What do you do after work? I have encountered men who have answered that question with a variety of responses, but they can all be boiled down to two choices. They either run to their families or they run from them. What message are we sending our families by what we do after work? When we're at home, are we attached to our e-mails, phones, or any other bonds that draw us away from our wives and kids?
Gentlemen, whatever message you may have been sending to your family, send them the right one, send it clearly, and send it today. I have never heard anyone regret having spent time with his family. I have never heard any man in his dying days wish that he had just given more of himself to the company, or spent more time at the gym, or at the bar. Our enemy, the devil, would love to destroy our families. And, one of the quickest and most complete ways to accomplish that end is to separate Daddies from their families, either physically or spiritually (he'll take either one). Never surrender the lives in your family to the enemy. My family needs to know that Daddy loves them, and that with his feet planted firmly on the Word of the Lord and none other, that he will stand between his family and evil.
We are not trapped by a group of people who are bound to us because of a stale promise that we made when we were younger. That's the world's portrayal of the family that our enemy wants to perpetuate in order to entice us away, exactly as he did in the garden of Eden. We are no longer slaves to sin and to the grave of self-destructive self-indulgence to which it leads. As the free men of God, we stand for our families because they are an unfathomably awesome gift from Him. We stand for them because by the sacrifice of Jesus, we are free to.