Explanation: A godly father recently asked me and several other men to write a charge to his eighteen year old son. This is what I wrote:

Dear Brother ______. I do not really know you, but I do know and respect your father. I appreciate the fact that he is trying to bring you up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. I know that you also appreciate this, but you will appreciate it even more in years to come. Having a godly father is very rare in today’s world and it is one of the greatest blessings you will ever receive from the Lord.

The world today has it “heroes,” but they are not really heroes at all. Most of them are sports figures or are from the entertainment world. Most of them are openly ungodly. The great majority of the real heroes in the world today are virtually unknown. In my office I have pictures of several of my personal heroes. Some of them, like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, are from yesteryear. I have the pictures of three men whom I have known personally, but who have gone on to be with the Lord, on the walls of my study. One is my own father, E. A. M. Guess. He went to be with the Lord in 1965, when I was twenty-four years of age. I am now sixty-seven, but he still has a great influence on my life every day. He was not famous, but he was a great man. He set the example of seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. He was a hard-working man. He had a great sense of humor, but he was very sober-minded. He had a clean mind. He was not vulgar. He taught me by precept and example that serving the living God was the most important thing in life. He was courageous in his death. In short, he showed me how to live and how to die. I charge you to live the same kind of life. Strive to be a hard-working, God loving, clean-minded man.

Another picture in my office is that of my father-in-law, Anthony Machiavello. He went to be with the Lord in 1997. He, too, has a continuing influence on my life. He was born in Spain to Roman Catholic parents. He immigrated to the United States and soon saw the fallacy of Roman Catholicism. He met my mother-in-law and became a faithful, studious, learned Primitive Baptist. He loved the Bible and he loved church history. He was a great believer in the London Baptist Confession of Faith. He was ordained a deacon and was truly full of wisdom and the Holy Ghost. He was a great one to hold up the hands of the ministers of the gospel, but he was not a “yes man.” Sometimes he disagreed with me, but he always did it in a godly way and had a Biblical reason for doing so. He earned the respect of the congregation by his gracious attitude and by his studious devotion to the Word of God. I charge you to live a consistently godly life and to earn the respect of God’s people.

The third picture in my office is that of my father in the ministry, Elder Hassell Wallis. He, too, went to be with the Lord several years ago. He, being dead, yet speaketh. He daily influences me. He was an avid student of God’s Word. Towards the end of his life he virtually lost his voice and was not able to do much public preaching. However, this did not diminish his eager study of the Bible. He was reading meditating and learning until the end. Even though he lost his speaking voice, he was very powerful and effective in private admonition. He was a very honest and courageous preacher. He refused to be a man-pleaser, and absolutely would not play ecclesiastical politics. This cost him a lot of popularity, but the loss of human acclaim did not influence him to deviate from the course of truth and integrity. He had several sons in the ministry and he repeatedly admonished us to remember that we would have to give an account to God for our ministry. I charge you to be a life-long student of God’s Word and have the courage to live by its precepts in the midst of the adversarial and hostile environment of this world.

Remember these words of the great apostle in 1 Corinthians 6:19-20, "What? know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost which is in you, which ye have of God, and ye are not your own? For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God's."

I pray God’s richest blessings to be upon you,

Brother Zack Guess