The Father Who Began

In 2013 I published a short piece called “Possessed By Possessions.” It warned that the things God gives us can come to rule us, and it ended with an instruction in capital letters: “CUT IT OFF!”

The warning was true. Whatever competes with Christ for a man’s heart has to go. But I lived much of my life inside a radical Christian mentality that kept the warning and lost the inheritance. It taught me that since we take nothing with us, a faithful man should not try to acquire and hold onto anything here. It said almost nothing about what a father is supposed to build and hand down. I need this correction as much as anyone reading it.

The passage I quoted in that old piece should have given me pause. Peter told Jesus that the disciples had left everything to follow Him. Jesus answered that no one leaves house, family, or farms for His sake without receiving “one hundred times as much now in the present age” (Mark 10:30 LSB), and He named what that includes: “houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and farms,” together with persecutions, and eternal life in the age to come. The promise includes persecution, and the family it describes is larger than blood, because it is the household of God. Christ names houses and farms among what His people receive in this age, held and shared inside the household of God. The promise commends the man who leaves them for Christ’s sake, and it condemns no man who keeps them and uses them for Christ’s sake. The warrant for building and handing down comes from other texts, and they follow.

I have already argued from Genesis 1 through Ephesians 6 that Christians are called to build generations in “Why the Rich Build Empires While Christians Are Called to Build Generations.” This entry corrects the teaching that trained so many of us to think otherwise, and then it turns to the work. What should a father leave? How does he prepare the ones who will receive it? And what does a man do who has spent decades thinking wrongly, or who has little money and little time left?

What the warning got right

In Luke 12 God calls the rich man a fool because he stored for himself. “So is the one who stores up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:21 LSB). He had planned his barns around his own ease and never reckoned with the God who required his soul that night.

Paul reminds Timothy that “we have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either” (1 Timothy 6:7 LSB). That verse carried more weight in the radical teaching than any other. Read the rest of the chapter. Paul tells Timothy to command the rich “not to be haughty or to set their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly supplies us with all things to enjoy” (1 Timothy 6:17 LSB), and to be generous and ready to share. He commands where their hope rests and what their hands do with the money. He never commands them to stop being rich.

These warnings bind every Christian, and they bind fathers with special force, because a family estate can become an idol with a respectable face. A man can use his grandchildren to excuse greed, close his hand to the poor, and keep accumulating long after he has enough. Putting his family’s name on his covetousness does not sanctify it.

Storing up for whom

The same Scripture commends the father who stores for the generation after him and treats it as the ordinary course of a good man’s life.

“A good man leaves an inheritance to his children’s children, And the wealth of the sinner is stored up for the righteous” (Proverbs 13:22 LSB).

“House and wealth are an inheritance from fathers, But a wife who has insight is from Yahweh” (Proverbs 19:14 LSB).

And Paul, explaining why he would not take the Corinthians’ money, assumes something so ordinary that he does not stop to defend it.

“For children ought not to save up for their parents, but parents for their children” (2 Corinthians 12:14 LSB).

The verb Paul uses for “save up” is thēsaurizō (to lay up or store), the same verb Paul uses for the weekly collection set aside in 1 Corinthians 16:2. Jesus uses it in Luke 12:21 for the man who “stores up treasure for himself,” and in Matthew 6:19-20 both for the treasure on earth He forbids and for the treasure in heaven He commands. Scripture never treats the act of storing as sin in itself. Luke 12:21 condemns storing for yourself without God, Matthew 6 condemns a heart that lives on earth, and Paul says parents ought to store for their children. The radical teaching read all of it as one prohibition, and Paul’s sentence will not allow it.

The strongest objection comes from John Piper and others, who read 2 Corinthians 12:14 as describing parents who support their children while they are growing, and they are right about Paul’s immediate point. Paul is talking about living support, and the verse settles nothing about wills. The inheritance itself rests on Proverbs. Solomon praises the good man for an inheritance that reaches his grandchildren, and he names house and wealth as what fathers hand down. Paul shows that storing up for children is a parent’s obligation. Solomon shows that a good man’s provision reaches past his death to his children’s children.

None of this condemns the poor man. Illness, persecution, and years of honest work at low wages leave many faithful fathers with little to hand down, and God does not call that sin. What these texts forbid is the teaching that material inheritance is a lesser use of what God has given because the people receiving it are our own children.

The men who taught me

I was discipled into this mentality by men whose teaching I now have to test, and I will name what they actually said.

David Platt’s Radical (2010) closed with a one-year “Radical Experiment,” and one of its five commitments was to sacrifice your money for a specific purpose. That summer he explained it this way: “Put a cap on your lifestyle; free up as much as you can for one year to make sacrifices in our lives; and free up as much as we can to give away for the glory of Christ” (Preaching, July 2010). He and his wife sold their house and moved into a smaller one to do it (Biblical Recorder, March 2010). A man may cap his lifestyle and do well. Platt himself told PBS that year that “there’s no hard and fast rules” (PBS interview). I can find no place where he forbade an inheritance. The damage came in what we did with it. A voluntary limit became the measure of a serious disciple, and every dollar a father kept for his own household had to justify itself before a court that had already ruled.

Francis Chan’s Crazy Love made the problem sharper. In its “Profile of the Lukewarm,” Chan describes people who never need to trust God for the unexpected because they have a savings account, and never need His help because they have a retirement plan in place. Chan was warning against practical unbelief, which is a real sin. His examples condemned what Scripture commends. “Go to the ant, O sluggard” (Proverbs 6:6 LSB), and the ant stores in summer. “There is desirable treasure and oil in the abode of the wise, But a foolish man swallows it up” (Proverbs 21:20 LSB). Scripture calls the man who stores wise and the man who consumes everything a fool. A savings account can be an idol, and it can also be the ant’s summer store, which Solomon calls wisdom.

John Piper deserves more care than a passing charge, and I will give it. I still respect him, and I honor his life’s work and his commitment to Christ. His famous seashells illustration in Don’t Waste Your Life attacks a retirement spent on leisure, and he has defended saving and Christian financial planning more than once (Ask Pastor John, 2018). Where I part with him is his 2022 answer to the question “Should I Leave an Inheritance for My Children?” (Ask Pastor John). He reads Proverbs 13:22 as a description of how God blesses the righteous more than as instruction, applies 2 Corinthians 12:14 to raising children, and counsels leaving a fixed amount to each child and the rest to Christian ministries. Much of that counsel is sound. A fixed gift is lawful, and generous giving to Christ’s church is good. But a proverb that praises “a good man” for what he leaves is teaching men what goodness does, and its horizon is the grandchildren. The proverb holds that pattern up to every father, and the radical teaching set it aside.

A household that worships, works, provides, and gives is itself service to Christ. A gift does not leave His kingdom because it goes to a son instead of an institution.

The same conclusion from the other side

The world reaches the same conclusion by a different road, and its leading men have said so in public.

Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 essay “Wealth,” later known as “The Gospel of Wealth,” asked, “Why should men leave great fortunes to their children? If this is done from affection, is it not misguided affection?” He wrote that he “would as soon leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar,” and that “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced” (Carnegie Corporation edition). Carnegie allowed moderate provision for a man’s family. The surplus, he taught, belonged to the public.

In 1986 Warren Buffett told Fortune that a very rich parent should leave his children “enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.” Nearly forty years later he wrote, “I’ve never wished to create a dynasty or pursue any plan that extended beyond the children” (Berkshire Hathaway, November 25, 2024). His children will distribute his fortune to charity as trustees.

Bill Gates said in 2013, “I definitely think leaving kids massive amounts of money is not a favor to them,” and credited Buffett’s 1986 article with persuading him (AMA transcript). In May 2025 he announced that he would give away virtually all his wealth through his foundation by 2045, and he quoted Carnegie’s line about dying disgraced (Gates Foundation).

I am not accusing these men of starving their children. Their children were educated and provided for, and the church’s discipline does not reach outsiders (1 Corinthians 5:12-13). Still, the sage passed the sluggard’s field and said, “I beheld, I set my heart upon it; I saw, I received discipline” (Proverbs 24:32 LSB). We are permitted to learn from what we see, and what these men have taught in public is a doctrine. It holds that abundance handed to one’s own children is presumptively a harm, and that wealth reaches its higher use when it leaves the family. That doctrine runs straight against Proverbs 13:22. It also shares a root with the radical teaching I absorbed. One came dressed as philanthropy and the other as discipleship, and both told a father that his own house was the wrong place for what God had given him.

Paul says the opposite. “But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8 LSB). The context is the care of widows, and the verse cannot tell any man what percentage of his estate he owes. It does establish that no appeal to the wider good cancels a man’s duty to his own. Jesus said the same to the Pharisees who dedicated to God what they owed their parents (Mark 7:9-13).

What a father leaves

Psalm 78 sets the order of what is handed down. God “commanded our fathers That they should teach them to their children, That the generation to come might know, even the children yet to be born, That they may arise and recount them to their children, That they should set their confidence in God” (Psalm 78:5-7 LSB). At least three generations stand in those verses, and on the natural reading four, and the inheritance that passes through them is the knowledge of God. A prosperous great-grandson who has forgotten God is a failure by the measure of that psalm, however large his holdings.

So the first inheritance is the faith. Teach your children who God is, what He commands, what sin deserves, and what Christ has done for sinners. Open the Scriptures with them every day. Let them hear you pray as a man who depends on God. Let them see you repent when you sin against them, because that is how they will learn to repent. Money cannot purchase the new birth, and instruction cannot compel it. God still commands fathers to teach, and He works through the means He commands (Deuteronomy 6:6-7; Ephesians 6:4).

The second inheritance is work. God gave Adam dominion and put him in the garden “to cultivate it and keep it” (Genesis 2:15 LSB), and He still gives dominion to men who work. Bring your sons into your work. Teach them to finish what they start, account for materials, keep their word, take correction, and earn honestly. A trade is a weighty gift. So is the judgment to run a business, start an enterprise, or practice a profession well. Paul joins honest labor to having something to share (Ephesians 4:28) and ties working with one’s own hands to a life that commands the respect of outsiders (1 Thessalonians 4:11-12). Daughters belong in this instruction as well. The woman of Proverbs 31 considers a field and buys it, plants a vineyard, and trades from her household, and a father who wants that for his daughters has to teach it at his own table.

The third inheritance is a name. Solomon says of the righteous man who walks in his integrity, “How blessed are his sons after him” (Proverbs 20:7 LSB). “A good name is to be chosen over great wealth” (Proverbs 22:1 LSB). An inheritance built by fraud teaches the children fraud, and the money never corrects the lesson.

The fourth inheritance is holdings, and Scripture tells a father to govern them. Solomon hated the thought of leaving his labor to a man who might be a fool (Ecclesiastes 2:18-19). “A slave who acts insightfully will rule over a son who acts shamefully, And will share in the inheritance among brothers” (Proverbs 17:2 LSB). “An inheritance gained hurriedly at the beginning In the end will not be blessed” (Proverbs 20:21 LSB). These proverbs teach that blood alone does not make a son competent and that an inheritance seized early is not blessed in the end. They give no father a rule for disinheriting a son. Paul draws on an arrangement every reader knew: “as long as the heir is a child, he does not differ at all from a slave although he is owner of everything, but he is under guardians and stewards until the date set by the father” (Galatians 4:1-2 LSB). Paul is teaching redemption there, and his illustration still shows that inheritance and supervision belong together. A father may provide guardians, stewards, and a set time. He may not use money to rule his married son’s household.

Jeremiah 35 shows which of these inheritances lasts longest. Jonadab the son of Rechab commanded his sons not to drink wine, build houses, sow seed, or plant vineyards, and to live in tents. Generations later his descendants still obeyed him, and God held them up as a rebuke to Judah: “Jonadab the son of Rechab shall not have a man cut off from standing before Me always” (Jeremiah 35:19 LSB). The text records no land that Jonadab left. He left his sons a command, and they kept it for generations. God praised their obedience to a father’s word, and that word outlasted anything a father could have handed them in land, tools, or money.

Land, children, and nearness

God’s first word to man was “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it” (Genesis 1:28 LSB). The psalm of the man who fears Yahweh sets his children “like olive plants All around your table” (Psalm 128:3 LSB). A father who wants to build for generations will welcome children as the blessing Scripture calls them (Psalm 127:3-5). God gives children in the measure He chooses, and a couple to whom He has given few or none has not failed Him. The family that refuses them has chosen against His blessing.

Land serves this work. A home, a workshop, a field, or a place of business gives a son somewhere to begin. When Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard, Naboth answered, “Yahweh forbid me that I should give you the inheritance of my fathers” (1 Kings 21:3 LSB). Naboth was keeping a statute (Leviticus 25:23). Israel’s land law was particular to Israel, and selling a modern property is no sin. Naboth still teaches what the radical teaching forgot: land can be an inheritance to keep, and a man is right to hold it when God has given it to him.

Ground has grown harder to obtain. The median first-time home buyer in America is now forty years old, the oldest on record, up from the late twenties in the 1980s (National Association of Realtors, 2025). A young man starting from nothing will struggle to buy ground. A father who has ground, or who buys it with his sons in view, can change that for them.

I want to see families live near one another again, with parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents sharing ordinary life. Nearness has to honor marriage. “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother, and cleave to his wife; and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24 LSB). A married son heads his own household. His father’s land does not make his father the ruler of his marriage, and separate homes on shared or neighboring ground can serve both. Sometimes work, a church, or plain necessity will require distance, and Abraham and Lot parted when the land could not hold them both (Genesis 13:6-9).

This is a call to obedience in the present. I have written against the idol of a golden past in “The Idol of Simpler Times,” and nothing here returns to it. Nor is the distance as great as many assume. In 2015 the typical American adult lived about eighteen miles from his mother (The New York Times, December 2015). What has thinned is the intention to stay together, especially among men who follow a career wherever it leads. A job across the country should be weighed against kin, church, and the care generations owe one another, and higher pay is only one weight on that scale. A government pension does not cancel the duty Paul gives children and grandchildren to “make some return to their parents” (1 Timothy 5:4 LSB).

Begin where you stand

A young father and a grandfather begin in different places. Both of them can obey today. “How blessed is everyone who fears Yahweh, Who walks in His ways. When you shall eat of the fruit of the labor of your hands, How blessed will you be and how well will it be for you” (Psalm 128:1-2 LSB). “It is the blessing of Yahweh that makes rich, And He adds no pain with it” (Proverbs 10:22 LSB). God sets the measure of the blessing, and He commands the obedience now. Psalm 128 pronounces its blessing over the man who fears Yahweh and works, and it names no age. Begin today.

This is the work in my own house. I am focused hard on teaching my children, and especially my sons. One of my sons started working at fourteen. He is learning what hard work is, and he has already built a good name with others. Without being asked, he gives toward our family’s groceries. We do not need his money, and I thank God for the selflessness in him. I want him to start a business of his own. He is not drawn to that yet, but he loves making music and talks about starting a studio or making music his work, and I am pushing him to dream that large. I live frugally, I owe no one, and I am teaching my children to do the same. I am investing for the long term and working toward land that my children and grandchildren can build on. Inflation and the price of ground have made that hard, and I am still working out how to get there. I intend to teach these things to my children, to the spouses God gives them, and to their children after them.

Put your household under the Word. Set a daily time for Scripture and prayer with your family. Use a sound catechism. If you have neglected this, confess it to God and to your wife and children without a speech about anyone else’s failures, tell them what will change, and then keep doing it. Write down what you want your great-grandchildren to know about Christ, His church, honest work, and the sins they must refuse. A written word can be read by children you will never meet.

Take account of what you have. List what you own, owe, earn, spend, and give. Our culture trains men to live on borrowed money, and the training runs deep. American households owe $18.8 trillion, $1.26 trillion of it on credit cards (Federal Reserve Bank of New York, August 2026). The tax code rewards the habit. The mortgage interest deduction lowers the cost of a larger loan (Tax Policy Center), and businesses deduct the interest they pay (IRS). Inflation rewards it too, because rising prices shrink the real weight of what a borrower owes while they eat away the savings of the man who stored (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). The very wealthy have learned to borrow against what they own and never sell, because a loan is not taxable income, and gains left unsold at death escape capital gains tax (ProPublica, 2021). Ordinary families copy the habit without the assets that make it work for the rich. A Christian father has to work against this training on purpose. “The borrower is the slave of the lender” (Proverbs 22:7 LSB). Make a plan to get out of consumer debt and stay out. Keep a reserve suited to your household so that the first emergency does not send you to a lender.

Keep the reserve separate from the long store. Cash is for the household’s needs. It is a poor place to keep wealth meant for grandchildren. A dollar from 1913 buys about three cents’ worth of goods today, by the government’s own price index (Bureau of Labor Statistics). Wealth meant to last generations belongs in what holds its value and produces: land, a business, tools, and productive assets chosen with care. I have written about money and debasement in “Jubilee, Bitcoin, and the Quiet Revolt.” No particular asset is commanded, and every asset carries risk.

Build while you are alive. Teach a skill. Provide tools. Help a son into a trade, a business, or a first piece of ground when you have the means. A gift that helps a young household begin can bless grandchildren before they are born. Take your wife’s counsel, and never fund a son’s start by neglecting the provision his mother needs.

Buy land with sense. Where you can, look for property with work and future households in view. Learn what can be built and what it will cost to keep. Work toward owning it free and clear. A mortgage gives the lender a claim until it is paid, taxes and upkeep never end, and land can be hard to sell. Count those costs before you buy. Renting while you prepare is no failure.

Put your intentions in writing. Make a will. Name guardians for your children. If your heirs need oversight, arrange it with a competent attorney while you can still explain your reasons. I am not a lawyer or a financial adviser. Wills, trusts, and titles need a competent attorney.

Young men should prepare for marriage, children, work, and provision, and should refuse the long adolescence our age offers them. Fathers in the middle years should bring their children into the work and correct their own habits while there is still time to practice better ones. Grandfathers can teach, counsel without taking over, help a new household begin, and leave their affairs in order for the ones who will settle them. No stage of life exempts a man from generosity, and no man needs a fortune before he can begin to obey.

The father with little time left

An older man may read this and see mainly what he cannot recover. His children are grown. The land was never bought. There may be no money to hand down at all.

If you worked faithfully through hard years and have little to show for it, you have nothing to repent of on that account, and God does not call poverty sin. If you neglected what God gave you to do, name the neglect and repent. Forgiveness rests on Christ’s finished work, and you do not earn it by rebuilding an estate before you die (1 John 1:9; 2:1-2). You can still ask forgiveness from those you failed, make restitution where you owe it, teach the truth you once neglected, and give whatever help remains in your power.

Scripture gives him company. God gave Abraham no inheritance in the land, not even a foot of ground (Acts 7:5). What he held there he bought: a burial cave, when Sarah died (Genesis 23). Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah were laid there after him (Genesis 49:29-32; 50:13). Jeremiah bought his cousin’s field at Anathoth while he was confined in the court of the guard and Babylon’s army surrounded Jerusalem. He sealed the deeds in an earthenware jar “that they may last a long time,” because Yahweh had said, “Houses and fields and vineyards will again be bought in this land” (Jeremiah 32:14-15 LSB). Scripture does not give Jeremiah’s age. His purchase belongs here because he bought under a promise whose fulfillment lay beyond the exile and beyond his own life. Caleb was eighty-five when he said, “So now, give me this hill country” (Joshua 14:12 LSB). Each acted under a particular promise of God, and none of them guarantees an old man a profitable purchase. Together they answer the lie that faithful action is pointless because its fruit lies beyond a man’s remaining years.

The righteous “will still yield fruit in old age” (Psalm 92:14 LSB). That fruit may be instruction, reconciliation, prayer, hospitality, or a younger man strengthened for his work. If your children will hear you, speak to them. If they will not, repent anyway, and do not demand that they trust you on your timetable. Keep walking in the fear of God, and leave the timing of restored trust with Him.

The one who began

Psalm 49 describes the men who die and leave their wealth to others: “Their inner thought is that their houses are forever And their dwelling places from generation to generation; They have called their lands after their own names” (Psalm 49:11 LSB). That is the empire I wrote against last year, a name carved into land to outlast its owner, and death takes the owner anyway.

Generations from now a young man may ask why his family worships together, works hard, holds its land, and stands firm through hardship. If God is kind, someone will tell him about a father who saw his own neglect, repented, and began to obey, and about the mercy of God that met that father in his failures. That is the right way to be remembered. He began the work, and God gave the increase.

The inheritance passes from hand to hand for one purpose: “That they should set their confidence in God And not forget the deeds of God, But observe His commandments” (Psalm 78:7 LSB). Whatever your descendants receive from you should serve that end, and Christ will be worthy of their confidence long after your hands are still.