Sunday was Father’s Day, the day set aside by our Congress to honor fatherhood. The celebration started in 1909 in Spokane, WA. The woman who started it was raised by a single dad, a Civil War veteran. The next year, the mayor of Spokane made June 19th the official day to honor fathers. The first Father’s Day celebrations included handing out red roses.
Maybe the greatest surprise I had when we first became parents was that babies do not know anything. They have a few, very basic instincts that God gave them but after that, babies and children have to be taught everything. When Jesus was a child, Luke writes in Luke 2:52 that Jesus increased in: wisdom, physical height, and in favor with God and with man.
So, dads, how do we help our children to mature in wisdom, and in favor with God and man? To put it more simply, what does it take to raise our children to be mature? The apostle Paul wrote the Christians in Ephesus: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord” (6:4).
INTELLECTUAL MATURITY:
We want our children to have a Christian worldview. When they are at the age where they are exposed to ideas that are antithetical to the Christian worldview, we help them examine why we reject those ideas: because they are not consistent with the nature of God or they are not consistent with biblical teaching.
What we are against is not teaching our children how to “test everything. Keep what is good” (1 Thess. 5:21). Dads need to be involved in their children’s education. Dads, help your children mature intellectually.
SPIRITUAL MATURITY:
Dads are the shepherds in the home. We are the ones who have the role to guide our homes into service to Jesus Christ. We oversee the spiritual food our children eat and the spiritual water our children drink. Dads, help your children develop a heart for God (Deut. 6:5). Obedience to God begins in the heart (Matt. 22:37).
How do we teach our children to have a heart for God? It begins with teaching them from the time they are born why they should love God. We instill love for God in the hearts of our children is by setting the example.
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To help our children mature we need to help them resist the temptation to live like the ungodly world wants them to live. We teach them when they are very young to say “no” to temptations. Even if they are young and are not tempted to sin just yet, we have to teach them that they can’t have everything they want.
SOCIAL MATURITY:
Dads, we have to teach our children to interact with others in socially appropriate ways.
Proper manners. “Please” and “thank you” are also necessities. Kids need to be taught that there is appropriate clothing to wear and there is inappropriate clothing to wear. There are places where certain clothing is acceptable and there are places where the same clothing would be inappropriate to wear (1 Tim. 2:9-10).
The #MeToo movement has come out against treating women as sex objects and that is a good thing but if you don’t want to be viewed as a sex object, don’t dress as a sex object.
The bottom line is that we’re teaching our children to mature socially by teaching them to be considerate of other people. It is never right to be wrong. On one hand, Paul says in Eph. 5:4 that “filthiness and silly talk and coarse jesting” are not fitting for the Christian. On the other hand, Jesus says in Matt. 12:36-37 that we’ll be judged by the words we use.
There is no better guide in learning how to treat other people than the Golden Rule (Matt. 7:12): “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
Dads, let us train our children to mature intellectually, spiritually, and socially so that they can reflect Christ wherever they are, in whatever they do.
