Ask Pastor Mike Live

Holden: Hey there, Pastor Mike. We appreciate you coming out to Compass Bible Church, Treasure Valley, for the family weekend this past weekend.

Pastor Mike: Well, it was fun. Yeah.

Holden: It was a blast. We had a quick follow-up question from the first sermon you preached. Proverbs 10, the first proverb that you hit on was, "A foolish son is a sorrow to his mother." And then we went over to Ephesians 6, and the verse I’ve got a question for you is verse 4: "Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and the instruction of the Lord."

So the question is, as the head of my family, what principles should I implement for my family when I'm not necessarily the primary parent who's at home with the kids all day? That is just something that I'd love to get a little bit of clarity and direction because I feel like sometimes my role is maybe delegating some of those items and making the leadership decisions.

And then if there's time for the follow-up question, you had talked about the balance of work-at-home parenting because I feel like on this side, work-at-home parenting would be great to be here more frequently with the kids and stuff like that. But I just wanted to see your thoughts on principles of how to really bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord when maybe I'm not home with them all day.

Pastor Mike: Yeah, that's a great question. You might remember at the teaching I did there with hundreds of people in the room, I had the fathers all stand up when I was teaching through that Ephesians Chapter 6, Verse 4, much like I might have if I were at a pastor's conference and say I had all of these staff members there, and let's just say I had the lead pastor stand up. In one sense, like Timothy in Ephesus or Titus on the island of Crete, these are the senior leaders. And those senior leaders had something very important to do in managing their teams. So there was something important, even though they delegate a lot to their teams.

I just came out of a meeting just now with my pastors around the table, and we were talking about some things that were going on in the kids' ministry, something that happened in the little kids' ministry just this last week. And I'm not there; I'm busy preaching down the hall. All I can do is—we had to discuss something that went on in that room, which was something that kind of happens every week, but in a way, it got to a parent and a situation and an incident report and all that. So I need to make sure that all that was dealt with properly. We put our minds together, we dealt with it, and at the end of the day, I need to make sure it was done properly.

In a sense, I carry some of that responsibility even though a lot of that is delegated. I look at the pastor over that, our kids' director pastor—he's a pastor, Pastor Doug in this case—and he's responsible for how that whole team deals with an incident in that department. I say the delegation is delegation, even though ultimately I hold someone responsible over that. In a sense, you are responsible as the father. When it says don't provoke your children to anger, it could be how you—what you expect to be done.

What time you expect them to be put in bed, how you expect them to eat, how much ketchup you expect to have on their french fries, whatever. There are parents that have unbelievably strict rules that are provoking their children to anger; they're unreasonable. In some of my teaching on parenting, sometimes I say I'm going to teach tonight at our own church for parents of older children, and I will say to them, "Sometimes what we need to do is rethink what the strictures are we're putting on our kids." Sometimes we're just overly intensive about the details, and we need to rethink that.

Sometimes I think the problem that we have in falling into the danger of Ephesians 6:4 is we just are putting too many things in the way of our kids. We're micromanaging too many things when we've got a 12-year-old or a 13-year-old, and we need to start backing off and saying, "Okay, it's the big issues that we need to start setting the boundaries for, and we need to start letting our 13- or 14-year-olds have the management of somehow how they're going to implement that."

Even though I know most of those dads are going to go off to work and mom's going to be enforcing a lot of that throughout the day. Certainly with a 13-year-old, it's not going to be that they're going to be dealing with the Shabbat as we talked about this last weekend, but they're going to be enforcing how they deal with all that. That's what I'm saying about fathers. A father's ultimately going to have a conversation with his wife in an intact family and decide where the lines are drawn. Moms, in most cases, are going to be there dealing with how all of this is going to be run in a day-to-day situation.

Dads at home—that became an issue, especially in the Q&A when that threw a lot of people because especially in Idaho, it seems like a lot of people, more than down here in Orange County, California, a lot of dads were working from home. I said very carefully when I was at that conference, these are just my observations. I have no authority to say from Scripture what the policy should be about dads working from home, but I am seeing that there is a lot of pressure, it seems, on families and some strain on marriages even when dads are just there all day long in the homes.

Traditionally, in farms and agrarian societies or in the Industrial Revolution, dads were going off to offices. I think since COVID, at least for the last five years, it has been a difficult stress when dads are local. I'm not saying it can't be done right, but as I tried to suggest at the conference this last weekend, I think if dads can shut the door and can say, "It's work time now," and then at break time come out and interact.

If moms can say if there is a problem with the kids, she even knows when to go and interrupt dad and say, "Okay, now I do need some help with this five-year-old or this four-year-old." I'm just saying be careful of having a dad's workday completely enmeshed in the domestic role. Mom needs that established role of managing her children, which is part of what Titus Chapter 2 is trying to tell moms to do. She's got to manage those kids, and in a way, dad can kind of interfere with all of that, the implementation of mothering and managing a household.

Even as Proverbs 31 says, when kids are starting to go over her head, so to speak, if a dad's there traipsing through the hallway to get to the kitchen to get a snack, I just think there's a lot of things going on that are not normal since 2020 in how families have been adjusting to dad at home. In where I'm at at least, a lot of dads have gone back to the offices, and a lot of bosses and companies are sending them back to the office.

I want dads obviously to be involved, and I want them to be very involved in the discipleship of their kids. I want them either in the morning or evenings to be highly invested in their kids and of course on the weekends. We had it in our family, a day when it was very important that there was a time when dad was investing even in recreation with the kids, a focused time or even a dad night or a daddy-daughter night. There has to be time when dad is investing individually and in groups with his kids and family.

Of course, that's important, but I just think be careful how you do it and make sure that you are not putting too much in place in terms of restrictions on your kids that is going to be so restrictive that kids feel like it's like a straitjacket that ends up flustering them. I think that's what Ephesians 6:4 is all about. The provoking kids to anger is maybe an overbearing helicopter dad that just has too many rules that really aren't necessary.

Holden: Yeah, no, I think you nailed it. One thing that we had discussed after this weekend was even coming after one of the other Q&A questions where one of your answers was pretty much if your job is prohibiting you from really being there for your family, it might be time to pray about looking at another job. We can make decisions that remove us from the picture to where we can't disciple our kids first thing in the morning over breakfast, or it swings the entire opposite way where we're not working hard and instead we're lending ourselves to a child-run home. So, no, you did a great job. Really appreciate it.

Pastor Mike: Okay, Holden, that's great. Let me just say what you've just said is so important, and let me try to simplify that. When we become Christians, we just added a whole third sphere to our life as compared to the non-Christian. Think of the non-Christian man who's married and has kids. He's got this domestic sphere and he's got his work career sphere.

Now all of a sudden, as a Christian, let's just say I'm 30 years old and I become a Christian, now I've created this whole new sphere of loving the Lord, devoted to the Lord. Now he says you're going to love the body of Christ and serve in the body of Christ. Now I've got a third sphere. It's like juggling a third ball in the air, and I've got to now say, "Wait a minute, what I might have been able to do as a non-Christian in my career—if I'm really going to balance my home and my church life, I may not be able to be the worker that I could have been as a non-Christian."

I think that's why even I talked about that this weekend in that seminar. It's all about realizing that First Corinthians Chapter 7 is going to—if I'm going to be devoted to the Lord and try to keep that ultimate devotion to the Lord, I really can't be all I could have been in my career and I really can't even be all I could have been domestically. I can't have a Norman Rockwell life where every single corner of my domestic life is tucked up and perfect as the world might be able to accomplish it.

I can't have the career that's all that it could be. I can't be the worker that excels through the corporate ladder. I may have to say no to a promotion, I may have to say no to something that may make more money but would require me to travel more. And that's exactly what is true because we've added a third ball that we have to juggle, and that is I'm devoted to the Lord. It adds a whole other dimension to life.

That just helps me realize that I can't make every game of my kid's Little League. I can't go to every soccer game, and I can't take every promotion at work. That's a very realistic way that we have to look at things once God has put his mission on our life as his ambassador, as an active part of his church, as one who's supposed to now worship him and read his Bible every day. This is a whole new thing that takes the 168 hours of our week that everybody has.

My non-Christian neighbors have the same 168 hours that I have, but I've got to now divide it up with a whole new third sphere. I think that's the part that some Christians haven't really factored into how it's going to affect every area of home life and work life. I think that's what you're mentioning, and I think to think of it that way is helpful because it does help men who sometimes can get so devoted to their career they don't realize that Christianity and a good home life are going to mean that I can't be all that I could have been in my career. And that is okay. You may not have as many square feet in your house because you couldn't have climbed the corporate ladder as far because you're a good Christian man, and that's just coming to grips with the reality of Christianity.