Fathering Like the Father | Week 7

Those macho-dad images can mask the softer side of fathering. We want to emphasize that fathering like the Father means becoming friends to our children without surrendering the family headship role.

What forms does friendship take as we look up to our fathers and down to our children? How can we spin off God’s relationship with Abraham to become father-friends at home?

Friendship as Attitude

• Rules minus Relationship = Rebellion
• Rules plus Relationship = Positive Response
• What happens when you have a Relationship minus Rules?
• The foundational attitude for friendship is trust—Abraham trusted God, and God trusted Abraham.
• Your friendship with your children depends on your attitude toward them and their attitude toward you.

Friendship as Presence

• The sad reality is that many fathers who work hard to support their families and really love their families, injure them repeatedly by not being available when needed.
• Abraham could be God’s friend because they knew each other intimately.
• In order to raise emotionally healthy and protected children, the doctors stated in an interview that kids’ number one need is a nurturing, consistent connectedness with a parent or other important adult. This goal can be achieved only when society begins to put children first and revolve everything else around them—including our jobs.

Friendship as Togetherness

• Friendship is not only attitude and presence, it is togetherness—father and child doing things together
• Christian families ought to be like teams with Dad serving as coach.
• God’s description of the kind of man he wants in congregational leadership emphasizes faithfulness in family life (1 Tim. 3:4–5, 11–13).
• Jesus also called that serving relationship a friendship. He said to his disciples, “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15).
• As servant-leader dads to our children, we coach them and teach them based on what we have learned from our heavenly Father.

Friendship as Love

• If we approach [fathering] as a biblical activity, we grow in our understanding of what God expects of us to whom he gives this important responsibility.
• The Bible says a great deal more about husbands loving their wives than their children, perhaps on the assumption that if they achieve the first, the second will follow.

And you husbands, show the same kind of love to your wives as Christ showed to the church when he died for her.…That is how husbands should treat their wives, loving them as parts of themselves. For since a man and his wife are now one, a man is really doing himself a favor and loving himself when he loves his wife!…a man must love his wife as a part of himself.

-Ephesians 5:25, 28, 33 TLB

• Being a father-friend may mean jumping into holes on more than one occasion, holes you’ve seen before, holes whose dangers and fears you know, but holes out from which you’ve successfully climbed in the past and now can help your children do the same.

A father is a thing that is forced to endure childbirth without an anesthetic.…A father never feels worthy of the worship in a child’s eyes. He’s never quite the hero his daughter thinks, never quite the man his son believes him to be and this worries him, sometimes. So he works too hard to try and smooth the rough places in the road for those of his own who will follow him.…Fathers are what give daughters away to other men who aren’t nearly good enough, so they can have grandchildren who are smarter than anybody’s. Fathers make bets with insurance companies about who will live the longest. One day they lose and the bet’s paid off to the part of them they leave behind.

-Paul Harvey

Homework for 8/3