Family Second!
It’s so easy to get caught up in the thinking that if I just raise my children to think this way or that, then they will “turn out okay”. Biblical manhood does have so much to do with the way we treat our wives and kids, especially how much time we spend with them, that it’s easy to get our focus off and make our family ultimate instead of God. Weird things begin to happen when we make our family ultimate. We start to let our kids schedules dictate our lives and we become “too busy” to spend any real quality time with God or serve well in our church. We shouldn’t think for a moment that our words to our kids will speak louder than our actions. We tell them: “God is first”, “Church is important”, “Jesus is the most important thing in life” etc, yet living completely contrary to that. All we are doing is teaching them how to talk the talk if we are not living it in front of them. I mean, my five year old picks up on my hypocrisy already. How much more does a teenager pick up on it?
Our lives should be lived in such a way that if we never even said “Jesus first”, they would know it without a doubt. By no means am I saying we should be perfect, or our kids shouldn’t be involved in sports or activities, but they should know that if it came down to a decision between the two… God wins! Otherwise they will be inclined to think that they are the most important thing and that set them on a track to self-absorbed destruction down the road. We have to be willing to take some tough stands with our kids, even if we lose a few cool points in the process. Also on a different side of the same coin, as a men and the leaders of our homes, we can’t give our families wisdom and revelation if we are not spending time with the God of the universe who gives it to us.
I’m not saying this to beat up on us guys, but we spend so much time and effort on this website devoted to helping men become the leaders of their homes, that it would be easy to get our focus off of God and on our families. PLEASE lets be sure that Christ is first in our lives and that our families know it!