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Introduction
1. Ephesians 6:1-4
2. 1 Kings 2:2
3. Genesis 2:15 – Guide, guard, govern, Prophet, priest, king
Five Things a Father Must Teach His Children
1. The attributes of God.
2. Who Jesus Christ is, what He has done, His promise
3. The nature of man, and his need for a savior
4. The requirements of salvation
5. Reverence for the Word of God
Three Ways a Father Must Love His Children
1. Redemptively, sacrificially, unconditionally
2. Love centers in the will
3. Love must be habitual
Five Things a Father Must Give His Children
1. Acceptance
2. Approval
3. Affection
4. Association
5. Authority
Six Practical Things a Father Can Do for His Children
1. Correct them – Guidance is the rule of correction, and punishment is only the reinforcement of correction.
2. Don’t ignore wrong behavior.
3. Don’t pamper your children.
4. You don’t mold clay when it is dry. Lower their defenses to counsel them.
5. Give your children equal access to you. Give them time.
6. Make learning a joy for your children.
Love Your Children
1. Don’t give gifts that have more value than the love you give them with
2. Don’t give grudgingly
3. Correct them in love
This is a particularly important month because it’s the month that we annually celebrate Father’s Day. I want to talk to you about fathering. I want to talk to you about some very practical matters that deal with us being fathers. And in order to do that, I want to read from the Bible today, so if you’ll just take your Bible and turn with me to Ephesians 6 and let’s just read a few words here:
1Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.
2Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise;
3That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.
And here’s the one I want you to hear:
4And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.
Now that is a charge that God gives to you and me. It’s interesting in the Bible, when you read about fathers and how they gave charges to their children. King David in the Old Testament, the king of Israel, was a man who dealt in different ways with his children. He dealt differently with Solomon than he did with Adonijah or Absalom or with the others. With Adonijah, the Bible says that he was indulgent with him. He never restrained him at any time, never did discipline him at any time, and as a result of that, Adonijah—the one who rose up and tried to wrest the kingdom from his father, David—was spoiled. He was used to having his own way. With Absalom, because of the way he was, David almost pampered him, and then Absalom, of course, became seditious and tried to steal his father’s kingdom. Solomon, however, was a different matter, and Solomon was the one that inherited David’s throne. David gave him a great legacy, far more than he did his other children. And it’s interesting, too, because the charge that he gave to Solomon is one that he didn’t give to his other children.
And here in I Kings 2:2, it says David said to his son, Solomon:
2I go the way of all the earth: be thou strong therefore, and shew thyself a man;
And what he’s literally saying to his son, Solomon, is, “Grow up and be a man,” or just “Be a man.” That’s what he wanted Solomon to be. The only thing God wants us to be is to be men.
Now, as fathers, however, there are some things that we need to understand, some things that the Bible tells us about, some things that we need to be aware of. So for a moment or two, let me recap for you very briefly some things the Bible teaches:
According to Genesis 2:15, there are three things that every father must do. The father in the home is the Jehovah-Jireh, the “lord who provides.” And the father is to guide, guard, and govern. That means to direct, protect, correct. To nourish, cherish, admonish. To be the prophet, priest, and king. Those are the three things that a father must do.
There are five things that a father must teach his children. The five things that a father must teach his children are:
1. We must teach our children the attributes of God. You and I cannot leave this up to paid professional preachers or to other people. We can’t leave it up to a Sunday school teacher or to a friend or a neighbor. As a father, it is our responsibility to raise our children in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. The first thing we must teach our children are the characteristics or the attributes of God. The very nature of God himself is revealed in His Word.
2. Secondly, we must teach our children about the person of Jesus Christ—Who He is, what He has done, and what His promise is to you and me. They must understand that Jesus is their personal Savior. He is not an impersonal creed. He is not somebody’s catechism. Salvation is personal because it is in the person of Jesus Christ, and we must teach our children who Jesus is.
3. Thirdly, we must teach our children the nature of man. In this day and age of humanism and materialism, where we have the feeling that everybody is good and that all we have to do is to be educated to let that goodness come out, we have a wrong premise. The Bible doesn’t teach us that. The Bible teaches us that we and our own human nature have gone astray. We have each turned to our own way. We’re willful, we’re selfish, we’ve come short of the glory of God, and we are in need of divine help. And as long as children are taught that they are good, there is no need for them to have a savior. We must realize that none of us—even at our best—can approach being like Jesus. We have to have the nature of Christ imparted to us because we are people in need of a redeemer.
4. We must teach our children the requirements of salvation. We’re not saved by the recitation of some creed. We’re not saved by self-immolation or flagellation or some other forms of punishment of the flesh that can somehow accrue to us righteousness or right-standing in the sight of God because we have demeaned ourselves or diminished our stature in some way or somehow ended our life in some great act of martyrdom. That doesn’t cut it with God. There is only one way to be saved, and that’s by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ. In order to do that, there has to be the balance between repentance and faith. Our sons and our daughters must understand the requirements of salvation.
5. We must teach them reverence for the Word of God. If children do not have reverence for the Word of God, they have no absolute for their standard of morality. No one can come to the knowledge of God by explanation, only by revelation. That’s the reason why many times when you go to talk to somebody about the Lord or about God and try to tell them Who Jesus is and what He did when He came to this Earth and died on the Cross, they ask us about God or some question. We try to explain God, and the first thing you know, we’re bogged down because you can’t explain God, and we lose the ability to save. The Word of God itself brings the revelation of God, so any witness or testimony that we give must come from the Word of God. It’s the Word that is the incorruptible seed of the Word. Like Jesus said concerning the rich man and Lazarus, if they hear not the Word, then they won’t believe, even though somebody rose from the dead and came back and told them what the afterlife was like. We must have reverence for God’s Word. Our children must be taught that the Word of God must have Lordship in our lives or else Christ is not Lord.
We also need to also understand that we are to love. There are three ways that God loves us, and we’re to love our children the same way: Redemptively, sacrificially, and unconditionally. That’s how God loves, and that’s how God wants us to love.
Understand two things about love. First, love doesn’t center in your emotions. Love doesn’t center in your mind. Love is not synonymous with like. Love centers in the will. Love can be commanded. You can command to love, and you can command not to love. Therefore, we must teach our children that love is an act of the will. We will to will the Will of God, and that’s the evidence of our love.
Secondly, love—to be loved—must be habitual. It cannot be spasmodic. It cannot be something that only comes when we are emotionally stirred. But it has to be habitual. It must be in the will. And then it must have a relationship. It must be that way, or it is not love.
There are five things that every man must give his children. You and I have to understand that as the Jehovah-jireh, it’s our responsibility to minister to our family. It’s our responsibility to minister to our children.
I want you to understand these and hear these, because after I give you these five, I want to talk to you about some very practical things of how we can help our children and how we can raise them in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. The five things that God gives us that we must also give our children are:
1. Acceptance. If you don’t accept your son, you don’t accept your daughter, you reject them. Out of that rejection by the father, they’ll transfer that to God in Heaven, and they’ll suffer from that rejection all their lives. We must, primarily and fundamentally, accept our sons and our daughters as our children. We cannot deny them. When we’re born of the Spirit of God, the Bible says in 2 Timothy 2:13 that God will not deny us, even when we’re too weak to have any faith. Because if He did, He’d be denying Himself. Because we are part with Him as a partaker of His divine nature.
2. Approval. We not only need to give our children acceptance; we need to give our children approval. Our children need to have the approbation of a father. That confirms their identity. Without that, they have an identity crisis that may never be resolved simply because it’s never been confirmed by a father’s approval.
3. Affection. We need to give our children affection. You have to understand something about affection. Affection is not just simply a warm feeling towards someone; it is a devotion to that person. We have to be devoted to our children. Not devoted to things, but to our children. When we’re devoted to things, and children see our devotion to things more than to them, they begin to think that they’re taking second place. That’s like in America where so many fathers are addicted to television. And the child comes up to talk to Dad, and Dad’s watching television and says to the child, “Don’t bother me.” And the child realizes he’s taking second place to an inanimate object. That child then suffers because the child doesn’t get the proper affection or devotion that’s necessary.
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.
2. Don’t ignore wrong behavior. When you’re child does something wrong, don’t ignore it. When they’re crude, crash, when they’re willful, when they are rebellious, don’t ignore that. The Bible says don’t spare the rod. In other words, there are times when your children may hear you but not pay any attention to you, and at that time, you must enforce your discipline.
3. Don’t pamper your children. Give them protection. Remember, you are to direct, protect, and correct. One thing you have to do to protect them. And one of the things that happens with many children when they’re dealt with unjustly by someone else and they try to tell you, bit you take up for the other person rather than your child, you may be doing them an injustice. What you need to do is to determine who’s right and wrong before you do any correction at all. Because when you do it wrong, whether it’s to the other person or your own child, then you turn out to be in the wrong.
Remember to protect them. We have to protect them in a variety of different ways. Men have to protect their daughters in order to protect their virginity because it is a glory to a man to present his daughter as a chaste virgin at the time of the marriage. And one of the things we have to do is to protect that. We have to protect her. We don’t need to provoke children by overseeing them to the point of smothering them, but we do have to protect them.
4. You don’t mold clay when it is dry. Lower their defenses to counsel them. Whenever you need to counsel your children and you need to talk to them about things that are important, one of the things you have to do is to lower their defenses. And if you try to talk to your child about things—your son or your daughter, whether they’re young or teenager or whatever they may be—if you try to talk to them in their bedroom or in your living room, you’re on their turf or they’re on your turf, one way or the other, defenses rise and fall. And what you need to do is to take them apart on neutral territory so that you can talk to them when their defenses are down.
When I pastored, people laughed that when Pastor Cole asks you out for a Coke, be careful because he wants to talk to you. So the “Coke ride” became the synonym for getting counseled or talked to. But I wanted to get them on neutral territory. I would take them out and play racquetball with them, or I’d play handball with them, or do something with them. And then after we had done that and had a time of fellowship, I’d sit down with them, because you see, the principle is: You don’t mold clay when it’s dry. It has to be moistened. You have to get them into a receptive mood. You have to get them into a place where they’ll receive what you have to say. If they are hardened or if they’re not receptive and you try to tell them something, they’ll reject it. It won’t do them one single bit of good. So one of the best things you can do with your daughter, take her out on a date. In the process of taking her out, talk to her about various things. Find out what she’s like. But don’t try to do it where she’s going to be defensive and you’re going to get into arguments. It will be very, very difficult. I’d tried that. I know!
I have a daughter who’s now a district attorney. I’ll never forget the time when I tried on her turf to tell her some things and she backed me down. I walked away from there feeling very, very foolish. Whe was only about 12 or 13. But she’s the one that I knew was going to be an attorney. I’ll never forget one day when Lois was in a pout because her mother wanted her to do something and she didn’t want to do it. It came dinnertime and she had stayed in her room all afternoon. We all sat down at the dinner table and she wasn’t there. Finally, I called her and said, “Lois, you come on and sit down here.” And she came out very reluctantly and sat down at the table. I wanted to get her out of that kind of a mood she was in, so I asked her, “Lois, why don’t you pray for the dinner hour? Why don’t you say grace for us?” Boy, she gave me a look! She looked at her mother. She looked at her brother and her sister. And then she bowed her head, and we all bowed our heads, she began to pray. And she said, “Lord, I thank you that you’ve prepared a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” And I mean we roared! It just broke everything up! It was one of the funniest things that ever happened!
But, I just want to point that out that when you want to counsel your children, do it on a neutral territory. Neutralize the situation so that they don’t become defensive and argumentative with you.
5. Give your children equal access to you. Don’t be partial with your children. One thing that happens when you have three children, is that the middle child always feels like the one that is left out. The middle children feel as though they are left out because the older one seems to get the burden of responsibility and the younger one gets all of the affection, and the middle child is right in between there. To avoid that, you must give your children equal access. If you show partiality to either one of your children, you develop what is called sibling rivalry where they begin to try to outdo one another. And rather than loving one another, the children become hateful toward one another because you’ve set up jealousies because you didn’t give them equal access of time. That was one of the problems that David had with his children. He didn’t give them equal access of time.
Part of giving children access to you is to give children time. We live in a very peculiar age—a very peculiar time—when many fathers get up before dawn to go to work and come home after dark and seldom see the children during the work week. They can’t give the children time necessarily during the day. But you see, the issue is not how much time you give them but the quality of the time you give them. You could be at home every day all week long and never give your children real time because quality time is undivided attention. When you pay attention to them—when you respect what they’re feeling, what they’re saying, what they’re thinking where you give them quality time—it’s not the amount, it’s not the quantity, it’s the quality of time that you give them.
It’s the same way with your wife. It’s not how much time, not quantity but quality. You see, that’s the common problem that women have. She says, “My husband listens to me, but he doesn’t hear me.” Because you don’t give undivided attention. And one of the things that you need to do with your children was to give them real time.
I teach these things because I made so many mistakes when I was growing up. My son played ball when he was in college. He played a lot of games in college, but he was down in Southern California and I was up in Northern California. I was a pastor. I was doing my thing and was very busy. But do you know one of the games that he best remembers is not the game that he hit the home run in, it’s not the game that he scored the most runs in. It was the game that I attended because Dad was there. Quality time. He never forgot it.
6. You and I have the ability to make learning a joy for our children. To learn you must want to be taught. If we don’t teach our children and give them joy in learning, they will not want to be taught. Our teachers—our educators—they don’t have the burden and the responsibility of making our children want to learn. That’s us! If we’re unteachable, our children will be unteachable. But if we have joy in learning, if we have delight in finding something new, whether it’s about the nature of man, nature itself, or the nature of God, or something of a book, we teach that to our children. We teach our children that dogs are not man’s best friend but books are. We have the ability to teach our children how to learn and to want to learn and to want to be taught. We create that in them. If we don’t teach them that, we can’t blame others when they don’t either. That’s our responsibility. You can’t pay somebody enough money to do that for you.
One of things you and I can do is to invest in the positives. Rather than investing in some of the things that are recreation for us or that are things or toys for us, we need to invest in learning helps for our children—recordings, books, camps, things that our children can go to or be involved in that will mark them and influence them. There are many times we’ve got to sacrifice ourselves and things that we would delight in in order to do that for our children, but that’s part of our stewardship. Invest in the positives that will influence our children or eternity.
And then lastly, God loves us unconditionally, and we’re to love our children unconditionally. When we only love our children and have affection for them when they do things that are good or do things of which we approve, then we give them conditional love and they learn to do that in order to get love. They have to know that even when they’re bad, even when they are not good, we still love them.
In loving our children, don’t ever give gifts that have more value than the love you give them with. If you give your children things but not love, the gifts don’t hold value. And don’t give grudgingly. Either delight in giving your children or don’t give. That’s what the Bible talks about! Not to give grudgingly. Don’t give grudgingly to your wife. Don’t give grudgingly to your children. If you grudge about giving, don’t give. If you can’t give out of love, don’t give. If the gift does not have the value and the estimation of love that gives it its value, then it becomes literally worthless.
When we correct them, we do it in love. I remember my dad used to punish me and say, “This hurts me more than it does you.” I could never figure that out until I had to punish my son, Paul. And I told him, “This hurts me more than it does you.” I don’t think he could figure it out until he had to do it with his son. Yes, there are some parameters and perimeters in love. But we are to love unconditionally because that’s how God loves us.
This will help us in being the kind of a father God wants us to be because really, in our fatherhood to our children, we are the reflection of God’s Fatherhood toward us as His children.
If you’re a father and you need prayer, we have those who can pray with you. Or if you’re a son and you need to pray about your father, we’ll pray with you. This is the time when we as fathers need to take stock. If you’re a father and you have not been doing the things that God has required of you to do and you’ve not been a good steward of your children, this is a good time to make a determination to be the father they need and God wants you to be.
