A Father's Long Shadow Part 2

Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.

Ancient fortresses had walls, gates, and guards. It's high time for dads to put on some armor and start protecting their kids against those who'd like nothing more than to corrupt them for life. Fathers, are you ready for a real challenge?

If so, 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, the morality in modern entertainment media sinks to deeper lows every passing day. This makes a dad's job more crucial than ever.

Dave, you've described it so well, but it brings heaviness to my heart. All last night when we were asleep, people were awake, thinking of new ways to seduce teenagers. And of course, we know that the primary way today is through technology. And you're absolutely right that the role of the father is very, very critical. You know, God worked mightily in my life, even when I was very young. I felt a call to the ministry, born on a farm in Saskatchewan, Canada. There was something within me that told me that was not my future. And I sometimes tell my story with one intention, and that is to give God glory and to show how he led me, even when I was unaware of it. And in this interview, which I gave recently to Pastor Philip Miller, I talk about the past, but I also talk about the present, the changes in our culture, and what I see happening in the future.

And that's why the interview is called The Past, the Present, and the Future. And today is the last day that we are making this resource available to you. For a gift of any amount, it can be yours. Go to RTWOffer.com.

That's RTWOffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. And thanks in advance for helping us as we continue to get the gospel around the world. The Bible says regarding God, Lord, you are my refuge and my fortress. And that's what children need in today's world, a refuge and a fortress.

So you protect them from the enemies of the family, namely drugs, immorality, pornography, crime, sexual predators. You talk to them about these things. And you discuss them. Let them express their opinions even if their opinion is different from yours. Hear them out. Hear them out.

But stand in for them. A father in this church, a very good father, talked to me the other day about movies that are being shown in the school that show marriage as diverse to men, to women. That also is a marriage. That also is a quote family. How old do you think his daughter is who's supposed to look at these movies?

Six years old. And there's a father who's standing in for his daughter keeping tabs on what she sees in school and discussing it with the principal involved in her life involved. So you're the protector. Be the mentor in humility, in patience, in servant love.

Be a mentor. You don't have to know a lot about the Bible. That's what I'm not talking about, though the more you know, the better. But it's the modeling of it. My parents could have taught us faith, and I'm sure they did, but to me the greatest lesson of faith was when Hale consumed every blade of wheat on our farm, and they got on their knees in the old farmhouse and thanked God for his mercies and for all that he meant to them in the midst of their devastation.

Children don't forget that. You say, well there's something in my life, there's a reason why I can't be a mentor. I have unconquered sin in my life. If that's the case with you, my dear father, would you join a small group? Would you go for help?

Would you seek God? Would you do whatever needs to be done to get rid of what it is that stands in the way of you entering into your child's world? That's the way we can fulfill this admonition. Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord, and he will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children. Father, today turn your heart to your needy, crying children at great personal cost. It was Seneca who said years ago, Seneca said, no man can consider himself a success if his children are a failure.

Now that's the first part of verse six. He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, but now I want to speak about the second part of this verse, and the heart of the children to their fathers. Namely, children reconciled to fathers. All of us have had fathers. We've all had imperfect fathers, and we had better make peace with them, no matter how imperfect or even abusive they have been.

Before I give you a list of the kinds of fathers with whom you need to make peace, I want to say that there are also some good fathers out there. My father, if you were to test him by many of today's standards regarding what fathers should do, he would come up short in some respects, but he was a very good father. He prayed for us. He took care of our needs. We knew that we were loved. There were rules in the home. We knew where the lines were to be drawn, and he expected obedience, but he was a good father. How I thank God for my father. When he was a hundred years old, I was visiting up in Canada, and my wife gave me a suggestion. By the way, the Lord often leads me through my wife. I hope that's okay with you.

It's just the way it is. She gave me this suggestion. She said, you know, your dad is a hundred years old. She said, remember in the Old Testament when fathers would give a blessing to their sons?

She said, you're going to be home for a day. Why don't you go to him and say, dad, give me a blessing, just like they did in the Old Testament. So that evening, as my father was sitting in the rocking chair reading his Bible, I knelt beside him and I told him, I said, dad, you know, in the Old Testament, they gave, fathers gave sons a blessing.

I said, would you do that for me? And I want you to know that he took my head in both of his hands and lifted up a prayer to God that made heaven shake. It was absolutely awesome. When it was finished, I was crying. He was crying. We embraced.

I embraced my mother. And you know, when the call comes, that was three years ago, he still living when the call comes that dad has died. I can tell you that in my heart, no regrets, no loose ends that have to be made up, nothing that I wish I would have told him, but it was too late. No, he can die in peace and I can die in peace that I and my father have indeed been reconciled on every issue. Not that we needed reconciliation the way it is generally spoken of, but we died.

We die knowing that all is well between us. Some of you have a father like that. Don't wait until he becomes a hundred though, because there's a good chance he won't live that long. Well, let me now list some of the fathers that some of you may have to be at peace with. The Bible says that the sins of the fathers are visited upon the generations to come.

Up until, what is it, the fourth generation, it says. It's up to you, my friend, to break the curse of a negative impact that your father may have had. Some of you need to be reconciled to a workaholic father. You don't understand why he was a workaholic, and the answer is probably because he received very little affirmation from his father, so he needed to prove himself, and in order to prove himself so that others would say, look at what so-and-so has accomplished, he works himself to death.

And then there's an added benefit. If he works a lot, he can get to stay out of the home and not deal with all of those emotional issues that he does not want touched in his own life. And so you're resentful and you're angry. You have to be resolved to be reconciled to a father like that. First of all, you have the workaholic father, the silent father.

He does a tremendous amount of damage, not to your body, but to your soul. The emotionless father, the passive father, the one, it doesn't matter what goes on in the home. Somebody can be misusing his child at school and he will not intervene, he will not run interference, he will not be involved. All that he does is sit there, inviting others to try to figure out what's going on in his heart. Listen to the words of a brother written to another brother about their dad.

It's about a passive father. Dear Jim, as for your concerns about dad, that's a big issue and I'm not sure I know where to start. I can tell you that I've spent a long time in therapy dealing with it, and just now I'm getting to some kind of closure on it all. It has affected me a great deal, I know for sure this, that dad is not going to change. I've had a hard time accepting that and I've spent my entire life setting myself up to receive some little acknowledgement or blessing from him, only to be disappointed each time. Somewhere along the way I stopped trying. I will always miss him though, there will always be a hollow place inside of me where love and acceptance from him should have been.

That is something though that I cannot change. A life lived with a passive, uninvolved, emotionless father. There's the alcoholic father, won't say much about him. The next message in this series, by the way, is on abuse in the home.

You need to hear it. The tyrannical father controls everybody through anger, through criticism, incapable of compliments. No matter what you do, if he does eke out a compliment, it is always with a warning or always with something negative, something that you didn't do. No matter how far you kick the ball, he always changes the goalposts so that you will miss. You get an A and he can't figure out why it isn't an A plus.

He's never, never satisfied. The tyrannical father, but I run my home and there are certain rules in this home and if you're going to be in this home, you're going to obey, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the absent father, maybe absent because of immorality, absent because he ran off, shirking his responsibility. So now the daughter mistrusts men, throws herself at men, always comes up short on relationships filled with jealousy, filled with intense insecurity because she cannot trust the boy as gender insecurity wonders who he really is growing up without a dad. And so those are the kinds of fathers that some of you need to be reconciled with or you will perpetuate the curse.

By the way, having listed all of these, it has often been said, you know, that a girl marries someone who is like her father, which explains why the mother of the bride always cries at weddings. How do you make peace with your father? Whether he's dead or alive, with his cooperation or without his cooperation, let me urge you to listen carefully so that you might be free. First, face the pain and tell the truth.

Face the pain and tell the truth. See, what happens is in the life of a child, and God has put this in the life of a child, he views his parents as those who cannot be wrong. That's why if you're an abused child, you probably think it was your fault because mom and dad are always right. And even as an adult, it's easy to look back and to say, you know, my home wasn't really an abusive home or my home wasn't a dysfunctional home because you don't want to admit that your parents were what they were. Well, it's time you did to simply say mom and dad failed, my dad was thus and so, speak the truth, the whole truth.

But of course, nothing but the truth, but speak it. Face reality. Secondly, after you have done that, grieve the loss, grieve the loss. When parents lose a child, of course we expect them to grieve. There would be something wrong with them if they didn't grieve. They weep and they never really get over it. Now, you've not lost a child, but you have lost your childhood.

And that's something to cry about. The opportunities that were lost, the what ifs of life, what if I'd have had a dad that would have been different, what if dad had been there? And so what you need to do is to grieve over that which you have lost and in the process of grieving to understand that God meets us in the midst of that grief. Be honest, be real, feel free to grieve, God gave us tear ducts. Not a product of evolution, they are there so that we can weep and some of you today ought to weep. You may be weeping in this message and that's perfectly fine if you can't weep in church and be accepted and loved. Where can you go to cry your eyes out? Third, you choose to lay down the bitterness, to accept the fact that reality is reality and if your dad is still living and he's still just as hard-hearted as ever, he's not going to change, don't hold on to childhood fantasies.

He probably will not, we hope that he will, but don't count on it. And what you do is you choose to bring all of that grief and all of that emptiness that you have felt and all that sense of betrayal and you lay it at the cross and you say, Jesus you have forgiven me so much, I now choose to lay it down and to forgive, to take the poison and to spill it out. Finally, and this is most important, you now become acquainted with your Father in heaven who is a father to the fatherless, the Bible says. God is there, you know, to meet us and he becomes the nurturing father. In fact, in Isaiah it even says in chapter 66 that the father says, I will nurture you like a mother with tenderness, like a mother nurtures her child. We sometimes when we think of God the father, we think of the harsh side of God, the judgmental aspects, but I invite you to become acquainted with the tender heartedness of God, the compassion of God, the love of God, the overreaching pity of God.

I say that because I just read this past week, Psalm 103 where it says, like a father pitieth his children so the Lord pities those that fear him for he remembers our frame, remembers that we are dust. Your Father in heaven cares and he can reach out to you and even the vacuum that is in your life because of a not so good relationship with your dad, even that vacuum can be filled with a love of Christ and God in the process may give you a surrogate father, someone who steps in, gives you a hug once in a while, somebody who becomes to you what you never had. That all happens within God's family. I urge you today at whatever level you are either as a Christian or a seeker, I urge you today to come to the father. You remember that story that Jesus told about the prodigal son.

He ran and was in the far country you'll remember and when he came back his father saw him when he was yet a great way off. God sees you today no matter where the state of your heart may be. Whether you're close to God or open to God, he sees where you are at and then the prodigal came who had dishonored his father and had misused his father's wealth and had shamed the father and the father says bring hither the breast robe and put it on him and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his feet and bring hither the fatted calf and kill it for this my son was dead and is alive and is lost and is found. That's the way our heavenly father welcomes us when we come home to him.

The robe represents honor, the ring authority and the shoes sonship and the father says welcome home where you belong. It is much more important that you have a father in heaven whom you can call father than that you had a father on earth. Despite all of the pain of fatherlessness, there is nothing as terrible as entering into eternity without a father.

Our father who art in heaven was sung to us. He's there for you and for me. Let us pray. So what do you have to tell God right now?

What's on your mind? Are you prepared to make peace with your father, fathers? Are you prepared to connect with your children? The message has been altogether too hurried but I pray that the Holy Spirit may do in your heart what needs to be done and if you need to talk to God you talk to him right now because he's listening.

The father is waiting. Lord we ask in Jesus name that the work that you have begun in many hearts shall be completed and grant all who have listened to this message the grace to step to the plate and to say today I'm going to live differently as a father but also for those who say that as children in Jesus name. Amen.

Amen. Well this is Pastor Lutzer and of course I'm so glad that I have a father in heaven but I'm also glad that I had a good father on earth, a godly man, a man who prayed, a man who led his family and a man who made sure that we were provided for out on that farm in Canada. I told my story to Pastor Philip Miller in an interview entitled the past the present and the future but I need to emphasize that I gave this interview to give glory to God to show how he led me even when I was unaware of it.

In making ordinary decisions only in retrospect do I see the hands of God but also I talked about the present the changes that I've seen in the culture during the last 50 years and even the future. This is the last day that we are making this resource available to you that I think will give you some insight as well as some inspiration and some encouragement. For a gift of any amount it can be yours here's what you do go to rtwoffer.com. By the way this interview can be either on a CD or DVD. Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. When you connect with us thanks in advance for helping us as we continue to get the gospel of Jesus Christ to more than 20 countries of the world. Go to rtwoffer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337.

Ask for the interview the past the present and the future. You can write to us at Running to Win 1635 North LaSalle Boulevard Chicago Illinois 60614. Running to Win comes to you from the Moody Church in Chicago. Next time we look at domestic abuse the destructive secret that keeps all too many families on the road to failure. Don't miss our next program. For Dr. Erwin Lutzer this is Dave McAllister. Running to Win is sponsored by the Moody Church.