Now Streaming Week 8: Modern FamilySample

Modern Family is ABC's longest-running comedy series, and each of its first five seasons won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. Over its eleven-season run, the show won twenty-two Emmy awards and garnered seventy-five nominations. The sitcom features three related but different families who navigate various situations and challenges—parenting, sibling rivalry, divorce and remarriage, career changes—in the midst of differing family values and structures.

Perhaps the biggest impact Modern Family made on its loyal viewers was the endearing way it made family diversity so funny and relatable. Far from a modern idea, a diverse but united blended family is exactly what the Lord intends for His followers. In Paul's letter to the Ephesians, he explained the radical truth that Jesus broke down every relational barrier, redefining family and establishing a new, unified church—the family of God.

Contemporary Christian churches often emphasize an individual's decision to follow Jesus and that person's personal relationship with God. Salvation is personal, but not to the exclusion of other Christians. In Ephesians 2, Paul diagnosed the unifying condition of all people: "You…were dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked according to…the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves" (vv. 1-3). All people—young and old, men and women, religious and nonreligious, Jews and Gentiles—are dead in sins without Christ.

"But now in Christ Jesus," Paul continued, "you who once were far off have been brought near" (v. 13). Because of Jesus' death on the cross, even Gentiles who were physically separated from the Jewish temple and socially alienated from the Jewish people were brought near, brought into the family. God has reconciled outsiders and insiders into a new body, the church, so that there would be no "dividing wall of hostility" (v. 14, NIV) any longer. When it comes to salvation, we are all on level ground. Since God removed the barriers between people and between us and Him, we must not now allow anything to divide us.