INTRODUCTION: “Top 10 Things You’ll Never Hear a Dad Say”
I loved to play with my dad’s tools when I was a boy. Anyone else like to do that? They were greasy and dirty and well, they were just cool because they were dads. Now my sons love to play with their dad’s tools. Illustr. – Travis wanting screwdrivers, hammer, tape measure, etc. When Grandpa Wendell comes out, Travis loves to get in the back of his pickup and play with Grandpa’s tools. He even has his own tool bench now! This idea of men and tools gave me the idea for this message “Dad’s Toolbox.”
Every father is put on this earth to build something. Psalm 127:1 – “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain.” Are you building the right things the right way or are you wasting your time?
THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB/PROJECT YOU WILL EVER HAVE IS BEING A GOOD FATHER TO YOUR CHILDREN.
If you want to build something, you’ve got to have the right tools! What are some of the essential tools you need to be a good father?
STEP ONE: FOLLOW THE INSTRUCTIONS! (INSTRUCTION MANUAL)
The paper booklet that I hold in my hands is something most men think is absolutely worthless. That’s right, it’s an INSTRUCTION MANUAL. A waste of paper and ink. For you see, when you have the superior intelligence of a man, you instinctively know how things go together! You don’t have time to be bothered with all that reading and the boring details of how to put that new gas grill together. You say to your wife, “I’ve put together hundreds of these things! Piece of cake!” Four hours later you’re taking it back apart and putting it together again with your wife’s help because you left out something and the thing won’t go together right! Should’ve read the instructions!
Illustr. – Refrigerator door from left to right open.
When you don’t read the instructions, you waste a lot of time and run into a lot of trouble. You get mad, lose your temper, say things you shouldn’t say, break things, throw things, lose things…it’s bad. All because you thought in your pride that you could do just fine on your own. Dad, listen to me. If you want to build a healthy family, you’ve got to read the INSTRUCTION MANUAL (BIBLE). Being a husband and father is a complicated job! It’s way beyond you. You need help. Before you pick up one tool, you need to become as familiar as you can with the God’s INSTRUCTION MANUAL.
There’s important information in here that will tell you how to be a good husband. How to love and discipline your children. How to build a healthy home. How to be a man of God. It’s all in here! But a lot of you guys either aren’t reading it or you doing that other guy thing, you think you’re so smart that you don’t need any help. When you don’t read the instructions, you waste a lot of time and run into a lot of trouble. You get mad, lose your temper, say things you shouldn’t say, break things, throw things, lose things…it’s bad. All because in your pride you thought that you could do just fine on your own.
Bad things are happening to our families because we’re not reading the INSTRUCTION MANUAL. Dads, many of you have all the tools you need to build a great family, you’re just not paying attention to the INSTRUCTIONS.
STEP TWO: STICK WITH THE PLAN – BE CONSISTENT! (HAMMER)
When I think of a HAMMER I think of CONSISTENCY. You can’t drive a nail into a 2”x4” with one blow. You’ve got to strike that nail repeatedly until the force eventually drives the nail home. If you’ve ever been around carpenters/builders when they’re “framing” a house, you will hear the rhythm of the hammer blows as they do their work. A room isn’t built with on blow of a hammer. A sturdy wall isn’t made from a couple of 2”x 4”s just thrown together. No, every sixteen inches you lay another 2”x 4” and hammer it into place. Before long, nail after nail, 2”x 4” by 2”x 4”, you’ve got a sturdy wall, and then another and after a while, you’ve got a room and in a few weeks or months, a whole house.
Dad, God has given you the INSTRUCTION MANUAL to help you build your “dream home.” With God’s “blueprint” you can’t fail! The problem is, we think we can get by with an occasional prayer here and a church service there. We’re not consistent. We try to build haphazardly and then when the family starts falling apart we run to God for a quick “patch job.” We pull out the INSTRUCTION MANUAL for a few days because we’re failing and we try to throw up some hastily made support walls. We go at it furiously for short periods of time out of desperation. Take some time off. Take the kids swimming. Take the wife out to eat. Go to church together. Maybe even say a prayer or two.
But I’m holding this HAMMER to remind you to CONSISTENTLY STICK WITH THE PLAN. Get a spiritual rhythm going and keep HAMMERING away at the right things. Prayer, time with God, Christian friends, reading the Word, going to church, a men’s accountability group…keep driving away at the right things every day and over the course of your lifetime you will build something that lasts.
Illlustr. – “Try Harder” God has given you an advantage, you’ve just got to try harder and be CONSISTENT.
STEP THREE: TAKE A BREAK! (SCREWDRIVER – SENSE OF HUMOR & THERMOS - RELAXATION)
Once a guy gets “into” a project, it’s hard to get him to stop! We get focused and all we can think about is the job. If we’re not careful, we’ll spend every waking hour trying to finish. Sunup to sundown. Late into the night. Working on very little sleep. Barely stopping to eat or go to the bathroom! Totally absorbed. Let’s be honest this morning fellas. Some of us need to grab the THERMOS and take a break! We’re wound up way too tight. All stressed out. Grumpy. Tired. Serious all the time. You need to get out the SCREWDRIVER and LOOSEN UP!
Dad, it you don’t have some “stress relievers,” you’re not much fun to be around! It’s just my personal opinion but I think any really good dad needs to have a “screw loose here and there!” (SENSE OF HUMOR) Life’s too short to be so serious all the time! Have some fun! Learn to laugh at yourself!
Illustr. – “Poupon”
Illustr. – “The Road’s Too Slippery”
C’mon Dad! Lighten up and laugh! If you don’t, you’re going to “crack up!” My dad always loved to have fun. He was goofy. On Wednesday nights, I get weird. Have fun! Take some time off. “You deserve a break today.” Grab the fishing poles and head out for the lake. Load the family in the car and take a day trip. Go buy a hammock and sit in the shade sipping lemonade! You need some stress relievers. You’ll be a better dad if you keep a sense of humor and take some time off.
STEP FOUR: BUILD WITH INTEGRITY (LEVEL & TAPE MEASURE)
These are two important tools for testing the integrity of the things you are building. Any builder knows that you can really mess something up bad just by a slight miscalculation in your measurements. Illustr. – Cutting the outlet switch in the wrong place on a piece of drywall. It doesn’t have to be off by much to cause a serious problem. The same is true with the level. If you don’t want your walls to be crooked, you’d better make sure, “they’re on the level.” If you get off just a little bit, and you don’t correct it, you’ll have a mess!
Once again, we’re back to the INSTRUCTION MANUAL as we try to keep our responsibility of being a Godly father “on the level.” Psalm 119:11 – “Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.” God’s Word is your “plumb line.” Your “measuring stick.” You’ll never “measure up” if you take your measurements from the standards of the world around you. There is compromise everywhere. Here are some ways of measuring your INTEGRITY:
(Dave Roever) Be a man of your word. When you make a promise, live by it. If you break a promise, explain to your children why you can’t do what you said you’d do. And make sure your reason for not doing what you promised is more important than doing it.
Say no. Your kids may be saying, “Aww, Dad!” on the outside, but inside they’re saying, “Thank you. You gave me a reason to say no when I didn’t have the courage to say it on my own.” If you don’t discipline your children, you don’t love them. Proverbs 13:24 – “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.” If you let your children compromise, you aren’t helping them build lives of INTEGRITY and the further off center they get, the more of a mess they’re going to make.
Prove that you can be trusted. Gary Ezzo, Ex. Director, Growing Families International – “Your chief challenge as a father is to build a foundation of trust in each child. How do you know whether you’re building that kind of foundation? Ask yourself two questions: 1) Do my children show by their actions that they really trust me? And 2) is one of their actions coming to me for counsel and advice? Do your kids come to you saying, ‘Dad, I’ve got a problem. Can we talk?’ And when they do, how do you respond? You see, if a child can’t trust his Dad more than he trusts his peers, then his peers, not his Dad, will shape his destiny.”
Live with nothing to hide. Integrity – means doing what is right when no one is watching and everyone else is compromising. Illustr. – Son who put back the sunglasses. If you don’t do what’s right, you can’t expect your children to do what’s right!
TOOLS TO GET YOU BACK ON TRACK WHEN YOU’VE GOTTEN AWAY FROM GOD’S PLAN
1. INSTRUCTION MANUAL! If you’ve been putting things together the wrong way you may need to dismantle and start rebuilding. (Actually, building things other than God’s way will often dismantle things for you!) II Chronicles 30:9 – “If you return to the Lord, then your brothers and your children will be shown compassion…for the Lord your God is gracious and compassionate. He will not turn his face from you if you return to him.” You may have made a real mess out of things, but if you will get back to the INSTRUCTION MANUAL, God will begin to turn things around!
2. TIME (WATCH) I encourage you to keep a WATCH in your toolbox because many of you dads have become so absorbed in what you’re doing that you’ve lost all track of time and your family misses you. The average father spends 15 minutes a week with his kids. Nearly all men feel a responsibility to provide for their families. They take their God-ordained role as “breadwinner” seriously. Maybe too seriously. Men who focus too much on the “providing” aspects of fatherhood risk becoming an ATM for their families instead of a DAD. Children need fathers who take active, caring, loving interest in their lives. That’s hard to do when you’re spending all your time at the office!
Illustr. – “I will give you 365 hours of my time this year…”
Illustr. – Dawson McCallister – “Several years ago, one of my sons almost died. As we were rushing to the hospital, I cried out to God, ‘Take me, not him! Take me, not him!’ Praise God, my son survived, and made a complete recovery. The other day, after I’d gotten back from a long trip, I was tired. Dead tired. But I could hear my son bouncing the ball outside. And he called out. ‘Hey Dad! Wanna’ play some basketball?’ No. I didn’t want to. But in the back of my head, I heard God say like He was standing in the room, ‘You told me you were willing to die for your son, now go out there and live for him.’”
3. LOVE & COMMITMENT (WRENCH)
Dads need to tighten up their level of love and commitment to their families. The problem in many American homes is that dad simply isn’t home anymore. Illustr. – The number of American children growing up without fathers has more than doubled in the last 40 years. The results are devastating. Almost 75% of American children living in single-parent families will experience poverty before they turn 11 years old, compared to only 20% of children in two-parent families. When daddy’s not home, it not only hurts financially. Homes without fathers also lead the nation in teen pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse and violent crime, to mention a few.
Illustr. – In his book Faith of the Fatherless, Paul Vitz says, “Many of history’s most famous atheists were alienated from their dads.” Friedrich Nietzche, the philosopher famous for saying, “God is dead,” lost his father when he was just four years old. He perceived God as weak and sickly. Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychiatry, despised his weak father, who he claimed was a pervert. Joseph Stalin hated his father, who beat him unmercifully. Hitler also received terrible beatings from his father, who died when Adolf was 14. After studying these and other “major historical rejecters” of God, Vitz found a “weak, dead or abusive father in every case.”
Vitz compared family conditions of prominent atheists to those of outstanding theists from the same area and found that the opposite was also true. Men like Blaise Pascal, the great French mathematician, William Wilberforce, the heroic abolitionist and Deitrich Bonhoffer, the German theologian executed for resisting Hitler all had close, loving relationships with their fathers.
“Small boys learn to be large men in the presence of large men who care about small boys.” – Phyllis Theroux
One last thing: Dad, treat your children’s mother with love and respect. Tell her you love her every day – in front of the kids. Tell her three, four, five times a day. They need to hear you say it. They need to see you live it!
STEP FIVE: TAKE PROPER CARE OF WOUNDS (BAND-AIDS)
This is not something you’ll usually find in a tool box but it’s a good idea to have a box of BAND-AIDS in there because when you’re working with tools and trying to build something, accidents happen. Illustr. – When Marty ran screw gun tip into his thumbnail.
Men are hurting. “Trends in American Men” 1) Men are identified by what they do and not by who they are. Mom/kids, give your dad a great present today. Tell him you love him just because of who he is! Your dad may have lost his job or may be going through a rough transition time in life where he’s questioning who he is and feeling like a failure. Let him know how much you love him. 2) Men are taught from a young age not to feel or express emotions. A boy falls and gets hurt, we say, “Don’t cry, be a man.” And we teach that little boy to grow up into a man who doesn’t know how to let his true feelings show. Dad, it’s not a sign of weakness to cry/show emotion. It communicates! Don’t hold it in. You’ll regret it. 3) Men are becoming friendless and isolated. Men, you need a friend! Someone you can talk to. Someone who will hold you accountable. Someone who will encourage you.
Chuck Swindoll – “(Your dad’s) not perfect. He would be the first to tell you. Nor is he altogether fair…nor always right. But there’s one thing he is – always and altogether – he is your dad…the only one you’ll ever have. And quite frankly, there’s only one thing he needs on Father’s Day. Plain and simple, he needs to hear you say four words: Dad, I love you. That’s the best gift you can give.”
Some dads here this morning may need a BAND-AID because you’ve been hurt. Some dads may need to hand out some BAND-AIDS because you’ve done the hurting. I hope some healing takes place this Father’s Day.
STEP SIX: DON’T QUIT UNTIL THE JOB’S DONE!
“What is a Father?” – “Fathers fight dragons almost daily. They are knights in shining armor; fathers in shiny trousers. There’s little difference as they march away each workday to the arena, which is sometimes called an office or a workshop. There they tackle the dragon with three heads: Weariness, Work and Monotony. And they never quite win the fight, but they never give up.”
Illustr. – “Hold My Hand” – James Dobson
Illustr. – “Last Words” Don’t quit, Dad! Be there to the end.
CONCLUSION: “I Want to be Just Like You” (VIDEO)
