Friday, August 11, 2017

Our Father – Part 1 - Dad


Exodus 20:12 “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God is giving you.” 

This week, we continued in our church’s Wednesday evening small group video study series by Pastor Louie Giglio titled “Relat(able)”. Pastor Giglio explained that the relationships with our mothers and our fathers are the formative relationships in our lives. Our parents are responsible for bringing us onto this planet and our ability to relate in the world – the kind of spouse you’re going to be, the kind of son or daughter you are today, the kind of friend you are, and your interpersonal relationships - are wrapped up in our relationships with them.

Ephesians 6:1-3 Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. “Honor your father and mother,” which is the first commandment with promise: “that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.”

Fathers are supposed to be empowering, encouraging, examples, protective and supportive, saying: “You can do it!?” and “You can count on me!”. When they are not, we struggle with who we are and what is our place in the world. There are “absentee dads” (both physically and emotionally). There are abusive dads that damage and hurt, rather than help. We carry the weight of these types of imperfect dads through life. A lot of people, when they think about an earthly “father”, they imagine a broken, absent, abusive, performance-based person that they don’t even really know or have been fighting against all their lives. The enemy (the devil) knows that God is a perfect Father. If he can fracture relationships with our earthly fathers, he will have distracted us from fully understanding who God is, how we relate to Him, what He thinks about us, and how to live in an amazing relationship with Him.

Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

All of us have a natural gravitational pull for the acceptance of our father. Heavenly Father God is not a “reflection” of our earthly father; God is the “perfection” of our earthly father. Our Creator Father God is not a bigger version of our earthly father, but the version of the dad that we all long for deep in our heart. Know that the “good news of the gospel is powerful enough to reconcile us to God, to reconcile us to ourselves as God sees us, and to bring healing and impact into our relationships – no matter how messed up they are).

Hebrews 12:9 “Furthermore, we have had human fathers who corrected us, and we paid them respect. Shall we not much more readily be in subjection to the Father of spirits and live?”


Pastor Giglio give us four “Big Faith” ideas to improve our relationships. Big Faith Idea #1 – When you come to know Jesus Christ, you receive a new identity. That new identity isn’t that you’re a church member or that you believe something, but that you become something : a Christians … not what you think or do, but what and who you are. Born again by faith into a new relationship with God as we become a son or daughter; birth all over again from above, from sin’s death to salvation’s transformation live in Christ. Almighty God becomes our Father, when we are born into a new relationship with Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.  

Let's continue Louie Giglio's message on "Fathers" in our next post.
In Christ, Brian

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