PART 4
Tell a fool that more money will not bring him happiness and immediately he’ll spit back, “yeah it will, yeah it will.” If this fellow wins a $30-Million lottery most of that money will be gone within 5-years and he will have proven he knows no wisdom, nor happiness, or what to do with money!
I could give you an entire seminar about money but for now I’ll say just this much. Wealthy families think 3-generations ahead. Most of the world thinks ahead no further than Friday night. ALL of that has much to do with the love you are able to show your family.
Without the wisdom of God, we can’t point our children back to God. Children are a gift from God. Psalm 127 says that children are our heritage and a reward from the Lord. They are like arrows in our quiver. They will not remain in the quiver, but they are in a man’s hand like arrows in the hand of a warrior. It is a man’s responsibility to make straight arrows and point them at the right target. We will shoot them into the world; the question is “which direction will they go”? The first thing a warrior will do is focus on the target. If you are not focused on the center of God’s will, it will be almost impossible for your children to seek the center of God’s will.
Be A Model By Your Example
You must have a singular focus before you can model a God-respecting example. The Bible says that a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. If you are torn between the world and Christ, you will be a poor example to your children. Children see through hypocrisy. If you are a Christian on Sunday morning and compromise your stated values when they interfere with your desires or plans, you are training your children that faith is not real.
Karl Marx began one of the most powerful, godless movements to trouble our world. He wrote the Communist Manifesto, began the Russian Revolution that put in place one of the most powerful, Godless, and oppressive governments in history. He also coined the phrase that ‘religion is the opium for the masses’. He was raised with a religious father who jumped from religion to religion for business purposes. When he lived in a Jewish community, the family was Jewish. When they moved to a Lutheran community, they became Lutheran. When they were around Godless business associates, his father was as Godless as they were. He would tell his son it was important for business. He not only showed his son how to compromise for business but he also trained his son to be Godless and shaped his future with spiritual disillusionment.
That young man finally wrote a poem vowing vengeance against God and the world and he with the help of a different god, satan, has been largely indirectly responsible for the horrid and unnecessary deaths of over 175,000,000 people worldwide. I think the total is still climbing and there will be far more before the end of year 2025. Truth is life. Spewing lies is spewing death. Don’t take this lightly because my good man, your life may also hang in this balance.
What we do now with our daughters and sons determines what they think, write, vote and do in their work and leisure time for the next 60-years. I’m age 68 and still working. The world’s greatest marketer, Drayton Bird is age 82 and still teaching. A guy can start working at age 12 and be influenced by his youth until age 85 and he can influence others that long, so if we poison a boy’s mind it’s not to be taken as a temporary inconvenience. Don’t assume “he grow out of it.” 1 in 5000 might.
It is critical to be the same man at home as we are in church. Our kids should not be able to detect the difference between everyday life and day’s at the church. When trouble arises, we teach our kids whether God is real and can be trusted by how we handle the problem. Do we cheat to avoid the hassle or lie to get out of trouble? Do we trust God to meet our needs and use problems as a tool to train our kids in godliness and character?
It is easy to trust God when the sailing is smooth, but what happens when life’s struggles come to us? It isn’t the good times that shape our kids but it is the hard choices. It is the times when we do what is right even if it will cost us that show our metal. It is standing up for what is right even if injustice is the penalty that proves our true masculine and spiritual value.
When we sacrifice our self-interest to do what is right, we are showing our kids that our faith is real and that God can be trusted even when we can’t see around the curve. A man of real faith will stand on his faith even if the consequences are disaster. The greatest example of real faith was Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego who faced the fiery furnace (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are figures from chapter 3 of the Book of Daniel.)
When the king of Babylon ask if the God they served could deliver them they answered, “Our God whom we serve is able to deliver us, but even if He does not, we will not bow.” They knew real faith. Trusting God for the outcome regardless of if we are delivered, is total trust. That is a powerful testimony for a child. To see a daddy who has enough faith in God to willing pay the price if necessary will impact a child’s understanding of faith dramatically.
We also show our children our faith by our speech and attitudes. How we treat our wives directly reflects our spiritual lives to our kids.
Everything you do as a father will be modeled by your kids. If your faith is not real, they have no foundation for a real faith. If you show them a poor marriage, they will not respect marriage nor will they respect their future spouses. Very possibly they will refuse to marry.
You have to live by what you say. You can’t live by the phrase, “do as I say, not as I do”. They may not be at liberty to imitate you openly, but they will imitate your lifestyle as they become adults.
It was a cold November 17 in year 1906 when a baby was born and his parents agreed to name him Soichiro. His mother was a hard working weaver and his father was a blacksmith and took up mechanical work and later bicycle repairs. They set an example of an honest life of diligent work and long hours.
He learned mechanical work, bicycle repair, then automobile repair. His coworkers said no one could compete with him because he was self-driven to be good at everything, electrical wiring, transmission work, welding, you name it. He worked very diligently to be a perfectionist at the work. He went to college for engineering, said in class he could develop an engine that didn’t need piston rings. The others tried to shame him and laugh him out of class. He continued study to be the best engineer he could be and worked so many long hours people said his face changed. He produced bicycles with motors, then motor cycles. He started making race cars and then began producing cars for all of Japanese buyers. The government office of industry told him it was a hopeless case. He had too much competition from bigger firms. His answer was they knew government but never built a car.
When World War II broke out he developed a machine that could make a wood airplane propeller in 15-minutes. Until then it was made with a lot of hard labor and the fastest one could hope for was one prop every 45-minutes. Now women could run machines and do the work.
His factories would be bombed and the working men there would quickly rebuild and continue working. He was the first to dare to open a dealership for his cars in America. Today, Soichiro Honda’s cars and motorcycles are on highways all over the world. He was still involved with the work past age 80.
You might find this an interesting short story, but the most important sentence was near the beginning. About his parents: “They set an example of an honest life of diligent work and long hours.”
That example led to one young boy becoming one of the most honored names in all the world!
It is not enough to live your faith, but you must also verbally instruct and explain why you have faith. If you live a Godly life and never fill in the blanks that arise in your child’s mind, they will not have a complete picture of a Godly example. Make your faith real to them.
There are many examples of Godly parents that raised ungodly children. Eli was a priest and a man of faith but his sons were so evil that God destroyed them and stripped the priesthood from Eli’s family. How can a faithful priest raise non-God-respecting sons? Far too many men who live God-respecting lives fail to pass that faith on to their kids. As a general rule, each generation drifts a little farther from the faith of their fathers.
In Deuteronomy 11 we are told to earnestly obey with all our heart and soul and to teach them to our children. Not just to tell them, but tell them when they lie down, get up, when you are going along the way.
Children need to see it and live it to be taught and they need repetition. Kids quickly forget unless it becomes an ingrained part of their lifestyle.
Actions and verbal lessons together paint a God-respectful picture. The people of Israel did not obey this command through all of their generations. The early generations saw the miracles of God first hand and they kept the law. Some with their whole heart and some out of necessity. The next generation saw their parent’s faith and carried a weakened faith. The next generation did not understand the purpose of the law so they turned away. Each successive generation got farther away and more wicked. Finally they were worshiping gods made of wood and stone, no different to Hinduism. The failure was the result of neglecting to teach the reasons the people trusted God.
When the kids did not experience God, they accepted some counterfeit worship belief system. What they needed was their own deeper understanding, leading to their own faith. They needed a personal experience with God and a faith that was real, based in real history and prophecy.
The USA is teaching today’s young people that God is a myth and that life is just a lot of biochemical accidents waiting for a moment to happen. It’s a gigantic lie and over the past most notable years from 1970 to 2018 American society has degraded so dramatically it appears to be the signs of the end of an empire! What is taught to your children carries on to the next and next until the entire society is ignoring God’s Ways entirely.
The role of the father is to teach his faith to his children. Teach and train, don’t preach to your kids. Start early. The later we wait, the harder it is to get them to catch our vision of God. You are in competition with the effluent gushing out of the text books and regurgitating from the mouths of public school teachers, radio, television, Internet, public news sources, and popular magazines. Short of moving onto a farm among those who have refused modern technology from 1850 onward, I don’t see an easy path for anyone to raise a Godly daughter or son. But, it’s incumbent upon us to make the attempt.
Anything you can do to get that young person to realize God is real, Jesus is here to rescue, and we are in a war against the spiritual powers of evil and darkness, is an effort well made.
When we see the consequences of sin, this becomes a good teaching tool. Society teaches the value of greed. Greed doesn’t benefit you but only hurts. Greed leads to coveting and coveting leads to stealing. Where do you think that person went wrong?
LET’S CONSIDER THIS FURTHER IN THE FINAL PORTION, SECTION #5
CONTINUE TO SECTION #5 >>>
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