Intentional Fatherhood

As we continue our series on the seven deadly sins, we pivot to the more outward, consumptive sins: lust, greed, and gluttony, specifically focusing on lust in this episode. Pornography often comes to mind first, but it's only one of many ways lust can show up in our lives. Since most of us have heard plenty about what not to do, we start with a better question: what is sex actually for?Sex was God's idea from the beginning. It points to our deeper longing for union with God, unites us with our spouse, and brings forth new life. Lust isn't the desire for sex within marriage. It's a disordered search for intimacy that promises connection but trains us to avoid it, keeping us in a loop fueled by excuses like "you're stressed" or "you're lonely." Desire isn't the enemy, but it becomes destructive when it stops asking, "How can I love?" As Augustine said, our hearts are restless until they rest in God, and lust promises to fill that restlessness but never delivers. In the end, lust isn't wanting too much of God's design. It's wanting far too little of it.Brook gets personal about what lust takes from fathers, sharing how it affected his family of origin and how pornography became a temptation during an overwhelming season of life. We talk about asking, "What's the thing behind the thing?" and why taking our sin seriously helps us take God's grace seriously.Practically, here's where we landed:You'll be most protected from lust when you're running to God and to your marriage for intimacy.Stay in open, ongoing conversation about lust with covenant friends.Your wife should know the passcodes to your phone, and you should never be alone with it.Don't let your kids be alone on the internet.Podcast Episodes Mentioned: Sex in Marriage: Communication, Connection + Healing Past Wounds Around Intimacy (YouTube, Spotify + Apple Podcasts) + The Hidden Blockers of Sexual Desire in Marriage + How to Move Past Them Together (YouTube, Spotify + Apple Podcasts) + Brook’s Interview on the Open Spaces Podcast (YouTube, Spotify + Apple Podcasts)Protect Young Eyes: Website, Instagram + FacebookIntentional Fatherhood Retreat: November 12-14, 2026 in Austin, TXScripture Mentioned: Genesis 1, Genesis 2:24, Genesis 4:7, Matthew 5:27–28, Matthew 19:6, Ephesians 5, James 1:14–15, 1 Corinthians 10:12, Joshua 24:15Sowing a Hidden Seed: Marriage Edition is currently available as our thank you gift to Legacy Builders, Intentional’s monthly giving community. Learn more at intentionalparents.org/devotional.Submit Questions: Send a voice recording to [email protected], mentioning your name and where you’re from.Intentional Fatherhood WebsiteFollow @intentionalfatherhood_ on InstagramWatch + Subscribe on YouTubeIntentional: Website + InstagramJustin Whitmel Earley: Website + Instagram

We don't usually call it envy. We call it "just being honest," or "I'm not jealous, I just wish things were different." But envy is sneakier than that. It's a refusal to be content with the life God actually gave us, and it shows up as comparison, insecurity, gossip, and pushing people out. This week continues the Seven Deadly Sins series with a hard look at where envy starts, why it hurts the person feeling it most, and how to fight it with the one thing strong enough to counter it: love.Envy starts with discontentment in your own story, not with someone else's blessing. And here's the part we don't say out loud enough: the primary victim of envy is you. It's easiest to feel toward people close to us, within the same sphere or vocation, which is part of why it shows up so often in the church, where we're quick to rejoice at someone's downfall and slow to rejoice at their win. And it almost always has some sort of wound underneath it: shame, a father wound, or performance-based love. That's why you can't white-knuckle your way out of it. You only defeat envy by practicing its opposite.Six Ways to Reframe Envy as Love:Envy asks, "Why them?" Love says, "Thank God for them."Envy says, "There's not enough." Love says, “God's grace isn't scarce.”Envy says, "I have to compete." Love says, "I get to celebrate."Envy says, "Their success diminishes me." Love says, "Their success blesses us."Envy says, "I wish I had their life." Love says, "I want to steward the life God gave me."Envy says, "Why not me?" Love says, "Good for them."Practices: The Antidote to EnvySpecifically confess the ways you are jealous and envious of people in your life.Stop scrolling.Practice the discipline of gratitude.Practice the discipline of encouragement.Practice celebration.This kind of change happens slowly, and only by the Spirit's work in you, not by trying harder. We spend so much of our lives convinced there's never enough, when half the time we're complaining about a prayer God already answered. Ask yourself if you're wishing you had someone else's career, family, or circumstances. Then let it go. There's always room for more in the kingdom, and your life, the one right in front of you, is the one God is using to shape you.Intentional Fatherhood Retreat: November 12-14, 2026 in Austin, TXScripture Mentioned: James 3:16, Proverbs 14:30, 1 Corinthians 13:4 + Philippians 4:11-13Submit Questions: Send a voice recording to [email protected], mentioning your name and where you’re from.Intentional Fatherhood WebsiteFollow @intentionalfatherhood_ on InstagramWatch + Subscribe on YouTubeIntentional: Website + InstagramJustin Whitmel Earley: Website + Instagram

Anger might be the quintessential sin of fatherhood. It's the one that shows up at bedtime, in the car, in the moment a kid won't listen for the fifth time, and it's the one our kids are most likely to watch us model and then repeat.We open this episode with a pattern Brook is still working through: bedtime gets stressful in his house, and it often ends in anger. But when we look closer, what makes us angry in that moment usually isn't the kids at all, it's everything sitting underneath. Brook and Justin dig into why anger is a secondary emotion, and why our families so often get our worst, even when we hold it together everywhere else. Most of us don't have an anger problem. We have an awareness problem: we don't recognize what's actually driving the reaction, which is usually a realization that we're not in control, we're not God, and we can't always get what we want.But we don't stop at the diagnosis. We get honest about our own angry moments, name the pride that's often underneath ("this shouldn't be happening to me"), and land on the real hope: a Christian father isn't defined by the absence of sin, but by the presence of repentance. Repair has a way of healing even the most painful places, moving a family from pain to healing to resilience. We close by looking at how Jesus modeled anger rightly: never for his own power, always for the sake of someone else, making room for joy, kindness, and long-suffering instead.This is a candid, Scripture-anchored conversation for any father who has lost it and needed a way back to his wife and kids.Intentional Fatherhood Retreat: November 12-14, 2026 in Austin, TXScripture Mentioned: James 1:19 + Romans 12:19Books Mentioned: Habits of the Household by Justin Whitmel EarleySubmit Questions: Send a voice recording to [email protected], mentioning your name and where you’re from.Intentional Fatherhood WebsiteFollow @intentionalfatherhood_ on InstagramWatch + Subscribe on YouTubeIntentional: Website + InstagramJustin Whitmel Earley: Website + Instagram

This week, we're opening a new season built around the seven deadly sins: sloth, anger, envy, lust, gluttony, greed, and pride. We’re spending this season walking through each one in depth, not to shame you, but because you can't fight what you won't name. This episode starts with sloth, what we think is the defining sin of our generation.Sloth isn't what most of us picture. Thomas Aquinas called it “sorrow about spiritual good,” a sadness that sets in when the right thing is also the hard thing. That means you can be productive at work all week and still be spiritually asleep. It's a sin of omission, not commission: the gap between the life you're living and the life you were made for. And you don't close that gap on willpower alone. You can only do it with the help of the Holy Spirit.We trace where this actually shows up in a father's life: the hard conversation you keep putting off, the disengagement that looks like exhaustion but is really avoidance. It's the same instinct Adam had in the garden. God asks where he is, and Adam says, "I heard you and I was afraid, so I hid." Sloth hides. What it's chasing is comfort, when it actually needs rest.Here's the hope. The opposite of sloth isn't hustle, it's faithfulness, joy and intentionality. It’s caring enough to be hurt and present enough to be interrupted. Ephesians 5 tells us to wake up, because Christ will shine on us if we do. Your kids are watching whether you're a father who's tired or a father who cares. This season, we want to help you become the second one, by shining a light on the areas of your life still stuck in the dark.Season 4 Recurring Themes:Jesus loves you in the midst of your sin. This isn't about shame, it's about transformation.What if the biggest threat isn't what you do occasionally, but what you're becoming?You live in an action movie. It's a spiritual fight.You're called to live a life without secrets. Sin flourishes in the dark but dies in the light.You can't do fatherhood alone. You fight sin in community, and covenant friendship with others and Jesus is where sanctification happens.Your sin isn't unique. Naming it has power.Sin comes at you with reason, making itself sound reasonable.Grace means you can live differently.You're like a garden. Gardeners work at the intersection of grace and agency.Sanctification takes practice.Questions to Ask Yourself:What conversations have you been avoiding?Where have you confused being busy with being faithful?What part of your soul have you stopped tending?Where have you settled for existing instead of being?If your children copied your spiritual life exactly, would you be excited or concerned, sorrowful or encouraged?Applications:Community: Name your sloth to yourself first, then confess it to your spouse or a friend. Send this episode to that friend and ask each other what's been left undone, and how it will be different next time.Spiritual discipline: Read. Reading usually coincides with caring, and it pulls you out of apathy.Spiritual discipline: Build key rhythms into your week that improve motivation and keep you out of the habit of avoidance.Intentional Fatherhood Retreat: November 12-14, 2026 in Austin, TXScripture Mentioned: Galatians 5:19-21, Colossians 3:5-11, Genesis 3:10, Ecclesiastes 2:17-26, Revelation 3:15-16, Ephesians 5:14-16 + James 1:22-25Books Mentioned: East of Eden by John Steinbeck + The Body Teaches the Soul by Justin Whitmel EarleySubmit Questions: Send a voice recording to [email protected], mentioning your name and where you’re from.Intentional Fatherhood WebsiteFollow @intentionalfatherhood_ on InstagramWatch + Subscribe on YouTubeIntentional: Website + InstagramJustin Whitmel Earley: Website + Instagram

In this episode, Brook sits down with Fred Odom for the second installment of Fatherhood in the Wild, our series featuring everyday dads in the trenches of marriage, work, and raising kids. Fred is a dear friend, a husband to Becca, a father of three young daughters (affectionately dubbed the family "C-suite"), and part of the team behind Chick-fil-A's leadership conferences, where his gift is helping others find the words to say what matters most. What began as a work call became a real friendship, and this conversation is a window into what fatherhood actually feels like for a man carrying a lot all at once.Much of the conversation centers on the difference between the title of leadership and the weight of stewardship. Fred shares how a recent promotion taught him that greater responsibility isn't about accolades but about carrying more people, and how that same posture applies at home. We're not owners of our work, our marriages, or our kids; we're stewards of all of it. Fred opens up honestly about discovering his struggle with anger only after becoming a dad, and how underneath it is a desire for control and a deeper question of whether he can trust God to provide what he needs through the very life he's been given.Fred also walks us through his story: his parents' divorce at age three, growing up between a predominantly white school and a predominantly Black church, and the quiet ache of not knowing where he belonged. That longing for belonging, he's come to see, is woven through his whole life, from inviting others in during college to helping speakers know they have a place on stage today. He shares how his mother's resilient faith shaped him, how a retreat finally gave him permission to bring his anger and grief to a God who loves him, and how he's learning that his calling isn't something he has to force into existence. As one friend told him, God cares more about who you're becoming than what you're achieving.The episode lands on a word Fred sensed God gave him this year: devotion. What he expected to be about his devotion to God turned out to be about God's devotion to him, learning to believe he is a beloved son. He shares a prayer spoken over him that has reframed this whole season: that his surrender would be greater than his sacrifice. We talk about how the enemy uses the lie that you're "behind," how greatness in the kingdom is the hidden life that leads to serving others, and how it's the small, faithful, daily things, family prayers in the car, a weekly core value, wiping the counter, that shape both our kids and us. Fred closes with a reflection on how a simple invitation to gather a few men has grown into something the Lord is using, a reminder that impact often starts with nothing more than initiative.Intentional Fatherhood Retreat: November 12-14, 2026 in Austin, TXScripture Mentioned: Nehemiah 8:10 + 2 Chronicles 16:9Submit Questions: Send a voice recording to [email protected], mentioning your name and where you’re from.Intentional Fatherhood WebsiteFollow @intentionalfatherhood_ on InstagramWatch + Subscribe on YouTubeIntentional: Website + InstagramJustin Whitmel Earley: Website + Instagram