The final battle will be marriage and the family - Spiritual Leadership in the Home

The sins of the fathers gets passed down but the righteousness of the fathers gets passed down too. - (Numbers 14:18 - Exodus 20:5-6)

God tells Fathers to instruct and train up their children in the ways of the Lord.

• Deuteronomy 6.5-7: You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

Being a husband and Father is a huge responsibility.

A rather obscure but large and important study conducted by the Swiss government in 1994 and published in 2000 revealed some astonishing facts with regard to the generational transmission of faith and religious values. (The full title of the study is: “The Demographic Characteristics of the Linguistic and Religious Groups in Switzerland” by Werner Haug and Phillipe Warner of the Federal Statistical Office, Neuchatel.  reveals: “It is the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children” (Emphasis mine).

The study reports:

1. If both father and mother attend regularly, 33 percent of their children will end up as regular churchgoers, and 41 percent will end up attending irregularly. Only a quarter of their children will end up not practicing at all. 

2. If the father is irregular and mother regular, only 3 percent of the children will subsequently become regulars themselves, while a further 59 percent will become irregulars. Thirty-eight percent will be lost.

The enemy knows the power of a husband and father’s faith in his family so his primary focus is to undermine the man.

He makes him believe that he doesn’t have time for prayer. That he works hard enough anyway. That so long as he is a ‘good’ person that is enough. But we can be ‘good’ for many reasons. Jesus confronts this many times. We can be good because we want praise or status or reward, even if that is the reward of a good feeling. Pure and selfless giving comes through God alone and His sanctifying Grace. To gain Graces we need the sacraments, we need prayer, we need The Word. 

When a husband and father doesn’t take up his cross of spiritual leadership in his family the wife and mother often has to do it.

The enemy will allow this because he knows it puts enmity and resentment between the husband and wife.

Therefore more obstacles will often come against the husband’s spirituality.

Eventually, the  husband may resent his wife for ‘knowing’ more than he does about spiritual matters. On a subconscious level he may even resent her spiritual leadership. This is a natural response. She shouldn’t be in this position. It’s not the way God designed it to be. 

Equally, the wife will resent her husband for not taking on that responsibility himself and thus forcing her into the role. Eventually, this can make her feel superior to him. And even justify her undermining of him even in front of the children.

The enemy knows how this will play out.

The husband will begin to associate his faith with a sense of repression and disempowerment. His interest in it will be worn away over time.

The husband and wife will begin to grow apart. The children won’t see the self sacrificing love that should be the example of marriage in their home.

When they are little they will likely follow their mother in her devotions but as they enter adult hood and the cares of this world grow up like weeds around them they will see that their father has done very well in the world without practicing his faith. So they begin to mistrust it. Is it really necessary, they wonder. They begin to think in a worldly manner. The wife feels such great sorrow that all her years of giving have ended this way. And part of her blames the husband. But it was her fault too for falling into the trap of assuming her own righteousness and failing to simply focus on her own sins and striving to love her husband and be a quiet and gentle spirit in the home.

Saint Peter gives advice to wives on this matter. - 

Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands so that, if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without words by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as elaborate hairstyles and the wearing of gold jewelry or fine clothes. Rather, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God.

Saint Lucia of Fatima said that the final battle between good and evil will be the family.

‘  ‘The final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about Marriage and the Family.’ Don't be afraid, she added, because whoever works for the sanctity of Marriage and the Family will always be fought against and opposed in every way, because this is the decisive issue. ‘

These words of Saint Paul teach us well the beautiful and good design for both women and men. - 

Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body.“For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.”This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.

The woman’s role is vital in all this. Mary’s Magnificat reminds us that to be humble is to be raised up. And Jesus teaches us that to be last is to be first and that those who are meek shall inherit.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen highlights a woman’s valuable spiritual  role in relation to her husband.

“When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.”

Women and men are equal in value but they are sanctified through different roles.

Let’s pray to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. To seek the narrow way which is to simply repent and believe and above all Love one another.

The advantages of family prayer

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