Father Figures

All right, all right. Welcome. Welcome to Salt Church. Good morning, everybody. How’s everybody doing this morning?

I don’t remember the password. Oh, my gosh. Okay, okay. No, please don’t give that out to everybody. All right.

All right. Well, good morning. Hey. Happy Father’s day to all the fathers out there. We just want to take the time, as Matthew said.

And Miranda, you know, to honor fathers this morning, because our job is so important for our children, for our wives or our families, for this, our country, our nation. We need fathers that are strong in the family. The family is the unit of society, and the devil is trying to attack it. And so today we are going to look at how our heavenly Father and how we can be in relationship with him as men and as father. So last week, we learned about the joy of the Lord and how we can have that joy no matter what the world wants to tell us that, you know, look.

Oh. Like, we’re in this valley right now. The only time we get to experience joy is on the mountaintop. Right? That mountaintop high experience.

And then when we’re in the valley, it’s just. It’s just all kaput, right. That is not the way that we are to operate in the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit is there to give us joy even in the midst of the trials and the tribulations that we’re going through in the valleys. So it wouldn’t be complete.

Father’s Day would not be complete without first having a couple dad jokes. So my first one, I don’t know if this is okay. I heard some yays and some oh, no’s. So the first joke is, what did the rainbow say to his son after the thunderstorm? Nobody.

I am so proud of Hugh. That’s my favorite. Oh, the drums aren’t here today. Okay. All right.

And then also. So on Father’s day. On Father’s day, we like to leave dad to his own devices. The only problem is he can’t remember his passwords. I should have led with that one.

I think so. All right, so how is our heavenly Father? Right. There’s three persons to the Trinity, Father God, God the Son, Jesus Christ, God the Holy spirit. That is very important today.

All right? It’s biblical, the godhead. The Bible talks about the godhead. So for fathers today, we honor you. We thank you for everything that you do.

Thank you for being a model for raising your kids up to know the Lord, and for bringing them up in the administration and the fear of the Lord. But we cannot be the fathers that we need to be, unless we first let our creator God be who he wants, the father he wants to be to us, right? So he is our father and we have to allow him to be our father, right? Our relationship with our families, with our wives, our children, our friends in the community, they will not be right until we let ourselves be a child of God with our father, right? It’ll affect our relationship with everybody else if our relationship with our heavenly Father is not right, if we’re not close to him.

And we actually see from Jesus how to be in relationship with the Father. The great thing about Jesus is that he not only tells us what to do, he shows us, he showed us while he was here on earth, and he shows us now the way to be in relationship with the father. So Jesus emphasizes that God is both his father and our father. And this is seen in John 20, verse 17, where Jesus said to her, this is after he was resurrected. Jesus said to her, do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the father, but go to my brothers and say to them, I am ascending to my father and your father, to my God and your God.

So hallelujah, that not only is our heavenly Father the father of Jesus, he’s our father as well. And so when he says that, we know that the way that Jesus was with our heavenly Father is the way that we can and we should be. So that’s the thing that’s so important today, I want us to see first is that Jesus shows us how to be in relationship with the father. Galatians four six says, and because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father. Now that word Abba denotes a very, very close relationship.

So Jesus was saying that Father, heavenly Father, Father, God is his Abba, right? That’s an aramaic word. Without getting too technical, that means father. But it’s really closer to daddy, right? The way that a little child looks up at their dad and they’re like, daddy.

That lets us know that Jesus trusted completely in the father and that he was so close with him, his relationship was so intimate with him that he knew what his will was, right? Jesus knew he was so close to the father that he knew what the will of the father was, and he did his will. So this is a common term that expresses affection, confidence and trust. And it’s basically the trust that a young child has in their parent and their dad. So today on Father’s day, it’s a joyful time, but for some of us, it can bring up remembrances and memories of relationships that were not the best, that were strained or at worst, abusive.

So some of us may not have had a close relationship with our fathers growing up. Our fathers may have been absent, they may have been abusive, or they may have been there presently with us, physical, but they may have not been there really for us emotionally. They may have not been interested in being around us. But I’m here to tell you today that that is not how our heavenly Father is with us, not at all. So we cannot let our earthly father dictate to us the way that we are in relationship with our father God, because that is so important.

And I know for a long time I struggled with this because I, you know, my dad wasn’t there when I was growing up. He was, you know, he was, he was gone. And he, you know, God revealed to me that he is there. He’s present and wants to spend time with me. He’s interested in us.

He wants to be involved in every aspect of our lives. Every aspect. He is always there, and he’s waiting for us to spend more time with him. So it’s kind of the reverse, the way I think about it, it’s the reverse of an uninterested father. So the way we picture fathers that are uninterested is the dads over here and the child’s like, daddy, daddy, daddy, I want you to spend time with me.

Come play with me. Come, you know, come do this. Let’s go do this. Let’s go do that. But the actual way our relationship is that normally what we do is our heavenly Father is saying, hey, come on, let’s go.

Let’s spend time together. Let’s go over here. Let’s do this. Just be with me. I want you to be with me.

I want you to spend time with me. I’m here. I’m available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no matter what time it is. There’s no open or closed hours. But what do we do?

We say, I’m sorry, I don’t have time right now to spend with you. I’m sorry, I’m too busy. I’m too busy with this. I’m too busy with that. We can be busy bodies and not really be getting anything done.

We can not be accomplishing anything and thinking that we’re doing all these things when really what we need to do is just stop and just sit and be in God’s presence. We think being in God’s presence, spending time with him, always means, of course, reading the word of God is spending time with him, worshiping him, is praying to him, is spending time with him. But just being in his presence, just talking with him as we talk to our earthly dad, that’s what he wants. That’s what he wants from us. He’s waiting for us to spend time with him.

So the first thing we need to do is spend time with him. We just need to set aside time where we’re available. We’re available. There’s so many things going on in our lives today. We’re so busy with everything, all these activities and all of these things that we’re doing, and we are forgetting to take the time out to just stop and spend time with him, just to be still and quiet in his presence.

So the thing that always amazes me about our heavenly Father is that God is so high, he’s separate and far above us, right? He’s so high and lifted up because he’s holy. He’s a holy God. He created everything. And think about this for a minute.

He created everything. He needs nothing, and yet he chooses to want to spend time with us. I mean, a God that is that high up, he condescends to us and is like, I want to spend time with you, please spend time with me. Right? I mean, it’s like God is pleading with us to just stop.

Stop everything that you’re doing and take the time out to be with me. God is personally, emotionally, and he’s even sacrificially involved in our lives. He is present in all ways that we need him to be. So he’s not emotionally unavailable. If you think you can’t share your emotions with Goddesse or, you know, it’s like you’re trying to hide something from him.

He knows everything that you are going through already. So we just need to be honest. We have to be honest with our father. I just highlighted something. Okay, so we need to receive the father’s love.

John 1010 says, I have come, that they might have life and have it to the full. So Jesus didn’t just come to show us how to be good humans, he did that. He showed us how to live a holy life, righteous life. He was the perfect example of the father’s love. But he still had a relationship with the father, right?

I mean, Jesus was in heaven before he was born, right? He was pre existent before he was even born on the earth, right? And he came to earth and showed us how to have a relationship. So Jesus came so that we could have life but have it to the full, right. Not just halfway, but have it to the full.

Romans 623 says, for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Jesus Christ, Lord. So really, the first way that God has demonstrated his love for us is by sending his son Jesus to die for us in our place. This is a free gift that we have to receive from God. It’s not something that we have to work for. It’s not like, oh, God, I’ve got to put in these hours.

I’ve got to do this. I need to do that in order to receive your salvation. God has already provided the way and the gift, and all we need to do is turn to him in faith and receive the gift that he’s given us. There are no strings attached to this gift. So even if it’s, you know, when somebody in the world’s like, hey, here’s this gift, it’s free.

You can take this and you’re like, is this really free? I don’t know, am I going to get phone calls afterwards or what’s going to happen after I take this gift? So there are no strings attached to. To this gift. It’s freely and holy for us and our salvation, for us to be close and have access to the father.

So another way that God shows us that he’s our father or another way that he is with us as his children is the father cares and provides for us. Right? As fathers, our children, we always want to care for them. We always want to provide for them. We always want to give them the things that they need.

And to be honest, a lot of times we probably give them things that they don’t need or more than they need. And it’s like, I’ll just give you all this. But our heavenly Father knows what we need, right? And in Matthew 625 through 34, in this passage, we read Jesus words that God provides for the birds of the air and how we are of much more value than they are to him. So if God provides for the birds of the air, you know, the Bible says they don’t reap, you know, they don’t store away in barns.

They’re holy. If you think about it, birds and animals like that, they’re wholly dependent upon God, right? They don’t have anywhere. They’re not like, hey, I’m going to go to the store and get some birdseed. You know, they have to go get things from nature that God provides.

So why do we worry? Why do we worry about things that we know God is going to provide for us? All right, I know why we worry? Because we’re human. That’s why.

Matthew 634 says, therefore, do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. So that means today we have trouble today. But God will always care and provide for what is going on in our lives today. Our God is the perfect father.

And I mean that in the highest sense I could ever say. You know, we’ve said, you know, oh, they’re perfect. They don’t have anything going on in their lives. God is the perfect father. He loves us with an unending love.

He cares for us and provides for our every need. And this makes me think of that going back to us as fathers, men as fathers, our kids ask for things, and a lot of times we’re just like, yeah, that’s good. Let’s get that, please. Let’s get through the checkout line. That’s all I need.

Just take that and put it in the car. But God tells us no, right? God tells us no. We pray for things and God will tell us no. And why does he do that?

Because he knows that we don’t need that. He knows that that’s not good for us. And he has our best interest in mind. His love is perfect. His care is perfect.

I don’t know if you realize this, but God cares about you. Think about that for a minute. He loves you. And we know from the Bible, he loves us from everything that we read because Jesus came to die for us in our place and pay for our sins on the cross. But after that, God cares about you to the point that he is intimately.

He wants to be intimately involved in everything that’s going on in your life. Everything. There’s nothing that he, you know, sometimes we’re like, hmm, dad, I don’t know if I should share that, like, our earthly dad. You know, I’m just not going to share that with you because I don’t really think you’re interested in that, or, I don’t want to reveal that to you. But he already knows.

He already knows all these things. And I think that God just wants us to come to him and acknowledge what’s going on in our lives and come to him so that he can heal us. Our father, God, is also the father of hope. We can put our hope, or, I’m sorry, we can put our hopeless situations into his hands and cast all our cares upon him because he cares for us. So we don’t have some cold, distant father who’s sitting up somewhere and he’s like, yeah, you know, hey, I sent my son to die for you, and now you’re just kind of on your own.

That’s not the way he is. He cares for us and he wants us to talk to him first. Peter, chapter five, verse seven, says, casting all your cares or anxieties on him because he cares for you. So who in here, by a show of hands, has any cares or anxieties? I mean, okay, who doesn’t have any cures or anxieties?

I should say maybe those people should. I see you in the back? I see you in the back. Oh, sorry. You were stretching.

Okay. Okay. All right. That’s fair. That’s fair.

I was gonna say I need to talk to you after service, if that’s the case. But listen, this verse says. Listen to what it says. Casting all your cares upon him because he cares for you. Right, I know.

The King James version says, he careth for you, which I also love. And some verses I memorize in the King James version, it’s just never going to get out of my head. So it says that we should cast our cares upon him. That means he is interested in everything you have going on in your life. There is nothing he’s not interested in.

Nothing. It doesn’t matter how small the detail. You’re like, man, I don’t know. Should I go and bother God with this? Like, that is not from our Father, God, he is so caring.

And this verse says to cast all. It literally says to cast all our cares upon him. I don’t know if that means. Yeah, I’m not sure if that means cast or just, like, hear, God, I can’t take this anymore. You know, give it to him.

If you’re going through something and you have no idea how you’re gonna get through it, he wants to share the burden. He will not only share the burden, he will take the burden from you. Right? Because he cares for you. That’s why we can have hope.

Romans 1513 says, may the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. So this right here says that our God, our heavenly Father, is the God of hope. And it says, as we trust in him. Taken together with one Peter five seven, where we just said, casting all our cares on him as we trust in him, he will fill us with all joy and peace. And it says, not just so that you can have a little bit, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit, listen.

Today we need to take all of these things to him and cast our cares upon him. And God will fill us with his hope, his joy, his peace. I didn’t say the joy of the world that we talked about last week. I didn’t say the peace of the world because there is a peace of the world. He doesn’t say, you know, the hope of the world.

He says his hope, his joy, his peace. Right? And we need to remember to be present and have the Holy Spirit with us as we go through our day. And he will overflow, fill us like this cup. To overflowing to where?

Well, this cup isn’t overflowing, but you can imagine if it was, water would be getting everywhere. But God wants to fill us up when we spend time with him in our spirit, so that no matter what we’re going through, he will fill us to overflowing with joy. So God is. He is the God of all hope because he turns all of our impossibilities into possibilities. He turns our curses into blessings.

He turns our limitations into potential. He takes all those crashed expectations and he turns them into a new reality. So if you’re here today, here, or you’re watching online, and your life has crashed into a wall, not literally, but your life has crashed into a wall, and you have no idea how you’re going to move forward after this. I’m here to tell you this morning that God, our heavenly Father, will turn that into a new reality. See, we can put all kinds of expectations upon ourselves that God does not place upon us.

The world places expectations on us. We place expectations upon ourselves. Our jobs place expectations on us, our culture. And I’m here to tell you today that if it’s not from God and he doesn’t expect it from us, he will create a new reality in our lives. Right?

So you can throw all those expectations off that people try to place upon us, and they don’t come from our heavenly Father. Just like we sang in worship, God turns our impossibilities into possibilities. And it’s only through him that we can do this. There’s no other way to do it. He turns our curses into blessings.

So when the enemy is telling you you can’t do that, there’s no way you’re gonna be able to do that. Look at this. Look at your life. Your life is a mess. Your life is completely in ruin.

You have no hope now. You have nothing to hope in. I’m here to tell you today that God is our hope and we have hope in him, and we can tell the enemy, the devil, that we are hoping in God. We’re not hoping in ourselves. We have our hope in Jesus Christ and in God the father.

And when we place our hope in him and our trust in him, he will fill us with joy and peace. So let’s stop taking our cues from the world and start taking them from our heavenly Father. So why does God do this? Why does he do all these things for us? Is it because we’re so great?

Is it because we’re worthy? Is it because he, you know, we’re. You know, we weren’t born of blood by God, but it’s because he’s our dad, right? Our children, the children that we have as fathers. Or even if you’re not a dad here yet, hopefully you will be someday.

Because it’s an amazing, amazing thing. Drink water. He loves us. He loves us. And I don’t mean, like I said earlier, from in some cold and distant way, like you see in some pictures where God is on the throne, and he is on the throne in heaven, but he’s not far.

He is on the throne, but he’s not far and distant. He’s close to us. He wants to be close to us when we put our hope in him. He will never. We will never.

Sorry. We will never be disappointed because he never fails. All right, so we ask things of God sometimes. We pray for things. And like I said earlier, God will tell us no.

And I have to tell you today that I’m so thankful that some of the things that I prayed for, God told me no, because I didn’t need those things. I didn’t need that relationship. I didn’t need that thing that I wanted. Whatever it was, it was a truck. Like, God, I need a new truck.

Please give me a new truck or a new car. I didn’t need it because it would have just. And I actually had to give it back. So I did get it. It just wasn’t.

It wasn’t in God. Like, that wasn’t a God thing. And so I couldn’t afford it, and so I actually just had to take it back. I’m like, here’s this Chevy blazer. Extremely.

Take it back. And then I still had to pay for it. So, yeah, it was a voluntary repo. Yeah. I just gotta be.

I gotta be vulnerable and tell you that I really loved it and I wanted to keep it. But. But listen, God never lets his children down. So I don’t know if anybody has heard that Brandon Lake song, kids, but if you haven’t heard it. You gotta listen to it.

After this, you have to go listen to it. I’m gonna make sure I check up with everybody and that you wanna listen to it. But I’m telling you, the song says, when you say you’ll show up, you show up. When you say you’ll come through, you always do. If you did it back then, you can do it now.

And he actually says before that, you don’t ever let your kids down. So God is not an absent father. We leave him. We leave God because we want to go out on our own and strike out on our own. And last Father’s day, we preached on the prodigal son and how the father was always there.

The son is the one who chose to leave. He gave him all the provisions he needed to go out, even though he was nothing, going out and doing something great. But God still provided for him. Our validation also only comes from our heavenly father. So we seek validation.

You know, my dad, I always wanted my dad to validate me, to be like, hey, good job, son. Good job doing that. And I didn’t always get that. But the failures of our earthly fathers, it can be healed by the faithfulness of our heavenly father, by his love. I guarantee it.

If you had an absent father, if your dad wasn’t there, if he, you know, either physically he wasn’t there, emotionally that he wasn’t there, our heavenly father can, can heal that. He will heal it, but we have to come to him, right, and sit at his feet and just let him be our dad. So I want to, now I want to speak to all the men here, even if you’re not a dad, as men in the church and just as christians, not just in salt church, but everybody. So if you’re a man here today, you’re not getting out of Father’s day without hearing a word from the Lord either. Hopefully, you will be a father someday to your own son or daughter, or you will be an example to somebody.

So according to the US Census Bureau, 17.8 million children. And that staggers me. Nearly one in four. And this is in the United States.

This is not like. Worldwide, 17.8 million children, nearly one in four, live without a biological step or adoptive father in the home. Alright, so my house was one of those. When I was growing up.

My father was not around much. As I stated earlier, my mom and dad divorced when I was eight. My dad struggled with alcoholism throughout his life. But thankfully, and writing this message, you know, I had so many, I had so many godly men in my life that were amazing examples. And they showed me.

They really, truly, they showed me. They didn’t just say it. They walked the walk, and they showed me how to be a godly man. And so Ted Peterson, Mark Wolf, Mike Radcliffe, George Coleman, and so many others, they were father figures to me. Through them, I felt the love of the father, and I knew.

I knew the love of the father, and I came to know him. It was actually through Ted Peterson, who was my youth pastor, that I was saved. I got baptized when I was younger, but I realized that I didn’t truly know God until it was just me, Ted Peterson, my friend Jeff Jones, in the seat, the seat next to me. And I was like, I gotta be honest, like, I don’t know. I thought I knew God, but I don’t.

First corinthians 415 17 says, even if you had 10,000 guardians in Christ, you do not have many fathers, for in Christ Jesus, I became your father through the gospel. This is Paul talking to the church in Corinth. He says, therefore, I urge you to imitate me. For this reason, I have sent to you Timothy, my son, whom I love, who is faithful in the Lord. He will remind you of my way of life in Christ Jesus, which agrees with what I teach everywhere in every church.

So the powerful thing to me about this, this passage is that Paul and Timothy had a great relationship, right? And as men in the church, as christians, it’s our duty to be an example to the young men in our society, in our church, especially. And in society, look, we have an epidemic that’s going on, 17.8 million. And that’s.

Is that children or. That’s. Yeah, that’s children. So that’s. That’s.

That’s young men, that’s boys, that’s girls that are growing up without a father. So little girls and little boys need mentors. They need godly examples in their life that’s going to show the father’s love to them. So we should not regard someone as out of our circle because of their age. So Paul and Timothy.

Paul was older, Timothy was a younger man. And this passage says, timothy, my son, whom I love, so they weren’t related by blood, but Paul calls him his son in the faith. Please. As men in the church, we need to be father figures to people in our congregation today more than ever. During this time frame, I think the family structure was pretty sound, but today it’s not, and it’s under attack.

And so even if people don’t have a father, there that’s biological or adoptive father. We can be that for them. So there is no age gap in friendship or in love. Christian brotherly and sisterly love. We need that.

We should not misjudge someone as being too outdated or too immature. So, you know, Timothy could have looked at Paul and be like, man, you’re just an old fuddy, fuddy duddy. I’m not going to listen to you, Paul. No, he listened to him. I’m sure he took correction from him because it says in here, who is faithful in the Lord?

That’s how Paul describes Timothy. He says, he will remind you of my way of life. So Timothy was probably going to tell some older folks, hey, I don’t know if you guys are doing the right thing or living the right way, right? And he tells him, you know, he will remind you of my way of life in Christ Jesus, which agrees with what I teach everywhere in every church. So he was, in a sense, saying, look, Timothy’s going to come remind you of everything I have told you already.

So, Titus, two and two says, older men are to be sober minded, dignified, self controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness. This is the way that we are supposed to operate as men in the church, to be an example. And I’m telling you, without these other men in my life, I would have been. I may not have been saved, because Ted Peterson, my youth pastor, and I hope you’re watching. Ted, thank you for everything you did.

If it wasn’t for them choosing to be involved in my life and making sure to be an example and disciple me and witness to me, I may not be saved today. So either young men today are going to learn how to be a man from the world, from the influence of our culture, or they can learn how to be a godly man from us, right? Because if they’re going to learn it from the world, if they don’t have a dad there, they’re going to learn it from somewhere. And we want it to be from one of us, from a christian brother or sister. No matter what our biological, adopted, or family situation is on earth today, we as christians have a spiritual family, and it’s everybody that’s sitting in here.

We are not just friends. We are family, right? All of us are. So my question today is in closing, is, have you been adopted into God’s family? So John 112 says, but to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God who were born right, because we had a physical birth not of blood, nor of the will of Mandev, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.

So this morning, this says, but to all who did receive him, who believed in his name. Whose name? Jesus Christ’s name. So it’s like this picture in my mind that I get where if you’re not saved today here or online, if you’re watching with us, there’s an adoption agency that’s just over here to my right, and there’s a door that leads into that adoption agency. And if you haven’t been adopted into God’s family, you can’t receive his love yet, because it’s only through Jesus Christ, his son, that we receive his love.

So when you look at this adoption agency, you’ll see it. It doesn’t look that impressive. But I’m telling you, there may not be. There are no windows. There are no windows on this adoption agency.

There’s no side door. There’s no back door. There’s no way in through the roof. There’s only one entrance into this building, and that is through Jesus Christ, who is called the door in the word of. And I’m telling you, the door is frosted.

You can’t see anything on the other side. And you’re like, why would I walk through this door? What’s going on? But I’m telling you, if you open that door and you pull it open on the other side, God the father is waiting. He’s waiting.

And he’s not just, like, sitting down, he’s like, when are they going to come through the door? When are they going to come through the door? Do you get it? He’s waiting. He’s not just sitting down.

He is waiting for you to go through the door, and you need to open it. You need to walk through it, and you need to go and run to the heavenly Father, because if you don’t, you will never know and experience a father’s love. So it’s in closing. I just wanted to pray this morning with all heads bowed and all eyes closed. Lord, we just thank you so much for this day.

Thank you, Lord, that you are our heavenly Father that loves us so much, Lord, that you sent your only son to die in our place, and that you not only sent him to die in our place, but now you’ve opened the door to us when we walk through it, Lord, and you receive us as your sons and your daughters, Lord Jesus. So I pray that if there’s anyone here that does not know you or anyone that’s watching online, Lord, that they would open the door and they would come to you, Lord Jesus, and that they would receive the father’s love and know and experience. Not just know, but they would experience your love in their heart and in their minds. Lord God, we thank you, Lord, for all of these things. We pray these things in Jesus name.

Amen. I.