Theological Made Practical Series | #9

337 Words / Read time: 2 Minutes

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Two Things That Make a Dad Like God

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Striving for virtue, our fallen nature tends toward either deficient or excessive behavior (St. Thomas Aquinas).
Regarding food: we starve ourselves (deficiency), or binge (excessiveness).
Regarding sex: we deem the act as perverse (deficient) or we indulge immorally (excessive).

Regarding fatherhood:

We lower ourselves to our children’s level—only.
We want to be their friend.
We demand little of them.

Deficiency.

Or we act as a moral force of authority—only.
We neglect to foster a relationship with them.

Excessiveness.

A great father does two things:
He condescends and elevates.

He condescends to his child’s level.
Condescension in the biblical sense means to humble, to lower, to stoop.
Christ, though God, voluntarily descends from His divine rank to become man (See Phil 2:5-11).

A great father, like God, humbles himself.
He stoops down to his child’s emotional, spiritual, moral, and psychological level.
He enters his child’s world.

But he does not remain there.

He elevates his child to objective truth and reality.
God became man so man could become like God.
A father stoops to his child’s level that his child may become like The Father.

A father errs when:
He neglects to link his child’s subjective experience to objective truth.
This creates self-absorbed monsters.

Or:

A dad who enforces objective morality without entering into and linking it to his child’s world is perceived by his child as authoritarian.
This creates rebels.

If you don’t lower yourself to your child’s level, your child will not respect you enough to ascend to your level.

Whether you are playing with, teaching, praying with, disciplining, or having a meal with your child, try to implement these four things:

1. Intentionally lower yourself to your child’s subjective experience.
Understand your child at his/her intellectual, emotional, moral, psychological level.

2. Look. Listen. Engage and relate to your child in their “space.”

3. Do not remain at that level.

4. Draw the child upward from their level to yours.
Link their experience with the eternal truth that you know and live by.