Equipping the Warrior - Leadership Devotional for MenSample

The Great Imitators

I was looking at and listening to myself. Those were my words. The voice inflections were astonishingly similar and the tone just as harsh. It pained me to experience it. To watch my oldest daughter chastise my youngest daughter was painful. There was no love or sense of gentleness to be found. Accepting the reality that she learned this response from her father was excruciating. 

Poet, playwright, and social critic James Baldwin is quoted as saying, “Young people often fail to listen to their elders, but they never fail to imitate them.” It brings to mind a drug prevention commercial I saw often in the 90s. A father confronts his son about his drug use demanding to know where his son picked up the bad habit. The son’s words cut the father to the bone. “From you. I learned by watching you.” Humiliation bathed the father’s face. 

We want our children to display all of our good qualities and none of our bad ones. We even think that we can convince them with our words to be better than us. The idea is quite laughable. Not much compares in impact to our personal example as fathers. 

From this perspective, I could make a case for Nadab. You could argue that Nadab didn’t have much of a choice. His father was King Jeroboam and Nadab was just like him. Jeroboam helped Israel to relive a dark spot of their history. The golden calf experience was a rough patch in Israel’s relationship with God. Instead of waiting patiently for a message from God, in the absence of Moses, they form a golden calf and begin to worship it. Now years later in an effort to draw the hearts and attention of the people, Jeroboam ups the ante. His effort to secure the kingdom came in the form of creating two golden calves and encouraging the people to worship them instead of worshiping God in Jerusalem. Jeroboam had shrines built, commissioned priests, and called for feasts. 

I wonder what young Nadab was doing during this experience?

Scripture records that none of the nefarious practices of Jeroboam were lost on Nadab. In fact, Nadab followed in his father’s footsteps. One might ask how could he not. With such a terrible example laid before him how much of a chance did Nadab really have?

As fathers, the greatest lessons that we can teach our kids are the ones they learn from watching us. The way we talk, our work ethic, our social interactions are all recorded in the logbooks of their minds. Our children will walk in our ways. They will imitate us. Our challenge is to ask for the God-given strength to walk in the right direction. 

Writer: Pierre Quinn