Train in Morality

Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

--Paul of Tarsus in a letter to the Christian Church at Ephesus

Sometimes as a father I feel the burden to prepare my kids for the ‘real world’. Usually this line of reasoning takes me into some moral gray zone where I start trying to justify lying or fighting or some other such thing. The truth is, God has given us righteousness as a breastplate and faith as shield to protect us from whatever may come at us in the ‘real world’.

If a child is trained from birth to know x, y, and z are wrong and that a, b, and c are right, he will remember these rules all his life. Even when he is of a rebellious age, it will be very clear what he is rebelling against and in what direction he must go to defy these rules.

If, instead, a child is given no guidance, if he is told not to talk about certain things like sin and morality because he may offend some people (usually those people who practice sin and prefer immorality for some reason), if he is taught that a thing is sometimes wrong and sometimes right, he will be lost. He will have no touchstone by which to test his choices.

Such a child is not beyond hope by any means. Every man is born with a conscience. But it is harder to find studs in a wall with a stud finder than it is to mark them while the sheetrock is off and they are plain to see.

What happens when you bring the stud finder to a wall so difficult to penetrate that it becomes unreliable? How then do you choose where to drive the nail? Eventually, things descend into a guessing game where nail after nail is driven until finally something solid is struck. This exercise leaves the laborer exhausted and the wall devastated. How much more do we see exhaustion and devastation as the results of thrashing around in moral ambiguity, trying every likely possibility and retrying when those fail.

Contrast that with the man who knows where to find the studs under the plaster. He knows because the one who built the house has shown him exactly where each one is. Such a man will not, if he is wise, waste energy where there is nothing solid to strike. Again, so it is in life. Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain.

We do our children no good service when we fail to mark the boundaries between good and evil. This is the purpose of morality. It is not only to please God, which it does, but to shelter us from the storms of this fallen world. It is to keep us safe, whole and in our right mind until our savior can rescue us.

Father’s do not forget to pass on these lessons along with all the other gifts you give. Do not fail to preserve your own integrity. Keep it. Protect it. It is a sacred trust intended for generations yet unseen. May it pass through our hands unharmed.