Jeff:
Today is on the power of a father’s voice. This is something not talked about often. Something deeply important is you have to understand your voice is a shadow or an image of God, the Father’s voice himself. So you have to ask yourself a myriad of questions of whether that’s accurate, whether that’s doing what it needs to do in your kid’s life with love and truth and grace, but also authority and blessing and all these other things. But Jeremy, you guys have thought a lot about this. I love how you talk about it, so what would you say?

Jeremy:
Yeah, this is one of the things you’re actually stewarding, guys, the power of your voice. You want your voice to have a certain kind of weight in the ears of your children. This is something that needs to be cultivated. A quote from Gordon McDonald was, “Words have an awesome impact. The impression made by a father’s voice can set in motion an entire trend of life.” And if you guys just ask yourself from a scale of one to 10, how much weight does your voice carry in your home?

When you say something, how are you stewarding the power and the gravity of your voice? I think this is maybe why our voice hits a little bit lower decibel. I don’t know. Maybe that was part of God’s design, but when you’re thinking about this question of what does it look like to steward your voice, there’s really two things and if you’re like thinking about this, thinking oh man, I don’t know if my voice really carries the weight that could really set in motion someone’s life, a trend of life like this quote says. What are some things? So I would just give you guys a couple of things to dial down and some things that dial up. Some of you guys, your voice is carrying a lot of weight in your home and this may not be something you need to dial in as much, but others of you, maybe you find that it’s does just as not carry the weight that you wish it did.

So some things to dial down would be foolish chatter, hypocrisy and any kind of abuse of authority where your anger or you say things you don’t mean. Those things really can cause your voice to go down in its weightiness. Things that really cause your voice to increase in its weightiness are things like consistency, wisdom and follow through. Right? If you have a dad and every time they say something, no matter how, like it’s not done in anger and you know that when that is said it’s going to happen, it’s like there’s no distance between what is said and what is done, that’s a voice that has a lot of strength behind it. The point of this you guys isn’t so that we can get our way, right?

We know this. It is not so that we can rule our homes with an iron fist. It’s so that we can do what this quote, what Gordon McDonald is saying is that we can set in motion their life into the right direction. We want to be able to quickly and carefully and wisely and lovingly correct our children when they are struggling with the different paths that they’re picking on a day-to-day, hour-by-hour, week-to-week basis and the way that we do that is primarily through the power of our voice, the weightiness of our voice. We have that for a reason and I think we need to both steward it well so that we increase its strength and we need to use it really strategically so that it actually blesses and guides our children. But yeah, Jeff, what are your thoughts about it?

Jeff:
Yeah, I love that. What I would say is that I would end with two things. I would say the first being I loved what you said on how to dial it down, how to dial it up. I think one thing we have to always be careful too and something I’m always checking my heart for is I don’t know if I’d call this hypocrisy or just put it in the kind of lowercase hypocrisy bucket, but I think dads who aren’t hypocritical in a moral way, I think we have to realize more to let our yes be yes and our no be no too in some sense. I mean that with kids in regards to when they ask you to do something and you say, “Yes.” Can you take me here? Yes. Can you not? No, whatever it is, but don’t vacillate on those.

I think those are deeply important to toddlers in just building anchor and trust specifically, but also kids obviously of all ages of just the very small things. But you let your yes be yes. Let your no be no. I think that one’s really important. The one thing I would say too is like you said, this is not about ruling with an iron fist, but it’s actually the opposite. But what we do need to realize is that we have a cool opportunity to mirror the Father, capital F Father in Heaven. That Father opens his mouth and the whole world gets created. That Father opens his mouth and the whole universe gets created. That Father opens his mouth and Jesus himself is not created but is the Word of God, the very logos of the Father. He is the Word himself, and so he has insane amounts of power coming from his voice.

With that power he creates and speaks and it booms, but it also put him on the cross, it sacrificed himself. So there is a level of sacrificial love that comes with that. I think that is the tension of this. It’s not to just like command, but your voice does command, but it will lean into the command of sacrifice and love and blessing that we see in the life of Jesus. And so is your voice mirroring that in your home? Is it mirroring the Father? Here’s another way to put it. Is your voice mirroring the Father’s power and then Jesus’ is kind of sacrifice in your voice because that’s what you see in the “Word” of God, the Father and Jesus as the Word himself. So that’s the encouragement I’m going to leave with you guys today.