Greetings dearly beloved,
We thank God for bringing us into a new week. We pray that this week the favour of God will locate you. You will not suffer any loss and God will cause heaven and men to remember you for good in Jesus name.
I trust that you have been following our series onRECONCILING FATHERS AND SONS.
Today we will be looking at the Part 3 of that series focusing on Fatherhood.
May this be a blessing to you.
DEFINITION OF FATHERHOOD
Looking at the biological father, he is the head of his home, the carrier of the family genes that will bring about an extension of their lineage which is what we referred to as "genealogy". Matthew 1 began to give us the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the Son of David, the Son of Abraham.
The father is the leader over his family. Every father is expected to provide leadership, to lead his family, to exercise influence over his children in order to get them to fulfill family visions.
It is rather unfortunate that so many fathers have no vision for their families. Many fathers just produce children and that is the end. The highest they do is send them to school. A father should be able to craft a vision that the family follows, so that the sons and daughters would say that this is the vision of our family. Many have not heard about this before. People think about vision in relation to ministry alone, business, or mission statement.
"Ministry cannot succeed as a congregation until Ministry succeeds as a family structure". Until we are successful in running ministry in family system, we may not be able to run organization, church, business, and so on successfully; this is because the family is the basis of Ministry. That is to say, my wife, children and I must succeed in running our family the way God designed it, because Family is our first ministry.
In the New Testament, the Bible says that if a man cannot rule his house well, then he has no right ruling in the House of God. If a man has failed in his family, it is going to be difficult to succeed in the House of God. It then means that it is the father's sole responsibility to provide leadership in his family.
(1) To provide vision and guidance for his family.Every family needs to craft vision statement, so that as the children are growing up, they are taught, so that they will understand why this family is unique from the other families. Why must we not do what the other families are doing? The children must grow up knowing why they are unique, understanding what the vision of the family is. Even when it seems you have failed as a father, understand what needs to be done and begin to remedy certain things where necessary.
For those who are not yet married, I challenge you, it is important that you craft a vision and follow the vision, so that when your children begin to come, they will know where the family is going, what is the call of God for the family, what is the destiny of the family, why are we the way we are, why are we located where we are located, etc.
Many of us run our lives without linking to our Father in heaven on family system. Many of us only see God as Our Provider, so we do not bother to ask, we are the extension of God. Every father on earth is the extension of God. Every family on earth is the extension of the family of God in Heaven. No matter where you come from, language, tongue, tribe, or people, every family on earth is the extension of the family of God in heaven. So it is important we understand what God has in mind concerning the family.
(2) A father lays a proper foundation for his son to build upon. But it is unfortunate that so many of us, as fathers, have no foundations. We are the ones who just started to create the positive foundations, as it were, because many of us inherited idolatrous foundations from our fathers. We have inherited what God has not intended for us to become. We now tend to realize that our foundations are faulty at old age; we are now beginning to re-lay the foundation.
But try and understand that it is the primary purpose, plans, and ideas of God that fathers and families become foundational pillars for their children to build upon. It is not in the plan of God for us to re-invent the will, no, which is what is happening. We find ourselves creating and re-inventing our own will because this is not working. But we need to lay solid foundations for your children - educational foundation and also give them moral education. That is one proper thing to do.
(3) Values of life you teach it in the family. Values are learnt in the family. We call it family value, of course, which grow to become values you carry. There are families, even though they are not born again, they cannot touch anything that does not belong to them anywhere they are. They may not be talking in tongues, they may not be talking Jesus, but anything that does not belong to them, they dare not touch it. It is a value they learnt from their family. It is a foundation they have acquired. But we are gradually losing touch with these values, we are gradually raising our children without keeping a proper family value.
For example: Respect is an African culture and it is a value you learn in the family.
My father and mother had us 10 (8 males and 2 females), a very big family. I think my father was trying to compete with Jacob, but time ran out on him. In fact, if not for my eldest brother who went to him one day and said "papa, we are 10 already, if mama becomes pregnant again in this house, I promise you I will get five girls and I will make sure that they have children every year in this house". When he told my father that, my father knew that his son has grown and so he had to be careful. That was how he stopped having more children. My mother could be pregnant and will yet go to the farm; I don't know how she did it. While on the farm, she sometimes put to bed on the farm and sends message that she had delivered. With this in view, my father was busy having children (10 of us).
But you see in our family, we were taught respect to the point that whenever we (the children) finish eating food, the younger ones must thank their seniors; that is the order. The last born has a long thank you to do. He begins to thank papa, mama; if all of us are at home at any given time and we finish eating food, some of us will only do five level thank you, some will do four, some will do two, but the last born has to go all the way up to thank everybody. That is the extent of family value.
If my mother catches you with another person's book or pencil while searching your bag, and you are unable to explain who gave it to you, your buttocks will surely receive some latches before you eat lunch. So you dare not mistakenly take an exercise book that belongs to another child in class. Before you leave for school, she must check your schoolbag. These are values that are learnt in families.
Today, we have left our children in the hands of Sunday School Teachers in churches, some of whom may not have been properly brought up. After several years in Sunday School, a child graduates into all kinds of horrible young man and you keep complaining "but I took your child to church...?"; you know why, because we did not follow God's order of raising a child in the Family system.
In God's order, according to Deuteronomy Chapter 6, God ordered that the father should teach his children. God never said take your children to the tabernacle to be taught by the priest. The order of God is that the father should teach his children the way of the Lord. It says teach them when you are lying down with them, in other words, there is social time with your children. But we have so many official fathers who are so officious in dealings that their children cannot come near them to have the feel of a father; that parental warmth is not there most of the time because both the father and mother rush out in the morning and everybody comes back at night, we now hurriedly fix up dinner and manage to feed the children; and we do not create time for family union, family fellowship where we can teach our children. That is the order of God.
The moment you refuse to understand God from the family flow and the family structure, every other thing goes out of alignment. Ministry goes out of alignment, business goes out of alignment, and genealogy cannot be extended.
So the father is the high priest of the home. We have as our example Abraham. Abraham was sacrificing to God; Isaac his son learnt how to sacrifice to God. Jacob ran away to Syria, he got to Pandaram, laid down there and slept, when he encountered God, when he woke up, nobody told him what to do, he knew what to do. He knew that when you encounter divinity, you must make a sacrifice. How did he learn it? He saw his father do it. He saw his father practiced that. So it became a family structure, it became how we grow in families. Many of us try to do it, but we do it when our children have outgrown that family learning age. There is an age children learn from their parents.
Between age 0 and 12, that is when a child actually learns from the parents; that is when a father should teach his children, because whatever a child says at age 2, a stranger will not understand. The mother of the child will understand. She talks to the child and the child understands what she says at that age. That is also the age we have to teach them the Bible. We need to lay spiritual foundation for them in the family. I am not talking about in the church, but in the family.
But for many of us, our grammars are too high for our children to learn. So, we don't know how to come down to the level of our children, play with them, so that we can communicate to them in order to lay necessary foundations, build necessary pillars, impart the necessary things they need for tomorrow.
Jethro, the man who taught the children of Israel how to make sacrifice, because Israel has been in Egypt for 430 years. They have forgotten all about how to offer sacrifice to God.
Jethro, an Ethiopian came and taught them how to offer sacrifice to God. How did Jethro learn how to offer sacrifices to God, since he was not a Jew? Jethro was a descendant of Abraham. When Sarah died, Abraham married Keturah and had children. Midian was one of the descendants of Abraham which is an Ethiopian. Jethro learnt those principles; the same principles Abraham taught Isaac, he taught all his descendants, how to offer sacrifices to the God of Heaven.
God chose the lineage of Isaac, but Abraham had sons and daughters other than Isaac and Ishmael. So, it became easy for Jethro to come and say to Israel this is the way to offer sacrifices to the God of Heaven. It is important. And remember that God said concerning Abraham in Genesis 18:17-19
"17And the Lord said, "Shall I hide from Abraham what I am doing, 18 since Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him? 19 For I have known him, in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice, that the Lord may bring to Abraham what He has spoken to him."
What guaranteed Abraham access to the mysteries of God? What gave Abraham access to the secrets of God? Vs. 19:
"For I have known him, in order that he may command his children and his household after him, that they keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice, that the Lord may bring to Abraham what He has spoken to him."
God saw family order in Abraham's home. It qualified him to have access to the secret things of God. So, when the Bible says that the secret things of God are for those that fear Him, one way to fear God is to set family order. This is at the Heart of God. Family order is at the Heart of God.
God is not happy when fathers cannot roar in their own house. In other words, whatever the children do, he just keeps quiet. Eli had his sons and he knew that the activities of his sons were wrong and abominable before God, he never roared at them. You know that there is a way a father roars and everybody warns himself or herself to be careful. Whether it is spiritual father or biological father, there comes a time a father has to roar. Everybody sits up. But if you are a father, 'you are there but you are not there', you are present but you are absent. That is a big problem.
Because God saw Abraham, the way his family was developing, He said, 'this man I know him; he would command his house, and the nations are to be blessed in him. Why don't I tell him all that is in My heart? Why I came down from Heaven to visit Sodom and Gomorrah'. That was how Abraham gained access to the revelations of God, he acquired the power to become an intercessor before God.
Apostle Victor Uchegbulam
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"Possessing The Seven Mountains of the Nations 4"
Date:
July 24 - 29, 2015
Venue:
Youths Centre RCCG Camp Lagos
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