If I Am a Father, Where Is My Honor? What Happens When Church Becomes Optional

God asked Israel a question through the prophet Malachi that most modern parents have never had to sit with. He wasn’t asking about attendance. He was asking about honor — the kind that shows up in what you actually give someone, not what you say about them. I want to ask you the parent version of that same question, and I want to tell you upfront that I don’t have a tidy answer to hide behind. I’ve lived the hard version of it myself.

The Question God Asked First

Malachi wrote to a nation that still called itself faithful. They still showed up. They still brought offerings. God’s response cuts straight through the appearance of devotion to the substance underneath it.

“A son honors his father, and a servant respects his master. If I am your father and master, where are the honor and respect I deserve? I am the Lord of Heaven’s Armies, and it is you priests who have despised my name. But you ask, ‘How have we ever despised your name?’ You have despised my name by offering defiled sacrifices on my altar.” (Malachi 1:6-7, NLT)

They weren’t accused of absence. They were accused of giving God their leftovers while still expecting Him to treat them as priority one. That contradiction shows up everywhere, and I want to talk about one specific place it shows up in a lot of Christian homes right now — not because I’ve solved it, but because I’ve watched it up close in my own.

Church, But Only When Nothing Better Comes Up

You know the pattern even if you’ve never said it out loud. Church happens when the weekend is open. It gets skipped for the tournament, the trip, the extra sleep, the thing that felt more urgent in the moment. Nobody decided to stop being a Christian. They just quietly decided that church would compete with everything else on the calendar instead of sitting above it.

Kids notice that arrangement long before they’re old enough to name it. They don’t inherit a parent’s theology. They inherit a parent’s actual ranked list — the one revealed by what wins when two things compete for the same Sunday morning, not the one anyone would write down if asked. That’s worth sitting with if it describes your house. But I want to complicate it, because I don’t think it’s the whole story, and I’d be lying to you if I let you believe it was.

What We Actually Did, and What Still Happened

My wife Wendy and I did not treat church as optional. Our kids were talented athletes, and more than once that meant turning down select and travel teams that required playing on Sundays. We made exactly one exception in all those years — my son’s soccer team was invited to play at Reunion Arena, where the Dallas Mavericks and Dallas Stars played, and the game fell on a Sunday. We let him play that one time, and we had a long, serious conversation with our kids about why it was an exception and not a new rule. It never happened again.

They watched their mother serve as an administrator at the Christian school they attended and serve faithfully in our church and they watched me lead home-based Bible studies and serve as a deacon. They watched me walk through one of the hardest seasons of my life as a deacon, when I had to help remove a pastor I myself had helped bring in — a man who had replaced the mentor I loved. That wasn’t a private struggle. My kids saw the toll it took on me, because faithfulness to the church cost something real and they were close enough to see the cost.

Here’s what I have to tell you honestly: none of that guaranteed the outcome I hoped for. My children are good, hardworking people, and they are not in church today. When a crisis hits, they find God again — the way a lot of people do — and then life gets busy and the distance returns. I did the things Deuteronomy 6 describes. I didn’t do them perfectly, and I didn’t do them once — I did them for years, at real cost, and I still don’t get to point to my kids as proof that it works.

What Deuteronomy Assumed Would Happen

God never intended faith to transfer through a single Sunday morning announcement. He built it to transfer through constant, unremarkable repetition.

“Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up.” (Deuteronomy 6:7, NLT)

That’s not a promise. It’s an instruction. Nowhere does it say the repetition guarantees the result — only that it’s what a parent owes their children, regardless of what the children eventually do with it. That distinction matters more than most sermons on this passage let on.

So What Does That Mean for the Rest of Us

If a home that made church and Christ a genuine, costly priority still couldn’t guarantee the outcome, that should raise the stakes for the home where church is treated as optional — not lower them. Nobody gets to coast on the logic of “well, even the faithful families lose kids sometimes, so what’s the difference.” The difference is that faithfulness was never about guaranteeing an outcome. It was about doing what was actually yours to do. The planting is the parent’s job. The harvest has always belonged to God, and it always will — whether you plant faithfully or you don’t plant much at all.

So if you’ve been quietly treating church as the thing that loses to whatever else is happening that weekend, this isn’t a guarantee that trying harder fixes it. It’s simply the truth that not trying removes any excuse you’d otherwise have.

The Test That Doesn’t Show Up on a Sunday

Here’s the honest exercise, for every parent reading this, faithful or not. Don’t ask whether you go to church. Ask what your kids would say gets first place in your life, based only on what they’ve watched. Then ask yourself the harder question underneath it — even if you already know the answer, are you still willing to plant faithfully, knowing you don’t control the harvest?

The Takeaway

God’s complaint in Malachi was never really about the sacrifice. It was about what the sacrifice revealed — that Israel wanted the benefits of being His people without giving Him what that relationship actually required. I can’t promise you that giving God what He’s owed will bring your kids back to church. I can tell you that withholding it removes any question of whether it might have. Honor was never a strategy for guaranteed results. It’s simply what’s owed, regardless of what comes back.

New Series – Start At Home – July 13

A new series called Start at Home launches July 13, and it starts on exactly this ground — not what’s wrong with the culture, but what’s actually being planted at your own kitchen table, and what it looks like to keep planting even when the harvest isn’t what you hoped for. Subscribe below so you don’t miss it.

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