TOOL #5: Empowering Servant Leadership

Empowering your wife and children by putting their needs above your own will yield rich benefits today . . . and for generations to come. This is the essence of great fatherhood.

“The Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many.” Matthew 20:28, NASB

“Don’t ever doubt the impact that fathers have on children. Children with strongly committed fathers learn about trust early on. They learn about trust with their hearts. They learn they’re wanted, that they have value, that they can afford to be secure and confident and set their sights high. They get the encouragement they need to keep going through the rough spots in life. Boys learn from their fathers how to be fathers. I learned all those things from my own father, and I count my blessings.” Former VP Al Gore speaking at the Third Annual National summit on Fatherhood in Washington DC, June 2, 2000

The Servant Leadership Tool is another absolutely critical tool for us as Dads. And it’s not an easy one to develop in our “me first” culture. The word willingness is a big part of this Tool, because putting our family’s needs and wants above our own is, when you come right down to it, a matter of the will.

There’s nothing easy about saying “No” to what I want (for example, watching the football game Sunday night) in order to put my family’s needs first (say, doing homework with my son, who needs help in math or whatever). In fact our culture feeds us a steady diet of ‘me first and the heck with everyone else’ from our earliest days. So becoming an empowering servant leader is truly swimming upstream in today’s culture.

Maybe you had a Mother and/or a Father who readily sacrificed for you. If you did, I trust you realize how much you owe them. Sacrificial love is a powerful thing – in every culture and for all time. Today almost half the world celebrates in some form or fashion the death of a poor, itinerant Jewish carpenter on a cross 2,000 years ago in an obscure backwater in the proverbial middle of nowhere. Think about that for a minute. Whether you are a believer or not, that fact is mind boggling. It shows us both the power of God and the power of sacrificial love (which is at the heart of servant leadership) at the same time.

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