10 Truths We MUST Teach Our Sons

A few months ago I read a great blog article entitled "Seven Things We Must Tell Our Daughters."  It was so helpful to me as a Father of 2 daughters.  As I've thought through that article since then it occurred to me that the reason every generation of young women has increasing struggles with a healthy body image, self-respect, and purity is partially, if not near fully, due to males refusing to be men.

Sadly we are living in a culture that is embracing males who refuse to be men.  A generation where males are believing it acceptable to act like teenagers well into their 40's and the women they chase romantically are supposed to lower their standards and accept it as well.

So as a Father with 2 sons of my own I am thinking through how I can raise them to be a real men.  Men who are ready to lead their generation towards Christ and not conformity to this world.

Please know I do not consider myself perfect nor do I have any lofty ideas that I will do this without mistakes.  But prayerfully with God's guidance when I do fail I will demonstrate repentance to my sons so that they learn even from my sinful shortcomings.

Here are 10 suggestions for truths that we must teach our sons to raise a generation of men, not boys.  These are not intended as a comprehensive list.  Feel free to comment with any you may have that are not on the list and I may include them in future updates to this article.

10 Truths We Must Teach Our Sons

1.) You are valuable

You have value simply because you have been created by God.  No matter what standard the world holds up as criteria for the worth of a man, don’t buy into it.  Even still you have a God-given value and as your father I will help you to see that value so that in turn you glorify God for it and grow to understand what it means to be a real man one day.

2.) Your ‘manliness’ is not determined by the bench press

Physical strength has value in both your physical health and ability to protect others.  However, you are not the sum total of your muscles.  You are not less of a man if you can’t track and kill an animal bare handed, build a car from scratch, and bench press a small train.  You may or may not be able to do any of those things.  There is nothing wrong with any of them. In fact, you may find any or all of them to be incredibly useful skills, but they do not define you. You may be able to do many other things.  First and foremost, real men commit to love God and love/protect their family above themselves.  My prayer is that you always see this modeled in me.

3.) You don’t NEED a girl

Not right away at least.  Take advantage of the time of your childhood and youth to learn what it means to be a Godly man as it relates to your relationship with a woman.  Use your pre-adult life to learn what you need to be to one day be a great husband and father.  God’s Word defines both of these things.  Seek out His truths as your treasure.  You do not learn how to be a husband by dating around and making emotional attachments with girl after girl.  Furthermore your singleness is not a bad thing.  If you are not ready to pursue marriage, you are not ready to have a girlfriend.  Your job as a man is to protect the heart of any woman you know.  From the friendships you develop through that, God will send you a wife who will be the delight of your heart.  I have that delight with your mother and I pray that you see that in the way I treat her. Beginning with your mother and sisters, the girls who you form friendships with in life, on to the woman that you will one day marry and the daughters you may have of your own in the future; strive to protect their hearts.  As your buddies go through relationship after relationship and heartache after heartache, just remember, if you are not prepared to love, care for, and sacrifice your life for her you aren’t ready to marry her.  You must be able to choose to love her the way that Christ chose to love you.

4.) You are ‘cool’ just as you are

This is not intended to inflate your ego or anything and it isn’t to make you believe you aren’t sinful and in need of Christ. (You are a sinner, same as me, and you DO need Christ to rescue you from your sin.)  I want you to know that ‘cool’ is not defined by popularity, athletics, or even academics.  You being satisfied with and pursuing a life that pleases God is all you need to concern yourself with.  At many times that very thing will be the most ‘uncool’ thing you can do according to your peers.  I am not going to be more proud of you for being the star quarterback or straight A student than I am with you simply being who God made you to be; a young man who loves Christ and seeks to put away the sinful flesh in order to pursue Him more.

5.) ‘Boys will be boys’ is a terrible lie!
Of course boys will be boys in the genetic sense.  Boys are born boys and will remain males for their whole lives. You must know that excusing ‘youthful indiscretion’ with the cliché that it’s ok because boys just do those sorts of things is unacceptable.  Hear me clearly that the lust of the flesh and crass crude behavior is natural because of your sin nature but it is not okay.  It is a temptation from Satan that men are prone to give in to all too easily.  You must resolve early on to wage war against those desires now.  Go to God in prayer and ask Him to help you apply His Word and to strengthen you.  Ask Him to protect your mind, eyes, and heart and keep them pure and undefiled.  ‘Boys will be boys’ cannot and will not be used as an escape in my house nor will it be tolerated as acceptable and you will cripple your development into manhood if you buy into this destructive lie.

6.) Your eyes are to desire your wife, not every woman you see

Related to the previous truth, the world will tell you that it is ok to look and lust after any woman you see and find desirable.  This is a lie.  Jesus has said that to look with lust is equal to having committed adultery with her.  You’ve sinned in your heart against God and her in doing so.  While the temptation is common and normal, it is not who God made you to be.  Though portrayed otherwise in most media, women are NOT lesser creatures to men.  They do not exist to fulfill your lustful desires.  You must train your mind to view women as God’s beautiful creation, not a source of lust, no matter how much skin she may be showing off.  It is ok to find a woman attractive and admire the beauty God has given her, but you must be very careful to guard your heart that it goes no further for any woman who is not your wife.  You need to understand that there is great beauty in a woman of modesty, not immodesty.

7.) Love your Mother

I will not always be around.  I will age and one day die just as everyone in this world does.  God has given me sons because you are to protect and lead the family in my absence.  I hope that you see in me that I love your mother deeply.  When I am loving your mother as God has called me to, you will see modeled there how you are to love your wife one day.  I hope that I am training you to do that well and when you fail to do it, as I often do, I hope that you see me repenting and learn repentance yourself.  If you cannot love your mother and sisters, you cannot love a wife.  I will commit to teach you how to love showing you what that looks like.

8.) You have talents and abilities that God has given you

You have talents and abilities and gifts that God has given specifically to you.  He intends for you to use those to glorify Him with them.  If you aren’t using them to His glory you are in danger of sinning.  Pursue those talents with an eye on the cross.  Seek God for wisdom to distinguish between Godly desires and uses for those talents verses worldly ones.

9.) Follow Christ, not the world

Be courageous in the face of opposition to those who would have you go the way of the condemned.  The Bible says that it is the wise that walk in the way of the Lord.  It is he who walks in the way of the Lord who is blessed.  Do not waste your life walking with the fool in their folly.  As you decide what to do and what not to do, filter all of your decisions through Scripture and bathe them in prayer.  Seek counsel from me and other Godly men in your life.  Put no value on the wisdom of fools who do not love Christ.  They will lead you astray.  There is one passion and one alone worth living your life for and it is Christ, nothing else will satisfy. 

10.) I love you

I love you.  I make it my goal to tell you, your brother, your mother, and sisters that on a daily basis.  You are not less of a man for being able to say ‘I love you’ to someone that you love.  In fact it is a Godly attribute to be able to not only say but to show love to those in your life whom you care about. Just as God calls on you to love others, so too He intends for you to express it.  I hope I model that for you.  I want you to hear that I love you because as you grow and feel turned away by this friend or that or experience disappointment I want echoing in your mind that no matter what, I will always love you.  More than that, you must remember that God loves you.  No matter how hard life gets remember God loves you and desires you to trust Him, not the world.  I want you to know that I will always be there for you whether we are celebrating your successes or crying together over failures or talking through your mistakes to learn valuable lessons.  I will always love you.

Jesus loves the little Children!

Just a short 27 verses into the book of Genesis we learn that God not only made man.  More specifically Moses is careful to tell us that God made man “in His image”.  That caring act of creation set man apart from all of the rest of God’s creation.

In Psalm 139 we learn that God has continued His loving act of creating man by uniquely creating each individual person.

Psalm 139:13-14 - For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

We were formed by God’s own hand.  Knit together.  And the Psalmist says that our having been created by God in such a way that we were created to praise Him.  He says, I praise you BECAUSE I am wonderfully made.

Made in God’s image, we were created to praise God.  That is man’s chief purpose.  God created us so that we would freely praise His Name!  Yet, the Bible tells us in Genesis 3 that man has a dire problem.

Romans 3:23 says that we have all sinned and fallen short of God’s glory.  In other words, because we have all sinned, we have all failed to meet God’s standard of perfection.  And we are not just a little below the mark; we are woefully short of giving God the glory He deserves.

Our job as Christian parents is to teach our children what they were created for.  They need to understand that they were created to worship God. But our job is not a simple one.  We compete with their attention against TVs, iPods, video games, and a culture that increasingly pushes them to grow up quickly and grow up focused only on themselves.

Every human being was created to worship, and every human being worships something.  Our job is to point our children towards the only One who is worthy of our worship; urging them to trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The question then becomes one of how?  How do I lead them towards Christ?  How do I show them their need for and the value of a life lived for the glory of God?

Well, the key is to teach them God’s Word.  Use the principles from God’s Word to train them.  For example, the 10 Commandments.

It is so important that you teach your children the 10 Commandments.  God’s Law, the 10 commandments, is there for a myriad of purposes.  Chiefly, it shows that which God requires in order to be properly worshipped.

However, as we examine our hearts in light of each commandment we quickly realize that we have not perfectly met any of God’s requirements.  But in doing this the Law shows us WHO we are.

We are a people prone to give room in our hearts to other masters besides Christ.  But the Bible says in Luke 16:13 that our hearts can only have one master. 

The second thing God’s Law does is show us WHAT we need.  The Law commands us to do good, and then proves that we cannot and have not.  To do what the Law requires we need righteousness.  A righteousness that we obviously do not possess given our frequent transgression of it.

Next, the Law reveals WHO God is.  He is our Lord and our Savior!  His giving of the Law was intended to point us towards our need for CHRIST because HE and HE alone is the perfect fulfillment of all of those Laws that we could not keep.

Being perfectly righteous Jesus kept every Law perfectly on our behalf!  As we teach our children God’s Law they should see that they need Christ!  That God sent Christ to lovingly rescue them from their sin!

As we teach our children the 10 Commandments God will show them that their every violation of it or any one that they will ever commit has been absorbed by Christ on the cross!

The world tells our children that people should accept them just as they are, but the reality is that the world creates systems that force them to earn any acceptance that they may want. 

But teaching our children God’s Word teaches them that God will truly accept them just as they are.  Not because they are good, not expecting them to be perfect. 

No, the Bible teaches that God will accept them because He is satisfied by His Son’s sacrifice that was made on their behalf.

Not only that, but God’s Word teaches that God will put His very Spirit within them and that Spirit will begin to work in them so that sin’s reign in their life is broken as He begins to transform their lives! 

He transforms them and frees them from the burden of their guilt and sin and it frees them to be the worshipper that God has created them to be!

Remember our text in Psalm 139, I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made!  We have to teach them the beauty in having been created by a good and holy God.

But it will not do to simply teach these things to them.  That is the quickest way to produce self-righteousness in them.  We must not only teach them God’s Word, we must also model it for them.

Our kids have to see that we too love Christ and His law.  They need to see in us a wholehearted response to God and His Word to us.   Our lives must not only demonstrate the pursuit of obedience to God but they must also demonstrate the response we should have to disobedience.  Our children need to see us striving to obey Christ, and when we sin and fall short they need to see us repent. 

When your children observe your sin.  Maybe you blow your top and scream at them.  Maybe you speak harshly to your spouse in front of them.  Maybe you get cut off in traffic and they witness you saying terrible things about the person who has offended you. 

When those things inevitably come up, be transparent with them about what you’ve done, why you know it was sinful, and why you need to repent of that sin.  Make it your goal to not only tell them about the importance of trusting Christ but show them how that looks in your own life.

Psalm 1:1-2 - Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.

When you pass one day, and your children inherit your possessions… what will you pass on to them that is of lasting value?  What will they remember about you?  The greatest legacy you can leave your children is one that teaches them to flee from their sin and trust in the sufficient grace of Jesus Christ.  They need to see and know that your delight is in the Lord alone!