Good evening. I don't know how you follow so much of what's been said. By the way, Tom, if you went to our website and get a sermon, send an offering. So praise the Lord, stuff costs money. But so much has been said and such esteemed gentlemen have spoken.

It's difficult if some of you have ever been in this environment where the Lord has already talked and moved and then you have the keynotes so just pray for me because basically what y'all have done is kind of just rear-ended everything I wanted to kind of say plus y'all have said it like three or four times so I'm trusting the Lord to give us something that's that's worthwhile. I had a little bit more than what I'm going to do, but I do believe the text that the Lord had given me to start this out is still relevant. So if you still, if you have your Bibles, you Turn with me to Genesis chapter 18. I'll just take a couple of verses from Genesis 18. Scott already mentioned this text, and I'll just take a moment to talk about it just a little more while you're getting that on your phones or whatever you have.

My name is Carlton McLeod. I am a pastor at Cal Revival Church in the great city of Chesapeake. I've never been in Montgomery and Tom has given me the tour and I've taken pictures. This heat is a little different than Virginia heat, but Praise the Lord for that. I'm married, I have three beautiful children, all adopted, 12, six, and five.

And for years now, I have seen what I believe is some pretty encouraging fruit in the area of fatherhood and family in our church. Now, I pastor a very imperfect church, but my assignment tonight is to speak on the topic restoring biblical fatherhood, and perhaps Dr. Orange will cover some of what he has to share. Tamar, I'm honored to meet you, by the way, sir. I've heard a lot about you.

But what I haven't necessarily, I don't think what we've gotten to tonight is maybe some ideas about how to restore this thing called fatherhood. One of the brothers at the back mentioned earlier, how do we solve it? Well, before I read the text, I'll start with a quick sea story, as we used to say in the Navy. About five or six years ago, several pastors from the city of Chesapeake, Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Newport, New Hampton, we were all called to the state capital of Richmond to talk with city officials about some of the issues in welfare, some of the issues in family. And if any of you are familiar with Richmond, it's typical inner city with typical inner city problems, budgetary-wise and family-wise and crime and so forth that it goes up and down depending on the year.

And so some pastors were called by, it was a meeting called by the mayor. Mayor wasn't there but it was called by the mayor kind of on the hush hush and lots of representatives from his council and his government was there, and they actually called the meeting. Now, given some of the talk that we've had tonight and some of the wonderful comments that we had tonight, this might be interesting. So here we are, a bunch of pastors in the room. There's maybe 100 of us in this room.

And so, and there, we're getting all of the presentations. I mean all the PowerPoint is going. I mean we got this is going on in welfare. This is going on in falllessness. This is going on in crime.

And this is going on in poverty. And this is going on in drugs and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's just running and your eyes kinda glaze over at all the bad news. And so at some point, I don't, I believe it was, I forget which department it was, it may have been Human Services, it may have been, it may have been more on the economic side. One of the officials gets up and this is a true story, room full of pastors and city officials giving presentations, and he says, you know, you may wonder why we're here today.

We haven't really gotten to the point. And he kinda says, is that door closed back there? And he kinda looks around, and he's kinda like, okay. And we're all going, what is, and is he gonna ask us for money? I mean, that's what we normally do with you people.

Give us money, right? Give us a grant or something. And he looks around, true story, he looks around and he goes, okay, so pastors, There's charts and graphs behind us and everything, and he's like, we can't fix this. We need you to fix this. Amen.

So the government, at least in my state, kicked it back to the church. And we're sitting in a room going, what did he just say? We've, And he says, we've thrown millions at this problem. And another slide comes up about the money spent here and the money spent there and the money spent here and the money spent on WIC and the money spent and money spent and he says the thing the correlation that we have found that actually fixes this we can't even barely advocate for the way you can it's marriage and fathers because when marriage and fathers. Because when folk get married and stay married, this goes away.

And He says, when fathers are active in their children's lives, this all disappears. It immediately drops, and it's because of the constraints of government, and I'm no government expert, so forgive any governmental faux pas. I'm a preacher like Scott. But he says, we can't go after this the way you can. Only you can look a father in the eye and tell him what the Bible says about marriage and staying with that one woman and being faithful and raising his sons and raising his daughters and working.

And he doesn't have to be rich, he just needs to be there. And so all of us pastors were taken behind the woodshed by the government. I don't know how relevant that is in a room like this, but I'm telling you this was a true story in my state. Well, so fast forward several years later and I look around my church and some of the churches that I'm affiliated with and there are black men, white men, Hispanic men, Asian men, imperfect, flawed, but spending time almost daily with their children is in the word of God. Hey, that didn't cost anything.

And there's almost an immediate difference in the culture of the family when this happens. Genesis 18, verses 18 through 19, just for a few moments, seeing that Abraham shall surely become a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth shall be blessed in him. For I know him that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord to do justice and judgment that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which he hath spoken of him. Great Father, thank you tonight just for the reading of your word. Thank you for all the great men who have spoken and shared their hearts with us.

I pray, Lord, that over these next few moments you'll add something to our discussion tonight that points us in a direction, a way forward, something to consider. And I pray, Master, that you would be pleased and honored in all that we do. Let us never forget that if change really is going to happen, and it always happens in the heart of men, and it always happens via the gospel of Jesus Christ. Thank you for your son dying on the cross for our sin. Thank you, oh Lord, that when we face you one day, we'll face you covered in his blood.

Thank you, oh Lord, that Jesus didn't stay in the grave but rose from the dead. Thank you that he got up from the grave and now sits at your right hand making intercession even for us. Thank you that one day we'll receive glorified bodies and there'll be no more pain and no more suffering. There'll be no more fatherlessness or racism or anything else because you would have redeemed this fallen creation. We bless you tonight and we keep in mind tonight who you are and what you can do if we would preach your word in Jesus name.

Amen. So we all we know the deal right? We know the stats. I have some here, but some of them have already been mentioned. But pretty much everything changes when a father is present by every sociological statistic that we can possibly measure.

Things move, things adjust, and things change. One of my favorite statistics though which I think is is I think has some some relevancy in a in a gathering like this is something that came out many years ago by the was put out by the Baptist press. And it says this, it says, according to this particular report, if a child is the first person in the household to become a Christian, there's a 3.5% probability that everybody in the household will become a Christian. If the mother is the first person in the household to become a Christian, there's a 17% chance that everybody else in the house will get saved. If the father is the first person in the household to become a Christian, anybody want to guess?

3.5 if the child is first, 17% if the mom is first. Anybody wanna guess? 93. It goes from 3.5 to 17 exponentially to 93. This speaks to a father's spiritual influence on everything that happens in the household.

This was verified a few years later by the Gospel Coalition who said, "'In short, if a father does not go to church, "'no matter how faithful his wife's devotions, only one child in 50 will become a regular worshiper. If a father does go regularly, regardless of the practice of the mother, between 2 3rds and 3 quarters of their children will become churchgoers, regular and irregular. If a father goes but irregularly to church, he doesn't go all the time, Regardless of his wife's devotion, between a half and 2 thirds of their offspring will find themselves coming to church regularly or occasionally. A non-practicing mother with a regular father will see a minimum of 2 thirds of their children ending up in church. In contrast, a non-practicing father with a regular mother will see two-thirds of his children never darken the door of the church.

Again, the need for fathers is great. One of the great creation order blessings of fatherhood, of course, as I said, is his spiritual influence. And as I was sitting in the back listening and kind of marveling at some of the testimonies, The last brother who spoke, a man right here, and talked about his dad, I so sympathize with him. I don't want to kill my father too. I grew up in an alcoholic's home.

I grew up in an abusive alcoholic. You know, there are sloppy drunks and abusive drunks, and funny drunks. Well, my stepfather was an abusive drunk. And one of my vivid memories of childhood was running down the street behind my mother who he had beaten and chased out of the house. I was a little boy.

I couldn't have been more than eight or nine years old trying to find refuge in a neighbor's house. She had nothing on her feet. She just got out of the house as quickly as she could when she was able to escape, and I was in tow. And I was so little, I couldn't defend her. And any of you who have ever grown up in any kind of an environment like that, it does something to a little boy.

And so I started training myself and taking martial arts. I was gonna be Bruce Lee. I had something for daddy come about 17 years old. And I wish to try to pick fights with him as I got older because I wanted to hurt my father for what he did to my mother. So I'm not preaching from this ivory tower.

I have a biological father too, but one of my most vivid memories of his fatherhood was coming out of my room and going into the family room where he was watching TV with his living girlfriend and a couple that was coming, that was over. And it was 12, you know, 1 a.m. In the morning. And I'm trying to go to the bathroom as a young, I don't know, 11 year old boy visiting my father for the summer and they were having a little porn party in there. So I'm not, as I lay this out to you, I get it And this is kind of where I kind of came from, this brokenness in fatherhood.

They were there, but they were no examples at all. And so as I add my kind of news to what I've heard here as I sat in the back, I thought it might be interesting and maybe even helpful to dream a little bit. What if this thing turned around? That's one thing we haven't really done tonight. It's not that we couldn't have, I'm sure all of you could have, but for whatever reason, the night just didn't flow this way.

So it's left up to me now and that's cool What if what if this thing turned around what if there was an actual revival in fatherhood? What if it actually happened? What if the God that we serve is actually so good and so powerful that the thing turned around. Can you imagine with me the widespread impact of another, I don't know, 20, 30, 40 million fathers who caught on to a biblical message about what it means to honor Christ in their fatherhood and it radically shifts them quickly. And can you imagine what would happen if more men decided they were gonna love the Lord their God with all of their heart, with all their mind, with all their soul, with all their strength.

Can you imagine what would happen if he began to work hard, regardless of what he made, but he worked hard with a vision of where his family could be based upon his effort? Can you imagine what would happen if, I don't know, 10 million, this stream big, 20 million more men decided that they were gonna pursue holiness and decided that they were gonna refuse to hurt their own families with their own unrighteousness. Can you imagine what would happen if more men repented quickly when they failed? If they lovingly and tenderly but firmly declare the word of God in their homes every day regardless of their Race regardless of their background regardless with it. How many I mean, I understand that we got a big race problem But how do you know the gospel applies to everybody?

Come on, somebody say amen don't y'all I might have to preach up in here tonight. Okay, the gospel applies to everybody and it applies to everybody equally. We get to heaven, there's no black heaven, there's no white heaven, there's no red heaven, there's no yellow heaven. Yes, we have to deal with stuff here because we're broken and we're sinful and we're falling But the gospel is it was born out of the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ so can you imagine if black fathers heard that word and white fathers heard that word and Asian fathers heard that word and they decide okay. That's it.

I'm gonna give my life to the Lord. I'm gonna live for him, and I'm gonna line this thing up in my fatherhood the way the master has commanded me to. Friends, I'll say to you tonight that more than anything else, that is our hope. Amen. Our hope is still built in nothing less than Jesus blood and righteousness It's always been that way It will always be that way and to the extent that everything else we build is built on that then we'll be okay but if we get off into something else and think that's gonna fix it, it won't because it hasn't.

What would happen if our marriages got better, husbands became more tender, knew how to love their wives and tell them how beautiful they are. What would happen if husbands and fathers did family worship and spent time with their children in prayer and in catechism and all these tried and true methods that we've gotten away from. Friends, I'm telling you, it's bad, but it can be fixed because of the God that we serve. This is about restoring biblical fatherhood. And yeah, and we all have stories to tell, but what would happen if something changed?

Well, it did change at our church a little bit and it's still, we got a long way to go but I'll get to that. The need, the great need right now is God-fearing, Jesus-loving, Gospel-declaring, Biblically masculine men. It's almost like we're afraid of masculinity now, too. We just, we can't, if it's too hard, we can't, no, no, no, we need men who are not afraid to be men. I'm sorry, but, you know, half the time, we can't get men in church now because we got too many, first of all, we got too many services, they too long, and too many anniversaries.

Brother ain't going, I'm sorry, man, I just, you know. And then If you're a preacher, you can't have everybody wiping your sweat and calling everybody baby. Men ain't going to go for that. We can maybe talk some practical stuff tomorrow. OK.

But we need brothers in church right now. And we need to kind of understand that if we just did it the way God lined it up for us in the Word, that men would hear that message. But if we kind of PC it and softify it, they're like, I mean, you just run in a game. I can run a game in the street. We need men who will command their families to keep the way of the Lord.

Now, I'm gonna get to Genesis here in a moment, because that's the text that we read, but that word command is in there, at least in the King James that I just read. And that's a tough word in our day, because no one likes to be told what to do. But I just heard a few of y'all say there's no discipline like a father's discipline. And I just read to you some statistics that say that when a man gets on his job, his influence is exponentially powerful. We need men who would declare like Joshua, but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.

We need men who will lead forth his trained men born of his house and go in pursuit of relatives and friends taken captive by the enemy. We need men who despite the wickedness and chaos around us declare, nope, I'm the strong man of this house, by the grace of God you have to come through me. And why am I saying this? That sounds a little rah rah. You know what?

I'm saying it because a lot of times what I found men need flat out need to be challenged. Flat out, you need to look them in the eye and say, brother, here's your assignment. One of the reasons why our men's breakfasts start strong and fail and our men's ministries start strong and fail and these things keep happening over and over and over again because we treat men like women. Breakfast? Okay, yeah, yeah, we like to eat, don't get me wrong.

But if that's all you got, I mean, come on. You know, a breakfast, really, you have to put some nice flowers on the table and blah, blah, blah. Come on, man. That doesn't work like that. So if you're going to do a breakfast, then at least do it.

Give a charge at the breakfast. Here's what needs to happen, brothers. Here's where we have to improve. Here's see a man, a man down in his heart wants an assignment that's going to cost him his life. He's born for this.

He was bred. God, God built him to, to, to dream big and to tackle big things, and right in front of him is one of the biggest things in the world. If he has a family, he's charged with discipling his wife and children. Does it get any bigger than that? It's huge, right in front of him.

And if you can unlock that, I'm kind of getting ahead of myself, but if you can unlock that in the heart of your men and if you can love on your ladies enough, they'll allow that to happen right in their homes. Oh man, so much can change. I've seen it. I've seen men begin to lean forward and then go get other men and say, hey bro, you thought the gospel was soft. No, it's not soft.

Here's how this works. Here's what we're charged to do. Did you know that God commands you to disciple your wife? Did you know that God commands you to disciple your children? Once that clicked, did you know that you're responsible to oversee everything that they learn?

Yeah. So all of a sudden now, it's not about a Super Bowl party. This is what we need. If you want to restore biblical manhood, this is my assignment. Now, if you change the assignment, tell me, I'll do.

But if you wanna restore biblical manhood, then that means, now, call me crazy, many do, that means we have to preach the Bible. Okay, and if you're gonna restore, and this is, I came with notes that this was about restoring biblical manhood. So restoring biblical manhood means we have to go to the Bible and say, man, this is what you do. This is how it's done. I'm going to help you.

We'll hold you accountable. But this is what needs to happen. What we really need, Scott hit on it earlier. I'm going to circle back around here. And I'm not, by the way, discounting all of the expertise in this room in the realm of politics.

I'm just so ignorant on it, I can't really deal with it. So I admit my failure there. But what we really need to do as it relates to manhood and this advice, I believe, this council, I believe, is independent of who you stage in life, is independent of how much pigmentation of melanin you have in your skin, how coarse your hair is. Listen, we need to get back to embracing something called the sufficiency of scripture, both in our orthodoxy and in our orthopraxy. The word of God unfolds the beauty of male headship.

I don't know when I say that somebody gets up and walks out, but y'all stayed, praise God. Because of the rise of feminism and sadly, some hurtful imbalances within the church as well, this truth has been infused with all sorts of baggage. But I believe God meant for a man's leadership to be a blessing from the Garden of Eden, God established men and fathers to lead in love, to be priests and prophets, to be providers and protectors. And I'd like to submit to you that part of our issue is that we haven't trained, released, encouraged, or even taught men to be men, sometimes because we didn't know, sometimes because we're flat out too scared to. A man's ministry is a critical part of just about every facet of the plan of God as it relates to the family.

He is to provide safety, he is to provide security, and do all of these things in love. He is to be a teacher in his own home, and he is an integral part, as we'll talk about tomorrow if it be the Lord's will, he is an integral part of the ministry of the gathered church as well. The Bible calls Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob patriarchs. Biblically speaking, patriarchy simply means father-led. And I submit to you that one of our issues, one of the reasons why biblical fatherhood has not been restored is to be flat out, either don't believe that or we haven't taught that.

Now in some circles, I go and say that in, and literally you can see everybody, you can see faces change, noses wrinkling, I mean the whole thing goes on, while your plan isn't working. Still losing our children, right? Still got two-thirds without fathers, still got marriages breaking up, still got a porn problem, right? Still have a biblical worldview problem and the lower you go in age the worse it gets. Okay?

And all the money in the world hasn't fixed it to this point. Maybe we ought to try it God's way. Maybe. Maybe we ought to think, hmm, you know, we might, as we're working on these other worthy things, we might really up our game as it relates to actually teaching. Now, let me stop here real quick.

What do you want to do if you want to restore something, revive something, reform something, change something, if you want something to be reformed, if you want something to be revived, that RE gives us a clue, right? That means You have to go back. You have to go back and cry out to God again, figure out where we've blown it and do those first things over again. We have to go back to the word of God and say, okay, Lord, Where have we blown it here? And it wouldn't be that hard to figure out where we've blown it.

Wouldn't be that hard. And it's in some very simple fundamental, but hard to do areas. Bible simply teaches a father led home, And a lot of fathers simply have never been taught that. Now I pastor a predominantly African American church, although it's diversified quite a bit over the last year or two, but it's very much a predominantly African American church, and I'm very well aware of kind of the mindsets that crop up when you talk about a father-led home because of the fatherlessness. But how do you, do you fix it by ignoring the solution?

Or do you fix it by preaching the standard and then helping everybody get there? I've chosen the latter, but so often we ignore the discussion entirely for fear of offending when what we might wanna consider is saying, here's the plan, you may not be there now, but you have sons, you have daughters. So we're gonna create a biblical church with elders and deacons that can help us all get to this place. This is how everything else that we want to see changed is changed, it always starts in the heart of man. It always starts based on the gospel and then it always starts with a church and families that make up that church that decide we're gonna do it God's way.

This is all we did in our church. This is it. I didn't do anything else. I look around our church right now, And it's flawed, don't get me wrong, but I feel like I need to give a test, a little bit of an example, a little bit here tonight of what could happen. We started with the standard stuff where fathers and families were disjointed and so forth, and it was, and you know, I fell into that normal preacher inertia where the women are the readers, the women are the this and the that.

And so you just kind of tend to slide everything towards what makes the sisters happy, which is nothing wrong with trying to be a blessing to the sisters. But what I found was as I was a little bit imbalanced in that, I started losing, brothers was dropping off, and I went, what's going on? Then I started looking at what's happening with the children and they were coming, we were very programmatic, we came, they came through all our youth, I mean, some of you preachers will understand this, You went through every youth program in the book, still got pregnant, still fell, still got on crack, still joined the gangster. What happened? You trying to tell me a program can't fix this?

Not in every case, apparently. So I did this crazy thing. Meet the elders in our church. We said, let's just go back to the Bible and redraw it based on whatever we find out in the Bible. That's how I ran into Scott Brown and some other folks.

And my phone is beeping saying, stop. You see, the timer says stop. Okay. So, I'm not stopping right now. I ain't done.

Okay, wait a minute. Okay, everybody else took their time. All right. So, everybody else said, you know, I know I can't be long, but then the Lord said. All right, so let me do mine too, okay?

So now you look around and there are these fathers sitting with their children, And there are these fathers that are, it got infectious where men started to see, wait a minute, at your church what happens? They don't put the men down? No, no, no, no, they train them. And so now there are these fathers that are doing catechism, these fathers that are active in their children's lives, these fathers that are helping in our worship, and these fathers, and these fathers, and these fathers, and people come into our church and they look around and go, I've never been in a church where there's more men than women. Now, please, no horn tooting is actually going on here.

We're sinful and crazy and need help. But I'm just saying that God's word does work. Hallelujah, somebody. It actually does, all right? And so again, by way of caveat, I'm not trying to say that some of the other kind of the political bend is not needful, helpful.

I'm just saying I don't know a lot about it. So all I can do is tell you what I know about. And so if we get back to the sufficiency of scripture and saying, okay, if God said it, let's do it. If God didn't say it, we need to really think about whether or not We need to be a part of that. And so what does God say about manhood?

Well, he says this. OK, what does God say about womanhood? He did that. And this is where it gets tough, friends, because that means I actually have to teach manhood and womanhood and what the Bible actually says about those things in our church more than once. And I have to be willing, as the brother said, to lay truth out and then just let it all fall if it falls.

Now that is easier said than done, especially, the brother said it before, I had this happen in my church, on Father's Day, when you have women saying, you ought to be wishing me a happy Father's Day. Okay, that's a tough environment to preach biblical womanhood and biblical manhood. But it's the only way forward that's gonna mean anything because that's rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Genesis 18 and 19, I think it's, and that's our focus, just that one verse, I think it's ironic if not out and out prophetic that God speaks of his choice, Abraham, and what he's called Abraham to do in the midst of his anger at Sodom and Gomorrah. It's almost eerie how powerful it is in the day in which we live, where if we read Genesis 18 and 19, and we see that God has this thing that he's called Abraham to do because he knows that Abraham will command his children after him.

Meanwhile, he's on his way to wipe out Sodom and Gomorrah. I'm looking at that going, you know, I'm not trying to make a strong exegetical argument there. I'm just saying, wow, that seems like now. That really seems like what we need now. We need some Abrahams.

Because we're getting wiped out out there. It's as ugly as I've ever seen it. I was a kid in the 80s and I was telling somebody here today that we were, you know, maybe we weren't but at least from my perspective as a young person, it seemed like we were doing better with race relations in the 80s when we were break dancing against each other than we're doing now. If you'd have told me back when I had a Jerry curl that, well, actually, I had an S curl because we couldn't really afford Jerry. So we got S-ness, Spud Webb on his eye.

OK, So if you'd have told me that in 2017 people would be on college campuses advocating for segregated dorms, I'd have called you crazy. So we're getting slaughtered. So what needs to happen is a return to the preaching of the word, and that includes how we do with race. Listen, I don't have the breadth of experience to have walked through what Dr. Owens walked through.

So I choose my words with deference, But I'm hoping that the gospel still applies to everybody. This race thing is absolutely out of control. And too many Christians unquestioningly jump on the same tired, ungodly, unbiblical talking points on both sides. You would think some Christians would go, wait a minute, wait a minute. Before we have the discussion about skin tone, can we at least acknowledge that there are two races?

Sheep and goats. Because that gives us a unifying point from which to make other points. If we don't do that, are you mean, no, no, see I don't buy into the race foolishness where we are, where my monkey develops slower than your monkey. Because if you trace the evolutionary, this is not the subject, but we've heard so much. So if you trace the evolutionary kind of foolishness back a little, a couple hundred years, What you find is, oh, wait a minute, the whole concept of race, the way we use it now, was that, oh, Caucasoids came from this monkey, and that was a smart monkey.

Negroids came from this monkey, and it wasn't so smart. Really, Christian? Really? Okay, so at a minimum, can we go back to, okay, I'm sorry, that was an aside, that one's for free, but we will pass the offer plate if you really want to. So the entire narrative of Genesis 18 and 19 is God and a couple of angels ready to go just take Sodom and Gomorrah to town based on what he had heard, the wickedness that he had heard.

And I'd just like to throw out a quick point. I think it's prophetic. I think it's prophetic that that context is so similar to where we are now. We need fathers for exactly the same reason to command his family after him and we're in almost a similar setup where we got Sodom and Gomorrah raging all around us and some would say even impending judgment. No one should misconstrue God's intentions and no one should say that this word command is used for ill intent.

A man is never to be sinfully harsh or unbiblically domineering, nor should he be violent with his wife or administer an inappropriate level of discipline to his children. Yeah, but getting put in the hospital is an inappropriate level of discipline. I've had a few inappropriate levels leveled on my head as well. Indeed, the qualifications for elders gives us how a man ought to act. We don't have time to go there, but read 1 Timothy chapter 3 when you get a moment, or Titus 1, and you'll see models for manhood there.

But neither is a man to be passive. He is not to be spiritually wimpy, nor is he to allow his household to get out of control as Eli did. Abraham was to command his children and household after him, and every godly father by the grace of God must do the same. And friends, we must eventually get to the point where we challenge fathers who call themselves Christians to behave like Christian fathers. In love, in grace, walking with him, but nevertheless, he has to be met in that place and say, here it is, and I've seen it.

I've seen the fruit of it. I've seen men who went from, you know, just all they know is ESPN and the last three pointer LeBron hit, or LeBron doesn't hit threes, but anyway, or whoever, sometimes. All of a sudden now he's very interested in building his library because the weight of the responsibility of what he's been given to do, which is sitting squarely on his shoulders. And oh, by the way, in that place, no excuses. Most men like that, if they get it, they won't accept any excuses.

They won't tolerate, they won't use a bunch of I, bah, bah, bah, I came out of a broken home, I did too. Okay, but I'm a Christian, I've received the gospel by the grace of God. Oh, I found out what he taught me. Scott taught me and I see it. Jason taught me and I see it.

Okay, I have to go, so whether that means I need to make an adjustment or whether that means they need to work a little harder here or do whatever. Once a guy gets it, he gets it and this is what we're missing. We're missing solar scripture coming to bear on fatherhood. We got a lot of worldly thoughts and worldly ideas and a lot of carnality and not as much scripture. The truth of the word of God coming to bear on fatherhood.

And so very quickly, Abraham wants to do a few things here from this verse. Number one, he was to command his family after him. That means he was to set an example. Brother, they already mentioned it kind of. Abraham was a man of hospitality in this chapter.

We didn't have time to read it, but the angels came, and of course he rolled out the carpet for them. He was a man of humility and reverence, prostrating himself before the Lord in that very chapter, a man of faith, If we go back one chapter, believing the Lord for the Son of promise, a man of deep love and prayer, if you continue reading, he cries out for Sodom, cries out for Gomorrah, and that's the kind of men we ought to be. Number two, Abraham was to command his family to keep the way of the Lord. I've kind of already mentioned this, but if we want to see a restoration of biblical manhood, this is how men have to start thinking. And it's across the board, because this is the kind of thinking that brings God's covenantal blessings upon families, upon churches, regions, and nations.

So a man looks into his household and everything now come with his wife's aid comes under his purview. Okay, is our entertainment godly? Is our education godly? Hey, here's a topic. Should I let my daughter walk out the house looking like that?

I never get an amen there. Okay, so y'all just kept up with the status quo. All right, so I mean, this is the whole nine yards. He doesn't become this overlord, but he recognizes his responsibility to serve his family with the word of God and He uses his influence for good and godly purposes I have a 12 year old and all the fashions want her to look like Beyonce I don't want her to look like Beyonce they want all the fashions frankly want her to look like a streetwalker and I refuse And so so we have this thing in my house where I'm like, okay, it's particularly in the summertime, all right, spin. Okay, good, that's presentable.

Why, now why are we doing that? Because you want me to honor God with the way that I dress, what's in my heart, should show on my body. And what else did Daddy tell you? That if my skirt is too short, to sit down on a cold chair is too short. Thank you.

Right? He commands his family then to keep the way of the Lord. He uses the creation order influence that he's been given three. He is to command his family towards justice and judgment. And this is where some of you who are more learned than I could probably make some really good points about some of the other things that we've talked about tonight.

But if you look, that word justice means rightness to actually be holy in practice. That word judgment implies making right decisions on a matter. I would suppose that would apply legally, but it certainly applies to the development of a biblical worldview, something else within a father and mother's purview. And so right in this one little verse, all of these nuggets of a father's teaching exist for the purpose of fulfilling God's covenant, which was to bring Israel into the land. But ultimately, it was about a Lord that was coming who was preeminent, a father must, a must must command his family after him.

In other words, it's not just about circumstantial, temporary blessings, but it's about eternal blessings. One of the pastors of our church said, and I'm almost done, he says, how the Lord must have loved Abraham, to choose him out of the world, to make him aware of his plans to render judgment, but to also show him the great blessing that will come upon him because he obeyed God by faith. Brother and sister and if we would obey God by faith, Dr. One's already said it, know the voice of God. If we would obey God by faith in this area of fatherhood and just do what the scriptures say.

Teach them, model them. Truth is we need godly fathers, which presupposes godly marriages, but we need godly fathers more than we realize. So here's what I did quickly. Here's what I did. And some of you may have different testimonies.

First of all, when we realized that the primary key to pass the generation, the faith on to the next generation was the teaching of fathers, not your youth pastor. Because the most successful youth pastors practically live with the kids, i.e., fathered them. So when we realized, although you want to use Pastor Cool, but just Don't think he can be a surrogate father to 50 kids. He can't be, it's impossible, right? So when we realized that we had to train up fathers if we were gonna have any hope to see the faith pass on to the next generation with any kind of success, then we went to prayer.

The first thing we did, we prayed. We knew we were deficient. I knew I was deficient. I knew I had substituted programs and money and cute things for exhorting men to wade in there and spend significant and reorder their lives around the church and family. And so We prayed, we repented, we cried out, and we went, Lord, we failed.

I thought maybe if I did this or put some money over here, and I'm sorry, and we cried out. We cried out to God. That's one practical thing we could do as it relates to biblical fatherhood. We could get before the throne of God and say, Lord, we've blown it. We're sorry, would you help us?

Okay, number two, we modeled and taught, we actually started teaching. You wanna see something change, you wanna see something revive, you have to cry out and teach it. In the context of prayer, you got to cry out and teach it. I got before my church and literally said, I'm sorry. I messed this up.

Would y'all please forgive us for putting emphasis where it should not have been put in almost totally ignoring this. Would you give us a chance to get this right, please? And so we started to teach about fatherhood and family. And this is where Scott's ministry really came in. Cause I just, frankly, Scott, I just kind of took your stuff and put my name on it a lot of times.

I need to send you an offering, actually. That's why I love this man. But again, there are other people who've done this as well, and Scott wouldn't want me to toot his horn. There's many other good men who've said these things. But I repented, first of all, in prayer.

And then we started to teach. We said, we need to just do A to Z through the Bible and figure out what a godly family is, what a godly father is, what a godly mother is. And we need the courage that when it clashes against what we're all doing, we need the courage to back up and bow our heads and say, yes, Lord. OK? That's the tough part.

The teaching actually isn't that hard. It's the change part that's hard. OK? Then number three, we invested in men on purpose. We started spending time with men, and there was like no food.

How do you ever get them to come without food? But we purposely started pouring time into men and encouraging them to go lead their families. And that became this guy who's bringing this guy who brings... Now, it's not always like that, but it started that way and we still see the fruit of that and we need to continue to give attention to pouring into men with a specific purpose. That's so important.

That's so important. Brothers, here's some things we've learned about prayer and helping your family and praying with your little ones and interacting with your children and send them home, fired up and ready to go love their wives and children. And it makes a difference in her life and makes a difference in the lives of the children. Number four, we try to hold one another accountable. This is hard.

It's against everything else that we see out there. You just can't push a button and get this done. This is active fathering, active manhood, almost 24-7. And so we had to hold, we started holding each other accountable in an encouraging way. Hey man, how you doing?

Yeah, you know what, that thing I tried for family worship didn't work too good. Okay, hey, I got this 16-year-old, and now that I'm trying to be a good father, she's in total rebellion, what do I do? You know, that kind of stuff. And then finally we celebrated a few wins, you know, when we started seeing things go well in people's lives, we got around that brother and we congratulated him and we prayed with him and we rejoiced with him. And now, none of this sounds very, you know, you can't really put this in a box.

Nothing I've said. It doesn't package well. Maybe That's one of the reasons why it's a hard sell. But if you wanna restore biblical fatherhood, here's the one thing I want you to take away from my rambling talk tonight, and that's this. Go back to the Bible.

Go back to God's word. Let the Holy Spirit teach you what it says and then determine in your heart, okay, I'm gonna go do this. If it says this is about fatherhood, this is about motherhood, this is about womanhood, this is about church, this is about, I'm gonna go do this and wherever I find my life out of alignment with that, then I'm going to do the very best I can to bring my life into alignment with the inerrant, inspired, infallible, sufficient Word of God. That's my time. God bless you.

Thank you so much.