Paul Said There Are Plenty of Instructors and Almost No Fathers

He noticed it in a barbershop, of all places, listening to a man about sixty talk about a job he had left in 1994.

He was leaning in more than the story deserved. He caught himself doing it and knew the shape of it immediately, because he had done the same thing with a supervisor, and a coach, and a landlord, and a man who ran a garage on Peachtree.

He does not ask any of them for anything. That is what makes it hard to name. It is quieter than that. It is a low hum of hoping that one of them will one day say something specific about him, unprompted, and mean it.

And none of them know. That is the part that gets him. He has been auditioning men for twelve years for a job none of them applied for and none of them were ever told about.

Which means when they do not deliver, they are not failing him. They are just being men who came in for a haircut.

Paul says the shortage out loud

There is a sentence in Corinthians where Paul, in the middle of an argument, names something almost nobody names.

For though ye have ten thousand instructers in Christ, yet have ye not many fathers. (1 Corinthians 4:15, King James Version)

Read that as a piece of arithmetic. Ten thousand of one thing. Not many of the other.

He is not complaining about the instructors. Instructors are useful and he does not run them down. He is saying they are a different category, and that the second category is scarce, and that the scarcity is real rather than imagined.

Which means the hum is not a defect in you. You are looking for something the Bible says there is a genuine shortage of.

You are not broken for noticing a shortage the Bible names in as many words. 1 Corinthians 4 counts them out at ten thousand to not many, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old count feel like it explains twelve years of something.

And somebody did do it for Paul once

Here is what makes that sentence carry weight. Paul knew what he was talking about, because it had happened to him.

After his conversion, nobody wanted him near them, for good reasons. He had been hunting them.

But Barnabas took him, and brought him to the apostles, and declared unto them how he had seen the Lord in the way. (Acts 9:27)

Took him and brought him.

Barnabas walks a dangerous man into a room full of people who are frightened of him and stands there while he explains himself. Nobody made him do it. Nobody else was going to.

That is one man. Not ten thousand. One.

You have a God who has done this with one person before and not with a crowd. Acts 9 records the one who went and got him, and it is His Spirit who makes an old introduction feel like something that could still happen.

God says He places people in households

Next to the line where God names Himself a father of the fatherless sits a sentence about arrangements.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains. (Psalm 68:6)

Setteth is deliberate. Somebody puts a person somewhere.

And Jesus says something similar and stranger, when Peter points out that they have left everything:

But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands. (Mark 10:30)

Read the list carefully. Houses, brothers, sisters, mothers, children, lands.

He lists nearly every household relationship there is and He leaves one off. He does not promise fathers. Bible readers have noticed that for centuries and there is no getting around it.

He is not being careless. There is a reason the one He leaves off is the one He has already claimed for Himself.

You are placed into something rather than left to assemble it. Psalm 68 uses a placing verb and Mark 10 lists a household on purpose, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a list like that land on people a man already knows.

The one role nobody else is filling

That gap in the list is the point of the whole thing, and it is worth being plain about.

And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven. (Matthew 23:9)

Jesus is not banning the word. He uses it about earthly fathers Himself elsewhere. He is talking about a title people were handing out in a religious system.

But the reason He gives is the reason that matters here. One is your Father.

The barbershop is not going to produce him. Neither is the supervisor. Not because those men are bad, but because the position is occupied.

You are not going to find in a room what is already assigned to somebody. Matthew 23 says the reason plainly, and it is the Holy Spirit who is described elsewhere as the one who puts the word Father in a man's mouth at all.

What the older men actually are

And then, having said the position is filled, the Bible immediately makes room for the other thing.

And the things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also. (2 Timothy 2:2)

Handing things down is real, and it is required, and it is meant to keep happening.

So the man in the barbershop is not nothing. He may be somebody God places you near for exactly the reason Psalm 68 describes. He is simply not the answer to the hum, and expecting him to be is what turns a good relationship into a disappointment neither of you signed up for.

You have been given real men to learn from and one Father to belong to. 2 Timothy 2 keeps the handing down and Matthew 23 keeps the title, and it is His Spirit who lets a man hold both without confusing them.