For June 21

 

Sermon: A Father’s Legacy

Intro: Happy Father’s Day!  It’s a special day to honor our Fathers, who raised us and provided for our needs, as well as Dads, who may have stepped in for an absent Father, like a relative, a foster father, or another supportive man in a young person’s life, like a scout leader. So to all of you fathers and dads, we honor you, especially on this your special day.

​

I.  Our Heavenly Father

A. But the ultimate Father, the one who not only loves each and every one of us, who is accessible to everyone, at any time of day or year, is our Heavenly Father, our very Creator. So, this morning, I would like to turn our focus on our Heavenly Father. To do that, we must fully embrace the premise that we were all created by the Eternal God, and given life by Him. Created in His image of what we should be and how we should function that mirrors His Nature and Character. That premise eliminates an evolutionary, impersonal process. Although the Loving Father created us to be an outlet of His deep love, to live in relationship with Him, He gave us free will to use His created life to function as we see fit. We might blame Adam and Eve who used their free will to sin and brought eternal consequences upon us, but each of us uses our free will to choose to sin, separating us from His intent for us to be in relationship with Him. But we can also, by His Grace, use our free will to accept our merciful Father’s Plan of Salvation to overcome that sin, be forgiven, and take on the Nature and Character of the God who created us.

B. Our creation involves more than our physical bodies, though. Our bodies being mortal, are formed from earthly, natural elements, like carbon and oxygen, etc, but once our life ends, the body reverts back to those natural elements. But our Heavenly Father also created us with an immortal soul, the essence of who we are, that inherently craves, strongly desires, to be united with its Creator. The soul that, when this mortal life ends, was intended to return to its Creator, our Eternal Father.

C. Children are born with a natural craving for being nurtured, finding their initial satisfaction of that craving from a physical mother/father. It’s been proven that without human touch, after 48 hours, a baby will die.

Then, as a child grows, its physical needs and desires continue to grow, but the inner soul begins to exert its spiritual longings to seek its Creator. Maturing to an age of reason, a child begins to distinguish between the soul’s moral influences – right and wrong, influences by the Holy Spirit, competing with its physical desires. The classic struggle between the physical and the soul’s craving continues, eventually our free will allowing one to take precedence, so that when this physical life ends, the soul is judged on its acceptability to its Holy Creator. That’s a very simplistic summary of our earthly lives, because there are so many influences that affect that final outcome. The outcome that human fathers were meant to significantly influence on God’s behalf.

D. The opening of our Call to Worship, from Psalm 42, portrays that deep craving of the soul, like a deer being hunted, longing to quench its thirst,

its craving for God. We might even think of this portrayal as the conflict between the soul and the physical. Physical demands trying to overtake craving souls thirsting for its Creator. The two other psalms, Psalms 63 and 84, further express the psalmist’s earnest yearning for God, finding it more satisfying to spend a day in His courts, even as a doorkeeper in the house of our God, than to dwell in the tents of the wicked.

E. Parents were created to reflect the different traits of the character and nature of our Eternal God. Fathers have been generally given strength attributes as the protector, while mothers are generally given the nurturing traits. Their combined traits should influence the child’s craving for its Creator. As in our Hymn of Preparation, “Happy the Home When God is There”.

​

II. Isaiah 42:5-13

A. Although we know children don’t come with an Instruction Book, Scripture serves as a manual of who our Heavenly Father is. Our OT lesson from Isaiah would be a page from that manual. God identifies Himself as ‘the Lord’, meaning eternal and unchanging, reinforcing that God is Creator of heaven and earth and of all He gives breath and life to.

B. As Lord, He calls us to righteousness, the strong moral and ethical fiber of God’s nature and character, saying He’ll take hold of our hand, leading us to His righteousness. I especially like that image of a Father holding our hand. Like the father and his daughter crossing a bridge on windy, rainy day. The father tells his daughter to hold his hand, but the daughter says, “No, Daddy, you hold my hand. If I hold your hand, I might let go, but if you hold my hand, I know you’ll never let go.”  The soul craving its Creator that it knows will never let it go. A picture of what an earthly father is intended to emulate to His children in leading them to know our Heavenly Father.  

C. Isaiah continues that our Father gives us strength and assurance in making us a covenant, a sacred, faithful promise, for all people, opening the eyes of the blind, those unable to see through spiritual ignorance, freeing captives held in their sins, and those in dungeons of spiritual darkness. God announces that “I am the Lord, that is my Name!” Our Perfect Father. who will never let go of His children, and never yields His glory to idols.

D. Isaiah exhorts us to sing to the Lord a new song of His praises from the ends of the earth to all people, including Gentiles. Sing them from the mountaintops, the symbolic divine habitation of God, from where He gave the Ten Commandments, spoke to Moses, and sees the world below. In the final verse of Isaiah’s passage, he says the Lord will march out like a champion, like a warrior stirring up zeal to lead us into battle. The Father we crave will lead us through the hardships of life as our Champion.

E. I remember as a boy hearing my Dad tell me the stories of his life growing up. But it wasn’t until I was home on leave one year that I asked if we could walk through his boyhood neighborhood so he could show me those places. As we walked from his parents’ house, to the house of his grandparents that I never knew, along his newspaper route, seeing where he rode the streetcar for a nickel, arriving at the church he grew up in that I had also grown up in, that I better understood what it was like to live through the hardships of the Great Depression. I loved my Dad, my Champion, but now seeing all he had been telling me, through his eyes,  by walking with him and listening again to his words, gave me a greater understanding of him that even deepened my love for him.

F. Our children can hear words and stories about our Heavenly Father, but when we, as fathers and mothers, relate our personal experiences with God, they begin to see God through our eyes. By our personal experiences about our walking and talking with our God, they may come know our God more personally, and love Him even more. It what parents are meant to do.  

G. In contrast, in Prison Ministry, going to prisons for violent and sexual offenders, I learned that many inmates could understand about Jesus, and even the Holy Spirit, but could not understand the concept of a Loving Father as a result of their personal experiences of a father. They hadn’t experienced  spending time with a caring father, walking and talking with them, gaining an understanding about them. Instead, they only knew about absentee fathers who weren’t there, that should have been. Or, abusive, uncaring fathers who were there, but shouldn’t have been. And that was their concept of a Heavenly Father. Not only did those inmates repeat those examples, evidenced by their now being in prison, but in turn became the absentee, or abusive fathers that had so badly influenced their lives.

​

III. Luke 15: 11-24

A. Our Gospel Lesson provides a more accurate picture of our Heavenly Father. A wealthy father had two sons. The younger son wanted his independence and freedom, and to that end, demanded his share of his inheritance from his father. It was a shameful request since an inheritance would usually have come as a result of a father’s death. So, the son was in effect saying he couldn’t wait until his father was dead. Such behavior brought great shame upon his father in that culture. But the father granted his request, and the son then took all his belongings and went to a distant land, away from his father’s influence, and squandered his wealth. All his materialistic friends soon deserted him, and he was forced to hire himself out tending pigs to survive. In the Jewish faith, pigs were considered unclean, and just being around them was about as low as a Jewish person could sink to in that culture. Worse yet, he had to eat food intended for the pigs to survive. Finally, he came to his senses and remembered that even servants of his father’s estate were living better than he was. But, after his shameful treatment of his father, and furthermore, as a Jew living among pigs, he was totally unworthy to be a son again, but he humbled himself and decided to ask to become one of his father’s servants.

B. It would have been understandable for his father to have turned his back on him, having already given his son his inheritance, and being shamed by his son’s wishing him dead. But this loving father saw his son coming while he was still a long way off, indicating he had never stopped waiting and hoping for his son to return. The son had practiced humble words, but his father came compassionately running to greet him, and didn’t even let his son finish before he was telling his servants to put a ring on his finger, a new robe on him, sandals on his feet, and kill the fatted calf. All those actions were significant. Jewish men did not run – anywhere, but the compassionate, overjoyed father ran to meet him. Putting a ring on his finger restored his son’s legal authority for his father’s affairs. A new garment covered his shameful appearance. Slaves usually went barefoot, so sandals elevated him above the status of a slave. The fatted calf was kept for very special celebrations, which this father considered this to be. His son who had been dead, was alive. Lost, but now found.

C. That’s  just a glimpse of our Heavenly Father, who knows our sins making us unworthy of His love, but never ceasing to wait and hope for our return to him. Withholding nothing from His love when we ask for His forgiveness, our soul’s craving to be restored to  full relationship with Him. Even though this prodigal had treated his father shamefully, turned his back on all he had been taught to value, completely separated himself from family, religion, and his culture, this father, symbolic of our Heavenly Father, never gave up on his child, waiting patiently, hopefully for his return. When his son repented, coming home, humbly trying to confess his sins that made him unworthy, the Father had already unconditionally forgiven Him, restoring him to the full relationship his child had turned his back on. And that’s the Heavenly Father we have, lavishly even giving his prodigal children the greatest gift of love ever - His only begotten, not created, Son to die to pay the cost of our sins, so that our craving souls can be satisfied to be restored to full relationship with Him.

​

Conclusion. if the prodigal son had not repented, had not returned to his father, he would have never found forgiveness, never found the love of his waiting Father. He would have died in desolation, never realizing the depth of his father’s love. Woe to those who never repent of their sins, never know that even though unworthy of His love, we can know His unconditional forgiveness, and the full joy of a personal relationship with Him. That our panting, longing souls can be quenched by His Living Waters. Our craving souls can know being in His Presence, not as a doorkeeper but as a fully restored soul in the House of our God. What a fellowship, what a joy divine, to lean on the everlasting arms of our Father. Especially as we celebrate our Heavenly Father on this Father’s Day. Amen