Fathering with Patient, Long-Term Urgency

Make it all "of the Lord"

Photo by Bambi Corro on Unsplash

Fathers, you are a gardener. You planted the seed, which created kids in the first place, and now God commands us to keep tending our gardens. By patient faith - faith that He is producing thousands of generations, through you.

Think about it this way: in 500 years, there will be, all things being equal, about a million people that will have come from you. But the only point of connection you have with all those people are your children, and to a lesser degree, grandchildren.

So we labor both with the long-view in mind, but also with urgency. How?

Paul commands us, simply:

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (Ephesians 6:4)

The way we obey the negative command here is by pursuing the positive one. The way we keep from provoking our children to anger is by bringing them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.

The three most important words here being: “of the Lord.”

The original word for the word “discipline” is the Greek word “paideia”, which does mean discipline, but its full meaning is one that we have largely lost in modern English. The best word for it is the modern word enculturate. God calls us to situate our children into a certain culture - a culture “of the LORD.” Just as a gardener makes sure his garden’s soil and light and location are best for growth. Fathers are to see to it that their children are brought up as Christians, in a culture that is of the LORD.

There are three basic parts to this.

First, get them to church. This is not always easy, but it is simple. The church is the base piece of the Lego house. It’s in Lord’s Day Worship that our desires are shaped to love and enjoy what we should love and enjoy - that is, God Himself.

And as they get older, do not trade one religion for another, and forsake Lord’s Day worship for club sports. Do not enculturate them in Almighty sportsball for free money at Leviathan U. It’s not worth it.

Secondly, this means setting a tone, a temperature in the home that is OF the LORD. This may seem like a lot, but Christ’s yoke is easy, and his burden is light. It’s JUST reading a bit of the Word at dinner. It’s JUST praying about stuff that’s hard. It’s JUST laughing at silly things around the table.

Thirdly, once our kids are school-age, we must consider what culture they are being situated in, 8 hours a day, five days a week. One of the great evils of modern education is the rampant RELATIVISM embedded in all of it - the belief that there is no absolute standard of truth, goodness and beauty. This is the garden, the soil of all our other modern insanities. Which is no soil at all, which is why our generation is so rootless, so untethered.

All of this we are drawn to do, by faith - faith that our labors are not in vain, that God responds to simple obedience with grace that spans thousands of generations.