The Father's Voice Part 1

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith. We who run the race of life may not realize the deep impact left by our fathers. Much of our inner pain can be traced to poor relationships with our dads. Today, a revealing look at why your father is so important in your life, even if he has passed away.

Stay with us. From the Moody Church in Chicago, this is Running to Win with Dr. Erwin Lutzer, whose clear teaching helps us make it across the finish line. Pastor Lutzer, as the family breaks down, the father figures disappear. Is this why so many youth tragically turn to crime? Dave, you are absolutely right, and if I could shout across the United States of America, and for that matter, around the world, I would shout to fathers and say that you have a powerful impact on your children. Therefore, it is so important for you to be in a home to help guide them and direct them. My heart breaks because of the breakup of the family. And in a moment, we're going to be talking about the importance of fatherhood. And those of you who didn't have a father that you knew, you listen as well.

There's hope here for everyone. You know, I've written a book entitled Managing Your Emotions, God's Good Gifts Gone Wrong. There are many people who deny their emotions. There are many people who live by their emotions. How do we really manage them? I think this book will help you.

And you know something else? Every chapter has questions at the end, questions for discussion. I think this would be a great book for you and your small group. Here's what you do. Go to RTWOffer.com because for a gift of any amount, this book can be yours.

RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. I'll be giving you that contact information after the message. For now, listen carefully and think of the implications of God in your home.

I live in a vacuum that is as lonely as a radio tube when the batteries are dead and there is no current to plug into. Those are the words of Ernest Hemingway before he committed suicide in 1961. Well, as you know, this is a series of messages titled Why Good People Do Bad Things. And we've talked about issues such as shame and anger and desires, how they deceive us.

And today we're going to talk about the impact of a family on us, similarly the impact of a father. Ernest Hemingway actually married four times. He lived a life of debauchery. He was in love with booze and traveled the world without conscience, rebelling against his Christian upbringing.

The question that we want to ask is why? His grandparents on his father's side were graduates of Wheaton College. They attended in the 1860s. His grandfather Anson was a good friend of DL Moody and actually was the secretary to the YMCA. And his famous grandson Ernest was born in 1899, the very year in which DL Moody died. His wife, Adelaide, Anson's wife, was in love with nature and she communicated that to her grandson, Ernest.

They moved to Oak Park, were very active in Christian ministry and in the church. On his grandmother's side, his grandparents were equally committed. In fact, they called that grandfather Abba, just to kind of indicate their great respect as if he was almost a god. They so reverenced him and appreciated him.

Ernest's father was named Edward. He was a physician and a very strict disciplinarian. For example, if the kids were playing together and suddenly there would be some kind of an infraction, he would take them to the room. They would be spanked.

They would be on their knees asking God to forgive them for what they had done. One day, he took the kids to the Joliet Corrections Center, the prison, and he showed them the huge gates and the barbed wire and the guards and said, that's what will happen to you if you pursue a life of sin. The problem is that for little Ernest, the standards seemed to be too high. Though he went along, he was a good Sunday school pupil. He read the entire Bible in the King James Version, was the treasurer of the church in Oak Park, volunteered for ministry, and sometimes gave speeches in behalf of the church. Well, later on, he became involved in journalism, World War I. He came back. He went to northern Michigan where he began to write his stories, and at that time, his parents began to reject him.

They said, why don't you get a real job? He was having some difficulty getting his stories published. And so he went from job to job and then he wrote a book that was published and his parents interpreted it as disgracing them. And so the breach between him and his parents was complete. Later on, Ed, his father, being one of these high-strung perfectionistic people who had all these high standards for his kids as well as himself, no longer could put up with his depression, which sometimes happens to those who live such a tightly wound life, that he took the pistol that his father had given him who was an alumnus of Wheaton and shot himself.

Ernest's relationship with his mother now even grew more strained if that was possible. And then when his mother finally sent him a birthday cake on one occasion, she took the pistol that her husband had used to commit suicide and she put it in the cake, hinting for him that he should do the same, which he did in 1961. But my question to you today is, where did things go bad? Here he is. He's dedicated to the Lord in the Oak Park First Congregational Church. The evening of his baptism, his mother wrote in her diary, we have dedicated him as an offering to the Lord to receive his name and to be counted as one of his little lambs. What went wrong? Well, of course, Ernest Hemingway is going to be judged by God in accordance with God's standards and I do not want to make excuses for him, but at the same time, we would be amiss if we didn't see a connection between his home life and the man he eventually turned out to be.

Let me suggest some lessons. When the standards in a home are so strict, when parents are so determined that their children are going to toe the line, the children become so exasperated, so discouraged that they often end up rejecting their parents and everything that their parents stand for. I think that's what Paul meant when he said in the book of Ephesians, fathers, do not exasperate your children. Imagine high standards that are unattainable.

No matter how high the bar is, when you try to jump over it, it becomes an inch higher. Later on in this series of messages, I'm going to preach a message on controlling people, people who want to control, and I'm going to suggest at that time that the reason that God can't do a work in the adult lives of children is oftentimes because their parents get in the way. They keep manipulating, cajoling, controlling, and God does not work until the controllers give up their charade. I think there's a second lesson, and that is that children who are rejected by their parents, children who are rejected tend to reject everything that their parents stood for. Now, of course, you say, well, his parents couldn't have approved of his behavior.

I mean, after all, four marriages, a life of booze and writing things that were to be denigrating the Christian upbringing that he had. I understand that. But at the same time, his parents could have said to him, Ernest, we want you to know that we love you. We will always love you. You are our child until the day we die. We'll love you and even beyond. We don't like what you're doing, but our affection will never be withdrawn.

What a difference that might have made. There's another lesson also and that is the impact that parents have on us, particularly the impact of a father for good or for ill. I had intended to speak briefly about fatherlessness in our society. Let me say that 40% of all those who are being reared in America today are in homes where there is no father. Or if they are in a home where there is no father, he may be an absentee father in the sense of being totally passive, totally disconnected from the emotional and spiritual life of his own children. And then, of course, we begin to think also of those who are abusive fathers.

The list could go on. What happens in a home like that is there's a tendency, it is not inevitable, but there's a tendency for a boy to grow up without the restraints, without the model, and he works out his anger with violence and he works it out with sexual exploits. Whenever I find a man who is very angry, and you know I've met some people like that, you meet them and you know that they are angry, I always say tell me about your relationship with your father.

They're very angry. They are either into evil or they are strongly driven. In the life of a young woman, a daughter, the effect may be different than that, but she does not know whether or not she is beautiful to men, and she wants to prove herself so she goes from man to man seeking somehow the approval from men because she did not have a father who would approve of her and love her tenderly and righteously and in a pure way. A young woman working in what is sometimes called a gentleman club said that we as girls are dancing for the fathers we never had. You know Princess Diana I think is one of the saddest stories, the late princess, but a recent biography says that her need for attention was all-consuming and few people could produce the affirmation in quantities required.

She had a void that no one could possibly fill. Could I simply say that if you are a person who grew up in that kind of an atmosphere it may be true of you, not necessarily as we shall say, but it may be true of you that you have an unlimited number of unmet needs, perhaps a bottomless pit of unmet needs. Now can you imagine what that does going into marriage when all those expectations, when you actually get married thinking that the person you're going to marry is actually going to make you happy?

There are people who get married thinking that and you can understand the deep disappointment as the needs are never met. Now I had intended when I was preparing this message a few weeks ago to speak about how to be connected and make peace with our fathers no matter what they were like, but as I began to think about it I've changed the focus of my message and I want to speak primarily about peace with our Heavenly Father. And this message is intended to motivate you to seek God and to find in God the fatherhood that all of us need whether we have come from a good home or a bad home. God is into fatherhood.

The word father occurs 1,180 times in the Bible. But before we open the Bible I have one more question to ask. Why is it that somehow we know that God loves us intellectually but we just don't connect? I've had people say I know that he loves me because the Bible says that he does but I don't feel anything. Why this disconnect between what we know in our heads and what we experience in our hearts?

Why is it that we can read the Psalms where David said even though my father and mother forsake me the Lord will pick me up and why is it that somehow the Lord doesn't seem to be picking some people up? And it seems that that bottomless pit of unmet needs continues. Well of course I'm glad that we don't have to be whole and perfect before God blesses us and uses us, but I believe that the key is found in the fatherhood of God. And the reason that we sometimes do not find that fulfillment in God is first of all because we think that God thinks about us and feels about us the way we feel about ourselves. We feel like failures. We feel condemned. We feel so wretched at times. We feel so disappointed in the way in which we've lived and we think God thinks that way too.

Let me pass this word of wisdom onto you. Feelings are not facts. Feelings are not facts.

God does not think of you the way you think of yourself. Let me give you a second reason and that's because we're dishonest about our feelings. You see if you were brought up in a home and all of us to some extent had to always bottle our feelings but some homes more than others where they'd had to be pretend to pretend to pretend pretend because appearances were everything. You're brought up in an atmosphere like that. You soon discover that that you can't express your feelings and you get older and you're emotionally numb. The answer to that I think is again found in the Psalms where we find that David for example continually was coming before the Lord and spilling out his heart before God. It has to do with honesty. When the mass gets taken away, when all of the pretense ends and we are who we are in all of our reality, in all of our failure and in all of our limitations in the presence of a God who knows, who cares and who understands. There's another reason too and that is that we probably were brought up in homes where performance dictated love.

Certainly Ernest Hemingway was in a home like that. If you perform if you get that good job we will love you. If you do something that we think disgraces the family we will reject you.

Let me ask you a question. What if you were to fall into sin this next week? Serious sin.

Now I have to clarify that I certainly don't recommend it. As a matter of fact I warn you against it but if it happened would that drive you away from God or would the knowledge of your sin cause you to rush in the direction of Jesus Christ's outstretched arms? Do you think that God's love for you is dictated totally upon your performance or do you understand he loves you because he loves you because he loves you because he loves you? What I'd like to do in the next few moments and they shall be few is to list four or five graces that God gives to us and this outline I trust is going to be a motivation for you to seek God.

All of us must. We have to take a page from the life of David who said as the deer pants after the water brooks so my soul pants after thee oh God. Let me give you some of the graces that God does toward us and I'll give you verses of scripture that you can write down and in some instances read later. First of all he begets us. He begets us. It says in James chapter one verse 18 by his own will he begat us by the word of truth. It says again in first Peter 1 23 that we are born again not of corruptible seed but of incorruptible by the word of God which lives and abides forever. Now my dear friends just like in natural birth you have the sperm and the egg coming together so it says in John chapter three that we must be born of the spirit so watch this.

God takes the word of God and combines it with the spirit of God and the result is the life of God when we are born again and we become partakers of the divine nature. In fact there is a part of you if you're a believer in Jesus Christ there's a part of you that cannot sin and the reason it can't is because it is righteous. It is the nature of God. I think that's the way we should interpret those verses in first John that give us so much trouble where the scripture says that he it is born of God is sinneth not.

He cannot sin. That has to do with the new nature looked at just from the standpoint of our new created nature. It cannot sin and this means that there should be a family resemblance right? You beget a child the child looks like you do. God begets his children and his children should somehow represent him and that's why the scripture says that we should also be followers of God and imitators of God because he begets us by his own will. Let me give you a second grace that God gives to us and that is that he adopts us. You know it says in Galatians chapter 4 it says because you are sons God sent the spirit of his son into our hearts the spirit who calls out Abba father so you are no longer a slave but a son and since you are a son God has made you an heir. The whole idea of sonship in the Bible is very interesting because what the Lord says here in Galatians is that a child that grows up can inherit a lot of money but he doesn't enjoy it till he gets old enough. God says that's like Israel they didn't enjoy their inheritance because they were like a child but he says you the minute you accept Christ as Savior you are a son a full-fledged son with all of the rights and privileges and honors pertaining thereto. That means that you can enter into your inheritance immediately.

You can have accepted Jesus Christ as Savior yesterday and begin to walk in the inheritance that is yours as a son of God and now that you are a son of God God is not going to abandon you you're not going to be part of a child custody battle because you're going to belong to him forever. He adopts us. Do you remember that story of Peter Deineke? He was coming from Russia in the 1920s by boat and if you know anything about Europe in those days nothing was ever included in the price of the ticket.

It's that way today we flew a number of years ago on Aeroflot one of the airlines and I think it's float but it sounded flat and you know you had to buy the the orange juice that was served on the plane. So here's Peter Deineke thinking that he had to bring his own food on the ship. His parents prepared all of this rye bread they dried it out so that it wouldn't get moldy on the ship and he took it when everyone else went to the dining room he went to his room and he ate his moldy bread and some of the soldiers said to him you know we'll even give you some of our food if you help us and so he was working just to get a little bit of dessert.

It was not until he arrived in America he said he realized that the meals were included in the price of the ticket. My dear friend it's possible for us to live without recognizing that the blessings of sonship are included in salvation. You are an adopted son you're an adopted daughter before God. Third he loves us and for this I do ask you to turn to first John it says how great is the love the father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. How great is the love of God toward us that's a good question to ask.

And you know my friend it's very important that you listen to Running to Win next time to find an answer to that question. It'll be beneficial for everyone who is listening. You know I've written a book entitled Managing Your Emotions God's Good Gifts Gone Wrong. Sometimes we as evangelicals so emphasize the deity of Christ we forget that he was also fully human. Read the New Testament and you'll discover that he experienced anger sorrow also amazement and joy. Jesus experienced the same range of emotions as we do I think even maybe fear in Gethsemane of what the cross would mean. How do we manage our emotions? How do we understand that God has blessed us with them but at the same time they cannot control us?

Those are the kinds of issues I discuss in the book Managing Your Emotions God's Good Gifts Gone Wrong. Here is what you do for a gift of any amount you can go to rtwoffer.com. That's rtwoffer.com or you can call us at 1-888-218-9337. I'm going to be giving you that contact information again but let me thank you in advance for your support of this ministry. Together we are making a difference and you are helping us. If you're interested in the book Managing Your Emotions God's Good Gifts Gone Wrong you can contact us at rtwoffer.com or if you prefer 1-888-218-9337. A critical study of who we really are and how we manage our emotions. You can write to us at Running to Win, 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard, Chicago, Illinois 60614. What many Christians may not realize is the provision God has made for us as our Heavenly Father. On tomorrow's broadcast more reasons why the Father's voice can give you peace in the midst of your storms. For Dr. Erwin Lutzer this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.