RUN LIKE A CHAMPION

Healthy Relationships – Part 2
Sammy Tippit: I want to welcome you back to our daily devotion with Dr. Walt Larimore. His book will be such a blessing to you (10 Essentials of Highly Healthy People). We’ve been discussing some of the principles and some of the truths in that book, and I think we have something today that will be very helpful to you. We’re talking about relationships, and I know men struggle especially with relationships.
Walt, I want to go back to where we were talking yesterday. We talked about the mentoring relationship and the accountability. What role do past relationships play in present and future relationships? In other words, if a man has had a good relationship with his father… I heard a statistic recently that 95 percent of men in prison did not have a warm relationship with their father. Talk about that a little bit.
Walt Larimore: Past relationships that have been bad relationships can be damaging not just through our entire lifetime, but according to the Scripture, that will spread from generation to generation. The iniquity of the father is spread to the fourth generation. If we cannot as men develop a strategy for breaking that cycle, it will continue.
There are two things I’ve found critical in breaking that cycle. First is forgiving those who have hurt us in the past, of not carrying that anger, that cynicism, that bitterness, that unforgiveness onward, because it’s going to inhabit every relationship we have if we cannot break that cycle. What’s interesting is the Bible tells us God will only forgive us to the degree we forgive others who have harmed us.
Sammy: Yeah, yeah. Right.
Walt: So spiritual health begins with forgiveness. Relationship health is centered on forgiveness. That affects our emotional and even our physical health. Now that may be difficult for a man to do alone, and sometimes it takes having an emotional coach or relationship coach. It may be a pastoral professional. It may be a Christian counselor. We’re not talking about ongoing psychotherapy, but just someone who can help you get through that hurdle of forgiving others.
Then investing in improving or making highly healthy the relationships you have. I have a men’s group I meet with. One of the fellows is an older man, and he became convicted that his relationship with his boys… He hadn’t invested in that relationship. He was an authoritarian, mean, angry father. His relationship with his boys had broken down. It was dissolved.
He decided to try to repair those relationships. The way he did it, Sammy, was he flew to them. He wanted to just have a cup of coffee with them. He wanted to confess to them that he had wronged them and to ask them to forgive him. He said, “I don’t deserve your forgiveness, and if you don’t give it to me, it’s fine. But it’s important. I wanted you to hear me apologize to you for where I had gone wrong and ask you to forgive me.”
Both of those boys (middle-age boys) wept, broke down in tears, and were able to forgive their father. The reestablishment of that relationship (beginning to invest even though he has little time left in life) has made a difference in his physical, emotional, and relational health.
Sammy: I’m going to ask you a question that will lead to our next devotion. My father was not present not because of divorce but because of illness. He was in the hospital more than he was at home. Once I was married, my father had passed away. I had this thing. I had a family now, and I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know how to deal with my family. I didn’t know how to be a father.
But I drew from my relationship with the heavenly Father, and I just started studying his fatherhood. That was my teaching grounds. Can you speak to that a little bit? Is there any kind of evidence that helps or not helps? Do people have a wrong view of God? How does that play out?
Walt: Well, if we have a wrong view of God the Father, it can affect every area of our lives. That’s one of the ways spiritual health affects relational health and emotional health and physical health. Whether it’s through Bible study, whether it’s through reading books of wise men who have written in this area, to get a proper understanding of our heavenly Father and then forgiving our earthly father where he has harmed us…  I’ll even have some guys I work with write down the grievances they’ve had with their father and then go through a process of forgiving him for that. He may not even be alive still. Then actually burning that list of grievances to make them dust, to put them in the past.
Then to move forward in our relationship with our heavenly Father and to ask him to teach us his principles of being a godly father, a godly husband, a godly boss, a godly employee, a godly neighbor, allowing him to penetrate every one of our relationships that we come to know him more deeply and sweetly and become like him in our relationships with others.
Sammy: Let’s pick up this discussion tomorrow in our daily devotion. I think there’s a lot there we need to think about. We’ll look forward to tomorrow. Then we’ll turn to the spiritual aspect of health.