A message to fathers

(Songs that fit this message: 1. Turn your eyes upon Jesus)

A message to the man of the house

Reading

Heb 12:1-15

12:1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.

2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

3 Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.

4 In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.

5 And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: "My son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you,

6 because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son." {6 Prov. 3:11,12}

7 Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father?

8 If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons.

9 Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live!

10 Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.

11 No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

12 Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees.

13 "Make level paths for your feet," {13 Prov. 4:26} so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.

14 Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord.

Most men become fathers.

Fatherhood is not an easy part of a marriage. To be a father demands responsibility, physical, and moral strength. And, of course, to be a father is to be a husband which also requires leadership skills and love.

God has given us fathers, guidelines wherein we will find all that is necessary to live up to a standard that pleases the One who created us. God is the Author of the most wonderful Book in the entire world. The Bible is a handbook; a manual for every task that we, the greatest of His creation, can have.

In our Scripture for today, “Fathers’ Day” we will see what and how our heavenly Father deals with His children which could serve as an example for human fatherhood.

The examples of essential faith (in ch 11)

Those whose exemplary faith is displayed.


ch 11 ends with the promise that these whom God recognised as Heroes of faith will be made perfect only together with the NT heroes of faith.


Heb 12:1 Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.


Let us get rid of everything and anything that can cause us to sin. Including that particular sin that we find difficult to resist. Let us be done with it now and forevermore.

If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. If your eyes cause you to sin pluck them out.

Whatever victory we accomplish will be done by the Holy Spirit through faith in Christ.

Then let us continue the race that God has marked out for you and me. Persevere, don’t ever give up.


2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.


Jesus is the Pioneer or Leader of our faith ie He set the pace for us; He demonstrated the meaning of faith for us to follow in His footsteps. He was focused on the final outcome of his faith. Let us concentrate on Jesus with regard to our faith and our faithfulness


3 Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.


So that. . . . If we could get just one glimpse of the joy that awaits us; if we could get just one moment in heaven, we would put everything else out of the way; we would aim at the one and only goal waiting for the faithful ones.


Are you experiencing opposition and discouragement from “sinful people” ? Do they succeed in causing you to give up and to lose heart? Then you haven’t got that glimpse of heaven. Fix your eyes upon Jesus.


4 In your struggle against sin, you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood.


What is meant here is - how would you react if your faith was challenged with being under threat of giving up your life because you are a Christian?

PERSONAL EXPERIENCES

God is our Father; the Father of fathers.


5 And you have forgotten that word of encouragement that addresses you as sons: "My son, do not make light of the Lord's discipline, and do not lose heart when he rebukes you,

Discipline (Disciple)

A Disciple is a disciplined child of God. Self-control is the aim of discipline.


The nature of Christian discipline

6 because the Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son." {6 Prov. 3:11,12}


Discipline comes from a father teaching his son / daughter self-control.

The application of discipline sometimes seem to be harsh and like punishment.

In military training, discipline is a major subject. An undisciplined soldier can become a life-threat to his companions.

Likewise an undisciplined Christian can cause disruption and destruction in the Body(Church). So also, is an undisciplined child an embarrassment to his family.


The apostle, Paul wrote to the Corinthians, No test (temptation) has taken you but such as is common to man. But God is faithful; He will not let you but will, with each temptation make a way of escape ….. so that you may be able to bear it.

b. The Necessity for Chastening.

7 Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons. For what son is not disciplined by his father? 

8 If you are not disciplined (and everyone undergoes discipline), then you are illegitimate children and not true sons.


9 Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live!

10 Our fathers disciplined us for a little while as they thought best; but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness.

Respectful for past corrections

When we become mature as adults, we look back to the severity and harshness of what our fathers did to discipline us but we look back with gladness and rejoice in the fact that without his disciplining us, we would not be the kind of people we are. What would we be if dad did not discipline us?

Sometimes, the burden of applying discipline is left to the widowed mother. However it is done, discipline is essential and is best done by the father.


An undisciplined man has a hard time being disciplined by God when his earthly father never applied discipline.


Sadly, many criminals are in jail because they were not disciplined by their fathers when they were young.

11 No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it.

Rom 6:16 Don't you know that when you offer yourselves to someone to obey him as slaves, you are slaves to the one whom you obey-- whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you wholeheartedly obeyed the form of teaching to which you were entrusted.18 You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness. 19 I put this in human terms because you are weak in your natural selves. Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness.

Stop making excuses

12 Therefore, strengthen your feeble arms and weak knees.

13 "Make level paths for your feet," {13 Prov. 4:26} so that the lame may not be disabled, but rather healed.


Fathers…

Let us be role model for those who are weaker than us. Become active in your spiritual life. Bring to life, the domestic role of family altars and family prayers as regular occasions.

So that the weaker ones may be enabled. . .

The church is God’s chosen vessel wherein the manifold witnesses of God’s wisdom is displayed. Watch out for habits, coming from repetitious absence, or lack of interest becoming your comfort zone. Become the role model for your friends and family.

14 Make every effort to live in peace with all men and to be holy; without holiness no one will see the Lord

Do whatever it takes to be holy.

The importance of caring for the souls of others

15 See to it that no one misses the grace of God and that no bitter root grows up to cause trouble and defile many.

We have celebrated Mothers on Mother’s Day.

She is the one who cares for the children in a soft, loving way. Remember that the children will one day be mothers and fathers. The boys will become men. And men become husbands and husbands become fathers – like you ?

Father, you are God’s instrument in producing a godly offspring. God has given us, as men, the strength and whatever else is needed to raise a family for God. 

We must do whatever it takes to get ourselves prepared for THAT DAY, so that we can also bring our personal offspring to the same destiny we are aiming at.

By Pastor Ron Roux

THE PRESENCE OF GOD Trinity Sunday

Today is Trinity Sunday. For some that means a Sunday that's a bit of a puzzle, with a subject that cannot be easily explained. For all of us this should mean a reality of great mystery, but one that is to be very practically experienced and understood in our daily living. We have our being in the God who is Creator. We have been redeemed by the Son who is our Saviour. We are renewed and empowered by the Spirit within us. That is what eternal life means. It is life given by the Father, lIved in the Son by the Spirit who makes him real in our hearts by faith.

As one teacher simply taught: The Father is God above us; the Son is God beside us; the Spirit is God within us. A good theologian like Nazarene Tom Noble warns: "We have so often (or, too often, my addition) taken the trinitarian heart of the Christian faith forgranted in order to get on with what is thought to be more practical and relevant."^[1] This sermon today is to say that there is nothing more practical and relevant than the core Christian doctrine of the Trinity.

Why? Because Godliness in human life flows out of the central Christian belief in the atonement of Jesus, the incarnation of the Son of God, and the Trinity, which makes living union with God in Christ by his Spirit possible and real. Our shorthand summary above states this: God is the Father above us, our Creator and Life-giver; Jesus is the Son of God beside us, our redeemer and Saviour; the Spirit is God within us, renewer and sanctifier. That is how we live: by experiencing the reality of all three aspects, by sharing in the hilarity and hospitality of fellowship with God in Christ by his Spirit.

     

Down through time different people have tried to explain the Trinity by using mental pictures like metaphors: the Trinity is like Parent, sibling, child; or, the Trinity is like H20, that is water, steam and ice; or, the Trinity is like a threefold cord or even a triangle with three equal sides making up one whole.  The real question is: Who exactly is God? How does God make himself known? What happens when God shows up? What does this look like, what does this feel like? These are some of the questions our scriptures and our topic present to us this morning. Who is this God? And, who will go for him?

     

Artists and musicians have tried to answer this question down through the centuries. Scientists and architects have tried to draw diagrams to portray or explain him. Johannes van Eyck, in the Altar piece of the Cathedral of St. Bavo, in the town of Ghent, Belgium, done in 1426-7, used a triptych to do this.^[2] On the right hand panel there are performing angels gathered round an organ. But the organ has 21 pipes (not the normal 15 of those times) making up three octaves. Then he has the organist playing three notes, C and G with the left hand, and F with the right hand, to form two sets of thirds in harmony. All of this is to try to portray, with the middle panel of God the Father crowned as King with a three-tiered crown, God as Trinity, a God who brings and creates harmony, that is agreement, peace, and unity.

     

200 years later Kircher, in 1650, created a diagram to explain God through an artifact called "Harmony of the Birth of the World."   In this he shows the order of creation. Six circles above show six days of creation. At the bottom "Trinity" is portrayed by an organ console where the black keys are all in threes (not twos or threes as normal) and three levers or stops are shown at the side. And he concludes: "Thus God's eternal wisdom plays in the sphere of the worlds." I find the following scientific analogy helpful: just like the periodic table of the elements provides a way of understanding the nature of matter, that is the material world, (like Uranium = 238, atomic number, 92, etc.) so does the Trinity offer a way of understanding the whole cosmos in its connected whole. It is comprehended and understood from a non-material point of view as related to the Trinity. It is a connected community in which the basic unit is triune, like a father, mother, and child. But also like two friends meeting a stranger where they learn to understand each other better by crossing a boundary into another world and they begin to transcend themselves in order to truly understand who they are in relationships with an Other. Most of all the Trinity is reflecy

     

Let's make a practical start by opening the Scriptures and finding three strikingly different word pictures of how people saw how God showed up in the past. We have these scriptures before us today: The first one is Psalm 29, about God in a storm.  The psalmist describes vividly the Voice of God breaking great trees like cedars, God shaking the wilderness, making Lebanon skip like a young calf. When he speaks his voice flashes forth flames of fire, he causes oak trees to whirl and strips the forest bare. When we read this like a meteorologist today, we might smile and say: we can explain all that without God. But to the Psalmist God was like a mighty storm: untamed and untamable. He is like an untamable storm, like an unconsumed fire, and like an unshakeable, unfailing friend. When he shows up beware, be aware, be still, and know that he is God.  For us to understand God in nature we need to see this through the lens of Jesus in the New Testament. How did Jesus view a storm on the Sea of Galilee? He slept through it, and when the terrified disciples woke him, he rebuked them and the storm, and said "Peace! Be still!

     

The next picture is Isaiah chapter six. This offers us another window into the Presence of God: "In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord, high and lifted up, and the door posts of the temple shivered and shook, and the whole earth was filled with his glory," so the prophet describes his awesome Presence. Serapis cover their faces and yell, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts!" And Isaiah the prophet groans, "I am done for!" This time it is not a storm in nature but a political upheaval caused by the death of a good King, maybe not unlike the passing of Nelson Mandela last year. What is the nation to do? Who will stand up and lead? Who will go and do God's work in a new day? Must we look to the political leader to do this? Isaiah was shaken to his roots by this vision of God and cried out desperately, "I am done for. i am undone. I am imploding. My rock of strength has been removed. I live in the midst of a people who are  unacceptable in God's sight. What am I to do?"

     

So we have these three windows through which to look and see God present: the first  one is God in the storm (in nature); the second one is Isaiah, in the temple (where most of us expect to find God); and the third is face to face across the table where Jesus the Teacher teaches the great teacher of Israel, Nicodemus, how to find God in his heart. That is the supreme dwelling place for God: in the heart of his people. Let's listen one more time to Tom Noble right at the start: Jesus in the heart religion in isolation doesn't work. "The doctrine of the Christian life, including sanctification, cannot be articulated in isolation as a separate doctrine. If it is, the danger is that it will become an individualistic, introverted, subjectivist, and spiritually self-centered quest. The sanctifying of the Christian can only be understood in the context of the sanctifying of human relationships within the church, the people of God. And the sanctifying of human relationships among those who are drawn into the church can only be understood in turn by seeing that the fellowship enjoyed within the church is the mutual fellowship of the Father with the Son, which is the fellowship of the Holy Spirit."^[3]

     

Whether we smile or frown or laugh at these efforts, can we see that down through the ages people have struggled to discover that the God who is Creator of Heaven and Earth is also intimately and practically present to his creatures everywhere. He is triune, and it takes three faces, as it were, to describe him: that of Parent, child, and inner advocate and friend. And this God sends his Son to say, "I have not come to condemn the world, I have not come to declare you a sinner, I have come to tell you that you are adopted into the family of God. You are precious and you belong to me. I would rather die than live without you."

     

Nicodemus is puzzled by this kind of message. The Gospel writer in John says, "No one has seen God at any time; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known." And how does Jesus make God known? Jesus makes the bold and blunt truth clear: "Nicodemus, unless you are utterly transformed from above, unless you are born again, that is, not by a fleshly re-entry into your mother's womb, but you must. Be born of water and the Spirit. Then you will be ushered into the kingdom of God. Here I am, Nicodemus, standing right before you to say to you that we have come to make our abode in you. The God who created you, the Son who has come to redeem you, and the Spirit who is like the wind that breathes in the trees, will breathe into you the breath of life, that you may live and know eternal life. We will come and make our abode in your heart, Nicodemus!"i

     

On this Trinity Sunday may we not be as puzzled as Nicodemus, and as preoccupied with little diagrams and pictures or ways to describe the Trinity. May we come to grasp that God is not "the Big Man upstairs" nor the "Big Buddy and Friend" who chums up to me, nor some wild and exotic emotion that zaps me, but God is an awesome and gracious host who entertains me by welcoming me into the hospitality of the kingdom, what some have called the hilarity of the kingdom, where God regales the whole household with his generosity and laughter. This begins in a new reality right within the domain of my own heart, here and now.

"How can these things be?" is the way we typically respond. We want to believe but this all sounds stupendous and out of reach. One way is to become ready to say, "Here I am Lord! What is it you want me to do?" This is to rethink how we think about God. Ask yourself these questions? Is God a King or a Lover? Is God a Friend or a Judge? Is God a warrior or a shepherd? Is God a Loving Spouse or an accusing Critic? Or, in some strange way, all of these and more?

     

Our answers will tell us a lot about ourselves. And a lot of the time we are really doing nothing more than excusing ourselves and rationalizing our behavior. One glimpse of God radically changes everything.

Isaiah had pinned his hopes for the kingdom of God on an earthly King and good ruler, King Uzziah. When he died, the young prophet was devastated. He lost faith. His hopes were crushed. Was that why he could see the Lord as if for the first time, in the temple which was supposed to be the dwelling place of Almighty God.

     

"I saw the Lord, high and lifted up," he says. The foundations of the temple shook. The sanctuary was filled with smoke. That is how the young man described the scene. He saw his whole life shaking and being consumed. He saw himself and he was devastated. "I am lost. I am undone. I am disintegrating," he cried. "I have been taken apart piece by piece." I am imploding.

     

This is not the Gospel declared by many modern preachers: "Come to find yourself. Come to find peace and joy. Come to discover Jesus as a wonderful Buddy for the rest of your life." Nor is it the Gospel of fire and brimstone declared by many other preachers: God will judge you. God will send you to hell if you do not repent. When God in Jesus stands in front of you,and the Spirit of God whispers in your heart, this God our Creator is saying, imperiously, "Surrender! Give us your heart. Open up to the One who created you and who speaks to you by His word made flesh in Jesus. Allow the Spirit to whisper in your inner heart the assurance that you belong in the family of God."

     

Yield to the King who is the supreme Lover of your life. Bow before the Judge who is the great advocate for your freedom. Listen to the Spirit who is the Spirit of adoption whereby you are enabled to cry, "Abba, Father!" God's Spirit will bear witness with your Spirit that you are a child of God."

Conclusion

Now is the time to Listen to the Voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" (Isaiah 6:8)

Then I said, "Here I am! Send me."

And the Lord will say, "Go" but do not expect easy results and quick responses. Go, and speak in my Name, but be prepared for people to hear and not understand, to see and not perceive, to be consumed, but not with love.

But go, and I will be with you.

And who is this God?

My grandmother answered for me when I was about three years old:

     

Absolutely tender, absolutely true

Understanding all things, understanding you,

Infinitely loving, exquisitely near,
This is God our Father, what have we to fear?

Amen

By Prof. David P. Whitelaw

---

^[1] Page 5 of 224, Tom A. Noble, Holy Trinity: Holy People, The Theology of the Doctrine of Christian Perfecting.  (Didsbury Lecture Series) Eugene, OR:2013.

^[2] Done with his elder brother Hubert, and reputed to be one of ten most famous works of art To survive in the modern world. Wikipedia: Johannes van Eyck.

^[3] Noble, ibid. page 20 of 224