Father's Pulpit - Spurgeon Theology on Fatherhood Part 2

Podcast Episode Description: The Father’s Pulpit — Charles Spurgeon’s Theology of Fatherhood

In this episode of The Father’s Pulpit, we explore Charles Spurgeon’s theology of fatherhood and how the “Prince of Preachers” understood the calling of a father in the home, the church, and the Christian life. Spurgeon preached often about the spiritual responsibility of parents, the importance of raising children in the fear of the Lord, and the sacred duty of fathers to lead their families with truth, tenderness, prayer, and biblical conviction.

This episode looks at Charles Spurgeon on fatherhood, drawing from his sermons, writings, and pastoral counsel to uncover a deeply biblical vision of what it means to be a Christian father. We consider how Spurgeon viewed the father as a spiritual guide, a teacher of Scripture, a man of prayer, and an example of godly character before his children.

Whether you are a father, a pastor, a preacher, or a Christian seeking a richer theology of the home, this episode will help you see fatherhood not merely as a family role, but as a holy calling before God. Through the lens of Spurgeon’s preaching, we are reminded that the father’s influence is one of the first pulpits a child will ever hear.

Topics in this episode include:

Charles Spurgeon, fatherhood, Christian fatherhood, theology of fatherhood, biblical parenting, family worship, fathers and spiritual leadership, Spurgeon sermons, pastoral theology, Christian home, raising children in the Lord, and the father’s role in discipleship.

Listen to The Father’s Pulpit and rediscover a biblical, pastoral, and deeply practical vision of fatherhood through the theology of Charles Spurgeon.

Transcript

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The Father's Pulpit. Spurgeon's Theology for Fathers, Husbands, and Men of God. Part two. What you are actually building. The scale of what happens inside your household. Drawn from the sermons of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Metropolitan Tabernacle, London. Part 2, what you are actually building, the scale of what happens inside your household. Part 1 was about identity, who you are before you lead, the ground from which everything else comes. Part 2 turns from the ground to the structure. What are you actually building in your household? Most men underestimate this. They understand their household in functional terms, the provision, the management, the logistics of a family. Spurgeon understood it in theological terms. The household is a church. The daily worship you maintain or neglect is shaping souls. The example you set is being absorbed more deeply than anything you say. The quality of your faith, its depth, its reality, its manliness, is the atmosphere your children breathe every day of their lives. Four chapters carry this argument. Chapter 5 is about the family altar, the daily practice of household worship, and why Spurgeon placed it at the same level as the work of Moses and Solomon. Chapter 6 is about the pious example, what your children are actually learning from watching you, for good and ill. Chapter 7 is about the manliness of Christianity, the specific, courageous quality of faith that Spurgeon believed men in particular were called to embody. Chapter 8 draws all of it together in his Sermon on Fathers in Christ, the portrait of the mature man of God who has known him from the beginning and whose life shows it. You are building something. Spurgeon knew what it was. Read accordingly. Chapter 5. The Family Altar. Why the daily worship of your household carries more weight than you think. There is a way of reading the scriptures that makes the priestly work of the household feel like a secondary concern, something added to the real business of faith rather than central to it. You go to church, you pray privately. You believe. And the household worship, the family altar, the daily practice of scripture and prayer with your children. This is supplementary, beneficial if you can manage it, not essential. Spurgeon had no patience for this reading. He pressed the family altar with the same urgency he pressed every other aspect of the Christian life, and he was explicit about why. The transmission of the faith from one generation to the next depends on it. The household that does not maintain it is not merely missing a spiritual discipline. It is failing to do the work that God designed the believing family to do. Your first and most pressing duty. In his sermon on the Sunday school in the scriptures, Spurgeon was pressing on the importance of teaching children from the earliest age. He named what he considered the primary instrument of that teaching, and he named it with unusual directness. Let no Christian parents fall into the delusion that the Sunday school is intended to ease them of their personal duties. The first and most natural condition of things is for Christian parents to train up their own children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Christian women, by teaching children the holy scriptures, are as much fulfilling their part for the Lord as Moses in judging Israel, or Solomon in building the temple. Fathers, the godly training of your offspring is your first and most pressing duty. The Sunday school and the scriptures, Sermon No. 1866, 2 Timothy 3.15. Your first and most pressing duty. Not your most visible duty. Not the duty that feels most significant. The first and most pressing one. Spurgeon places it before everything else a man might be occupied with. His work, his ministry, his public usefulness. The training of his own children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord is the first claim on his deliberate, sustained attention. And the comparison he makes is not accidental. Moses in judging Israel, the man who gave the covenant people their law, who led them through forty years of wilderness, who stood between them and God at Sinai. Solomon in building the temple, the man who constructed the house of God, who organized the worship of the nation, who presided over Israel's greatest era of peace and prosperity. These are the figures Spurgeon places alongside the father who teaches his children scripture at home. Not to flatter him, to tell him the truth about the scale of what he is doing. From a very child. The text Spurgeon was pressing in this sermon was Paul's statement about Timothy. From a child thou hast known the holy scriptures. He pressed the earliness of the instruction because he believed the first years of a child's life are uniquely formative and uniquely irreversible. The expression from a child might be better understood if we read it from a very child, from a babe. It does not mean a well-grown child or youth, but a child just rising out of infancy. Babes receive impressions long before we are aware of the fact. Give us the first seven years of a child, with God's grace, and we may defy the world, the flesh, and the devil to ruin that immortal soul. Those first years, while yet the clay is soft and plastic, go far to decide the form of the vessel. Among the thoughts that come to an old man before he enters heaven, the most plentiful are those that visited him when he sat upon his mother's knee. The Sunday School and the Scriptures, Sermon No. 1866, 2 Timothy 3.15. The clay is soft in the early years. It is still being shaped. The father who understands this does not wait until his children are old enough to reason about faith before he begins the work of forming them in it. He begins when they are small, when the impressions go deepest, when the patterns of how God is related to in the daily life of the household are being absorbed at a level below the explicit and the articulate. And Spurgeon's observation about old men is worth pressing. The most plentiful thoughts as a man approaches death are the ones from earliest childhood. Not the theological arguments he wrestled with in his forties. The things from his mother's knee. The verses she taught him before he understood them. The prayer she prayed in his hearing. The way God was spoken about in the house where he grew up. These are the things that last. The father who fills those early years with the right content is doing work that will outlast everything else he does. Take this child and nurse it for me. Spurgeon pressed the sacred trust argument directly. He wanted fathers to understand that the children in their households are not simply theirs, they belong to God, and he has specifically entrusted them to the man's care for the purpose of their formation. O dear fathers, you have a very sacred trust reposed in you by God. He has in effect said to you, Take this child and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages. You are called to equip the future man of God, that he may be thoroughly furnished to every good work. If God spares you, you may live to hear that boy speak to thousands, and you will have the sweet reflection in your heart that the quiet teachings of the nursery, and the faithful leadership of the household, led the man to love his God and serve him. The Sunday School and the Scriptures, Sermon No. 1866, 2 Timothy 3.15. Take this child and nurse it for me. The image is of a steward, not an owner. A man does not own the children in his household. He has been entrusted with them by the one to whom they actually belong. And the trust is specific. Nurse them for me. Form them in the knowledge of God. Equip the future man of God. Do the work that only you, in this household, with these children, in these years, can do. And then the extraordinary promise, you may live to hear that boy speak to thousands. The chain runs from the faithful father's daily teaching through the Son who carries it into the world and beyond. The Father does not see the end of the chain from where he stands. He sees the boy at the breakfast table who needs to hear the word of God again today. But Spurgeon is asking him to hold in view the length of what he is building. The ages look to you. Spurgeon's concluding challenge to the household teachers in his congregation was directed to Sunday school teachers, but it carries identical weight for the father at the family altar. In your household sit our future evangelists. In those children sits an apostle to some distant land. There shall come from your faithful teaching those who are to bear the banners of the Lord in the thick of the fray. The ages look to you each time your household assembles for worship. Oh, that God may help you to do your part well. The Sunday school and the scriptures, Sermon No. 1866, 2 Timothy 3.15. The ages look to you each time your household assembles. You do not know which child sitting with you tonight will become the man who stands in the thick of the fray for the faith. You cannot see what is being planted by the daily practice of Scripture and prayer in your household. But it is being planted. And the ages, the generation that comes after yours, and the generation after that, are shaped by whether you maintain the altar or let it go out. This is Moses' level work. Do it accordingly. Questions for reflection. 1. Spurgeon said the godly training of your offspring is your first and most pressing duty. Looking honestly at your actual priorities, does it hold that place? What is competing with it for the first position? 2. He said, Give us the first seven years of a child and we may defy the world, the flesh, and the devil to ruin that immortal soul. What are the current years being filled with in your household? Are the impressions being made the right ones? 3. The image is take this child and nurse it for me. Does your approach to your children feel more like ownership or stewardship? What would change in how you lead your household if you felt the weight of the sacred trust? He said the ages look to you each time your household assembles. How would your family worship change if you carried that sense of generational consequence into it? What specific practice of family worship exists in your household right now? Is it consistent and genuine, or has it become occasional and mechanical? What is one step toward making it what it should be? Chapter 6. The Pious Example. What your children are actually absorbing from watching you. Spurgeon made two statements about the relationship between a father's life and his children's formation that, read together, describe everything a man needs to understand about the weight of his example. The first is encouraging, the pious example of a godly father prepares the ground for grace, softening the soil in ways that formal instruction alone cannot reach. The second is sobering, your sins will be imitated by your children. They are watching everything. What they see you do, they will do. What they see you love, they will learn to love. What they see you ignore, they will learn can be safely ignored. The example is not optional to the household leadership. It is the most powerful form of teaching available to a father. The question is not whether he is teaching by example. It is what he is teaching. The pious example of a godly father. Spurgeon described what happens in the household where a father is genuinely walking with God, and he placed the father's pious example alongside the mother's loving instruction as the two things that most effectively prepare a child's heart for grace. In some of our cases, the pious example of a godly father, and the loving instruction of a tender mother, had softened us somewhat, so that though still we were unsaved and still out of Christ, yet we were like the man who lay at the pool of Bethesda, we were close by the edge of the healing stream. The preparatory work had already been done. God's grace still had to come, but it did not have as far to travel, and it found the ground already broken, already softened, already positioned near the place where healing happens. Sermon on Preparation for Grace, Volume 9. The pious example of a godly father. What Spurgeon is naming here is not a formal religious influence, not the father who takes his children to church and teaches them the catechism. He is naming something more interior and more powerful, the witness of a man's actual life. The way he prays. The way he speaks about God in the ordinary moments of the day. The way he handles difficulty. The way his faith shows under pressure. The way Sunday is related to Monday and his actual behavior. A child who has watched his father take God seriously for the first decade of his life has been softened. He is not far from the edge of the healing stream. He may resist the faith for years. He may wander. But the impressions made by a father's pious example do not dissolve easily. They go too deep. They were received at the level where lasting formation happens, and they stay there long after the child has left the house and forgotten most of what was formerly taught to him. Your sins will be imitated by your children. The same principle that makes the pious example so powerful makes the impious example so dangerous. Spurgeon did not soften this. Here comes the father. Sir, your sins will be imitated by your children. You cannot therefore understand your errors, because they are sins against your own offspring, sins against the children that have sprung from your own loins. The father whose life is marked by habitual dishonesty, by ungoverned anger, by prayerlessness, by contempt for the things of God, that father is not merely failing to set a good example. He is actively setting a bad one that his children will carry into their own households and their own children. Sermon on Hidden Errors, Volume 6. Sins Against Your Own Offspring. Spurgeon is pressing the man who thinks of his private vices as private. They are not private. They are observed, absorbed, and eventually imitated. The child who watches his father manage anger poorly learns to manage anger poorly. The child who sees his father treat Sunday as indistinguishable from every other day learns that God is not particularly important in the daily life of a man. The child who grows up in a house where prayer is theoretically valued but never actually practiced learns that prayer is theoretical. The reverse is also true. The child who watches his father handle difficulty with genuine trust in God learns that God can be trusted under difficulty. The child who sees his father's faith shape the way he does business and the way he treats people, and the way he responds to failure, and the way he talks about Christ and the ordinary conversations of daily life, that child is being formed in ways that no sermon from outside the house can replicate. The Sunday Evening Table. Spurgeon's most personal account of how a father's household leadership shapes the next generation is also one of the most sobering passages in all 63 volumes. He was reflecting on his own formation, and he named the specific practice of his home, led by his mother with a father who supported it, that shaped him most profoundly. I cannot tell you how much I owed to the solemn words of my good mother. It was the custom on Sunday evenings, while we were yet little children, for her to stay at home with us, and then we sat round the table and read verse by verse, and she explained the scripture to us. After that came the time of pleading, and the question was asked how long it would be before we would seek the Lord. Then came a mother's prayer, and some of the words of that prayer we shall never forget, even when our hair is gray. I remember on one occasion her praying thus Now, Lord, if my children go on in their sins, it will not be from ignorance that they perish, and my soul must bear a swift witness against them at the day of judgment if they lay not hold of Christ. That thought pierced my conscience and stirred my heart. Children brought to Christ, Sermon No. 581, Mark 10, 13-16. That thought pierced his conscience and stirred his heart. The most famous preacher of the Victorian era, who shaped the faith of hundreds of thousands across his ministry, traces the beginning of his conversion to a Sunday evening table and a mother's prayer. Not to a dramatic conversion moment. To the long preparation of years of household worship, faithful and specific and pointed, that had softened the ground and positioned him at the edge of the healing stream. Notice what Spurgeon does not say about his father in this passage. His father was not absent from his formation, he has spoken elsewhere about the influence of both parents. But it is his mother's specific practice he names here, because it was the most formative. The implication for the father and Spurgeon's congregation was clear. If the household worship is happening, it is happening because someone is making it happen. If the father is not that person, his absence is being felt. And if he is that person, the Sunday evening table where verse by verse the scripture is explained and the questions are asked and the prayers are prayed is doing work in his children that he will not see the full extent of until they are gray. What this means for you, practically. The practical challenge of this chapter is an honest audit. Not of your intentions or your theology, but of your actual daily example. What do your children see when they watch you pray? Is it genuine or perfunctory? Do they see a man who actually expects God to answer, or a man going through a religious form because it is expected? What do your children see when they watch you read scripture? Is it a book you love and return to and wrestle with, or a book that sits on a shelf except for Sunday mornings? What do your children see when something goes wrong, when the finances are difficult, when the relationship is strained, when the work is hard and the future is uncertain? Do they see a man who trusts God under pressure, or a man whose Christianity functions only in the comfortable seasons? Spurgeon's word to the man who finds his audit uncomfortable is not a condemnation. It is a direction. You cannot change yesterday's example. You can change tomorrow's. The pious example that softens the ground in your children's hearts is built one ordinary, unglamorous, consistent day at a time. Start today. Live it in front of them. Let them see what it looks like to be a man who actually believes what he says he believes. Because they are watching. Every day. And what they see, they will eventually become. Questions for reflection. 1. Spurgeon said the pious example of a godly father softens the ground for grace. What is the primary impression your children are currently absorbing from watching your actual daily life, not your formal teaching, but your life? 2. He said your sins will be imitated by your children. Is there a specific pattern in your own life, a habit, a attitude, a way of relating to God or to people that you would not want to see repeated in your sons? 3. The Sunday evening table practice is what Spurgeon remembered most from his formation. What is the equivalent in your household? Is there a regular, consistent practice that your children will remember decades from now as the thing that shaped them? 4. He said that thought pierced his conscience and stirred his heart, referring to his mother's solemn, specific prayer. Do your children know that you pray for them urgently and specifically? Do they ever hear you pray? 5. What would the audit of your example reveal? Where is the gap between the man you intend to be in front of your children and the man you actually are? What is one specific step toward closing that gap? Chapter 7. The manliness of Christianity. What real courage looks like in a man of God. There is a version of Christian manhood that Spurgeon had no patience for. It is soft in the wrong sense. Accommodating where it should be firm, evasive where it should be direct, eager for approval where it should be indifferent to it. Willing to let the world set the terms and then adjust its Christianity to fit. He called this fawning and cringing before the mighty, and he believed it had done significant damage to the faith. Not because strength is everything or because tenderness is wrong. But because the Christianity of the New Testament is a courageous religion. It was built by men who went to prison for it, and died for it, and stood alone for it when the entire culture was aligned against them. And the man who has no category for that kind of courage in his own life has not yet understood what his faith requires of him. The manliness of Christianity. Spurgeon was preaching on Stephen's martyrdom, and he found in Stephen's calm before the Sanhedrin the portrait of a quality he was determined to press on his congregation. I pray God we may learn the manliness of Christianity, for much injury has been done to the faith by professors fawning and cringing before the mighty. God has put within the true believer a spirit of uprightness and sternness for the right which the world cannot bend, let its blasts howl as they will. Eyes up, Christian. Let your heart go up to heaven, let the desires mount, let the whole soul fly towards heaven. With heaven in your eye, you may walk through the crowds of men as a lion walks through a flock of sheep, and your fellow men shall involuntarily own your power. Sermon on Stephen, Volume 13. With heaven in your eye you may walk as a lion. Spurgeon is not describing aggression or dominance. He is describing a quality of groundedness, the man who knows where he is going and who he belongs to, who does not need the approval of the crowd because he is not oriented toward the crowd, who walks through the pressures and the mockery and the culture's contempt for what he values without losing his footing because his footing is not in the culture. This quality has direct application to household leadership. The father who will not lead his household in prayer because it feels awkward has not learned the manliness of Christianity. The father who will not teach his children scripture because it does not fit the cultural expectations of what a modern man does has not learned it. The man who shrinks from the priestly role because nobody around him is doing it and it requires him to swim against the current, he has not learned it. The line does not check whether the flock approves of its walk. It walks. The man of God who has learned the manliness of Christianity does not check whether the culture approves of his household leadership. It is good for a man to bear the yoke. Spurgeon pressed the manliness question from a different angle in a sermon on bearing the yoke in youth. He was addressing the specific temptation of easier times, of a generation that has had things more comfortable than its father's and is in danger of becoming weaker for it. I only hope that the easier times, which are now happily in fashion, may not breed a softer and a less manly nature among our young men. It is good for a man that he should bear the yoke of labor, trial, and difficulty in his youth. Many a man who has succeeded in life is very thankful to God that he had in his early years to bear a little poverty, and to work hard, for he never would have come to be what he is if it had not been for the strengthening and educating influence of trial. Sermon on Bearing the Yoke, Sermon No. 1330, Lamentations 327. A softer and a less manly nature. Spurgeon sees the danger of ease producing something that is less useful to God and less capable of the kind of faithfulness the faith requires. He is Not romanticizing hardship. He is observing a pattern. The man who has been tested and carried the weight and persisted through difficulty has something in him that the man who has been shielded from difficulty does not have. He knows what he is made of. He has found the resources that only difficulty reveals. This applies directly to fatherhood. The man who leads his household through hard seasons, who maintains the family altar when he does not feel like it, who keeps teaching his children when the teaching does not seem to be taking root, who continues to pray for his children through years of apparent fruitlessness, is being formed by the difficulty into exactly the kind of man his household needs. The trial is not the enemy of his fatherhood. It is the furnace that produces the quality of metal it requires. Superlatively manly. Spurgeon's clearest definition of what manliness actually looks like in practice comes not from a description of strength, but from an examination of Christ's behavior under extreme provocation. He was pressing the distinction between the world's definition of manliness, the aggressive response to insult, and the genuinely manly response of a man grounded in God. Was it manly to refuse to call fire from heaven, and to touch and heal the wounded ear? To me it seems superlatively manly, and may such be my manliness and yours. Our Lord, when reviled, reviled not again, but submitted himself to him that judges righteously. O man of men, be the criterion henceforth of all the manliness at which we aim. If others count the opposite to be manly, let them count it so who will, we are not of their mind. Herein is victory, when a man so overcomes himself that he replies to evil with good and wise answers, and not with fierce and reviling words. Sermon on the manliness of Christ, Volume 22. Superlatively manly. Spurgeon is reclaiming a word that the world has defined in terms of aggression and dominance, and he is filling it with a different content, the man who is so secure in God that he does not need to retaliate, so grounded in Christ that he can absorb insult without being destabilized, so genuinely strong that he does not need to demonstrate his strength by crushing the opposition. This is the quality that the household needs from its father. Not the aggressive dominance that mistakes volume for authority. The calm, grounded, Christ-centered strength of a man who has overcome himself. Who can be firm without being harsh? Who can lead without needing to dominate? Who can correct without cruelty and instruct without contempt? Who is strong enough to be gentle, because his strength does not come from his own resources and does not depend on the compliance of the people around him. What this means for you, practically. The manliness of Christianity that Spurgeon is describing is not a personality type. It is not the exclusive possession of men who are naturally bold or who find leadership easy. It is a quality of character produced in any man who has genuinely found his identity in Christ rather than in the approval of the world around him. The practical test is where you take your courage from. Does your leadership of your household depend on the cooperation of your family? Does your family worship require everyone to be in the mood for it to happen? Does your willingness to be the priest in your own house depend on whether anyone around you respects that role? The manly man in Spurgeon's definition does not require the world's endorsement for what he has decided to do. He walks through the flock as the lion walks, not aggressively, not seeking attention, but also not adjusting his direction based on whether the flock approves. He has an orientation. He has made his declaration. As for me and my house, bear the yoke when the bearing is hard. The trial is producing something. Stay at the altar when no one else seems to value it. Lead the household in worship when the family is tired and the conditions are unfavorable and nobody is particularly grateful. This is what the manliness of Christianity looks like in its daily and unglamorous form. Not the dramatic moment of heroism. The ordinary and persistent faithfulness of a man who has decided what he is and what his house will be, and who is not going to change his mind because the season got difficult. Questions for reflection. 1. Spurgeon said much injury has been done to the faith by professors fawning and cringing before the mighty. Where in your life are you currently accommodating the culture at the expense of your calling? Is there an area where you are adjusting what you believe or how you live based on what the people around you think? 2. He warned that easier times may breed a softer and less manly nature. Has comfort made you less willing to carry the weight of difficult spiritual disciplines? Where has ease produced softness in your faith? 3. He defines superlative manliness as the man who overcomes himself, who responds to evil with good, who absorbs pressure without being destabilized. Does your household see that quality in you? How do you handle provocation and pressure in front of your children? The practical test is where you take your courage from. Does your household leadership depend on favorable conditions and enthusiastic cooperation, or can you maintain it when neither is present? What sustains it in the hard moments? Spurgeon said, Walk as a lion, with heaven in your eye. What would it look like for you to lead your household this week with that quality of groundedness and direction? What would change? Chapter 8. Fathers in Christ. The mature faith that has known him from the beginning. John's first epistle addresses three categories of believers little children, young men, and fathers. The description he gives of each reveals what he considers the defining characteristic of spiritual maturity. The children have been forgiven and know the Father. The young men have overcome the evil one and are strong. The fathers have known him, that is from the beginning. Spurgeon preached an entire sermon on that phrase. Fathers, because ye have known him, that is from the beginning. He was asking what it actually means to be a father in Christ, what the mature male believer looks like, what he has, what he knows, what he has become. And the answer he gives is worth pressing carefully, because it describes not just a stage of spiritual development but the destination toward which every man who leads a household is aiming. Who are the fathers? Spurgeon began by defining what he meant by the term, and he was careful to separate it from the question of age. Fathers are persons of maturity, men who are not raw and green, not fresh recruits, unaccustomed to march or fight, but old legionaries who have used their swords on others, and are themselves scarred with wounds received in conflict. These men know what they know, for they have thought over the gospel, studied it, considered it, and having so considered it, have embraced it with full intensity of conviction. They know the voice of the shepherd, and a stranger will they not follow. They are not fascinated by error. New converts in their difficulties resort to these fathers, for doubts which bewilder the beginner are simplicity itself to those who are taught of the Lord. Fathers in Christ, Sermon No. 1751, 1 John 2.13-14. Old legionaries scarred with wounds from conflict. Not men who have been shielded from difficulty, but men who have been in the fight and have the marks to show for it. Their faith is not theoretical. It has been tested under conditions that could have ended it, and it has held. They know what they believe not because they have read about it, but because they have lived it through the kind of circumstances that reveal what a man's faith actually consists of. Spurgeon was pressing this because he believed the church in his generation was too full of what he called light, frothy, chaffy minds, men who held the faith loosely, who were moved by every new theological fashion, who could not be depended upon when conditions became difficult. The fathers were the ballast. The men whose settled, tested, deeply rooted knowledge of God made them reliable when everything around them was shifting. The household needs this kind of man at its head. Not the father who has all the answers, but the father whose faith has been tested enough that his children can see it is real. Whose knowledge of God is not merely conceptual but personal, earned through years of walking with God through circumstances that require genuine trust. That man leads differently from the man whose faith has never been tested. Men of stability and strength. The specific quality Spurgeon pressed on as the defining feature of the fathers in Christ was a kind of immovability, not stubbornness, but the settled, rooted quality of a man who has gone deep enough in his knowledge of God that the surface turbulences do not threaten the foundation. Fathers are men of stability and strength. If thieves are planning to attack a house they care little about the children, and make small account of the boys, but if fatherly men are about, the thieves are not eager for an encounter. Even thus the archdeceiver has hope of injuring the church by deceiving the little children and the young men, but the stalwart men of God, who walk in the midst of the household, looked up to by everybody, are not so readily blown to and fro. These are men who know how to wear the armor which God has provided, and to use the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. Men of strong faith and convictions, of decision and courage, of prudent action. Be ye steadfast, unmovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord. Fathers in Christ, Sermon No. 1751, 1 John 2.13-14. Looked up to by everybody. Not because they seek status, but because a genuinely stable man is recognized even by those who have not articulated what they are recognizing. The child who has a father whose faith is settled and unshakable and genuinely deep, grows up in a household with something that cannot be manufactured, a living demonstration that God is real and can be trusted under any circumstances. That child does not need to be argued into the faith. He has seen it. He has watched it function under pressure. He knows what a man looks like who actually believes what he says he believes, because he has lived with one. And when the day comes that his own faith is tested, and it will come, he will have a point of reference that no amount of formal theological instruction could have given him. Ye have known him. The central characteristic of the fathers in Christ, the thing that distinguishes them from the young men and the children, is in three words, ye have known him. Not known about him. Not believe correct propositions about him. Known him. The language of personal acquaintance, of relationship, of actual intercourse with the living God. Ye have known him. A dear servant of Christ sat beside me and said of a certain person, he is one that knows the Lord. He is not merely a Christian, but he knows our Lord, you and I know what that means, do we not? I could only look at him with a deep look of loving appreciation. True fathers in grace meditate upon Christ, they feed upon Scripture, press the juice of it, and inwardly enjoy the flavor of it. They not only know the Lord by much meditation upon him, but they know him by actual intercourse, they walk with him, they talk with him. Such saints are more with Christ than with anyone else, to no one do they tell so much as they have told to him. Fathers in Christ, Sermon No. 1751, 1 John 2.13-14. More with Christ than with anyone else. That is the portrait of the mature man of God. Not a man who performs religious duties efficiently. A man whose actual daily companionship is with Christ, who brings everything to him, who talks to him, who tells him more than he tells anyone else, who has been shaped over years of this kind of intimate daily fellowship into someone whose character actually reflects the one he has been walking with. This is what the household actually needs from its head. Not expertise in theology or skill in leadership or even the capacity to teach the family altar well. A man whose knowledge of God is real, personal, tested, and lived, a man who actually knows him, is the man whose household will be shaped by that knowledge in ways that formal instruction and deliberate programs cannot produce. The children will feel the reality of his faith in the atmosphere of the house. They will absorb it in the way children absorb everything their parents genuinely believe, through the pores, in the ordinary moments, without being taught it in any explicit sense. Not only known but also knowing. Spurgeon ended his sermon on the fathers with a challenge that turns the whole portrait into a call to action. He had described what the Father in Christ knows. He pressed the congregation to ask whether they were becoming what they were hearing described. Oh, ye fathers, cry hallelujah with me. For if you are such fathers, dear brethren, I rejoice in you. If you are not such as yet, aspire to this eminence, and pray the Lord that you may not be long before you arrive at the ripeness and sweetness which belong to mellow Christians who are prepared for the great in-gathering. Many light, frothy, chaffy minds come into the church, and give us untold trouble to keep them right. Oh, for more men of such a sort that if the whole world went wrong, they would still abide by the right, men who cannot be carried away by superstition, men who cannot be borne down by skepticism, men whose faith is on their own accounts determined and unyielding, for they will not stir beyond, it is written. Fathers in Christ, Sermon No. 1751, 1 John 2.13-14. Men whose faith is determined and unyielding, they will not stir beyond it is written. That is the destination. Not a stage of spiritual development that simply arrives with age, but a quality of settled, scripture-anchored, personally tested knowledge of God that is the product of years of deliberate, daily, unglamorous walking with Christ. It is what every man who leads a household is building toward. Not just for his own sake, for the sake of the children who are watching him and absorbing the quality of his faith into the fabric of who they are becoming. The father who is building toward this kind of mature, settled, personal knowledge of God is building a household on rock. And what is built on rock holds. Questions for reflection. 1. Spurgeon described the fathers as old legionaries scarred with wounds from conflict. Does your faith have that quality of being tested and proven, or is it still largely untested? What has been the most significant test of your faith, and what did you find when you needed it? 2. He said they know the voice of the shepherd, and a stranger they will not follow. How discerning is your own knowledge of God right now. Can you distinguish his voice from the voices of the culture and your own desires? What shapes that discernment? 3. He pressed ye have known him, personal acquaintance, actual intercourse, more with Christ than with anyone else. Is that an accurate description of your current relationship with God? What would need to change for it to become true? Spurgeon said the settled father is looked up to by everybody in the household, even if no one articulates why. Do your children see in you a man whose faith is settled and reliable? What would they say if asked whether their father actually believes what he says he believes? 5. He described the destination men who will not stir beyond it is written, who cannot be carried away by the world's current because their anchor goes too deep. How deep does your anchor currently go? What would deepen it?