My Father, My Hero

By Doug Robbins

What qualities make a man an effective father? Are there a few key things a man can do that will lead his children to keep respecting him and want to emulate his Christian walk even when they are grown? My Father, My Hero is the author's introspective walk through the Bible to try and find answers to those questions. By examining Bible fathering stories with both good and bad outcomes, along with some other key teachings of Jesus, this book finds answers that many dads will find quite helpful. Especially with the hectic pace of life that many dads face today, the conclusions of this book will allow dads to focus their energy on the things that ultimately matter the most in transferring our hearts to our children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Aug 2, 2016
• ISBN: 9781681973586

Doug Robbins

m Bio Doug has been a lifelong horror movie fan.  He is even having five of his short screen plays turned into short films. Prose Bio Doug fancies himself the next Edgar Allan, with his short horror fiction. He contributes to the first edition of “The 100 Voices Anthology”. He won an honorable mention in The L Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future Contest.  Also he contributes to all six of “The Demonic Visions” Editions.

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My Father, My Hero

Doug Robbins

ISBN 978-1-68197-357-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-68197-358-6 (digital)

Copyright © 2016 by Doug Robbins

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

296 Chestnut Street

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Initial Thoughts

Prologue - The Failure of Samuel

Chapter 1 - The Pride of Their Children

Great Men, With Fathering Breakdowns

Chapter 2 - King David and Absalom

Chapter 3 - The Man with All the Answers

Chapter 4 - The Twelve Sons of Jacob

Chapter 5 - Let’s Do the Math

How Does This All Fit Together?

Chapter 6 - My Father, My Hero

Chapter 7 - How a Man Treats His Wife

Great Men, Great Fathering Stories

Chapter 8 - The Son Isaac Loved

Chapter 9 - King David and Solomon

Chapter 10 - Jacob’s Favored Son and A Few Thoughts

Chapter 11 - What Do I Do Now, Coach?

Final Thoughts

Epilogue - Recovering Unbelievers

Initial

Thoughts

Prologue

The Failure of Samuel

When Samuel grew old, he appointed his sons as Israel’s leaders. The name of his firstborn was Joel and the name of his second was Abijah, and they served at Beersheba. But his sons did not follow his ways. They turned aside after dishonest gain and accepted bribes and perverted justice.

—1 Samuel 8:1–3

Now how on earth could that have happened?

Samuel, called as a boy to be a servant of the Most High God in His very temple, had grown up straight and true under the headship of Eli. Through Eli’s example and the enduring love of a mother who never forgot her great sacrifice to the Lord, Samuel had grown into a great prophet and a wise judge.

A man of the finest integrity, he could stand before Israel on a great day of reckoning and hold himself out as absolutely righteous and fair, and with no one in a huge crowd even voicing a contrary view! (How many of our leaders today could pull that one off?)

A stern witness for God’s truth, he stood up to the mighty yet unstable King Saul time and again. Potential negative personal consequences did not influence his actions one bit—only the burning desire to speak forth the Word of the Lord!

How then could such a man, having seen the whole sorry story of Eli’s two unjust sons, raise two boys of his own, who were just as corrupt? And at what consequence to Israel! It was Israel’s rejection of those sons as judges that led them to demand the kingship that ultimately failed the nation. Truly, how?

When I first felt inspired to write this book, it was to try and find an answer to just that sort of question! If being a godly man, a pursuer of the truth, does not in and of itself produce the makings of a good father, what does? Is it possible to be both?

Which other godly men in the Bible produced wicked children? Which fathers produced righteous ones? Are there any worthwhile trends?

So much of the impact I will ultimately have on my Lord’s earth rides on the choices to be made by my own two kids, Micah and Abigail. Having realized this, I felt compelled to really try to glean everything I could from God’s Word—not just on how to do fathering right, but how not to screw it up.

So I began to take a look and see what I might discover.

Chapter 1

The Pride of Their Children

On a family retreat in 2006, in a creative Christian writing setting, I was looking for a passage in the Bible to meditate on and came across Proverbs 17:6, Children’s children are a crown to the aged, and parents are the pride of their children.

Interesting! And to be honest, a bit of a surprise. The above is the quote from the NIV. To make sure I was getting the author’s true intent, I checked my good old KJV, which puts it interestingly as well, Children’s children are the crown of old men, and the glory of children are their fathers.

Wow! I’d sure never noticed that before. So often, Scripture behaves like that, of course, living and breathing new things into you every day. But the latter part of the verse still caught me very much off guard.

Of course, the first part of the verse speaks to legacy. What godly man wouldn’t want a crown full of jewels, each gem a godly grandchild?

But the second part derailed me a bit at first. Parents are the "pride of their children? Their glory?" Not so much, if you go by what modern society tells you, right? Even in the most family friendly TV shows (i.e., Disney, Nickelodeon, etc.), it’s the cool happenin’ kids who seem to always end up teaching their goofy folks the lesson. At least in those shows, they do seem to tolerate their parents, but glory in them? Sheah, right…

But giving it some more careful thought, I remembered that when I was quite young, my parents were indeed my heroes. I thought they were perfect! According to this verse, I wasn’t the only child to think that way. I believe God ordained it that way, in all kids, to make families work.

Which leads me to ask, what do we as parents do with that pride and admiration?

Who hasn’t heard this pride on the playground? Something like, My dad could beat up your dad! Or how many times does a youngster, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, name their dad’s job? God must have put that in them!

Again, what do we as parents do with it?

Before answering, let me say a few things: I’m not writing this with a purpose of criticizing absent dads, abusive ones, or those drawn off into alcohol, drugs, affairs, or whatever. All those things are surely bad, and they contribute to what I’m concerned about—they are just not specifically the thing I’m writing about. Nor am I writing a how to book on parenting. There are plenty of those, and I doubt I could add a ton.

I’m simply asking God, through his Word, if there are a special handful of items that godly dads should focus on. Things they can reflect on daily, no matter what sort of day it is. Why? Because these might be the things that can preserve in their children, throughout childhood and adolescence, this pride the kids feel in us when they are young—this view of us as hero. Assuming we as dads are walking a godly path, what can make our kids keep on wanting to be just like us when they grow up?

This has to matter greatly to God. His last scriptural statement in the Old Testament (Malachi 4:6) tells us that the children’s and fathers’ hearts being turned one to another is that very thing needed to prevent the land being cursed. Being an optimist, I’d like to turn that around and say that getting it right is the key to great blessing. Anyway, you get the idea!

I’ve gone into this study believing that we can find this handful of things and that doing them will also make us more effective fathers in general. By the way, my idea that focusing on a few key things can make us more generally effective is not new. Our Lord Jesus encapsulated all the law into two Great Commandments—paraphrasing, to love God our Father with everything we’ve got and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. And he said if we could manage to walk in those, we’d find that we were keeping the whole thing after all!

As I indicated in the prologue, my intent is to first try to find these things by taking a look at godly fathers in the Bible who produced ungodly children. I believe that patterns must exist that can help us to come up with some worthwhile insights. Then we can check biblical fathers who did well with their kids and see if the patterns still fit!

Lord, for the sake of my own children as well as those of anyone who reads this book, help me to grasp what you want to show me through your Word, and help all our hearts to be turned more fully to our kids as we renew our focus. Amen.

And here we go!

Great Men,

With Fathering Breakdowns

Chapter 2

King David and Absalom

There are few tragedies played out on a grand scale in Scripture that are more heartbreaking than that of David and his third son, Absalom. Had he the notion, I believe Shakespeare might have written a great play about their story.

In it, we find that David, a man after God’s own heart, somehow had raised a packet of out-of-control, ungrateful, rebellious sons. At one point, Absalom (the most beloved to his father at the time) led a full-scale insurrection against David’s kingship and almost wrested that kingship away. The rebellion ended in the gruesome death of the beloved son and a completely broken heart within the father.

What crazy chain of events could possibly have led to this?

David’s valiance in battle, his confidence in his God, and his loyalty shone forth through all the stories recounted in 1 Samuel. He bore up well and righteously through years of slander and abuse by his predecessor, King Saul. He languished in the wilderness, fleeing from Saul for his life. David clung to God as he resisted the urge to kill Saul when it