Mark Sanborn
June 17, 2012 - W1225

    How many of you were a member of a 4H club? 4H is the largest youth organization in America.  Six million members of current 4H clubs are across the United States.  It’s made of different clubs to help kids learn different life skills, and there are sixty million alumni.  There are 540,000 adult volunteers and thirty-five thousand professional staff that help 4H exist.  Today, I’m going to address the fathers so let’s talk about the 4H’s and how you and I can become a 4H father.  The first H is your head.  It’s about what you think.  Whether it’s at home or in a class, an average teacher teaches a subject.  A good teacher teaches students how to learn.  But a great teacher or a great father teaches the student how to love learning.  The problem sometimes, men, is that we don’t share everything we know.  We think our kids don’t want to know or act like they don’t want to know so we keep it inside.  I want to give you a homework assignment if you’re up for it so you don’t fall into that trap of not sharing what you know.  When I turned fifty, I wrote down the fifty most important things I learned in fifty years of living.  We turned it into a PDF and gave it out at my fiftieth birthday party to anyone who wanted it, but the reason I did it was for my sons.  Because I figured if I was fifty and I had not learned one good lesson per year, I was messing up and missing out.   I wanted them to know what I thought was important and pass on what was in my head into their head.  So, I wrote it down—one lesson a year.  You can do that. To be a 4H father, make sure you share what’s in your head. 

 Now sometimes, if we’re reluctant to share what’s in our head, I can tell you we’re reluctant to share what’s in our hearts.  Proverbs 4:23 is a very popular scripture.  It says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the well spring of life.” It has dawned on me that we as men tend to get it wrong.  See, what the Bible is saying is to guard your heart against corruption - not against others.  We’re afraid as men to be mocked.  We’re afraid to let people know how we feel for fear that’ll be seen as weakness rather than as honesty and openness.  And if there is anything our children and wives want, it is our hearts and that is the second H. 

I want to suggest two things that can really help you be a 4H dad especially when it comes to the heart.  The first is touching and embracing.  You may not have come from a family that hugged or touched.  People say that all the time.  “I’m not real comfortable; nobody in my family really hugged or touched.  That doesn’t mean you can’t break the pattern.  I’ve never ever heard anyone say, “You know, I hug my kids too much.”  But I can’t tell you how many people told me later in their lives, “I didn’t hug or embrace my kids enough.”  So touching and embracing are two ways to share our heart.  Another way is to open our emotions so it’s apparent.  One of my favorite scriptures in the Bible is John 11:35, “Jesus wept.”  What is the context of this verse? His friend Lazarus just died.  Did you know that Christianity is unique in world religions in that God did not call us just His creation or servants; He calls us His friends.  Jesus was fully God and fully man.  He called Lazarus His friend.  Here is what is really interesting about Lazarus.  When they came and said that Lazarus was dead, Jesus already knew that He was going to raise him from the dead. So, why did He weep? He wept because it was the appropriate thing to do when someone’s friend dies.  He met them at their emotional need.  He didn’t use His perspective.  What we need to do is meet people at their emotional point of need.  That’s the second H.

    The third H is the hands.  The hands are what you do.  Everything we do either promotes or pollutes.  Do you ever stop and say to yourself, I’m turning into my parents? Do you have that moment when you say something and you realize you are channeling your mother or father?  When your children do that someday, will they see it as a blessing or a curse?  Hands, being figurative for what we do, make all the difference.  Integrity is the distance between our lips and our lives.  It’s what we do that creates our legacies.  You know what the world is starved for?  They’re starved for Christians that are different in the right way.  You ask the average person what they know about Christians, and they’ll say Christians are judgmental, critical, negative, “they don’t like me or my behavior”.  We seem to be identified by the negatives and what we need rather than the good that we do.  So the third H is your hands, and what you are doing to demonstrate to your kids how to live life. 

    Finally the fourth H is your health.  Think about this for a moment if your head is what you think, heart is what you feel, hands are what you do, what’s the role of health?  Health is what sustains you.  A lot of people work out and exercise for vanity reasons.  They want to look good, but I’ll tell you why I’m committed to staying in shape.  It’s because I want to spend as much time as I can providing for my family.  The reason I continue to watch my health is because of what I call the principle of reserve.  I want to suggest today the three reserves you need if you want to be a 4H father.  The first reserve is physical.  We need to take care of ourselves.  I’ve been a student and devotee of exercise for a long time.  In 2008, I was diagnosed with cancer.  I’m fine now by the grace of God, but within eight days of surgery, I was back on my exercise bike.  That’s when I realized the power of reserves gives you a margin when you have a health setback.  You also need financial reserves.  Did you know the average American is two paychecks away from insolvency?  In other words, if they miss one or two paychecks, they will default on their mortgages or other financial obligations.  We live in an age of consumption.  However, do you know what we need to do as Christians? Not just consume but create.  My father taught me the most powerful financial planning tool ever: spend less than you make and save some of what you don’t spend.  That’s how you create financial reserves.  But the third reserve is the most important reserve of all—spiritual reserves.  In the 19^th chapter of Matthew, Jesus said it is harder for a rich man to get into Heaven, than for a camel to go through the eye of the needle.  The eye of the needle was a passageway in the city where camels, fully laden with material goods, could not walk through.  They had to unload all the goods, and the camel had to get down on its knees to pass through the needle.  So, what Jesus was saying, was not that it was impossible for a rich man to get into heaven, but that it was really hard and typically, you had to unburden yourselves of the love for material things.  I’ve always wondered why it’s hard for rich people to get into heaven, and I have a theory.  See, when you have so much material wealth, you don’t see the spiritual void in your soul.  It’s not till you fail in a relationship, take a financial setback, or health downturn, you realize that as good as material and physical reserves are, the ultimate reserve is your faith.  What are you doing to build reserves in advance?  Someone once said to me years ago, someday life is going to shake you to your foundations, and so you better prepare now.  So, the fourth H is health; that which sustains us.

    I think a lot of people resist the kingdom of God, because they think if God is anything like their earthly father, they want nothing to do with Him.  Lots of people have “father” wounds.  And if you have one, it’s unfair and unjust, but I got good news.  Your earthly father may fail you, but your Heavenly one doesn’t fail you!  God never changes, and you can break the earthly father pattern.  You can become the kind of father to your children, you wish you had.  That’s an incredible opportunity and privilege to rededicate yourself to that.  If you had a good father or parents, repay that by being an even better father to your children.  God sings His love into our lives.  We, as fathers, are conduits of God’s love.  And the challenge and opportunity of a 4H father, today, is to take the love of God, sing it, speak it, and live it into your kids.  Godspeed.

Discussion questions:

1.    What four ways can you become a 4H father?

2.   What are you doing to build reserves in advance?

3.   How can you share your heart with your children?

4.   What keeps you from sharing what you know in your head?

5.   How can you leave a Godly legacy for your family in what you do?