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By Pastor Glenn Pease
CONTENTS
1. THE LORD'S PRAYER PART I
Based on Matt. 6:7-15
2. OUR FATHER Based on Matt. 6:9-15
3. DESIRE DETERMINES DESTINY Based on Matt. 6:7‑15
4. THE ETERNAL DESIRE Based on Matt. 6:7‑15
5. THE KING AND THE KINGDOM Based on Matt. 6:7‑15
6. THE TRINITY OF DESIRES Based on Matt. 6:7‑15
7. THE DEBT DISSOLVING DESIRE Based on Matt. 6:7‑15
8. THE DESIRE FOR DELIVERANCE Based on Matt. 6:7‑15
1. THE
LORD'S PRAYER PART I Based on Matt. 6:7-15
Paul Aurandt in his book, Destiny, tells of the powerful
impact a single father can have on a whole society. Norman's father was a salesman in Connecticut. He did not like people who were different
from himself, and that was almost everybody.
In other words, he was a bigot.
He constantly insulted people, and cut them down for their race or
color. Women were degraded, and his own
wife was not allowed to speak her mind.
Home life was one of constant tension with fighting and shouting. Norman's father ended up involved in some
shady deal on the sale of stocks.
Norman was 12 years old when his father got out of
prison. But this did not change him at
all. He was still as narrow, dogmatic,
and critical as ever. Norman still loved
his father, for inspite of all his weaknesses, he had a good and loving side to
him. So when Norman grew up he made his
father's image one of the most popular images America has ever known. Norman became a famous TV producer, and one
of the biggest hits of all time was Norman Lear's Archie Bunker in All In The
Family. Archie Bunker was not
portraying a figment of someone's imagination.
He was portraying the life of a real father.His views and values were
those of Norman's own father.
When we come to the life and teachings of Jesus we need to
recognize also that they represent the views and values of a real father. Jesus was the express image of the Father. He said, "He that hath seen me hath
seen the Father." If we want to
know what God is like, we look at Jesus, for He is the full and final
revelation of God the Father. Henry
Drummond said, "We can unlock a man's whole life if we watch what words he
uses most." The word Jesus used
most for God was Father. He calls God
Father 17 times just in the Sermon on the Mount, and 12 of them are here in
chapter 6. He uses this name for God in
this chapter more than anywhere else in the synoptic Gospels. This is the God is Father chapter. I call your attention to this so you do not
think we relate to God as Father only because the Lord's Prayer begins with our
Father. Jesus makes clear that
everything we do is to be done in the Father-child relationship. All we do is done either in obedience or
disobedience to our heavenly Father, and so the Christian life could properly
be called,all in the family.
A Sunday school teacher, after a service on the omnipotence of
God, asked her class if there was anything God could not do? There was silence, and then one little guy
put up his hand. She felt disappointed,
thinking he must have missed the point of the lessons. She asked, "What do you think God can't
do?" He said, "Well, He can't
please everybody."That, of course, is literally true, for not even our
heavenly Father can please everybody,
even those in His own
family.
The story of the Prodigal Son illustrates this. The Father was an ideal father, and there is
not one thing you can detect in him that makes him a poor father. Yet he had two sons,
and both of them were not
pleased by his values. The younger son
did not want to stay around and live under his ideal love. He wanted to take off and live an
independent life.
The father did not please
him enough to hold him at home. The
elder brother, on the other hand, was not pleased with his father when he
accepted the rebel back. Here were two
boys who had as good a father as anyone could ever have, yet they were not
pleased.
The point is not, that it is impossible to be a good father,
but that it is impossible for a good father to always please his children. Not even the only perfect father, who is
God,
can do this. The result is God's children all through
history are like the two sons in the parable of the Prodigal. One side goes to the extreme of stressing
God's justice and discipline, and this causes many to want to leave the
family. The other side stresses the
love and compassion of the father, and this makes the other side feel like
walking out of the family, because this seems to them to make God a wishy-washy
indulgent parent. The family of God is often torn by the conflicting pictures
of the nature of God's fatherhood. Is
He a Divine Domineering Disciplinarian,
or is He a Passive Permissive
Parent?
History would indicate that people tend to lean one way or the
other depending on what kind of an earthly father they had, and whether they accepted or rejected their
father's values. Whole cultures have
followed one or the other concept of God.
Eastern, or the Greek church, tended to develop the idea of God as the
Father-Creator, and the Father-Redeemer.
His main purpose in history was to restore His fallen family to Himself
through our Redeemer-Brother, the Lord Jesus.
The Western, or Latin church, followed Tertullian, the
brilliant theologian who was also a lawyer, who established a more legalistic
approach. God was the judge, and the
penalty must be paid, and so if you have no alternative you are condemned. God, however, provides a substitute to take
your condemnation. It is the Lord Jesus
who sets you free.Both of these have a Biblical foundation, but our Western
emphasis can be easily distorted, and lead to all kinds of fears of God as a
condemning judge. The problem with
trying to lock God into one form of fatherhood, or another, is that the
universe cannot contain God, let alone some form, category, or description that
men formulate for their own convenience.
God's fatherhood is as varied as it needs to be to meet the needs of all
His children.
God is Father to both the legalistic and the freedom
loving. Both the Prodigal and his elder
brother were equally sons of the same father.
The father is not responsible for the weaknesses of either son. He did not want his youngest to go off and
live for sensual pleasure. He knew that
road would end with hogs and humiliation.
But neither did he want his eldest to be such a legalistic snob, who
would rather see his brother perish than be welcomed back and forgiven. The father was not the problem, but he was the center of that
family, and the only hope of the families survival. The father is the only hope of the two sons ever being
reconciled.
So it is in the family of God. The fatherhood of God is the foundation for all Christian
unity. Christians will differ on many
things, even on the meaning of fatherhood, but the reality of that fatherhood
is the basis for their oneness. And
that is why the first word of the Lord's Prayer is OUR. Not any father in heaven, but our
Father. Not the father I have created
in my own image, for my own satisfaction, but the father of all the great
family of God, with its multiplicity of personalities, and varied backgrounds
and cultures. Here is all the world of
human complexity tied up in divine simplicity:
OUR FATHER. It is the same
concept we have when we say our nation.
The United States is one nation, yet 50 states.It is E Pluribus Unum-or,
the many in one. Such is the family of
God.
The Lord's Prayer, therefore, is a family prayer. You will search in vain to find an I, me,
my, or mine in this prayer. It is
always the plural you will see: Our
Father, give us
our daily bread, forgive us,
and lead us not into temptation. Jesus
said we are to get alone to pray, but not to pray for ourselves alone. You are to shut out the sight and sound of
others,but never the sensitivity to the needs of others. The poet captures this truth so beautifully-
You cannot pray the Lord's
Prayer,
And even once say "I."
You cannot pray the Lord's Prayer,
And even once say "My."
You cannot pray the Lord's
Prayer,
And not include another;
You cannot ask for daily
bread,
And not include your brother.
For others are included
In each and every plea,
From the very beginning
It never once says, "Me."
We are not getting into the issue of the universal fatherhood
of God, for that would take us down a different road, and we have plenty to see
on the road we are traveling, so let me just state what all can agree on: The "our" here certainly includes
all who have received Jesus as their Savior, for John makes it clear that as
many as have received Him have been given the right to be called sons of God. This means that private prayer still has a
social function. Jesus expects that we
will come before our heavenly Father with an awareness that we part of a
family. This awareness will make a
world of difference in both our prayer life, and our life in general. It should make us more selfless, and aware
of the needs of others in the family.
We have a natural tendency to be self-centered.
A mother asked her boy what he learned from the story of the
Good Samaritan? He said, "I
learned that if I am ever in trouble somebody should help me." This is the tendency of all God's children,
to see life only from the perspective of their own need.
This is what makes it so
hard for God to please everybody in the family. But if we come before God as, our Father, we will come with a
broader perspective that goes beyond self needs. None of us would consider it proper for a father of four to grant
all the requests of one at the expense of the other three. Such a father would be spoiling the one, and
being mean and unfair to the others.
The gist of what Jesus is saying by the form of this prayer
is, all of us should come before God with assurance that He will grant us all
the basic needs of life. But when we
branch out into other areas, we need to recognize that our requests may not be
consistent with fairness to the whole family.
If I desire it to be a beautiful day, and pray for sunshine, I need to
do so with the spirit of, not my will but thine be done, for I know the wider
family needs may demand rain. I can't
expect God to be an indulgent Father to me, and grant my every whim, regardless
of the consequences for the whole family.
There are a lot of issues in history where Christians are on
both sides, and legitimately so, for their needs, background, and values, take
them down different roads. It is
legitimate also that they both seek God's guidance and providence to achieve
their goals.But they should always have the perspective that God does not
choose sides in the family,but seeks for reconciliation. We must come with the spirit of plurality,
and say, our Father.
He is the Father even of
those sons who differ with me.
Therefore, not my will be done,or their will be done, but Thy will be
done. What is best for the whole family
should be what we desire.
The "our" of the Lord's Prayer is the key to harmony
and peace in the family of God.It can do wonders for unity in the home as
well. The assumption is that the father
will do what is best for the family whether or not he does what is best for
you. That will make you sad or glad
depending on seriously you take the "our." Abraham Lincoln told the story of the farmer who married a woman
he thought was as meek as a dove. She
was until one day he said to her, "I'm going to enlarge me
dairy." She said, "That is
our dairy dear." He was shocked at
her claim, and stubbornly said, "My dairy, dear." She went wild and began to clobber him with
the skillet, and in self-defense he fled to the bedroom and crawled under the
bed. After a while she appeared at the
door and said, "Now what are you doing?" He responded from under the bed, "I'm just looking for our
pants dear."
What husband has not had to have a little help to get passed
the, "My car, my money, my whatever," thinking. Some never make the transition, but the fact
is, only when, "our" comes through is unity and oneness becoming a
reality. That is the goal in marriage,
and in the family of God, and that is
why prayer needs to begin with the word "our." Jesus did not teach any prayer for an only
child, for God has many children, and this is a major importance in our
approaching Him in prayer. No request
can be consistent with His will if it is detrimental to others in the family. The Prodigal got his fair share, but the
father did not give him any of his brother's inheritance. A wise father must constantly balance his
giving so as to be fair and just to all of his children.
The very nature of prayer, because of this "our"
means many prayers will not be answered.
This is another subject we will not pursue now, but we need to recognize
what is true for human parents. Have you granted your children every request
they have made? Have you even attempted to fill the endless requisitions of
their never ending need, and unquenchable greed? If so, you already know why God does not answer all prayers. Much prayer is as unanswerable as your
children's request of you. When our
grandson was little he had days when all he wanted was cherrios. If you gave heed to his every plea for them
he would never eat anything else. Many
prayers get off to a false start, for they begin with a request, not to our
Father, but to my Father. That is, it
is a purely selfish request with no regard to the rest of the family. We cannot expect God to grant our every wish
regardless of how it affects others.
We need to see that the reason the our is so vital to
successful prayer is because every defect and neurosis there is in the human
family, because of poor fatherhood images, is also a part of the family of
God. There are Christians everywhere
who have the right concept of God in their heads, but do not have it real in
their hearts. Their views of fatherhood
are distorted by many factors. Robert
Frost gives an example in his book,
Our Heavenly Father. A gifted Bible teacher told of her tragic
childhood because her parents took the discipline by fear approach. All parents use it sometime, but it was
their specialty.
Beside constant threats, they once packer her suitcase and
dragged her down the stairs saying they were going to give her away. She became hysterical, and begged for one
more chance. She was constantly told
that God would punish her if she was bad, and each time she fell and skinned
her knee this was used to inform her that God was punishing her. It is not hard to understand why her image
of God was that of a sadistic fiend whose greatest joy was the suffering he
could inflict. She grew up and studied
the Bible for herself, and came to grasp a totally different view of her
heavenly Father, but the emotional scars were still in her heart.
Ten of thousands of God's children have had such scars from
false teachings, and the experiences of their youth. One of the most common problems Christians have in their inner
life stem from bad father images. Their
healing demands that they go beyond the,
my father level, to the our
father level, and see in God all they never had in their earthly father. The beginning of the Lord's Prayer could
bring healing to many who can be brought to see that the our Father represents
the ideal father, and not the fallen father they have come to fear.
Absolutely tender,
Absolutely true!
Understanding
all things!
Understanding
you!
Infinitely loving,
Exquisitely near,
This is God our Father,
What have we to fear?
This is a message of good
news that millions need to know and believe to be happy members of the family
of God. We are to live by every word
that proceeds out of the mouth of God, and this one word OUR can be a feast
that will develop our spiritual muscles, and make us mature sons and
daughters.
The point Jesus is making by this opening word is not that
prayer is never personal and self oriented.
Jesus prayed prayers that were totally self-centered. He said things like my God, my God why has
Thou forsaken me. Life is full of
occasions when we cry out to God for personal needs that have little to do with
others in the family. These are valid
concerns, and are not signs of selfishness at all.
Selfishness comes in,
however, and dominates our lives when we loose an awareness of the family, and
cease to approach God as our Father in most of life's issues. Prayer then becomes a method whereby we seek
to manipulate God so He is always on our side in the world of competition.
1. God help my team to win.
2. God help my stock to rise.
3. God help my interest to come out on top.
We do not consciously think
these selfish things, but that is the inner motive that drives us.
We have lost sight of the
our, and family nature of prayer.
The more we become conscious of the our, the more we will
recognize both teams have Christians playing, and both want victory. The only honest prayer, therefore, is, help
us to do our best, and thy will be done.
If God, in His providence, wills to shift the balance in favor of your
opponent, as part of the family, you know it was for the good of the whole
family. If the victory goes to you, you
also know it is no basis for pride, as if God loves you more than His other
children. It simply means, God either
stayed neutral, and your team has superior skills, or God providentially tipped
the scales in your favor for values that go beyond your personal need, for the
good of the family. In prayer, as in
all other activities, are ultimate goal is not self-satisfaction, but the
pleasing of God. That is why the first
three petitions of this prayer focus on God before there is any mention of
personal need.
Christians do not realize how they hurt one another by their
false use of prayer. It actually
becomes cruel to use prayer as a self-centered means of excluding the rest of
the family. People will say, "I
prayed, and God brought my son home
from the war." This said, by one
Christian to another who also prayed, but whose son did not come back, can be
cruel. Others might say, "I prayed
and my cancer was healed." This can be a low blow to the family where
cancer is not healed, even though they prayed with equal fervency and deep
faith. It is not that we should not
praise God and give public testimony to His blessings in answer to prayer, but
that we should recognize that it was the Father's good pleasure to so respond
to us, and not our superior faith or worth compared to others in the
family. In other words, whether prayer
be answered or denied, the true family spirit is the same: Thy will be done. It was for the good of all the family that Jesus did not escape
the cup He so much dreaded. He drank it
to the last drop, not because there was anything in Him worthy of such
suffering, but because it was necessary for the whole family.
History is full of examples where Christians have suffered and
died, not for anything in them that demanded it, but for the sake of the whole
body. Some Christians suffer much, and
other suffer little. It is not because
God plays favorites in the family. God
is no respecter of persons, but is a fair Father. If there is one son whom He did favor, it was His only Begotten
Son, and He suffered more than any in the family. There are many mysteries, and much we do not grasp about the plan
and will of God, but the point of this pattern prayer for the whole family of
God is to recognize we are all in it together.
The goal is not to come out on top, but that our Father will be gloried,
and that His kingdom will come and His will be done on earth as it is in
heaven. That is the primary purpose of
this prayer, and the focus that unifies us and makes the family one.
Their are millions of born-again Christians in both of the major
parties of our nation. They are Christians who disagree on many political
issues, and theological issues as well. They will tend to pray for that which
supports their party. This is perfectly
natural, but they need to recognize the valid concerns of others in the family,
and not pretend that theirs is the only perspective that God should be
supporting. In other words, how much
you read into this one little word that begins the worlds most universal prayer
will change your theology, your politics, and your attitudes and actions on
every issue of life. If God is my God,
and my God only, then I will use God for my ends, and my Christianity will be
primarily competitive. If God is our
God, then my goal will be primarily cooperative, for the good of the whole
family.
I do not think any of us can fully escape the individualistic
and competitive spirit of our culture, and we shouldn't, for there are many
values in it. But we should always examine
it in the light of the Lord's prayer.
This will enable us to keep it in balance so we do not let the
competitive spirit rob us of the cooperative spirit. This is vital to the family spirit of those who desire to be
truly Christlike. This means the successful
prayer is one we have already looked at as being, secret prayer, and simple
prayer. Now we see it is also to be
selfless prayer.
The goal of prayer is not to get what you want, but to get
what God wants for the whole family. If
that means you must give up your personal desire, then so be it, if that is
what is best for the family. The
Pharisees got what they wanted, and Jesus said that was their reward. Their own self goals of self glory and
public acclaim is what they got, but they missed the only reward that really
matters: The reward of being
cooperative with God in getting His will done on earth, and pleasing Him. This may cost some personal dreams, but if
it is best for the family, and the purpose of God, the reward will more than
outweigh what is given up. Competition does get something, but cooperation gets
everything that really matters.
Immaturity in the family of God is evidence by a selfish and
competitive spirit. We see it in
Corinth where they were saying, "I am of Apolos," "I am of
Paul," "I am of Cephas."
The Christians of Corinth
had so many family problems because the spirit of competition so dominated them
that the spirit of cooperation could not get a foot in the door. That is why Paul had to stress the matter of
love. Agape love rises above
selfishness and competition, and makes cooperation the dominate motive. No Christian is a mature and successful
Christian until the spirit of cooperation dominates. Such a Christian takes very seriously the implications of the,
our Father.
2. OUR
FATHER Based on Matt. 6:9-15
A man who worked in a Ford plant for many years just quit for
no apparent reason. When he was asked
why he did it he said, “All I did everyday was to screw nut number 999 to bolt
number 999 for years and years, and if I keep on doing this much longer, I
shall be nut number 999 myself.”
Automation brings many blessings in the material realm, but it can also
be a curse when it turns men into robots.
The debate is, do men control the machine, or does the machine control
men?
Dr. Glenn Frank declares, “The indictment brought against our
civilization is this: Man is losing
control over the machine. He machine is
destroying body, worth, and beauty.” It
is already a proverb in Africa-“An old man is one who remembers when people
were more important than machines.” The
machine is making man more and more materialistic and mechanistic in his
attitudes and values. People are
becoming secondary, and life is becoming more impersonal. A machine wakes us up in the morning, makes
our breakfast, takes us to work where we park in a machine operated parking
lot, take another machine to the proper level, and spend the rest of the day
operating a machine or a computer.
After this they go through
the same process to get back home where they spend the evening being
entertained by a machine. The machine
reigns as king.
At the University of Seattle there is a painting where the great
wheels of industry, and skyscrapers, and factory chimneys are converging on the
crust and prostrate body of a man. The
title is The Eclipse Of Man. Many do
not need a painting to convey this, for they experience it daily. A middle age woman said, “I live alone and
all day long I work at an IBM machine until I feel as if I could scream. I can’t talk to a machine, and at night I
can’t talk to my TV set.” Her life was
dominated by the impersonal machine.
For many there is more tragedy than humor in the story of the scientist
who fed the question into the giant computer they had just completed-is there a
God? The answer that came out was,
“There is now.”
In a world where machines dominate the Christian has a great
obligation to believe, experience, and communicate the true nature of God as a
Person, and as Father. No one can be an
adequate Christian whose highest values are not personal rather than
mechanical. We do not reject the
mechanical, for God is Himself the creator of the most marvelous machine of
all, which is the whole universe. The
Christian is one, however, who recognizes person-hood to be the supreme
value. The highest title or name of God
is not king, master, or creator, but Father.
Wordsworth said, “Father! To God
Himself we cannot give a holier name.”
F. Faber wrote,
Father! The sweetest dearest name,
That men or angels
know!
Fountain of life, that had
no fount
From which itself could
flow.
John Watson wrote, “With Jesus God and Father were identical. Fatherhood was not a side of Deity, it was
the center. God might be King and Judge; He was first of all
and last of all, and through all, Father.”
The very first word we have recorded of Jesus was when He was 12 and His
parents found Him in the temple. He
said He must be about His Father’s business.
The last words of Jesus before He died were, “Father, into thy hands I
commend my spirit.” From beginning to
end of His earthly life, and eternally, God is, was, and ever shall be to
Jesus-the Father. But this is not just
because He is uniquely the Son of God.
This is so, and Jesus revealed God as Father because God is this to all
men potentially, and to all in Christ actually. To as many as received Him John said, to them He gave the power
to become the sons of God.
This is why Jesus emphasized the Fatherhood of God all
through His life. This concept of God
has greater power than any other to give assurance and security in a materialistic,
impersonal world. Jesus says that when
we pray we should say our Father who art in heaven. Fatherhood is the basis for prayer, and the basis for all true
understanding of God and His will. To
address God as our Father in heaven implies two things about God which art
extremely important to know and feel to have an abundant Christian life. The first thing it indicates is-
GOD IS INTIMATE.
The philosopher would rather talk of a transcendent God, and
the Totally Other. They feel this is a
more mature way of thinking about God.
But this ignores both the words and practice of Jesus who said we must
become as little children to enter the kingdom of God, and who addressed God as
Father 170 times. God is the great God
of creation, and a God of transcendent glory.
He is King of Kings and sovereign, but when it comes to His personal
interest and care for us, He is Father.
Paul says in Gal. 4:6 in the Berkeley Version, “And because
you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, calling
out, Abba! Father!” When a Christian is in right relationship
with God and yielded to His Spirit, He will call God Abba. Abba is the Aramaic word that children use
to refer to their father. It is
equivalent to our English word daddy.
This is the kind of intimacy we are to have with God when we fully
realize the significance of His Fatherhood and our sonship.
This seems childish to the proud, but the humble Christian
sees it as the fullest maturity, for we do not begin to know God as we ought until
we trust Him as a little child does His father. When a child goes through the dark unafraid because he holds his
father’s hand, that is not childish.
That is childlike, and to be childlike is what is required for Christian
maturity. The child is not impersonal
and mechanical. His life is intimately
involved in, and related to persons.
Our lives will be more personal also if we learn to say our father, and
learn to live with the full assurance of God’s intimate concern for us as
individuals.
Earthly fathers are
often rightly charged with child neglect, and they often fail to be intimate
with their children. They are too busy
providing the material and impersonal things of life to have time for the
personal concerns. But God forbid that
we think that He too is caught up in this devotion to materialism. There is only one answer to the cry of the
lonely heart which says, in the words of Ralph Cushman,
Can God see me?
When mighty universes glare
And flaming suns demand His
care?
Among such giant, can it be-
So small a thing am I-canst
thou see me?
Can God find me?
Among the teeming throng,
The myriad millions, dare I
long
For Him, or dream that He
could give
My outstretched hand the
grasp for which I live?
Can God hear me?
When angels raise their
songs on high,
And kings in adoration lift
their cry,
Down in my humble alley of
life
Is there a God who hears
amidst the strive?
The answer is yes! In
Christ it is yes, yes, yes. God can and
does see, and He hears me. That is why
I pray, “Our Father.” God is intimate,
and He cares for individuals. In the
Old Testament God was more of a collective God. He was the father of Israel as a whole, but with the coming of
Christ God became the God and Father of individuals. Jesus could say to Mary, “I ascend to my God and your God, to my
Father and to your Father.” Every
believer can claim Jesus as brother and God as Father. Augustine said, “He loves us every one as
though there were but one of us to love.”
We can never be all that we ought to be until we are fully convinced and
assured that God is this intimate, and is our Father in heaven. This leads to the second point we want to
consider.
GOD IS ADEQUATE.
Our Father in heaven distinguishes God from our earthly father. He does not have all the limitations of an
earthly father. He is the eternal and
perfect Father. All fatherhood has its
origin in Him, but all fatherhood but His has been corrupted, and it has
fallen, and is a poor reflection of His fatherhood.
Unfortunately this has been a hindrance to man’s grasping the
significance, beauty, and adequacy of God’s fatherhood. Fatherhood is the first and supreme
relationship in the universe, for it is eternal in the very nature of God. In Matt. 12:50 Jesus said, “Whosoever shall
do the will of my father which is in heaven, the same is my brother, and
sister, and mother.” Note that he did
not say the adult man who did so would be his father. He had only one father and that was God. We can be brothers, sisters and mothers to
Christ, for all of these relationships are temporal, but the father
relationship is eternal, and there can be no other but God. He gained mothers, brothers, and sisters,
but He had His Father eternally.
Our Father in heaven is alone able to fulfill the duties of
fatherhood adequately. Earthly
fatherhood, however, is derived from God’s fatherhood, and it was meant to be a
reflection of His fatherhood. Man,
however, has a tendency to depreciate fatherhood and exalt some other
relationship such as brotherhood or motherhood. There are books and poems galore exalting mother to the pinnacle
of perfection, and though they are not undeserving of much praise, it is way
beyond the proportion due than when you consider how little is written
concerning fathers.
The pagans exalted their mother goddesses and worship them
with great devotion. The Catholic
church followed this tendency to exalt the female over the male as an object of
worship, and Mary rose to a place superior to that of Christ in practice, if
not in word. Fatherhood just does not
have the value the Bible gives to it, and the result is we lose an adequate
concept of God. Even those who exalt
fatherhood end up putting it in a secondary position. For example, Judge Micheal Musmanno said in a decision which
ruled that a 6 year old daughter was to be returned to her father for permanent
custody: “Poetry, sculpture, music and
oratory have permeated the world with sublime fragrance and the divine chant of
mother’s love, unequaled as it is in beauty and devotion. But a father’s love, though not so
celebrated in song and oratory, in verse and in statuary, is of an intensity
and amplitude that in the trinity of the ultimate in adoration and worship, the
only two that surpass it are the love of God and the love of mother.”
What is missing here is the recognition that the love of God
which is put first is none other than a father’s love. Father love is the most adequate of all
love, for it is the love of our Father in heaven. He alone is adequate as a Father. Nevertheless, as fathers on earth we have a great obligation to
God and our children to be images of, and channels of the love of our heavenly
Father. In fact, all of God’s children
are responsible for exalting the concept of fatherhood in general, for if we
neglect it, or degrade it, we degrade the primary concept by which people can
know God.
A father who is not a good father and a loving father will
make it more difficult for his children to know God as Father. Whereas the good father will aid a child in
coming to a full realization of the blessing in being able to address God as
Father. In other words, fatherhood can
be a means of evangelism, and it can lead our children to God. Every father needs to be fully assured of
his own commitment to Christ. Jesus
said that no man comes to the Father but by Him, and so every child needs to be
committed to Christ, for then, in spite of the failures of earthly fathers,
they can pray with assurance, “Our Father who art in heaven.”
3.
DESIRE DETERMINES DESTINY Based on
Matt. 6:7‑15
People succeed for a
thousand different reasons, but the one thing they all have in common is
desire. Igor Sikorsky, the great
Russian airplane designer, tells in his autobiography of how his father took him to Paris as a boy,
and they visited an airport where he saw his first plane. His imagination was stimulated, and he
developed a burning desire to build a machine that would fly. He begged his father to let him leave school
and work on it. At 17 he began, and
after two years he had spent nearly all of his fathers money, and his plane
never got off the ground. His sister
still had faith in him, so she gave him all she could afford. After two more years he got his plane off
the ground, but plunged it into a local lake, and barely escaped with his
life. The family still believed in him,
so they mortgaged their property to enable him to build another plane. He did it, and then went on from this
success to build the first successful multi‑motored plane. Finally, he designed an built the famous
China Clipper, which he flew around the world.
His success began with his burning desire, and it was his
desire that pushed him on through all this failures to achieve his goal. If failure stops a man from pressing on, you
can count on it, he has lost his desire.
As long as desire is burning, there is always fuel to keep it going, for
desire determines destiny. This is true
in every realm of life. Take marriage
for example. If two people really
desire to find a solution to their problems, they will work out a way. If they loose desire, however, they have
little hope of success. Desire is the
fire that pushes us higher.
On the locker room wall of the University of Notre Dame's football team is the well known saying, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." Football games are not won in the first half when both teams are fresh. Victory comes in the second half when their bodies ache, and they only want the grueling punishment to end. That is when the team with the deepest desire digs to the depths of their being for that reserve energy to keep going. If there is no deep desire to win, it is all over. If it is there, however, there is no telling what kind of spectacular plays will be made. Deep b