People should understand that men and women are different because they are made to fill different roles.A man may be a wonderful father, but he's unlikely ever to become a wonderful mother. A woman may be a wonderful mother, but she's never going to be a wonderful father.
A child needs both a father and a mother. A child needs security. After that, a child needs love, discipline and teaching. A child needs to learn obedience and respect for authority.
That's the parents' responsibility. And first and foremost the father's. "Fathers," says Eph 6:4 (not "mothers"), "do not provoke your children to wrath, but bring them up in the training and admonition of the Lord." Training includes discipline. Admonition means to call attention to, to warn, to caution, to reprove gently where necessary.
A father, moreover, must teach by example.
This week I saw details of some Swiss research that I found interesting. It showed that where both father and mother attend church regularly, 33 per cent of their children will end up regular churchgoers.
If the mother attends church regularly but the father only irregularly, only three per cent of the children will become regular churchgoers, and if the mother is a regular churchgoer but the father non-practising, then only two per cent.
But if the father attends church regularly and the mother attends only occasionally, 38 per cent of the children will become regular attenders, and if the father attends regularly and the mother not at all, then the number goes up to 44 per cent.
The spiritual welfare of the children is the responsibility not of the mother, but of the father.
Fathers, are you listening?
