The fact is no family is perfect and every family will have ups and downs. The key is to get back up when you are down, to get back on track when you are off. There are course corrections that have to be made regularly. As the father of the family you can’t just let the family take its natural course or it will crash. Like driving a car you have to keep it on the road. If you take your hands of the steering wheel things may look okay for a few seconds, but the car will soon be heading into oncoming traffic or toward the ditch. Sometimes we veer a little, and sometimes we may even take a wrong turn and be on the wrong road, but we have to turn it around and get back to the road we want that is going to take us where we want to go.
I recall trying to get somewhere and following someone else who was supposed to be going to the same place. I did not have my own directions, and they didn’t know where we were going like I thought they would. Needless to say, it was a mess. We took several wrong turns that I could have avoided if I had good directions to follow. We need to remember that it is our responsibility as fathers to get our family where we are going, and we can’t just follow someone else. A preacher, elder, deacon, or other seemingly spiritual Christian may wind up leading us down the wrong road if we don’t have our own set of directions to follow. If we have directions and we see someone else take a wrong turn, we can still go the right way.
We have to beware of following the majority or a group. Exodus 23:2 says, "Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil; neither shalt thou speak in a cause to decline after many to wrest judgment:" I was going to a large event one time in a larger city than I was used to. I knew generally where to go, but not exactly. I figured since it was such a big event that once I got close I could just follow the many cars that would be going that way. It didn’t work out quite right. Apparently there were some other things happening that a bunch of people were going to as well. I saw a line of cars getting off the interstate at one particular exit and thought that must have been it, so I followed. You guessed it, wrong! At the end of the exit ramp those cars went all different directions and I didn’t know which way to go. Even in the church, a group of people who are all supposed to be trying to go to heaven, people are going all kinds of different directions. You can’t just blindly follow the majority even among Christians.
Take hold of the wheel and guide your family. We sometimes try to push and pull and lift and everything else. Have you ever noticed how hard it is to push a car to the right or left compared to the ease with which you can do it from the driver’s seat with the steering wheel. Drive your family, don’t push them.