Rick Johnson - Better Dads, Stronger Sons: How Fathers Can Guide Boys to Become Men of Character

2006 by Rick I. Johnson

Published by Fleming H. Revell
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.revellbooks.com

Ebook edition created 2010

Ebook corrections 01.04.2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meansfor example, electronic, photocopy, recordingwithout the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4412-0016-7

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, New International Version. NIV. Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

Scripture quotations identified NKJV are from the New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations identified NASB are from the New American Standard Bible, copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. www.lockman.org

To Frank and Kelsey.

Without you, none of this would have happened. I love you guys, and Im proud to be your dad.

Contents

I D LIKE TO thank Brian Smith, the best writer I know personally, for all his help with this book. Ive also been blessed to have one of the most patient and gracious editors a writer could have, Dr. Vicki Crumpton. Thanks, Vicki, for your encouragement and unending patience with me as I stumbled along the rocky and very narrow path of authorship.

Id also like to thank Steve Ziegler, Monte Edwards, and Tim Hart for their contributions to this book and for being good men.

Of course, Terry, Linda, Bill, and Brian, you all deserve a big thanks. Without such a top-notch writers group, how would I have ever ended up here? And thanks to George and Riley for being my constant companions during the days and nights of writing.

As always, Suzanne, you deserve most of the credit for any and all of my accomplishments.

Introduction
The Redemption of a Man

G OD DOES WORK in mysterious ways.

I was raised in an alcoholic home. I can distinctly remember lying in bed at night as a little boy, my little brothers and sisters huddled around me in fear, my pillow tightly pulled over my ears, desperately crying to God to make the fighting, screaming, and hitting in the next room stop. I prayed fervently, with all my heart and soul. But God didnt answer those prayersthen.

I grew up to be an abuser of drugs, alcohol, and any other substance that would deaden the pain I felt in my soul but didnt acknowledge. I slept with a multitude of women, never realizing that what I was really looking for was love, not sex.

I met my wife and married her when I was twenty-five. She unwittingly followed my masculine leadership into depths of degradation and despair. Finally, with the birth of my son when I was thirty, I recognized my foolishness and stopped taking drugsthe first step on the road to recovery. Years of counseling followed as I attempted to lead a normal life and be a good husband and father despite my lack of a positive role model growing up. By then I had substituted work and achievement (societys legal narcotics) for the numbing effect of drugs.

At forty, I had what the world said should have made me happy and satisfied. I owned a relatively successful business. I was married to a beautiful wife with two great kids, owned a nice house and new cars, and had money to burn. We werent rich, but compared to most people we were living a pretty good life. I was what the world considers a success.

Yet I was miserable. The more I accomplished, the less gratifying my success was. I stubbornly adopted a me against the world attitude; I was going to win no matter the cost. I believed that I controlled my destiny and that all I needed to do was work harder and smarter to achieve my dreams and goals.

But I was trying to ignore a reality that undermined all my efforts. I had hypocritically compromised so many of my self-imposed principles that I had a hard time looking myself in the eye when I shaved in the morning. I despised who I had become. Not that I was a bad guy. In fact, by the worlds standards I was considered a fairly good man. But I had a void in my soul that couldnt be filled, no matter how much I poured into it.

How could I have everything the world offers and still be so dissatisfied?

I remember thinking many times as I drove down the freeway how easy it would be to just turn the steering wheel a little to the right, hurtling my car into a telephone pole. Perhaps that would give me the relief I sought so desperately, putting an end to my feelings of despair and hopelessness.

That I didnt kill myself is a tribute to Gods grace in my life, even while I still despised him. I told myself I resisted suicide because I didnt want to cause my wife and children to suffer, but the truth is, I was too cowardly to take my own life.

I finally decided to take inventory of my life and see if I could fix whatever was wrong with me. After all, thats how I had taken care of every other dilemma I had faced before. Since I had no men in my life whom I respected at the time, I decided to look at the lives of admirable men throughout history to determine what they had that I didnt.

As I researched the lives of brilliant men such as Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, John Adams (and nearly all the other founding fathers of our country), Abraham Lincoln, and many others throughout the ages, the one common thread I discovered among them was that they were all Christians. I was shocked. I had grown up in a family that considered religion in general to be a crutch for weak people and Christians in particular to be a bunch of hypocrites.

In reaction to that revelation, I set out to prove to myself that Christianity was a false concept. I believed that the Bible was written by uneducated, superstitious savages and that the basis for believing in a mythical Jesus was one of unenlightened ignorance. I was a scoffer of the highest magnitude. In fact, I despised people who could so easily be led around like docile cows with rings in their noses.

After a year of research and study, I finally had to admit that I could not disprove Christianity. As illogical as I believed the concept to be, something about it spoke to me deep in my gut. In time I became convinced that Jesus Christ not only existed but was actually the Son of God who had come to earth as a man to die for our sins and rise again in order to provide eternal life for all who chose to believe and accept his gift.

So I believed. I took the gift. The decision was not based on emotion or one that someone talked me into but one based on logic and my own research.

Talk about a paradigm shift! My whole worldview was shaken and turned upside down. I thought, So now that God has hunted me down and saved me, where do I go from here? Someone told me I needed to start praying. I didnt know how to pray, and frankly, it was a little scary. I had prayed before, as a kid, and God had ignored me. But I decided that if I really believed in this God, I would be a hypocrite not to try to live by his guidelines. And in my family of origin, being a hypocrite was worse than being a Christian. So I began to pray.

In faithfor I really had no reason to believe prayer workedI prayed every day for two things. First, that God would allow me to like myself, because I was convinced there was no way I could ever love myself. But if I could just like myself, I thought, things would be okay. At least I wouldnt want to kill myself anymore. And second, I prayed that God would bring some friends into my life. I was so lonely. I had many acquaintances but no real friends. Now, years later, God has blessed me so abundantly in both of those areas, far beyond my dreams and expectations. But thats a story Ill tell later in this book.