f©2002 Larry Huntsperger Peninsula Bible Fellowship

6/16/02

Spirit Fathers

6/16/02 Spirit Fathers

Happy Father’s Day to all you dads!

In honor of the occasion,

I can’t resist the urge to make just a comment or two about fathering.

I actually spent most of one full day this past week

working on a Father’s Day talk

that, in the end I decided to junk

because it wasn’t going together as I’d hoped,

but buried in all of the stuff in that talk

that wasn’t worth our spending our time on

was on concept that I still want to share with you.

I have been thinking a great deal about this whole fathering thing,

especially during the past few years of my life.

Part of it, of course, grows out of being a daddy myself,

but it’s far more than just that.

We have talked frequently in the past.

and in fact quite recently,

about how we Christians are the literal Body of Christ here on this earth.

We are the means through which

our Lord now does much of what He does in our world.

He has placed His Spirit within us,

and He gives us His mind,

His thoughts and perspectives on ourselves and on the world in which we live,

and then He literally lives His life out through us.

Fortunately we are usually not aware

of what He’s doing

or the way it’s affecting others,

because if we knew

we’d be forever fighting raging battles with pride,

which would defeat the whole thing.

But the truth is,

as Paul put it to the Corinthians,

2CO 2:14 ¶ But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place.

It doesn’t mean that our Lord doesn’t sovereignly intervene

in our lives and the lives of others,

accomplishing in us and in them

things that He alone could do,

because obviously He does constantly.

But still, part of this whole arrangement He has established

between us and Himself through Christ

involves His using us

as the means by which He expresses Himself on this earth.

Do you remember where we were three weeks ago?

God established His church... “EPH 3:10 so that the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known through the church to the rulers and the authorities in the heavenly places.”

Now, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know through your own experience.

Every one of us have had points in our lives

where God has deeply touched our lives

through the words or actions of another person.

It was another human being doing the talking,

but we knew it was God Himself

performing the work in our spirits.

I mention all of this

because during the past few years

I have become increasingly aware

of a special work God seeks to accomplish in the lives of those who are open to Him.

Twice in the Psalms

God describes Himself as “a father to the fatherless”.

PSA 68:5 ¶ A father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows, Is God in His holy habitation.

PSA 146:9 The Lord protects the strangers; He supports the fatherless and the widow, But He thwarts the way of the wicked.

Now, of course in part, He is telling us

about a special work He accomplishes

within the lives of those who come to Him.

He is telling us about the way in which

He becomes not just our God,

but also our Heavenly Father,

not just in some passive generic sense,

but in daily living reality.

When Paul described the way in which

the spirit of the Christian

would respond to the Creator God,

he told the Roman Christians,

ROM 8:15 For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, "Abba! Father!"

And he told the Galatians,

GAL 4:6 Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!"

That word “Abba” appears only one other time in Scripture,

in Mark 14:36,

where Christ Himself is talking to God.

But it was not an unknown word to the first century readers of Paul’s letters.

In our culture today

the best translation for the word would be “daddy” or “Papa”.

It was the word used by a child

as he or she would crawl up into his or her daddy’s lap.

It is the word that captures the very heart of the father/child relationship.

And when God describes Himself

as a Father to the fatherless,

part of what He is doing

is describing that unique spirit union

that will take place between Him and His people.

But in recent years

I have become increasingly aware

of another whole aspect to this truth,

something that, once we become aware of it,

will dramatically affect our own appreciation of some of the things our God is seeking to accomplish through us.

And just so I don’t get you lost in all my words this morning,

let me pull together what we’ve seen so far.

First of all we’ve seen

that God has established a relationship

between Himself and His people

in which He accomplishes His work

and His will through us.

We ARE the BODY,

the arms, and hands, and eyes, and ears, and heart of God here on this earth.

And then second,

we have seen one of the things

God has told us He seeks to accomplish in the lives of those who are open to Him -

He becomes a father to the fatherless.

And what I have begun to realize

in a powerful way during the past few years

is that this role of being a father to the fatherless

is one of the roles that Christ has now given to us, His people.

It is one of the ways

He seeks to express Himself through His Church.

Our Lord seeks to accomplish

the heart of the fathering role

in the lives of those around us

through us.

In a very real way

God seeks to father the world

through the Body of Christ.

Or, turned around,

God has given to the Body of Christ

the role of being a father to the world.

Now, before you tune me out altogether,

let me assure you that I’ll define “fathering” in a few minutes

in a way that will help you make more sense of what I’m trying to say here.

But let me first say that what I’m seeing here

is in no way limited to married men with children.

I believe this fathering role

is something that God seeks to accomplish through every Christian,

whether we are male or female,

no matter what our age,

no matter whether we are married or single,

no matter whether we have any biological children of our own or not.

Though I certainly didn’t think of it in these terms at the time,

I believe the first time I began to gain a glimpse of this truth

was thirty years ago

during my second year on the Island of Trinidad.

I was 24 years old at the time,

more teenager than adult in my own approach to life,

living each day in the tropics

in a T shirt, cut-offs, and a pair of tire-soled sandals.

I had a group of about eight or ten young believers I was working with at the time,

and for most of that year

we mostly just hung out together.

I was only a few years older than many of them,

but in the most remarkable way

I became a father to those kids.

I didn’t fully appreciate the power of what God was accomplishing that year

until I returned to the Island about 20 years later

and discovered the kind of relationships that still existed between me and those kids I spent that year with.

You see, the heart of all true fathering

involves our answering for another person

one question that every one of us desperately needs to find the answer to,

one question we cannot answer for ourselves,

one question, the answer for which we automatically turn to a father or father substitute.

And the remarkable thing

is that, if God uses us

to give that answer to another person,

in a unique way we become the father of their spirit.

I know that, when we hear God talking about becoming a father to the fatherless,

we typically think of orphans,

or perhaps in our society,

of children being raised in single parent homes

where the father is not present.

But anyone who has not had this question answered for them

is, in spirit, fatherless.

And the truth is,

we live in a culture in which most people are fatherless in spirit.

I always find it fascinating

to see the way fathers are portrayed in the entertainment industry.

More often than not,

at least in the shows I’ve seen,

whenever a person talks about his or her father

it is either within the context of a physically or emotionally absent or abusive father,

or in the context of a demanding father

for whom the person is frantically trying to perform

in order to win the father’s approval, or affirmation, or validation.

Of course the script writers throw those things into the plots

because they know that huge sections of their audiences will identify

and be pulled into the story emotionally.

But why is it

that this need for a father’s validation

is such a huge thing to us as human beings?

Obviously it is, of course.

But WHY?

What is it we are really asking for

when we reach out to our human fathers for that validation?

And what huge question remains unanswered within us

without that validation?

And when our Lord uses us

to father the spirits of those around us,

what question is it we are seeking to answer in their lives?

I believe we seek that validation

because through it we receive the confirmation we so desperately need

of our own eternal value

as unique creations of God.

We receive confirmation that we matter.

We have talked often in the past

about the kind of problems we created for ourselves

when we chose to use our free will

to rebel against our Creator

and reject His Lordship over us.

At the top of that list of problems

was the loss of our ability to hear

the voice of the only One who could tell us who we are,

and why we have value - God Himself.

Once we could no longer hear His voice,

we automatically turned to the one human figure in our lives

who most naturally assumes the God role in our lives - our human fathers.

And what we want from them,

what our spirits hunger for

is a clear, certain voice telling us

that we do, indeed, have an eternal, unique, and important significance -

that who we are matters,

that our being here matters.

It isn’t just that we seek the validation,

it is that through that validation

we find peace with ourselves.

But here’s the trap that we so often get caught in -

we are all looking to our human fathers

who are in turn looking to their fathers

who are looking to their fathers for the same validation.

Some of you here this morning are dads.

And, as I talk about these things,

just my suggestion that your children have delegated that role to you

creates fear inside you.

You see yourself as utterly unqualified to know how to give that validation to them

because your father did not give it to you.

So how does God go about bringing into our lives the healing that we need?

And how can we both give and receive

the kind of validation that will bring about that healing?

OK, to answer that,

let me begin first of all

by stating the truth we are afraid to admit.

The validation of our human fathers,

even if it is given clearly and repeatedly,

in itself is incapable of bringing us the peace with ourselves that our spirits long for.

Until our spirits have found peace with God

no human voices,

even the voices of our human fathers,

can give us peace with ourselves.

And I’m not just talking here

about whether or not a person has chosen to trust the death of Christ

as payment for their sins.

I’m talking about whether a person

has chosen to rest in the goodness of God,

whether they have fought their way through to the point

where they have come to understand and accept

that God is, indeed, absolutely and profoundly and eternally NICE,

that He is not just trustworthy

but utterly worthy of our trust.

Our Church world is filled with people

who have prayed to receive Christ as their Savior,

who have accepted the death of Christ as payment for their sins,

and yet who simply don’t like God very much.

If they could ever be honest,

which they rarely will,

they would say they are not at all pleased with the way this God of theirs has dealt with them and their lives.

Until that issue is resolved in a person’s life

there can be no true healing within us at the spirit level

that will bring us peace with ourselves

because we cannot hear the voice of God giving us the validation we need.

There is a fascinating phrase

in what I personally consider to be

the most significant prayer recorded for us in the Epistles.

The prayer itself is so significant

because of where it sits in the New Testament writings.

It is found in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians,

a letter in which Paul describes for us

God’s plan and purpose for the Church.

He describes how He created it,

and why He created it,

and what He seeks to accomplish through it.

If you were with us three weeks ago,

you know we spent a good deal of our time talking about a single verse in that letter

in which Paul tells us that God brought the Church into existence

so that the manifold wisdom of God Himself might now be made know through the Church

to the all of creation.

But right at the end of Paul’s description of God’s creation and design for the church

Paul offers a remarkable prayer.

He says,

EPH 3:14 ¶ For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,

EPH 3:16 that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man,

EPH 3:17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love,

EPH 3:18 may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,

EPH 3:19 and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.

Basically he prays

that we would come to understand

the remarkable love of Christ for us

because it is that understanding

that will qualify us for the role God has given us as His Church.

But the phrase I want to point out to us this morning

is that phrase where Paul prays “...that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith...”

For years I couldn’t figure that out

because Paul has made it clear in this letter

that he is writing to Christians.

This is not an evangelistic prayer

in which he is praying that his readers will invite Jesus into their hearts.

These are Christians he’s praying for,

and yet he prays that Christ may dwell in their hearts.

And then I made a remarkable discovery.

That word “dwell” carries with it the concept of settling down and feeling at home.

Paul is praying

that our faith pilgrimage

will bring us to the point where we not only let Christ in,

but where we feel at home in His presence

and He feels at home in ours.

And do you know what brings that about?

That happens when we will thank Him

for the way He has handled our lives.

It happens when we reach the point

where we can thank Him

for the body He gave us,

for the mind He gave us,

for the parents He gave us,

for the chronic weaknesses He has allowed to remain in our lives.

It happens when we reach the point

where we will accept the truth

that God really is GOOD,

and that His heart desire is to be good to us.

Until that battle is resolved in our lives,

no human father

or father substitute

can ever give us peace with ourselves.

But, once that battle is resolved,

once we have accepted the genuine goodness of our God,

at that point God can bring into our lives

human voices that serve as spirit fathers for us,

voices that confirm for us the truth,

that we have great value,

and great dignity,

and great importance as unique creations of God.

And in the process

God uses those voices to bring tremendous healing into our lives.

Do you know who my greatest spirit father is?

It’s Sandee.

Each day she tells me once again

with her words

and with her attitude toward me

the truth about who I am.

And I serve the same role in her life.

And my point with all these words is simply this -

we Christians have been given by God

the role of serving as spirit fathers to the world.

As God brings people into your life,

with your attitudes,

with your actions,

and, when He gives you the opportunity, with your words,

tell them the truth about who they are.

Tell them they are unique and wonderful creations of God

who have eternal value and importance.

Most of them will not be able to receive what you’re saying

because they are still not at peace with God themselves.

But every once in a while

you will tell the truth to someone

whose heart is at peace with God,

and when you do

it will create between the two of you

a depth and richness in human relationship

that cannot be achieved any other way, as you become their spirit father.