Category: Fatherhood
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Adult Children: Forgive Your Parents
A Word to Adult Children Most adults have layers and layers of subconscious anger resulting from being loved insufficiently as a child. Anger’s function is justice. It is a reflex to perceived injustice. All people know intuitively they should be loved. Almost all people internalize, as infants and children, the anger of the injustice of…
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Modesty of Speech
On Sex Talk and the Immodesty Of Our Age [ONLY AN OUTLINE RIGHT NOW] Children from evangelical homes are still getting the impression their parents think sex-talk is dirty. Then, they find out sex is fun, and they throw off everything their parents told them, because their parents taught them a taboo, instead of…
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Do Not Coerce the Heart
The pre-school child will tell you what God is doing in his heart. He will openly talk about his moral thoughts. He will naturally think about God, death, and the afterlife. He will keep telling you – forever – if you respond correctly when he does. Listen for the heart-work that God is doing, and…
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The Point Of It All Is Friendship
You might read all this talk of law, discipline, reaping and sowing, and think that the ideal Christian home is some sort of concentration camp. Quite the opposite, since the point of it all is warm friendship between parents and children. There is a danger not only that all this talk of…
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Inside-out Versus Outside-in
God’s job and the parent’s job are different: same goal but opposite processes: God: inside-out Only God has direct access to the heart, the parents do not. It is not the earthly father’s job to make his son feel guilt over sin or to sanctify him or to directly effect any spiritual state in…
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Word-environment
The parents must be immersed in God’s word enough that their spontaneous conversation is about it. How much? So much that the conversation of the parents will be more dominant and more attractive than what is on television and in the movies and on the computer. The Kingdom of God is more beautiful than the…
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Eden
The first responsibility of the father is to create Eden, place the child in it, show him its beauty, and allow him to tend it. He will fall again, of course, and create within himself the world anew, and finally be exiled and alienated to wander abroad. But that is his business; yours, is Eden.…
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The Healthy Ratio
Note the ratio of prohibitions to permissions in Eden: one prohibited thing to many, many good things, and all good things are there for the enjoying. This is the rule for healthy discipline from earthly fathers, too. The child’s universe must have in it a few prohibitions but the focus is on the panoply of…
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Even a Child is Known By His Doings
You should teach your children to love the good and to hate evil. If this teaching is not the foundation of everything else, then the else is sophistry. Let’s shed all the faux-sophistications about parenting. Let’s not twitter on and on about this and that but fail at the foundational task: people,…
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Speaking Like a Father
At the beginning the father is not afraid to command in hard and succinct language. One of the signs a man has enough vir-tue to be a father is that he speaks and enjoys receiving direct propositional statements. Later, he may offer an explanation which is short and direct. This is a nod to the…