Keith Battle - A Father's Three Rooms

The subject I’ve chosen today is «A Father’s Three Rooms.» Now, pray with me as I connect the dots between this subject and this topic.

Father, I thank You that at the entrance of Your word, You give light. Enlighten us today, inform us, inspire us, make it make sense to us, give us what we need, and make us better. We pray in Jesus' name, amen.

The three rooms of a Father, or a Father’s three rooms, when it comes to parenting, is not only a difficult task but has complexities to it. As I’ve pondered this and prayed over it, I think parenting, and talking to fathers particularly today, happens in stages. There are phases of parenting, and I’m calling them rooms today. There are more than three; there are more complexities to the role of being a parent. But for the sake of time and simplicity, I want to condense the parenting assignment into three rooms. I’m going to tell you what those three rooms are if you want to write them down, and then I want to unpack them before we leave.

The first room is called the training room. The training room, although it may certainly be a priority, is just as important as the other rooms. It is the most brief room; it is the room in which we spend the least time as parents because it is a window of opportunity that we have to train our children. Training doesn’t continue for perpetuity; it is a window of training. In that training room, we give instructions, discipline, correction, and guidance. In fact, the Bible says we show them which way to go.

The second room I’m going to talk about is what I call the boardroom. That room is a transition from the training room that many of us get lost in. The boardroom is when your child grows and matures to a level where they move from an authority-based relationship with you to an advisory-based relationship. If you don’t make that transition effectively, you won’t be allowed in their boardroom. If you think you’re supposed to be an authority at a time when it is now time to advise, you may not get invited to the boardroom because there are people in the boardroom that you didn’t invite. We know it takes a village to raise a child, and when you’re training a child, you kind of control the village. You say, «I’ll tell you where to go. I’ve picked your friends for you. You’re not going to play with them. You’re not going to play that fool.» By the time they reach a certain age, you walk into the boardroom, and there are people you don’t know, and you may not be one of them if you don’t handle the transition well. If you don’t understand what room you’re supposed to be in, advising a child is different from a totalitarian system that says, «Everything I say goes; I am the sole voice of authority over your life.» But when you get to the boardroom level, you are one of many voices, and your voice can be drowned out in a sea of voices that include social media influencers. Are y’all tracking with me? Look at somebody and say, «You have to know which room you’re in,» and the room you’re in as a parent is determined by the maturity level of the child.

The third room I’m going to talk about is the prayer room. The prayer room is one that you should be in the whole time. It is not a room you go in and out of; you start in the prayer room before the child arrives, preconception, while they’re in the womb. We should be praying for that child, and the prayer room is a place of intercession. Intercession, by definition, is when we say prayers on behalf of somebody else, and in this case, it is when we pray for our children. We should do that until the day we die. The one thing you will carry with you throughout your life is a prayer life if you have kids.

Let’s unpack these rooms and connect them to this text. The Bible says, «Train up a child,» according to the old King James Version, «in the way he should go,» or «she should go, and when they are old, they will not depart from it.» The New Living Translation says, «Direct the child onto the right path, and when they are older, they will not leave it.» I need to start with a confession: when the Bible says, «Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he’s old he will not depart from it,» or «Direct the child onto the right path, and when they’re older, they will not leave it,» that verse has been a mystery to me for years. The reason why it’s a mystery to me is that I’ve seen it not work. Can I be real in here? I’ve seen people be trained the right way and live the wrong way, and I bet you have too. If you’ve seen that, just put in the chat and say, «Pastor, I’ve seen this.» So, how is it that if God says, «If you do this, you’re going to get this,» but you do it and get something else? That has always baffled me. But what I discovered is that my issue and my problem weren’t experiential; they were hermeneutical…