Fathers

I gave a sermon a couple weeks ago in Nashville about Father's Day, and I was able to give it here. I want to talk about fathers today, the importance of fathers. I talked about mothers here, right? What was that? A month ago? I've lost track of everything. I haven't talked about fathers here, have I? I keep meticulous records, but lately I'm not even sure where. I actually got up out of bed the first night home, and I couldn't remember where I was. It was the middle of the night, and I thought I was in a motel room. My mother, her father died when she was two years old, and she spent much of her childhood without a father. When I talk about mothers, I mention that, but I remember her telling me that she spent her whole childhood looking at men and saying, maybe he could be my daddy. Maybe he could be my daddy. This need, this feeling that I should have, this daddy in my life.

In 2012, there was an article appeared in The Psychology Today, in which a psychologist did this in-depth study of the effects of fathers on children in a positive sense. Now, this material I'm covering for decades and decades and decades, hundreds of books, hundreds of articles appeared all over throughout society at all different levels, saying the same thing, and it's changed. And I want to stress that. It's changed. Part of it is what's happening with this whole flood of these three issues of abortion, homosexuality, and transgenderism that has become the battleground of religion, and this focal point between religion and politics. Here's some of the conclusions he came to in mass research as a psychologist. He called it father absence, father deficit, and father hunger, the importance of paternal presence in children's lives. Now, some of the things he came up with wasn't new. In fact, none of it was actually new. I got books to go clear back in the 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s. They're all saying the same thing. All the research showed the same thing. Fathers impact a child's self-concept and sets of physical and emotional security. Children actually learn as life goes on, usually to have less fear if they come from a stable family, with father and mother together. They also have more of a sense of security about themselves because they grew up in a sense of security.

They also have a lot of self-value, which is based on, to a certain degree, what they learn from their father. Now, once again, if there is no father in a home, I've seen mothers or even grandmothers do this at a remarkable level. It's just a lot harder. If there's two of you, it's a whole lot easier.

So, what we supply is a sense of security, a sense of security and a sense of who you are in the world. Mothers supply something different. Fathers impact a child's ability to socially adjust. And actually, if you have a father involved in a child's education, they do much better in school than just if the mother is involved.

Fathers impact how children approach marriage and sex. That's obvious. If you see your dad abuse your mother or treat her wrong, you're going to be angry, either at him or you're going to be angry at women.

So, how the father treats the mother has a huge impact on child development. Once again, that wasn't new. I haven't read all kinds of research over the decades on that. At this point in 2012, he said 85% of youth in prison had an absent father. Those figures just kept going up and up. I was surprised how high, but not really, if you just look at the trajectory of that over the years. Fatherless children are more likely to smoke, drink alcohol, and abuse drugs. That was nothing new, either. 90% of runaway children have an absent father. No, I didn't know that one. 90% of the children run away from home. There was no father there. Without that security, without a sense of where am I in the world, where's my place? And then, here's something that surprised me a little bit, too. Fatherless children are at greater risk of suffering physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. I thought, why would that be? I mean, the mother's protecting them, but it just has to do with they end up in situations where they're not protected. They're just not protected.

When we look at the family privilege movement, which is part of the things that we see in this whole movement that's going on in the United States, family privilege is that the best form of family is a husband and wife together forever raising their children. But since that's not normal in human conditions, and it's very rare, what we have to do is we have to define all new ways of family as equal, and we have to make sure that children raised in a family with a father and a mother don't get special privilege. Because, see, they tend to make more money, they tend to be better in school, they know that, the research shows it. So, this psychologist came out with family privilege a few years ago that's just really caught fire, is that we, instead of saying the best form of raising a family is a husband and wife together, staying together, raising children, they're saying, no, that gives children privilege over the rest of us. So we must bring that down. We must bring that down because it gives them a privilege. So if you haven't heard family privilege yet, and about a year ago I started reading about it, it's a big thing that's coming. So, fathers, where are we in this? Where are we? What's our role in this? Because our role is real important. And grandfathers, too. More is a support role, but fathers is a direct leadership role. Now, some of you are going to say, well, I'm past the father stage, you know, my life. I'm older, my kids are all grown up. First of all, you're always a father if you've had kids. I don't care how old they are. You're always a father. And if you look at younger men, we need to give them help. We need to give them support. I mean, that's one of the things, the men's group that I've developed, that we're experimenting right now with developing a men's group that we then include everybody into it, that wants to be in it, is to learn how do we even discuss these things? How do we bring these things up? How do we look at, how do we understand ourselves as men in a Christian way? Now, what is the Christian definition of what it is to be a man?

As grandfathers, we can help. My son-in-law, on rare occasions, will come and say, they'll just start talking about something, and I realize they want a little advice. Except my son-in-law, when he ever says, Man, Kelly is so stubborn. I'm going to tell you this, they're not here. And I'll say, no, no, no, no. Before you married her, I said, you have no idea how stubborn she is. And I said, remember, once you're married, you can't even talk to me about that.

Because you know. You know. And so, you know, I don't go give them advice unless they ask for it, but I'm there. And if they want to talk, we can. We can sit and talk. Now, there's four basic models of fatherhood if you just look at the type of fathers. I mean, you can bring this down into a dozen.

But I mean, just look at a general sense. There's the authoritarian model, where the father basically makes up rules and enforces the rules. Now, the father does have certain authority in the house. And he is the one who makes up the rules. And he has to enforce the rules. But if that's all he is, if that's all he is, he's going to produce very angry children who actually don't care much about the rules in the end.

He has to be more than that. There's the unresponsive model. This is the man who says, My job is to feed them, clothe them, house them. My job is basically economic. And he fulfills that very well, but he isn't involved in their lives. That produces children to have all kinds of problems. There's the committed model. The committed model is the man who is really committed to his family and his kids. And he spends time with them. But that's not enough either. The fourth model, what I'm going to talk about today, is the biblical model, which sees...the biblical model of fatherhood is the father who sees his being a father as part of his Christianity.

It's actually part of his relationship with God. Being a father was not just a role he took on. It becomes a core part of who he is. He is a father. I mean, you produce them. Right? So we have a responsibility then. So let's look at a few...well, I'll tell you what. Let's look at something here in Genesis that's very interesting. Because you could be an authoritarian, an unresponsive, or even committed and miss something here and part of our role as fathers, and even grandfathers, Genesis 18. I think I told you about how Maddie, my little granddaughter, and most of you know her, she broke her nose this week.

Which anybody knows Maddie, it's not surprising. Fortunately, there was a picture of her crying. The next picture was after they gave her pain medicine. And she looked incredibly happy. Not normally happy. But a few hours later, she's back to normal. In fact, they're having to help her understand. You have a broken nose. She was climbing a tree a few hours later. No, don't do that. You're going to have to spend some time.

But that's Maddie. Anyways, Maddie a while back asked me a question about God. And I said, I don't know Maddie. I said, I don't know. God's bigger than me. And she got real upset. She said, then who am I supposed to ask? If I can't ask you, who am I supposed to ask? And I said, but nobody knows that.

Somebody has to know it. No, they don't, Maddie. It was just a shock to her that there wasn't some adult someplace to answer every question she has about God. But, Matthew, Genesis 18 verse 16. And this is where the one we know who became Jesus Christ, and two angels came and talked to Abraham. Verse 16 says, And a man rose from there, and looked towards Sodom, and Abraham went with them, and sent them all their way. And the LORD said, Shall I hide from Abraham what I am doing? And said, Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him.

For I have known him in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they keep the way of the LORD, to do righteous and justice, and that the LORD may bring to Abraham what he has spoken. And said, The LORD says to him. So God talks to him.

Notice one of the things he said about Abraham that was important. He will teach this to his children.

You and I cannot control adult children. They make their own decisions. It would be wrong for us to try to control our adult children, and they're going to make their own mistakes and go their own ways. And you can't control that. I can't control that.

But we are to teach them and prepare them the best we can for making their decisions. That's all we can do.

Every parent has suffered various degrees of frustration because of what your adult children do, right?

But that's between them and God at some point. All we can do is prepare them. The thing is, we are commanded or expected as fathers to prepare them. Not just mothers. You can't just give all teaching of God's way to the mother. We have to be involved in it. So, here's our biblical roles. First one is we have to be the leader in worship and teaching of God's ways so they can learn how to make good decisions.

The book of Proverbs needs to be taught in a way that makes sense to children. That's the problem with Proverbs. A child reads it and makes it a sense. And yet, the book of Proverbs is about how to make decisions, how to live life. It is one of the most practical books in the entire Scripture. And that needs to be made understandable to children. They need to know who Jesus Christ is.

They need to know that they, too, have to repent. They, too, have to repent before God. We tried to teach our children and our grandchildren that very early. That was wrong. You need to go tell God you're sorry. He'll forgive you, but you have to go tell him.

So that they understand that submission to God is at the core of everything. The ability of submission before God is at the core of everything. So we go to Deuteronomy 6, right? You can't talk about children and not talk about Deuteronomy 6. So we just have to go back. So, although we're going there again, we go there all the time. But let's look at it and remember what we're told in context of fathers. Okay? Sarah was going to teach those children, too, but he says, I know Abraham will teach them. He would lead this. He would lead the family in learning about God and in learning about God's way. So Deuteronomy 6, verse 4 says, And then that spans out in all kinds of things. You don't love your neighbor as yourself. As it says in the New Testament, if you don't love your neighbor, you're not loving God. So these things get tied together, but this is the top of the pyramid. He says, This means you've got to put effort into this. You should talk diligently to your children, and you should talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. In other words, Christianity is just how you live. If Christianity is nothing more than a half-hour Bible study every Friday night with your children, and then they come to church with you, they're not going to learn it. They learn it because we bottle it.

Now, we're not perfect. There's no perfect human beings. That's part of the problem. But we model this to them. We talk about it. It's what we talk about. It's what we think about. It's what governs our actions so that they see that. They see that. This relationship with God, this understanding of Jesus Christ is this way of life.

Of course, you can't be a strong, I can't be a strong model, now to my grandchildren, if I don't have a relationship with God. How do you model a relationship with God if you don't have it? That means, as fathers, we have to concentrate. We have to put energy into our personal relationship with God. Or we're going to fail in teaching them that. We have to be there. We have to be right with God. He has to be with us all the time. Should they see that and accept that? That's reality. That's the way life is. We become the spiritual leader of the home. And it supplies security, and it supplies the basis for our children to be able, if they decide, to respond to God.

The second thing is, this is going to seem a little strange, our role as father is based on our role as husband. I guarantee you, if you want to raise unhappy, selfish children, give it to every demand, allow them to be manipulative, and let them believe that they are the center of the universe. And not only are they going to be unhappy, they're going to make you absolutely miserable.

We have to help them understand, there are priorities. It is God, it is your mother, and it's you. And if you get between me and God, you and I have a problem. And if you get between me and Bob, you and I have a problem. They have to know that. And you know what? They thrive in that. They absolutely thrive in it.

When Mom and Dad are okay, the world's okay. Depending on how young they are, right? That's a 16 year old. It's two things. But when you're 5, when Mom and Dad are okay, the world's okay.

So we have to let them know, you're not the center of the universe. And you're not, neither am I. But you are number three on my list. I don't have a lot, my priority is maybe a long list, but you're right at the top, but you're not number one or number two. And we have to make Mom number one. And that will give them security. Something I read, oh, I don't know, 25 years ago. It was a book on, you know, I have a whole collection of books on raising children. It was a book where the author said, you want to teach your children about sex? The best thing you can do is Mom can be washing the dishes, and you walk up and give her a little slap on the rear end.

And she giggles. And you just taught them all about sex. That there's something special between these people that's not, you know, Mom wouldn't let me do that. You go, you're going to get slapped back. You just don't do that, right? There's something special between these people. I don't understand it. I'm seven years old. But that is something good, and that makes my life secure. If they're not together, who am I with? What happens to me?

So Mom has to be number two. And don't let those kids ever get between you. And just a mention to wives here, never put him down in front of the kids. You just undermine your ability to really help them, because they will use that against you.

So it's easy if you feel like, oh man, you know, my husband was mean to me today. So you somehow let the kids know. So they're on your side? Boy. Expect the division in your family later that's going to happen.

Mom has to support Dad. If you have something to say to him, say it privately. You say it, but you say it privately. You never tear him down in front of those kids. Now, they may see you disagree a little bit. That's life. So you have a little disagreement. When kids see you work out a disagreement, oh good. That's how you work out disagreements. If they see you tear down each other, that's a whole new thing. To a child. Because they're processing everything emotionally, not logically. That's a whole new thing. So, as we fulfill these roles, the wives have to support us in these roles. But we have to take the lead as spiritual leader. And then we have to put her first. We have to put her first so that they can't ever get between us.

The third thing is we're the coach. I'm amazed how many young men have told me, well, I didn't have a dad. But they're a very successful life, very stable people. And you ask them, who influenced you the most? They'll say, coach. Coach did. It is amazing that the impact coaches, or some teacher, or someone in a community center, or someone in a church. But it's amazing how many times it's coach. You and I are coaches. That's who we are.

Go to Judges 13.

As a coach, you don't... Think about if you coached a basketball team.

You wouldn't say, let's see, you're 6'4", I want you to be the guard, and you're 5'8", I want you to be the center.

To fulfill my desires. Because that's what I want you to be. You have to know the abilities of the people you're coaching.

And I've seen people hurt the development of their children. And Kevin and I have talked about this, how times we had to stop it. You can't impose on them what you want. You want... You may want your son to be a star baseball player, but he's going to be a star oboe player. And what you have to do is help him become the best oboe player possible.

Because you're coaching him. You're not modeling him into... Now, Christianity-wise, you're trying to model him into Christ. But you're not modeling him according to his abilities. My dad figured out pretty early in the summers where I worked sanding floors with him, which is hard work.

And after a few summers he said, you better go to college. Okay. I mean, I could have done the work. But you know, it wasn't somehow my abilities. I could do it. I wasn't bad at it. But it was his passion. Sanding floors wasn't my passion.

You know, making a gym floor look like you could skate on it was nice.

But, okay, we're done. Let's go home. He went to stay there and look at it for a while.

You have to know who they are. Look at Judges 13. Let me get there. You're probably already there.

Judges 13. And I'm going to go ahead and read a few verses here. It's a little long passage, but I think the story is so important. Again, the children of Israel did evil on the side of the Lord. This is verse 1. And the Lord delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for forty years.

Now, in a certain man from Zorah, the family of the Danites, whose name was Menorah, and his wife was barren and had no children, and the angel of the Lord appeared to the woman and said to her, Indeed, now you are barren and have more no children, but you shall conceive and bear a son. Now therefore, please be careful not to drink wine or similar drink and not to eat anything unclean. For behold, you shall conceive and bear a son, and no razor shall come upon his head. For the child shall be a Nazarite to God for the womb, and shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines. In other words, he was going to have a Nazarite vow for his whole life, which was unusual. Don't cut your hair, can't drink any alcohol, can't touch a dead body. And your whole life is dedicated to God. Of course, we know this would be Samson.

And so the woman came and told her husband, saying, A man of God came to me, and his countenance was like the countenance of the angels of God. Very awesome. But I did not ask him where he was from, and he did not tell me his name. And he said to me, Behold, you shall conceive. So she tells him, the husband, Menorah, what he said. Now, a lot of husbands would have said, Were you hitting the wine earlier today?

You're seeing visions. The man knew his wife, and he trusted his wife. And what he does next is very interesting. Verse 8, Amenohas prayed to the Lord and said, O my Lord, please let the man of God whom you send come to us again, and teach us what we shall do for the child who will be born. Now, it's interesting. Menorah is told by his wife, He's going to be a deliverer of Israel. He's going to be one of the judges.

And he's supposed to be a Nazarite. And what was Menorah's response? He's a coach here. Okay? What am I supposed to teach him? I can make him a Nazarite. I can do that. But what am I supposed to teach him? So he prays to God, and what happens is, God sends the angel of the Lord back, and what does Menorah say?

Verse 12, And Menorah said, Now let your words come to pass. What will be the boy's rule of life and his work? Notice the coaching that's going on. Okay, I'm the father here. And you're telling me I'm going to raise a deliverer of Israel, a Nazarite. How do I explain that to my neighbors? Why haven't you cut your boy's hair? He's seven years old and has never been cut. Because he's under a Nazarite bow. Why? Because God told me.

He had no problem with that. His problem was, what is his rule of life, and what is his work? What do I teach him to be? You know, at 10 and 12 and 13? What's he going to do for a job? Until he becomes the deliverer of Israel. That's coaching right there. He understood his role. And he asked God to help him. We have to, as fathers, ask God to help us fulfill these roles.

You know, his work is very interesting. Because one of the things that fathers really help develop in children is the work ethic. A work ethic is so important. Just for happiness. I couldn't stand to stay home and just collect unemployment because it's more that I'd make work not work. I'd have to go work.

I'd be so unhappy. I'd be miserable. I have to produce something, right? That work ethic comes a lot from dad, especially in men. You know, a woman can teach the girls how to work, but guys will just say, yeah, that's mom. They get old enough and it's all, man, it's just mom. That's where dad says, oh no, that's not just mom. I probably told him to do this when Chris, and I hate to talk about my own kids, when Chris was, I don't know how old he was.

He was bigger than me. He was like bigger than me at 15. So he must have been about 15. And Kelly and Jen come around. Dad! Chris is yelling at mom! And I said, really? He does what he's voicing. He was just a mild-mannered guy. And he was standing there, I walked in, and he's looking at her and he's saying, look, you're just a woman, and I'm a man, and I don't have to do what you tell me to do. And I'm thinking, okay, don't laugh.

Don't laugh. Don't make him feel like you're making fun of him. He said, hey, come here a minute. He's, you know, wonderous over there. I said, hey, you know, that's your mother you're talking to. But I want you to understand something. This is really important. That's my wife. He started bawling like a baby, scared him to death. That's my wife you're messing with, because he knew I mess with her. Guess who I mess with? Me. He turned all red and just started baking forgiveness. You know?

Now, I never was rough with my son. I never hit my son. I hardly spanked my son. But the realization, wait a minute, I'm breaking this something between me and Dad, scared him. And he ran back and apologized to her. There's something with guys we teach, because we're guys. Men learn being men from other men. We just do. We're not born with just, here's how to be a man. We know how to be males. And some of that's pretty dysfunctional sometimes, right? Basically, we're born to be cavemen. Unless a man comes along. I mean, we're barbarians, unless a man comes along and teaches us.

And we teach them work ethic. We coach them. We coach them in what is wisdom and how to make decisions. And how does sometimes you suffer for your family? You don't get some little trick at you, God, because the kids need shoes, right? They need to know that. That's what a man does.

We teach them that. If we don't teach boys that, they won't know it. They just won't know it. The father's a disciplinarian. You know, we have the passage in Samuel. First Samuel won't go there. But Eli was the high priest. God rejected him as his high priest because his sons, he would not discipline his sons. And his sons, who were also priests, when people brought their sacrifices to God at the tabernacle that was there, they would make them give them the best cuts which were supposed to go to God.

They took bribes. And the thing that just turned the Israelites against them was they actually brought in women. And they'd say, okay, we'll go to God and get your sins forgiven, but we have to go into back room here, just the two of us. And God said, you know what, Eli? You would not stop this.

You were supposed to stop them. You're the high priest, and you're their father. So you're all three are going to die. And they did. They all died. So we do have a role as a disciplinarian to teach certain rules. You know what's hard for us? We get angry. And sometimes when we act out of anger, it doesn't produce the best result. We have to control that anger. It's not wrong to be angry, but we have to control that. Or we'll actually produce the opposite results of what we want to do.

So we have to understand that. That's why in Ephesians 6, 4, we have what the apostle Paul writes here. Now we read this so many times. Again, it's one of those passages we talk about children, we talk about fathers, and we have to go here. Ephesians 6, 4, And you fathers, do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord. That word admonition in Greek is very interesting. In the New American Standard, it's actually translated as instruction. See, admonition, instruction. How could translators come up with two totally different English words to try to explain it?

It's a very multifaceted word. One Greek dictionary puts it this way, It means training by word of encouragement when it is sufficient, but also of reproof, blame, and as required. In other words, you try to encourage and you try to lead. If that fails, you punish. You don't punish first. See, it's not saying if you make them angry.

Because I tell you what, if you do what's right, your children sometimes are going to be angry with you. Last week, we were in San Antonio. We got to spend two days at the Sabbath and Sunday before we had to come back with our little granddaughters, whatever started to throw a fit, and I looked at her and said, you really think that's going to make a difference? So she stopped. Now, there was a point where maybe her daddy would have had to step in and stop what was going on.

You see? But the first reaction wasn't, now you're going to get spanking, the first reaction, mine, was, as always, is, I find this amusing, but it will not produce anything. So the second reaction, if she's totally out of control, daddy had to come along because grandpa steps back.

Daddy comes along, and daddy says, come here, we've got to go talk. And he works it out. Sometimes that may take punishment. A lot of times it doesn't. It just takes a discussion, not a discussion. It takes an explanation.

You explain. So we have to be careful not to anger them. I made that mistake. I mean, sometimes I look as a father, all the mistakes I made, and I wonder if my kids came up sane, and I realize, well, kid was involved, and that was the big balancing thing that happened there.

And God, I know God was involved. But there are no perfect mothers. There's no perfect fathers. We do the best we can, and that's why taking them to God is so important. And the last role I'm going to talk about is father, and we need to remember this role. We're playmates. You know, I remember coming home, you know, from a hard day going out and visiting people and doing an afternoon Bible study or whatever, and I come home, and the girl's crystal-deed born yet.

And when I opened the door, I could hear them scream and run towards me. Daddy said, let's play, let's play, let's play, let's play. I mean, all they do is play. And so you play with them. Believe me, I had a lot of lukewarm water and terrible cookies over the years. As we said, we have our tea party. And then we go outside and throw the ball, you know, we would do something else. But we play with them.

They learn from that. First of all, they learn to be a little tougher. Right? Oh, it's not a bad scrape. Should we cut your leg off? No! Oh, you're not crying anymore. Good, let's play some more. That's a band-aid problem. Or, no, that's serious. Let's go in and take care of it. They learn to be a little tougher. They also learn that losing is part of life, and you can't let it destroy you. In fact, character is shown sometimes through losing, not winning.

And winning and being a winner that puts down other people, well, that makes winning meaningless. They learn that from dad. They learn winning, they learn losing. They learn to play hard. They learn to be a little tougher. They learn to be fair. You don't break the rules. This is all we do as teachers. And, you know, I didn't realize how many men don't do that until one time when my girls were little, I took them to the playground.

And they were playing, and I'm, you know, pushing them into swings, we're going down the slides. We weren't there that long, maybe a half hour, and I said, okay, we've got to go now, girls.

And they ran up, and we're going towards the car, and there was a group of women watching this. And a woman came over and said, we have a question, all of us. We were talking. And I said, what? And they said, you're divorced, aren't you? And I said, no. Why would you say that? And she said, because all of our husbands don't play with our children. We figured it's probably your divorce, it's the only time you get with them. And I said, wow, that's rather sad. I look forward to playing with the kids.

I get to be a kid, too. That's what Kim says, go play with the other kids. Why don't you go play with the other kids? Okay, I run off and play with the other kids. We played with them. That's part of what we do. Now, I can remember my dad taking me fishing. Remember my dad having me catch? He was a fast-pitch softball pitcher. No one wanted to catch fast-pitch softball. So at 13 years old, I'm learning how to catch. He wasn't much of an athlete. But every place I went at the Feast of Tabernacles, they had fast-pitch softball tournaments. I got to play with them in, because that's the only one who could catch a fast-pitch softball.

Okay, I'm not as good as an athlete as you, but I know where I fit here. I can do something that nobody wants to do. And at playing with him, still, to me, I look back at 12, 13 years old. That was an amazing time. I don't want to talk about Bill Cosby and the situation he's in now, but I want to talk about his show. Remember the Bill Cosby show?

My kids loved watching that show. And one time, my older daughter was mad at me, and she paid me the biggest compliment anybody ever has. She says, I hate living in this house. It's like living in the Cosby show. And I said, thank you. I appreciate that, which has made her madder. That was a good show, which modeled family. That was a great show. It modeled family. My kids loved that show. One of the things I did when my son was young, because I'd get so busy, when I used to get too busy doing things, I had an inbox and an outbox on my desk.

And in the inbox, there was a poem. And so as I take things off, take things off, eventually that poem would rise to the top. And basically, the poem said, and it's a very interesting poem, basically it says at the end, I can be rich, I can be famous, I can be all these things.

And if I fail my son, what have I done?

I remember that because I'd be days and days not interacting with him like I should, and then eventually would come to the top, I would read it, and I would leave my desk, and lay it down, I'd come back, and I'd put it at the bottom again. So it had to come to the top.

I get angry at what's happening to men in this country. I get angry. It's against God, and it's against who we are.

And we have to not let it change us. We were designed by God to be husbands, and leaders of the family, and we were designed by God to be fathers. That's a calling. Remember I talked about motherhood as a calling? It's a calling from God to be a mother. It's a calling from God to be a father. And it is appalling how many men refuse to do that. They produce children, and they don't father them, because it's too much work, they have to sacrifice too much, and they're not manly enough to do it. They're just not manly enough to do it.

We have to, if we're going to stand up against the dam that's going to break, we have to have strong families. And we as men are going to have to step up to the plate more. I don't care how old you are, I don't care if you're very young or very old, I don't care if you have children or not. We're going to have to step up to the plate to help families, and to be examples to other men, especially younger men. We're going to have to be examples to them.

We didn't get to do this for Father's Day, but I still wanted to give it, because it's important for us to understand as Christians our calling as fathers.