In his new book, “King Me: What Every Son Wants and Needs From His Father ,” Steve Farrar helps guide fathers in connecting with and mentoring their sons.
Steve Farrar sees the stewardship of fathering as being close to the task of building a house.
“You draw up the plans, you gather the materials, and you start building. Along the way, you might hit rock when you’re digging the foundation, or lumber prices may rise, or it may rain for six straight months. Then the concrete drivers may go on strike. Inevitably, you will discover some adjustments you need to make that you hadn’t foreseen in your original plans. That’s sort of what fathering is like.”
The building analogy is from Farrar’s new book King Me: What Every Son Wants and Needs From His Father (Moody Press, 2005). In the book, Farrar draws on the lives of the kings of Old Testament Israel to help guide fathers in connecting with their sons in such a way as to mentor them to exhibit the character of the King of Kings.
“Fathers and sons are to have a hardwired connection,” Farrar writes. “That is God’s plan. The enemy is working overtime to sever that connection. And unfortunately, he’s having much success.
“…God has hardwired us from the womb. And he has hardwired us for relationships. And one of those relationships is a father and his children. Kids in America are in trouble because many of them have lost this central connection to their dads.”
Farrar is the author of the best-selling book Point Man: How a Man Can Lead His Family. A former pastor and frequent speaker at Promise Keepers, Farrar founded and chairs Men’s Leadership Ministries, a ministry that equips men for spiritual leadership. Farrar also serves as a council member for The Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.
Why a study of the lives of the kings of Scripture? After all, the best-known of all kings, David, committed adultery and murder. Solomon, despite all his divinely-imbued wisdom, had more than 700 wives and lovers; hardly a candidate for a Promise Keepers advertisement.
Yet, Farrar says the kings of Scripture, in spite of their myriad foibles and their scant successes, have much to offer fathers regarding how and how not to raise their sons.
“Interestingly enough, there were forty-three kings of Judah and Israel in the Old Testament,” he writes. “And their lives, their decisions, and their behaviors take up almost two-thirds of the Old Testament. Yet I would venture to say that besides David’s shameful and sordid affair with Bathsheba, and Solomon’s seven hundred wives and concubines, most guys know next to nothing about them.
“We know that most of them had weird names and that most of them screwed up. This disturbs us. And it disturbs us even more that the kings who didn’t screw up seemed to have sons that did. How can somebody who walked with God as closely as some of these kings did, yet end up with such messed-up kids? Our tendency is to throw up our hands and pretty much dismiss any hope of learning something worthwhile from them. But God put them there for a reason. He doesn’t want us to just skip over them.”
The book includes chapters on building sons into men, mentoring sons through mistakes, discipline, masculinity, guidance, sexual purity, communication, and friendship. Farrar’s work is thoroughly tied to Scripture and offers dozens of helpful illustrations that make the book easy to apply and pleasurable to read.
King Me is available in the CBMW webstore: https://www.cbmw.org/cgi-bin/store?show|531|Men.
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