FamilyLife Today®

Bruce: I don't care about my name being remembered, but I would love for my boys and my wife to remember me as someone who was after Jesus's heart. If I can demonstrate that in the ways that I repent and the ways that I'm intentional about showing them, sharing the testimony, the things my mom overcame and her mom and my wife's mom and her dad, the things they've overcome on their journey so that we can look to the author and perfecter of our faith and run this race.

Dave Wilson: Welcome to FamilyLife Today where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Dave Wilson.

Ann Wilson: And I'm Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com. This is FamilyLife Today.

Dave Wilson: One final day with just us men in the studio. No women here, just us guys talking about marriage, talking about parenting, talking about legacy. What would you guys say to a guy like Bruce? And I'm talking season of life. They've got young kids. We all have older kids. They want to do fathering well. They want to be the best husband. If you had 30 minutes with them at lunch, what would you say?

Bruce: There's a lot of pressure to get this thing right, parenting. Just trust God with your kids. So yeah, be intentional about teaching your children. You're going to fail from time to time. Don't be so hard on yourself. And learn from other good dads.

George: Failure's baked in for sure. You're going to fail. Just be ready for that. It's okay. It's okay.

Bruce: Not to minimize sin, because that's not okay. Confession is a part of that. And I think that's like the beautiful gospel demonstration. I demonstrate the gospel to my kids now, when before they thought I was perfect. Ryan, you got one?

Ryan: For me, I would probably say we've already said a lot of good stuff about being intentional and confessing and really getting in a few good habits. But I think some for me is just the perspective of my goal isn't just for my kids to make my life easier. And there is some great wisdom to when the Proverb talks about when you discipline your children, it will give their parents rest.

There is a lot of truth to that and you want to be a good discipline parent, but recognizing that they are working out their own sin. And so to not be surprised when they break your heart because they will break your heart and they will break it in ways that allow you to connect with the heart of the Father.

Dave Wilson: Because you think, how often does God feel this? If he truly loves us the way he says he does and that he's a personal God, and to see how many times have I been wayward to that in my thoughts. So you multiply that by billions and for God to be broken. I would just say it's going to happen. Feel the brokenness in your own heart. Feel the hurt, feel the pain, and then go, "Okay, then how do we move forward? And how do I love them in such a way that God loves me?"

Something happened in you when you said that. You just replayed the conversations where my daughter in college just working out her own sinfulness. And you get shocked and you go, "That's not how we raised you and that's not how you've presented yourself to us." And then you find out the real story. My son in high school and catching him with weed again. And how do you deal with in that moment? How do you bring him back to God?

The goal isn't to make my life better in this moment or to be embarrassed because of how he— we got a call from a mom basically outing one of our kids. You talk about embarrassing and you're starting to think about your perception management where you're in ministry and all this kind of stuff and you're feeling all that and all you feel is anger like, "How could my kid do this to me?" And it's like you got to step back from that and go, "We all do that." So now how do I draw them back to God in this moment, still give them discipline, they've got to have consequences. But my goal isn't to make my life better now and more orderly from what the chaos they just brought in. My goal now is to move through that chaos and connect them to a Savior and leave that impression.

Bruce: It's easy to think as a parent your goal is to have a perfect righteous son or daughter when they're 18. That's not the goal. And so you sort of parent in a way that you don't want them to ruin your reputation in high school and you put this pressure on them and it's like, no, the goal is that when they're 30 or 40, and maybe this fall that they're taking is God's journey to get them to be the man of God you're hoping they're going to be in their 30s.

Again, I'm not— and then when I had a 30-year-old, I'm like, "When they're 40!" You keep pushing it back. But it isn't— I think we get stuck in especially as Christian parents that we have to have this— they're reflecting us more than their own life. It's how am I looking as a parent, especially when you're in ministry? And that's so wrong. I would say to a young dad, and we've already talked about it, when you feel the nudge or even the thought and it could be the Holy Spirit like, "I should pray with her," pray.

Or "I should open the Word of God with my son," he's 10, he's 15, he's 18, do it. Don't wait a day, don't even wait an hour, grab that moment. That's the Holy Spirit right there, that's who you're talking about. And I just know that there were so many of those I look back that I thought I'll do it later today or later tomorrow. The moment's gone, the day's gone, the week's gone, the year's gone. And then you'd hear older dads when you're in your 30s or 40s go, "Oh man, it's going to— you're going to blink, they're going to be gone." I'm like, "Yeah, whatever, this is forever," you're changing diapers, it just feels like, and then you blink and you're like, "How many days did I miss?"

Ryan: I wish I had put a visual reminder, a visual reminder of how quick it's passing. Somebody gave the illustration of they put a marble in, a marble for every week of your kid's life, and then you just take one out every week. And you start to see that my time is going and it helps you just get reminded that while it's called today, how do we do today?

Dave Wilson: Last thing we'll talk about: legacy. And I don't know what you think of this verse in Exodus 20, it's in the Ten Commandments, it's actually the second commandment, you shall not make a false image. And then he ends it with, "I'm a jealous God who will visit the sins of the father on the third and fourth generation." And most people stop there and don't realize verse five says, "And to a thousand generations I will bless for the father that obeys and loves my commands."

So we only think of the sins of the father. But there is a truth there that's not an idea, it will happen. Our sins are going down our generation for several generations unless we stop them. In other words, I don't know what your dad gave you, but mine was not good. It was abuse and alcohol and adultery and divorce. And so I had this drive, especially as I got involved with FamilyLife, they gave me a vision for what marriage and family could be. Dennis Rainey became a role model, I didn't know him very well, I'm like, "I want that, I've never seen that."

So I was like, we got to stop this. The Wilson name has to change from this to something else. Others get a godly legacy and you continue it. What's your journey? Because now your kids are living out you either stopped it and tried to change something from ungodly to godly or you had godly and you continued it. But I know it's visceral for me. I hear the word legacy and I'm like, "I got to be a legacy changer." And now I'm starting to see some of the ripple effect. I just preached Sunday with my son. We got to do a thousand-man breakfast with eleven Detroit Lions and a couple of guys, it was really just this men's thing. And I'm sitting there and I turned to him, I go, "Cody, I can't believe we're doing— you know what this feels like to be able to do this with my son thinking of where I came from?" So I got a little glimpse of "Oh God has done something." What do you connect with when you hear that? Not my story, but the whole—

Ryan: First of all, I just felt the weight of that. That's weighty. It is. What do you mean weighty? It's weighty to know the impact that I have on my children as a dad, negative, positive, whatever it is. It's a huge impact.

Bruce: Even when you hear the word father wounds, you think, "Am I wounding them?" Yeah, it's a heavy weight. It's weighty, but at the same time, I'm thinking about the non-examples I had and the humans. My father was a human, my mom was a human. We do a lot of dumb and sinful and bad stuff. We do a lot of beautiful things. So again, it just for me, it just goes back to trusting that God loves my kids more than I ever could.

So just to do the next right thing, as I take steps of obedience and repentance. I've always said I don't care about my name being remembered, but I would love for my boys and my wife to remember me as someone who was after Jesus's heart. And if I can demonstrate that in the ways that I repent and the ways that I'm intentional about showing them, sharing the testimony— what's that passage that talks about we were overcome by the power of the blood? Revelation, by the blood of the Lamb and the word of their testimony.

Like sharing that with my boys. These aren't the trials and difficulties— so remembering also that great cloud of witnesses. I think that's what I'm alluding to. Like the things my mom overcame and her mom and my wife's mom and her dad, the things they've overcome on their journey. Remembering the Moseses and the Abrahams and the things that they overcame on their journey so that we can look to the author and perfecter of our faith, my kids' faith, and run this race, because this ain't easy. It's an endurance race. It's the long game.

George: I think for me, when I think of legacy, thinking about where I come from, and I used to be really angry with my parents. I didn't grow up with either one of my parents really. They were just not there. They had their own struggles. They did the best they could with the information that they had. That's where I just leave it up to. They had some wrong information, which led them down some really bad decisions, and God was able to redeem that to pull me to where I am right now.

So I'm thankful for that. And I think the legacy I always want to leave with my kids is that no matter what, trust God with wherever you're going. And I'm always constantly in the back of my mind is Numbers 23:19 and I love that story because you got Balak and Balaam. And he's sitting there and he's trying to curse the people of God and God was like, "No, you're not going to do that." And then there's just this one thing and he's like, "Man, I can only do what God says to do."

And you got to think, he's being paid to curse these people, God's people, and God is talking to him and he's like, "Man, you can pay me whatever you want to pay me, I still got to do what he says I got to do." And then there's this one line and this verse 19 and he says, "God is not a man that he should lie, nor the son of man that he should repent. If he said it, he's going to do it. If he promised it, he's going to make it good." And that's the motto that I live by is that God said he's going to take care of it somehow, some way, we're just going to have to deal with that. So I lean into that pretty heavy with my kids because I want them to know that I don't have any of the answers really. I don't have any of the answers worked out. I'm going to make mistakes, I'm going to try to do the best I can, but at the end of the day, lean into God and if he says do it, do it.

Ryan: Whenever you say the word legacy and I think about fathers and sons and what's been passed on, it's Proverbs 17:6 says that "the glory of the children is their fathers." And glory, "kabod" in the Hebrew, is weight. And that weight can be positive and it can be negative. And I think about my dad. And I remember when I was 16 years old, we were going to where my dad grew up and he grew up poor dirt farmer in North Carolina.

His dad didn't make a lot of money. His dad died when I was probably seven or eight, I didn't really know him very well. His mom died when he was 10. So he grew up with a stepmom who was real sweet and a hurricane had hit North Carolina and had destroyed this barn. So he said, "We're going to go down." I remember it because that's when my dad decided to finally have the sex talk with me. So we get down to this barn and everything's wrecked and he said, "Just find something of value, pull it out."

So I start finding rakes and shovels and all this stuff and then I find these Mason jars and I start picking these Mason jars out and they have this yellowish liquid and I start stacking these Mason jars and now it's a game and I stack up like 13 of them. And I look at my dad and I said, "Dad, what are these?" And he said, "Oh, that's my dad's homemade brew." And it was in that moment at 16 I realized that my scrapbook looked a lot different than my dad's scrapbook.

And when he— his dad was an angry drunk. And when he was eight years old, he told me a time where he and his dad came home and they lived in a small house, like two-bedroom house. So he heard his dad come home and he was yelling about something and my dad just peeks out of the door and he sees his mom on the ground and his dad saying, "If you get up, I'm going to kill you." Like my dad's taking a picture. This is what manhood looks like. This is what it looks like to be a man or a woman.

And I just think, I didn't have those pictures. My dad met Jesus and he's like, "I'm not going to pass on the same scrapbook." And I know there's pictures my kids would want to rip out of their scrapbook too. It's not a perfect scrapbook, but I hope that I'm able to just pass on and stop that legacy and create a new legacy. Like you, Dave, just hearing you and your son. I hope we can just pass on and just keep that going because you know that the other way that that story can go can be devastating. My dad had to overcome things I didn't have to overcome. Thank God.

Dave Wilson: It's interesting when Cody and I were up there speaking and we're just going back and forth and there was freedom to say whatever you want. "Say what you want, Cody." And Cody tells this story at the end, which I remember, but I didn't know the impact on him. And it was: we were invited a few years ago to go back to Ball State where I played college football and he played at a school in the same conference. So he's going back to a place where he's caught some touchdowns.

And playing this golf outing, alumni golf outing. So anyway, long story short, we— I pull into a parking spot in front of the stadium and we're going to go in and take pictures in the end zone, that kind of thing. But as we're sitting there, I just felt led by the Spirit to tell him the story. So I turned to Cody, and anyway, he tells this story to a thousand men this way: he goes, "We pull in this parking spot and Dad turns to me and says, 'Before your mom, I was dating this girl for four years that I was going to marry. And we were doing things that weren't honoring God, but I was in love with her and I was going to marry her. And then I came to Christ and everything changed and then I go to see her and I catch her with another guy and it's over. And I meet your mom and we start dating and we're on this course and it's months later and my old girlfriend shows up at Ball State and she says, 'I want back. I've realized I made a mistake.'"'

And Cody says, "So Dad drives me out to this parking spot and we are sitting in the spot at the stadium. He said Dad turned to his girlfriend and said, 'I'm a new man, I have a new life, we're done, I'm never going to talk to you again.'" And he goes, "Dad, have you ever talked to her again?" I go, "Nope." And he goes, "He didn't know it, but in that moment I was born. In that moment, my life that I'm living was made because my dad made a decision that he wasn't even thinking about me, but it has impacted not just me but this church, this city."

And I just want to say to the men listening, do you realize every decision you make, the little ones, the big ones that you don't think— you think they're about you? They're probably about your legacy because every decision has a legacy. It's made it more weighty. But you talk about weight, I mean, we don't think about that. It is a weight that we— it's a privilege to carry because God has said, "You guys, it's not about you. You're leaving a legacy and someday your kids are going to tell stories about private things you did that impacted them that you didn't even know, you didn't even think about."

And it's not just a way for you to carry it, it's Jesus saying, "Listen, I'm going to carry your burdens." And so we feel the burden and all we do is get to give it back to Jesus. But when we hold on to it and we don't press in and make the decision and trust the Spirit in the moment and confess and all the things we talked about, none of that feels natural. Cody doesn't even know, nobody knows, but in that moment I was this close to saying, "Okay, we're back." Because I really had a heart for her, I'm like, "You're kidding me, you realize you were wrong." I was this close and it was just like, "No, this is a line in the sand, dude." And again, I had no idea the legacy of that, but we're all living that every day, every dad listening is living that, every husband. We want to cheer them on, right? Go for it guys, get men in your life, do the right things, live the life you can.

You know, as a pastor, I have definitely felt the tension of serving marriages in our church. It's a passion of ours and couples aren't falling apart, but they're not really connecting either. So things can look fine on the surface or on the outside, but there's always some drift happening underneath. And you see this as a leader and you know marriages need support, but figuring out what to do often it can feel overwhelming. So we've walked with a lot of churches through this and most just need a simple place to start.

Ann Wilson: And we have that for you. So if you've thought about doing a marriage event but didn't want to build it from scratch, this is a great way forward. When you purchase 10 or more workbooks, we'll include the full video study. Just use the code "STRONGFAMILIES" through June 30th. And you can go to familylifetoday.com and click the link in the show notes and just, again, enter the discount code "STRONGFAMILIES."

Dave Wilson: Let me tell you, strong families don't happen by accident. Sometimes all it takes is one intentional step to help couples reconnect again. All right, let me ask you guys this: what's one thing you wish you'd known earlier as a dad? I mean, you're all old guys now, so think back to when you were much younger. Is there something comes to mind, "I wish I'd known this"?

George: I still look good.

Dave Wilson: Yeah, you do look good. You got that hat on. I don't know if you realize that hat says 1954 on it.

George: Hey, that was when you were born. Not yet. Not yet. I'm not that old. That's close. Something I wish I'd known earlier.

Ryan: I wish I'd known how to put the car seat in because that's got to be some of the most frustrating things ever, just putting a car seat in was miserable. There's no course on that.

Bruce: Have you ever put the car seat in, put your son in the car seat, little baby, and didn't hook it to the seat? When you stop, the car seat flew through the air and he's stuck in it. That happened to us.

George: Her name's Zaila, so this is my eight-year-old. So she's in the back seat and I'm driving, I think I got her buckled in and I take this turn and I take this turn and I'm still good. I look in the back and she is laid over, car seat's over, she's over and just staring at me like this. I'm like, "Oh, I got to pull over somewhere fast." The seat wasn't buckled in. She's buckled in, but the seat wasn't buckled in. It was a mess. She still tells that story. She said, "Dad, you got to take those curves a little slower." I'm like, "That was years ago." She does not care, she does not forget.

I don't know if I can say this. We can edit it out. I wish I would have known our door had a lock to our bedroom.

Dave Wilson: So what happened? You didn't lock the door one time or 10 times or what?

George: Story time. No, that has happened.

Dave Wilson: So that's your lesson. "I wish I knew doors had locks." I could have done that. Bruce, you got one?

Bruce: I don't know, I was totally relating with the car seat thing. I've never done what you guys did where the car seat fell over, but we have definitely arrived at our destination to find the baby in the car seat but not strapped into the car seat. He's just chilling. "Glad we drove safe!" Prayers and Cheetos. Prayers and Cheetos, that's the first time I've heard that.

Dave Wilson: Here's mine. And this is just "duh." I wish I'd known earlier that when my wife's up working, I should be up helping. Say that one again. You didn't know that? Erase that. What kind of working are you talking about? I mean, she's in the kitchen, I'm watching the game. It's like, seriously, can you come on and help me do the dishes? It'll take 10 minutes. I'm like, "No, I can't. It's fourth quarter, the game's on the line." It's always fourth quarter though when they need help. You're like, "Wait a minute. No, I got to see this!" Edit that out, Dave, because now I can't watch the game! Don't let your wife hear this. No, it's one of the things I did say to my sons when they got married. I said, "If she's up, you're up." Man, that says, "I'm your partner."

I mean, when our kids— when we were first married and we had our first baby, when he would cry in the middle of the night, she would turn to me like at least go get him because she was nursing. And I literally faked like I was asleep. After a while, she's like, "I know you're not asleep." I'm like, "I'm not going." How selfish can a guy be? Everyone has done that. Every dad I know has done that. You've never faked? Not fake sleep. You just really were asleep. No, I have faked where I'm like, "Oh, what did you say?" Like I've done that before, like I didn't hear that, but I've never faked sleep. Well, you're a better man than me.

Let me just say, this has been a rich three days with these guys. I think what you guys have shared about marriage and family and today really about legacy is legacy-changing. So thanks guys. And let me say if we can help you, just go to familylifetoday.com/parentinghelp. And any way that we as a ministry can help you as dads and moms, we want to do that. So go there and get some help.

Ann Wilson: Our vision at FamilyLife is every home a godly home and we need your help to get there. And when you become a FamilyLife partner, your monthly support makes that vision actually possible.

Dave Wilson: Yeah, you'll get access to exclusive updates and events and the chance to join our partners-only online community. But more than that, you're helping change the future of families. So the question is, will you come alongside us and alongside FamilyLife? You can go to familylifetoday.com and read more about it and become a partner. Just click the donate button at the top. And again, you can go to familylifetoday.com.

FamilyLife Today is a donor-supported production of FamilyLife, a Cru ministry, celebrating 50 years of helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.