‘He shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children and the heart of the children to the fathers’
Almost 20 million children in America grow up without a father – seventyfive percent of them in poverty. And it gets worse; these children are five times more likely to commit suicide, ten times more likely to take drugs and twenty times more likely to go to prison. Luther Burbank said, ‘If we paid as much attention to our plants as we do our children, we’d be living in a jungle of weeds’.
As a father, answer these three questions:
- Are you giving your children things instead of yourself?By the time they’re 12 years of age they’ll have learned seventy-five percent of all they’ll ever know. The question is will their teachers be television, some drugged-out rap artist, their peers or will it be you? As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.
- Are you giving your best to your career or to your children?If you spend all your energy at work and leave none for your family, you’ll pay a high price. Remember, you get only one bite at the apple. Your children will grow up either to resent you, repeat your mistakes or rejoice in the memory of a home where love was spelled as T.I.M.E!
- Are you setting a spiritual tone for your family?Does your wife run circles around you in this area? Thank God for mothers who ‘stand in the gap’, but the Bible holds fathers responsible for the spiritual training of their children. ‘Fathers … bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord’, Eph. 6. 4.
Ten or twenty years from now, what are you going to wish you’d done today?
Selected
