The Covenant Household

by Douglas Wilson

This is also tied in with our messed-up theology of how sinners come to God. There is a Christian song that goes, “Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me, see on the portals He’s waiting and watching, watching for you and for me: ‘Come home, come home, ye who are weary come home.’” In this view, Jesus is standing by the door of Heaven, wringing His hands like that poor sap in high school who never could get a date, pleading with people to come because unless they choose to come He cannot save them. Some Christian husbands think that this is what Jesus did, and this is why we have a bunch of milksops for Christian husbands—that is what they are imitating.

So when husbands get a glimpse of what it means to be a head, it ought to scare them sideways. Headship does not mean that the husband gets his way in all the petty things. It does means that the husband cannot blame his wife for the state of their marriage. Just as Christ assumed responsibility for things He did not do, in the same way husbands should be willing to take responsibility for things their wives do.

I consider 100 percent of the marriage’s problems to be the husband’s responsibility. The husband is the head, and so he is therefore responsible.

If your one central goal in life is to keep your wife happy, then the one thing I can guarantee is that you are not going to make her happy.

Our task as parents is not to get your kids to conform to the standard: our job is to get them to love the standard. Fathers, your kids will love the standard when you love God and you love their mother.

There is a kind of frenetic childrearing where the parents try to oversee and monitor absolutely everything that the child does, because they do not want anything to go wrong. This is a problem because they are trying to manage and control this process so that they can wrangle the kids a seat on the bus to Heaven. But the only way to keep the covenant is by faith in God, and not by works. The reason many parents are so anxious and worried about their children is because they are still trusting in their works.

Here is a slightly exaggerated illustration: imagine a kid comes from the backyard and asks, “Why are we Christians?” The dad looks up from the sofa and explains that their family follows Jesus Christ and then lays out the gospel. Suppose the kid says he does not want to do all this, only to hear Dad say, “Too bad, we’re in this together. You’re still going to Heaven. And that means you are going to be holy also. Like it or not.” It may seem crazy to have this kind of quiet confidence, but it is our duty simply to believe: this is just the way it is. This is not presumption, though some might call it that. I grew up in a godly home, and all my life I could no more imagine not being a Christian than I could imagine flying to the moon or living under the ocean. I could not even get my head around it. Why is that? My dad and mom believed the promises.