The one warning in Scripture addressed to fathers alone, and the Spirit-filled way out of it

Most of the sins named in the Bible apply equally to men and women. Lying, envy, pride: none of them care whether you are a husband or a wife. But at least once, Scripture singles out fathers. It names a sin, aims it squarely at men, and tells them to stop.

On this week’s episode of the PassionLife Podcast, we turn to that sin, the one that seems to tempt fathers most. We want to name it so that we can beware of it and take up arms against it.

It may seem like an unusual subject for a ministry whose mission is to rescue the vulnerable in the places where abortion is most concentrated. But in every difficult pregnancy there is more than a baby to consider and more than a mother to help. There is always a father. And what kind of father he becomes matters more than most of us realize.

More Than We Know

It is hard to overstate the role fathers play in raising children. The Bible addresses it directly, and lacking that wisdom from above has left our society with many, many problems, largely because we as fathers do not recognize the incredible influence we carry.

That becomes clearer with age. Mark Nicholson, our executive director, is now the father of grown children. Looking back on how he fathered them, and on how he continues to father them, he sees how significant the impact has been, for good or for bad, depending on how aware he was of God’s will and how faithfully he followed it.

Social science tells a similar story. Mothers have the greatest influence on their children until roughly the preteen years. Somewhere around eleven, twelve, or thirteen, the influence shifts from mother to father, and that is true for boys and girls alike.

So when a father is missing, children go looking. A young woman without a father in her life will often look for a male figure, most likely a boyfriend, and a great many of the troubles young women fall into trace back to that empty place. A young man without a father may do well through grade school, but as he reaches those preteen years he will find male models somewhere, in gangs or on the streets or wherever he can, because all of us are hungry for a man’s influence at that point in life.

In 1960, about 17 percent of American children were raised without a father in the home. Today that figure has roughly doubled, to about 34 percent, and it has set off a ripple effect of social problems.

The Bible speaks of widows and orphans, and it speaks a great deal about the fatherless as among the most vulnerable members of any society.

In the mid-1990s, while John Ensor, our president, was ministering in Boston, David Blankenhorn published Fatherless America. John still has his copy. It made a huge splash, and he remembers article after article and commentary after commentary drawing on the data Blankenhorn had gathered about what happens to children who grow up without fathers.

The lesson cuts both ways. Even if you were not raised with a father, you have been shaped by one. And we as fathers had better pay attention to the influence we have.

The Warning

The Bible says as much. It gives fathers one very specific command concerning their children, and here is the gender-specific sin we have in view. That does not mean women cannot commit it; they certainly can. But men seem to be especially vulnerable to it. It is found in Ephesians 6:

Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. (Ephesians 6:4)

Mark first studied that verse as a young man engaged to be married. He and his fiancée, Dana, took their first parenting class before the wedding, nowhere near having children but already thinking ahead. He memorized the verse in the NIV: Fathers, do not exasperate your children. It has come to mind time and time again over the years, as he raised his own children, and now as he watches his son raise his.

It is a unique warning for fathers: flee the sin of uncontrolled anger. That is what it means to exasperate a child: to frustrate him, to leave him flummoxed, with nowhere to turn.

Filled With Something

The wider context of that verse reaches back into Ephesians 5:

And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit. (Ephesians 5:18)

Everything that follows, including Paul’s word to fathers, flows out of that command.

A man given over to alcohol is overwhelmingly a man out of control. He lacks self-control. He overreacts to everything. And overreaction seems to be the sin fathers are most vulnerable to, whether it comes straight from the bottle or simply from pent-up frustration. Things go badly at work, parts of our marriage frustrate us, and we vent it onto our children, who have no idea what is going on.

And no idea what to do to fix it.

Mark knows the feeling. He has seen it in other fathers, and he can think of times when he put his own children in a position where they felt there was no way to please him, no way to obey, no way out of disobeying. All that was left was to cry in exasperation, because of the sin he had committed against them by being too harsh, too demanding, too exacting, until they had nowhere to go.

In moments like that, there is almost always something else going on. A father is taking the frustrations of his own life out on defenseless children. That is exactly when a man needs a brother, an elder, someone he trusts, who can take him by the ear and walk him out of the room.

The Spirits Rather Than the Spirit

John’s father was an alcoholic.

When you are raised in an alcoholic home, you don’t know it is abnormal. It is the only life you know. You simply assume this is what men do. And you are not aware of its impact on you until much later in life.

John remembers the alcohol-fueled fights, the anger, the screaming and shouting, things being thrown. For a child that is horribly disruptive. You get knots in your stomach. You get scared. Your home is your whole world. A child knows, even though he could never put it into words, that his peace depends on peace between Mom and Dad. As their marriage goes, and as the stability of the home goes, so goes his life. He just wants them to be together and for everything to be happy and good. It is instinctive.

Years later, home from college for the holidays, John had become a Christian and was beginning, for the first time, to see things from a biblical perspective. He was old enough to reevaluate how he had been raised and to understand his father. One day, while John was asleep on the sofa, his father came home and kicked him out of the house.

He was eighteen or nineteen, and he does not think he was especially traumatized. But he can still remember it vividly. It was completely irrational. It was the Scripture verse incarnated: a man filled with the spirits rather than the Spirit, who came home, reacted to something he did not know how to handle, and threw his son out.

Some people in that position become angry and bitter. John believes he would have, except that by then the grace of God was at work in him. He could see the difference between what an unsaved man is going to do and how a Spirit-filled young man ought to respond.

That is why these warnings are in the Bible. And it is why the ESV words the verse the way it does: do not provoke your children to anger. Because that is exactly what out-of-control, exasperating behavior from a father produces in a child: bitterness, anger, fear, confusion, and a desire to pull away and hide.

John is convinced that would have been the trajectory of his life, had God not saved him at seventeen and put him on a new path. God became his Father. When you have a heavenly Father, you get to begin a new relationship with him.

Everyone Has a Father

But Ephesians 6:4 does not stop at the negative. It moves from do not to do: bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. That is the solution side of the verse.

There is one thing we can say with certainty: everyone reading this has a father, and he has influenced you. That is true even if you never knew him, even if he was emotionally absent or abusive, in the home or out of it. We all live under the influence of fathers. So going forward, it matters that we take the warning seriously and become good fathers.

To see what the positive side looks like, we went back to a conversation we recorded with John and Noël Piper about the fathers who shaped them.

Fifty Years

John Ensor and John Piper have known each other for fifty years. John was a twenty-one-year-old college student at Bethel; Piper was his thirty-year-old teacher. Somehow John needled his way over to the Pipers’ house for dinner while Piper was still teaching there. He still has no idea how he pulled that off. But it was around that table that things moved past a professor and his student into a friendship that has lasted ever since, complete with games of charades at the Pipers’ house.

A Little Billy Graham

John Piper’s father was an evangelist. From age nineteen until the day he died, that is all he did. He was a full-time itinerant preacher, a “little Billy Graham,” as Piper puts it. Billy Graham had his fifty thousand; Piper’s father had his five hundred, moving from church to church and tent to tent for one-, two-, or three-week crusades and revivals.

Piper remembers sitting at a square card table in his parents’ bedroom, licking envelopes. The letters went out to a network of churches all over the country: I’m an evangelist. I will come to your church and preach for you every night and lead people to Christ. Churches would call, and at the end of the meetings they would take up a love offering. That is how the family lived.

Piper considers it an easy upbringing. His father was a good dad, a really good dad, and Piper admires him very much. A big picture of him hangs in Piper’s attic exercise room, beside the apostle Paul, Dan Fuller, and Jonathan Edwards.

Was his father the seed of the passion for the gospel, evangelism, and world missions that Piper is known for around the world? Of course, he said. Children don’t know the impact their parents have on them, because so much of it happens preconsciously. They are simply watching their parents for eighteen years or so, and beyond. But even consciously, his admiration for his father is enormous, and you tend to become like those you admire.

His father’s preaching was blood-earnest. Piper can still see him squinting as he said, It is appointed unto men once to die, and after that the judgment. As a little boy, Piper trembled when his dad talked like that. And yet when his father came home, he brought jokes. He put together a remarkable balance: a healthy, humorous life at home and blood-earnest preaching in the pulpit.

When he was home (he was away three-fourths of the year), the family prayed together every night. Piper remembers his father praying for “the home and foreign fields.” He said it so often and so quickly that to a small boy it sounded like a single word: homeandforeignfields.

Missionaries at the Table

Noël Piper’s father was a country doctor. Sometimes that meant simply not getting paid. Early on he was doing surgery and delivering babies, a true general practitioner, and over time his work narrowed into what we would now call family practice. He was a man devoted to helping people live.

But before she spoke about medicine, Noël wanted to speak about missions. Her parents met in Norfolk, Virginia, in a church that was deeply missions-minded, and they brought that with them when they moved to Georgia, where she did most of her growing up. Missionaries were often at their table. Her parents took it upon themselves to invite missionaries they knew to speak at their little church, which otherwise would probably never have seen one. She grew up surrounded by missionary influence in her own home.

It is a story we hear again and again. John grew up in a non-Christian home. His father was not away three-quarters of the year preaching; he was sitting in a tavern. Yet over the years John has been surprised by how many people tell him they learned at the dinner table, from the guests their parents brought home.

The Pipers made room for those guests too. Greg Livingstone, the founder of Frontiers and one of Piper’s great heroes, who has since gone to be with Jesus, once came to their table and made a deal with the Piper boys: he would give them a quarter for every country they could name where he had never been. He had been to a lot of countries, but the boys still made some money. And they were listening.

What Fathers Bring Home

That conversation with the Pipers only got deeper as it went on, but this was where it began: with their fathers, and with the influence of a father on the home.

Noël in particular credited her father as the one who brought missionaries and mature Christian adults into the house, and she attributes much of who she became to his desire to expose his children to people like that as they sat around the table.

Charles Spurgeon, one of the most famous pastors of the nineteenth century, never went to seminary. John remembers reading in a biography years ago that much of what Spurgeon learned about God, the history of redemption, and the call to ministry came from listening to the pastors and missionaries who were guests in his family’s home. It all came through the ordinary practice of hospitality. The same was clearly true for Noël. And John Piper’s father came home with stories from the road.

Notice, too, that John Piper’s father was gone three-fourths of the year, out on the road holding tent meetings and leading people to the Lord. Here was a man who was absent for most of his son’s childhood, and yet he held an overwhelming position of authority and influence in that son’s life. John Piper admires him to this day, and his is one of the four portraits Piper looks up at every time he climbs onto his exercise machine.

A Men’s Issue

This is where fatherhood meets the work of PassionLife. As we serve all over the world, from Argentina to Zambia, we try never to forget the influence fathers have.

Across the social research on why women have abortions, the man in her life consistently carries the greatest influence, whether that is her boyfriend or her father. Many women have abortions to please a man. Abortion has always been a men’s issue, far more than a women’s issue.

That is the opposite of what the world says. But in most cases, the man has more influence over whether an abortion takes place than the woman does.

That is why the challenge to fathers has to go worldwide. Young men need to realize they no longer have a choice between being a father and not being one. Once the baby is there, the only choice left is whether to be a good father or a bad one.

So everywhere we work, wherever we can bring men into the decision, we do. Men have an innate instinct to protect a child. They don’t want to hurt one. It is one thing for a woman to see an ultrasound. But we have heard many testimonies from men who saw their baby on an ultrasound screen, were deeply moved, and wanted to protect that child because they recognized it as their own offspring. That is one of the reasons we use ultrasound.

The Discipline and Instruction of the Lord

It is also why Scripture calls men to be filled with the Holy Spirit, and to raise their children in the good, self-controlled discipline of the Lord. That means teaching them the great works of the gospel, the nature of God, and his saving mercy, and showing them patience and forbearance along with instruction. It is a great challenge, but it is a deeply fulfilling one.

The psalmist shows us what that looks like when it is passed down:

O God, we have heard with our ears, our fathers have told us, what deeds you performed in their days, in the days of old. (Psalm 44:1)

Fathers shape their children by speaking the words of the Bible, by speaking good theology, and by bringing people of great faith into the home. John and Noël Piper reminded us of that. Their fathers are still speaking through them.

Watch the Full Interview

Our full conversation with John and Noël Piper is posted at passionlife.org. We encourage you to watch it all.

And fathers, let’s be good men, godly men, and great fathers.

This article is adapted from the episode transcript.