Beware Of Practicing Your Righteousness Before Men #5

So this morning, we're going to be looking at the Lord's Prayer as it's found in the Sermon on the Mount. And I was trying to figure out how quickly to go through it, because we could go really, really slowly through it, and it could take like eight or nine weeks. We could go really, really quickly through it, and I don't know that I like that. And I haven't really decided how quickly we're going to go through it, because as I was preparing this week, I got through the first two words, and my sermon was written. And so you're going to get through two words today and the preamble that comes before it. Jesus has been teaching us, leading up to the Lord's prayer, warning us about praying to be seen, praying like a hypocrite, always looking over the shoulder to see who's paying attention and who's watching. He's warned us against praying in an effort to manipulate God or to get him to see or to do the thing we know needs to be done, like the prophets have veiled it.

He's been warning us about praying as though God doesn't know what we need. Last week, we saw that he knows what we need even before we ask. And so now Jesus moves on to simply instructing us by way of example and how we should pray. When you pray, pray like this. And so as we study the Lord's Prayer, my hope is that God will help us to consider each of the petitions and the things that they contain, and not just to consider them in our minds, but to consider them down in our hearts. And I pray that they would take root in us. and grow us in our holiness as well as our prayer lives. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord from Matthew chapter 6 verses 9 to 15. Pray then in this way, Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts

as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us, and do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. For if you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgression. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So the first two words are not, pray then. but our Father. When Jesus teaches us to pray, these words, our Father, I think are the most needed words to understand in our day, that God is our Father, that when we pray, that when we live, that when we marry, that when we have kids, that when we live every day of our lives, that we would come to understand that we do it with a Father in heaven. What do these words teach us? Well, first, Our father teaches us that it's a corporate prayer. It's not my father or a distant father or someone else's father, but our father, yours and mine. And so whenever we pray, if you'll think about the times when you're most compelled to pray, you're most eager or fervent to pray, it's often when you feel alone, isn't it? You're like, I don't have any help. There's nothing else to do. What am I going to do? I'm going to pray. And so Jesus teaches us in that moment, not to pray as though you're alone, but to pray.

as though you have brothers and as though you have sisters and as though you have mothers and as though you have fathers and as though you have children, as though you're a part of a network, a family. I think the book that I've read that was most helpful in me understanding this idea that we're not alone was Life Together by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Now, that's not a book about prayer per se, but it's a book about the fellowship that we have with other people. And he writes that book while he's in prison. awaiting his death for an attempted assassination on Hitler. And he talks about the benefits of being present with other people through prayer, that he is never alone. Though he is alone in his cell, that he, through Jesus Christ, is connected to and unified with Christians all throughout time, and that he should never feel as though he was alone. And we see Paul saying this same sort of thing in to the Corinthians where he says, you know, while I'm absent from you, from my body, I'm present with you in spirit. And so one of the first things we should learn when we read that we should pray our father is that we are never, ever, ever alone. You're never alone. You're never without those who have gone before you. So often Satan will tell you that the things you're going through in life, no one else has ever gone through them before or no one else has ever.

faithfully gone through them before. And it is simply not true. God has had people, a faithful group, a faithful remnant, a faithful group in this world since the very beginning. And if we are Christians, then they are our brothers, and they are our sisters, they are our mothers, and they are our fathers. While we have not met them yet, we will one day meet them. When you think of getting to heaven, have you ever sat and thought about who is going to be there and what it will be like? All of the people you've read about that have been faithful in Scripture and throughout history, I've often thought about and thought, man, I think that John Calvin would be amazed at the fact that we drive down the street as fast as we do with no media. It's like how fast our cars go. It's really quite an incredible thought if you think about it. There's just this paint that keeps us from crashing into other cars. And we go 60 or 70 miles an hour opposite. It's an insane thought, really.

uh, done anything but walk or perhaps ride a horse. I mean, that's a, that's an insane thought. And it's like, can you believe what we do? I think having been in heaven long before us, he will have believed it and seen it and will be amazed by it. And it won't be him that's amazed that we drive on two lane roads really fast, but they will be amazed at the glory that's in heaven. But he, along with a whole host of, of, um, of Christians who've gone before us will be there. And when we go, we will be with them because they are our brothers and our sister. And they're not our brothers and sisters when we get there. They're our brothers and sisters now. And so when you feel alone, I want you to remember you're not alone. Jesus taught you to pray. One, when you feel alone, pray. And two, pray as though you have brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and people who've gone before you, who fought the good fight, who've run the race, and who have finished their course.

and strive and endeavor to be like them now does this include you exclude you from praying a private prayer praying to god as my father no it doesn't exclude it it doesn't say you can't pray like sometimes what i think one of the abuses of the lord's prayer is that people will take this prayer and act like they're magic words like there's some sort of like magic dust that if you say these particular words in just the right way that somehow it's a it's a special thing that you're doing that's not what's going on That's not what's going on here. As we go through the different petitions that are made or the different truths that are stated, this prayer is instructive, and it's meant to instruct our hearts. It's meant to teach us. It's not meant to be these special words that we tag onto our prayers as though they somehow legitimize the other things we've talked about. It's not meant to be a limiting type of prayer that says, oh, well, it's at our Father, so I need to make sure that every single prayer I ever, ever, ever, ever, ever say starts off with our Father. That's not actually the point.

not actually though it would be good for us to realize that if we never think of ourselves as being joined to other people or if we don't think as we'll come to see in a little bit that God is our father that we actually should pray sometimes to our father that we actually should say those words not because they're magic but because they're instructive because they teach us something they remind us about something that we're very prone to forget which is that we're not alone first And so the goal here is not to say, memorize the Lord's prayer, because it will somehow change your life and make it drastically different than it is. The words will not. The content, content will. If you learn to think and see things the way that God sees them and to desire the things that God desires and the things here that Jesus teaches us to desire, that will change your life. And so the first lesson is that we would pray to God.

corporately, realizing that we're not alone. And that whenever we feel alone, that is a really, really good time to stir ourselves up by way of prayer, reminding ourselves that we're not alone, that there are those who've gone before us. There are those in our own lives. It's not just this ethereal, like in history, there were people who were faithful. There are actually people that you know who've had hardships, who've dealt with difficulty, who've persevered. Remember them. Call to mind your family, your Christian family. those who have gone before you, and ask God to give you strength. This is the best medicine we can find for feeling like no one understands. All of us sit here and we all have our particulars in our lives and we think, no one understands my life or my past or my burdens or my health or my you name it. Whether they do or they don't, you're not alone. Whether they've experienced it in just the same way.

whether they've thought of it in just the same way. You're not alone. You have brothers and sisters. Now, you might object and say, well, actually, this passage doesn't teach us primarily that we have brothers and sisters. And I say, but it does. What do my kids call me? Like, so one of them can address me, hey, daddy. Or a whole group of them can address me, hey, daddy. And what comes out of their mouth next will indicate whether they're alone or whether they're together. Daddy, we were wondering. Daddy, we were wanting. And so we have a father in heaven. Now, the next thing, and really the thing we're going to spend the rest of our time talking about is that God is our father. I think this is one of the most offensive things in our society that we would think of God being a father. Now, there's lots of ways that it's offensive. It's offensive because it makes God masculine and it's somehow seen as being a denigration of women. And that's a lie or an accusation straight out of the pit of.

Not because it's not true. God is masculine. The Bible tells us that he is a father, that he is a son. But it's not meant to denigrate women. Now, in this room, is that the trouble that we have with the word father? No, that's not actually the trouble that we have with the word father. Do we have trouble with the word father? Yes, we have trouble with the word father, with the title father. We have trouble with fathers. Not the trouble that it denigrates women, perhaps, or that somehow makes them second-class citizens, but the trouble of our own fathers. The trouble of what we've experienced with regard to fathers. We think that dads do a lot of harm. They're absent. They're angry. They're manipulative. They're violent. They're selfish. They're lazy. And the list could go on. When we think of fathers, The thing that pops into our head, whether you have ever met him or not, is your own father. And then what happens is you think of his failure. When you're young, you didn't see him. You thought dad and mom were great. And then as you got older, you started to realize dad, not perfect. Dad has sins. Dad messes things up. And then you got further on into your teenage years and into your early 20s. And you started to realize like, man, I'm really ill-prepared for life. And I think it was my dad.

I think my dad didn't prepare me for the way things were going to be. And then perhaps you get angry about it, and you confront your dad. You say, Dad, I think you really should. And maybe he handles that well, or maybe he doesn't handle that. But either way, it doesn't resolve the problem. Whether he acknowledges, yeah, I dropped the ball in that area or the other, and I'm sorry, or whether he goes on justifying whatever was his fatherhood and remains to be his. You're left with this gaping hole of fatherhood in your life. And you're like, there's a mess here. There's something that's wrong. He's done terrible things. But then you'd like, but he's my dad. And I can't just like writing him off. Isn't like, that's, that's not right. That's not, that's not the thing because he's my dad. And we just live in this, this tension and this conflict and this, this burden out with his burden on our backs. And so then when we come to this passage where Jesus tells us to pray to our father who is in heaven.

We bristle at it because we're like, but fathers aren't good. Fathers don't do the right things. My father has hurt me. And we think, well, I know intellectually that God the Father is not like my earthly father. But then the question immediately comes, if God the Father is perfect, why did he let my earthly father fail in the ways that he failed? And we that quickly attribute sin or failure or judgment to our Heavenly Father. And what it produces is an unwillingness in us to be open, honorable, trusting, humble with our Father in heaven. Now, what's that look like? How does that express itself in our lives? Do we walk around complaining about the fatherhood of God? Probably not. Do we walk around complaining about our own Father? Probably not. But I'll tell you, one place it does show up is in prayer. Both in the frequency of prayer, the things you pray for, and most especially, how you address God, how you address God. When people pray, we should listen. And what I hear when I listen is very few people pray to God as Father. It feels weird. It's like, that's not how we were taught to address God. That's not how we were taught to conceive Him. There are lots of other titles that God goes by. When we say God, who exactly is it we're referring to? Well, it could be the Father, or it could be the Son, or it could even be the Spirit.

But many times I don't think that if we were to replace the word God and say, okay, well, what other titles does he go by? We would come up with things like Lord or Savior, Friend, Comforter, Creator, Judge. But Father is not the one that would come to our minds. It's not the one that we would think of and say, this is at his most foundational essence, what he is. He is a Father. We don't think this way. We've been taught not to think this way. And so we pray to God generically, or we'll pray to Jesus, or we'll pray to our Lord. But praying to our Father, the best way I know to describe it is it just feels weird. It feels strange to address God as Father. And the reason it feels strange to you is because of the connection in your mind between the Father you've had and the Father from whom all fatherhood gets its name. You think, I don't know how to negotiate that tension. I don't know how to

settle this conflict. And so we drop the idea, the words, the reality that God is our father. Is it a big deal that we refer to God as our father, that we think of him as our father? Yes. Yes. I think it's the most foundational thing that you have to get and I have to get through our heads is that God is our father. We can talk long about theology. We can talk long about what the Christian life should look like. We can talk long about... many things. But if you don't understand all of those contexts, all those conversations in the context of the fatherhood of God, something essential will be missing. And you'll come to very different conclusions if you conceive of God as something other than a father. Some of you are young fathers. Many of you are young fathers. You have small children. You have few children. And you might wonder at older fathers why they're not more vigorous in their treatment of their children, why they're not more

Why they're not more of a disciplinarian. Many young fathers look at older fathers like, we're supposed to discipline the kids for that. And the older father's like, well, yes, but not like you think. And the difference is the older father has a perspective that the younger father doesn't. He's become to see more of the cost of his action. He's understood what it means to actually exasperate his child because he's seen now the look on his kid's face that he remembers having on his own face at one point and in his heart. And he saw it and he went, oh. I did that. That's not a good thing. Everyone's going, you need to fix that problem. And he's going, okay, I'm learning how. Now, am I going soft on discipline up here? Is that what I'm, is that, is that really what I'm accomplishing here is I'm saying, actually dads need to be this like grandfatherly big, you know, it's okay, honey. Nope. No problems here. Just no, it's not actually what I'm saying. What I am saying is that there is a tenderness to the fatherhood of God that we don't understand. And that young fathers, young men, especially don't understand.

And so they look at older men who are still a very imperfect representation of fatherhood, and they think there's a failure there. Why aren't they pushing the envelope? Why aren't they being more aggressive? Why aren't they lancing the boil with their child? Why are they enduring? Why are they bearing with? The simple answer is because they've come to understand a little bit of something about fatherhood, and the fatherhood of God specifically, that leads them to be patient, that leads them to be merciful, that leads them to be gentler. Of all the things we could call God, Father is the most intimate we could call him. More intimate even than brother, as we would refer to Jesus. Father, because he made us. He made us. In Galatians 4, it says, you are son. Because you are sons, God has sent forth the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Therefore, you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir of God.

This is what God the Father does. He makes us. Not like he makes us physically, though he does do that. But when we become a Christian, he makes you new. He makes you his son. He gives you his spirit. He changes you. He makes you his child. And he sends his spirit into your heart to cry, Abba, Father, Daddy, Father. Like your little kids, when you come home from work and they're too young to know that you sinned yet. or to have experienced it, and they just run up to you and they just want to give you a hug and they just want to sit on your lap and they're just happy. That sweet, innocent love that young children can have for their fathers. If their fathers will spend time with them or pay attention and play with them, then you'll have that. That's one way of describing this heart cry of Abba Father that's in all the hearts of God's children. Many of you guys know that I grew up without a dad. My dad left when I was...

a baby, like six months old or something. I've got a picture of him. I don't quite know how old I was, but less than he. I never knew him and never met him. I never had any interactions with him. My mom never remarried. It was just me and my mom for all of my growing up. And then years ago, once I were up here and we planted this church, I thought, you know, I want to reach out to my dad. I want to see if I can find him. Now, I don't, the truth is, I didn't know if he was alive or dead. I had no, it wasn't like, Oh, my dad lives over in Kentucky. Like last I knew my dad had gone back to Israel. That's all I knew. I didn't know if he died in Israel 25 years ago. I had no idea. And it's kind of hard to search for a, you know, 70 something year old Palestinian, you know, from Israel online. They don't have Facebook accounts, you know, hard to find them. So I found a guy who had a similar last name to me.

was born and raised in Jerusalem, was Palestinian. Looked like a skinny version of me, I think. And his name was Aziz. And so I just emailed him. I don't know this guy from Adam. He has a blog. He used to teach it. I think it was George Washington University. And so I just emailed him. I said, hey, do you know my dad? Here's what I know about him. Here's how old he was. You know, just the details. And eventually, through communicating with Aziz, I eventually, my brother, half-brother, half-brother, contact him. Hey, I guess, you know, we're brothers. Okay. Where are you from? And where do you live? And did you know, you know? And so I eventually, through talking with, with my brother Muhammad, um, I went to go meet with my dad. Now that's a weird, weird thing to do. Really awkward. It's like, how's that going to go? You know, I don't remember how, well, we had probably five or six kids. This was about 10 years ago. And I'm married. I'm a Christian. I've got kids. I'm a pastor. Like.

I haven't known this guy since I was a baby. And the thing that's going on in my head is like, why did you want to talk to this guy? Why did you want to talk to him? Because it's like, it was really awkward. He lived, it turns out my dad lives in Illinois. About four and a half hours from here. Came back in 2001 when I was 19. Had six, eight more kids. No, four more kids after I was born. No, I'm sorry. He had four kids, then he had me, then he had six more kids. So with the same woman and she's here. Two boys, not including me. And so Mohammed was two children younger than me. I talked to him. So I go out to meet my dad. I don't even know how to begin to explain to you how weird or awkward or surreal this whole thing is. I've never met the man. Now, what would you say to him? I was asking myself this question, like, what am I going to say to him when I meet him? Why'd you leave? I know why. How come you never reached out? I know why he never reached out.

You made my life miserable by your absence. It became very apparent to me that after meeting him, he was already aware of that. What did I want to say to him? Well, what I wanted to say to him was simply this. I'm not mad at you. God's given me fathers to take care of. And God's my father. And so you can go to your grave. I didn't say it in these words. But me reaching out to him, me spending time with him, me. talking with him and asking him questions, me giving him a hug, me bringing him pictures of me and him as a baby that he didn't have. All said to him, I'm not mad at you. I have a father in heaven who's done well with me. That was all I wanted to say to him. It was a really strange meeting when I met him. He was, he's like, he's not much bigger than John. Maybe a little, a little bit thicker, but about like John. Very, you know, he's like this tall and thin.

And here I am, you know, I don't look like that. And we got there early and, you know, we're going to go have me to the steakhouse. And we, you know, of course we're going to get there early. I took Mike Bowles with me, who's one of my dads that God's given me. And so we go together and we go out there to meet him. And we're thinking, well, you don't want to be late to a meeting like this. So we get there, you know, the steakhouse opens at 11. So we get there like 1030. Well, guess what? My dad had the same idea. So then, so we're both at the steakhouse a half hour before the steakhouse opens. So we have nowhere to go, but there's only two cars in the parking lot and it's theirs and it's ours. So what do you do? You like pull up and hey, you pull up and we get out and he just comes over to me and he just gives me all these hugs and he's just crying, just crying. I'm not crying, but he just gives me this hug and he's hugging me and he's looking at me, he's hugging me, he's looking at me, he's crying.

I'm like, I don't have any idea emotionally how to process what's going on. This is very surreal. I've never experienced anything like it. But I can tell you that the thing that motivated me to try to find him and what directed our conversations that day, those things were only possible because I have a father in heaven who's taking care of me. And so if you have frustrations with your dad, I can tell you that story. the good happy story. I could tell you stories about growing up without a father that would not be happy story. I could tell you about my mom working two full-time jobs basically until I could bring income into the house. I could tell you about being in trouble with police and having my mom call the police on me and tell them to take me away because of how awful. I can tell you about getting in trouble for graffiti and wanting to be a little gangbanger. I could tell you stories about bankruptcy.

I could tell you stories about getting in fights at the park. I could tell you lots of stories that are not happy stories and really are all connected to the absence of a father. But I'm not without a father. I have a heavenly father. And I came to realize that as God was merciful to me and made me one of his sons. And it gave me the ability then to process my own father's failure in a way that wasn't embittered and wasn't angry. And that's what we need. And that's something that only God will give. I didn't do that in myself. I don't have some magical strength or anything like that. That was simply the work of the Holy Spirit in my life that would give me that sort of disposition. There were times when I grew up where I was very frustrated that my father didn't at least pay child support. He wasn't in the States to do it. But if he could have at least just sent some money. There were days where we were very frustrated. I kind of think I was. But in the end, God was merciful to me and became my father.

And that reality allowed me to forgive my father's failure. And so if you come and you're like, well, I don't want to pray to God as father, and I don't like that, that makes me feel uncomfortable because I've got this long list of my father's failures. I'm here to tell you, I'm not going to fight with you about the list. I'm sure there are things on there that are overblown or exaggerated or what have you. But the fact is, every one of us has been sinned against by our fathers in some way or another. They failed us, and they've not failed us in small ways. They've failed us in big ways. They failed us in ways that impact the rest of our lives, that have colored and shaped who we are, what our temptations are, what our weaknesses are. This is the effect of fathers in our lives, the best of them, let alone the worst of them. But if you're a Christian, then you have a father in heaven who is able to fix and redeem and, excuse me,

heal whatever failures you've endured, whatever failures you've endured. This is the love of God, the love of the Father for us as children. In Romans 8, 15, Paul says this, you've not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, and this will sound very similar to Galatians, but you've received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, Abba, Father. The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, heirs also. heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ. And then just a few verses later at the end of the chapter, Paul says, I'm convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. And in that list, I would include the failures of your own fathers. That if you're a Christian, there is nothing that your father has done that ought to be able to separate you.

from the love of God. Instead of having your earthly father and his failures color the fatherhood of God, we should have it be the other way around, where the perfection of our father in heaven gives us context and understanding for our earthly fathers and his failures. Otherwise, we've lost God as a father, and you will feel many times in your life as though you're an orphan, as though you have no one. There's no greater need in our day than for us to believe and to proclaim that God is a father and our father. And the impact of that touches every bit of our life, including how we process, view, and interact with our own earthly father. One of the things that's a comfort to me as a father is in Hebrews, it says that our fathers disciplined us as they thought best, or as what seemed good to them. And I just thought the author of Hebrews, I don't know who wrote it, but man,

I think he had a kid. I don't know if Paul wrote it or who wrote it, but it's like it was a gracious thing for him to say to fathers at that. They disciplined us as they thought best, which is to say that they were not always right, because then he compares it to our father in heaven. He says, but he disciplines us, which means that sometimes our earthly fathers don't discipline us for our good. Sometimes they screw up. But our heavenly father, he always does it well. He always does it perfectly. He disciplines us for our good. And so if we love, the author of Hebrews argues, if we loved our earthly fathers who just screwed it up, how much more so should we love our heavenly father who never makes a mistake in his dealings? The reason we don't have men today in our society, because we don't have fathers. Statistically, you can get outside of anything Christian and you can look at the statistics simply of whether there's a father in the home and what happens to the children and to the woman. You can look at it in terms of crime.

You can look at it in terms of education. You can look at it in terms of unwed pregnancies, poverty. All of those things can all be tracked to whether there was a father. Fathers have an incredible impact on their children. And so the reason we don't have men today, the reason that there's a manosphere that exists, the reason that we don't know how to be men is because we've lost fathers. But we didn't just lose our earthly fathers. What we've lost in the process was our heavenly. that there is a heavenly father, that he loves his children, that he cares. My story, it's not unique. It's particular to me, but it's not unique for a Christian to have a testimony or to testify to the things that I'm saying. I've come to forgive my father for his sins because God has been so good. That's not unique to me. If you want to become a man, the first step in you becoming a man or a husband or a father yourself is to understand.

The fatherhood of God. That he's a father to you. That he loves you. And that when you sin and when you fail and when you screw up, whatever your earthly father did when that happened, your heavenly father will love you. That doesn't mean he won't discipline you. Doesn't mean there won't be pain. Doesn't mean you'll get what you want. But it means that he will do what is best for you. Always. And so if we want to restore manhood, husbandry, and fatherhood to our society, we have to start with the fatherhood of God. it's very easy for us to say, well, there's this problem in society that needs to be fixed, and here is the way that it should be fixed. But it's not a political problem that we're dealing with. We're dealing with a moral problem. We're dealing with an attack upon God. And if there is to be reform, if there is to be a revival or a reformation, it's going to come from the people of God first getting what was messed up corrected in themselves and in their own homes and in their own family.

So I'm not here to say there aren't problems in society or that we shouldn't have any care for those things, but I'm here to say if you want to actually see a change, one, you should look and see, who do I actually have the ability to affect? And why is it that people you have no real relationship with, why is it that they're the ones that are taking precedent over the people who sleep under your own roof at night? Brothers, it shouldn't be this way. If we want to see these things healed, I'll tell you, you will not see them healed in your lifetime. You will see progress in your life, but you will not see these things healed. If your aspiration is to see our society changed or renewed or reformed, you will probably not see that in any of our lifetime. But you can see the start of it. You can labor toward it, but it will be small. It will be unseen by many in the world. If you are a father or if you are a wife and a mother, what do you want said about you, about your husband or your children's father when he is dead?

What do you want your kids to have to say about him? Whatever the world has to say about him, they may or may not know him. The fact is most of us will not be known very far outside of our families and a small group. What do you want those people to say about him? What do you want to be said about you? Do you want them to speak about you the way you speak about your father? Well, here were his sins. Here's what he did wrong. Here's what he never could seem to figure out and get right. No, I think you'd want them to look at you and to see that you don't want them to ignore your failures and your sins, but you do want them to see that there were lots of good things that you gave to them. It was a kindness of my dad to meet with me. Because when he came over here, the arrangement was that he and my mom would get married so he could become a citizen so that then they could divorce and then he could bring his first wife, real wife, and their kids over here. He wanted to immigrate here. And my mom agreed to it. Then my mom got pregnant. And then the plans changed.

So when things fell apart between my mom and my dad, my dad went back to Israel, remarried his former wife, and as I said, had six more children. When I reached out to him, he had to decide whether or not he was willing to acknowledge me or not. Because all of my older siblings, they knew about me because they had heard their mom and dad fighting. My younger siblings, including Mohammed, the one who emailed me, he had no idea I existed. My dad knew that. And he had to decide whether he was willing to have that sediment in his life and in his marriage and his family stirred up. Would you? Would you want some skeleton in your closet to come knocking on the door some 30 years later saying, hey, you want to let me out? What would you do? I think what he did was right and good. And I don't know that it was selfish either. That was a kindness you all understand. And I'm thankful for it. Because I could have been left with like, sorry, too much trouble.

Don't want to deal with that. Already gone through it once. Not again. And so while my dad failed in many, many ways, he was not as bad as he could be. Not nearly as bad as he could be. While I wasn't a part of his plan, he did stay married to a woman and he did love her and he did raise 10 children with her. Not including me. It's very easy for us to look at the sins of our fathers and to just focus on it in such a way that we miss the good things that they did. There are very few fathers who have nothing. There is nothing in the good column. Very, very few. There are fathers that have very little in the good column, but we need to be careful how we reckon our father's deeds because the things we think about our own earthly fathers are not far removed from what we think about our heavenly father. If you'll consider it and think how you think of your earthly father, do you think of your heavenly father so differently? I think what you'll find is, no, you actually think about them very similarly.

So be careful how you think about your earthly father. Be careful what memories and what truths and what lies and what hurts. Be careful which ones you let grow, because those weeds will spread right over into your thinking about our heavenly. Many of our complaints about the men in our lives, our own fathers, amount to really, really, they're nothing much more than a thinly veiled threat or accusation about God. And so if we don't have the issue of God's fatherhood settled in our hearts, It will end up corrupting every relationship we have, and you men, it will end up corrupting your own fatherhood. You'll spend your life not wanting to make the mistakes your father made. And yet, if you don't have peace with your father in heaven and haven't done the work of forgiving your own father, you will repeat very similar sins in your own life. Now, what does it look like to get the fatherhood of right, the fatherhood of God correct? I can tell you that there's warnings, there's dangers, there's big scary pits over here.

What does it look like to get it right? Well, when you get it right, for one, you'll lose that sort of bristling at praying to your Father. You won't be put off by it the way you had been. Another thing that you'll find is a great motivation to obey God. I think a lot of the reasons we struggle to obey God is because we don't think of it being our Father that we're either obeying or disobeying. It's just a distant far-off God. But children want... want to please them. That's what Jesus told us when he was here on earth. Paul said a similar thing, though he doesn't mention the fatherhood of God directly. It's implied. In 2 Corinthians 5, he says, the love of Christ controls us. And you think, well, what is the love of Christ? And I'm like, okay, so the love of Christ was the love that gave us a sacrifice, a mediator, a savior. But the love of Christ that dwelt both in Jesus and in the father who sent him.

The love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all die. And he died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for him who died and rose again on their behalf. Now, the important statement here about the love of God, the love of the Father, the love of Christ, is that it controls us. Now, being controlled is not a good thing, right? Sometimes it is. Probably more times than if we think of it in terms of self-control than it is a good thing. What does this mean here that the love of Christ controls us? Well, have you ever had a sickness that controlled you? We've all had sicknesses that have controlled us. Like, you're not going out today. You're going to stay home today. It's controlling you. Whatever you thought you were going to do, you're not doing that today. You have this other consideration that has taken precedence and is now dictating the whole day for however long it sticks around. This word here,

translated for us, controlled, or in some other translations, compelled, has reference to that sort of control. It dictates to you in a way that you really, really don't want to throw off that control. If you know that you need to stay home because you're not feeling well, it's really important to you that you stay home. You're not like, oh man, I'm just going to go do what I want. I know that I'm sick. You're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to stay home because I don't want the consequences of not staying. Now, I understand that is not a very pleasant analogy, but it is actually the analogy given when you look up the word. It is a controlling, like a sickness controls us. But here it is not sickness that controls us, but rather the love of Christ. It constrains us. It compels us. It dictates to us how to live. And so, if you want to know what does it mean, what does it look like to get the fatherhood of God right, I would ask the question, do you feel constrained or controlled?

by the love of God. Do you think, I would not want to do that? I want to serve God. I want to love God. I want to do what He says. However much you fail at it, if that is what you want, is that what you want? Or do you just pay lip service to it? What do you want? No one else can really answer the question. Perhaps your spouse could give a decent answer if you are married, but even sometimes they will be wrong. Your children will not be able to give the answer. Your parents will not be able to give the answer. Not completely. Do you want to serve God? Do you want to love because you've been loved? Does that thought control you? If it does, then thanks be to God, you've gotten the beginnings of the fatherhood of God in hand. The love of God controls. It motivates. It tells us yes, and it tells us no. And so when you pray, our Father, you can say the word.

you can probably bring yourself, all you take away from this sermon is, Pastor Dave said I should pray Our Father at the very beginning. Then I suppose you've gotten the most simple, basic, but probably the least helpful point of the sermon. Because you can say the word, but when you say those words, Our Father, you should think about all the other stuff we've been looking at. That I'm not alone, that I have a Father who's in heaven, the one who cares for me, who's loved me, who's saved me. who's provided for me, who's given to me all the good things that I have, every single one of them, every single one of them. Are there burdens and are there hardships? Are there trials that I bear as well? Yes. But all of the good things that I have, I've received from my father, even the kindnesses of my earthly father, though there are many failures to boot. And so when you pray, our father, our heavenly father, your prayer should not be a cold or mechanical prayer.

as though you're talking to some far-off distant stranger. You can imagine, maybe you've seen an interaction where some child addresses his dad as, father, and you're like, I think that's an affectionate term, or it should be an affectionate term. I mean, I don't know if any of you have taught your children to call you father. Most of us teach our children to call us daddy or papa or something warm and affectionate, right? Something that we want our children, whenever they say it, we want them to know that word. That you learned about me is a word that should evoke love in you. My daddy. My papa. Same thing with your grandparents. It's hard because there's more of them sometimes, and so you can't call them all the same thing. At least not without confusion, right? And there's even a way. I know that, George, you have a grandfather. But even when you have a grandfather, it's not like grandfather. You love your grandpa. Call him grandfather, but there's no question that they love him.

and that he loves them. And so when we say the words, our father, we're not being told, simply say these words, these mechanical words, we're being told there's your God is your father who's in heaven, who loves you, who's given his own son for you. And so when you address him, address him as your father, as your daddy. That's what Abba means, Abba father. If you translate Abba, it means daddy. Address him now with warmth, with love. When we address him, as our Father, we can trust that he will hear and answer our prayers in the best possible way. Though they may not be the way that we want them to be, we can address ourselves to our Father and complete trust that he will take care of us and will provide for us the things that we need, the things that we need best to prepare us and to equip us to stand before him in judgment and to enter into his heaven. And so when you pray, ask God to help you see and to accept his fatherhood. Help him to show it to you in your life. Help him to show it to you in your own father.

and in the fathers outside of your family that God gives to you. Ask him to help you to rely on him, to be vulnerable with him, as with your own dad, and do it because he loves you. That's what it means to address God as your father. Nothing less than what I'm saying, but probably more, that we don't have time to cover today. And so pray to God as your father. Love him. Search out in your own life his mercies and his kindnesses.