Fathering

4. Association. We must teach our children association. They must have a sense of belonging.

There are only four basic desires in people: to be, to beget, to belong, and to possess. Those are the only four basic desires we have as humans. We all desire to belong—to belong to somebody, to belong to some thing. That’s why we have sororities and we have fraternities and we have organizations. Everybody wants to belong to something. And the one thing that everybody wants to belong to is Mom and Dad—belong to the family.

We must give our children the realization that they belong, that we’ve not only accepted them and approved them, but we’ve taught them by our relationship. They have an association that is a covenant relationship with the family, and they belong. When we don’t give them that sense of belonging and they don’t have that feeling of association that is a right relationship, do you know what can happen to them? They can go through life feeling rejected and turn out to be suicidal, assassins, anything because of what we as fathers have done in our home. I’m trying to recap some things that I’ve taught you at other times in more depth than what I am right now.

5. Authority. And the last thing—and I do want to try to burn this into your heart and mind—the last thing of the five things that a father must give his children is a sense of authority. In our world today where anarchy runs riot in the hearts of people on the streets, the reason for that is they have no real sense of authority because they have never had discipline at home. We must give our children the realization of what true authority is. We are the father figure. We are the God figure, in that sense of the word. And if we don’t teach our children authority by exercising proper authority, then it’s easy for them to be anarchistic and for them to become rebels and for them to deny any exercise of authority in their lives and want to live licentiously and lasciviously or rebelliously simply because they’ve never been taught authority in the home.

Now, here are some practical principles that I want to lay into your mind and into your heart. Some things that we can do in our homes, in our relationship to our children:

1. Correct your children. Let me remind you, don’t just punish your children—correct them. Correction that needs punishment for reinforcement is fine. But if all you do is punish your children and never correct them by teaching them what they did wrong and what they need to do right, then your punishment is unjust. They need to be corrected. If you punish your son or your daughter for doing something wrong but you have never taught them to do right, you’re wrong.

Let me give you an illustration. If you punish your child for taking out the trash the wrong way and you’ve never taught him first how to do it right, then you’re wrong. And your children already have a sense of high injustice, how they’ve been dealt with unjustly. And that can degenerate into rebellion simply because they feel like they’ve been dealt with unjustly. So never, never discipline you child—never discipline your son or your daughter—without guidance. Guidance is the rule of correction, and punishment is only the reinforcement of correction.