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"And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord."
(Ephesians 6:4)
Yesterday we celebrated Father's Day in a unique way at Great Hills Baptist Church. It was a special service where I interviewed seven godly dads. They each shared about being a father from their unique perspectives. They all did great, and our people enjoyed hearing from them. We did the same thing with moms on Mother's Day. It is good to mix things up a bit on Sunday mornings. When these men and women spoke to the church, people were dialed in and paid close attention.
The Bible has words of encouragement and instruction to dads. In addition to today's biblical text from Ephesians 6, here are a couple of others that speak powerfully to me about being a dad. Proverbs 17:6 states, "Children's children are the crown of old men. And the glory of children is their father." Proverbs 20:7 states, "The righteous man walks in his integrity; his children are blessed after him."
Thank you, dads, for loving your families and passing on the faith of Jesus to the next generation. Some of you are dads with young children, and you may feel overwhelmed and under-equipped to raise your sons and daughters. But God has given you this task, and what God assigns, He always equips us to accomplish.
It truly is astounding the power we dads have in our children's lives, especially during the formative years of ages 0-4, where their personalities and outlook on life are formed. In his book, Disciplines of a Godly Man, Kent Hughes writes on page 47, "You will have this terrible power till you die, like it or not... What terrifying responsibilities! This is truly the power of life and death."
Ephesians 6:4 says, "And you, fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord." This text contains a negative and two positives. The negative is, "do not provoke your children to wrath." Some translations say, "do not exasperate your children." The New English Bible says, "You fathers, again, must not goad your children to resentment." It is a present imperative verb with the ma conjunction, and a good translation is, "Stop provoking your children to wrath." We have many wrathful, angry children because their fathers have done a poor job of being a dad. There are many ways to provoke our children to wrath and resentment. We can be overly critical, too strict, too busy, and inconsistent.
Dads, we must be especially careful in the words we use while speaking to our kids. Proverbs warns us of the power of life and death in the tongue (Proverbs 18:21), and I have seen both the tearing down and the building up of a human being through the words people speak. But we dads can be overly critical by not only what we say but also what we do not say. To withhold praise and encouragement from our children is simply unacceptable. It does not matter if our dads raised us this way. That is like saying even though it is the year 2021, my dad was raised in a house with no indoor bathroom, so today we will also use an outhouse. But there is a better way. We can speak words of blessing and literally build up the self-esteem and character of our children.
More about fatherhood in tomorrow's devotion.
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