Facing Prometheus — Week 21 (Sacred Lives in a Secular World) | “The Character of a Father” | Pastor Jason Parrish
For the last several weeks the series has been working through the household section of Ephesians, moving from marriage to children and parents to the formation of the next generation. This week Pastor Jason returns to Ephesians 6:1–4 and turns the lens directly onto fathers. He opens not in the church but in Sparta. At the height of their power, the Spartans built their entire identity around military strength, and at age seven their boys entered the agoge, a state-run program of education, training, and socialization built on duty, discipline, and endurance. Thirteen years later they emerged as Spartan men, formed by an identity handed down from the warriors who had gone before them.
The contrast sets up the message. In Sparta the father’s actual role in a boy’s life was limited. Paul argues the opposite: the father is of the utmost importance to the formation of a child. In Week 21 of Facing Prometheus: A Letter to the Ephesians and the Future Church Dilemma, Pastor Jason examines the character profile of a father who has been shaped by God. This message is not primarily about kids. It is about fathers. But if you are not a father, don’t tune out, because it speaks secondarily to everyone: those who will be fathers one day, spiritual fathers, single men forming into the kind of men they should become, and single women discerning the kind of man worth building a marriage with.
The Text — Ephesians 6:1–4
“Children, obey your parents in the Lord, because this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, so that it may go well with you and that you may have a long life in the land. Fathers, don’t stir up anger in your children, but bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.”
— Ephesians 6:1–4 (CSB)
Paul is direct here, and everything hangs on two words he uses in verse 4: training (discipline) and instruction (relationship). We’ll get to both. But the thesis comes first:
★★★ Fatherhood is not simply biological; it is theological. When fathers, families, and the church begin to see it this way, it changes the way we father.
Grant Osborne notes that where Roman social codes centered on a father’s patriarchal power over his children, Paul reverses the norm and focuses on the father’s obligation to rule lovingly and to raise children up rather than beat them down. Christian fathers, in other words, live and love in a wholly different way than the surrounding culture.
★★ We do not take our cues from the world. We are shaped by the Father to be good fathers. The character of a father is not developed outside of a relationship with the Father.
John Stott frames the whole conversation inside the larger letter: because of Christ’s reconciling work there is now one multinational, multicultural family of God, so human fathers are to care for their families the way God the Father cares for his. The character of a father, then, is meant to reflect the character of God the Father, seen in the way God fathers his church. With that foundation, Jason draws out three things a father of character does.
1. A father architects a place and space for hearts to grow
Ephesians 3:14–20 (CSB) (excerpt) — For this reason I kneel before the Father from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named. I pray that he may grant you, according to the riches of his glory, to be strengthened with power in your inner being through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith… Now to him who is able to do above and beyond all that we ask or think according to the power that works in us.
Paul leads and loves the Ephesian church the same way a father should lead and love his children, and notice where it starts: he kneels before the Father. Everything about being a father must begin and end kneeling before God, because kneeling is a posture of surrender and humility. Only from that surrendered place can Paul do the next thing he names: he prays.
Dads, before you coach, play, or discipline, you pray. A praying dad is a good dad. As John Chrysostom put it, teach your household to be a church, for where there is prayer and Scripture and the presence of God, the place is no less than heaven.
★★ We do not contend for our families and our children with fists, but with fervency in prayer.
2. A father cultivates a life worth following and adopting
Ephesians 5:1–2 (CSB) — Therefore, be imitators of God, as dearly loved children, and walk in love, as Christ also loved us and gave himself for us, a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God.
The command to imitate God is for everyone, but it is modeled in the father-child relationship. In a culture constantly lowering the bar for who we imitate, Paul sets the bar at God himself.
★★ We have settled for role models when God has called us to reflect his image.
Paul says “imitate God,” and then, one chapter later, “Fathers.” The order is intentional. Before a father is ever called to raise his children, he is first called to resemble his Father. Said plainly: you cannot consistently reflect to your children the Father you refuse to imitate yourself. The trouble is that we keep trying to reflect everything else instead, the strongman, the put-together man, the businessman, the funny man, the deep man. None of them make us into the man God intends. Only one Father is meant to be reflected in our lives.
★★ A life worth following and adopting is not mass-manufactured. It is cultivated, with intention and precision.
That image is agricultural, and it’s built into the text. The word Paul uses in verse 4 is ektrephō (ἐκτρέφω): to nourish, to rear, to bring up to maturity. It is the language of a gardener tending a young plant, making sure the soil is right, the nutrients are present, and the conditions are conducive to growth. It echoes Ephesians 2:10, that we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works. God cultivates us, providing everything we need to grow. So:
★★★ You cannot expect to cultivate in your kids what is uncultivated in you.
This is also why Paul says, “don’t stir up anger in your children.” A father’s first responsibility is to cultivate healthy soil. Anger hardens hearts. Grace softens them. And we give anger when we are full of it. What is in us, if it goes undealt with, gets passed down to the very ones we are responsible for cultivating.
3. A father forms souls that reflect Christ
Back to verse 4 and those two words, which together form what Jason calls fatherly discipleship. They are different from each other, and both are needed.
a. Training — paideia (παιδεία): training done in and through action. It is a holistic term for the total formation of a person: education, habits, virtue, moral character, discipline, worldview, and identity. For the Greeks, paideia formed an adjusted citizen of the state. For Paul, the father forms a citizen of heaven, one belonging to the household of God. Chrysostom urged fathers to bring a child up from the very first in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, and never to treat his hearing of Scripture as unnecessary. Augustine put it bluntly: better the loving severity of a father than the deceitful indulgence of one who permits everything.
b. Instruction — nouthesía (νουθεσία): training through the spoken word. The term compounds the Greek words for “mind” and “to put,” functioning as correction designed to reshape both actions and attitudes. Part of that spoken word is the washing of the mind and life by the Word. As Kenneth Wuest distinguishes them: paideia shapes through experience and consequence, while nouthesía works through direct address and reasoned appeal, whether encouraging, reproving, or correcting as the moment calls for.
Pull the two together and you get one picture. Training without instruction becomes control. Instruction without training becomes mere information. Training shapes habits; instruction shapes convictions.
★★ A father is one who teaches, through his own character, both the rhythm of grace and the assimilation of wisdom, all of it carried by the word of God and the presence of his Spirit in the life of a father.
Closing
A father of character architects a place and space for hearts to grow, cultivates a life worth following, and forms souls that reflect Christ. None of it begins with technique. It begins on his knees. The father who kneels before the Father, who imitates the Father, and who lets himself be cultivated by the Father is the one whose home becomes soil where life can grow. That is the whole point: fatherhood was never merely biological. It is theological, and it is meant to put the character of God on display in the most ordinary, daily, hands-on way a person can.
Referenced in this message:
Nigel M. Kennell, The Gymnasium of Virtue: Education and Culture in Ancient Sparta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
Grant R. Osborne, Ephesians: Verse by Verse (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2017).
John R. W. Stott, God’s New Society: The Message of Ephesians (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1979).
John Chrysostom, Homilies on Ephesians and 1 Corinthians, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994).
Augustine, Sermon 82.7.
Greek word studies from Spiros Zodhiates, The Complete Word Study Dictionary: New Testament, and Kenneth S. Wuest, Wuest’s Word Studies from the Greek New Testament.
Scripture quotations are from the Christian Standard Bible (CSB).
