Welcome to Generations, friends. Kevin Swanson with you, Executive Director for Christian Home Educators, also a pastor. But the reason I'm here, I'm a father of five, one son and four daughters. Dave also in the studio, father of five. And we're fathers concerned about what's happening with faith, family, and freedom for our nation's future, for the future of our children and our grandchildren. Folks, the faith is dissipating. Yes, the Pew Forum just did a survey and found that the percentage of Americans who call themselves Christians falling dramatically since 1970, from 70% in 1970 to 50% and in another 20 years to 30% another 20 years after that to 10% my friends the faith is disappearing because the hearts of the fathers are not turning to the sons and the sons to the fathers we're dropping our parents faith we could care less about our parents parents faith because the relationship of father to son has disappeared the faith is disappearing in this country And by the way, so is the family. 37% of children born without fathers last year, up from 6% in 1960. We're seeing a tremendous breakdown of the faith, of family, of freedom. James Dobson said the greatest tragedy of the 20th century was the breakdown of the American family. And I agree. And yet, the greatest need of our day is fathers, is men. I truly believe that's the problem. If we don't have hundreds of thousands, millions of fathers who turn their hearts back towards their homes, back towards their sons and daughters, back towards their wives, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to see the continued breakdown of faith, family, and freedom. We don't live in the age of men, let alone mighty men of God. Folks, we have plenty of irresponsible men, spineless men, heartless and treacherous men who won't keep their covenants, dishonorable men, passive men, men who know how to play video games, but don't know how to sacrifice their lives for their wives. We have bureaucratic men who've been taught well to stack paper and be good in their committees and cubicles. We have conservative men who will not, under any circumstance, risk their own lives for any principle for which they believe. We have liberal men who will only risk the lives of others for that which they believe. We have men who have learned to insulate themselves from relationships that demand reservoirs of wisdom, courage, and love. We have the men who spend their days smoking peyote, engaging in tribal gang warfare, and impregnating half the village. We have men who are not courageous enough to be sacrificial lovers for their wives. We have angry patriarchs. We have macho men who couldn't lead a poodle on a potty walk. But mighty men of faith? Hard to find. But it gets worse. You get a mighty man with eyes of vision, heads of wisdom, backbones of courage, arms of strength, hearts of love. They are despised, let me tell you, by the majority, and admired by only a rare few. Occasionally, you'll get a man of faith who'll stand up to speak, but he's despised in the valley of the deaf. He must be placed in institutions where his eyes, head, backbone, arms and heart are surgically removed. Call them schools, churches, television or corporations. Call them what you will. The surgical process is hard to watch if you have eyes to watch. Dave, I wrote that on my blog a year or two ago. And I believe this is the crying is need of the day. Our families, our nation, crying out for fathers, for men, just men, men with vision, men with backbones, men with courage, men with love, men willing to go to the cross for their Christ and for their wives. Kevin, I think that the greatest tragedy of our day has been the emasculation of men. I think there's a whole lot of skiers running around pretending to be men, pretending to be bulls. But the need of our day, if there ever was a need, it is for men who are bold in the faith. Men who will stand up. Men like the men who founded this country. Men like the fathers of the faith who were centuries stood and proclaimed the word of God all the way to death when necessary. Men who loved their children, men who had a vision for the kingdom of God, men who raised their family not just to make a difference, to make a positive difference in the kingdom of God. Where are the men? There is a leadership vacuum and it's being filled by the video games, by the television shows, by the socialist government. The government has become the surrogate father for so many women because there are so few men. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the need of the day. And Dave, even the homeschooling movement with which we have worked has been largely a movement of mothers, of wives, who really turned their hearts towards their homes, towards their children, and actually did something to protect and shelter their children from the onslaught of destructive humanistic influences. But where are the men? Now granted, Dave, I go through conferences, and many conferences around the nation. I think I've been to 25 to 30 states in the last two years. and I will tell you that there are some states where men have stepped up and we see a 40-60 ratio or a 50-50 ratio of men to women in these conferences, but I still see a few where there's 15-20% men to 80% women and the men have very, very precious little vision. I mean, where's my channel changer? Where's my beer? How can I ignore my family? How can I avoid as much responsibility as possible Unfortunately, the vast majority of men and fathers across the country have very little vision. And yet, I'm not the glasses half empty here, I'm the glasses half full, because we are seeing more men than ever across the country getting involved, getting the vision, because the faithfulness of some women, some women who were willing to sanctify their household with their meek and quiet character, with their submission to their husbands, It's having the exact effect that Paul said it would have in Corinthians. And there are men coming to the fore. There are men getting the vision. So the glass is not half empty. God's kingdom marches on. And I say, thank God for that, Dave. I've met them. There are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of men that are waking up and getting a vision. I mean, it's amazing as I walk through eight to ten hours of talk throughout these weekends, I see the lights turn on in these men's hearts and minds and eyes, and they turn on and say, I can see now what God wants me to be. And Dave, you know what? Civilization hangs on it. The faith hangs on it. Family, freedoms. If we're going to be free 20, 30 years from now from the tyranny of government, we're going to see the faith survive. We're going to see families actually survive. The nuclear families survive in America. We have got to wake up as men. I think men are the answer to this problem. We've got to get fathers with vision. We have to have hundreds of thousands of them, hopefully millions of them, within the next 10 to 15 years. But the only way you're going to get millions of them is if we start taking our young men, our boys, and we raise them with a vision demanded. We teach them what it means to have godly testosterone. We teach them what it means to be bold for the faith, as a sacrificial lover to their home, and to stand firm on principle, and what those principles are that they need to stand firm on. men who have relationships and accountability with others, men who are willing to take risks, men who will provide for their families, men who will stand up and take the arrows of the enemy and extinguish him with the shield of faith. This is our crying need. We're not going to get millions unless we start with the twos and the threes. I have three, you have one, but that's what we have to start with. You bet, Dave. If we can start with a hundred thousand fathers and raise three to five sons each Over two to three generations we will have millions of mighty men of God taking down strongholds and doing some incredibly important things to rebuild the family, to rebuild our broken down law systems, to rebuild our economic systems, to rebuild our education systems that have been torn down by the humanists, by the feminists, and by the egalitarians, those that take on a different worldview than that found in the Word of God. Ladies and gentlemen, in just a moment we're going to talk about raising these mighty men of God We've got a few mighty men in training, Dave. Let's talk about it in just a moment. Be back in a moment. Stay with me. Christian Home Educators of Colorado presents its annual Christian Family Conference June 12th through the 14th at the Denver Merchandise Mart. Speakers include Doug Phillips, Chris Klicka, Dr. Bodie Bauckham, and Dr. Norm Wakefield. Current and future business owners should attend the entrepreneurial mini-camp on Thursday the 12th. And don't miss the ultimate family concert with the Von Trapp children and the Colorado Wranglers Friday the 13th. For more information go to chec.org or call 1-877-842-CHECK. Back on Generations, my friends, talking about the vital importance of raising mighty men of God with our sons. And the Bible gives us a vision for that. All we need to do is crack the Word of God and say, what does the Word of God have to say about dads, about fathers, about men? And it's very, very clear. God wants our boys to take dominion. God has provided a world that we're to rule according to His law. So we teach our sons the laws of God. And we teach them how to take dominion, how to rule, how to govern and family and church and state, how to govern the elements, the animal kingdom, et cetera, et cetera. The word of God talks about our young boys being ready to be shepherds in their own homes, sacrificial lovers for their wives. Ephesians, chapter five, heads of their homes. Shepherds of their children, Ephesians 6, 4. Resident theologians, 1 Corinthians 14, 34. If their wives have a question, they've got to be prepared to answer those questions that they have concerning these theological issues that come up in the church. The Word of God is very clear that our sons should be ready to be those that will provide the material sustenance for the home, 1 Timothy 5, 8. If they don't, they are considered worse than an infidel, worse than an unbeliever, and ought to be excommunicated from the church. So, Dave, I think the vision is very clear. There it is in the Word of God. There to be fighters and defenders of the home. Nehemiah 4 and verse 14, Deuteronomy chapter 21 to 5. We have all this stuff about boys, about men. Our girls are not to be the fighters, not to be the defenders of the home. Now granted, it's okay if they learn how to shoot and pound big nails through the heads of enemy generals that wind up in the tent after you give them the glass of milk, as jail did in Judges. But they're not to be in the army. They're not to be defending the home, normatively speaking. But our boys ought to be trained to be the fighters, the workers, the defenders of the home, the spiritual heads, the leaders, the disciples, etc. etc. Dave, that's the vision. Now how do we get there? Well, I think our strategy has to be that we have to, first off, give our sons a vision for godly manhood. They need to know what it means to be a mighty man, and they have to decide they want to be a mighty man. If they don't love Christ, if they don't have that desire to serve the Lord of Lords, you're not going anywhere anyway, because the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. So that's where you've got to start. And you've got to train your boys to be fighters. And they are fighters, but they just don't know what to fight, where to fight, why to fight, and how to fight. Outside of that, they're ready to fight. And Dave, I think the key thing here is, yeah, they're equipped as men to fight. Just if you don't focus them, they may be passive on the one hand, too passive and effeminized on the other hand, but on the other hand, they might be fighting the wrong thing. Therefore, it's important for us to draw the line of the law of God in their own heart and life by teaching them God's laws as we sit in a house, as we walk by the way, as we rise up, as we lie down. And that's what God commands in Deuteronomy 6 and verse 7. Teach your sons the laws of God and draw that line of distinction between the good and the bad, the right and the wrong, the evil and the righteous. We we need to draw this line all the time every day. They need to know that that abortion and homosexuality and and and speaking unkind words to their sister and being selfish and being proud is an evil thing and they need to fight that and And then defend what is right what is righteous and then equip them with the courage to stand out there and fight by the law of God, not by what is politically correct in any given point in time. And as we teach them, as we rise up and as we lie down and as we walk along the road, we keep on teaching. We are teaching. It's not teach in the past tense. It's an ongoing process. It's an over and over and over again, because part of what we're doing is not just showing them what they're going to fight for, but also how to fight. And that goes to the area of character. So now we have to give them a vision for manhood. And now we've got to shape the vessel that's going to fight with its character. I found that men, young boys, have a problem with diligence. Given the choice between working hard and sleeping in, 99.9 percent of the time they're going to sleep in. I'll tell you about the other one-tenth of a percent of the time later. Yeah, you know Dave, I think one of the important things you've got to do with your son is to teach him how to work. Early on my son was just a little slow at getting started with work and I was encouraging him to have his own business when he was eight or nine years old and you know over a couple weeks he was just dragging his feet on the thing. And we did the advertisements, you know, he was willing to rake leaves and so forth. And he just wasn't getting out there. So one Saturday morning, I just came up and said, Dan, you get out there and you get three jobs today. And if you don't get three jobs today, you don't get dinner tonight. And that was motivating. Yeah. Yeah. You do not work, do not. He does not work, does not eat. That's a pretty good motivator. It's amazing how that works. He came back with four jobs, you know, one to solidify dessert. One to make sure that you know, but but Dave I think also it's as we're teaching our sons that it is absolutely essential that they work work every day and and even if they lose their job They go grab a rake and go door-to-door and offer to rake the leaves. I mean, even if they're 28 years old and they're without work for a given day, they can go door-to-door and rake leaves for a buck an hour if necessary. I want my son to know that what he does is he works. This is what Christians do. We work. We don't sit at home and wait for the phone to ring. We go out and we work. And I want that running through his bloodstream at 8, 9, 10, 11 years of age. And the other thing is my son works with me an awful lot. We travel together. We work the long hours. We'll work some of these weekends, 14, 16, 18 hours a day for a couple of days. And we'll come home and we'll just, I mean, we're exhausted. I think it's important sometimes to work him hard. Give him a challenge. And when he's done, you know, we pay him something. encourage him and give him an opportunity to rest, but he's learning how to work. In fact, this last weekend you have Dan with you up at Idaho at the conference. He was working your book table. The whole time. He did a fantastic job on the book table. He's been doing that since he was 11 years old, traveling with me. And he does a very, very good job with it. But again, we've learned how to work hard together. We work side by side. We're a team in this and I am teaching my son how to work and how to maintain a good positive attitude. You know, after 12, 13 hours, sometimes you get a little, you might get a little irritated, you know, with people or with clients or customers. No, we're going to be continuing to maintain a strong, positive attitude the whole time. And that takes a lot of encouragement and prayer to get there. And this last weekend, I wasn't up in Idaho at a conference. I was with some other dads and some boys. We were doing a camping trip. We don't do scouting. We do camping with other fathers because we think it ought to be about the dads. And, you know, in scouting, they don't sit around the campfire and sing the Psalms. We like to give God glory and sing his praises. I noticed the first day, the first night it was raining and it was raining in the morning. But my oldest son was up by six o'clock in the morning with the rain poncho on. splitting wood, making a fire. Now that's that other one tenth of one percent of the time when they would rather not sleep in. I was surprised because he doesn't do that at home. But you see, it's in him. God has given him that dominion ability and that desire. And sometimes we have to free it from the box that we think the children should be in. Mothers, by and large, want to protect their sons from failure. I think as fathers we need to challenge our sons to and through the point of failure. Right, meaning at some point we crank up the expectations and then come alongside them and encourage them. You went on some hikes too, you're telling me. Yeah, we went on some hikes. We had a young adopted boy who was eight years old. And he actually lives in California at very low altitude. We weren't all that high, but for him I'm sure it was quite high. And he was complaining on the trail about how steep it was and how long it was, and it wasn't that long and it wasn't that steep. But he's a young boy and he's used to life being a little easier. And of course we challenged him and we challenged him. told him that he could do some things. And at one point I offered to carry him and I carried him like a fireman's carry across my shoulders. Now, to be honest, I put an extra bounce in my step. So he was bouncing up and down on my shoulders so that he was thinking maybe that walking might be more pleasant than the alternative. Meaning that you put him through some tough circumstances. When my son was about 12 or 13 years old we had him in a Team Pack challenge course. This was down in Alabama on a rather jungle property where he slept outside. for four or five days in a row on a sleeping bag without a tent just out there in the open and it just pretty much had to survive and they have him up at five o'clock in the morning doing the military exercise you know up and at him up and at him come on let's not mess around you've got 30 seconds get out of bed and down here now you know at five o'clock in the morning they're doing the jumping jacks and their push-ups And then they went on a 24-hour obstacles course. And even during that 24 hours, they were responsible to hunt their own food and cook it on an open fire. So they did it. They survived. And it was a wonderful challenge for them. And I recommend things like that. Of course, I was with my son a good part of that time. I was one of the teachers at this particular event. Well, having to hunt is not a real burden put on a boy. Now, I say this because I was up there with about 11 boys and one day, about five o'clock in the morning, and I know it was five o'clock in the morning because there was a whole bunch of noise and one of the boys says, it's five o'clock in the morning. Keep your voices down. We might wake somebody up. That was a pretty good clue about what the time was, because obviously I wasn't up at five. But by nine o'clock in the morning, they had actually hunted down a rodent and skinned it and were roasting it on the fire after having checked its liver and so forth for rabies. So actually having to restrain them from hunting was a bigger challenge for the dads than it was sending them out. Ladies and gentlemen, talking about the importance of raising mighty men of God. And I think Dave, the best way to do it is fathers spending more time with their sons. So if there's one thing that's going to result In the vision we're talking about here today, my friends, is the heart of fathers turning back to their sons and sons to the fathers. Bottom line here, Dave, it's not going to happen without somehow increasing quantity time with these boys. I'm not talking about quality time. I'm talking about you fathers spending more time finding ways to spend more time, not just an extra two to three hours a week. I'm talking about an extra 15 to 20 hours a week, if possible. And, you know, there's a lot of fathers out there that go to a corporation that don't allow that son to be plowing the field side by side with dad, as sons did for thousands and thousands of years until the Marxist form of economics took over in the 1870s and 1880s, and Almanzo's father left the farm to the corporation. but we've got to find a way to reintegrate sons and fathers in their lives. Now if they can't do it 40 hours a week, maybe there's an extra number of hours during the 128 other hours throughout the week that are available for father and son to be together. And I think it's vitally important that we find ways to reprioritize our lives to reestablish some schedules, to maybe even change our employment situation so that we can have more contact with our sons. Yes, I think we need to do some man things, if I can say that, sometimes during the week. I mean you have to do things that are overtly masculine in nature if you're going to teach your son masculinity. That's not going to happen unless you spend a lot of time with it. You might challenge your son to do some push-ups. Ask him to do more than you think he can. Bring him to the point of failure and then help him through that failure. Challenge him to go beyond what he knows. This is a very masculine approach to life. You're going to do this with math. You're going to do it with other areas. So you might as well get used to it. And Dave, that relationship is key. I mean, if your father's encouraging you here and he is telling you, I think you can do it, son, the kind of love The kind of wisdom that a father applies is critical in that relationship and it's only going to happen if that father really does know his son and know his capabilities and love him and supports him as he grows up and becomes the man of God that we want our sons to become. Well, ladies and gentlemen, you have been listening to a discussion on raising our sons to be fathers. And if we can just give our sons that head start, whatever we put into our sons will contribute, I believe, to the salvaging of our families in the future. It will contribute to salvaging fatherhood. and family, and even the faith. That's how we're going to perpetuate the faith from generation to generation. If fathers aren't turning the hearts of the fathers to the sons and sons to the fathers, folks, we're not going to salvage the faith, family, and freedom for generations to come. So this is really the nuts and bolts. This is the basic foundation of restoring a godly society. It's got to happen with the hearts of fathers turning back towards home. Well, ladies and gentlemen, this program has been aired for the last four years on this radio station. We are looking for sponsors. We're hoping to collect 120 sponsors in the next two months. I've got 14 to date. That means 106 to go. And if God lays it on your heart to help with this message, returning relationships and God's truth back to a lost and lonely world, please call Please sponsor this program. Please grab the prophet's arm and hold it up. Help us to continue to keep this vision on this radio station. Call right now if you want to be a sponsor of just $10 a month or $20 or $50 a month. If you can afford $10 a month, call right now. 877-842-2432. Again, that's 877-842-2432 to sponsor this program. All donations are tax deductible and Generations is a 501c3 ministry. And you can interact with the program by emailing me directly at host at kevinswanson.com. You can hear the program anytime, anywhere in the world at kevinswanson.com. This is Kevin Swanson inviting you back again next time as we cast a vision for the next generation.