Latest / The Family Teams Podcast / Ep. 03 | The Hearts of Fathers in the Old Testament

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Ep. 03 | The Hearts of Fathers in the Old Testament · The Family Teams Podcast

• 0:06
  Hey guys, welcome to the 5-Minute Fatherhood Podcast. I'm your co-host, Jeff Bethke, along with my friend and mentor, Jeremy Pryor. Join us Monday through Friday as we chat about quick tips, skills, and ways to help equip you on your journey as a father to build your multi-generational family team on mission. Stay tuned.
• 0:27
  Hey guys, it's Jeremy and Jeff here with the 5 Minute Fatherhood Podcast, and we really like to look at different verses in the Bible that specifically talk about fatherhood that might help us get kind of the big picture about what fatherhood's about. And, you know, it's always shocked me a little bit that the last verse of the entire Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, is a book about fatherhood.
• 0:47
  And it's actually one of the most intense verses about fatherhood in the Bible. It's right in the book of Malachi, the last chapter, towards the very end of the chapter. The last couple of verses talk about fatherhood. Let me read this to you guys. I wanted to talk to Jeff a little bit about this because this is so surprising that this came up. And it's interesting.
• 1:05
  How the prophet articulates this. It says,
• 1:25
  So there's something about fatherhood, and there's all the elements of this, the hearts of the children and their relationship to the fathers, the heart of the fathers, their relationship to the children, and the impact it has on the land. The Lord is, like, watching over this, and it seems like these three elements, the hearts of the fathers and children and the land—
• 1:46
  are totally interconnected. So yeah, Jeff, what do you think about this? What comes to mind you think about this past? Yeah, I mean, I think it's just, it's so self-explanatory in a really beautiful way that you just, I don't think anyone, even though we never talk about it, would argue that, man, if the hearts of fathers were turned towards their children and vice versa, do we really think we would be in such a bad state right now as a society, as a country, as a world, right? Meaning like if that really can be fixed, I think we would, it's very much almost the,
• 2:16
  the beginning of the momentum, the tip of the iceberg, right? Of like, man, that is something that if we can turn father's hearts back towards their children and vice versa, that really would change. It would have a snowball effect and enormous ramifications. And I think also remembering too that like, man, this is a huge...
• 2:32
  truth or promise that the scriptures are saying. And like you said, it's the very end of the Old Testament narrative of kind of visioning this future that will happen, right? And we see God put heaven and earth back together through the person and work of Jesus as the true temple, as the true sacrifice, as this kind of uniting and renewing all things in himself. And what a beautiful truth that what's going to happen when that happens, and already has happened, and we've seen in pockets, is that...
• 3:00
  There'll be restoration of family, parent-kid relationships. The land will actually flourish and be living and thriving again, which to me seems very much like Eden, right? Like that seems like a promise of Eden that there will be a garden. It won't be thistles. It won't be a desert. It won't be all these other things that we see when destruction does enter. And I just think catching that vision, man, letting that sink into your heart, taking that before the Lord, and actually like kind of chewing on that is almost the gasoline in your father's car. Your father's heart car is like, man, that is...
• 3:29
  The magic, that is the thing that can push you through the hard days. That's the thing that can get you through the hard seasons of like, this is that you're a signpost toward the future. Not only, you know, what Jesus has already done, but then Revelation 21 and 22, where it's fully put back together, that we are, that when we turn our hearts back towards each other, we're a signpost of where God is going, what he's doing, and we get to play a part in that drama. So I don't know, is there anything you would add to that?
• 3:52
  Yeah, these two different, and they're almost like completely polarizing in terms of how different. You're talking about what is wrong with the land? What's the root problem why things aren't working? And then you get all the way down to the root sort of solution, which is if the hearts of the fathers would turn to the children and the hearts of the children would turn to their fathers, then there would be healing that would take place. And so you have sort of a description of,
• 4:18
  And this is—every time you see people talk about, what's wrong with our city? What's wrong with our culture? It's really important that the root problem of the hearts of fathers and their connection to the children and the children to the fathers is immediately brought up as a root problem to why there's problems in society. And so you can—it's not a mystery. There are obviously complexities and other elements. But if this is not happening well, if you can point out and say, yeah, there's lots of problems, but—
• 4:48
  clearly fathers are disconnected to children and children to fathers. Well, hold up, man. If that's happening in the culture, in the city, in that nation, then you know from the very beginning that this sort of destructive force has been unleashed, and it's not going to go well until we fix that problem. So that's why we're so passionate about, man, we want to see thriving happen in our cities, in our cultures, and in order to really—
• 5:15
  To really push into that, we have to address this root problem of the heart connection between dads and their kids. Hey guys, did you know that me and Jeremy created a special fatherhood masterclass we do online called The Skill of Fatherhood? If you want to immediately level up your father's skills and learn an entire system with tips and tricks and philosophy and help that we believe can fundamentally change your family's life forever, then this masterclass is for you.
• 5:42
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• 6:04
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• 6:30
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• 6:46
  Hey guys, Jeff here. Thanks for listening. Make sure to subscribe on iTunes so you can get a new episode straight on your phone Monday through Friday. We are also on Spotify, Google Play, and a bunch of other places. If you don't know, we have a five minute fatherhood Facebook group for any of the dads listening here where we talk about the episodes. We encourage one another and we share tips and tricks as we're all on this journey together. Search five minute fatherhood
• 7:10
  Facebook, or you can go to our YouTube channel and the link is actually in all the descriptions of every single five minute fatherhood video. All right. See you guys tomorrow.