The call to biblical leadership is the call to serve our families. Accepting our positional authority and using it to firmly discipline our children is crucial for effective influence upon our children. Parenthetically, we don’t need to fear that wielding such authority will harm our relationship with our kids. Scripture assures us, We have had earthly fathers who disciplined us AND WE RESPECTED THEM. Firm discipline, in the long, run wins our kids’ respect. They will not respect a dad who just wants to be their play buddy. On the other hand, to maximize our influence there is no substitute for winning their hearts by caring for them well.

Some years ago, I found myself praying about whether I should pursue a DMin degree and write my dissertation on men’s ministry. But a rather sobering thought struck me. If my kids are in my home roughly twenty years and I live to be seventy, they are only going to be with me 2/7ths of my life. The price of pursuing the degree now will be paid by my 5 kids, who will get less time with me. I decided to put it off until 4 of my 5 kids were in college.
The years of greatest influence in our kid’s lives go by in a flash; so, dads whose kids are still at home, need to know how to maximize their influence, before their kids are launched into a world full of destructive worldviews. But it is not only Dad’s with kids at home who care about their influence. Even if our kids are already launched or have gifted us with grandkids, we also want to know how to maximize whatever influence we can have with both our adult kids and grandchildren. This episode examines God’s two-part design of the influence we wield as spiritual leaders of our home, positional influence and relational influence. In both cases, we must overcome false worldviews that undermine the way God wants us to lead our homes.
This is the third episode in our January series, Leading Our Homes Well in a Culture That Doesn’t Want Us to Lead. Last week we answered the first leadership question, “Where am I taking my family?” noting the biblical answer, to spiritual maturity as Christ’s disciples. Like Paul, home leaders say, One thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus… Brothers, join in imitating me. (Phil 3:13ff). Today’s episode examines the second leadership question, which has to do with my relationship with my followers. “How do I use my leadership influence to motivate them to come with me?” The biblical answer to this question, once again, requires us to overcome strong cultural headwinds, i.e. worldviews promoted in the culture, which undermine a man’s leadership calling. We identify four.
A. False Worldview #1: Men Are Unnecessary
This view is rooted in feminism, egalitarianism, and the LGBTQ+ movement. A lesbian couple can parent as well as a heterosexual married couple. Men bring nothing unique to the process of raising children. Egalitarian-leaning, church-going men know their wives have more intuitive insight about kids than they do. When the kids ask permission to do something, their response is, “Go ask your mom.” Such men don’t wear the pants in their family.
Biblical View #1: Fatherhood Is Irreplaceable

Creation, itself, tells us that the nuclear family is not just a social construct. The biological fact that conception takes place in the context of husband and wife making love speaks volumes about the best environment for nurturing that child to healthy adulthood. In God’s obvious creation design, for a child to thrive, he needs a family built on mom and dad’s love for each other.
The family code sections of Ephesians and Colossians are significant. They address wives, then husbands, then children—commanding them to obey their parents. So, we might expect the next group Paul addresses to be parents; but it is not. How about mothers? No. It is striking that when Paul addresses the training of the children, he doesn’t mention mothers but gives commands to fathers. This pattern of responsibility began with Abraham, the Father of the Christian Faith. God said of Abraham, I have chosen him, that he may command his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice, so that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has promised him (Gen 18:19). Perhaps fathers are specifically addressed because we inherited Adam’s passivity. He should have protected Eve from Satan and reinforced the truth of what God said.
Substantial research confirms that fathers and mothers discipline their children differently. Focus on the Family writes, “Dad takes an objective approach and provides his children with much needed instruction in the area of moral absolutes and the consequences of right and wrong actions. Mom, on the other hand, emphasizes compassion, empathy, relationship, and the importance of appreciating the uniqueness of each individual” (Online article, Mom and Dad Approach Discipline Differently). Both Mom and Dad are needed.

B. False Worldview #2 Teaches a Parent-Centered Approach to Children’s Discipline
In our narcissistic culture, it should not surprise us that some approaches to discipline are more about the parent’s feelings than the child’s behavior. It is reactive discipline. Here is an example. A dad on the playground says to his son, “Stop playing on the monkey bars.” But his son knows that this command means nothing. His father will not act until he has told the boy four or five times to stay off the monkey bars. So, the son continues to ignore his father’s command. The father, who is busy talking, yells at him again, but the son knows that his dad is not steamed up enough to act. Finally, the father reaches his limit and explodes,“You’ve got me really angry with you now. Get into that car.”
Instead of clarifying his instruction once, and then giving painful consequences for disobedience, this parenting approach is based upon the exasperation of the parent. Kids live up to whatever is demanded of them. The dad didn’t want to be bothered with the responsibility of being a good parent, but instead to continue his conversation. Furthermore, when my parenting is based upon how patient I feel, or how irritated or angry I am, punishment becomes random, and inconsistent, which provoke hot anger in a child. One moment, he gets away with murder, the next moment he barely steps across the line and is slammed with punishment. The dad trained his son not to obey until he started to get angry. He also made the issue HIS anger instead of the son’s disobedience. Good parenting isn’t rooted in how a parent FEELS but how a child BEHAVES. In fact, good parenting makes sure that the child understands that painful consequences for his misbehavior are NOT personal and do not interfere with the parent’s love for him.
Biblical View #2: Disciplining Children Is Part of a Training Plan for the Child. Paul Writes, Fathers, Do Not Provoke Your Children to Anger, but Bring Them Up in the Discipline and Instruction of the Lord (Eph 6:4)

Here are four wrong approaches to discipline that provoke anger: 1) Inconsistent discipline, as we’ve seen. Consistent discipline trains a child to know what the boundaries are because the parents have thought them through ahead of time. It is not a seat-of-the-pants, reactive discipline. 2) Discipline that attacks a child’s character using the words, you always or you never instead of correcting behavior provokes anger. 3) Disciplining a child in public will wound his spirit. 4) Discipline that is more frequent than praise wounds our child, also provoking anger. Studies show that parents use critical words ten times more than they use words to praise their children. Mostly correction with little or no affirmation CRUSHES kids’ spirits and can lead to a rebellion.
In context, as Ephesians 6:4 continues, Paul implies that the alternative to provoking anger in our children is to exercise discipline in connection with the rest of the training plan for the child. Paul describes the plan: 1) bring them up: Dads are NOT to watch their children grow up but to actively raise them with intentionality 2) in the discipline: This Greek word is PAIDEA, from which we get pediatric. It means using consequences to train children. A father’s punishing authority is never to be used selfishly, or reflexively, but as part of a TRAINING plan. Paul continues, 3) and instruction (of the Lord): Instruction, means literally “to put into the mind.” This requires a plan for what biblical truths, godly qualities, and characteristics of Jesus we plan to impart to our kids.

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There are consequences to sexual immorality. The most severe consequences are eternal for those who do not repent and turn to Christ. But there are temporal consequences as well, and diseases like Monkeypox are evidence of that. 

Rod Dreher wrote yesterday about the hypocrisy of public health authorities in 2020 who mandated lockdowns for COVID but who made exceptions for Black Lives Matter protests. Our ruling class’s inconsistency during the summer of 2020 was obviously not being driven by hard science but by social concerns. If you belonged to a favored group (like a BLM protest), then you were allowed to gather. If you belonged to a disfavored group (like a church trying to gather for worship), you were not allowed to gather. While churches were being harassed by local governments for continuing to meet, enormous BLM protests continued apace. The entire spectacle demonstrated in spades that public health authorities are not always basing their guidance on “the science.”
To some extent, it seems like public health authorities may be at it again with their response to the Monkeypox outbreak. Today, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Monkeypox to be a “Global Health Emergency.” The director general of the WHO overruled a panel of advisors to get this done—a panel that remains divided whether Monkeypox is an emergency. The director general explains his extraordinary decision, “We have an outbreak that has spread around the world rapidly through new modes of transmission, about which we understand too little, and which meets the criteria” for a public health emergency.
Monkeypox is a disease that causes flu-like symptoms and causes excruciating rashes and lesions on the surface of the skin. It is spreading primarily among gay men through sexual contact. The Washington Post reports, “Infections in the ongoing outbreak are reported overwhelmingly among men who have sex with men, and experts believe close contact during sexual activity is a major driver of transmission.” Likewise, The New York Times says, “As of Friday, New York City had logged 839 monkeypox cases, nearly all of them in men who have sex with men, according to the city’s Department of Health.”
The New York Times continues:
Many patients in the current outbreak have developed lesions only in the genital area. Some — especially those who develop sores in the throat, urethra or rectum — have suffered excruciating pain.
“I was scared to use the bathroom actually,” said one recent patient, Gabriel Morales, 27, a part-time model based in New York City. “I can’t even describe it. It feels like broken glass.”
This is only the seventh time in the last 15 years that the WHO has declared a worldwide public health emergency with the most recent being the COVID outbreak in 2020.
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All that we can do in great and deep affliction, and sore distresses of soul, is only to look up to Christ as a poor, wounded, bleeding man looks and cries to one who passes on the road for help. And our Savior and Physician is so compassionate that He will regard us, though we are able to say little more than, “Have mercy on us, Thou Son of David.”

The Puritans not only preached to comfort the weary and wounded, but admonished those who had close relations with such saints in how to help them.  So Timothy Rogers gave instructions to those who had to deal with those under a sense of God’s desertion:
Speak kindly and compassionately to those whom you perceive to be under the sense of God’s anger. Job complains in Job 19:2, “How long will ye vex my soul, and break me into pieces?” And as men who have been long used to poring over their troubles, he tells them how often they had vexed him in verse 3: “These ten times have ye reproached me; ye are not ashamed that ye make yourselves strange to me.” It is very likely that they did not vex him with their words purposely; for, being good men, they could not be so extremely barbarous. They made good sermons, but very sorry and mistaken application. It is easy to trample upon those with sharp and cutting speeches whom God and their sorrows have already thrown into the mire. It is easy for those who are in no trouble to silence and upbraid those who are. As Job says to Eliphaz, “Shall vain words have an end? I also could speak as you do, if your soul were in my soul’s stead. I could heap up words against you, and shake mine head at you. But I would strengthen you with my mouth, and the moving of my lips should assuage your griefs.”
When any of your friends are under spiritual trouble, you must carefully abstain from any passionate or sour word or action that may increase their grief; it will be some small help to them to see that you pity them, though you cannot give them relief. Use all the compassionate and kind words to them that you can, and seek to bind up their sores with a gentle hand. Beware of using any expression that savors of sharpness, reproach, or scorn, for these will, as they did to Job, vex their souls more, and they will be evil in you as well as unpleasant to them. Hence is that complain in Psalm 69:20: “Reproach hath broken my heart, and I am full of heaviness; and I looked for some to take pity, but there was none; and for comforters, but I found none. They gave me also gall for my meat, and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.” And Psalm 123:4: “Our soul is exceedingly filled with the scorning of those that are at ease, and with the contempt of the proud.”
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