Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
This is a conversational podcast that brings powerful moments from the Inspirational Media sermon library into fresh, engaging dialogue. Hosted by voices who care deeply about sharing timeless biblical truth, each episode unpacks key ideas from sermons, devotionals, and real-life stories — helping listeners reflect, relate, and rediscover hope in today’s world.
Whether you're exploring faith, seeking encouragement, or simply curious about spiritual truth, this podcast is designed to stir the heart and spark interest in the deeper resources available in our library.
🎧 Dive into the conversation and discover what’s waiting for you at inspirational.org.nz.
5290-128k
00:00:00 Speaker: This scripture is behind all of our functions as parents. The very first of it being so important. Psalm one hundred and twenty seven. Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it. Ephesians five twenty one says, be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. That's also a principle. To the degree that you are subject and reverence to the Lord Jesus Christ, you can be subject to one another. Inversely, to the degree of your distance from the Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord is not building the house. And to that degree, you cannot be subject to one another in right ways unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman keeps awake in vain. It is vain for you to rise up early, to retire late. To eat the bread of painful labors, for he gives to his beloved even in his sleep. Behold, children are a gift of the Lord. The fruit of the womb is a reward, like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one's youth. How blessed is the man whose quiver full of them. They shall not be ashamed when they speak with their enemies in the gate. And the second scripture. You don't have to look up. It's very short. John one fourteen And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth. What we want you to understand is that in our faith, religion, or faith and life are not apart from one another, that in all we do, since the Lord indwells us, the word is becoming flesh. The word becomes flesh when a father hugs his child. But here's the telling point. Since the Lord Jesus resides inside of us and the Holy Spirit flows through us, then you can understand that if you are doing anything in the nature of our Lord Jesus Christ, the gates of heaven open. The Holy Spirit is flowing through you, so that if you are hugging your wife, the Holy Spirit is flowing through, that God's Spirit is flowing through, and the word is becoming flesh, so that if you're sitting down to teach your child or read the Bible or pray with your child, the Holy Spirit is flowing through and the word is becoming flesh. But if you are in fury and in injustice beating on your child, can the Lord Jesus Christ flow through that? You see that he cannot. He is there, but he can only weep if you are unjustly haranguing one another as man and wife before the children. Can the Holy Spirit flow through that? There is no way. Then you're running in your flesh and the word is not becoming flesh. What is becoming flesh? Flesh. So you need to remember at all times that anytime you do anything good in the family, it is not that you're building alone, but the Holy Spirit is flowing through you, and Jesus is becoming flesh to your children. We're going to be talking about specific functions of a father. But before we get into that, I want to make a very clear statement, and that is that all six of our children are doing well. They are taking hold of their lives. And that is not because John and I did everything right. We learned everything we know by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. But in relation to our children, and most of what we learned was by the mistakes that we made with our children. But they're doing well because somehow they chose to forgive us. And many times we had to go to them and eat humble pie and say, I see now what I did, and I need your forgiveness. I'm sorry for that. And that did not do anything to destroy respect of children to their parents. In fact, it enhanced respect. It set them free and it set us free. We're only bound to our parents mistakes. We're only bound prisoners of our own childish ways by unforgiveness in our heart. That's the only thing that can hold us there. It's our own response to what happened to us that causes us to reap trouble in our present life. It's never what was done to us. It's how we responded to what was done to us or to what we thought was done to us. Sometimes we don't even have a very good grasp on the reality of what actually happened. But forgiveness is the essential ingredient. Forgiveness sets us free to grow into the fullness of the life that God has prepared for us. And Jesus has the power that is available to us to put off the old ways, the practiced ways of responding to life and to people, and to choose to walk in a new way that takes a little self-discipline, to choose to walk in a new way. But we have the power in our Lord Jesus. Now, the first function of a father that we want to talk about is spoken of in Ephesians six verse four. Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Now I really like another version better, which says, bring them up in the nurture and the admonition of the Lord. And where I want to put the emphasis, first of all, is on bringing them up in the nurture of the Lord. It seems like it's easier for us to nurture our children with food than with the real kind of nurture that they need to enable them to become all that they were designed by God to be. Nurture. Real nurture is what feeds the spirit. What gives strength to the spirit? What gives the child courage to be what gives him the ability to take hold of his life, to bloom and to blossom, to try new things, to adventure in new areas, and to be unafraid of of falling, unafraid of making mistakes. That comes primarily from the father. Now we have a tape called The Slumbering Spirit. And if you want to read or hear more about that, you could get that tape on the slumbering Spirit. But essentially in that tape, we're talking about how real nurture needs to be given from the baby even, or to the baby even before the baby is born. Because the moment that the Lord breathes a breath of life into a child, that child has a personal spirit which is very Insensitive, which can pick up on the subtlest of what is going on around him, and which has a capacity to respond to everything that is going on. Nurture comes from a father. When a father knows to lay his hand on the mother's tummy and pray, blessing and welcome for that child that hasn't even yet appeared to our view. Nurture happens when parents express affection to the child. A child only knows that he is loved. He only gets that strength of spirit when he's held and when he's rocked, when he's cradled, when the parent is there for him, when Jesus is becoming flesh through the loving touch of that parent. Though the child has a sensitive spirit, just by the gift of God, the child will go one of two directions, depending on whether he's nurtured or whether he's not. The world is harsh. There's a lot of ugliness. There's a lot of violence in the world. And when the child tunes in to all that he feels in the world, and he doesn't have the nurture of affectionate touch from parents and especially the father. What he'll do is withdraw inside of himself and put up walls to protect his heart. He'll flee back inside, and when he does that, he withers and dies. But when nurture is being administered to him, then he has the courage to come out and become full and to grow into wholeness. If we have an awakened spirit that's been awakened by nurturing love, then we're able to enter into worship, real worship that makes our hearts sing. We'll be able to tune in to God. We'll be able to get into a discipline of devotion that isn't just dry. It isn't just words. It isn't just a ritual we're going through, but it it causes us to grow inside. It expands us. It's meaningful to us because we're really meeting God the Father. If we're awakened by the nurture that comes to our spirit, we're able to receive inspiration from the Lord. We're set free to be creative. We're enabled to really communicate with people beyond words, because our spirit will flow out and meet their spirit, and we'll be able to identify with what's going on in the innermost parts of them. Real communication can happen. And then maybe most importantly, we develop a real conscience that keeps us from getting into trouble. It just doesn't make us feel bad after we've been in the trouble, but it enables us to identify with how our actions are going to hurt the other fellow. And conscience will stop because we've made that identification. Now, most fathers aren't aware of how important nurture their nurture is. Mothers, I think. Well, they're closer to the home. They're closer to the children. They're the ones who carried the baby for nine months. They're the ones who hold the baby to the breast. And they aren't so separated from who and what they are as mothers. But because of the way our culture is, fathers have lost an understanding from the heart of how important their nurture is. It always amused me, as well as grieved me, that the same man who didn't mind getting grease and oil all over his hands, was just absolutely freaked out by a dirty diaper. Just freaked out. Nurture comes by the simplest ways, from a father to his baby. By the way, the father relates to the dirty diaper and goes to change the diaper. And he does it not with disgust and with a shudder, but with love, because he's ministering to a very real need of that child. And as he touches the child with gentleness, as he changes the diaper the father administers, he transmits a real nurture to the baby. Lauren can remember vaguely, but he says it's a strong feeling that comes up in him sometimes. He could remember being tucked in his daddy's bathrobe and going around and looking at all sorts of dark corners at night, and he can remember being afraid, but he can remember being comforted just by feeling his daddy so near him and by being tied to his dad. That happened in Chicago when Lauren was a very little baby, and we lived in a neighborhood that where the black migration, uh, was very active and there was a lot of unrest in the neighborhood. And we lived in the fourth floor of an old church, and there were creaky sounds at night in the church. And often we would get up in the middle of the night to go see if somebody had come in to cause trouble, if somebody was in the church and we couldn't leave Lauren upstairs. So his daddy tucked him in their clothes. So Lauren has a spirit of adventure. He can go into areas that are unfamiliar to him, and maybe dark and a little scary because that nurture was given him. He had the father behind him and around him in close touch. Therefore, he can believe that Father God would also be there for him. Nurture is given to a child by the father when the father is rolling on the floor. Wrestling, playing, tickling. When the father is laughing. Playing games. When the father takes a boy fishing, or he just sits down and puts an arm around his girl who is falling apart in some tearful display, and he doesn't understand why she's so upset. But that isn't the important thing. Nurture doesn't come when he says, don't be silly. Nurture comes when he puts an arm around her and he says it'll be okay. Even not understanding that real understanding comes just in the tuning in, in the empathizing. And there's strength and there's courage and there's power. And her spirit is called forth to relate to a man, to relate to a husband later on by that tender empathy that the father gives. Every time you fathers open your mouths every time you touch. You are either destroying or you are calling forth. And the call on fathers is to call forth their children to to life. Now, mothers nurture in a beautiful way. Mothers give strength to their children. They give warmth, they give tenderness. But a father gives nurture in a very unique way by the strength that is in him, by the structure that is in him. And a girl will be able to contain the nurture that her mother gives by the structure that the father provides for her to contain that mother's nurture. A mother cannot do both jobs without a lot of strain that goes into the character, Enter into the spirit of the girl. God put us with parents. The second function of which we would speak is teaching. That same scripture, Ephesians six four, says to bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. And we began last night to talk about teaching that we want to flesh it out today. Unfortunately, what has happened in our culture is that not only has the man been told that he has nothing to teach because he goes off to work and he's out there isolated from his family. But what also has happened is that in the raising up of schools to teach how to read, and in the raising up of Sunday schools to teach about the faith, fathers have gotten the message that I delegate that out there. I don't have any more to teach. Nothing that I do teaches, and nothing could be further from the truth because we teach by example if we are not there giving nurture. If we are not there by example, whatever is taught out there will have no lodging place in the heart in any real way, because what lodges in the heart is what the father is. For example, both parents teach, and I can remember my mother teaching me and the words that she says. They still I can hear her voice and they ring in my ears still today. Her nickname for me was Jackie and she would say, Jackie, a man is a gentleman at all times. Jackie, a gentleman never curses in front of any woman. Don't you wish when you go to the restaurant today some people had heard that Jackie, a gentleman always treats every woman as a lady. Jackie, a gentleman never raises his voice to his wife, Jackie. A gentleman never hits a woman. Any man who hits a woman is not a man. And all that good teaching would have had very little effect. Except that my father bodied that out. He lived it. He fleshed it. I never heard my father ever insult my mother. I never heard my father hurl a curse word at my mother. I never heard him ever say anything disrespectful to her or about her. I never saw him raise his hand to her. I never saw him do anything but treat her as a queen. The queen of his life. That went into me. I can't take credit for it. It was built into me. From them, from God, through them. My children have never heard me hurl a curse word at Paula. They've never heard me shout at her. They've never seen me raise a hand to her. They've never seen me do anything but treat her with respect. Because that was what my father built into me. When it isn't built in, then what we need to do. And here I want to teach you something when it is not built in. I suggest that you look into the Gospels and you read the Gospels with an eye to seeing how did Jesus meet people and then build in by saying, I will do and say and feel only what Jesus would do, say or feel in that situation and build that teaching into your children. Concerning work habits. In the beginning of my life, my dad had it pretty much together and he taught us how to work. He owned a Winkler Stoker place. Now, in case you know what that was in the old days. They didn't have central heating. My father was on the beginning of teaching central heating and automatic furnaces and winker stokers. You put coal in the hopper, and then the worm took it into the fire. And I remember that he took my older brother and me when we were just little tiny tykes, and we went with him. And when they were to put in a new installation, uh, they let the old fire cool down, and it was still mighty hot, but we could stand it, and he'd put a wet cloth around our face, put gloves on us, wrap us in clothing, and then we would crawl inside that retort or furnace where big men couldn't get, and we would hand out those fire bricks. And we were taught that we had a contribution to make that work was important, that we gave something to society, and we participated in the laughter and the fun and the banter of the men and work was taught that way to us. We worked alongside of our dad. And so it became important to work, and we received the same teachings of that. How many of you have heard this? If anything is worth doing, it's worth doing well. And I can remember my dad saying, when you go to work for somebody else, a good day's work for a good day's pay. You never shirk at work. That kind of teaching is fleshed out as I walked with my father. Now later on, he kind of lost it. And mom used to say he worked hard at getting out of work than it would have taken to do the work. But by then it was built in in my formative years. Honesty, telling the truth. What we see the father doing. I remember when I was a kid, my younger sister, four years younger, and I, we used to love to do things together, and we went down to a carnival and we got in with this guy who was running balls down. They'd fall in holes and then he'd add up all the numbers, and if you got the right number, you won a prize. And he got me hooked into that game. Of course, he wasn't adding truly and everything else. And if you just if you just buy another two dollars ticket, you're going to win this one hundred and fifty dollars radio and all these things. He just got us going, got us hooked on the game and all we were, we were within two dollars of winning this huge prize and ran out of money. So we went back to the store. We owned a store at the time. I knew the combination, so I got an A, C, I borrowed twenty dollars, borrowed, went back down there and lost it. Now there's nothing to do but go home. So went home and just sat down and Dad and Mom told him what I'd done. Dad said, Jack, the main thing is you told the truth. Said, what did you learn from that? They made me talk about it. Made sure it was written on our hearts. Then he took us down there and landed all over that guy and said, I'm going to get the sheriff to arrest you for embezzling minors. Didn't work. Didn't get our money back. But it sure wrote on my heart. And I've never gambled since. I remember my mother saying, I would rather that you would hit me in the face than tell me a lie. If we got disciplined, it was not so much that we did the thing, but if we would lie to them and we learned that we must tell the truth, whatever the consequences, it was written. See, that was that was made flesh. Prayer. When a child sees his father at the dinner table, bow his head and say a prayer. That's. That's worth more than a thousand times. Taking him to Sunday school. And father just going to take the kid to Sunday school and leave Well, he goes out to the golf course. That's what he'll write, that we get God out of the way. But God isn't real. I'd rather do this. And so if he sees the father. Now remember my English father around the meal tables, he said, the rest of the time we could be ragamuffins, but for dinner we had to dress up. They had to be bathed, we had to have nice clothing on, and we had to sit around that table and we were polite, I remember that. If we ever said any word of disrespect to my mother, we had Instant tiger. And that was the one time my dad's temper went right off the top of the scale. And Lauren remembers a time when we were at the dinner table and one of the kids made the mistake of saying a impertinent and crass word to Paula, called her a bitch. he said. I don't remember it, but he remembers it very well. He said. My eyes twinkled with fire. The next second that kid knew he'd done wrong and was fleeing. And there I was with my big old legs right behind him. He said it's the only time he ever saw me use my hands and hit him, and he flew right over the couch. He said that was proper because he had disrespected. He was to learn the hard way. How many times we hear in counseling that children are saying awful things to the mother that must never be allowed, and father's body forth the Lord, when they treat the wife with respect, and see to it that the children do. Then finally we teach by how we handle grief and loss. I can remember dad got us up in the middle of the night when I was ten years old, and he brought us down in the living room. He sat Martha Jane on his lap, who was then six, and he said, well, grandad's gone. And Martha Jane piped up, where'd he go? And even in the middle of his grief, dad broke out and laughed. And I remember that learning from the way he handled grief, that grief was something you handled in the family. It was something you handled sharing together, heart to heart. It was something you sat down and talked about. You didn't haul off in private and soak and sulk, but you talked it out in the family. I can remember riding with my father. My older brother became a normal teenager, got into normal troubles, and I can remember my dad getting me up and saying, come ride with me, son. And we would go out. I was to help him look two in the morning. We're looking for Hal. I can remember riding alongside my dad, and he couldn't keep the tears away, and he'd be sobbing as he drove And ever since then, it's been easy for me to know. Psalm one hundred and twenty six he that goeth forth, bearing precious seed and weepeth shall doubtless return with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him. It's easy for me to know that Father God weeps over us, because my dad weeped over us. We body forth by the functions and the family who God is to our children. There's a scripture that talks about how a man leaves an inheritance to his children's children. And we've seen that in so many ways in our family. John talked about how he learned to work from his father. Our children learn to work by relating to the way work was done. And I can remember Lauren going to work seven thousand two hundred feet under the ground in a mine for quite a period of time. And he hated it. But he put in a full day's work. And I can remember marks working with lumber, laboring at a mill, and hating every minute of it. And yet it was built into him to do a good job. He couldn't do otherwise. And so on with our other children, because it was a gift. It was just simply built in as a part of their inheritance. The next function of a father is discipline. There's an awful lot of confusion about what the purpose of discipline is. Discipline is not punishment. Those of us who confuse discipline with punishment do so probably because discipline came to us always as punishment, and we reacted against the way it was administered because it was without sensitivity and maybe without love. And we felt like it had done a violence to us. We resisted it. Some of us were just ornery enough not to see what it was when it was given properly. But discipline is not for the purpose of controlling our children so that we can be comfortable. Discipline is to build into our children's structure so that they have something inside by which they can control themselves, its structure, so that they can rule their own spirit. Proverbs twenty five twenty eight says, like a city that is broken into and without walls, is a man who has no control over his spirit. So when we give loving, consistent discipline to our children, they have the kind of walls built into the very fiber of their being by which they can control their spirit, by which they can make a decision to act in a certain way, rather than just being driven into the behavior that they express. Little children have rampaging energies, all kinds of energies that they don't know what to do with. And when we stop them, when we tell them where their limits are, when we hold them accountable, when they go over those limits, then we minister to the anxiety that's in them. They're anxious about those rampaging energies and we bring them to rest. When we say, now you stop it. Discipline is to train a very important principle. A God given principle into the heart of a child, and that is that what we sow, we will reap. When a child is consistently disciplined in a way that he can understand for an infraction of the law that has been set down, he learns to associate the breaking of the rules with a penalty that he must pay, and that becomes a part of his innermost structure, so that he knows for the rest of his life from the heart level, that when he breaks the rules of God, there's going to be a penalty to pay. He's going to be held accountable. Whether somebody sees him or not. He's going to be held accountable. He will reap what he sows. Hebrews twelve, beginning with the fifth verse talks about discipline. You have forgotten the exhortation which is addressed to you as sons. My son, do not regard lightly the discipline of the Lord, nor faint when you are reproved by him. For those whom the Lord loves, he disciplines, and he scourges every son whom he receives. It is for discipline that you endure. God deals with you as with sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline? But if you are without discipline, of which all have become partakers, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. We train discipline into a very little child by physical means. A lot of people will look at a parent who is disciplining Planning a six month old child by a spat on the behind and say, oh, you're being so harsh with that poor little thing. He doesn't understand. But as a matter of fact, he does understand. I can remember, I think it was charity. Well, probably all three of Lauren's kids did the same thing, but I, I, I think I remember rightly that it was charity in particular and. Well, no Nathan maybe even more than she. But when they were just barely able to crawl, they learned that when you turned the knobs on the stereo, there would be sound. And they were told, no, you don't do that, you don't touch it. But when nobody was looking, they just stubbornly go over there and they touch it, you know, real quick. Well, they very quickly learned that when they touched the button on the stereo, their hands were spanked and they learned to associate doing the thing that they were told not to do with the pain that was endured. Sometimes they would weigh the pain. Just as their father did. Lauren would look us in the eye when we told him no. And you could just hear the wheels inside of his brain. Is it worth it? Is it going to be enough fun to endure the pain that I will, I know will come? And then he'd make his decision. But we knew that we had to be consistent with that discipline. I remember when our grandson, Jason was just barely toddling and he came up to me. I was sitting on the couch and I had a favorite potted plant there, and he stuck his hands in the dirt and I said, no, you don't touch that. And he weighed and he stuck his hand out and just looked me right in the eye and put his hand in the dirt. And so I said another no. And I said it with a sharp pat on the back of his hand, and he withdrew, put his hand behind him, and said, are. Now. He was letting me know that he didn't like that discipline, but he obeyed because he knew what he would reap if he did not obey that. Our little grandson, John Tyler, is learning that now. He was he's just barely two years old, and his mother's always calling me and sharing the little cute things he does. And some people say to them, well, you're being so harsh with him, but they can be strict with discipline because he gets so many hugs all the time. He's getting hugs whether he's been good or not. And Marty was telling me that Johnny had just really had to spank John Tyler hard because he was sassing. I mean, just really being sassy. And so he got the spanking and he was set down on the couch. And then John very carefully explained to him why he couldn't talk in the way he could. I don't know how much of it he understood intellectually, but he got the message. And John said, now you just sit there and you think about that. And so John Tyler did. And pretty soon he came over to his daddy and he says, I'm sorry. And then Marty said, John Tyler, why did daddy spank you? He says, I sassy. The children understand more than we give them credit for. Our discipline needs to be appropriate to their age. You administer physical discipline to a a little child, and that's scriptural. And I want to share a few scriptures with you. They're listed just by verse number on one of the sheets in your packet. And I'm just sharing a few of those. Proverbs twenty nine seventeen correct your son and he will give you comfort. He will also delight your soul. The fifteenth verse in the twenty ninth chapter, the rod and reproof give wisdom, but the child who gets his own way brings shame to his mother. Proverbs twenty two fifteen. Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child. The rod of discipline will remove it far from him. Proverbs twenty three thirteen. Do not hold back discipline from the child. Although you beat him with the rod, he will not die. Now a lot of people in this day and age are. They're really reacting to that word beat because of the injuries that are dealt to abuse children. The scripture obviously does not mean beat him until you bruise him and injure him. The word beat has changed in its meaning. It means a different thing to us. The scripture is just simply saying administer physical discipline, but with love not to injure, but just to give him enough pain so that he can associate clearly the calling to account with his breakage of the rules and he won't die. As a child grows, our discipline needs to change. When he's two years old, we let him say his no. We don't let him get by with it. We aren't permissive with him, but we give him room to screech that little screech like Jason did. And then we insist that he obey because he needs to learn to say no. If he learns to say no when he's little, he'll be able to say no when he's grown, If he's just controlled and brought into compliance, then he'll learn that he has to comply in order to belong somewhere, and he won't be able to say no in adolescence to his friends. He'll go along to belong to the crowd. So we're not saying let him get by with anything, we're just saying give him room to express an opinion. Don't crush his spirit. No child of mine is going to say that you're going to do what I say. Fathers who leap all over their children destroy their children. But fathers who come across with calm. No, you will not do that. And an expression of physical discipline, which resolves the issue for the child will build into their child an ability to say no later. Little children don't understand sweet reasonableness. Little children have such a tender spirit that they can tune in to what's in your heart. If you're angry in your heart, they're going to get that message, and they can't put it together with a smile on your face and the sweetness of your voice. And if you don't bring the discipline to sharp focus, then they're more afraid of what might happen if the parent ever catches up with them. We've counseled many, many people who were never disciplined physically, but they said, I knew my parents were angry and I just lived in fear of what might happen. And it never happened. We can remember when we would finally just spank our kids. They'd heave a sigh of relief. It's over. I paid the price. It's over now. We can go on from here. And it'd be almost with a a breathlessness that they'd sigh with that kind of relief. As our children get toward teenage, we need to gradually set them free. They have to be involved in the decision making. They need to be involved in the enforcing of the rules. We don't humiliate them with physical discipline anymore. We meet them where they are and we're sensitive to what they need in their spirit. But authority still needs to be expressed. And finally, we need to cut them free altogether. And if discipline has been loving and clear and wholesome, then we'll be able to cut them free and know that they're going to have a center of decision inside themselves by which they can live fruitful lives. It's the father's function to express authority, to express authority. He has to know his child. The trouble with the culture that we live in is that the father isn't in the home. Enough. He's at work, and he knows what to do at work. He knows what buttons to push in his office. He knows how to express authority. He probably knows a lot of his employees better than he knows his own children, because he spends more time with them. He can anticipate their reactions, and he doesn't have so much trouble expressing authority there. A man who works in mechanics knows what things to put together. When he puts them together, they work. But when a man comes home and he hasn't really spent a lot of quality time with his wife and his children, he doesn't know them well enough to know what to do with the reactions that they make. He doesn't know the griefs that are on his kid's heart. He doesn't know why they're getting into the things they're doing. He doesn't understand the things that have driven them to the behavior that they're expressing. He doesn't understand his wife's emotional reactions, because he hasn't been around her to see all the things that have been going on in her life to cause the build up. He just gets it at the door. Her frustration and her demand that you gotta settle these kids. And so sometimes he'll come in and he'll just jump on em on all fours without tuning in to where they are. And then he feels like he always has to be the ogre. And he flees from being the bad guy. He wants to be the guy with the white hat. He'd like to be a hero to his children, not the one who's always setting things in order. If a father hasn't dealt with what is in his own heart toward his own father, he will do the very wrong things to his own children that he saw his father doing and hated him for it. If he hasn't dealt with the things that are in his heart toward his mother, he will get into another relationship with his own wife. He'll let her come in and just take things over. He'll act more like a son in his own home, and he'll let his wife do all the disciplining. He won't express his own authority, or he'll demand from his wife. Or he'll criticize his wife for the way she expresses authority. One thing that John and I had to work out in our own marriage was that John didn't like to discipline, and I was the oldest of five children, and sometimes I had had to be a part of the disciplining of the younger brothers. It came more easily to me, and there was an anger in me because John wasn't disciplining him, and I would work to program him to do what he ought to be doing in relation to the children. And this cut into him. It undermined him. And I had to learn to give that to the Lord. I asked the Lord to bring the demand level to death in me, to deal with the anger in my heart. I dealt with the root of it, which was just simply the fact that my wonderful father wasn't around during the week to exercise the discipline. And I was mad because mom had to do it and I had to be involved. So I had to deal with that in my heart. Then I had to give John room and time to come into his own, and my prayers had to change. Instead of praying, Lord, make John express the authority and discipline the kids like he ought to change that kind of a prayer to a prayer that said, Lord, strengthen John in His Spirit. You speak to his heart and just keep me out of it. And then John was enabled by the gift of the Lord to come forth and be who he was created to be. The next function of a father is blessing. And that one has been destroyed by our culture more than any other that I know. And it's perhaps the most important function that a father continues to exercise all of his children's lives. When the children leave the home, they're on their own. We must release them. But the one thing that a father can continue to do, and should continue to do, is to put blessing on his child's life. If you picture it this way, picture a pane of glass. Picture another pane of glass. Now God is the light and God shines his light down through the father and through the mother to the children. Unfortunately, most of the time it's pain. You know, you shut them down through. That was me. Now the light of God comes down through the father and through the mother. Into the children. You remember in first Corinthians seven it says that if one is not a believer, he's consecrated to the one who is a believer. And so the light of God will shine down through if either one of the parents believes. And you can see then, that the more the father's life is cleansed before the Lord, the more light will come down through the children. So in this sense, the father is himself the blessing. Do you understand that he liveth a good inheritance unto his children? Great shall be the peace of thy children's children. If the father's life is clean before the Lord, the light of God keeps the children. But then there is conscious blessing, and that's the most important throughout the Bible. You see it? What did Jacob and Esau battle for? Come on, buddy. The father's blessing. Jacob stole the father's blessing. And when he did it. And the father put the blessing on him, Esau cried out, have you not another blessing for me? I'm undone. My life is a waste, is what he was saying, because we must have the father's blessing in Genesis forty eight. You'll read there how Jacob blessed all the children, and that blessing became a prophecy of the way their life would go. I learned this one time I was visiting with a psychiatrist, a Christian, and it came nighttime and bedtime, and his children came in and they kneeled, knelt down in front of him, and he put his hands on them, and he prayed a blessing over them before they went to bed. And my spirit leaped and it said, oh, ha, yeah, yeah. Oh, boy. Hallelujah! This is right. So from that moment on, Paula and I, every morning before the children went to school, we laid our hands on the children and we prayed a prayer of blessing. Lord, be with them in school today. Open their hearts and their minds to hear and to see. Give them a good time in school. Enable them to respect the teachers. Whatever. We put a blessing on their life. Lauren used to call home from college and say, dad, I've got a test. I need your blessing. Now, God wasn't going to do his homework, but God would be in his heart and his mind to keep it clear and open and unafraid, so that when he took his test, what he knew would come back up into his mind. If he had the father's blessing, all the children brought home their prospective mates for my blessing. You remember Fiddler on the roof? How many saw Fiddler on the roof? You remember Tevye and the first daughter. Seidel comes and She finagles him until finally he lets her have her. No, that's not huddle. What's his name? The guy she married. And. Huh? The tailor. That's it. The tailor. And then he put his blessing on their marriage. And then came huddle. And huddle was marrying a Jew yet? But they were going to go away, and they didn't even ask permission. They just said, we're going to get married. And he walked to the other end of the bridge where they met, and he wrestled with himself, and he was furious. And he said, you didn't even ask my permission. But I give it. You didn't ask for it, but I give my blessing. And he blessed the marriage. And then came the final daughter, who was the apple of his eye. And she'd married a Gentile, and she came, and she asked for his blessing, and he couldn't get beyond that, and he couldn't give his blessing. It was such a tremendous, poignant scene when he took his wheelbarrow and turned his back on his daughter, and she cried and he walked away. And today, how many of you, how many of you grew up in a culture in which you went and asked the father for the daughter's hand, and received his blessing? That needs to be returned. It's so important because the father stands at the water tap of favor and the good things of life flowing. And if the father opens that water tap and directs it to your life, blessing will flow to you. And if he does not, you walk in a desert. But the stream of life is over here and you haven't got it. We need to understand life operates on principles and we must be walking inside of the father's blessing. Such a blessing to me. All of the in-law children. They're a delight to my heart because I could put the blessing on the marriage. And so life and love flow into the marriage. We must fathers do that. Put your hand on the baby's tummy. On the mother's tummy. When the baby is in there. Bless the child before the child comes out of the womb. Bless his life. Put your blessing on them in your prayers. Pray affirmatively over them that God will be with them. That's so crucial and so important to rediscover. The father is one who does what Jesus does. And Jesus said, love one another as I have loved you. He loved us by laying down his life for us. A father will lay down his life for the children. We've had a lot of confusion from a scripture that's very familiar to all of us, which says, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it. And a lot of fathers have used that as an excuse to control their child, to make sure that he gets into the kind of mold that will guarantee that he will be a successful person, successful in his field. Rules and regulations are administered very harshly, and that isn't what the Scripture was talking about. We put the accent on the wrong word, train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it. It's the father's job to live, and the mother's to live close enough to the Lord, so that they're tuned in to what the Lord is wanting to call forth in the child, and to live sensitively enough with that child to discern what the desires of the child's heart are, and then to exercise authority and discipline and love and blessing, so that the child might be set free to become everything that God wants him to be. I've heard John say a number of times that because he was interested in racquetball and he played football and he ran the mile, he would have been pleased if his boys had been athletes like he was. But God made them to be artists and musicians and counselors. And as John learned to tune in to the Lord, he could begin. And I could begin to not insist on our own way, but to nurture the direction that the Lord seemed to be leading our children. A famous artist, a sculptor, said that he would put his hands on the clay and he would just try to sense what this clay was to become. And when he got the sense of what this clay was to become, that he would begin to set the clay free. And that's what we're to do with our children when they're old. They will not depart from that way because it feels so right to them. They're so at home when they've been set free to become who they are, and they're not going to depart from that kind of a sense. There's another way in which parents, and especially fathers, need to lay down their lives for their children. And that is in the way that the father of the prodigal son laid down his life. He wasn't concerned to protect himself. He let his son go knowing the trouble that he would get into. And there are some things, many things. I'm just going to mention a couple of them. Some things that we miss in that scripture because we don't understand the culture. We don't know how he was. The father was risking himself. He waited for a long time until the sun had burned his fingers enough. He'd wasted enough of himself, and he finally came to his right mind when he saw the sun coming. He ran to meet him. It was a very humiliating thing for a man in those days to run. He humiliated himself in order to go out and meet the sun. He had to lift his skirts in order to go meet the sun. And that was humiliating for a man. And then he escorted the sun back into the community, because he knew that the sun would be met with taunts. He would be abused when he came back into the community. And the father risked himself to protect that son until he was restored to his inheritance. Christian fathers fall on their face before the Lord in prayer for the sons. They don't go out to control them and stuff them in the mold. That's why I've said you can always recognize a Christian father by his flat face. The final function about which we would speak right now is the function of protection. It is a father's task to protect his children. That doesn't mean to control and keep them always out of harm's way. It means, rather, to put such a blanket of the Lord's protection by intercessory prayer, that the child can get into harm's way and learn thereby, and yet come out safely. Now, being a prophet myself and being gifted, the Lord could do things with me that maybe he can't do with others. But I tell a couple of stories, but that doesn't keep you from doing the same thing. Without that gifting, Uh, I remember one time he said to me, pray for Johnny. He is going to get into a car with another boy. They're going to drive too fast. They're going to have an accident, and they're both going to be killed unless you pray. And so I came to Paul and said, that was on a Thursday afternoon, and we prayed when we got home from the mission. Sure enough, on that very day, he got into a car with another boy. They drove one hundred and five miles down the road next to us. They bashed into a pickup truck. The pickup truck was demolished. Their car was demolished. The boys weren't hurt and neither was the man. And that was an absolute miracle. And another day he came and said, you better pray again. Johnny's getting in another car. And he he said, prayer. They're going to be killed. What Johnny did, he went across the street to the neighbor boy, and the neighbor boy had a very powerful car. And they drove out here around Hayden Lake on the dirt road. The first time they told us it was forty miles an hour. And the next time it got up to fifty, we finally discovered it was eighty. And they went around the curve and didn't make it. They flew through the air, turned over two and a half times, hit a tree, turned over two and a half more times. The car was totally accordioned until there was nothing left but the passenger compartment. Neither boy was hurt except Johnny, who slid down, put his feet up on the roof when he saw the crash coming, and the crash ripped his shoe off and sprained his ankle, and that was the only harm, although the car was totally demolished. Now that kind of protection, you don't have to have that gifting to be able to hear, but you can sense when the Lord comes on you and he calls you to pray, and you can pray for the protection of your son. I didn't tell Mark this, but when he came to visit us up there recently in December and he started to leave, I knew he was going to have an accident. I tried to run after him, but he was already gone. I was going to tell him to be very careful to slow down. Uh, before he would get to a place, he'd have to stop. And so I went into prayer then, and the car. And he had an accident, and I didn't catch him in time. But God let me know another time. Johnny let him off when he was going to go skiing. And as I let him off, the Lord warned me with a premonition. See, I didn't see it. But you people can feel it. I felt that downturn in my spirit, so I prayed for protection. You've seen those cartoons where the skis go down on both sides of a tree. Johnny, going lickety split down the hill, went right smack into the tree. Hit it so hard that he knocked all the snow down and completely buried himself. He wasn't hurt at all. Wow. Now it isn't just for our own children, but we are fathers inside of the church family. Let me tell you another story that just happened very recently. Uh, we're in a prayer group in a, you know, in a support group. And when we're home, We're in Jim Tiffany's group. Now, Tricia is a member of that group. And so Lauren is one of her spiritual fathers. Jim Tiffany is one of her spiritual fathers. And in that group, she had come to me for help and I became a father in Christ to her. Now there's a man came just to visit with her. Um, you know, possible prospects going on here. And they went out to a show. And before the show began, he started getting fresh. And she just kept trying to stop him, and he just kept getting more and more fresh. And she said, you aren't understanding me. Do you know how this makes me feel? It makes me feel cheap when you treat me this way. He still wasn't stopping. Well, that evening Jim was at my house and we were playing pinochle, waiting for Lauren to come by because Lauren was going to take him to the show. And so Lauren came. We stopped our game, and then I didn't want to go to the show, but the Holy Spirit just let me know. I had to go to the show with him. So I dropped the cards in the family and the three of us went to the show just after Tricia said, do you know how this makes me feel? Cheap. Her three spiritual fathers walked in and sat down right in front of him. Now that isn't protection. And that young man, young man's mouth just fell open. He knew he had been stopped. That is the function of a father to be there for the protection of his children. And when he is there in on the job, the Holy Spirit can call him, and he can pray for the protection of his children. Now, if he didn't know and tragedy happened, then there is forgiveness in the Lord. Jesus isn't there. We can still come to the Lord and we can ask forgiveness. I didn't do it. I ask forgiveness because I didn't pray enough. When Mark went home in the car. because maybe that could have been prevented if I'd been more on the job. You see. So then we we pray and ask forgiveness. Okay. We have time for two more functions. The next function of the father is provision. There is a scripture that says if a father doesn't provide for his own family, he's worse than an infidel. And we have misunderstood this. Many fathers who have been out of work for a while get down on themselves in condemnation. I'm not providing for my family because our culture has told us that we have to provide all kinds of material things. Our standard has gone way out of proportion with the need. And fathers have lost sight of what kind of provision is absolutely necessary to their children. Children need their fathers persons, Their love, their attention, their touch, their fellowship. That is the kind of provision that is far more important than putting food on the table, though. That's a part of provision also. But most fathers understand that they must put food on the table. Few fathers understand that they must put food in the spirit. There was a study that was made. You'll find that as a part of your packet. Also a study that was made on the average amount of time that a father spends. Philip Wylie observed that there are one hundred and sixty eight hours in a week. The average man spends about forty of them at work. Allow another fifteen hours for commuting time, lunch, overtime, and so on. Then set aside fifty six hours eight each night for sleep. That adds up to one hundred and eleven hours, leaving dad fifty seven hours. He can find time to be a father to his children. Now, how many of these fifty seven hours does the average father actually spend with his children? One group of three hundred seventh and eighth grade boys kept accurate records for a two week period. The average time the father and son had alone together for an entire week was seven and a half minutes. Thus, the price of business success or professional achievement might sometimes occur at the expense of being less than adequate. As a father. There is no greater opportunity to influence another life than we have when we become parents. We will never make a mark in the world as important as we make on the spirit of that child. One of the greatest joys that we have is to see our children ministering more effectively than we do our children disciplining their children with more wisdom than we had when we were making our mistakes with ours. And I expect that their children will be better equipped than they are. There's no more important investment than when we invest our time, our energy, our love, our very life with our children. When I was growing up, it was just after the depression. And as I look back now, I realize that my mother and father didn't have very much material wealth. I can remember putting rubber bands around our shoes because the soles were flopping and we didn't have money right then to have them fixed. I can remember, um, a lot of days not having meat, but peanut butter was wonderful. And cheese. I can remember not having very many clothes to wear. And my mother made most of them. I can remember her making underwear for my brothers out of sheets. But I don't. Look back at any of that with a feeling of being impoverished. I remember the very rich times that we had where we shared together. And I know that I was never hungry. But especially I wasn't hungry in my heart because I knew I was loved. Now, this really is the final one. It is through fathers that we either come into our destiny or we are prevented ever coming to it. How do we come into our destiny through our father? It doesn't mean we have to do and become the same thing he is. Our calling may not be that, but when we live with the father, who is determined to pour all that, he is sacrificially into serving others, that builds into us the quality of life which will become our destiny. If we live with a father who's a plumber and he is determined to do the very best kind of a job, and he won't cut corners, and as we work with him, we see that he sacrifices extra sweat and toil to do the job right for the sake of others. That builds into us. Philosophy. Definition of life. Purpose. It says this is what a man is. If we live with a father who is determined to do the best job of taking care of the garden, who works at it and does it for the sake of the work itself, to have a good job done that writes on us. That in our life we want to do the best job we can. If we work with a man who will not cheat in his business and who says, honesty is where we stand, that says to me about my destiny. And so if we live with a man who is honorable, then we want to be honorable, and that means we will come into our destiny. But hear this if there is lodged in our heart disrespect of our father, if there is lodged in our heart judgment of our father, regardless of whether he deserved it, maybe he did deserve it. Maybe we did see him lying to his customers. Maybe we did see him cheating. Maybe he consciously tried to teach us that was the way life should go. And we judge about that. That judgment will prevent our coming into our destiny, that will block. We will not come into the fullness of what we were meant to be, because only as we respect, admire, and trust. And that isn't naivete. That means if we forgive the father, but honor all the good that is in him, if we honor the position anyway, even if he was despicable. If we do that, then the Lord is enabled to move us into our destiny and to bring us into the fullness of our service to mankind. And the Scripture is Ephesians two ten for we were created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. Every one of us has a contribution to make, a destiny to fulfill. And it was laid out before we ever came to earth. It was prepared beforehand by God. But what determines whether we come into the fullness of that destiny is our attitude towards our fathers, and where there is disrespect and judgment, we will be prevented from entering that. But where there is honor, we will be led into the fullness of it. And that's so whether we're a housewife raising children, still the same disrespect of parents will prevent respect, will open doors. And that means forgiving when they went wrong. I saw my parents. How, how how should God prepare a counselor better than to put him into a home which fractured because I saw my parents fractured. I saw them divorced and I was called on to forgive. But that prepared me to be a counselor. It didn't keep me from my destiny. When I forgave, forgiveness is at the core. Honor and respect. And we come into our destiny. Let us bow in prayer.