Education Insights • 2024 • Volume 2 • Issue 1 22 Spouse The vast majority of people seek to be married. According to Statista, in 2018 there were around 2.13 million marriages in the United States.9 With millions of people uniting annually in the bonds of marriage, the question is raised as to who or what defines marriage. The secular definition of marriage is and will always be a moving target, whereas the Christian definition and understanding goes beyond the magistrate to the Messiah. Christ is the church’s cornerstone for all horizontal relationships. Hence, fathers today need to be educated and equipped in how to love, lead, and live with their bride so that the gospel shines forth from their family and to generations of families to follow. Professor and pastor George W. Knight III instructs, “In defining how men and women are to relate to one another in fulfilling their respective roles, God has called men to exercise a headship that is loving, gentle, and considerate (Eph 5:25-32, 1 Peter 3:7).”10 In light of all these things, men need to evaluate their commitment to their bride. The Lord has sovereignly placed husbands within a marital relationship and commissioned men to love, lead, and live biblically with that one whom he freely selected to marry. As husbands evaluate their leadership, they need to take stock of how they spend their time, the pace of their life, the object of their focus, and their attitudes and actions toward the local church. The local church is an essential resource for the martial relationship. Leading their family to engage in a biblical healthy local church will demonstrate their submission before God and their dependence upon God to sustain them through the highs and lows of the Christian journey. Children Fathers must seize the season of opportunity before them and utilize the rich resources available to them and assume their role as the primary faith-trainers in their children’s lives. Those looking to the Bible to give step-by-step instructions on how to educate their children in the faith will find no such passage. The Bible is sufficient for Christian living, but it is not exhaustive in the details of living as a Christian. Information is not transformation. For transformation to take place, fathers must engage in historical practices, such as catechizing and family worship, that are grounded in the Word of God. Three instruments, the Apostles’ Creed, 9 Statista, “Number of Marriages in the United States from 1990 to 2018,” accessed July 20, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/195931/number-of-marriages-in-the-united-states-since-1990/. 10 George W. Knight III, “The Family and the Church: How Should Biblical Manhood and Womanhood Work Out in Practice,” in Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood: A Response to Evangelical Feminism, ed. John Piper and Wayne Grudem (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2006), 345.
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