day no. 16,569: we do not need more men without mentors

1 Timothy 5:8

But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel.

Every person is not your person, but God does assign certain persons to us. In His providence, He gives us a father and a mother to honor. By His grace, He often provides a wife to love, lead, serve, provide, and protect or a husband to respect, follow, serve, and help. By even more grace, and a natural, normal outcome of the previous grace, He often provides children to love, discipline, instruct, and nourish in the Lord.

If you have any or all of these, they are your people. No question about it. Your father and mother, your spouse, your children, your elders, your employer, your employees, etc... These are your people. God has given your neighbor to you as a gift and has defined who those neighbors are by determining the time and boundary of your and their particular habitation. (Acts 17:26)

We must disciple our own children before we look to disciple others. Everyone is someone's son or daughter and you should not spend your time disciplining someone else's son or daughter before you have discipled your own. You merely create more young men without mentors when you ignore your own sons in order to disciple someone else’s. There is a way to do both, but that means that the other guy’s son gets the leftovers, not your own.

When God commanded us to make disciples (Matt. 28:18-20), He did not mean for us to make more children for someone else to disciple. He meant that we were to spread the Good News to the nations, who are full of sons and daughters who had never heard the Word of God and the Good News of Christ crucified, buried, resurrected, and ascended to reign. We should do our best to reach those who have not had fathers or mothers to teach them, but we should not create spiritual orphans in our own homes in order to father spiritual sons somewhere else.

Do not create more men without mentors in your zeal to mentor other men without mentors. If you abandon your son for the sake of someone else's, you merely make your son the project of another man with children of his own. Rather than discipling everyone else's children, let us begin with our own and free up resources for those who truly have no one else. Your children have you. Do not withhold what God has provided to them.

We do not need more men without mentors; we need more men who mentor the sons they've been given.