Good morning. Any veterans here this morning? Couple of you. Very good to have you. It’s Veterans’ Day weekend. We’ll pray for the vets and get busy.

Father God, thank you for an opportunity to get into your Word today. Lord God, we do remember this day the freedom that we have, the freedom that we have because so many have given of their time and of their life and have invested themselves in such a way as to procure freedom for the rest of us. Lord God, we thank you that because of the sacrifice of many men and women, that we can gather together to freely worship according to conscience and according to Scripture.

Lord God, we pray at this season a special measure of grace upon the armed forces that are overseas, many involved in what seems to be an escalating war and conflict. Pray, Lord God, that it would be short-lived. Pray, Lord God, that those families that are currently separated, that you would protect and provide and care for and encourage those family members, particularly those children who have parents that are away from home at this season, during a time of war. Pray, Lord God, that your people, Christians, would surround them and love them and encourage them and invest in them and show in a very tangible way your love and your grace and your goodness to them.

Lord God, we pray as well that the conflict would be short-lived, that the casualties would be minimal, and that fathers and mothers would soon come home to their children. We ask this in Christ’s name. Amen.

This morning we’re talking about men as fathers. This will conclude for us the brief series we’ve done out of Proverbs on men, and then next week we start our series on women. I’ll begin by reading from the Psalms 127, beginning in verse 3. It says, “Sons are a heritage from the Lord, and children a great reward for him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them; they will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate.”

Psalm 128 then tells us, “Blessed are all who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways. You will eat the fruit of your labor; blessings and prosperity will be yours. Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your home, and your sons will be like olive shoots around your table. Thus is the man blessed who fears the Lord. May the Lord bless you from Zion all the days of your life; may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem, your city, and may you live to see your children’s children. Peace be upon Israel.”

For a man, that is the good life: a beautiful wife who’s pregnant, a bunch of children who love him, sitting at his dinner table, having a bite to eat, worshipping the Lord, prosperity upon his city, and good health so that one day he can play with his grandkids. That’s the good life according to the Psalms. That’s the theme of our discussion today. We’re going to speak about men as fathers.

The first thing we have to note, though, is before a man can be a good father, he has to be a good Christian. To be a good Christian, he must realize that God is his Father, as Jesus taught us to pray. Our Father. God is our Father. And that having God as his father is what instructs a man on how to take care of his own children, that he becomes an imitator of God, and he becomes a father and treats his children the way that God has treated him.

What this means initially is that a man should love and fear God, and that then he should seek to have children who worship the same God as he does. It is repeated multitude of occasions throughout Scripture, where it says that they worship the god of their fathers. We are supposed to worship the same god as our dad. You and I worship the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That’s a dad and his son and his grandson.

In the same way, my dad’s name is Joseph. My name is Mark. My son’s name is Zack. When my grandson comes, I hope and pray that he worships the god of Zack and Mark and Joe. That’s what I am praying for. That’s what I want to see. I want to see my children worship the same god as me. But for them to do that, I must worship that god first. I must worship the one true god as my father, repent of my sin, come to him by faith, and love and adore him, and commit myself to his ways, and be his son, so that as he gives me sons, I know how to care for them and take care of them and invite them to serve and worship the same god as I do.

You see this throughout Proverbs. Proverbs 3:11-12, the father says, “My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline and do not resent his rebuke, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, as the Father the Son he delights in.” If a father loves his son, he disciplines him and deals with him to keep him on a path of purity and righteousness. In the same way, a father has God as his Father, and he should be receiving discipline and instruction and rebuke from God his Father so that he matures and grows, and then he should turn around and do that exact same thing for his son that he loves.

We’re then told in Proverbs 14:26, “He who fears the Lord has a secure fortress, and for his children it will be a refuge.” The safest place for children, Scripture says, is with a man who fears the Lord. If a man fears the Lord and worships God and loves and adores and reveres God and his Word, then he builds basically this great fortress in his life, within which he invites his children to dwell.

And in Proverbs 20:7, we’re told that “The righteous man leads a blameless life, and blessed are his children after him.” That as a man is a good Christian and loves the Lord, he grows in faithfulness and love for God, and he starts to walk away from his foolish sins, his childish ways, as Paul calls them. And then that is a blessing to his children because all the sins that a man commits, either before or after he’s married, in one varying degree or another do impinge and impact upon his children. And so he wants to be a blessing to his children by walking in the fear of the Lord.

This is important because what can happen then is a man will become a father. He’ll have children, and he will instruct them and guide them and discipline them, but he may be a fool and a hypocrite, under which circumstances the children won’t pay any attention to him. That’s what Proverbs 26:7 refers to. “Like a lame man’s legs that hang limp is a proverb in the mouth of a fool.”

Some of you had a dad who said, “Well, don’t do as I do; do as I say,” meaning “I’m a complete hypocrite, but do what I tell you to do.” This is the dad who tells the 16-year-old son, “Hey, stay away from alcohol. Don’t get yourself in trouble.” But dad’s always pouring a few back every night he gets home from work and is setting this foolish example for his son.

It’s this issue that some men know what the Bible says, and they tell their children to do those things, but they themselves are not doing those things, and Proverbs says that men like that speak with no authority. Nobody listens to them. Their children just sort of mock them and think it’s sort of funny. Dad is the quintessential hypocrite.

Here is the goal, though. Proverbs 17:6, “Children’s children are a crown to the aged, and then the parents are the pride of their children.” What this tells us is that a young man should be thinking about what kind of grandfather he’s going to be. You say, “Well, I’m only 20 years old.” Well, this is a good time to think about that because you have a lot of work to do before you’ll be a good grandfather, and a man needs to start with a goal of not just having children, but having grandchildren.

Jonathan Edwards, one of the godliest men in our nation’s history, prayed every day for five generations of his children and his grandchildren and his great – you wanna be thinking long term. What kind of grandchildren will I have? What kind of grandfather will I be? And I want to raise my children in such a way that they raise their children in such a way that I enjoy my grandkids.

And in the same way, we’re told there in Proverbs that a grandfather or a grandmother enjoys their grandchildren is the same way that a child should feel about their own parents. Any of you ever seen a good grandmother or a good highly motivated grandfather? Those are happy people.

I have the privilege of – I had the privilege of birthing with my wife. She did all the work; I was just sort of there. We had – my first child was Ashley, my oldest daughter. She was the first grandchild on both sides of our family, and my son Zack, who’s now 2, he was the first grandson on both sides of the family, and I have never seen my parents or my wife’s parents as happy as when they’re playing with the grandkids. They love being grandma and grandpa, and I have told the kids, “Don’t even infer that you need or want anything when you’re around them, because they buy you five.” And we have five of everything because they love their grandkids, and they lavish much grace upon them.

It says in the same way that you see grandparents just doting over and loving and adoring and boasting about and just investing in their grandkids, that’s the same way that children should be toward their own parents, that a son should look at his dad and say, “That’s my dad,” and he should do that with joy. He should look at his mom and say, “That’s my mom,” and he should be proud to say that. Same for the daughters. That the children should celebrate the kind of parents that they have and be glad that that’s their mom and that’s their dad. That’s what Proverbs says.

And so the issue is a man, if he’s going to be a good father, needs to start to live and behave and conduct himself in such a way that his children will celebrate that he’s their dad, and that his grandchildren will follow in suit, generations downline. And what this becomes, then, is that he begins to reflect, even in a fallen or limited degree, God who is his Father, and his children will understand that. My daughter is 4 years old, and she tells me all the time, she says, “I’m very lucky to have two daddies. You are my daddy, and God is my daddy.” She gets that.

What you find as soon as you’re a father, that God has bestowed upon you a very sacred title, and that’s “father.” That’s the name that God reveals himself by, as our Father, and when he shares that name, that title, with men, it’s a sacred thing, and they should take it very seriously.

This begins in creation. Men were created to be fathers. We’re told in Genesis that God instructed the man to be fruitful, increase in number, fill the earth, and subdue it. That means two things. One, he is to have a lot of children – a lot of children – and that those children are to be fruitful. There is a difference between the fruitfulness and the multiplication. Some people think, “Well, we had a lot of kids; that makes me a godly man.” No, that makes you fertile. That’s half the battle. Just because you had a lot of kids, that’s not all that the Bible calls you to. It calls you to cultivate and raise fruitful children that fill the earth and represent God well.

And so a man’s duty is to have children, but then to raise those children and bring up those children and love those children so that they are fruitful. He has to cultivate them. So then God tells him it’s not good for him to be alone, so he creates a wife for him, Eve, a helper who is suitable, a wife who is a companion for this journey and this work. We’ll deal with her role next week.

What happens then, we’re told, is that a man leaves his father and mother. He grows up, becomes a man, gets a job, seeks a career, puts his life together, and then he marries a woman, and then the two become one flesh. They have intimate relations. Out of that come their children. That’s the way it is supposed to work. In our culture, we have it backwards: You live together, sleep together, and try your hardest not to have any kids, and if at all possible, avoid marriage. We have it completely backwards because the world in its wisdom, Paul says, does not know God.

The way it is supposed to work is a man is supposed to leave childish ways, grow up, be a man, take a wife, and have some children, and have children that are cultivated so that they are very fruitful. Within that, in the Old Testament, the man had ultimate and complete authority over his children. Today we have completely negated this. We’ll get into this when we get into child discipline.

Today we think that children are to be bartered and negotiated with: “Johnny, don’t hit your sister with a truck, and I’ll give you ice cream.” Biblically, that’s not the way it was to go. The parents had authority over the child. In the Old Testament, if you – for smiting, cursing, or attacking a parent, you could be put to death if you were a child, which means we’d all be dead, right? We’d all be dead. If you yell and swear at and curse your mother or father, or if you physically attack them, you could be put to death. Ultimate authority was delegated to the parents in the Old Testament, and they were to use that carefully.

The first thing a man should do if he wants to be a good father, after cultivating his own soul and being a lover of God, is that he should pursue a good woman as a wife, not a girlfriend, not a Friday-night date. He should look for a wife. Not just a wife, but a wife who will be a good mother to his children.

I did this long ago. I found a great gal, thought she was great, and as soon as I was very interested in marrying her – I was about 17 years old – I said, “What do you feel about children?” She says, “I wanna be a mother. I look forward to being a mother, and I wanna stay home with my kids.” Good. Now all I gotta do is find out a way to close this deal, because we agree on the terms. This is very important.

I had a conversation not too long ago with a guy, and he says, “Well, what’s your wife do?” I says, “Well, she raises our children. We’re gonna have a lot of children. Our children are gonna be fruitful, and we have big plans.” And he says, “Well, how did you get her to do that?” Like we wrestled, and she lost, and now she has to do what I tell her to do. And I said, “I didn’t get her to do anything.”

Here’s the key, men: Marry a woman who agrees with you. Isn’t that easier? That’s so much simpler. I wanted to have children and be a father who made good money so his wife could stay home with the children. What am I looking for? A wife who wants that. I’m not going to marry a woman who thinks that’s sin and then fights me every day. I don’t have the energy for that.

So you marry a woman who agrees with you. What that first means: You have to know what you want. You have to know what your values are and what your biblical convictions are and how you view your life and your future, and then you seek a woman who agrees with you.

So what Proverbs says – Proverbs 18:22, “He who finds a wife finds what is good and receives favor or grace from the Lord.” A man needs to be looking for a good wife, and when he finds her, he gets a lot of grace from God.

What he should look for are these things. Proverbs 14:1, “The wise woman builds her house, but with her own hands the foolish one tears it down.” He should seek a wife who wants to build a home. We’re gonna get into this further. This is seen as a denigration in our society. It’s not in Scripture. In Scripture, the home is where the early church met. It is where discipleship happened and evangelism happened. The church is called the household of God. Men who manage their households well become pastors and elders in the church. That the home, over the course of its life, will spend millions of dollars and raise generations of children. It is an enormous task, and you want a woman who has wisdom and fears the Lord, who wants to build this kind of home.

Likewise, we’re told in Proverbs 31 about the virtuous woman: “She speaks with wisdom, and faithful instruction is on her tongue. She watches over the affairs of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness. Her children arise and call her blessed; her husband also.” This wise woman manages her home well. We’ll get into that. She’s good with money and real estate and investment, and all of these things are included in the home-building. We’ll tease those out further later, but here it says that she watches over the affairs of her home and that her husband and her children call her blessed; they speak very well of her. That means that the husband and the children are so blessed by her that they speak of her accordingly.

“Likewise,” we’re told in Titus 2, “teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. Then they can train the younger women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled and to be pure, and to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the Word of God.” What this is, is that women are supposed to be homeward in their orientation and that a man needs to seek a wife who will be homeward in her orientation.

And you may say, “Well, why is it so important to have a good mother for my children?” Well, Proverbs 19:13 says that “a foolish son is his father’s ruin, and a quarrelsome wife is like a constant dripping.” Okay? Do you see how these go together? Well, how do you get a foolish son that’s driving you crazy? Well, it began with a nagging, troublesome wife. If she is home raising those children, if she is decay in your bones, like Proverbs says, then she will instruct the children through her life, and they will follow in her stead, and it will be a nightmare.

I had a – not too long ago, I walked in the door of a gentleman’s home. His wife didn’t know the pastor was coming over, which always – they always talk differently when the pastor’s coming over. They start talking in King James English: “Oh, my beloved, how art thou?” It’s like, no. I know this isn’t how it normally goes.

Walk in the door. I’m behind him. He gets one foot in the door. His wife just launches an aerial assault on him: “You didn’t do this. You didn’t do that. The kids are driving me nuts. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And immediately the kids kick in: “Yeah, Dad, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,” and they launch in on Dad. And I’m just thinking, “Oh, I know how this works.” Mom is like a dripping faucet, and the children are killing him. She has caused them to be allies with her against her father – against their father. And then I walk in right behind him. “Oh, pastor!” (Chuckling) No. No. Don’t give me that. Don’t give me that.

This is, by the way, how we got our present world. I was reading a feminist theologian, and she said that the way that the world got the way that it is, is that in the 1950s men were not doing a good job leading and loving their families. And so what happened was that the wives didn’t have the power and the authority to overcome their husbands to beat them, and so what they did is they recruited the children as their allies. And that if they could undermine the father’s authority and undermine the father’s respect in the home, then the wife and the children could control and manipulate and drive out the husbands and rule over the family.

You say, “Well, how did we get from the 1950s to the 1960s?” That’s how we got there. Whose responsibility is it? Well, ultimately it’s the husbands and the fathers. But Proverbs puts these two together. A certain kind of woman produces a certain kind of child, and that leads to a certain kind of life for a man that usually ends in divorce or alcoholism or complete depression.

And so it’s important – the most important thing that a man can do after loving God is to find a woman who will love his children and be a good mother and invest herself in those children and respect him in front of them. Does this mean that the wife never can speak to her husband honestly? No, she can, but she should do it privately and respectfully, not in front of his children. Some of you grew up in homes where mom continually just cut the knees off of dad right in front of you, and you learned to dishonor your father. He needs to be careful in the wife that he chooses, because the children will follow the example of their father, and they will follow the example of their mother, and if their mother is incongruent with their father, then there is conflict in that home.

We’ll get into now some of the Scriptural duties of a father. First thing, he must be a good Christian. Secondly, he must seek a wife, not just a girlfriend or a good time, and that wife he should hope and trust and pray and seek would be a good mother and seek to love children.

Ephesians 6:1-4 says, “Children, obey your parents and the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and your mother,” which is the first commandment with a promise, “that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth.” Fathers, do not exacerbate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and the instruction of the Lord."

Fathers have a tendency to be harsh, mean, overbearing, or intimidating with their children; that exacerbates them. Fathers should not be that way. The goal of a father is not to crush his child but to cultivate it; it is not to punish that child but it is to correct that child. And so fathers must be careful that they don’t use their strength to harm their children or to exacerbate them, cause them grief and frustration. Some of you had fathers like that, were just mean and harsh and nasty and overbearing. You didn’t respect them.

But what they are commanded to do is to bring their children up in the instruction of the Lord. The Greek word there is the word called the paideia. There’s a good book by Douglas Wilson. It’s called The Paideia of God. It talks about what the paideia is. In the ancient Greek civilization that this was taken from, this was the sum total in cultivation of a human being: your education, your spirituality, your work ethic, your vocation, your intelligence. The totality of who you are as a person is your paideia, and the father’s duty is to cultivate and to bring to bear the paideia of the child.

What that means is that everything in the life of the child is ultimately the responsibility of the father. We don’t live in that world, do we? Whose responsibility is it currently in our society to educate children? The government, school. We’re gonna get into this when we get into childhood education. It is not biblically the duty of the school to make sure that the children are well educated.

It’s interesting to me. There was recently a front-page article in The Seattle Times that said that an organization was looking at suing the Seattle school district for the pathetic nature of the education that children are given. The sad part is, in that coalition were very few, if any, fathers at all. The government is supposed to educate the kids, so the fathers view that as it’s none of their obligation or responsibility, and the children are getting a very poor education, so another government organization comes in to sue one of the government organizations to make them do a better job.

The issue is, well, where are the fathers? Where are the dads? It is dad’s job to make sure that the child has a good education. What that means, men, is if you want to be a father, you need to understand education of children well. You need to have a philosophy of childhood education. You need to do your homework, because if a child is going to go into a classroom for six or eight hours a day, for 12, 13 years, you better know who the teachers are. You better know what the curriculum is, and you better know what the philosophy of education is.

And the whole goal is, what are you trying to produce in a student? Walk into the average classroom and ask the teacher, “What is the goal of the child training and education that happens here?” and you will not get an answer. They don’t know what the ultimate goal is. We want them to learn math. That is not the ultimate goal.

According to Proverbs, what is the ultimate goal that a parent should have for their child? A redeemed heart that fears the Lord. That’s the goal of all instruction. That’s a big responsibility, isn’t it? You say, “Well, no, I wanted my kids to learn math and reading.” Well, I do too. That’s good. That’s part of the paideia. But all of that is so that they would love and fear the Lord, that they would be children of the King. That’s the goal of education.

Public education in this country is only a few hundred years old. Up until that point, the only place where literacy spread is where Christianity spread, particularly of a Calvinistic bent, because it was reformed. They wanted people to read the Bible. To read the Bible, they had to get people literate. To get people literate, they had to start schools.

See, the fathers realized that their children needed to have a good education. So as a father, you’ll need to think about, well, are we going to homeschool? Are we going to do public education? Are we going to do private education? Are we going to do Christian education? What is our philosophy of education? What does the Bible say about educating our children? And if a father is going to send his child to a school, he is delegating that authority to those people in that school, but he is still responsible for the education.

For me, this is a huge deal. I’ve got a 4-year-old daughter who goes to kindergarten next year, and I started a year and a half ago doing an enormous survey of philosophy of education. Enormous survey. You find that there are certain schools that work out of operating principles like: Children are basically good; they’re not born with a sin nature, and if you just give them lots of permission and lots of freedom and lots of love and encouragement and self-esteem, they’ll grow up to be wonderful people. The Bible says we’re sinful from our mother’s womb, that we need correction and instruction, and we need to be raised up. That educational philosophy will do nothing to raise a child that loves and honors and fears God.

Some of you are sitting here saying, “What does this – how does this pertain to me?” Part of it is you may have been raised in that system, and you may need to investigate all of your own pre-suppositions before you raise your children. What do you want for them? That’s the dad’s job. Men need to think, then, “Well, if I’m going to have children, then I need to pay for an education, and if I’m going to send them to a school that educates them, how am I going to afford that?” This is all the responsibility of the father. All of it.

This includes the spiritual instruction as well, the raising up, the paideia. We think, “Oh, it’s the school’s job to educate the kids, and it’s the church’s job to lead them to Christ and teach them the Bible.” It is not. It is not. It is the duty of the father. Every child should have a full-time youth pastor, and his name should be Dad. Should be Dad. Dad should be praying with the kids and reading the Bible with the kids and loving the kids. Church should be supplemental to that, not primary. It’s a father’s duty to raise up his children in the paideia of God. He should be involved in their life and cultivating and participating and nurturing and loving and raising them up, not by being homeward – that’s the mother’s job – but by being the father, present.

Some ways that a father does this work of paideia – first is that he must provide for his children. You say, “Well, this seems obvious. Why hit the obvious?” Because it’s not obvious. It’s not obvious. In our society, which group of people are most likely to be in poverty? Children. The second most likely is the elderly.

In our state, 84 percent of public school districts serve breakfast to kids. You know why? Because they’re not eating breakfast. Provision for a child includes breakfast so that they don’t fall asleep in class. We live in a society that doesn’t know that. One out of three children qualifies for a free lunch. A lunch in our state is between $1.50 and $2.25, so let’s just say 2 bucks. It’s 10 bucks a week for a kid to eat lunch. One out of three kids can’t afford that. To qualify, a family of four needs to have less than $23,000.00 a year household income. None of you, I am suspecting, live on less than $23,000.00 a year, let alone with three kids. Some of you go to SPU. How much is SPU? About $23,000.00 a year. And you don’t have anything to eat yet, or wear, or a place to sleep.

The average household income – the average worker income in the Puget Sound is about $50,000.00 a year. The average household has two incomes. It’ll take you a good $80,000.00 to $100,000.00 a year to raise a family in this city at least. You wanna have three kids, maybe a wife and two kids, a family of four, less than $23,000.00 a year?

I have to hit the issue of provision because men aren’t even taking care of their own children. Upwards of one out of three birth certificates today does not have a father listed on it. There is no dad. They don’t even know who he is. So then what you have to do is we’ve created paternity tests to prove that he’s the dad so we can take him to court and sue him and force him to send money to mom so that the kids can have breakfast. Biblically, God’s people are not supposed to behave that way.

Tells us, 1 Timothy 5:8, “If anyone does not provide for his” – this is not a 50/50 deal; dad makes half the money; mom makes half – “his relatives, and especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.” A lot of men say, “Yeah, I wanna have a lot of kids and a wife.” Well, you better make some money. You better make some good money. You say, “Well, isn’t that worldly?” Is breakfast worldly? No, breakfast is breakfast.

Goes on to tell us in Proverbs, “A greedy man brings trouble to his family, but he who hates bribes will live.” Some men are greedy. They make good money, but they still don’t take care of their kids. This is the dad who has all kinds of toys and hobbies and free time, and he spends it on himself lavishly, and he does not take good care of his wife and his kids.

Proverbs 19:14, “Houses and wealth are inherited from parents, but a prudent wife is from the Lord.” Houses and wealth are inherited from parents? I won’t ask for you to raise your hands, but I know that most of you are not going to get an enormous inheritance from your parents, and when you get married, they’re not going to give you your first home. You laugh at me because you think it’s funny, but Proverbs says if you had wise parents, that’s the way it would be. You think about that. How much easier would it be in our economy if, when you got married, your parents gave you a home? Well, that would help.

See, we live in this greedy, shortsighted economy that only thinks from weekend to weekend; it doesn’t think from generation to generation. A man’s goal should be to make money, invest it, be wise, be smart, and then leave an inheritance, including homes, for his kids. A single man, before he has any children, should be thinking about how he’s going to buy a home for himself and for his kids.

You say, “Well, that’s a lot.” It is. It’s not supposed to be this hard, ‘cause they’re supposed to be blessing from generation to generation. Some of you, though, are gonna need to be Abraham and Sarah, and matriarch and patriarch, for a new family and start with you. My goal is, when my kids get married, I wanna at least give them a down-payment for a home, if not their home. That would be great.

He also tells us, Proverbs 13:22, “A good man leaves an inheritance for his children’s children.” His grandkids. I look forward to the day when I get to pay for my grandkids’ education. I hope and pray I have grandsons that wanna go plant churches, and I look forward to funding those works.

Solomon says in Ecclesiastes, he says, “Food is good for the stomach, and wine makes life merry, but money is the answer for everything.” I love that verse. We’re gonna deal with finances in Proverbs as well. Some of you think that because you’re poor, you’re like Jesus. No, you’re just poor.

It is a father’s duty to feed, house, clothe his kids, to give them a good education, and to provide for them and to have something left over to invest, which means if you’re a single man, you should start a college fund right now for your grandkids. That’s wisdom. And you should pray, then, that God gives you a wife and kids and grandkids that that money can go toward, and you should love that. And I’ll tell you what. If you’re a single man and you meet a woman and she says, “How do you feel about kids?” you say, “I’ve been working on the college fund for my grandkids,” you are very sexy. “All Scripture is God-breathed and profitable.”

In addition to provision, the paideia includes bringing this child into a larger community. There is this crazy notion that the nuclear family is the biblical concept of family. At the end of Genesis, Jacob’s family numbered 66 people. There is immediate nuclear family, and then there’s large extended kin and clan family. The church is called the household of God by Paul. It’s a big family. That’s why you treat older women like mothers, and younger women like sisters, and older men like dads, and younger men like brothers. So your children should be brought up in a community that nurtures and reinforces biblical instruction.

It says in Proverbs 12:26, “A righteous man is cautious in friendship, but the way of the wicked leads them astray.” And in Proverbs 2:20, “Thus you will walk in the ways of good man and keep to the paths of the righteous.” And Proverbs 27:10, “Do not forsake your friend and the friend of your father, and do not go to your brother’s house when disaster strikes you – better a neighbor than a brother far away.”

Friends, good people, righteous people, friends of the family, and neighbors are supposed to be part of the cultivating and the raising of the children, which means that your children should see other marriages and children and families, and that’s the whole function of the church for the children. The children are not to be tucked away and hidden and uninvolved. They’re supposed to be involved in their friendships and involved with the friends of their parents.

This is one of my favorite elements of our church. My daughter has an enormous number of friends, and some of her friends are my friends. Lately I’ve been praying with my daughter for her friends. She’s 4, and she prays for her friends who are little, and she prays for her friends who are big. I asked her who her two best friends were. It was a girl who was 4 and a woman who was in her 30s. Those are her best friends. Those are her friends. She loves them. She lives life with them. They love her.

The children should have the values reinforced. I asked my daughter last night, I said, “What should a good daddy be?” I said, “I’m teaching on daddies. What should a daddy be?” She says – first thing, my sweet daughter – she says, “A daddy should make a lot of money.” She says, “A daddy should read his Bible, and a daddy should love his kids, and a daddy should be silly and have lots of fun.” That’s a good list, for 4 years old. Fear God; love you; pay the bills; have some fun. And she said that he should teach and discipline his children as well. That was her fifth.

And I said, “Well, do you know any good daddies?” and she just starts running it through her head. She has an enormous list of men who are good fathers. Her friends have got really good fathers in this church. Some great dads. I am happy to have my daughter play with those kids and see those families and be influenced by those husbands and wives. It’s a joy. All they do is reinforce what I’m teaching her. And so in addition to the provision, part of the provision must be an extended community for those kids.

In addition, there should be instruction. Proverbs 22:6, “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.” A father sets for his children a life course. It says in Proverbs that even a young child is known by their reputation. You’re trying to cultivate a reputation in your child and a life course. What this means is that it begins when they get out of the womb. You start, and you set precedent, and you walk with them through all the seasons of their life, instructing them, and you’re setting a life course you’re hoping that they won’t depart.

That’s why you see people whose lives are a wreck in their teen years. It began when they were little, and they have just been building momentum in a particular direction. It’s true, positive and negative, that if you train a child, they pick a life course, and they do not depart from it. That can be good or bad. And so you wanna cultivate and train your children to go toward a fear and a love of God, and an honoring of father and mother, and a high view of Scripture, and a desire to do the things that Proverbs speaks of.

In Proverbs 4:1, the father says, “Listen, my sons, to a father’s instruction; pay attention and gain understanding. I give you sound learning; do not forsake my teaching.” The dad is teaching. When I was a boy in my father’s house, still tender, and an only child of my mother before the other kids were born, he taught me and said, “Lay hold of my words with all your heart. Keep my commands, and you will live.”

Fathers are supposed to teach their children. Dad, you are a pastor. You are a pastor. And those children and that wife, that’s your church, and you’re supposed to love them and read the Bible with them and pray with them and instruct them, and the men who do that well, Paul says, they become elders in the church. Every man in the church is supposed to conduct himself as a pastor in his home, and then those men who do it exemplary, they become the pastors in the church. They manage their households well. Their children honor and respect them. Their wives are beautiful and godly and sweet. That’s 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1.

You wanna be a pastor, be a good husband, be a good father, and if the rest of us look at you and say, “He’s the best of the best,” then you’ll be a pastor in this church. Seminaries do not produce pastors. Bible colleges do not produce pastors. Women and children produce pastors. We’ve gotten it backward, completely backward. Men who love God and do a great job with their wife and kids, make ’em the pastor. Let ’em do that with a lot of people.

Dad should be teaching all the time. What this does not mean is that there are subcategories in your home, and you have a devotional time with your kids once a week. This means that Scripture and wisdom and God should be woven into every experience. Not in a mean, cruel, legalistic way; in a fun way. Something happens. “Okay, kids, the Bible talks about this. Let me explain this.” And using the teachable moments, and that’s how Jesus worked. He’s walking around talking about harvesting, and he’s talking about sowing and reaping, and he’s talking about children and parents and the kingdom of God, and he is using the opportunities that arrive as he’s walking with his disciples, and he’s instructing them from the experiences of life. A father should be that same way, just talking about things and bringing it back to Scripture and investing wisdom in his kids all the time. This means that the kids should continually see the Bible open by their dad.

On Thursdays, I put my sermons together, and I used to go away to study, and the Lord convicted me. He said, “Don’t go away to study. Study in your living room with your kids.” My sermons come out of the dinner table at my home. I sit home on Thursdays with my Bible open and my commentaries out, and my kids are playing with me, and my wife is home, and I am studying the Bible and putting my sermon together as I’m in the midst of my family, and I want the children to see Dad with a Bible open, studying and praying.

And the kids inevitably ask, “Dad, what are you reading? What are you studying?” And then all of a sudden my 2-year-old son, he’s got a little red children’s Bible, and he carries it around like a prize because Dad does. He says, “This is my Bible. Read me Bible, Dad.” He wants me to read him the Bible, and he wants me to talk to him about my sermons and what I’m putting together, and as well my daughter. My daughter, I come home every Sunday night. First thing she asks, “How many people were at church?” She wants to know if the church is growing. She’s 4. And she says, “Did you tell them about Jesus?” “Yes, I did.” “Did anybody become a Christian?” Those are her questions. And I say, “Well, so-and-so, you need to pray for them.” “Okay.” And that night, we tuck her in, and she prays for them.

If this is cultivated by dad, then it makes mom’s job so much easier because if mom is trying to love the kids and Bible study with the kids and pray with the kids, and dad never picks up his Bible, he is undermining all of her efforts, but if dad’s doing his job, it makes mom’s job so much easier. Your kids should come to you. They should want you to read the Bible. They should ask you questions. They should see Scripture as the place that dad always comes back to. They go to their father for a question; he goes to his Father for the answer: “Well, let me pray and read the Bible, and we’ll talk about that tonight around the dinner table.”

It’s a different view, isn’t it? And it’s glorious. It is so fun. It is enjoyable. It is amazing how much children are able to assimilate. My children each started praying on their own at 18 months. I was laying in bed sick. My 18-month-old daughter came and laid hands and prayed over me. She was 18 months old. You say, “Well, where did she learn that?” Well, she learned that from her mother and father. Every time she was sick, we’d lay hands and pray over her. So we get sick, she lays hands and prays over us.

My son loves me to read the Bible to him. Now he’s 2. Yesterday I read for hours and hours and hours. He just wanted to keep reading, and he had all of these great questions. He can’t understand why certain people don’t love God. I’ll read him about Goliath and Nebuchadnezzar and Pharaoh, and he says, “Daddy, they don’t love God. Why? Why?” He’s just puzzled. That’s a really good question for a 2-year-old boy. We’re doing significant theology at 2.

Dad should love this. Dad should adore this. Dad should embrace this. And I tell you what, men. Don’t make this like eating the vegetables for the children. Make this enjoyable. One of the things you can do, a little trick if you’ve got small kids – when the kids get older, you can give ‘em homework and Bible assignments and conversation at the dinner table. When they’re real little, you’re just reading to ’em a lot, telling ’em Bible stories.

Part of what I like to do – we have all these dress-up clothes for the kids in boxes, and they love it ‘cause we built ’em this little stage thing that they stand on now, and we do Bible night. And I’m the narrator, and I’m kinda over the top with the narration, and they get all dressed up in the outfits, and they act out the whole story. They love that.

My daughter always wants to be Queen Esther. Always, always wants to be Queen Esther. She’s got a tiara and a crown, and she’s got a scepter, and she’s got earrings, and she’s got little-kids’ high heels, and she puts on this long gown, and she’s Queen Esther. And she always wants her brother to be Mordecai, and he never wants to be Mordecai. He wants to do David and Goliath every night. He wants to put on the Viking hat, and he wants to get his weapons, and he wants to come and have me be Goliath and he be David, and he wants to knock me to the ground. That’s what he wants to do. One of his favorites is to play Zacchaeus, ‘cause Zacchaeus is a short little man who couldn’t see Jesus, so he climbs up in a tree. So my son stands up on the dinner table, and he’s Zacchaeus looking around.

Have a little fun with it, okay? If your kids enjoy God, it’ll be a lot easier for them to be motivated to study about him. Bible study with kids should not feel like seminary. Should not be an overhead in the living room, and the father parsing Greek verbs, okay? Your kids are little. You cultivate ‘em. You love ’em. You enjoy ’em. You weave it in. And then as they grow older, you just continue to nurture that and instruct them. Proverbs 1:4 says that’s the whole point of proverbs: “For giving prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the young.” Proverbs is a book written for little kids.

Proverbs 13:1, “A wise son heeds his father’s instruction, but a mocker does not listen to him.” Proverbs 19:27, “Stop listening to instruction, my son, and you will stray from the words of knowledge.” And Proverbs 23:19, “Listen, my son, and be wise and keep your heart on the right path.” To do this, then, a father must not only instruct; he must make sure that his kids don’t mock him. He must make sure that they don’t stray from his teaching, but instead they keep on the right path.

Some men wrongly think, “Well, when they were 4, I told ‘em a few things, and now my job’s done.” No. They’re gonna stray. You gotta keep ‘em on the right path. The instruction has to continue. That’s why you see throughout the book of Proverbs, he says certain things over and over and over and over and over. Why? ‘Cause that’s the way it is with kids. Need to instruct them and re-instruct them and re-instruct them and re-instruct them and keep them going on that same path.

In addition to instruction, a father must discipline. Instruction comes first and then discipline. Some guys just spank their kids, and their kids don’t know why. You teach your children what they’re to do, and then you teach them what the consequences are if they don’t, and then you discipline them when they sin. That’s how God works with us. In Genesis he tells Adam, “Don’t eat from this tree or you’ll die.” Very simple. Adam eats; he dies; he’s not shocked. He knew this was coming.

We’re gonna do a whole series on discipline. But the purpose of discipline is not to punish a child, but to correct them, which means it’s not to be done with anger or violence or anything. Correction, that’s all. But a father must discipline his children, because his children sin, and if a child is never learning discipline, they’re not going to learn self-discipline either.

Proverbs 3:11-12, “My son, do not despise the Lord’s discipline and do not resent his rebuke, because the Lord disciplines those he loves, as a father the son he delights in.” The principle here is don’t discipline children unless you love them and delight in them. Fathers who don’t delight in their children and love them when they discipline them, they’re just being mean and angry and violent. My children know that I love them, and they know that I delight in them, and they know that the purpose of discipline is correction. So you have to cultivate the relationship, and discipline is a part of it.

Proverbs 13:24, “He who spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is careful to discipline him.” A father must be careful to discipline their children. Again, I can only touch this briefly. We will do many weeks on this.

Proverbs 19:18, “Discipline your son, for in that there is hope, and do not be a willing party to his death.” The issue is that if you wait too long to discipline your children, they’ll die before you get to them, and you will have no hope of restoring things.

My mother is the attendance secretary at a public high school in the south end of the city. She tells me the most horrendous stories about teenagers in that school. She’s telling me recently about some different girls who have surveillance monitors on their legs because they’re under house arrest. They’re not allowed to leave home or school, and if they stray too far from where they’re supposed to be, it triggers some sort of mechanism whereby the cops are called to come and look for them. If you were a 16-year-old girl who has sonar on your leg because society has deemed you so dangerous that we need to restrict where you are, somebody should’ve disciplined you while there was hope. It’s a little late now. That’s why children die.

I can still remember when I was in high school, a girl who I knew died of a drug overdose. I went to her funeral [Technical difficulty], and I remember as an unbeliever thinking, “Why didn’t her parents step in before this? I mean, now it’s all gone. She’s dead.” That’s where you’ll see fathers who don’t discipline, love, instruct, and walk with their children, and then their children hit a point where they become rebellious or promiscuous, and all of a sudden the father flies in like a superhero and wants to save the day. And the kids are like, “Who are you? Where have you been? Haven’t seen you in years.” Discipline your children while there is hope, Proverbs says.

And Proverbs 29:17, “Discipline your son, and he will give you peace, and he will bring delight to your soul.” That’s what you want. You want discipline that causes peace between your children so that you can delight and enjoy your children, and fathers must do this. I see too many fathers – I have seen too many fathers who push this burden off to the mothers. The mothers are home with the children. They discipline the children all day. Dad comes home. Dad won’t discipline the kids, and he sets himself up in an adversarial role with his wife. Mom is the bad guy; Dad is the good guy.

Some of you grew up in that home. Mom will discipline you, spank you, tell you not to drink Coke before you to bed, and to not jump on the couch, and Dad comes home and says, “Oh, you’re being too hard on the kids. Do whatever you want, kids.” He thinks that he’s loving his kids ’cause his kids really appreciate him. They appreciate him the same way that an alcoholic appreciates the liquor store. You just give them what they want, not necessarily what they need.

And so Mom, then, continually has her authority undermined because Dad will not discipline the kids. He’s too worried about being fun and having the kids like him. And some mothers in that circumstance, they have an awful time because every time Dad walks in the door, he brings ice cream and anarchy, and the kids really love their dad, but their dad really doesn’t love those kids. He’s not cultivating a fear of the Lord.

In addition to discipline, a father is to give protection for his children, particularly their sexuality. I’ll tell you a story from Deuteronomy 22. There’s a case there where a young woman becomes married to a man. The man believes that she has been sexually unfaithful prior to their marriage and that she is not a virgin, and so he wants a divorce because he’s been lied to. Basically a judicial court hearing is held, and the woman and her husband are brought in, and they need someone to testify as to the condition of her sexual history.

Who do they bring in, according to Deuteronomy 22? Her dad. Her dad. Because it is assumed that her dad knows her, loves her, and has cultivated her and blessed her and held watch over her so that boys didn’t take advantage of her, and that Dad was there protecting his little girl, and that he has complete knowledge of all of her sexual history. And so if the dad comes in and says, “She was a virgin when she got married,” that’s the law. Dad’s word stands as law because Dad knows his little girl. Today, fathers don’t even know what their daughters are doing. They have no idea.

One of the dumbest conversations I’ve ever had was recently with a pastor. Wanna have a dumb conversation, talk to a pastor. Talking to this pastor, this pastor says – we’re in this meeting with other pastors. He says, “You guys need to pray for my daughter.” She’s like 16 or 17. We say, “Why?” He said, “Well, she’s dating a guy who’s not a – I don’t think he’s a Christian, and I’m pretty sure they’re having sex.” I was like, “Pray about what? Like that you don’t miss with a gun? What do you want me to pray for? Pray that you’re a good shot? I’ll pray for that. Like what –”

He says, “Well, no. She’s an adult now. She makes her own decisions. I just can’t get involved and tell her what to do.” I say, “Well, you sure can. Sure you can. You need to be involved. You’re supposed to be knowing what your daughter’s doing sexually, especially if you’re a pastor and she’s a Christian. Well, what is this? Where do you find a license in the Bible that says that Christian husbands and fathers and pastors have no right to know who 16-year-old girls are sleeping with? I mean, give me that verse.”

And I said, “Well, tell you what. I’m not gonna pray for your daughter. So I’m gonna pray for you, that you’ll take care of your daughter or you’ll quit your job, ‘cause you’re a disgrace.” The Bible doesn’t say that the pastor’s kids will be perfect, but my goodness, we’re very far from that. It’s a sick deal.

Also in Deuteronomy 22, there’s a situation where a young girl goes out and commits adultery with a married man, and they go to put her to death by stoning, and where do they put her to death at? The steps of her father’s home. You say, “Why is that?” Because it’s his responsibility. All this talk about “Oh, these single mothers all these young women and all these sexually immoral girls, we need to give them more birth control and abortion.” The issue is, where’s their dad? Doesn’t he love his daughter? Doesn’t he know that teenage boys don’t have noble intentions for teenage girls? Isn’t he involved? Doesn’t he care? Doesn’t he love her?

A father’s duty is to be on guard and vigilant, to care for and protect his children sexually. You see this throughout Proverbs as well. Proverbs 2, Proverbs 5, Proverbs 7, Proverbs 30. “Son, listen, don’t chase loose women. Get married; love your wife; enjoy her. That’s it.” This is dad’s job. Most of you, your fathers didn’t say anything about sex. Some of you, what they did is they bought you a porno or a Playboy and told you to figure it out. This is dad’s privilege, his duty, and his honor. As fathers, you should look forward to this. You should look forward to this.

I can still remember going for a walk with my daughter – I’ve told you this story a few times. I was doing a wedding in the Napa Valley. I went for a walk with my daughter through the vineyards there, the wine vineyards. She was all dressed up. I was in my suit, and I just took her for a walk barefoot through the vineyards. She was about 2 and a half or 3 at the time, and we were talking and visiting, and I was just enjoying my daughter.

She looked at me and she says, “Daddy, someday I will be married.” I said, “Yes, you will, sweetheart.” We’re there for this beautiful wedding. And she says, “And you will tell me if he’s a good man.” I said, “Yes, I will.” She’s holding my hand, and she says, “I won’t marry anyone unless you like them, okay, Daddy?”

I think she – I never poured that thought into her mind, but because I love her and I’m her father, she has that thought in her mind, and she should have that thought in her mind. “Yes, Dad loves me. Dad loves God, and if Dad doesn’t approve, then he’s probably not worth the time.” That’s the way it should be.

In addition, a father should teach his children how to repent of their sin. In Job 1:5, we’re told that Job is this noble man, that he loves God, that he’s blameless, and then he continually confesses his sins, and he walks upright before God. Job has some children who occasionally throw parties, the brothers do, and they invite their sisters over. They’re a little older. And here’s what Job does. Job 1:5, “When a period of feasting had run its course, Job would send and have them” – those are his children – “purified.”

Early in the morning, he’s on this right away. He would sacrifice a burnt offering – that’s worship – for each of them, thinking, “Perhaps, maybe, my children have sinned and cursed God in their hearts.” This was Job’s what? Regular custom. Now, that’s a good dad. Dad who knows what all of his kids are doing and knows that there was a possibility for sin and is praying about it before the sun comes up the next day, for the possibility of sin.

The worst thing you can do to a child when they have sinned, particularly when they are young, is just tell them “Go to your room.” They don’t know how to confess, repent, pray. They don’t know what to do about their sin. You’re just punishing them. What a father should do is repent for his children, and thereby instruct them how to deal with sin.

I’ll give you an example. My son is 2. A few months ago he was having one of those days. He was not obeying. He was not being respectful. He was just tormenting his sister. He was overwhelming his mother. It’s amazing. A man this tall could completely overwhelm my wife. And he was just being out of control, and I came home, and I looked at my wife, and I looked at my daughter, and it looked like they had just run a marathon. I could tell it had been a long day with my son, and they said, “You gotta do something with the boy.”

And I observed him for a while, and I disciplined him, and he was not responding. He was just getting angry, and he was being defiant, and my discipline was not doing anything. He was just getting mean. And then finally my son attacked me. I’ve got him by 200 pounds. I mean, he is an incredible optimist.

And I thought, “You know, I’m gonna exacerbate my child now.” Ephesians 6. “I’m gonna exacerbate this kid,” and God brought to mind Job 1:5, and I picked up my boy. He was thrashing. And I took him upstairs, away from his mom and his sister, and I laid down on my bed, and I set my son on my chest, and I held him, and I began to pray for him. First thing I prayed for, I said, “God, thank you for the Holy Spirit. I pray that the Holy Spirit would convict Zack of his sin. And Lord God, I pray you would take this anger out of his heart and you’d put love in his heart. Give him a new heart to fear you. And Lord God, I repent of his sin.”

And I started repenting of his sins that day. “I repent of the fact that he has done this to his sister and this to his sister and this to his mother and this to his mother, and that he has done this to his father.” And I began – I was just rubbing his back, and I was praying for him, and he calmed down, and I just repented of all of his sins. I said, “God, as his father, I’m asking you to forgive him and to give me wisdom. James 1:5 says if I lack it, to ask for it and you’ll give it. I’m asking for wisdom to be his father and to train him to love you and to set a life course of direction that he will not depart from.”

Began praying Proverbs, and my son broke. Absolutely broke. My son cried for about ten minutes. He cried so hard he could not breathe, and he was choking. He was repentant. He was broken. He realized now that he was sinning against his father, and he was sinning against God, and that I was responsible for him, and he was implicating me in his indiscretion and in his sin, and I held him, and he cried for about ten minutes. He just wept so hard his chest was just heaving on mine, and he looked at me. He was just bawling, and he just said, “Daddy, I’m sorry.”

That’s what a good father is supposed to do. Am I saying I’m a genius? No. Just read the Bible and try to be a father like God is a Father. In Romans 2, I think it’s Chapter 2, verse 5, Paul says it’s the kindness of God that leads us to repentance. What that means is that fathers lovingly cause their children to repent. How do you do that? Well, part of the way you do that is by repenting of their sin, and you cultivate in the child the habit of life, and you train them in the way they should go.

The goal is, then, when the children are 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 and they sin, they’ve already learned what to do: “I’ve sinned. I need to confess my sin to God. I need to ask him to forgive me. I need to ask him to give me a new heart of love and repentance. I need to ask him to forgive me and cause me to fear him, and I need to go to those that I’ve sinned against and ask for their forgiveness.” That gets cultivated in the child from the womb, and if they get that, then the Gospel will make perfect sense and won’t be hard for them to grasp, and that’s a father’s privilege is to do that with his children. What happens after these things: provision, instruction, discipline, protection, repentance of sin? The fruit, then, is that you get to enjoy your kids. That’s the beauty of it.

Proverbs 24:13-14, “Eat honey, my son, for it is good; honey from the comb is sweet to your taste. Know also that wisdom is sweet to your soul; if you find it, there is a future hope for you, and your hope will not be cut off.” These kinds of fathers have a lot of hope for the future, and what they see is that their kids are sucking on lollipops and have wisdom. That’s what you want: a kid who’s a kid, sucking on a lollipop, eating honey, a kid who’s happy and has future and hope because there’s wisdom that you, by God’s grace, have poured into them.

Proverbs 23:15-16, “My son, if your heart is wise, then my heart will be glad; my inmost being will rejoice when your lips speak what is right.” There’s nothing more beautiful than when your children start to become wise, and they start to speak their own convictions, and they’re biblical, and they love God.

I had a conversation recently with my daughter. She says, “Daddy, what are you doing?” I said, “I’m reading a book about children’s schools so I can find a good school for you. I’m trying to determine where the best place is for you to go to school.” She looks at me. She says, “I want to go to a Christian school, and I want to learn about Jesus. I don’t wanna be told any lies.” She’s 4. Man, I was so proud. She’s 4. And you start to get these glimmers of hope where it’s like, my kids have got their own convictions, and even though they’re young, maybe if it begins when they’re 4 and it continues when they’re 14, and then they pass it on to their kids, there is hope, and there’s joy in that.

Lastly, Proverbs 23:24-25, “The father of a righteous man has great joy; he who has a wise son delights in him. May your father and mother be glad, and may she who gave you birth rejoice.” Listen to these words: hope, gladness, rejoicing, joy, delighting. You see, that’s what you want with your kids. You want to enjoy them, delight in them, rejoice in them. Well, how do you get there? It takes time. It takes cultivation. It takes years. That’s why a foolish man has kids, comes home, barks out three or four commands, things don’t look like they should, and he just doesn’t enjoy his kids, and he leaves. “Like a bird that strays from its nest,” Proverbs says, “is a man who strays from his home.”

“Well, it’s not going like it’s supposed to. Whatever, I’m gone. Hire somebody else to take care of this mess.” The issue is, no. No, no. You have to do all of these things to have enjoyable kids, and you have to do them continually to cultivate the kind of children that you can enjoy, and it is a privilege to be a dad. It’s a great honor and a high distinction.

I had a good day yesterday. I was home with my wife and kids. I wrestled with my son. I cuddled up and watched cooking shows with my daughter, ‘cause she loves Emeril. My son wanted me to read the Bible to him. I read the Bible to him a lot yesterday. He had a lot of questions about why people don’t love God. We did some art projects. We went for a long walk and crumpled leaves and came home last night. We had a nice dinner. We built a big fire in the fireplace, and we roasted marshmallows. Prayed over my kids, and then my kids prayed for me that I would preach a good sermon for you. It was a good day. They’re 2 and they’re 4, and my son’ll be here at Christmas, but my hope is, when they’re teenagers, I feel that same way. It’s a beautiful picture. What God calls men to is fathers.

Here’s the stark contrast. Here’s the tall glass of reality. Here’s the city and the nation we live in, the place that hates children. Half of Seattle is between the ages of 20 and 44, yet there are fewer children under the age 5 per capita in our city than any other city in the U.S. other than San Francisco. What that means is in Seattle everyone is young, but they’re not having children.

In Seattle the cohabitation rate is one cohabitating couple for every four married couples. Nationally the average is one in ten. You are 250 percent more likely to live together in Seattle as an unmarried couple than the rest of the country as a whole. What that means is we love sex; we don’t love marriage. We love sex; we don’t love children. We have removed sex from marriage covenants and from childrearing. So in our city, sex has nothing to do with marriage or kids, and so we use enormous amounts of birth control and abortion to regulate against children, because we hate them and we don’t want them.

Roughly, according to an article I read, half of all “Christians” – I put that in quotes – seeking a church wedding in Seattle are presently cohabitating. Half of the “Christians,” quote-unquote, who walk in to their pastor and say “We want a nice church wedding” are already living and sleeping together.

In the article, one of the leading larger, quote-unquote, “Christian” groups in the city – the pastor said, “Well, and there’s nothing we can really do about that, and so we just give them a church wedding and pray that God would bless them.” Well, there’s a lot we can do about that. Part of what we can do is we could read the Bible. We could encourage other people to do the same thing, and we could tell the men that it’s a noble thing if they wanna have sex; they just need to find a wife who loves them and is in covenant. And they need to leave childish ways behind them and leave their father and mother and grow up and not just run around having sex and fathering children and then abandoning those women and children. There’s a lot we can do. There’s a lot we can say.

Most young people are having sex using various forms of birth control because they do not want to get pregnant. Am I saying birth control’s a sin? No, but am I saying – if you’re using it just because you think that you may have to end up marrying the person you’re having sex, yeah, that’s an evil thing.

One third of all children nationally are aborted. There are women in this room that have had abortions. God’s grace is there, and he can forgive you. But what does it tell you about a society that has a multibillion-dollar industry trying to not get pregnant and, if you do, to terminate the pregnancy? That tells you how that society feels about children.

Last week at our church, we had 1,000 people. If there wouldn’t have been abortion, how many would we have had? Fifteen hundred. We’re missing 500 people last week. That should sober you up. One out of three. That means there’s only two thirds of us here. The thousand who were here last week were missing the other 500. They didn’t make it. You would get the impression from all the money we spend that we’re a society that loves kids; we don’t, especially the men.

One of the rising tides among young men when they’re single is getting vasectomies to make sure that they won’t get women pregnant, because they never intend on marrying. They never intend on fathering children. And Proverbs says, no, you’re supposed to be a wise man who’s thinking about his grandkids. What that means is when you’re a 60- or 70-year-old man, you should think about how great it’s gonna be to have your grandkids and to play with them and to love them, rather than just being the lonely, dirty old man.

Up to one third of all births do not have a father listed on the birth certificate. Forty percent of children nationally do not live with their father. Four out of ten, and the number is increasing. We’re fast on our way to half. These children are five times more likely to be poor, ten times more likely to be extremely poor, more likely to drop out of school, use drugs and alcohol, cause teen pregnancy, perform crime, suffer from mental illness, and commit suicide. And so we have an entire social service army, including prisons and medication, to try and cope with a crisis.

Over 60 percent of mothers work outside of the home. The childcare industry is trying to pick up the slack. Eighty-four percent of school districts in Washington now serve breakfast. One in three kids qualify for a free lunch.

And there was an article on Page 1, I think it was, of The Seattle Times recently, said for the second year in a row, children entering into emergency rooms at hospitals are coming in more frequently for mental health than physical health issues. You think about that. When you think of an emergency room and kids going in, you’re assuming they scraped their knee ‘cause they fell off their bike or they fell outta their tree fort or they got hurt in Little League, right? No, they’re coming in because they’re depressed and they’re suicidal and they’re anorexic and they’re bulimic. More children going to the emergency room for mental than physical health. In our city. We’re not talking a faraway land; we’re talking here.

I will tell you this: Ours is a city that hates children, and the men hate them the most. And men who are having sex outside of marriage, and men who are fooling around with girls rather than seeking a wife, and men who are lazy and sluggard and not seeking to find a career, and men who are not doing their job, they hate children. And God is a father to the fatherless, and they’ve put themselves up as enemies of God.

And at Mars Hill, we do not do that. I don’t care what the world does; we are not the world. The world in its wisdom does not know God. The way it’s gonna go here is different. On this issue, I have driven hundreds of people out of this church. By God’s grace before I die, it will be the tens of thousands. I want men to love their wives, and I want men to raise their kids, and if men walk in and they don’t want that, they will leave this church or they will change. We want the men to be different kinds of men. We want them to have different kinds of marriages. We want them to have different kinds of children, because God is their father, and that means something.

I’ll read a few things to you out of the Scriptures. I was meditating on this. God brought to mind Jeremiah 29. The context in Jeremiah 29 is not unlike Seattle. They are in exile. They’re in a place called Babylon. It’s a godless place where people are doing everything they’re not supposed to do, and the men there are thinking, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t get married. Maybe we shouldn’t have kids. This is such a wicked city. It’s such an evil place. Maybe we should just abandon what God has called us to, ‘cause this is a very bad place to be a father. It’s a hard place to be a husband and a father. It’s a hard place to raise kids.”

So God speaks to the men directly, in Jeremiah 29:4. “This is what the Lord Almighty, the god of Israel says to all those I carried into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon.” The issue there, who brought these guys from Jerusalem to Babylon? Well, that would be God. Acts 17 says that God has determined the times and the places in which we live. We are here because God has placed us here. You say, “Why? Does God want us to have a hard go?” No, because God wants to change the city, and he had to send some men in for the work.

So he tells them, “Build houses and settle down.” Plan on being here for a while. “Plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters; find wives for your sons and give your daughters in marriage, so that they too may have sons and daughters. Increase in number there; do not decrease. Also, seek the peace and the prosperity of the city to which I have carried you in exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.” What a dark city like Babylon or Seattle needs is good men who love their wives and have lots and lots and lots of kids and raise ‘em up as preachers and livers of the Gospel. That’s what it needs.

There are two groups that are having more children than any other group on the planet. Do you know who they are? Mormons and Muslims. They plan on changing the world by raising up enormous numbers of children. They’re thinking future generations downline. They got that from our Bible: “Be fruitful, increase in number, fill the earth, and subdue it.”

I have heard some men say foolish things, like “Oh, I don’t want to be husband and a father, because I want to do ministry.” That is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. You are a pastor; that is your church. If you do a good job with that, then we’ll call you pastor for the big church. Raising up four, five, six kids who love God and preach the Gospel, that’s ministry. That’s seminary. You’re training up the next generation of leaders for the Gospel. I hope and pray that my sons preach the Gospel and that their sons preach the Gospel, and I hope and pray that this goes on until Jesus comes back.

I’m glad that John Calvin’s mom had him. I’m glad that Martin Luther’s dad had him. I’m glad that Paul’s father had him. I’m glad that Jesus’ father stepped in and raised him. That is ministry. And so many men just chuck their family and their responsibilities and give all their time to the ministry and the church. Your children and your wife are your first ministry. You begin at home, and then you build a home and you invite the world in, and you just extend the work of your family through the relationships that are in your home.

That’s where I love Isaiah. Isaiah says, “Here I am, and the children the Lord has given me. We are signs and symbols in Israel from the Lord Almighty, who dwells on Zion.” If a man loves his wife and he raises his kids, he is a witness in this city. Walk up and down ______. Walk up and down Broadway with a wife and three kids. You are a freak. You are sign and symbol. You are preaching the Gospel just by loving them and taking good care of them. This is your ministry, men. You take care of the little church and you take care of the big church by being a man.

Joshua had it in his day. Many men didn’t want this. They wanted to worship other gods or find a shortcut. And he says, “Well, you make your decisions, but as for me and my household” – we’ll what? “We’ll serve the Lord. That’s what we’re gonna do. Me and my wife and my kids and my grandkids and my great-grandkids, we’re gonna serve the Lord. That’s what we’re gonna do, and we’re gonna do it right here.”

I want you guys to start to think about the next three, four, five generations. I wanna see these statistics in Seattle change. They will not happen by electing new officials. They will not happen by increasing government spending. What children don’t need is bigger breakfasts from the government; they need dads. What they don’t need is more mental health professionals; they need their dad, and they need their dad to fear the Lord and to raise them up in the paideia of God, and that’s what we’re here for. That’s why God has placed us here.

Some of you are saying, you say, “What does this have to do with me?” It begins now. It begins how you view kids and your life and your god, and it begins with you being a man like Jesus Christ who shows up and kids flock to him in droves because they wanna be with him. And the young men whom are single, they should be in the nursery. They should be learning how to be fathers. They should be loving children before they have them, and then God will make them a pastor and a father and give them a flock and a home.

Father God, I love you. I thank you that you’re our dad. Lord God, we pray for our city. We pray for peace and prosperity upon this city. We pray, Lord God, that things would be different in this city because of our children and our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren. I pray, Lord God, for the single mothers. This is a hard road for them. They have one of the hardest jobs I can even imagine. Lord God, I pray for much grace upon them. I pray, Lord God, that some men would view them as glorious and beautiful and that they would marry those women, that they would love them, and that they would seek to redeem what other men have dropped.

Lord God, I pray for the children that come out of the families in this home, that the kids would not view the government and the church as their primary influencers, but that would be dad and mom and the Bible open around the living room and the table at dinner and the course of life as they drive around in the car.

Lord God, we love you. I pray for the single men, that they would begin to rise to the occasion of being a man who is capable of being a husband and father. I pray, Lord God, that they would see women rightly and love them as such. Lord God, thank you that we have so many children that are coming. I pray we would do a good job with them and not just multiply, but multiply fruitfully. Lord Jesus, we ask for much grace, that you would forgive us for our sins, that you would cause us to be new men and new women, that you would give us hope and life for the future. Amen.

At this point, we respond by partaking of Communion, which is remembering Jesus’ body and blood shed for our sin. We collect our offering. If you’re a visitor or a non-Christian, don’t give. For the rest of you, your giving kind of sucks. You need to step it up. And then we will sing a bit as well. Thank you.