Published: June 22, 2009 04:29 pm      

How to be a good father, Part 2

On this Father’s Day, I wanted to conclude some wise advice that was shared with me concerning being a good father. Last time we looked at Love your wife, Don’t expect perfect children, Enjoy your children, Listen to your children and Provide for your children.

• Train your children. Ephesians 6:4 says, “And, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger; but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” We must teach and train our children to respect authority in the home or they won’t respect authority at school or in the world. We need to teach our children that there are boundaries that include rules, regulations and a line that they will not cross.

Your children are going to test you. They are going to see how much they can get away with. They are going to see if you mean what you say and if you’re going to take a stand, or if it’s just an idle threat. Every time you back down from Godly instruction, you will have to draw the line further and further away from God’s standard. If you’re not careful, after awhile, they will have become the authority and you will become the one in submission to them. Train your children to respect authority. Earn their respect by being consistent and disciplining them with love or they will never respect the authority of God in their life.

• Pray for guidance. 1 Chronicles 16:11 says, “Seek the Lord and His strength; Seek His face continually.” You don’t have all the answers to their questions and you can’t solve all their problems. You don’t have all the wisdom, love and patience to be the father you ought to be. Without God’s help, you can never be the father God wants you to be. You need help! You can’t do it by yourself

• Pray for your children. Psalm 55:17 says, “Evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray, and cry aloud: and he shall hear my voice.” You can’t be with your children all the time but God can. You can’t protect them wherever they go but God can. You can teach them right from wrong, and you can’t be there when it’s put to the test but God can.

Pray for your children! Lift them up to God to do for them what you can’t do. As parents, we aren’t perfect, and we make mistakes. If we had to do it all over again, we would do things differently. Maybe we’ve done the best we could and we did what we thought was right. We raised our children the best we knew how.

Now pray for them because your Heavenly Father loves them as much as you do and He has more experience than you do. Pray that God the Father will take your well-intended efforts at fatherhood and use them to bring your children into His loving arms.

• Be a positive role model. Proverbs 22:6 says, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” You are a role model for your children whether you like it or not. For the good or bad they will, to one degree or another, model their lives after you. You have inherited some of your father’s characteristics and your children are inheriting some of yours. Whether you know it or not (or mean to or not), you are influencing the lives of your children, and your children’s children.

• Prepare your children. Proverbs 23:24 says, “The father of the righteous will greatly rejoice, And he who begets a wise son will be glad in him.” You are preparing your children to leave home. Some day, they’ll take what they’ve learned from you, and begin to apply it out in the real world. You’ve only got approximately 18 years to get them ready.

Preparing them for life away from you is only part of the picture. If you haven’t spent your time preparing them for eternity, you have failed as a father. God didn’t give you your children just to prepare a doctor, a teacher or a plumber. God gave your children to Christian fathers to prepare them for eternity.

You can’t choose which eternal path they will take but you can choose to show them the way to heaven or you can choose to just ignore their spiritual destiny. They have to decide for themselves the path they’ll take but you can have a Godly influence on their choice.

It’s not easy being a good father but it’s not impossible either. It takes hard work, hard praying and making hard decisions. You can’t do it alone. God doesn’t expect you to. God doesn’t want you to. Don’t leave Him out of your adventure in fatherhood.