The Bible principal…you reap what you sow, is clear and repetitive, if you sow apple seeds, you will reap apples, if you sow to the wind, you will reap a whirl wind. Reaping of like kind has been engineered into creation by Godly design.

So what hope is there for we fathers who have the perception that we have failed miserably with our children?

Some teach that you reap what you sow….period. I cannot argue against the justice of that concept. However, along with the principal of reaping what we sew, God gives us example after example of His loving grace and forgiveness.

There in lies our hope.

We do not always reap what we deserve to reap.

” Those who sow in tears Shall reap in joy” Psalm 126:5.

That does not offend God’s Holiness or justice, but magnifies His love and grace….For by grace are you saved through faith…” For God so loved…

David was not a perfect father. Some would say he deserved no children. Absalom, David’s son, may have been one of those. I can see him, invisible, next to his mother, walking through the market place, hearing the whispers about David his father and Bathsheba. Or even going to worship and having the other children say things, hurtful things, that built anger and resentment into Absalom’s heart.

Was David reaping what he had sown through the death of his son Absalom? Not for me to say, but what I do know is that the lineage of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior,  is traced through Bathsheba and their Child Solomon. Do not underestimate the power of God’s unconditional, love, and grace.

Perhaps the greatest evidence of God’s willingness and even intent,  to see us spared from reaping what we sow, is our own salvation. If we all were to reap what we sow, we would still be in our sin, enemies of God and bound without hope for eternal destruction.

But Grace intervened.

We have all failed at times with our children, some of us maybe even beyond our ability to repair the damage we have done, But to just accept the law of sowing and reaping, without giving consideration to the grace and loving intervention of God, through repentance and forgiveness, would be a mistake.

David made a terrible mess of his family, and of Uriah’s family as well, beyond his power to repair, but not beyond the power of a loving God and His grace.

Be a man after God’s own heart, be a man like David…