Stop Calling Yourself The Head of Your Home
Stop calling yourself the head of the house if you leave it headless and will not actually lead it. What follows is tough love from one man who struggles to be the man for my family to other men who struggle to be the man for theirs. If you are offended, use that energy to repent. Here goes.
A lot of Christian men like the word headship because it offends feminists and sounds strong without costing them anything. They like the idea of a wife who will submit to every whim his foolish heart can conjure and children who obey like little robots. But when headship starts demanding blood, sweat, tears, repentance, discipline, protection, grit, courage, and the kind of sacrifice that takes intestinal fortitude to muster… Well, they suddenly go missing.
That kind of a man is not a patriarch. He is a balloon animal in the shape of a man, but everyone knows he is a fraud.
A patriarch doesn’t need to be cajoled or corralled into leadership by his overburdened wife. He does not wait for her to remind him to pray, to read Scripture, to discipline the children, to know what is going on in his castle, or just the basics, like reminding him to care. Brother, if your wife has to drag you into basic Christian fatherhood, don’t act like the problem is feminism. The problem is you.
Your wife should not have to carry the family worship, prayers, discipline, schooling, schedule, screen rules, hard talks, and maintain the emotional climate of the house. She should not be the only one summoning the troops to go to church, motivating them to hit the books, or showing them how to grab the holy axe and make war against their flesh. If you are drifting around your home like a hot air balloon, not investing a molecule of Biblical and godly wisdom into your children, you are the problem. You are dead weight your family has to carry instead of you doing the lifting. You are the anchor they are fighting to sail against, instead of the sails ushering them into freedom. Stop. Enough said.
And the reason I can simply say stop is two fold. First, if you are the man, act like it. Lead like it. Don’t be a coward. Gird up your loins and put your big boy pants on and do it. Your generations will thank you for it and God will be honored in it.
Second, and you already know this, but caesar wants your children. In the same way Pharaoh wanted to slaughter the Hebrew boys, our godless society wants to chew up our children and spit them out as rainbow colored, genderless, SSRI addicted boys with man boobs and girls with lumberjack boots, who contribute nothing meaningful to society and abandon God’s vision for who they are. In the same way Herod wanted to murder all the babies in Bethlehem, our society today kills millions of them in the concentration camps and murder rooms called Planned Parenthood. Godless regimes always salivate over the children first and the only thing standing between you and them is YOU!
Which means you have to stop acting shocked that bad actors exist and are coming for your children. You need to start acting like it is a certainly, armoring up with the weapons of our Christian warfare, and building the kind of defensive measures that will protect the lives God has given you to vouchsafe. If all you do is bring home a paycheck, you have not actually provided for your family, and you are worse than an unbeliever. Not my words.
So what do you do? Understand that God gave those children to you. Not to the government schools. Not to the co-op. Not to the youth group. Not to the screen. To you. They eat your bread, breathe your air, sleep in your beds, and are watching how you live, how you lead, and how you worship. And, one day, everything they have seen in you, will be what they implement in the raising of your grandchildren. They watch your faces, your words, and your tone. They learn what you love, what you fear, what you excuse, what you cower over, what you praise, what you punish, and whether Jesus Christ is actually King in the house or just a character in the ongoing play you are conducting.
Remember this question: if nothing changes in what you are currently doing as a man, will your child leave your home knowing down to his sinews that Jesus Christ is Lord? Or that He was the pinch of salt on an overcrowded plate? If the latter, stop what you are doing and make changes today. Stop making excuses. Stop giving yourself grace that lets you off the hook to continue to do nothing. Grab yourself by the collar and get to work. Repent before your God. Repent to your wife. Repent to your kids. And do the radical thing and change.
What does that look like? Open up the Bible. Pray out loud. Sing psalms and hymns with your family. Work out with them to ensure they are strong. Bless them with your masculine presence. Correct them. Discipline them. Take them out into the woods. Shoot something, skin it, and cook it. Have them tag along when you fix something. Protect them from all the wolves that would seek to devour them. And, teach your sons and daughters, how to make war with the world, the flesh, and the devil, in their uniquely gendered ways. Stop being a useless fixture in your home, man up, and do it.
Again, your generations will thank you for it and God will be glorified in it.
