LOH Father's Day 26 · The Irrational Father

Hey, everybody, it's Tim.

Welcome or welcome back to the LOH Church Podcast.

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and our YouTube channel, where you can access all our message content.

Most importantly, I hope the following message inspires you to take your next step in faith

journey.

If we are completely honest with each other, if we look at parenting purely from a logical,

biological, financial standpoint, it makes absolutely no sense, right?

We think about it, we take a perfectly functional, quiet, relatively clean house, relatively,

and you introduce a tiny, unpredictable human who contributes exactly $0 to the mortgage.

They don't respect your personal space, they have terrible personal hygiene, they dictate

your sleep schedule with the precision of a terrorist in a hostage negotiation, and

their primary method of communication is screaming until you, you, guess what they

want, right?

And yet, the moment they're born, you look at this tiny, screaming, financially ruinous

creature, and you decide instantly, I would step in front of a moving train for that kid,

right?

Parenting defies reason, it defies economics, it is by very definition of the word, irrational.

And so I came up with this, the Irrational Father.

Welcome to Father's Day at LOH.

I wanna talk to you about irrational love in the context of an irrational father, because

there's irrational love from different people, grandmas, grandmas have irrational love, mamas

have irrational love.

But dads have a very unique lane of irrational love, being an irrational father.

If you don't know me yet, I'm Devin, best known as Shelby's husband, sometimes Graham's

dad in all the sermons, if you hear about Graham, I'm the one who's his dad.

Oftentimes the guy in the sound booth up here, I'm all of those things, but I also have the

honor of being Pastor Tim's son.

As I said, growing up in the church and specifically growing up the pastor's son, isn't always

the easiest road to walk.

There's a reputation for pastor's kids.

And at times in my life, I earned every bit of that reputation, which adds to that whole

feeling disqualified at times for certain things.

But God qualifies the called, we remember that one, right?

As a pastor's kid, you live in a bit of a glass house, you're navigating the expectations

of others, you're balancing the pressures of your parents' ministry and you trying to

become your own full human, sharing your family with an entire congregation of people who

at times are not always the most grace giving.

It's a unique vantage point that can sometimes distort a child's view of God, if they're

not careful.

It did with me at times for sure.

It's difficult to bisect your personal relationship with God from the church relationship with

God.

But I am profoundly grateful for my dad also being my pastor.

My dad is my pastor and there's a fine line that I try to use in this church where I refer

to him as Pastor Tim, because those are two separate lanes that he serves in my life.

I didn't just hear sermons about love from the pulpit, I saw it lived out in the quiet

moments behind closed doors.

So I wanna take a moment to honor my dad, Pastor Tim.

He didn't just preach the gospel to a church, he modeled the heart of a father to his children.

He exemplified and still does to this day what it means to show a rational love to his

children.

When my sister and I were messy, when we made mistakes, when we were just trying to figure

life out, his love for us never flinched.

He showed us love that gave without demanding in return, mirrored the welcoming heart of

the Heavenly Father.

I'm nowhere near perfection, as I said, I've earned some of that reputation of being a

pastor's kid at times.

In my youth, I've made a lot of mistakes and God's grace is illustrated in my shortcomings.

But my dad has always helped me, always, through the small things and the big things.

Writing this, I remembered a personal crisis I had when I was living in Nashville.

And I told my dad about it, and then I went to bed and he drove through the night and

was there the next morning, so nine and some hours for me to wake up just to know that

somebody was there with him.

He couldn't fix it, but just to know that somebody was there with me.

So I'm not a public speaker like my father, I can speak in front of people if you give

me a spreadsheet, you give me data, but not this type of public speaking.

Honestly, I'm not even that great at expressing my own emotions, Shelby reminds me that from

time to time.

So when Pastor Tim approached me with the request to speak at church for Father's Day,

I could think of a few dental procedures I might prefer to that.

But it was in the way that he asked me that kind of slowed me down.

I'm sometimes quick to hit the brakes on things that could be God, I don't know if anybody

else is like that.

He said, take a couple weeks, I'll give you enough time, you can talk yourself in and

out of it a few times.

During the past few weeks, I did just that, but as I came closer to today, I did find

some peace in this thought, which is just talk about where you are as a dad.

Talking about fathers and being a father on Father's Day, two fathers, when I'm not so

far down the road of being a father, is almost like asking somebody, what's the best way

to run a marathon while I'm running my first marathon?

I'm in the thick of it, I'm learning.

So this is where I am as a dad, this is what's on my mind, on my heart, this is what I'm

working on myself, so there's no preachy judgment, you gotta do this.

These are just some things that I've noticed in my first eight years of being a dad.

And I'll trust that maybe God has this planned out, that it's some things that there's other

people who are working on those same things, too.

Today we're talking about fatherhood, specifically I wanna talk to the young dads in the room,

like myself, who is still super young, and not aging rapidly.

Yeah, I wanna talk to the young dads in the room, the ones in their 20s and their 30s.

You're deep in the trenches, you're doing diapers, you're doing temper tantrums, sleep

regressions, trying to figure out how to put together a piece of furniture that's got

instructions translated poorly from German.

I see you, you're exhausted, you're running on coffee, maybe too much coffee that we talked

about in the green room, and leftover goldfish that you found in the cracks of your car seat.

And you still ate because you forgot your lunch.

I've done that, I know you probably have, too.

I know exactly where you are because I'm there right now.

If you don't know me well, I wear a couple different hats.

I am here at the church in charge of operations and the media team, which kind of means my

job is to make sure everything behind the scenes runs smoothly.

And when things break, I'm the guy sweating it out in the sound booth.

But during the week, my other responsibility is being an assistant principal at an elementary

school.

I work with children all day long, every day, hundreds of them.

I manage behaviors, I coordinate with teachers, I talk to parents, break up playground disputes,

who actually won gaga ball all day.

And then I go home.

And I walk through the front door to my beautiful wife, Shelby, who is without question the

best, most amazing mother on the planet, and the glue that holds together the sanity of

our family.

And our own children, Graham, who is seven, Imogen, who goes by Emmy, who's five, and

Phoebe, who is two.

She'll tell you that.

Two by two.

I spend eight hours a day managing other people's children, and then I come home to a seven,

five, and two-year-old.

I don't have hobbies anymore, just varying degrees of chaos coordination.

My life is essentially one continuous exercise in crisis management.

But what I want to talk and get into today stems from an experience I had a few years

ago.

So we'll rewind the clock before Shelby and I had any of our kids, before Graham even,

where I had an experience that broke down and rebuilt my understanding of what it means

to lead children.

With all good life lessons, we'll start with a paradigm shift.

Again, not preachy, this is me.

Pick it up if you want to pick it up.

Lay it down if you don't.

I was working at a middle school near Baltimore.

Middle school, like we all know, is that beautiful, terrifying season where everyone is mostly

just hormones and bad decisions, walking around in oversized hoodies.

I was sitting in my office one afternoon with my mentor at the time, who was the regional

superintendent of the county.

I was working in an at-risk school with at-risk students.

My group that I was in charge of were called Red Zone Boys.

They're the 5% of students who account for 99% of the discipline in the school, because

it's usually disproportionate like that.

Kids who are constantly acting out, constantly pushing boundaries, constantly trying to find

the absolute limit of your patience.

I was frustrated in this moment, and looking at the situation from a purely operational

standpoint, if we are type A or type B, I'm A prime.

How do I manage these behaviors?

How do I fix these problems?

There's teachers who are coming at me, man, they're good for you, you let go of them,

they come into my class, they just reign chaos.

How do I fix this problem?

Maybe we need to even get these students out of this school and do an alternative setting.

That's where my mind was.

My mentor stopped me, and he looked at me across the table, and he said something that

I have never forgotten.

It became the true north for my entire career in education, and eventually a compass point

for my parenting as well.

He said, all children require someone who is fully, completely, irrationally in their

corner.

All children require someone who is fully, completely, irrationally in their corner,

not conditionally in their corner, not in their corner as long as their grades are good,

not in their corner as long as they don't act out, irrationally in their corner.

And he added this piece to it, it's not on the screen, but he said, and if they don't

have that outside of school, that responsibility falls to you.

They need a champion.

And I want to pause for a second, and I'm going to emulate Pastor Tim in this geek out

session, because I want to trace the root of the word champion.

In our society, we associate champion with being the best, with being a winner, right?

We are the champions, yeah.

The champion actually comes from a Latin word, campus, which translates to battlefield, which

is another funny coincidence that we call our schools and colleges, campuses, just walking

battlefields for our youth.

From there, the word evolves into campia, which takes a stand in for, it's a fighter

or a gladiator.

And then it goes on to its final form in the medieval period as someone who fights in a

duel.

Now, in the Middle Ages, duels could happen for a laundry list of reasons, but primarily

it boils down to someone did something wrong, and they're going to duel to defend the person's

honor who was wronged.

But the leaders in that society, they didn't want to get killed, obviously.

So they'd put forth their strongest, bravest knight to fight in their stead, and that's

where we get that word, the person who fought for them was their champion.

Keep that definition in mind as we kind of move through today.

So my mentor, he told me, these kids, who every adult is justifiably frustrated with,

they need a champion.

Someone irrationally in their corner, not my baby, they need a champion.

That paradigm shift changed everything for me, not immediately, but it grew as all good

ideas do in fertile soil, in my heart and in my mind.

I stopped looking at my boys as problems to be managed and started trying to look at

them as humans who were desperately searching for someone to stand for them.

And when Graham was born, and then Imogen, and then Phoebe, that exact same quote rang

out in my head.

If that principle applies to students just in need of someone to believe in them, how

much more does it apply to the children sleeping down the hall from me?

So your primary job as a father is not to be a manager.

Your primary job is to be your child's champion.

So let's look at the leadership parallel.

Because we often treat parenting as a management job.

We manage schedules, we manage behaviors, we manage messes.

One of my favorite authors, Simon Sinek, who writes extensively about organizational leadership,

he makes a profound observation.

He says, leadership and parenting are the exact same discipline.

There's a fundamental misunderstanding in our culture about what leadership actually

is.

We think leadership is about being in charge, but it's not.

Leadership's about taking care of those in your charge.

Great leaders and great parents share the exact same biological and emotional requirements.

We must be willing to sacrifice our own comfort, our own resources, and our own time so that

someone else can grow, feel safe, and eventually achieve more than we ever could.

Sinek wrote in his book called Leaders Eat Last, this concept, and it comes from the

Marine Corps, where the most senior officers eat after the most junior ones.

He calls it a physical manifestation of a spiritual truth, that effective leadership

comes from sacrifice, just as effective parenting comes from sacrifice.

Jesus perfectly summarized this in Mark 10, 45, for even the Son of Man did not come to

be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.

The Apostle Paul, in his letter to the Ephesians, maps out this exact blueprint for fathers.

He says, fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline

and instruction of the Lord.

Notice what Paul does not say.

He doesn't say, fathers, manage your children's bad behavior so they don't embarrass you in

public.

He doesn't say, fathers, make sure your kids get straight A's and excel at travel ball.

He says, bring them up, elevate them, and coach them.

When you have young kids, when you're in the thick of it, it's like a seven-year-old, a

five-year-old, a two-year-old like me, it's incredibly easy to spend your entire day reacting.

A cup spills, you react.

Emmy hits her brother over the head, you react.

Phoebe decides she's done with her diaper, throws it off, goes to the bathroom in the

middle of the kitchen, you react.

But a leader doesn't react, a leader responds.

James 119 reminds us, it says, be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger,

for human anger does not accomplish God's righteousness.

When we react, we are letting our frustration dictate the atmosphere of our home.

We operate from a deficit, but when we respond, we step back, take a breath, and we realize

the old principle that we are fighting not for victory in our homes, but from victory

in our homes.

As Pastor Bill Johnson beautifully points out in his book, Raising Giant Killers, we

are shaping arrows that will be shot into the future to hit targets that we will never

live to see.

That's parenting.

You cannot raise a giant killer if your primary parenting strategy is surviving until bedtime.

You have to establish an atmosphere of peace in your home.

And dads, that starts with us.

We are the emotional thermostat of our home.

I used to think that it was mom, it's dad.

If the leader is anxious, the team is anxious.

If the father is an angry aggressor, the children become anxious survivors.

But if the father is a safe space and a rational champion, the children become confident explorers.

So this is my favorite one.

How much does dad weigh?

I wrote this and I laughed for an awkward amount of time.

Do you know how long five minutes is?

I'm trying to time myself here just to make sure I don't go too long.

Five minutes is a long time.

I don't know if we've noticed, but dads are getting a little heavy these days.

Just let that sink in.

It's a joke, of course, but I do want to talk briefly about the weight of all of this.

There's a cultural narrative right now that loves to point out where fathers fall short.

Houses can do it alone, mothers can do it alone, the absent father.

And yes, accountability is important.

Dads, you have to own mistakes, I have to own my mistakes.

Sometimes it's the hardest thing in the world to say, I'm sorry, I was wrong.

But I want to pull back the curtain on something that we rarely talk about.

And that is the weight of being a father at times, being a young dad at times is incredibly

lonely.

And I'll go through this quickly, because I can sense all the young moms in the room

getting tense.

But as Ollie said, you guys had your Mother's Day, you got your video.

I got the mic and Dave's in my corner, he's not muting me.

So being a young dad, and I'll clarify, being a good dad, doing the dad job well can be

incredibly lonely.

You're simultaneously trying to build a career, love your wife, pay a mortgage that feels

too big and groceries that keep getting more expensive.

I mean, $50 doesn't get you what it used to.

Sound like an old man saying that.

And raise children who need your constant energy.

You carry a silent, heavy endurance.

You go to work and you absorb stress.

You swallow your pride when your boss and coworkers are acting unreasonable.

And then you pull into your driveway after the long day, you sit in your car for that

extra 30 seconds that we all do, you turn it off and just kind of sit there.

Trying to switch gears so that you can walk in and immediately be dad.

You immediately jump in, play Legos, have a catch in the yard, let Emmy do your hair

and makeup, and look fabulous.

And you don't complain about it, the good dads don't, because as TD Jakes so powerfully

points out, men will often choose silence over vulnerable communication just to keep

the peace.

You don't want to start that fight.

You don't want to bring the work stress into your living room.

This is something Shelby and I have a lot.

I come home and she goes, here's everything about my day.

I got a 14-point plan.

I'm going to walk you through each one of them, subsection A, B, C, D, down to double

Z.

And then she goes, how was your day?

I go, it's good.

Oh, really?

I heard the cops were called three times through school.

Yeah, not too bad, not too bad.

You don't want to bring that stress and we compartmentalize to keep that stress out.

So you just carry it and dads get heavy.

Jakes says that society doesn't appreciate a good father.

Society takes the good father for granted because it doesn't make a sound, it's quiet.

The provision, the quiet sacrifices, the invisible boundary lines that you draw to protect your

family's peace, it often goes completely unnoticed.

And when it doesn't, it's when you did it wrong.

We live in a culture that is obsessed with influence.

We want external validation.

We want to see people recognizing that we're working hard.

We want the gold star.

But fatherhood, true kingdom level fatherhood, there's that concept, it's built in the dark.

It's built in the secret places.

Look what Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount.

But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right is doing

so that you're giving maybe in secret and your father who sees in secret will reward

you.

Now you might be wondering, what are we talking about giving here?

It is a financial principle, absolutely.

But the spiritual principle behind it applies to everything we do for the kingdom, especially

parenthood.

Your father sees what is done in secret, dads.

When you get up at 3 a.m. to rock your sick two-year-old back to sleep so that mom can

have her well-deserved one hour of sleep, no one applauds.

There's no trophy.

There's no real life Instagram filter for these dark circles that just show up when

you hit 30 for some reason.

But your father sees you.

When you bite your tongue instead of yelling at your seven-year-old who accidentally broke

something that you just told him 40 times not to touch, your father sees that.

When you feel entirely inadequate wondering if you are royally messing up your kids for

generations to come, but you get up out of bed and you try again, again, your father

sees that.

When you don't give up, your father sees that.

And dads right now need to not give up.

Dads, you don't need the applause of the world when you have the eye of the creator on you.

We need to stop waiting for external validation and learn to find the joy in these secret

quiet moments of faithful leadership in our homes.

Give yourself some grace to grow.

You're learning how to be a dad at the same time that your kids are learning how to be

humans and it's a steep learning curve for all of us.

So let's go to the next slide and we'll talk about what a rational love actually looks

like in practice.

If every child needs a champion, how do we model that as fathers in our home?

And to understand it, we have to look at the greatest picture of fatherhood in all of literature.

It's a story Jesus told found in Luke chapter 15 and we usually call it the parable of the

Luke 15 · chapter mention

prodigal son, but it could also be called the parable of the irrational father.

We all know this story.

The younger son demands his inheritance early.

He's essentially telling his dad, I value your stuff more than I value your life.

Give me your money.

I wish you were dead.

He goes off.

He blows it on wild living and ends up in a literal pig pen and life forces him to go

home.

It's not his decision.

He didn't reflect on his decisions and go, oh man, my bad.

I did wrong.

I got to go home and do right.

Life forced him home.

So what does he do?

Like we all do when we're wrong and we're sitting up in the bedroom and our wife's downstairs

and we got to thread the needle.

We rehearse the apology.

What am I going to say?

How am I going to say it?

He figures he's forfeited his right to be a son.

That's done.

And so he starts the long walk home hoping just to be hired as his father's servant.

But listen to what happens.

Listen to the posture of a champion.

But while the son was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion.

He ran and threw his arms around his neck and kissed him while he was still a long way

off.

I would run to Graham a long way off.

The father didn't wait for his son to get cleaned up.

He didn't stand on the porch with his arms crossed waiting for his apology.

He didn't say, let's see if this behavior is improved, if he's really changed before

I engage with him.

He saw him from a distance covered in the filth of his own mistakes and he ran to him.

As Pastor Tim recently preached in the never-ending Ephesians series, grace found me before I

ever looked for it.

He also taught us the distinct difference between mercy and grace and that's exemplified

in this story.

He said, and this is Pastor Tim, I'm going to quote him again.

Mercy is keeping the wrath away, but grace is removing the wrath that is well-deserved.

The father in this story, the irrational father, he didn't just mercifully keep the wrath away.

His grace pursued his boy and his brokenness and removed the wrath entirely.

And that grace didn't leave his son in the dirt to be a servant.

To borrow from one more line, grace didn't just reach me, it raised me.

The father raised his son out of his shame and restored him back to his rightful place

at the table.

Now another geek out moment to get the full picture of the irrational father in this story.

You have to understand the cultural context of first century Middle East.

I was a history teacher before I became an administrator, so bear with me.

An elder patriarch of the estate property did not run, ever.

Running meant you had to pull your robes up.

It exposed your legs.

It was considered entirely undignified.

It was an act of public humiliation for the elder of an estate to run.

So why did the irrational father run?

Because in that context, a Jewish boy who lost his family's inheritance among Gentiles,

who shamed their family among Gentiles, could face what was called the Kizazah ceremony,

which was a ritual where the village would come out and they would break a pot in front

of them.

And it symbolized that they were cut off from their people forever.

The irrational father runs to reach his son literally before the village could get to

him.

The father absorbed his son's shame, humiliation, and judgment so his son wouldn't have to.

And that makes no sense logically.

After how his son acted, how he treated his father, how he treated his family.

That's not how you manage bad behaviors, dad, right?

That is a rational love from an irrational father.

Your kids are going to mess up.

My kids mess up all the time.

Your toddler's going to throw food on the floor.

Your five-year-old, if they're like mine, is going to probably throw the food on the

floor and then blame your toddler.

And your seven-year-old is going to test your patience until it literally wants to snap.

And then eventually, as they grow into their teens, they're going to make mistakes that

literally break your heart.

Can't wait for that.

Bob Goff talks about the concept of mistakes in one of my favorite books, which is called

Everybody Always, that perfectly illustrates irrational love.

In the book, he's talking about being a reluctant participant in a skydiving trip.

The instructor tells him that if the parachute fails to open, it's not the initial hit that

kills you.

He calls it, he says, it's the bounce.

The initial hit, he says, it breaks all of your bones.

The subsequent bounce punctures all of your internal organs, and that's when you die.

So Bob Goff, he makes this joke.

He says, well, if my parachute fails to open, I'm just going to reach out and grab the ground

real tight.

I'm going to hug it, and I won't bounce.

But here's the actual lesson, he says.

What is true in skydiving is true in our lives.

It's actually not the initial failure that takes any of us out.

It's the bounce.

We've all hit the ground hard at work or in a relationship or with a big ambition.

Whether we had a big public failure or even a bigger private one, the initial failure

won't crush our spirit or kill our faith.

It's the second hit that does.

The second hit is what follows when things go massively wrong or we fail big, and the

people we thought would rush to us create distance instead.

They express disapproval or treat us with polite indifference.

If we want to be like Jesus, here's our simple and courageous job, catch people on the bounce.

When we make a mistake, the initial failure isn't what destroys us.

The fatal blow happens on the bounce when the people who are supposed to be in their

corner pull away in judgment, anger, or shame.

The same applies to our kids when they make mistakes.

As fathers, leaders of our families, our primary job is to catch our kids on the bounce.

When those moments happen, how will you lead in your home?

Will you pull away and let them hit the ground, demanding perfection before connection?

Or will you be that champion who catches them on the bounce, running to them while they're

still a long way off?

Simon Peter tells us the theological version of catching someone on the bounce.

In 1 Peter 4, 8, he says, above all, maintain constant love for one another, since love

covers a multitude of sins.

Covering sin doesn't mean we ignore bad behavior.

Don't think that this is a message on gentle parenting, because that's very different.

We don't ignore bad behavior, we lead our kids through low moments, rather than simply

punishing them for hitting the ground.

Stephen Furtick talks about this exact dynamic when he discusses how to lead your family

through deficits.

He says, when your child hits a wall, when they fail, when their behavior is spiraling,

that's not the time to preach at them, it's the time to coach them.

It's the time to use the phrase, tell me more.

That's hard.

When your child's having a meltdown, to sit with them instead of saying, stop crying,

it's not a big deal, get your room, said all of those things.

What if instead we leaned down, got at their eye level, and said, I know that you're upset,

little tiny human with a little squishy underdeveloped brain, but tell me more.

And they're not going to respond to that question how you'd like them to, most likely.

Their children, as I said, their brains are underdeveloped, or undeveloped.

Not fully developed, let's call it that.

But it shows your kids who they can trust.

You're not validating bad behavior, you're validating their humanity.

You're showing them that your love is not contingent on performance, and that's an environment

where trust is built.

Cynic has another great analogy on trust.

He says that you don't build trust by taking your kids on one giant expensive vacation

to Disney World, just like you don't get in shape by working out for 20 hours in one day.

Trust is built like brushing your teeth.

It's two minutes in the morning, two minutes at night.

It's boring, it's mundane.

It's sitting on the edge of the bathtub while the kids splash water everywhere.

It's reading the same bedtime story for the 400th time.

One of my favorite authors, J.R.R.

Tolkien, he says, all that we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given

to us.

For us as fathers, the time that is given to us is spent in small, repetitive, unseen

moments.

What we do with that time determines the foundation that we build.

And crucially, the depth of trust is built in the vulnerability of ourselves in moments

of repair.

Because you, as a dad, are going to mess up.

I mess up a lot.

You're going to lose your temper.

I do.

As an educator, I can keep my cool with hundreds of kids all day long, and then I can come

home and trip over Graham's shoes in the hallway and lose my mind because I know what I've

told him.

I know how many times we've gone over it.

But why is it easy to give our best to those outside and our worst to those inside our

home?

The irony is not lost on me for that one.

When you lose your temper with your kids, the greatest leadership move that you can

make, the most irrational, beautiful act of love you can show them is to walk into their

room, sit on the edge of the bed, and say, I am so sorry.

I was frustrated, but I am the adult, and I should not have spoken to you that way.

Will you forgive me?

Which is controversial parenting to some.

Dads don't acknowledge mistakes.

We have excuses.

We deserve to be mad.

We deserve to be...

Do you know what I went through today?

Proverbs 28 tells us, the one who conceals his sins will not prosper, but whoever confesses

and renounces them will find mercy.

When you do that, you're not losing your authority as a father, you're establishing it.

You're teaching them what repentance and grace look like in real time, modeling it.

I want this behavior to be seen.

I have to model it.

You're giving them a living, breathing theology of a heavenly father who repairs broken things.

You're showing them that even when they or you mess up, you are still their champion

and irrationally in their corner.

So let's look at what all this is worth, our return on investment, ROI.

When you prove to your kids that you're irrationally in their corner, you're giving them the one

thing they cannot find elsewhere, which is a safe haven.

We are biologically wired to need a safe haven in our lives as humans.

The world outside of our home is chaotic.

It is full of pressure, comparison, danger, and noise, a lot of noise.

Your kids get enough of that at school.

They get enough of that on social media, God help us all.

Your job as a father is not to make your kids tough by being hard on them at home.

The world will be hard enough on them as it is.

Your job is to make your home the ultimate safe haven, a place where they know beyond

a shadow of a doubt that the leadership of the house eats last, that dad will always

protect them.

Dad will always listen.

Dad has irrational love for me.

I think back to my mentor in Baltimore a lot, where he said, all children require someone

who is fully, completely, irrationally in their corner.

I try to look at Graham, Emmy, and Phoebe through that lens every single day, even when

I'm exhausted, even when I'm spread thin between the church and school and being a husband.

Because the beautiful long-term reality of this kind of leadership, this kind of fatherhood,

is that when you raise your children with a rational love, when you coach them through

your deficits, catch them on the bounce, when you model boundaries and emotional discipline,

when you run to them in their mess instead of away from them, you're not just surviving

parenthood, you're building a generational legacy.

Twenty years from now, when those kids who are seven, five, and two are grown, and they're

navigating the complexities of their careers and their marriages, the hardest moments of

their own adult lives, they won't look for an escape, they'll look for their champion.

And because of the foundation that you're building right now today, and the exhaustion

and the hidden moments, the champion they look for will be you.

I hope it's me for mine.

One last thing as I'm wrapping up, and the band can come on up here.

I need to pause and remind the men in this room that just because you are grown doesn't

mean you don't need a champion too.

You cannot carry the weight of family, career, your own shortcomings entirely on your own.

And God obviously is the ultimate champion.

He's the one who catches us on the bounce, he irrationally loves us always.

But he almost always, exclusively, works through other people.

He works through brothers, and fathers, and spiritual fathers.

Tim, you're a spiritual father, man, I bless you, I'm thankful for you.

If you don't have those men in your corner, you need to start looking, who do I have?

Who can I lean on?

You can't be a champion for your family without letting someone be a champion for you first.

And vice versa, men whose kids have moved out, moved on, who can you be a champion to?

My dad is mine.

My dad has this habit of telling me that I'm a good father when I feel like the worst dad.

That's irrational love.

Ultimately, your irrational love and practice will point your kids directly to heaven, to

the father who never, ever takes his eyes off of them.

It'll point them to a God whose love is an open door, and if Emmy was here instead of

Shy Kid, she'd start singing that song from Frozen.

You got it?

Just kidding.

As Pastor Tim reminds us in his teaching on Limitless Prayer, approaching God isn't a

work, but it's a welcome.

Your kids will learn that connecting with their heavenly father is not overcoming some

sort of reluctance, but it's laying a hold of a father's willingness.

I'm listening, Dad.

Furthermore, rational love empowers your kids to find their calling.

As Pastor Tim says, there's a place in this church that will remain incomplete until you

step into it, until your kids step into it.

By being your kids' champion, you give them the confidence to step out of fear and into

their God-given purpose.

So keep going, Dads.

What you are doing matters.

What you are building in the dark is important.

Your father sees you.

Let's pray.

Lord, I thank you for every man in this room, the sons, the fathers, spiritual fathers.

I thank you for the weight that they carry, the sacrifices they make in secret, and the

love they pour out when they're running on empty.

Give them your eyes to see their children not as interruptions, but as arrows yet to

be released.

Give them the strength to respond instead of react.

Remind them today that they are seen, that they are loved, and they are championed by

you.

Fill them with the irrational love of heaven so they can pour love irrationally into their

homes.

In Jesus' name, amen.

Happy Father's Day, Elohim.