If David was anything, he was a fighter. He wasn’t a quitter. It wasn’t in his nature to sit passively by and let everything in his home continue to fall apart.

So he made a major midcourse correction.

He decided that it was time for him to start mentoring and stop being a passive, distant, and absent father. It was time to build a son. It was time to give his son what he really needed.

Just like David, you, too, can make a midcourse correction. No matter what your situation, your age, the sins of your past—David teaches us that it is never too late to change course. You can still become the father your son desperately needs.

In fact, it is here that you cannot fail.

The Enemy will do everything, absolutely everything in his power to distract you so that you will fail.

You cannot let that happen.

            You may remember the old country song “Take This Job and Shove It.”  Here’s another option:  Take your job and shovel it under the providential and strange plan that God is working out in your life.

            What is your current assignment in life?

            Are you pleased with it?  Do you hate it?  Or do you feel that you’re just drifting right now, without any assignment that you can discern?  Some assignments are welcomed and some are unwanted.

            But they are all from the Lord.

            Psalm 37:23 is very clear:  “The steps of a man are established by the Lord.”  God is in control of your journey and of your destination…right now.  And He is in control over the assignments of life.

            It is God Himself who assigns us to our posts.  When God gives you such an assignment, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be there forever.  It could all change in a year or in a month or in a week.  It could change tomorrow.

            But you’re there for now.

            You may be bored, you may be overqualified, you may be unchallenged, you may sense you are unwanted, and you may feel like a fish out of water.  But that doesn’t mean that the assignment is a waster.  The Lord doesn’t waste our lives.  He knows precisely what He is doing when He give us our assignments.

            So, let’s say you’re in an assignment right now that’s not to your liking.  You’re not sure how you got there, and you certainly don’t want to stay there.  But don’t become so upset or discouraged that you miss one very important fact:  Most likely, that assignment you’re in isn’t final.  But it is somehow preparing you for the work God has for you to do.

            In God’s plan, there are no wasted assignments.

            In God’s plan, every assignment is preparation.

A Dead-end Assignment                                                                                       

Let’s face it, sometimes in life, we hit a dead end.  We think we’re following a star and we end up in a ditch … or in a slum … or in a blind alley.  There are dead-end places and there are dead-end jobs.  The problem with a dead-end place is that there is no way out. That’s exactly where Joseph was – he was a slave and he would always be a slave.  Slaves don’t have a lot of options.  As a matter of fact, they don’t have any.                                                                   

            Perhaps you are in a dead-end place or in a dead-end assignment.

            So how did you get there?

            Ultimately, the Lord put you there.  And He has put you there for a reason.  What reason? you ask.  For now, the answer to that question is hidden from you.  It’s a secret known only to the Lord (Deut. 29:29)

            People in dead-end places or in dead-end assignments tend to think they will be there forever.  But you won’t.  In fact, God has you in a place of preparation and those dead-end places are very critical to what God plans to ultimately do in your life.  God uses dead-end assignments to get you ready for what He has planned for you in the future.  But so often in those dark, discouraging places, we think we have no future.

No Dead End Is Permanent                                                                      

Every dead-end place and dead-end assignment has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  God has set borders around your dead-end place.  He has lessons for you to learn in the dead-end place that can be learned nowhere else.  Your dead-end place will probably have a midterm and a final, along with a number of quizzes along the way.  God has set the dates of the semester.  It has a beginning and it has an end.  But you have no idea what those dates are.

            The longer you are in a dead-end place, the more convinced you become that you will always be there.  You begin to think there’s no way out.  But at the right time, there will be.

            I have a friend who oversees the editorial and biblical content of numerous Christian books that are published each year – books published in many languages and distributed all over the world.  Overseeing a large contingent of authors, he makes critical decisions about content and doctrine.  It’s his job to make sure that truth is kept in balance.  His position is a critical one that affects the lives of potentially millions of people.

            He was a top student in seminary, taking his course work very seriously.  Graduating with honors, he fully expected God to enrich his ministry.  But after pasturing a church for just a few years, he was asked to leave.  Devastated, my friend began to look for another ministry position.  But no matter how diligently he searched, there was nothing.  For three years the only job he could get was delivering newspapers.

            That was it.

            Every morning he would be up at four, throwing newspapers.  It was a dead-end job in a dead-end place.  At times he thought he would be there forever.  He thought God had passed him by.

            When my friend was throwing papers, he felt like a failure.  But the Lord was with him, and he was on his way to becoming a successful man.

            When you find yourself in a dead-end assignment, you are not alone.  It may feel like you’re alone, but you’re not.  Joseph was a slave in a foreign nation with a foreign culture and a foreign language.  He didn’t know a soul, and he was completely cut off from friends and family.  But the Bible makes it clear that he wasn’t alone.  Genesis 39:2 declares a significant truth:  The Lord was with Joseph.

—Steve Farrar

Steve Farrar is the author of many books, including the best-sellers Point Man, Finishing Strong, and Battle Ready: Be Strong and of Good Courage in These Troubled Times.

Charlie thought for a minute and said, “No, no, find the guy who hit the foul ball and sign him.  We’re looking for hitters.” 

There are a lot of guys who have started in the Christian life and started strong, but God is looking for finishers.  God is looking for men who can finish  strong. 

Thanks to the grace of God, you’ve got time to make up a lot of ground. 

–Steve Farrar

You can’t have a good nation without truth.  You can’t have justice without truth.  You can’t have a good marriage without truth.  You can’t have a good family without truth.  Truth is absolutely essential and has been in this nation for three hundred years.

But no longer.

I’ve mentioned that well-known phrase, “the truth will set you free.” But let me give you the context of that phrase.  In John 8:31-32, Jesus says, “If you abide in My word, then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (emphasis mine).

 Truth is the path to freedom.  But this doesn’t apply to everyone’s “truth.”  It applies only to God’s truth.  Just as Satan is the father of lies, God is the Father of truth.  All truth is God’s truth.  And the Bible is revealed truth.  That’s why the Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers built the foundations of this nation on the Bible.

—Steve Farrar

Steve Farrar is the author of many books, including the best-sellers Point Man, Finishing Strong, and Battle Ready: Be Strong and of Good Courage in These Troubled Times.

            But they don’t.

            God is bigger than evil and sin.  Evil will never get in the way of God’s plan for your life.  God is so big and so great that He makes evil cooperate and fold into His plan.  He is sovereign, but we are responsible for our choices and decisions.

            Here’s what we can say about almighty God.  He is in control, and His will is bigger than anyone’s.

            He is in control not only of everything but of everyone.  That includes anti-aircraft projectiles and men who pull the triggers.  It includes jealous brothers and the scheduling of slave caravans.  And it includes young wives hit by lightning on their honeymoons.

            That’s not easy to swallow.  We don’t see how that can be right.

            Some things are beyond our comprehension.  There are some reasons of God He has chosen not to reveal (Deut. 29:29).  And in the meantime, we can only stand with Job when he declares, “Even though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.”

            It’s easy to trust in a time of great favor and prosperity.

            It’s hard to trust in a time of shock and grief.

            But we are called to do both.

—Steve Farrar

Steve Farrar is the author of many books, including the best-sellers Point Man, Finishing Strong, and Battle Ready: Be Strong and of Good Courage in These Troubled Times.

We can get anxious about missing God’s will. We can obsess over the potential for pain or disaster. Some of us worry ourselves sick.

God is for you. He’s on your team. He’s your safety net. He is watching over you. He knows what you need and will provide it at the exact right moment. God is involved in every detail of your life, including your decisions, both good and bad, wise and unwise. If you make a bad choice, His providence is there to catch you.

Therefore, don’t live in a state of constant anxiety. Anxiety-driven people are self-absorbed people who need to feel in control. It’s a miserable way to live, and it is all wasted energy.

Don’t misunderstand me. Anxiety is normal—just as is anger. It’s what you do with anxiety and anger that counts.

Yes, you’ve got to think wisely and recognize the consequences of your choices. But there’s a huge difference between thinking things through carefully and anxiously obsessing. “Tremble and do not sin; meditate in your heart upon your bed, and be still,” said David (Psalm 4:4). You cannot be anxious and peacefully still at the same time. You are either one or the other. You can worship or you can worry. But you can’t do both at the same time.

So take your anxiety to the Lord (Philippians 4), and rest in the net. The truth is that you don’t have the ultimate control over anything in your life anyway. He does. He absolutely does. “Do not be worried about your life,” said the Lord, “for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.”

The antidote to anxiety is to do your part: Seek out God and His wisdom, and then make your decisions. Then you’ve got to let go, move forward, and trust in His goodness and mercy.

Are you going through an especially difficult chapter of life? God is intimately acquainted with every circumstance of your life. And He’s not wringing His hands. He’s got a plan. He knows what your future holds, and if you belong to Him, He’s not going to let go of you. He is your safety net. Hang in there with Him, and trust in His invisible hand. One day this chapter will end and a new one will begin. That day could be tomorrow. You don’t know. But He knows.

—Steve Farrar

Steve Farrar is the author of many books, including the best-sellers Point Man, Finishing Strong, and Battle Ready: Be Strong and of Good Courage in These Troubled Times.

Wayne Grudem explains it very clearly:

Hebrews 1:3 tells us that Christ is “upholding the universe by his word of Power.” The Greek word translated “upholding” is phero, “carry, bear.” This is commonly used in the New Testament for carrying something from one  place to another, such as bringing a paralyzed man on a bed to Jesus (Luke 5:18), or bringing a cloak and books to Paul (2 Timothy 4:13). It does not simply mean “sustain,” but has the sense of active, purposeful control over the thing being carried from one place to another. In Hebrews 1:3, [the grammar] indicates that Jesus is “continually carrying along all things,” in the universe by the word of his power.
 

Similarly, in Colossians 1:17, Paul says of Christ that “in him all things hold together. The phrase “all things” refers to every created thing in the universe and the verse affirms that Christ keeps all things existing . . .. If Christ were to cease his ongoing activity of sustaining all things in the universe, then everything except the triune God would cease to exist.

That means you and your iPod and everything else in the world would cease to exist if the Lord Jesus didn’t keep it going. This is true and it is staggering. And it applies to all things. John Piper writes: 

All things includes rolling dice (Prov. 16:33), falling sparrows (Matt. 10:29), failing sight (Ex. 4:11), financial loss (1 Sam. 2:7), the decisions of kings (Prov. 21:1), the sickness of children (2 Sam. 12:15), the suffering and slaughter of the Saints (1 Pet. 4:19; Ps. 44:11), the completion of travel (James 4:15), repentance (2 Tim. 2:25), faith (Phil. 1:29), holiness (Phil. 3:12–13), spiritual growth (Heb. 6:3), life and death
(1 Sam. 2–6), and the crucifixion of Christ (Acts 4:27–28).  From the smallest thing to the greatest, good and evil, happy and sad, pagan and Christian, pain and pleasure—God governs all for his wise, just and good purposes (Isa. 46:10).

When He governs all, that means He governs you and all of the events of your life—including your very existence.

With that kind of magnificent power, aren’t you glad that He is good? It was out of His goodness that He created you, and it is out of His goodness that He will give you everything you need at the precise moment you need it. That is providence. He will oversee your life at all times and provide for you. He is the reason that you are breathing.

—Steve Farrar

Steve Farrar is the author of many books, including the best-sellers Point Man, Finishing Strong, and Battle Ready: Be Strong and of Good Courage in These Troubled Times.

He is not only the Creator; He is the Ruler over all. He is the Sovereign Ruler. He has ordained all things, including your existence. He has declared the end from the beginning. Every being and event has been known and foreordained by God since before the foundation of the world (Isaiah 46:9–11), including the sacrifice of His very Son (1 Peter 1:20–21).

Think about it. God knew your name and my name before He shaped the universe. Such thoughts are mind boggling; they are too high and too deep. To Jeremiah the prophet God said, “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” (Jeremiah 1:5).

That’s not only true of Jeremiah; it’s true about you. He knew you before He made you.

Finally, God has spoken to us first through “prophets in many portions and in many ways,” and “in these last days has spoken to us in His Son . . . (who is) the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power” (Hebrews 1:1–3).

Now you’ve got to catch this. He knew you before He wove you together in your mother’s womb. You exist by His will. But God not only creates, He speaks. Why has He spoken? So that we can know Him—so that you can know Him.

“He is there and He is not silent,” wrote Francis Schaeffer. We can know Him, but we will never comprehend Him. “How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways!” (Romans 11:33).
 
This God who created you and speaks to you is an absolutely awesome and magnificent God. He is not to be trifled with—you can know Him and receive His goodness and mercy, but only on His terms. 

—Steve Farrar

Steve Farrar is the author of many books, including the best-sellers Point Man, Finishing Strong, and Battle Ready: Be Strong and of Good Courage in These Troubled Times.

How do you affect your family for the next one hundred years? By doing something today. By being obedient today. And then by doing something tomorrow. And one day those small deposits will begin to add up. Every time you love your wife as Christ loved the church, every time you live with you wife in an understanding way, every time you grant your wife honor as fellow heir of the grace of life, you are putting away principal. It’s like money in the bank.

Every time you take the time to listen to one of your kids, every time you bow your head and ask God to lead you and your family for the day, every time you refuse to alter your expense account to pick up a few extra bucks, every time you pray for a guy who stabbed you in the back in order to get a job promotion that should have gone to you, God sees those actions. And he will reward those actions.

In other words, every time you obey Christ and His Word, it’s as though you are making a deposit of spiritual capital. And every time you obey the Lord, He immediately matches your spiritual contribution of obedience. One day you’ll look around and begin to see that your children are picking up momentum spiritually that they will pass on to their children. And it’s quite probable that your compound interest will begin to pick up steam right about the time you reach the end of your earthly life. Just as you are ready to check out, the compounding effect will begin to pick up momentum beyond your wildest dreams.

This is estate planning at its finest. And when you leave this kind of spiritual inheritance to your children, it’s all tax-free.

Now you have to stay with me here. I am not talking about earning your way to heaven. That is impossible. And most of you understand this. But there may be someone reading this who doesn’t understand it. So let me take a couple of paragraphs to explain this. It’s critical that you understand.  There are men who think they are Christian fathers who are not Christian fathers. And they are pretty good guys. They don’t cheat on their wives and they don’t cheat on their taxes. But they are making a fundamental mistake. They are embracing Christianity on their terms. You can’t do that. If you are going to be a Christian, you have to come on God’s terms. 

A lot of people are trying to earn God’s favor and forgiveness through doing good works. And there are hundreds of thousands of fathers who view Christianity this way. But they have completely missed it. God does not operate on those terms.

The only way that any of us ever reach eternal life is through grace. Sheer, unadulterated grace—apart from any human work or merit. In other words, God gives you something you don’t deserve. And the reason you don’t deserve it is that you have sinned against God. And you know in your gut that you have sinned. Every person reading this has sinned. I’ve sinned and you have sinned. We’ve gotten ourselves in a hole we can never get out of. Only God can get us out. But we only get out His way.

Eternal life cannot be earned. It can only be given by God the Father through His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Are you still with me? The way that a person becomes a Christian is to throw himself on the mercy of God and to ask God’s forgiveness of his sins. The reason that God will forgive your sins is that Jesus went to the cross and paid for your sins by His own blood.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly  places, in Christ Jesus, in order that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, that no one should boast (Eph. 2:4–9).

That pretty well sums it up, doesn’t it? Forgiveness of sins is a result of God’s grace and mercy.

Have you asked Christ to be the Lord and Savior of your life? Do you realize that you have no hope to know God and to be forgiven by Him other than turning your whole life over to Christ?

When you submit your life to Christ, He will begin to change you in a number of ways. And one of the most important changes will be that you won’t be just a father. You will be a Christian father.

Let me bottom-line this one more time because eternity is hanging on your understanding of this. The Christian father is not trying to earn his way to heaven. Salvation  has been sovereignly given to him.  Eternal life and the forgiveness of sins are a free gift. A Christian father realizes the enormity of the gift that he has been given and, as a result, he begins a journey of living in obedience to the Word of God out of a deep sense of gratitude for what God has given to him.

—Steve Farrar

Steve Farrar is the author of many books, including the best-sellers Point Man, Finishing Strong, and Battle Ready: Be Strong and of Good Courage in These Troubled Times.

That’s the way families are. Every family is one link in a very long chain that stretches out for hundreds and even thousands of years. This chain is so long that it is hard to grasp the enormity of it. For most of us, we are doing pretty well if we are familiar with the two or three links in the chain that come immediately before our link.

God knows the importance of family chains because He invented the family chain. And that’s why God puts such importance on each father successfully anchoring his link in the family chain. I’m responsible to take care of my link, and you are responsible to take care of yours. That’s what He wants us to do. And He wants us to do it well. There’s no doubt that’s what He wanted the men of Israel to do. And God used Moses to tell it to the men of Israel straight.

In Deuteronomy 6, the people of Israel are getting ready to go into the promised land after forty years of wandering in the wilderness. They have before them an absolutely unbelievable opportunity. And that opportunity is to go into the promised land, obey the laws of God, and establish a new civilization and a new culture for their children and all of the generations to come.

Not too many people have the opportunity to start a new civilization. But that’s exactly what God was giving to Israel after forty years of wandering in the wilderness. God gave them a shot at starting over and doing it right. What a monumental opportunity! What an incredible calling!

And the responsibility for this new opportunity for the nation of Israel is laid squarely on the shoulders of the men. To be more specific, it is laid on the shoulders of the fathers.

Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the judgments which the Lord your God has commanded me to teach you, that you might do them in the land where you are going over to possess it, so that you and your son and your grandson might fear the Lord your God, to keep all His statues and His commandments, which I command you, all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged (Deut. 6:1–2, emphasis added).

Genealogies are in the Bible for a reason. And when you dig into them, they are anything but boring. The reason that genealogies are so fascinating is that genealogies contain the secret of having a significant and meaningful life.

Generally speaking, if a father anchors his family in Christ, then the odds go up dramatically that his sons will anchor their families. But when he decides he knows better than God and starts living to please only himself, that’s when a family begins to drift. America has millions of families that are drifting. Why are they drifting? They are drifting because they have no anchor.

When God changes a nation and brings revival, one of the primary things He does is to get a hold of some fathers and turn them into anchors. And in our day of crisis, in our day of a fatherless America, that’s precisely what God is up to. God knows who His men are. He knows where they are and He knows who they are. And He knows how to strongly support them.

—Steve Farrar

Steve Farrar is the author of many books, including the best-sellers Point Man, Finishing Strong, and Battle Ready: Be Strong and of Good Courage in These Troubled Times.