The Way of Young Men

A father called me once and asked me to meet with his 17-year-old son. He wanted me to give him thoughts on how he could better work on his son in the last year or two before his eldest went to college.

Now, a bit about this father. This patriarch was a good covenanter who brought this young man up from the font in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. He made his share of mistakes, but he doggedly loved his son and there was no doubt his son knew his father loved him. The young lad watched and heard his father seeking forgiveness from God and repenting before his tribe.

I eagerly took the opportunity. When I met this young man at a local coffee shop, he greeted me, and after grabbing our coffees, he sat down and pulled out his little notebook. He carefully wrote down a series of questions he wanted to ask me. These questions ranged from the characteristics he sought in a wife to my thoughts on various theological subjects. We spent about two hours navigating a host of questions, and I actually learned quite a bit from his intellectual and curious mind.

I did not leave that morning thinking to myself, “I really hope he makes it!” Instead, I left tremendously invigorated by his demeanor and preparation for life. In fact, when I left that morning, I did not think I had met a pre-adult but rather a man whose manliness far exceeded the righteousness of the Pharisees.

David sang that the sons of the righteous in their youth will be like well-nurtured plants (Ps. 144:12). These men will be steady and sustained by true religion, being humbled by “the mind of Golgotha” (Kuyper) rather than the entertainment values of religious naysayers.

In our day, however, the example above is viewed as some foreign case, a rare breed of young men. Why has this become the mood? Because Christian fathers have given over their young men to expectations of failure treating the entire navigational process as something neutral. “I tried to guide them, but they just got lost.” But this is surely not the nature of fatherhood in the Scriptures. Fatherhood trains the hands of men for battle (II Samuel 22), they don’t exist as bystanders throwing a book, meme, or adding some generic one-liners on random occasions.

The kinds of fathers that have left an imprint on their sons are the ones who lead in the way of wild repentance and intentionally train their sons to keep their eyes open to patterns of deceit and corruption and truth and purity. They instruct in these pattern-finding missions because they learned from a series of self-inflicted wounds in their own lives or because their own fathers trained them in these ways, but for them, the goal is clear: to send out these arrows with covenant advantages rather than a deficit.

The young man at 17 didn’t simply make a decision to think carefully about life and his future at a moment’s notice; he was trained to think carefully, and he was encouraged that such thinking would bear good fruit. He sought out rhythms of grace because fatherly grace had been poured out on him in millions of little moments.