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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