As a husband and a father, my chief aim is to reflect Jesus in my home and point my family to Christ. As laid out in Ephesians 5, Colossians 3, and 1 Peter 2, a man is called to serve and lead his house in the same manner Jesus serves and leads His Church. This call is a call to image Jesus to those you love. A father best does this when he acts in the Munis Triplex: as dad, I am the prophet, priest, and king of my home.
Because you are the best picture of Jesus your wife and children will ever see, it is essential to get this right.
Is There a Prophet in the House?
To be a prophet is to be God’s mouthpiece. In your home, you are the primary mouthpiece of God. Like the prophets of old, your job is to speak on behalf of God. You bring God [His Word] to the people under your care.
Being a prophet is not an easy task. Nor is it for the faint of heart. Being a prophet isn’t popular —you rarely tell people what they want to hear. Instead, you tell them what they need to hear despite the surrounding noise.
Everything in your child’s life is acting like a prophet. Thousands of false prophets tell your children what they want to hear daily. From the false prophetess Disney to the false prophets in many churches, most of what your family hears is a pro-humanistic, anti-god message.
To be clear, we watch Disney movies in my house. This is not a call to go all Benedictine and run to the hills. We are not of this world, but we are sent into this world. As fathers, we must recognize that false prophets come in all shapes and sizes. These voices are everywhere. We can’t shield our family from them. Instead of shielding our children from these voices, we need to drown out the voices. We watch lots of Cars in my house, but Lightning McQueen does not have the loudest voice or the last word. I do.
Prophet of Your House
As you reflect Jesus as prophet, your voice needs to be the loudest voice in the house. And it has to be because the world is a noisy place. Day in and day out, the world tells your kids to “be god.”
Christian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky once declared, “If God does not exist, then anything is permissible with man.” Along with being a tremendous writer, Fyodor proved to be a very capable prophet. Today, we live in a profoundly post-Christian culture— a culture where the Bible is not only inaccurate but also impossible. Our children are coming to age in what Nietzsche called the “wake of God’s death,” a time when “God is dead,” and self reigns supreme. Daily, our families are being told, “self is god.”
Imagine growing up and sincerely believing that you are God. This is precisely where our children are today. Our children are told they possess God’s privileges, prerogatives, and power. They are growing up in a society where they can define themselves at every level. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, queer, intersex, pansexual, two-spirit, androgynous, asexual —“You are who you say you are— your truth is your truth.”
“Live your truth” is the modern youth’s mantra, a claim that sounds eerily similar to the one Jesus makes (Jn. 14:6) and the one God makes... “I Am” (Ex. 3:14).
God, of course, is correct in declaring “I am” because He is! God’s self-defining declaration comes from His self-existence, a property belonging only to God. Yet, few today believe this. Our culture teaches that God is not self-existent. Indeed, we are told that God is non-existent. If there is no one, true God, then everyone is a god, and ultimately, self-definition becomes the mantra of the people. We see and hear it everywhere:
“You can be whatever you want to be.”
“Believe in yourself.”
“Follow your heart.”
“Trust your instincts.”
“Live your best life.”
All these wretched phrases are aimed at our children— words that inspire a self-definition that can only be born of self-existence. Our children are growing up in a world that tells them that they are self-existing, that they are God, and it is a lie straight from hell.
Satan wields the sword of self-definition because he knows it always leads to self-destruction. Just ask Adam and Eve. Self-definition destroyed the first civilization and has been destroying societies ever since.
Think about our modern-day prophets and the plight of our culture. Psychologists have redrawn the boundaries of the family. The High Courts have redefined marriage. Men and women have switched roles. Life has lost its sanctity. Self-actualization is the new sanctification. The Church is not immune—today—Churches look like amusement parks, and sermons sound like self-help seminars. The result? We are all becoming little gods, and the weight is unbearable. It is not by chance that youth anxiety and suicide are at an all-time high. Who can live under the pressure of being God, absent the privilege and power of actually being God? Placing the burden of godhood on a child is equivalent to dropping a house on them— it’s an unbearable weight.