A Father's Blessing

SERMON: 2016-06-19--g2716--a-father-s-blessing SOURCE DURATION: 00:37:26.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The recording begins with the exposition of a book ('The Blessing') and concludes with a structured prayer/benediction addressing sin and healing, both integral parts of the sermon. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: none ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: no ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: none Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- It's 26 years ago that John Trent and Gary Smalley first published their best-selling book The Blessing. Some of you undoubtedly have read it. It's proven to be remarkably popular in the enduring, in the passing or intervening years. It was reissued back in 2011 as an updated and a revised edition. And I believe that one of the reasons that it has been so consistently popular, especially among Christians, is that it gives voice to that age-long cry first echoed by Esau so many years ago when his brother Jacob stole the blessing of the firstborn and he cried out, "Bless me too, my father." There are different versions of it. This version says, "Bless me, even me also, oh, my father." As Neal Campbell pointed out, I think so very capably last week, the difference between a life that is successful and a life that often ends tragically can be attributed to the presence or the absence of a parental blessing in a person's life, particularly the blessings of a father. And what we want to try to do this morning in the time that we have on this Father's Day is try to summarize the five components of blessing that Smalley and Trent talk about in their particular book. Last week, if you were here, Neal Campbell pointed out the seven areas or the stages of life when blessings were especially needed. He talked about conception. He talked about birth. He talked about infancy, puberty, marriage, adulthood, and when we reach the senior years, each phase of life being a particular phase where blessing is particularly critical. If you were not here last week, I would encourage you to listen to that message. It's online at our church website. You can listen to the whole service or you can listen to just the message. This morning then, what I want to do is talk about what those blessings consist of. And Smalley and Trent have identified five particular components of blessing that are very important for us to understand and to communicate to our children. The first is meaningful touch, meaningful touch. I will never forget a number of years ago, a young couple stopped by absolutely and totally freaked out. The reason for that is that they had been driving along the road together. He was driving. It was his car. She was in the passenger seat. When all of a sudden she reached over, grabbed the steering wheel, and tried to steer the car into the oncoming traffic, only by wrestling the steering wheel away from her was he able to prevent a head-on collision. As you can imagine, he was freaked out, but so was she because she didn't know where in the world this came from. It kind of hinders your dating life when those kind of things happen, as you might imagine. So they came to see me. And as we began talking about their lives a little bit, it became very evident that when she had been a very young girl, she had been the apple of her father's eye. He played with her. He was physically affectionate. She would sit on his knees. They would roughhouse as fathers and children are wont to do. And all of this carried on until she reached puberty. And when she reached puberty, suddenly he dropped her like a hot potato. She had no idea what was going on or what happened, and what it did was just totally confuse her. Now I've never met her father, but I can wager a pretty good guess as to why it was that suddenly he dropped the relationship with her that he had had previously. I think he couldn't handle her budding sexuality. He was afraid of himself, I suspect. He didn't know how else to handle it but to cut her off completely. But what it did for her is it made her wonder, "What's the matter with me? I'm becoming a woman. Is there something wrong with becoming a woman?" His absent affection shamed her sexuality and her blooming identity. And so as a result, she turned elsewhere for comfort, and one of those places that she turned was the world of darkness, and it literally and truly was a demonic presence in her life. That had made her almost kill the both of them. Throughout Scripture, a meaningful touch is a very significant component of blessing our children. And notice the operative word there is meaningful. And meaningful means it's for the good of the person, it is for the other person's benefit, and it's appropriate to the occasion. We all know of people whose physical affection is not to bless the other person but to take from them. We all know stories of the slimy uncle whose kisses are sexual or whose hugs are unclean. And that, of course, does more damage than good. But we live in a world where we have become so afraid of abuse and people crossing lines that now more and more we have generations of children who do not experience affection for fear of somebody being accused inappropriately. And so rare is the school teacher today who can afford to show physical affection to a child even though often those children will need it. But I can tell you that unless we as fathers and mothers fill that need in the lives of children they will find somebody else and that somebody else will be a young man or a young woman for whom the sexualization of physical touch becomes a way of filling that hole that has been left in a person's life. Physical touch is the first component of blessing. Second component of blessing is spoken words. Spoken words. We're all familiar, of course, with the saying, "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me." And we all know that's a lie. Because most of us will remember for good or for ill words that have been spoken over us that have lodged deeply in our minds and that continue to play like an old tape whenever they get triggered. Some of you perhaps will remember a story that I've told you many years ago, a colleague of mine, a hardworking pastor, one who rose up into leadership positions in the denomination, who discovered at one point that he was being driven by words spoken by his mother when he was a young boy. What had happened to him is that he could no longer sustain the pace at which he was trying to live his adult life and he had a nervous breakdown. The nervous breakdown led him to a counselor's office. In the counselor's office, as they began to talk and pray about what had happened to him, what came back was effectively a curse that his mother had pronounced on him in a moment of frustration many, many years ago. He was a young boy who wasn't terribly motivated and she would repeatedly tell him that he was lazy to the core, somewhere along the line that penetrated into the very depths of his heart. And he spent most of his adult life trying to prove that what his mother had said was not true. And so he worked himself into a nervous breakdown all because of the tapes that were running in his head. The book of Proverbs puts it this way, "Death and life are in the power of the tongue and those who love it will eat its fruits." Those who love it will eat its fruits. What that means is that what you spit out is going to have consequences not only for the people that you spit it out upon, but it's also going to come back and impact your own life. As Neal Campbell pointed out last week, "If the Father had to say to Jesus, 'This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased, how much more do our children need to hear from you and me that they matter and that they are important?'" That is the second component of blessing our children. But there's a third component and that's very closely related to what I just said. The words that we speak must express high value and I would add they must be based on truth. We live in a world where the art of praising children has reached unprecedented proportions. You've noticed that, have you not? If in previous generations, children were to be seen but not heard, in this present generation, children dominate the scene. And I never quite know whether it is parents' own insecurity or a reflection of the fact that they were not praised in their own lives. We now live in a time when the pendulum has swung so far the opposite way that praising our kids, even under the most unlikely of circumstances, takes the cake. And so Johnny comes home with a little cartoon drawn in school and he's the next great Picasso. And Susie, she, you know, sings an off-key song and she's going to be the next American Idol's winner. In fact, if you've ever watched that show or other talent shows, you will know that every so often, just to make a point, they will feature not the best but the worst. You've seen that, have you not? And you say to yourself, "Why hasn't somebody told them you cannot sing?" And why do you want to embarrass yourself in front of the whole television audience? It is beyond my comprehension. That said, we need to be able to speak the truth to our children in love. And what that means is that we must not only speak words of value, but we must speak words of value that are true to what our kids are and to where they find themselves. We must be realistic in our encouragement and in our praise. And this is where as Christians we have, I think, a tremendous advantage over people who aren't Christians. Because as Christians, we can testify to the fact of God's unsearchable riches in Jesus Christ. Regardless of the abilities or the lack of abilities that our children have in the natural, in Christ there are the resources and the gifts that God makes available. And you and I as parents, we need to have an eye for what God has been doing in the lives of our children and then we need to be able to speak into that with words of encouragement and hope. You are, as we just sang a few moments ago, a child of God. You are no longer a slave to fear. You may have been born with the worst genes in the world and you may have been born with nervous wiring that is all backwards and life may be exceedingly difficult for you. But God in Christ is there and he can not only empower you to move forward, but when you fail, he can also help you to receive forgiveness and make a new beginning. In my book, Olive Shoots Around Your Table, and a lot of you have read it, some of you perhaps have not. I tell the story of a young lad who was left in charge of his father's greenhouse. Father had to go away for something or another and the father had told the son, "Listen, it's going to be a hot day. I want you to make sure that you open all the windows because if you don't, the temperature is going to rise and the plants are going to be destroyed." So he promised he would do that. But you know how it goes sometimes with young lads, they got preoccupied with a whole bunch of other things and later on in the day, his father comes back and the first thing he says to his son is, "You did open the windows in the greenhouse, did you not?" And the kid goes, "Oh my goodness, I did not." Water drained from his face and then from his father's face, but it became clear that this had not been done. In agonizing haste, the father drove over to the greenhouse with his son all the way over there. The boy just kept apologizing, "I'm sorry, Dad. I'm sorry, Dad. I'm sorry." His father didn't say anything, but his face spoke volumes. Sure enough, when they came to the greenhouse, their worst fears were realized. They walked into that place and the temperature inside had risen to a phenomenal 146 degrees Fahrenheit. Every last one of the more than 46,000 plants ready for market were fried to a crisp. The economic consequences for the family would be devastating. Not only was the crop lost, but it was too late in the season to plant a new one. Now, I don't know about you, but put yourself in that father's shoes. What would you do and what would you say? Probably not suitable for church conversation, I suspect. But here's the thing that so impressed me about that story. The father, faced with a colossal financial loss due to his son's negligence, turned to his son after surveying the damage and said, "Son, you've made a mistake. I know you are sorry, and I forgive you. I'll never mention it again." And true to his word, that's what he did. He never, ever mentioned it again. Now, that is ascribing high value to your kid, even when they have just seriously messed up. And I think only a person who knows God's forgiveness in their own heart can even come close to communicating that kind of value to their children when they have messed up so badly. So number one, we need to, let me review. We need to, I should know this because I wrote this down myself. Thank you, Stephen. Meaningful touch. Secondly, spoken words, words that express high value. And then number four, we need to picture a special future. Now when our son, Michael, was young, he would come up with these incredibly grandiose ideas of projects that he wanted to build. If my memory serves me correctly, it went from a snowmobile to a hovercraft to a helicopter. We're not talking about toys, just to be clear here. We're talking about the real thing. And he would have been somewhere eight or nine or whatever that age was. And I remember being so frustrated as a father because you want to encourage your kid. You want to help your kid, but you also want to know that that is totally unrealistic. Neither he nor I could ever pull that off. And we'd have these conversations and I'd say, "Michael, we can't do it." And then I'd go back feeling guilty because what kind of a father are you when you're always criticizing his brilliant ideas? Anybody ever been there? Well, that's the way we had to leave it. But what it taught me was this. These were an indication of a mindset that was very bent towards the mechanical. And as the years have gone by and that gift has grown and matured in Michael's life, this day there isn't a piece of equipment that he is not afraid to take apart. And most importantly, able to put back together, because that's quite another trick, and make it work again. And if you think I'm bragging about my kids, I am. Because I'm proud of all four of my kids and our grandchildren because they're precious and they're valuable, not only before God, but in the eyes of their mother and me as their father. And here again is where, as Christian parents, we have an incredible advantage. Because we know from Ephesians 2 that we are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God has prepared in advance for us to do. And what that means is that our children, by virtue of their birth, by virtue of their place in Christ Jesus—that's why it is so important for them to commit their lives to Christ—there is a plan and purpose that God has for them from before the foundation of the world. And God prepares them for that partly by the gifting that he gives them naturally, the experiences they have in life, and the supernatural gifting of the Holy Spirit which, if they yield to him, will flourish in their hearts and in our lives. And you and I have the privilege and the opportunity of picturing for them a special purpose rooted in the purposes of Christ, because what's God's destiny for all of his children? It's to reign over the new creation. It's to be faithful stewards, as we have been seeing recently, of all the gifts that God has entrusted to us. So what an opportunity for us to say to our kids in Christ, as you yield to him, the sky is indeed the limit within the context of his will for your life. Now notice how different this is from the talk that you find in the world increasingly where people are told, "Well, you can be anything that you want to be," which is absolute nonsense, because you cannot possibly be everything that you want to be. But in Christ, what Christ has destined you for, what he has gifted you in, what he has empowered you with, that you can reach, and that we can hold up before our children in a way that is God-glorifying and empowering. Number five, active commitment to help them along. It isn't good enough to just have a meaningful touch, spoken words, being valued highly, or having a special future pictured. We need somebody to come alongside us to help us. Gary Smalley, in the book, "The Blessing," tells us a story of how throughout elementary school, math was his weak subject, and that became his undoing in high school when he was failing geometry. I got to thinking, do they even teach geometry anymore in school today? Isn't it kind of all rolled up into, what do you call it today? Math is just everything thrown together, is it not? The only thing that I remember of geometry is hypotenuse squared equals side squared and other side squared. Do you recall that? Say it again, A squared plus B squared equals C squared. That is the most useful piece of geometry that you can find because it helps you build straight corners that are properly squared. That's what I remember. Anyway, he was having trouble in geometry in part because the teacher that he had was bound and determined to prove, so it seemed to him, that he wasn't able to do geometry very well. In fact, this teacher, and this blows my mind, arranged the seats, he placed the students in order of their grades. So the good students were at the front and the bad students were all at the back, and every time your grade changed, your seat changed. Now that's maybe really motivating to some. I suspect it was terribly shaming to some other people. Well, in the wisdom of the school administrators, that teacher went and a new one took his place, and this new one had a very different attitude. This new one says, "If anybody in this class fails geometry, then the blame lies equally with me, and I am committed to making sure that at the end of the year, you all pass this course." And so he went out of his way to help, to encourage, he tutored during class, after class, sometimes on weekends, played sports with them. At the end of the year, surprise, surprise, everybody in the class passed geometry when half of them had been failing previously, and Gary Smalley, who had always felt like a failure in math, got his first straight A in math ever. And that so encouraged him that when he went on to college later on, he took a math minor. And what that shows you is what we all intuitively know, we need somebody to believe in us, somebody to evaluate us realistically, and then somebody to pour their resources into us to help us move forward. And that, of course, is very much the job, not only of a mother, but also especially of a father, and one of the sad consequences of the breakdown in the family today is that fathers increasingly are not doing that job, in part because in many places, they're simply not there. I ran into some statistics this past week that I think are just mind boggling, let's see if I can find them here. This is particularly true of the black community in the United States, but it's increasingly true across the board, Hispanics, as well as increasingly white folks, people who are raised without a father or a father figure are five times as likely to end up in poverty, nine times as likely to drop out of school, and 20 times as likely to end up in prison. And to show you the perspective of this, back in 1960, only 5% of children were born to unwed mothers. By 1980, that figure, these are United States figures, but they wouldn't be much different than Canada, by 1980, 18% of children were born to unmarried moms, by 2000, 33%, and by 2015, 41%. Isn't that an astounding figure? In the black community it's even worse, in the United States in the year 2015, 73% of black children were born outside of marriage. And then we wonder why our children join gangs. We wonder why so many boys are only motivated to play video games or join gangs. See, if the blessing isn't there, we look elsewhere for those blessings, and if they don't come from home, where are they going to come from? Now that's not to say, let's be very careful, that single moms can't be very good parents and can have a lot of blessing. Or that broken families are destined for the garbage pile, not at all. In Christian community, we're family to each other. And I love these scriptures, the promises of God to his children. Psalm 27, 10, "Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me." And Psalm 68, verse 6, "God sets the lonely in families, he leads forth the prisoners with singing." God is a God of redemption, and if we will come to him in our places of brokenness and with our need, he is more than able to turn the curse into blessings and to change our lives and that of our children and our children's children, remember the promises of the covenant run to a thousand generations of those who fear God. So here's what we're going to do in a moment, I'm going to ask all the men and all the boys in this place to stand, and we're going to pray for three things. I know we did some of this last week, but it won't hurt to do it again this week. First of all, I want us to thank him for the blessings that we have received through our fathers. Even bad parents, and I know there have been parents who have been very neglectful. Even bad parents will deposit some good in our lives that we can be grateful for. Secondly, we're going to surrender to the Lord, places where we have been deprived of blessing. I've been around in the church world long enough to know that whenever you start talking about these kinds of things, it triggers places of loss and grief. And sometimes what so many of us take for granted, and sometimes what for so many of us has been a normal part of life, only stirs a deep sense of loss as people come to life. And those losses we have to surrender to the Lord and ask him to heal them. And then the third thing we want to pray for is for God to restore those places, to restore the years the locusts have eaten, so that the broken cycle of the generation stops with us and we can in fact impart to our children, and our children's children, those things that we had not received in life, because God has redeemed us through faith in Jesus Christ. So, every man, every boy, if you would please stand with me. Father, we're so grateful, and we've said this before in this service, but we'll say it again. We're so grateful for every good thing that we have received from your hand. We've all been born of mothers, we've all been begotten of fathers, and while there may be things over the years that we have lacked or that we have felt we lacked, we have also received the gift of life, and we have also received a measure of protection and a measure of provision. And so Lord, on this Father's Day, as we celebrate fatherhood, it's our prayer that you will remind us of the good things that we have received. It's so easy in the middle of the pain to concentrate on that and to forget that which was good. So help us to see our fathers as you see them, flawed and broken perhaps, but still, originally created in your image, and help us, Lord, to honor them for giving us life. And then, Father, there are those places where as we come to life and as we reflect on these things, we remember the pain. Sometimes it's the father who was an alcoholic, or a father who was abusive, or a father who was absent, or a father who just didn't see us, didn't care about us, and left us very much on our own. And Lord, part of us, we've just justified that. We have explained it as normal, that's just who he was, and he was busy, and all kinds of other stuff, and all of that may even be true. But Lord, if we're honest, we've been hurt, and that hurt has impacted us. It's made us close off our hearts. It's made us cut off very deep feelings, and it's impacted relationships with our own spouse, and with our own children, and even with people around us, and we've had to be tough in places where maybe really our hearts weren't that tough. And so, Father, we pray that you help us to get in touch with that, and to grieve those spouses, and to ask you to heal and to restore years that the locusts have eaten. And then, Father, we pray that you renew us in those places, because it's hard to give love when we haven't received it, and it's hard to know how to do relationships appropriately when we have not learned or seen it modeled. And so, Lord, we, out of places of brokenness, it's often more about us than about our children or our grandchildren, and Father, we confess that we have all sinned and fallen short of your glory, and we confess that we all need to be led and empowered by your Holy Spirit. And so, Father, we give you our lives afresh. We thank you for the privilege of having children and raising children, and many of us having grandchildren as well. We pray that as a community and as families, we can be there for each other in ways that are redemptive and healing to the end, Father, that our households may indeed be households of faith. We pray this in the name of the Lord Jesus, by the power of God's Holy Spirit, and all God's men agreed and said, amen and amen. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:37:20.170; remove through 00:37:26.000] [ [CUT]BLANK_AUDIO] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:37:26.000; resume after this marked segment]