Read Previous Articles in this Series:

Biblical Exhortations to Dads #1: Imitate Your Heavenly Father
Biblical Exhortations to Dads #2: Love Your Wife and Children
Biblical Exhortations to Dads #3: Lead Your Family
Biblical Exhortations to Dads #4: Provide for Your Family
Biblical Exhortations to Dads #5: Protect Your Family

If we want to be fathers who honor God and bless our children, we need to look at what God expects of dads.

Thankfully, God has told us in His Word what He expects from fathers. In this new series of articles, we’re exploring a list of biblical exhortations for fathers. We’ve previously reviewed the following exhortations:

1. Imitate Your Heavenly Father
2. Love Your Wife and Children
3. Lead Your Family
4. Provide for Your Family
5. Protect Your Family

Let’s look at the next exhortation on our list.

Disciple Your Children

A primary responsibility of Christian fathers is teaching their children to be disciples (or followers) of Christ. We are to be teaching them about God, His Word, the gospel, and how it applies to their lives.

In the Old Testament, we see a crystal clear command for parents to teach their children about God’s commands:

You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise (Deut 6:7).

How are we to teach our children about God and His Word? Diligently—with great effort and consistency. This is something that should permeate family life at all times. We are to teach them about the Lord in all circumstances all throughout the day. When you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

All Day, Every Day

Putting that in our modern vocabulary: when you’re getting ready for school in the morning, driving to soccer practice, and seated around the dinner table. It’s when your toddler is having a meltdown, your teenager gets A’s on a report card, your child tells you they are getting bullied at school, your child strikes out in Little League, you’re tucking your children in at night, and when they wake up in the night terrified because they’ve had a nightmare. We are to be diligently teaching them all the time. Every situation in family life is an opportunity to point your children to the Lord and to His Word.

We need to educate our children about who God is and what He expects. We need to teach them His Word so that they may have wisdom in life.

We should follow the example of Solomon in Proverbs of imparting wisdom and instruction to our kids. Towards the beginning of Proverbs, Solomon says this:

Hear, my son, your father’s instruction, and forsake not your mother’s teaching, for they are a graceful garland for your head and pendants for your neck (Prov 1:8-9).

He beckons his son to pay attention to his father’s instruction and his mother’s teaching. We need to be diligent in training them in the ways of the Lord:

Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it (Prov 22:6).

To be clear, we can’t save our children. Only God can take someone who is spiritually dead and raise them to life. Only God can take a heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh (Ezek 36:26-27; Eph 2:1-8). While we can’t save our children, we should be pointing them to the Lord at all times. (We’ll explore this priority more in our last article.)

Dads, if you teach your kids how to throw a football, change a tire, be diligent in their schoolwork, be kind and courteous, manage their money, and a hundred other great skills that will set them up for life, but you don’t teach them about God, you’re missing the mark. Seek their spiritual development above all else.