The Wise Man Who Became a Foolish Father

Let me quickly say, on the other hand, you have a foolish father who considers material provision a greater priority than spiritual direction.

You ask the average father, and even the average father perhaps in the church, are you providing for your children? And it would probably never cross their mind that you're talking about spiritual direction. They would think only physically, materially. They'd say, oh, man, I've got the best car seat in the world. I've got the best one they make.

Look at the straps and the fabric, and it's state of the art. Oh, am I ever providing for my child? Have you strapped him in for the ride of his life? Dads, if you had one wish for yourself regarding your parenting, what would it be? Would it be to teach your kids financial independence? Would it be to see them graduate without having made a serious mistake?

How about something like this? That you as a dad walk in wisdom, and that you see God incorporate biblical wisdom into the hearts and lives of your children. Could there be any greater treasure than that? Well, knowing the value of walking in wisdom and actually putting it into practice as a father are not the same thing. That's why Stephen called this message the wise man who became a foolish father. I want to address our fathers, our dads, and I am not trying, nor will I attempt in this sermon to harangue, but encourage, although I will say some challenging things I trust.

I want you to know I am preaching to myself as much as to any other father here. I read recently the story of a first time father named Michael Bryson. He and his wife had a little boy, and he decided to surprise her on her very first Mother's Day. She was having to work at the hospital where she worked as a nurse, so he decided to bring their son, Jason, to surprise her, and they did it. It was a wonderful party and balloons and laughter there for a little while until eventually Miriam had to go back to her post, and the two men returned to the car and prepared for the way home.

You can imagine all that stuff. Moms, you do it all the time. Dads, maybe you do it, too, where you get all that stuff that you got to carry along, and you get it all in the van or in the car, and he had the same problem. He balanced the baby carriage on the roof of his little car and wrestled the balloons out of the wind and stuffed them in the back seat and put the flowers on the floor board and got everything set, and then finally after getting everything arranged he headed home, and suddenly other drivers began to honk at him, and he couldn't figure out what was happening, and they began to flash their lights, and he still didn't know until he hit about 55 miles an hour on the highway, and then to his horror he heard scraping along the roof of his car, the baby carriage, and he looked in the rear view mirror and he saw Jason and that baby carriage slide down the back window, bounce a couple of times on the trunk and fall onto the interstate and begin to skid along. The driver in the car behind Michael's had spotted the baby carriage and was prepared. He screeched to a halt behind the car, the car seat there to shield it from oncoming traffic, and Michael slammed on his brakes as quick as he could. He got out of his car and he ran back to Jason, and believe it or not, Jason escaped with only a few minor scrapes that car seat had done everything the commercial said it would do, and more survived, but then the waves of fear and guilt and relief just washed over him and there, kneeling on the asphalt of that interstate, he held his son and he began to sob uncontrollably.

Can you imagine? I imagine we would do the same thing, dads, knowing we had put our child in that dangerous position. I wonder how many fathers today are committed with great passion indeed, not only in strapping their children into the seat of their van or their car, but strapping their children in for the ride of their lives.

Sure, checking to make sure the physical things are all there, they have food to eat and clothing to wear and an education, but how many never stopped to think of the spiritual safety of their sons and daughters and their eternal soul? If you wanted to, you could go to the Word of God and find one illustration after another of a father who failed. You'd have to look really hard to find one who succeeded.

In fact, you'd have to look 10 times harder. You have the stories of failures like Moses and Eli and Samuel and Saul and David and on and on and on. Perhaps the classic example and the one who stands as a poignant reminder and a challenge to all of us would be a man that everybody considered and called the wisest man on earth. If I were to give you a little quiz and ask you who was the wisest man apart from Jesus Christ who ever walked the face of the earth, you would answer Solomon. Yet a man who became perhaps the most foolish failure of a father recorded in the Bible.

And so I want to challenge us today as dads from the story of his success and ultimately his failure. If you have your Bibles, turn to 2 Chronicles 1. This is the wonderful story and text where God comes to young Solomon and he asks him, you give me any request and I'll fill it. Make one wish and you've got it. Can you imagine God coming to you and saying you can have one wish and you can't pull anything funny like, OK, I want three more wishes with your first wish. No, you got one wish.

But imagine that. What would you wish for? My wife and I were traveling with one of our daughters in a distant state and and I saw a billboard announcing that the state lottery had reached one hundred and thirteen million dollars. I do not endorse the lottery.

It's gambling and devastation to our society. But, man, just just there, one hundred and thirteen million dollars. A few miles down the road, my wife asked me, honey, what are you thinking about? I said, well, I'm in the middle of spending one hundred and thirteen million dollars. You know, it's not enough.

Actually, I needed more by the time I got to the end of my list. You know, we finished our campus. I want you to know. I want to put that first. We had another campus for the seminary, resident faculty, every ministry at a million plus a year to expand ministry, global missions, you name it.

And yes, I will admit to you sitting out in the driveway of my home was a was a fully restored, beautiful 1930s pickup truck with shiny hubcaps and wooden side walls. Man, was that living. One wish. What do you want? For seven, God appeared to Solomon and said to him, ask what I shall give you. And you remember what Solomon's wish was. He wanted what wisdom.

Give me wisdom. God granted him wisdom. And with it came everything else. In fact, I could quickly summarize Solomon's life by making two statements about it. Number one, he was a man who had it all.

And number two is a man who tried it all. He had it all. Wealth, fame, adoration, a powerful kingdom, his own his own personal house, by the way, spoke volumes and probably was a telling crack in the foundation of his life. He spent twice as much time building his own home as he did the great temple, the Yahweh.

That's a probably a telling quality of of his beginning demise. His home was nicknamed the House of the Forest of Lebanon after the massive pillars made out of cedar trees. My wife and I took a little anniversary trip to the Biltmore estate. You ever been there? He's going to go through the tour and you had a live bedroom after bedroom and bathroom after bathroom and 65 fireplaces. It covers four acres.

This millionaire built a house in 1895 and he just wanted to build as big as he could. And and you walk through this indoor winter garden, this atrium, this massive and impressive. And you walk through the dining room with with tapestries hanging from the ceiling to the floor from Europe. And you think, man, that is absolutely amazing.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have news for you. The Biltmore is an outbuilding to Solomon's house. Solomon's house was so lavishly furnished that if you were invited to eat a meal there, you would drink out of a solid gold vessel and you would eat off golden plates. Every three years, ships came with cargo that would be delivered to his private estate. The texts of scripture tell us they unloaded the gold and the silver and the ivory and the apes and the peacocks.

Talk about extravagance. Solomon had it all, anything and everything the world would love to have. He was the man who had it. Listen to him. He not only had it all, but he tried it all.

He held back from nothing. Solomon went after anything and everything, pleasure, business, recreation, sport, any thrill, you name it. He did it. There's a company that I came across some time ago called Thrill Seekers Unlimited. They offer an adrenaline vacation, they call it that. They promise a week of skydiving and bungee jumping and paragliding and rock climbing for the, quote, not so faint of heart.

I read this. One of his vacationers, who evidently had a little bit of the spirit in him, chose bungee jumping as his adrenaline sport. What made it so unusual is that Mr. S.L. Potter was 100 years old. He celebrated his 100th birthday by doing something he always wanted to do, bungee jump. His two children strongly protested. One of them was 68, the other was 74.

Dad, don't do it. He did it. He jumped safely from 200 feet in the air. Well, I think if you had taken a look at Solomon, you would have found that he was somebody who had tried everything. He was the one, by the way, who wrote that famous verse, whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.

You probably know his story. It doesn't end well. The wise man becomes a foolish man, and saddest of all, he becomes a foolish father. By the end of Solomon's life, his failure to live up to the proverbs he collected in his late 30s and 40s, then in his later years, a man filled with anger and frustration and discontentment. Somebody wrote this, and I think it would fit Solomon's story. In this world, there are two great tragedies.

One is not getting what you want, and the other is getting it. After his reign, his son, Rehoboam, would reign. And if you go to chapter 10 of 2 Chronicles, Rehoboam's reign of folly. In other words, the best we can say about this son of Solomon is that his reign was one of absolute total foolishness. The legacy of Solomon is not wisdom, it is folly.

In fact, a few years after Solomon's death, the great temple, the Yahweh, will be destroyed, but the temples he erected for those pagan wives, they would stand for 300 years. We know him as the wise man because we really don't know much about him. He became the foolish man.

How could that happen? How could a young man, tutored by Nathan the prophet, turn out this way? Better yet, how do we avoid this as fathers, and how do we walk in wisdom all the way to the tape? Well, let me give you a couple of observations, and I'll apply them.

I'm convinced of this. Godly fathers are passionate about two things, at least two. Number one, the shepherding in the home is more important than succeeding in the world. Let me quickly say, on the other hand, you have a foolish father who considers material provision a greater priority than spiritual direction.

You ask the average father, and even the average father perhaps in the church, are you providing for your children? And it would probably never cross their mind that you're talking about spiritual direction. They would think only physically, materially. They'd say, oh, man, I've got the best car seat in the world. I've got the best one they make.

Look at the straps and the fabric, and it's state of the art. Oh, am I ever providing for my child? Have you strapped him in for the ride of his life? Fatherhood is more than conceiving a child, more than feeding a child, more than putting clothing on their back and making sure they do their homework and making sure they get into college. It's more than helping them to learn how to manage money and stay out of debt and stay out of jail. But that's all the average father wants today. In the book, The Closing of the American Mind, written by Alan Bloom, he wrote these interesting words, quote, fathers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise.

Competence and success are all that they can imagine. Wisdom, by the way, is seeing life from God's perspective and applying God's truth to that life. It isn't something you master. It's something you live.

It is something you pursue. At any time, you can stop pursuing the way of wisdom. But listen to Solomon in his earlier years as he had that passion for his son to get wisdom. He wrote this in Proverbs 23, 15, my son, if your heart is wise, my heart will be glad and my inmost being will rejoice. He wrote further, the father of the righteous will greatly rejoice and he who begets a wise son will be glad in him. Son, you want to be a doctor?

Is that what you're saying? That's wonderful. But will you be a wise doctor? You want to be a mechanic? Wonderful. Will you be a wise mechanic? You want to be an artist?

Great. Will you be a wise artist? Will you see everything you do from God's perspective and apply God's truth to that life? Solomon challenged his son by telling him, my son, eat honey, for it is good. Yes, the honey from the comb is sweet to your taste. But the mouth of the soul, as it were, waters for sweet wisdom.

Just as you like sweet things to eat and you daddies are telling your kids, you know, by the way, this is really good to eat the chocolate-covered ones, you know, whatever you tell your kids. So the soul hungers for wisdom. How many fathers tell their sons and daughters, listen, you need to know how to handle money and you need to know how to do a little car repair and purchase clothing and handle a credit card and a bank account. You get all that stuff down and you're going to have a future. You'll have a future. Solomon said this, find wisdom and then you will have a future, Proverbs 24, 13, and your hope will not be cut off. The average parent is convinced that if we can just get them with a good education that somehow that will be all that matters, ladies and gentlemen, and especially today, for fathers and education without godly wisdom will only make your sons and daughters more intelligent failures at life. By the way, if all we needed to do was hand our kids a book and that would do it, Rehoboam could have been given the book of Proverbs by his dad and said, you know, here's a bestseller, I wrote it, all you need to do is read it and that'll do it for you.

No, the son or the daughter wants to know if you buy into it. They see how you live it. Maybe you think, well, at least I come home at night. At least we have the same address. 43% of the children in America do not have the same address as their fathers.

83% of the inner city. You say, well, I've got the same address. That's enough. Problem is that isn't enough.

It isn't nearly enough. And so we hand with this vacuum our families to the world and the world says, well, we'll fill that void. And so they do. For 30 years now, our culture has bought into the feminist agenda that men are overrated and even unnecessary.

And you know what? We deserve it because we weren't there. So somehow they do have to get along. Maybe we are unnecessary. And yet the data is now coming in that God knew what he meant when he gave the father the awesome responsibility of being the moral example and, as it were, the spiritual compass. I found it interesting just to read brand new research from the Southern Baptist Convention that revealed the influence of the father on even their children coming to faith in Christ. Obviously, a father cannot produce a spiritual person. We can pursue it and we can pray for it, but the Spirit of God has to awaken them. But what you find interesting is that those who choose to accept Christ so often follow their father. Listen to this data. If the child is the first person in the household to become a Christian, there's only a 3.5% probability that everyone else in the household will become Christians.

This is what they found. If the mother is the first to accept Christ, the percentage goes up to 17%. If the father is the first to place his faith in Christ, 93% of all households follow his conversion to Christ. Now let's go beyond that for a minute. Not just spiritual conversion, but let's think about the spiritual life. Let me ask you, Father, something. If your child's responsiveness to God and their hunger for the Word matches your hunger for the Word, if their desire to serve Christ in his church simply mirrored your passion for Christ in the church and advancing the gospel of Christ, if your child simply reflected your hunger for the Word, your pursuit of God, let me ask you, what kind of children would we have on our hands?

The absence of the father as a moral guide and a godly standard gave rise to another theory. We've now had 35 years of it. It's called the sexual revolution or liberty, a revolution that has now brought incredible devastation. Today, one out of every five Americans are infected with a disease transmitted sexually. In all, there are 12 million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases every single year.

Eight million of them are in, 26-year-olds and under. Every day, 6,000 teenagers become infected. And the message is still out there, of course, and they're hearing it, that what you need is, you know, birth control or no, what we need is self-control, amen? The father needs to communicate the message. The logic of our world is to go to the interstate with your teenager, toss them out on the interstate and then teach them how to dodge the cars. That's the logic of the world.

You teach them to stay away from the interstate. What I found interesting is that a secular journal known as the Journal of the American Medical Association actually bucked the current not too long ago and I'm sure they heard back because of it. But they published an editorial which I couldn't believe, quote, this has been the age of overindulgence, of tolerance for anything and anybody, of anti-celibacy, the age when homosexuality has come out of the closet and abortion has become on demand.

This is the age and has been of chlamydia and herpes. It was and is the age of AIDS. And then the editors concluded the shocking statement, this would be a great time to practice monogamy.

What a brilliant idea, right? It's interesting when the world comes to that conclusion. Solomon warned his son about immorality and he wrote to him in Proverbs 5-11, you are going to mourn at the latter day when your body is consumed. Who better to teach the value of fidelity and the safety of monogamy than a father who's chosen to love his wife and remain faithful to her and for their children to see that commitment. Number two, godly fathers are not only convinced that shepherding in the home is better than succeeding in the world, but they are convinced that being an example is better than simply giving instruction. You know, I hate to say that because that's so convicting to me. How about to you dads? You know, we would just like to think that if we give the instruction, that settles it.

But being an example is the issue. Solomon will become the fulfillment of the unsatisfied, the immoral, the unhappy, the discontented man he warned his son about in the book of Proverbs. He had written earlier, listen to these words he wrote to his son, his own iniquities will capture the wicked and he will be held with the cords of his sin. He will die for lack of instruction and in the greatness of his folly, he will go astray.

And Rehoboam was there the whole time watching him. If you asked him, well, what do you think about your father? He'd say, oh, everybody thinks my dad's a wise man, but I want you to know my dad couldn't care less about God. My dad doesn't care about the word of God. You should see the way he's living.

I know he's written a couple of books in it, but he doesn't really care about it anymore. What if our children could be interviewed and ask the question, what is your dad really like? And does he really care about God? And does he really care about God's word?

What would they say if they could get away with it? Most fathers think, well, you know, I'm just going to give him the instruction. I'm just going to throw this into the car seat with him and that'll do it.

It's not even the beginning. A godly father believes that his children's greatest development is not academic. It is not artistic. It is not social.

It is not economic. And all those things are wonderful. But the best development and the most important is spiritual. Well, what do we do about shepherding our children?

Let me give you a couple of thoughts. Number one, for dads here, let me encourage you by telling you that it's never too late to start. It's never too late to start. Begin with your own relationship with Jesus Christ. Begin with your own relationship with the Word of God. What do you need to change? What do you need to commit to? What would you never want your children to find out about you? You begin confessing there. That matters.

That matters. Pick up the Word of God and begin to evaluate everything in your life and the life of your family in the light of God's word and not the opinion of ungodly immoral wandering needy worldlings. It's never too late to start. You say, well, my children are grown.

They're gone. You know what the world needs? Godly grandfathers. Amen.

Wouldn't it be great to have godly grandfathers investing in the lives of their grandkids? It's never too late to start. Secondly, I want to encourage you by telling you it's way too early to quit. Some of you may be pursuing God. You know you're inconsistent. We all are. But you want God's best for your son or your daughter.

You want them to walk in the knowledge and wisdom of God's word, but there's little or no fruit in their lives. I want to tell you, don't quit. Don't stop. Don't abandon the shepherd's rod and staff even though they seem ineffective. Keep at it. You do not know what's happening in their lives even today.

Don't quit. One of my favorite commentaries on the book of Romans is a book or a commentary written by William R. Newell. Not very well known today. He was well known in the late 1800s and early 1900s. William R. Newell was a preacher's son and he rejected the faith of his mother and father. For some reason, he was filled with doubt and sarcasm and disbelief. He wanted nothing to do with it and his father and mother in a godly way attempted to reach him and they didn't. Came to the end of his high school years and his father commanded, you will go to one year of Bible college or I will not help you financially anywhere or beyond this point. And he said, well, okay, but I'm not interested. That's all right.

I want you to go one year. And so he applied to Moody Bible Institute in 1888 and he was rejected. R. A. Torrey, the president, wrote his father and said, we're not a reform school. We're a Bible college and turned him down. His father wrote a letter and he begged Dr. R. A. Torrey to please change his mind.

It may be their last chance. And R. A. Torrey changed his mind. And he said, William R. Newell can come to this school, but there are two stipulations. Number one, he can't break any rules. If he breaks one rule, he's gone.

And two, he has to meet with me every day. Newell agreed to those stipulations and he went to Moody Bible Institute with all of his anger and all of his sarcasm and all of his unbelief. And he kept the rules. And every day he would knock on Dr. Torrey's office and R. A. Torrey would let him in. And he would listen to William R. Newell with his rantings about Christianity. And he would quietly and patiently do what Newell's father had done.

He would take out the Bible and he would give him some answers and he would pray with them and dismiss them. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months, until one day, one day, William R. Newell came to Dr. R. A. Torrey's office and Torrey himself wrote these words, his face was aglow, like rain on parched ground. William R. Newell had come to faith in Jesus Christ. Don't quit.

You will never read William R. Newell's commentary. I doubt you will. But you have sung a hymn he wrote as a testimony to God's saving grace.

The lyrics go like this. Years I spent in vanity and pride. Caring not my Lord was crucified. Knowing not that it was for me he died on Calvary. Mercy there was great and grace was free.

Pardon there was multiplied to me. There my burdened soul found liberty at Calvary. The greatest desire in the heart of William R. Newell's father, whom we know nearly nothing about, was that his son would know and walk with the Savior and be prepared for the ride of his life. That was Stephen Davey and he called today's message, The Wise Man Who Became a Foolish Father. This is wisdom for the heart. We have two more messages for fathers and we'll bring you those over the next two broadcasts.

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