http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15042931/fatherhood-for-imperfect-dads
My wife and I raised perfect children.
By the time they were ten years old, they had memorized the New Testament. They came each morning to the family breakfast table with cheerful songs on their tongues, the melodies caressing their freshly brushed teeth. At an early age, they volunteered to launder their own clothes and never once complained about their studies.
They never used a whiny tone of voice with their mother, and they affectionately call me “dearest father” to this very day. I can’t recall correcting them. They were thrilled to share their belongings with each other. We never heard a mumbling word.
Yeah, right.
There are no perfect children. Vicki and I didn’t raise any, and my parents didn’t raise any either. Neither did yours. We live on a fallen and cursed planet. You are a sinner, and your children are too. They not only fall short of the glory of God, but they fall short of the expectations of their inglorious dads.
“Don’t give up on fatherhood just because perfection seems continually out of reach.”
But all is not lost. Fathers, don’t give up on fatherhood just because perfection seems continually out of reach. God extends more than enough grace to compensate for our shortcomings as dads. Children of defective parents — your children — can end up relishing God.
When Dreams Hit Reality
Expectations breed strong emotions, and unmet expectations even stronger ones. When our expectations collide with real life, the mismatch can erupt in a whole range of emotions — from dismay to sorrow to fuming anger. Mostly fuming anger. That’s what happens when people do what you don’t expect them to, or don’t do what you do expect them to.
Desires launch assumptions, which are then fueled by narratives we have subtly adopted. Such as:
- Unlike other children, my children will never make a big mess or be fussy in church.
- I will lose standing in the community if my kids don’t go to college.
- My children will replicate only my good traits and not my flaws and sinful attitudes.
- My kids will be spiritually advanced for their age.
Acting wisely and avoiding emotional hijacks requires winning the crucial battle — an unceasingly ongoing one — to align your expectations with reality. Those children you love dearly will sin dreadfully. As you have. Observe the one reality you cannot avoid in your parenting: you and your sinful nature. Your children not only live with your sin — they inherit it.
“Those children you love dearly will sin dreadfully. As you have.”
But parenting is not to be dreaded. To dread parenting exposes a misplaced love that you perceive to be in danger — like a love for your reputation if your kids mess up, or a love for your schedule if your kids make a mess when you’re already running late. The steadfast love of God is never in danger, and if your aim in parenting is to draw attention to his love, you have nothing to dread on that score.
Safe Expectations
Some expectations, however, will certainly come to pass.
You can plan on the fact that your parenting will never go exactly according to your plan. Your parenting plan isn’t perfectly wise, because you are not perfectly wise. My wife has a placard that says, “Man plans. God laughs.” In contrast to our plans, God’s plan for your parenting is perfectly wise. You are not sovereign. He is. And in his perfection, he assigned your children their father — namely, you.
Parenting is nevertheless a humbling experience. Your parenting won’t be flawless any more than your marriage has been without disappointments. You will face regret — regret that you weren’t a better parent, that you passed on your imperfections to your children, that you displayed anger at them for being like you, that you didn’t know as much as you had hoped you would.
My kids are now middle-aged themselves, all of them parenting their own unique God-given brood. And one of the disappointments I didn’t expect early on is that they haven’t passed along to their own children some of the lessons I insisted on giving to them.
For example, when my children were still living at home, I led family discussions about everything from Charles Finney’s approach to confessing sin, to how eye traps work (seductive clothing), to the value of singing together. As a grandparent, I don’t hear those lessons emphasized in the same ways in their homes. Meanwhile, they love their children deeply, and point them to Jesus in other ways I never did.
So there’s another side to this expectation coin. God provides occasions when your children exceed your expectations, times when you wish you were like them. Some of our children treat every day as a new day, forgiving yesterday’s offenses. Some are generous to a fault. Some seem impervious to peer pressure.
In a crucial sense, your children grow you. That is, they are God-sent instruments for your growth in maturity, your sanctification, your alignment with God’s plan for your Christlikeness.
Questions for Fathers
With some safe expectations in place, what steps might dads take to remove some of the imperfections from their imperfect parenting?
Fathers who rightly relate to God are on firm footing for rightly relating to their children. So how is your own relationship with your heavenly Father? Do you “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,” trusting that “all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33)? Would people who know you best say that you truly want what God wants for your children? Would you say it about yourself? Would God say it about you?
How do you parent today in relation to how you were parented? Are you replicating the errors of your own mom or dad? Are you motivated to avoid repeating the same errors? Once grace enables you to become aware of their errors, that same grace can enable you to break from those errors in your own parenting. Generational sins can be broken: “Now suppose this man fathers a son who sees all the sins that his father has done; he sees, and does not do likewise” (Ezekiel 18:14).
Ask God to help you seek his kingdom first in your family, especially in those places where you are tempted to repeat the errors of the past.
Humble Fatherhood
Perhaps most of all, however, we dads need humility. Even if your way of raising children is a good way, beware of concluding your way is the best way, much less the only way. In other words, remain teachable. One day it dawned on me that my small children could teach me a few lessons about my parenting. That was God whispering to me through my children.
Fathers, your offspring won’t admire everything about you. They’ll learn stuff you didn’t teach them. They’ll be better than you at some skills and more developed in certain character qualities. Your personal flaws will exert lingering influence on them. Pray for mercy.
They may or may not follow your preferred career for them. They will not develop uniformly without setbacks, nor be identical to their siblings. Recognize individuality.
Even though you work at it — and you are wise to do so — you will not always have your wife’s enthusiastic support in every aspect of parenting, from bedtimes to how much should be spent on gifts. Be gentle. Be humble. Seek God for more grace. Although not all of your expectations will be fulfilled in fathering, you can continue to grow and step into God’s great privilege of being their dad.
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How Does God Lead Us in Daily Decisions?
Audio Transcript
How do I follow God’s lead in my daily decisions? I know he’s my shepherd. He’s leading me. I think so. But how do I know if I am following him?
That’s such an important question we all must answer for ourselves, and it was a question taken up by a very young Pastor John Piper, in his very first summer as a pastor. In fact, just a few weeks into his pastorate, Pastor John preached through some of his favorite Psalms. One of them being, of course, Psalm 23. “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake” (Psalm 23:1–3).
I was 22 before I first saw one of the lines in this psalm. Now I’d seen it, but there is seeing and then there is seeing, right? Verse 3, “He leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake.” I’d never seen “for his namesake” until I went to seminary. Well, yes, I’d seen it. I’d read the words, but you can read over phrases in the Bible a hundred times and they never hit you for what they mean.
Open My Eyes to See
I went to visit Mrs. Bromgren just before her surgery on Wednesday. She was getting her eye operated on, and it was all bandaged over, and I read to her this verse from Psalm 119:18,
Deal bountifully with thy servant that I may live and observe thy word, open my eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.
And I said, “Isn’t it true that one of the best things about having two good eyes is the Bible, being able to read the Bible? But isn’t it true, too, that there is another pair of eyes that God has given us? The apostle Paul calls them the eyes of the heart, and he prays in Ephesians 1 that the eyes of the heart might be enlightened. I think that’s what Psalm 119 is talking about: ‘May the eyes be open that we may behold wondrous things out of thy law.’”
Well, I hadn’t seen that phrase there in Psalm 23 as wondrous. I’d been as deaf to that theme as you could imagine, but there it was, “he leads me in paths of righteousness for his namesake.” The thought that God might have been causing me to do right ever since I was a little boy for his sake just never dawned on me. I just read right over that phrase. It never struck me, though I’d read it hundreds of times.
So I want to zero in on that phrase for a few minutes, but before we get there, we better look at the phrase before it, namely, “he leads me in paths of righteousness,” and ask how God does this.
How Does God Light Our Paths?
The picture, of course, here is a shepherd leading sheep along with his crook, or maybe with his call. “The sheep know my name, and they follow me.” But when we get out of the metaphor of sheep and shepherd into our own experience in our day and ask, “How does God lead in paths of righteousness,” we need to ponder a little bit and poke around in the Scriptures to see how he does it.
“In my experience, I have never seen a manifestation of God going before me at a fork in the road.”
Now, in my experience, I have never seen a manifestation of God going before me at a fork in the road. I’ve never seen a cloud of fire or pillar of cloud like they had in the wilderness. That’s not part of my experience, nor have I ever heard an audible word that I know was God speaking. A lot of people talk in that language, and maybe I’m just callous, but that’s never been part of my experience to see God in some clear manifestation showing me it’s this way and not that way, or to hear a voice like my teacher at Wheaton said he heard one day while he was shaving in front of the mirror, “Go to Wheaton from Boston.” He was in Boston. “Go to Wheaton.”
God can do that if he wants. He’s just never done it for me, and he doesn’t do it for most people most of the time. The way he leads us is apparently differently, and I think we can get a clue from what David would say in Psalm 119:105. There, he says, “Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” And in that same psalm, verse 9, “How can a young man keep his way pure? By guarding it according to thy word.”
So one answer to the question, “How does God lead his people in paths of righteousness” is: he has revealed a lot about those paths of righteousness. He’s described what sort of paths are righteous paths and told us to walk in them so that we can read and obey. Surely, David did that often because he talked about meditating on the word day and night.
Why the Bible Is Not Enough
But now, that answer is only half the answer, isn’t it? By itself, the Bible will not keep us on track. No matter how wonderful the Bible is, and how we would be utterly lost without it, it is not enough by itself and for two reasons.
“By itself, the Bible will not keep us on track.”
One, we make lots of decisions in life which are not prescribed for us in the Bible — hundreds of little decisions every day and some big ones in which we look in the Bible and there are no sentences about that. How many children to have, where to send your child to school, where to go to work, this, that, just hundreds of little things that we have to decide every day, and we don’t want to bracket those and say, “Well, that’s not part of Christianity. I’ll just make those decisions anyway I please, and then Christianity is something else.” God has to do with all those decisions. But the Bible doesn’t give explicit guidance for every one of those little decisions and, therefore, something more has to be said if we’re to walk in right paths in those decisions, as well as the ones where the Bible is perfectly explicit.
The second reason that the Bible, by itself, is not enough to guide us in those paths of righteousness is this: a path of righteousness is doing the right thing with a right attitude or a right motivation. It’s not just a bodily action. It’s having a right attitude towards your wife as well. But, reading words on a page doesn’t always change attitudes.
You can read over what you ought to feel like in the Bible a hundred times and maybe your attitude is just the same. Something else has to come into play, and I think that’s why David said, “God leads us in paths of righteousness,” and why Paul said, “All who are led by the Spirit are the sons of God.” We need not only revelation coming to us from outside, namely the Bible, we need transformation coming to us inside from the Holy Spirit. The word and the Spirit together are the leadership that we need.
Renewed in the Mind of Christ
Paul says in Romans 12:2 this very familiar word, “Don’t be conformed to the world but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” — why? — “so that you can prove — or better, approve of — “the will of God, what is good, acceptable, and perfect.” In other words, you’ve got to have something happen up here on the inside, some changed attitudes, some changed feelings, or when little decisions present alternatives, you won’t know how to prove which one of those is the will of God.
So the Bible is the input into that new mind, and the Spirit takes the word and begins to shape our thinking, mold our emotions, so that even when there’s no explicit command in Scripture for this decision you’re facing, you weigh all the alternatives and you’re weighing those alternatives with the mind of Christ. Paul says, “We have the mind of Christ.” And then when you make the decision, you look back and you don’t say, “My, what a smart fellow was I,” but rather, you say, “Thank you for your word that informed the principles of my life, and thank you for the Spirit that shaped my emotions and my priorities so that I made this decision your way,” and God then gets the credit for the leadership, which means personally, for me, that I have been driven basically for all of life to meditate day and night on the word and to pray continually that the Holy Spirit would work on me.
You can’t over-intellectualize the Bible. You can’t over-spiritualize your private experience with God. It’s both/and, not either/or. It has been in my experience, and I haven’t found the two in conflict but tremendous complements for guidance in life.
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John Piper’s Favorite Things
Audio Transcript
Happy New Year, everyone! 2023 is here. We launch the new year with a more informal episode than normal. This one was recorded live in Nashville in front of two thousand friends of ours who were quite engaged, as you can hear.
The direction of our podcast is shaped by you, the listeners, right? You send us the questions; we sift through those; I ask John Piper the questions. I ask John Piper your most awkward questions. I’m willing to do that for you because I serve you, our listeners. And I’ve been wanting to do something like this for a long time on the podcast, and I figured, Let’s do this in Nashville. Let’s hear from John Piper about his favorite things.
Over our decade of podcasting, we’ve received over a hundred questions from listeners asking random questions about John Piper’s favorite soft drink, movies, novels, poets — things like that. So I just compiled all of those questions. I’m going to pose them to Pastor John, and he’s got to rapid-fire respond, okay? So you can’t elaborate very long. I’ve boiled down these questions to twelve. Twelve questions. Okay, here we go. Ready, John Piper?
Yeah, but listen, some of these are going to be really short — like one-word answers. Which means I can go longer on others, okay?
All right. John Piper’s favorite things. Here we go.
Movies
In APJ 696, you said, “I have my favorite movies.” And you left us at that; you never told us. So, what are your top three favorite movies?
I consulted my wife about this. I knew this question was coming, and we agreed that at the top would be Henry V, Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespearean movie. There’s an amazing speech that a pastor cannot listen to and not be moved to tears: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; / For he to-day that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother.” And then England defeats France at 5-1 odds. And they sing, “Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory” (Psalm 115:1). It’s just a riveting, dramatic Shakespearean piece. That’s number one.
Number two would be Chariots of Fire, which you have seen. And the scene of him opening the note that says “God glorifies [or God honors] those who honor him” — that’s a powerful statement that moved me deeply.
And my wife said, “You really have to say Princess Bride.” But you don’t know why I have to say Princess Bride. And the reason is because when I first saw it, I was preaching through Hebrews, and there is one scene that’s serious in this hilarious movie. It’s the scene where — now I had to go back and remind myself the names because I forget names — Inigo Montoya, he’s standing at the top of the cliff, and Westley’s climbing the cliff, and he’s going to fall down if he doesn’t hold on. And Inigo says, “I could drop you a rope.” And he says, “Yeah, and then you would let go of the rope.”
And a seriousness comes over his face, and he says, “I swear on the soul of my father, Domingo Montoya, you will reach the top alive.” And Westley gets serious and says, “Drop the rope.” I used that in the next Sunday sermon because of the power of a promise and an oath in Hebrews.
All right. That’s really good. That was a little more elaborate.
I won’t do that. I won’t do it anymore — might be tempted to.
Novels
Your favorite novel?
I’m going to cheat again, but I won’t elaborate. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, a contemporary — that is, in the last ten years — is a beautifully written book about World War II and the interweaving of lives of a young blind girl during the bombing of the Germans on France. All the Light We Cannot See.
A Man at Arms by Steven Pressfield is also contemporary — written in the last five years, probably. It’s a dramatic telling of a young speechless girl carrying the Corinthian correspondence to Corinth, Paul’s letters to Corinth. And a man at arms steps up to be her protector. Amazing book.
And then historically, if I had to pick a classic, it would be Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, just because the power of the description of the tormented soul of Raskolnikov is unparalleled.
Bible App
Your favorite, most frequently used Bible app?
Logos.
Logos Bible software?
Yes.
iPhone, iPad, laptop — all three?
All three. Right now, I’m on a leave working on Look at the Book. I’m on Logos nine hours a day. I ran it into the ground. We had to call them to get them to figure out how to make it work after nine hours of work. And they fixed it for me. I use my iPad for my devotions, and it’s Logos that I use. I’m very indebted to Logos.
Poet and Poem
Your favorite poet not in Scripture?
George Herbert — died in 1633, wrote a collection called The Temple with 164 poems. None of them has the same rhyme scheme or meter. It’s an absolutely amazing collection. The content, the craft — those two things together — I think in Herbert are without peer.
Your favorite poem not in Scripture?
Well, I thought a lot about that. “My Song Is Love Unknown” is a hymn, but if you take away the beautiful music and the beautiful tune, Samuel Crossman’s poem by itself is magnificent — simply beautiful. The rhyme structure and the meter are very unusual, and it’s very hard to put solid, deep, moving words without sounding corny into structures of rhyme and meter. So, “My Song Is Love Unknown” would be it.
And if I had to choose a non-religious one, it would be If by Rudyard Kipling. “If. . . . If. . . . If. . . . [then] you’ll be a Man, my son!” I love it.
Love that Crossman line, “Love to the loveless shown that they might lovely be.” Such a great line.
Yes.
Soft Drinks
Your favorite — oh, this is important; this is what the people want to know — your favorite pop, soda, soft drink.
It moves back and forth between Diet Dr. Pepper and Diet Coke. If I get tired of one, Noël will order the other, and back and forth they go. Which means — in the Washington, D.C., airport, there are no Coke products. And if you walk around here, there are no Coke products. It’s just appalling. Where are we?
Dinner and Restaurant
Your favorite dinner at home?
My wife’s spaghetti. She’s sitting over there.
There’s Noël.
Yeah, so there’s just no — hands down, she would know the answer to that right away. And so, I’m just on her case to make it as often as possible when we have company and elsewhere.
Favorite restaurant?
Well, we talked about that one, and she said, “You can’t say Chick-fil-A, and you can’t say Chipotle, because he doesn’t mean fast foods. He means real bona fide restaurants.” And so I said, “Well, how about, then, Olive Garden?” And she said, “Well, that would work.”
When our sons were growing up, we didn’t very often go out to eat, and when we did, we went to the places I like, like Chick-fil-A. And then, if we stepped it up, we would go to Olive Garden. And they thought Olive Garden was fine dining. It is. Why would you want to go any higher than that? Food tastes weird if you go higher than that. The more expensive the restaurant, the weirder the food. I don’t know why expensive gourmet chefs make food taste strange — it’s just strange.
A man of refined palate.
I don’t want my food to taste strange.
Hobbies
Your favorite hobby?
I love to play Scrabble with my wife. I love to work in the yard. I like to pull grass out of sidewalk crevices. I hate grass growing in sidewalks. And I like straight borders. I like it when the sidewalks are smooth. I don’t like weeds growing around the boxwoods. I get a deep satisfaction from making things look Edenic or eschatological, whichever way you want to look at it.
Breakfast
Your favorite breakfast? A lot of you know what his favorite breakfast is, but why don’t you say it.
So the first layer is Grape Nuts, and the second layer is Mini Shredded Wheats — not the sweetened kind. And the last layer is Great Heartland Granola, and then blueberries on top. I’ve eaten that for years and years. When we go on vacation, Noël puts it all in a big sack, and we take my breakfast so I don’t have to eat the stuff they serve here. I can eat that.
Songs
Your favorite song by a Christian.
That’s impossible. But just right off the front burner, since I’m 76, and death is just coming on very quickly, the fresh rendition of Matt Merker’s “He Will Hold Me Fast” has risen in my affections and in my personal singing and my church singing to a level of sweetness that few songs have in recent years.
Over the decades, I’ve had favorite hymns. But if you pushed my button right now and asked, “What would you like to sing? What’s your emotional quotient right now?” It would be, “He holds me. He’s holding me. I’ll get through. He’s holding me.” And the music that he put to that old hymn is perfect.
Your favorite song by a non-Christian?
I don’t listen to much music by non-Christians, but I did in the sixties. I think beautiful tunes were written in the sixties. I think The Beatles wrote beautiful tunes. I think Simon & Garfunkel wrote beautiful tunes, and The Seekers wrote beautiful tunes. And so I have a playlist in my phone called “Sixties Instrumental.” Get rid of the words. The words were usually nihilistic or vain, and so they’re not helpful to me.
So maybe “Bridge over Troubled Waters” by Simon & Garfunkel. “Bridge over Troubled Waters” is a song I would default to. Or I was playing a tune for Noël the other day. I said, “Can you recognize this tune?” And she said, “I recognize the tune, but I can’t name it.” And it’s “Here, There, and Everywhere” by the Beatles. So I’ve got a sixties heart left in me.
There it is, John Piper’s twelve favorite things.
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What Do the Lives of Teachers Tell Us? Ephesians 6:21–22
http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/15297244/what-do-the-lives-of-teachers-tell-us
