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My journey as a dad. I grew up in a family with both parents and two boys. My brother was a year younger. In other words, babies weren’t a thing.
When I became a Christian at 18, babies, families, and fatherhood became real. I saw around me what it looked like for a godly man to lead a family.
Anne and I got married when I was at 24, and when I was 27 Caroline was born. We had four more children within 7 years. 5 kids in 7 years.
When Caroline was born I had a business called Triangle Vinyl. Fixed car interiors and windshield chips for about 50 car lots throughout the Triangle. By the time Will was born in summer 2000, I was working for Cornerstone. I’ve been doing that ever since.
A few data points so you know who you’re dealing with:
A basic idea to grap: You are the dad your child needs. You need to be the dad your child needs.
Your parents are being called to parent well, but God calls you to honor and obey them—even when they don’t!
“Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.” (Exod 20:12)
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. 2 “Honor your father and mother” (this is the first commandment with a promise), 3 “that it may go well with you and that you may live long in the land.” (Eph 6:1–3)
Four key decisions to help yourself down the road as a parent. Each of these has an enormous impact on how fruitful you’ll be as a parent:
We parent our children by faith and not by works. But faith acknowledges that we have to work hard, but that God must show up with all of his grace and power. Faith knows that God must do it, but I must also be obedient.
R. C. Ryle captures this well in The Duties of Parents
Beware of that miserable delusion into which some have fallen, — that parents can do nothing for their children, that you must leave them alone, wait for grace, and sit still. These persons have wishes for their children in Balaam's fashion, — they would like them to die the death of the righteous man, but they do nothing to make them live his life. They desire much, and have nothing. And the devil rejoices to see such reasoning, just as he always does over anything which seems to excuse indolence, or to encourage neglect of means.
I know that you cannot convert your child. I know well that they who are born again are born, not of the will of man, but of God. But I know also that God says expressly, "Train up a child in the way he should go," and that He never laid a command on man which He would not give man grace to perform. And I know, too, that our duty is not to stand still and dispute, but to go forward and obey. It is just in the going forward that God will meet us. The path of obedience is the way in which He gives the blessing. We have only to do as the servants were commanded at the marriage feast in Cana, to fill the water-pots with water, and we may safely leave it to the Lord to turn that water into wine.
R. C. Ryle, The Duties of Parents
In other words, you can’t do God’s work (heart change), and he’s not going to do yours (faithful parenting).
Passages like Deut 6:4 and Eph 6:4 make that clear:
“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. 6 And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. 7 You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 8 You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 9 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. (Deut 6:4–9)
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (Eph 6:4)
The responsibility is to “bring them up…in the instruction of the Lord.” There’s no qualification here like, “If you had good parents as models.” Or, “If you’re good with young children.” Or, “If you handle chaos well.”
Your gifting and personality will impact HOW you go about accomplishing this, but God’s Word makes it clear you MUST do this.
Just as your children are “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Ps 139:14) and knitted together in their mother’s womb (v. 13), so are you. You will be a unique mom and a unique dad to your children. There are no clones.
The job is so enormous and so complex, aspects of it will be harder or easier for us. We’ll find ourselves more or less gifted for specific parts of it.
Early in my parenting I had a set of influences from our family of churches at the time. Lots of the things these dads did were helpful and inspiring. But these dads were so different from me in personality and gifting, I found over the years I had to really adjust what I did to suit me and my wife and my children.
It’s good to keep going back to the Bible and remind ourselves what God says my responsibility is.
I’m helped if I can simplify what I’m trying to do. Two passages that help us do that with fathering are Ephesians 6:4 and Colossians 3:21:
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (Eph 6:4)
Fathers, do not provoke your children, lest they become discouraged. (Col 3:21)
“Fathers” (pateres) – Can be “parents” but more likely “fathers.”
The law-giver of the Romans gave virtually full power to the father over his son, whether he thought proper to imprison him, to scourge him, to put him in chains, and keep him at work in the fields, or to put him to death; and this even though the son were already engaged in public affairs, though he were numbered among the highest magistrates, and though he were celebrated for his zeal for the commonwealth (cited Lincoln, Ephesians, WBC, 398-399).
Both passages say not to “provoke” our children.
We are to “bring them up/nourish” (ektrephete) also a present active imperative. “Continually bring them up/nourish them!”
Then we get the basic vision: “bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord”:
”Instruction” (vouthesia):
The second word (nouthesia), whether translated ‘instruction’ or ‘warning’, seems to refer primarily to verbal education, while the first word (paideia) means training by discipline, even by punishment (John Stott, The Message of Ephesians, 248).
Remember, “instruction” is not just for fathers. It’s also a mother’s responsibility:
Hear, my son, your father’s instruction, and forsake not your mother’s teaching, 9 for they are a graceful garland for your head and pendants for your neck. (Prov 1:8–9)
Once again it’s “of the Lord,” so the instruction is defined by God and not ourselves. It’s God Word that will be a central part of what we work to teach our children.
Colossians 3:21 adds that we’re to father our children in such a way that they not become “discouraged.” “Discouraged” (athumōsin) used only here in the NT. BDAG, “to become disheartened to the extent of losing motivation, be discouraged, lose heart, become dispirited.”
Douglas Moo on this:
Paul does not want to see the children of Christian families disciplined to such an extent that they ‘lose heart’ (NASB; NJB; NRSV) and simply give up trying to please their parents” (Colossians, PNTC, 307).
God has hard-wired children to be profoundly affected by their parents. A parent has a unique ability to discourage a child. Just as they have a unique ability to influence them for good, so a parent can discourage a child as powerfully.
Instruction has to do with the teaching we do as parents, getting God’s Word into the minds—and Lord willing, the hearts—of our children.
Read the Bible to your children—the best way is the way you’ll actually do it.
Have your children read the Bible. Start them with the habit even before they can read. A Bible picture book for 15 minutes with an audio Bible, that kind of thing.
Be sure to give them Bibles and Bible assignments that match their development.
Be faithful with church attendance. One of the enormous benefits of church attendance is being confronted by God’s Word. It’s read, taught, prayed, sung, and modelled in a hundred ways every Sunday. This is nothing more than “instruction of the Lord” as Eph 6:4 demands.
Church is also a powerful way to reinforce what you teach. When they hear the same things from other respectable, kind people, it validates and empowers your teaching.
Don’t just teach the Proverbs (which is excellent!), but teach LIKE the Proverbs.
The Book of Proverbs is a fascinating study in HOW to talk to our children:
Go to the ant, O sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise. (Prov 6:6)
For at the window of my house I have looked out through my lattice, 7 and I have seen among the simple, I have perceived among the youths, a young man lacking sense, (Prov 7:6–7)
Life is filled with teaching opportunities, teachable moments:
Talking about these things and how to think about these things is one key way you will pass along WISDOM to your child.
Don’t think of the gospel as something you teach them when they’re young “to get them saved.”
The gospel is the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ for sinners who deserve God’s judgment.
That’s good news we need hear throughout our Christian lives, not just at the front end.
The challenge is to communicate the gospel accurately, which is the promise of eternal life we receive by a personal and true faith.
Where it gets hard is when we take this relatively simple truth and add to it. E.g., we might want to see “evidence” of this personal and true faith before we give our children positive encouragement they’re Christians. This isn’t a bad desire. But if we do this poorly we can quickly and easily communicate that faith isn’t enough. You actually have to be good enough to be saved. Doing that, we’ve preached a false gospel.
In handling our child’s conversion there’s risk of false conversions (baptizing someone who isn’t a Christian) and also of preaching a false gospel (wanting to “make sure” they’re Christians we end up preaching you have to be good enough to be saved.
The challenge is that a Christian child is still a child. A 9-yr old boy who’s a Christian is still a 9-yr old boy. He’s still going to break windows and make heroic messes. The mess is because he’s 9, not because he’s unsaved.
A 12-yr old girl who gets saved is still 12. She’s going to talk back to her mom and have a bad attitude about chores sometimes. She grumbles about chores because she’s 12, not because she’s unsaved.
Instruction is like the kindling, bull, and water that Elijah assembled on Mt. Moriah. It was the fire from above that turned this into a radical divine event.
Your child being filled with the Holy Spirit could be one of the catalysts that radically changes their spiritual trajectory.
No, you can’t make it happen. But you can pray for it—and talk about it as it comes up in church life.
From birth till they leave the house, you’ll need an affectionate relationship with your child to bear real fruit as a parent.
There’s no simple or easy way to do this. Like all relationships, this will require your:
Rick Phillips talks about building that relationship through four things:
Don’t be someone you’re not when it comes to relationship. If you hate camping, go to a basketball game. If you hate sports, teach them how to play chess.
Kid’s activities and breakfasts are two big ones for me.
As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. (Ps 103:13)
See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. (1 John 3:1)
Once you have a child, you’re a parent and never cease to be one. Even a marriage might end, but the parent-child relationship never does. It can be bad or good, but the relationship itself remains throughout our entire lives.
But there’s a special phase of parenting you want to grab hold of: The clock starts when you have your first child, and it stops when your last child becomes an adult. Absolute minimum, that’s somewhere around 18 years. For some us, it’s much longer.
The challenge for us is this, not to lose focus throughout all these decades of the responsibility. This is hard, because in these same decades you’ll develop your career and likely advance to some challenging seasons in it. But despite the demands of your job, your responsibility as a dad is unwavering.
Every phase of a child’s life demands focus to see it bear good fruit.
Each phase of a child’s life has joys and challenges. Avoid thinking of any phase as “that dreaded phase,” whether it’s the baby years or “Terrible 2s” or “the teen years,” etc.
As a father shows compassion to his children, so the LORD shows compassion to those who fear him. (Ps 103:13)
Sometimes you need to step back and remind yourself you really love them.s
Why? Because that’s what we need!
For you to read:
For your child to read (or you to read to them)—several of these you’ll need to adapt as needed. E.g., the Presbyterian resources teach a different view of baptism than we have. You can easily use the bulk of them, however, and leave out those portions.
Here are some other recent messages.
We are a church built on the Bible, guided and empowered by the Spirit, striving to make disciples, and pursuing holiness in the context of robust biblical relationships.
© 2024 Cornerstone Fellowship Church of Apex
