7x Fatherhood

When a book such as The Seven Steps to a Sizzling Marriage is proclaimed as a must-read, I cringe. When a message with the theme “The Five Steps to a Struggle-free Life” is preached, I shake my head invisibly. When a tract titled “The Three Steps to Model Children” comes into my possession, I do not file it away with my important documents. When will we be honest enough to admit that life is not 90% theology and 10% experience, but 90% experience and 10% theology?

However, when the Lord blessed us with our seventh child, I could not help but ponder seven solid principles every man needs infused into his heart if he wants to be a successful father.

Fatherhood is a calling from the Heavenly Father. It’s not so difficult to see how God calls a man to the mission field in India. It’s not hard to believe God calls a man to preach His Word. It doesn’t stretch our imagination to accept that God calls a man to teach a classroom full of eager children. Why, then, is it a hard sell to believe that a man, who is providing spiritually, emotionally, and physically for his family, has been called by God to that role?

Providing for a family is a trek of Himalayan proportions for any man. It can feel like a very unspiritual season in our lives unless we take hold of the truth that it is indeed God’s calling. Not having a tight grasp on that truth causes us to see our wives and children as obstacles to our real callings as missionaries and ministers and schoolteachers. When our families are obstacles to us, we become incapacitated in our ability to serve them and become obstacles to them as well.

Fatherhood requires sonship. Knowing that the Bible teaches our wives and children to be submissive to men can inflate our heads. That is, unless we realize our calling is not to get from our wives and children, but to give to them. We fathers are not as tough as we may appear, and we stand in desperate need of constant provision to have anything worth giving to our families. For a man to seek life from his wife and to search for status in his children is out of God’s order and thus inherently wrong. Unless we are sons of the Heavenly Father and are receiving daily life and sustenance from His hand, our fathering is brittle and vain.

Marital fidelity is a must. In the heart-pounding excitement of courtship and those first few years of marriage, most of us men did not have a nebulous idea that fatherhood is not a 9-5 job but a 24/7/365 calling that does not come with a pause or stop feature. As that realization hits us with its force of bone-numbing weariness and exhaustion, Satan is right there to feed us his lie that there is satisfaction and pleasure to be experienced outside of these suffocating walls. “The best thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother,” is a simple but profound truth. To cast that truth away is to cast away our effectiveness as fathers.

A father is strong enough to cry. A checkup of our spiritual pulse is in order if we have never shed any tears as a father. What father can be present at the birth of his child and not cry tears of gratitude for the witness of a miracle, the safe birth of another precious new life? What father does not shed tears at the overwhelming knowledge that he is inadequate to fulfill the colossal responsibility for the spiritual and physical well-being of this life he now holds in his hands? For the father who has not experienced tears of gratitude and an utter sense of inadequacy simultaneously, take the time to pause at the bedside of each of your children after they are snugly tucked in and blissfully asleep. Pray a prayer of gratitude and blessing for each one. Even the most calloused of men will find this an exercise healthy for the heart.

Humility is essential. How well I recall the day three wise young men (not the ones from the Orient) sat at Subway eating subs, sipping drinks, and sharing their storehouses of wisdom on parenting. It still amazes me how little parents knew twenty years ago, but what is more astounding is how quickly I have joined the ranks of those clueless fathers and mothers. Humility in the heart of a father rejects the idea that a man can google some neatly packaged formula which guarantees a perfectly behaved son or a properly mannered daughter. Instead, he is fully alive to the fact that without the Holy Spirit empowering him as a father and without the Holy Spirit touching the life of his child, all his teaching and discipline will be mere ideas that never forge into convictions in his sons and daughters. A humble father not only is in touch with his utter inadequacy, but also accesses the immeasurable provisions God makes available to him if he is only willing to ask.

Avoid perfectionism like the plague. Men, never let anyone tell you that perfectionism is a worthy goal. The flawless family in which Dad and John always come in on time and Mom and Susie always have food on the table when it’s supposed to be? It exists in no geographic location, but only inhabits the pages of a book or the theme of a message.

Perfectionism is an idealism originating from the flesh tempting us to believe that everything will evolve into nirvana once I have my i’s dotted and my t’s crossed. Perfectionism creates a blindness to reality. Perfectionism builds pressure. Perfectionism assures resentment and eventual chaos. Perfectionism turns fathers into family programmers and social engineers. A child needs a father, not a technician.

The grace of God undergirds it all. Where would we fathers be without the grace of God? It’s only by the grace of God that we accomplish anything of value in our calling. It’s only by the grace of God that we are adopted as His sons. It’s only by the grace of God that we stand strong in our faithfulness to our wives and children. It’s only by the grace of God that our hearts can be made tender enough to experience moments which touch the deepest chasms of our hearts and move us to tears. It’s only by the grace of God that our layers of pride are peeled away, and humility grows within our hearts. It’s only by the grace of God that we can live above perfectionism’s cruel tyranny. And really, it’s only by the grace of God that we fathers may live within the grace of God.