What makes me a Christian dad is not that I have mastered the art of raising children beneath a tasteful banner of biblical conviction. No, What makes me a Christian dad is that Christ keeps dragging my fatherhood out of the closet of image and into the house of repentance, clinging, and real love.

I have been thinking about that question, and I don’t think I can answer it honestly by starting with the commonly emphasized parts.

I don’t think the answer begins with family devotions, or Bible verses on the wall, or whether I pray before meals, or whether my children hear Christian music in the house, or whether I have strong convictions about what is true and what is false and what kind of people I want them to become. All of that matters and I’m not trying to sound deep by pretending the obvious things are unimportant. They are important. But none of them, by themselves, get to the core of it.

Because the truth is, I can surround my fatherhood with Christian things and still be fathering in a way that is mostly powered by me. Things like: my preferences, my temper, my fears, my pride, my need for order, my love of quiet, my impatience with weakness, my deep and often embarrassing desire for things to go the way I pictured them going in my head five minutes before real life showed up and ruined everything.

This is, as I think on this, where it starts to get uncomfortable for me.

Because when I ask myself, what makes me a Christian dad, I’m not really asking whether I have Christian content in my home. This is usually how we start in this conversation. Indeed, I’m asking whether Christ has actually laid hold of me deeply enough that even my fatherhood has been bent into a different shape. And fatherhood, if I’m honest, has exposed just how much bending I still need.

There are a thousand small ways a man can discover what lives in him, but children have a way of finding the hidden rooms. I have discovered many hidden rooms. They press on places in me I didn’t know were still so tender to the flesh. They expose how fragile my patience is. They expose how much of my peace is really just the temporary absence of interruption. They expose how quickly I can feel personally wronged by something that is, in fact, just ordinary childishness colliding with my own tiredness. They expose that there is still a part of me that wants obedience, not always because holiness is beautiful, or for the sake of Christ, but because inconvenience is irritating. Really irritating. I have become painfully aware of how strong irritation can move in my heart at the slightest touch.

And that is hard to admit because it is uglier than I want my story to be.

I would rather tell the story this way: I am a father who loves truth, who wants to lead well, who wants to protect his home, who wants to hand his children something solid and lasting and beautiful.

And I think that story is true, as far as it goes. But it is not the whole truth. The whole truth is that I am also a father who can be selfish, proud, inwardly hurried, too easily bothered, too eager for outward peace, too willing to settle for quick compliance when what is really needed is shepherding.

So what makes me a Christian dad cannot be that I am better than other dads. It can’t be that I have the right opinions. It can’t be that my children live in a house where the name of Jesus is spoken. It has to be something deeper than that. Indeed that’s why I write this.

What makes me a Christian dad is that I am a man who has had to come to the end of himself often enough to know that I cannot be the christ of my own home.

I can’t save my children.

I can’t speak life into a dead heart by force of sincerity. I can’t discipline hard enough, organize carefully enough, explain clearly enough, monitor closely enough, or love impressively enough to do what only the Spirit of God can do. I can’t carry their souls up a hill and hand them safely to God as though I were the mediator between heaven and my house. I can’t atone for them. I can’t change them at the root. I can’t even keep my own heart as ordered as I would like, much less rule the unseen places in theirs.

And it’s strange, because admitting that sounds like weakness, but it’s actually one of the first moments of real sanity in my life. Because, as long as I live like the spiritual fate of my home hangs finally on me, I will either become crushing or crushed (I type this with tears). I will either become the kind of father who presses too hard because everything feels ultimate, or I will become inwardly frantic because I know I am not equal to the weight. I will measure too much by visible results (which I’m prone to do). I will grow angry at slowness. I will start acting like every childish failure is a threat to the whole structure. I will confuse control with faithfulness. I will put myself in a place only Christ can occupy. This is my greatest fear.

And that is no small mistake. That mistake can make a house feel cold even when the right things are being said inside it.

So, maybe one of the deepest answers is this: what makes me a Christian dad is that I know I am not enough, and I know where enough is found. It’s definitely not in me. Not in my tone, not in my “parental system,” not in my seriousness, and not in my ability to hold it all together.

Enough is found in Christ.

That means my fatherhood, if it is truly Christian, must be marked by a clinging dependence.

Not a decorative dependence, nor the sort of dependence that appears in the house as a brief prayer attached to otherwise self-sufficient living. I mean real dependence. I mean real clinging. That’s why I say “cling to Christ” in everything I write. Cause this is the kind of dependence I need more than anything else. The kind that comes from seeing my own limits often enough that prayer becomes less stoic and fake. The kind that makes me ask for wisdom because I genuinely do not know what this moment requires (which is mostly every moment). Is my son or daughter being defiant, discouraged, exhausted, insecure, foolish, ashamed, or some tangled mixture of all six? I don’t always know. So I ask God for help because I need help, not because asking is part of the Christian dad image.

And as I think about this, maybe that is part of it too. The “image” has to die. The idol with no life.

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