WHAT INFLUENCE DID YOUR FATHER HAVE IN YOUR LIFE?

Today's promise: God celebrates family

What influence did your father have in your life?

"I have singled him out so that he will direct his sons and their families to keep the way of the Lord and do what is right and just."

Genesis 18:19 NLT

Soaking up Dad

We teach our children even when we don't think school is in session. Too often we think our lessons are the sit-down kind, the planned-out kind. But our lessons are also how we react as a Little League coach when the ump blows a call, how we treat our wives after we've both had rugged days at work, and what we say when we see a homeless man on the street.

Sometimes our lessons are good ones. I hope my sons — without me saying a word — have become more color-blind by our attending a church with a black pastor and linking arms with a black ministry in rural Mississippi.

Sometimes my lessons are the wrong kinds. As a boy, what hurt so deeply was to hear my mother and father fight; though it wasn't a common scene, the most perfect day could turn blustery cold when their relationship iced up. Without intending it to, I've taught a few similarly chilly lessons to my own sons.

Our children are sponges, quietly soaking up all we say and do.

Bob Welch in A Father for All Seasons

From Men of Integrity Devotional Bible with devotionals by the editors of Men of Integrity magazine (Christianity Today, Intl), Tyndale House Publishers (2002), p 25

All our heritages are flawed — of course some far more than others. Modern men and women are so sensitized to this that many have come to use the sins of their parents as a cloak for their own sins and parental deficiencies. This has brought about, as Robert Hughes writes, "the rise of cult therapies teaching that we are all the victims of our parents, that whatever our folly, venality, or outright thuggishness, we are not to be blamed for it, since we come from 'dysfunctional families.'

R. KENT HUGHES

Content is derived from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation and other publications of Tyndale Publishing House