Trusting in God is the Ultimate Fatherhood Compass

Show Transcripts:

Intro:
Welcome to The Father on Purpose Podcast, featuring author and ministry leader, Kent Evans, and business executive and military veteran, Lawson Brown. This is a show for you dad. You want to be a godly and intentional father. Unfortunately, you’ve turned to these two knuckleheads for help. Let us know how that works out for you. Before we begin, remember this, you are not a father on accident. So go be a father on purpose. Please welcome your hosts, Kent and Lawson.

Kent Evans:
Hey, welcome dads. We’re pumped to have you with us. We’re in the beginning of a seven part mini series on an ebook that we wrote called, Survival Gear 7 must-have tools every dad needs for his journey. If you’d like a little context for that, go back one episode and listen to the episode right before this one. You’re on episode two. The first one we set up, got it started, walked you through the survival gear you’re going to need as a dad. Walk you through the stages you might be at. So we’re not going to cover all those again, instead what we’re diving into now is if you imagine your fatherhood experience being this journey you’re going on, you need some gear. You need to be well prepared for the journey and all of us enter fatherhood with varying levels of preparedness. In my case, almost zero. And over time, it’s not like you’re collecting this gear that you need along the way. And one of the things we all need, if we’re going on a journey and I want you to think of it almost like we’re headed out to a place we don’t know well, and we’ve got to orient ourselves and know where is north? Where is east, west, and south? And one of the things that can help you do that is trusting God or in the case of the metaphor we would use in this ebook it is a compass, a compass. Now for those of us who are a bit older we remember compasses, we might have used one when we were in Boys Scouts back in the day, might have learned how to orient ourselves using a compass. For a lot of us, this is going to take the form of the GPS on your phone. So some of you dads out there don’t know what compass is, it’s not your fault. You just got supplanted by technology. So the beautiful part is we all have this compass we carry around in our phones and we use it to navigate all the time. But I’d love for you to think about the old school compass, Lawson. The one where… it’s like metal and it has a little dial in the middle and if you turn it just right, what does the old school compass always point to?

Lawson Brown:
True north. Is that what you’re after?

Kent Evans:
Well, we rehearsed that before the episode, Lawson had two words to say, true north. And man, you delivered them on cue with like… It was awesome.

Lawson Brown:
We won’t get into it, but I’ve got a great story later. It’s not this episode, but about the distractions that can pull it off course.

Kent Evans:
No, that’s this episode.

Lawson Brown:
You need to-

Kent Evans:
No, we’re ready.

Lawson Brown:
Is it?

Kent Evans:
This is it. Did you know that?

Lawson Brown:
[inaudible 00:03:16]

Kent Evans:
It’s on this episode.

Lawson Brown:
Bro, we are trying to keep these guys engaged and with us.

Kent Evans:
So the truth of the matter is those old compasses, right? So God, when God built the world, he put this magnetic field in place that allowed orientiers. He basically used two things, right? The magnetic field, the sun, maybe three things, and the stars to orient themselves years ago, back before we had all this technology and now the technology’s driven by satellites and other things. But to say that we need to trust God. Here’s the thing I think is really challenging about this topic. And it’s the reason we put it at the beginning, trusting God is because God is sovereign. God is powerful. God is in charge. God has the answers. Not only does he have the answers, he is the answer. When he came to Moses and Moses said, who shall I say is sending me? And God just said, I am. I am. You don’t need to know anything else. You just tell people I am sent me. And so the reason we put trust God early, it’s the bedrock. It’s the foundation. It’s the beginning point of your fatherhood, of you being a godly dad. Trusting God is the bedrock. And one of the tough things about this topic I think Lawson is, no dad’s going to walk in here and go, “Oh, no trusting God that’s a horrible idea. That’s a bad idea.” And I think that’s a challenge because it’s… then the dad might conclude, “Well, obviously if I can say I trust God, well then I must be trusting God.” Because who would say they aren’t? So when we were talking before the show started, I’d love for you to share with us man, share a story Lawson or a time when either… You can go either direction with this, you can either share a story when you trusted God and you then saw the wisdom of trusting God as time unfolded or a time when you didn’t trust God, you trusted something else. You saw some consequences that were less than pleasant. Take us through a quick story about a time when either you trusted God or you didn’t.

Lawson Brown:
Yeah, I will. True north, I’m so glad that the compass was chosen, true north, no matter where you are it doesn’t move. And it’s another reference back to God. God is the constant that you can always search for and find. He doesn’t move. We may be all over the place, but he does not. So it was really more, I heard God and went with it, but my wife trusted God and I saw him in her faith. We at the time had been living in Louisville for seven or eight years. Things were great. We loved it there. We had a good life, young girls and we had lived in… that was our third place since we had been married and we’re getting roots and it… we loved our church. We loved our neighbors. We had some good friends and I guess we were 10 ish years into marriage at that point. And I began to feel a pull to move back to Georgia, she and I are both from Georgia. But all through those first… really, even before we got married while we were dating and engaged, we had talked about wanting to live away from Georgia. Not that Georgia’s at all bad, we spent the last 17 years of our lives there. But at the time we wanted to be out on our own and out and about, and we would go visit when we could or they would come visit us family, you know that we’re both being from Georgia. But anyway, I began to feel like I don’t understand why but I think I want to move back home and I just wouldn’t say it. I didn’t say it. I didn’t bring it up. I prayed about it. I was like, surely that is not what I’m hearing. And one day I remember in our kitchen in Louisville, I worked up the courage and brought it up to her and said, “You are not going to like this, and I don’t honestly know exactly how I feel about it either, but I’ve been praying and I think we might want to move to Georgia.” And dude, she just started crying because this is where the trusting God came and it was just so… Here’s why I remember it so vividly is because it was so affirming to me that he knows our heart. He is right here with us, because the reason she started crying was she said, “Because I had been praying and praying about how to tell you, I want to move to Georgia.” It was such a… We just felt God in our midst, and it was beautiful… And it doesn’t happen like that every time, God doesn’t unveil his wisdom for us in every moment with such a tearful, heartfelt experience. But in our case for that, it took speaking up and for us in our earlier on faith walk it reaffirmed, God is in control. God is our true north. Listen to him. And you know what happens in marriage when you’re both listening to him? You both are moving toward that same direction, that same true north.

Kent Evans:
Man, isn’t that awesome when you and your spouse or you and a colleague or a partner or anybody you’re working closely with, God puts the same idea in two different heads at the same time. And then you both voice it and you realize, “Man, this is… We feel like we’re heading in the right direction.” That’s… The other thing I got from that story, Lawson, was when you say things your wife cries and then you decide that’s a good thing from God. I don’t know that you’ve quite got the math right on that entirely. That object is not to make your wife cry every time and go, “Thou sayeth the Lord.” Don’t… That’s not good.

Lawson Brown:
Hang on. I’m writing, I’m writing this.

Kent Evans:
Lawson just does this podcast so I can teach him on the podcast. We all know the verse, Proverbs 3:5 trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding, that verse we’ve heard over and over again. What I think is interesting that we tend to overlook sometimes is the fact that it says with all your heart, trust in the Lord with all your heart. I don’t know if I said this yet, but trust in the Lord with all your heart. And then it goes on to say in verse 6, in all your ways acknowledge him and he will make straight your paths. I know that so often, I don’t even want to say it so often, that it almost sounds like I normally do the right thing, more often than not. I probably start moving my mouth before I start acknowledging God and trusting him. I was on a call about two weeks ago with a ministry colleague, and we were trying to decide between path A and B. We basically had two paths in front of us and we were back and forth going, “Well, we could do A, we could do B.” There were some trade offs. And man, just so much respect for this guy. He goes, “Man, Kent, you know what we need to do?” So what’s that? It was a Friday when we were talking and he goes, “Let me pray for us and then let’s just hang up, and let’s reconnect on Monday and let’s see what God tells us over the weekend.” And I just thought, “Oh my goodness.” It was brilliant. Brilliant, right? That it was the idea of not leaning on our own understanding. He’s a really smart guy. I’m a smart guy, neither of us couldn’t have figured it out, A and B were both good choices. I think the important thing here is we weren’t trying to decide between what was ethical and unethical or what was according to God’s plan, and what was an obvious end. We could have done either thing, both were ethical, both were godly but we needed God to tell us in this case, which one specifically he wanted us to do. And sure enough, Monday I texted him and said, “Hey man, here’s which way I’m leaning. I was leaning toward option B.” And he goes, “Absolutely, me too, full steam ahead.” And it was just cool and it was not what I would normally do, Lawson.

Lawson Brown:
Another thing about that is trusting God is also to me like a bit of a relief valve from having to figure it all out yourself, and be the perfect dad and have the most effective parenting skills, because we won’t know, we don’t know half the time but God does, and we lean on him and he’s our true north. And doing this fatherhood journey with no compass would be hopeless and helpless and scary. And so trusting God, having that as our means of direction finding is a relief and we can lean on that. And we can know that and trust that he knows better than us. He loves our children more than we do. He’s their creator. So to me, the trusting God is very, very… it gives me a sense of, “whoa! I’m glad it isn’t on me.”

Kent Evans:
Well, and as dads, which is often our perspective is that to be an effective dad, we have to always be steering the ship on everything. And we’re always driving. And we’re always deciding and as if we are not just the captain of the boat, but we’re actually the wave and the wind and the sun and the moon, we are all of it. And man, no, no. I’ve told my boys, and my boys at the time of this recording, I got boys from 6 to 21, I have five of them.And I’ve told my boys more than once man, I’m figuring this out as I go. Being a dad is like on the job training, you are learning as you go. And so one thing I’d love to talk about Lawson, on the other side of the break is, and you hinted at a minute ago, I do want to talk about this idea that trusting God means we’ve set our compass and our magnetic north. Our true north is God himself and his word, his word which John 1 tells us that’s Jesus, his word. God himself, his word is our true north but there are, there are magnetic forces that would seek to pull us off track and that’s what we’re going to cover right after this.

Kent Evans:
Hey dad, do you ever wonder where you are on the godly father journey? It’s like you want to be a more godly father but you’re not totally sure where you’re standing right now, and you’re not totally sure how to make meaningful progress. So what we built to help you and to help us is the godly father assessment. It is a 28 question survey that you can take, that will help you assess your fatherhood in seven crucial categories. And it will help you know, whether you’re just starting out in this journey or you’re a pro who ought to be helping others on their journey. Go today and take this free godly father assessment so you’ll know two things, where are you now and how can you make meaningful next step progress. Do this today at manhoodjourney.O-R-G, that’s manhoodjourney.org.

Kent Evans:
So Lawson that… you and I remember those stories from… it seemed like they don’t happen as often now, but back in the day there were these stories of people who got into the Bermuda Triangle and got lost. Their plane would crash. Things would disappear. People thought it might be where aliens were and there’s a UFO, and it would seem…

Lawson Brown:
Yeah. Why did those stories go away? I wonder.

Kent Evans:
It would seem that something about the Bermuda triangle was magnetically off. It literally messed with instruments in, especially small airplanes and it would mess with them and they would get disoriented, and think they were going up when they were going down or think they were going east when they were going west. And isn’t it true that there are… If we’re going to set our compass on true north and God is our heading and Jesus is our heading, there are some magnetic forces that are trying to convince us that there is something else out there that should be our magnetic north.

Lawson Brown:
I think unless someone has actually used one or seen one, especially I’m thinking of, if you’re camping now pulling out an actual compass, you’re out there with your GPS and your device that is pinpoint accuracy. Back in the day, I learned the hard way, don’t put your compass on the hood of a Humvee because the engine block is made of metal and it gives you this false reading of which direction to go, because it messes up true north. It completely pulls your compass off track.

Kent Evans:
Whoa, really?

Lawson Brown:
Yeah, for sure. And don’t hold your weapon up. Don’t hold your weapon up and put your compass on top of it because you’re… the barrel is made of steel and that messes it up too. So you’ve got to be careful with that thing because true north can get out of whack pretty easy. Today we have GPS and maps that take you step by step, turn by turn and all that. But yeah, for sure. And that magnetic force though it is really strong, on a map north is grid. On a compass it’s an actual pull toward a magnetic force and that is the true north, that’s the one you follow. And then you gotta be careful because along the way there are things that if you’re not careful, you’re supposed to be going 10 degrees, but if you’re going 15 or 17, that’s not that much. But over the course of two miles, three miles, the distance between 10 and 17 gets real great, real fast. And you can find yourself completely lost in a different area that you have no business being, or then you got to backtrack. If you’re lucky, you can backtrack or figure out where you went off course. But I think in our lives, there are things that as we as dads, as we as husbands are parenting, we know some of them and then some of them are things that… like in my case, I didn’t know. I didn’t even think about the home being the engine block and all that. I thought I was on course and people are following me. My family is following me at times and I didn’t realize that my compass was being pulled off of course by something that was affecting me. So last point, I’ll shut up is it would have helped me at the time to have someone who said, “Hey, pull your compass off. Take it away from your weapon, because it’s going to mess you up.” And in life here, now, today, I also need people in my life that are saying, “Doesn’t look like you’re on the course that you’re describing you think you’re on.”

Kent Evans:
Oh man, there are these forces man. And the reason I like covering them in the context of compasses and magnetic north is because I think it helps guys understand, you can’t see magnetic north. You can’t see the magnetism. You discover it through a compass. That’s the whole point about orienting yourself is it’s not like it’s a light, like a lighthouse and you can see the light off in the distance. It’s invisible, it’s invisible. And so sometimes we see things, we’ll see something like money and we go, “Oh, well money.” Well, man, Jesus talked a lot about money. And one of the reasons he talked a lot about money is because it has the potential to be a magnetic pull for us toward a bad place. Money can do a lot of good. Money’s not evil, we all know that. The love of money can be the root of all kinds of evil. The Bible would tell us, but money itself isn’t good or bad but man, it does have a magnetic pull that can pull us toward glamorizing it or making it an idol. Where that story from the Bible that talks, I think it’s in Luke. And it talks about the parable Jesus told about the rich ruler who had all this stuff. And he goes, man, I’m running out of space. I need more places to store all my stuff. And he said, this very night your life will be demanded of you. He kept building more barns to store all of his stuff because money had become his true north. And I think for men that’s super dangerous, sex, lust those kind of things can become a true north where it becomes an idol for us. It’s magnetic, it’s magnetic. It’s by design, by design it’s magnetic, but it can pull us into a place that’s really dangerous. And man, how many dads and men and pastors and leaders and sports people and CEOs have been dashed on the rocks of something related to sexual impurity just more than you can count, right?

Lawson Brown:
Yeah. And both of those cases, I’ve thought before. I haven’t had my life wrecked because of something to do with sexual impurity or money. But some people have and I’ve often thought, they didn’t wake up that morning and go, “I know where my true north is. I am going to purposefully reset it from God to money,” but it’s a pull away from what they hope they set out on this course. They put it at 10 degrees and it gets pulled off to five degrees before you know it you’ve really made a turn. But in any of these cases, it’s not like you go, “All right, I’ve done my prep. I’ve got my map. I’ve got my compass. I know which direction I’m going. Oh wait, hang on, hang on a sec. No, I’m not going to to go there. I’m going to put this power hungry success, hungry corporate ladder, entrepreneurial success in place of, or as my true north is just a distracting magnetic pull off of course.”

Kent Evans:
And the interesting thing for me I want dad hear is, it could be money. It could be sex. It could be power, fame, influence, sports, hobbies, whatever those pulls are in your life. Often, the reason that they’re pulling at you is because they’re easier to keep score at than the other things. So for example, if you used to make X and now you make two X in your money, and you’ve doubled your income in a year or five or 10. You’re twice as far ahead, you know you are because you used to make X and now you’re two X. Sometimes men will use power as their measure. I used to have one person who was quote unquote under me at my job, and now I’ve got 10 people under me, which that phrase always greats on me. But the idea is, it’s just amassing a scoreboard of victories whether they’re, again, money, sex, power, you name it. And part of the reason is because the other things God wants us to do in this area of trusting God, are sometimes very hard to measure, very hard to measure. And here’s what I mean by that. Let me tell a brief story and then I’ll let you land the plane. One of the things that’s really difficult about disciplining your family is, I heard somebody say one time, “Parenting’s the only job that by the time you know how it turned out, it’s too late to change it.” Not that it turns out. We’ve talked about this on this podcast before, you can go back and don’t send us hate mail. I understand if you’re a perfect dad, you don’t have perfect kids. There is no perfect dad, we know that. Having said that, we do want to give our best effort. And sometimes our best effort, we still don’t know if we’re winning or if we’re losing, right? I don’t know. This moment it’s… Right now we’re recording this on a Monday afternoon. Our kids more or less godly than they were on Sunday? Am I more or less godly than I was an hour and a half ago? It’s like sometimes man, that stuff is very hard to measure and especially in Western cultures and American cultures, we like to measure everything. I’m going to measure how many people listen to this podcast, right? I care about the numbers and the Bible does tells me, good stewards of what’s under our control. However, you can’t measure whether someone’s heart has grown. It’s not like the Grinch and the… Grinch of Stole Christmas, his heart grew three sizes that day. Wouldn’t that be nice if every day you could just put a little device on your heart and go, “Hey, 2% more than yesterday. I care more. I all of a sudden became more patient. My patient heart grew two sizes today.” Wouldn’t that be awesome? However, that’s not how it works. That’s not how it works. Faithfulness to God, trusting God, aiming toward the true north and just continuing to make progress as best we can but some days you can’t see the progress. And dads, that’s one of the reasons these other magnetic forces tend to pull you off. It’s not necessarily because you woke up like Lawson said and said, I’m going to make sex my God today. I’m going to make money, my God, today. You want to be able to measure, you want to be able to measure, whether you’re making progress. And in one sense, that’s a very healthy thing. God wants us to be good stewards. In another sense, it’s very unhealthy but we gravitate toward our fantasy football team’s performance because we don’t know how to measure whether our kids got any more godly today. And so that is one of the challenges for us as dads, isn’t it Lawson?

Lawson Brown:
Yeah. And the measuring thing it leads to comparing which… Like any of these other things we’ve talked about, it’s a thing. Money is a thing that isn’t bad. Having a powerful influential role is not a bad thing. It’s a tool for life, how are you using that position? If you have a lot of money, how are you using those things? You said a word that I think is critical, it’s progress. No one’s got this figured out. We certainly don’t, we’re learning every day. Like I said on one of the other episodes, I personally am getting something myself out of re-listening to these podcasts. God is clever and he uses everything as long as we are open to it. Back quickly to the compass, you don’t set true north and it is this long distance, way out that you can hardly see on the horizon. What you do is you take the compass, you look at it, you set it on where you are wanting to head. And then you look a little ways out ahead of you and you find the point, you find something, a tree, a rock, top of a little hill and you go from where you are to there. You don’t complete the journey, you go from here to that point of shortly in the distance. And that’s how you know you’ve made some progress. And that’s how you keep yourself on track because at that point, you stop, take a look around, check everything, check your compass again, have maybe somebody else look over your shoulder, look like we’re going right, yep, looks like we’re going right. Oh, well a little off, let’s turn just to touch this direction because I think we’re getting off course. So like I’ve said before, have some people in your life, check periodically and trust that you’re on course, trusting God and make progress in short little bits and the rest God will take care of.

Kent Evans:
And speaking of short little bits, I have one last thing to add. You’re not going to go there? Come on, Lawson. I was looking up scriptures before we started on trust and I would love to end with one that doesn’t get a lot of airplay in the trust conversation. We all know Proverbs 3 and there’s a few others that are very common, but there’s one in Psalm 40 that you don’t see as often, and man it’s really good and it goes right to what you were just saying about, you find a point that you can see. You march to that point, you reorient, you keep going and so there’s these checkpoints along the way. And Psalm 40 says, blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who makes the Lord his trust. I find that turn and phrase interesting, who does not turn to the proud. And then he talks about the pride and he says to those who go astray after a lie. Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud to those who go astray after a lie. So when we are becoming prideful and we are getting out of orientation with God, it’s almost like we went to a lie and then we went astray. We hit the lie and we kept going and it’s like, Proverbs also says that the wise man sees the trouble and stops, but the fool continues. There are times when Lawson, the best we can do is trust the Lord to your point, step by step, bit by bit and just find the next point on the horizon and head to that. Dad, we hope today’s episode has helped you cement your trust in the Lord and get your compass headed to true north. Come back next week and we’ll put the second item in your gear, your survival gear. Seven must have tools every dad needs for his journey. We’ll talk to you next week.

Kent Evans:
Hey dad, thank you for listening to today’s show. If you found this episode helpful, remember you can get all the content and show notes at manhoodjourney.org/podcast. And if you really liked it, please consider doing three things. Number one, share this podcast with someone. You can hit the share button in your app wherever you listen to podcasts, or just call a person up and tell them to listen in. Number two, subscribe to this podcast so you get episodes automatically that helps us as well to help dads find the show. You can do that through your favorite listening app, whatever that is. And finally review this podcast, leave us a review, good or bad wherever you listen. Those reviews also help other dads find the show. You can always learn more about what we’re up to at manhoodjourney.org or fatheronpurpose.org. We will see you next week.

Voiceover:
You’ve been dozing off to the Father on Purpose Podcast, featuring Kent Evans and Lawson Brown. Now wake up, head over to fatheronpurpose.org for more tools that can help you be a godly, intentional and not completely horrible dad. Remember you are not a father on accident. So go be a Father on Purpose.