting next to you for some conversation between, uh, between the two of you. And a matter of fact, I'm going to start you off right away. Uh, parents, I want you to talk to your son or daughter or whoever's with you. And if you don't have kids with you, you can turn and talk to a friend.I want you to describe your faith and relationship with God when you were between the ages of 18 to 22 and you can do the good, the bad and the ugly. I'm gonna give you about two minutes. Go. All right, let me pull you back together. I'm gonna move really quick this morning through these five action points. These ...
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    24 mins
Spirituality
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