Do you know how much and how often God thinks about you? Do you know how valuable you are to Him? My goodness, He would go through hell itself to be able to redeem you so that you could be with Him forever. And that love, that love is deeper and greater and better than any love that you failed to get from your Father. Welcome to the Summit Life podcast.
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So don't miss out, head over to jdgreer.com and sign up today. Today, Pastor JD identifies four types of father wounds that you perhaps may identify with, and he does this in order to show us how Jesus came to heal those specific types of hurt.
So whether your dad was absent or awesome, we want to remind you that Jesus is the everlasting father your heart has always longed for. Let's continue our study in Isaiah chapter 9. You have your Bibles this weekend. I'd invite you to take them out and open them to Isaiah chapter 9. Isaiah chapter 9.
Isaiah's prophecy is where we have been, where we are looking at a prophecy that was given about the Messiah nearly 700 years before Jesus had come. As we begin today, I'm just curious how many here at one of our campuses is expecting a baby. You're expecting a child in the coming months here. Raise your hand. Pregnant, expecting a child.
I know we have a number of those in here. One of the many things that they did not cover in my premarital counseling is discussing the difficulty of choosing a name for your kids. I've had to do it four different times in my marriage, and it can be a real relationship tester. There are all these rules about choosing a name that nobody ever tells you about. For example, if you or your spouse ever dated anyone with a certain name, then that name is off limits from now until the end of the world.
If you suggest a name to your spouse that reminds your spouse of a girl that she did not like in high school, that name is also off limits, which is something I had to learn. And then you got to think through first and last names very carefully. If not, you'll be Be like the man family, M-A-N-N family, who named their daughter Anita and sentenced their daughter to go through life declaring Anita Mann. And you could see how that might present a problem. This week, in my extensive and highly academic sermon research, I found a list by Craig Rochelle of unfortunate name combinations of actual people that he knew.
For example, one person he knew named their daughter Eileen Wright. You could see how awkward that would be. Certain conversations might get started off on the wrong foot. There was another one, though. I think this one is just awesome: Lois Price.
I just feel like that name just makes me feel close to God, doesn't it? Lowest price. That just makes me feel happy. Names are important and they can reveal a lot about us. And so I think it's significant to note that when God promised to send a Messiah, he describes him by four important names that reveal to us the kind of savior that he would be to us.
And then specifically the problems that he would address in our lives. His name, Isaiah says, will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, and the Prince of Peace. We're going to dive in this morning on this third name, Everlasting Father. I would suggest to you that if there were ever anything that you and I needed in a Savior, any relationship that we needed to be redeemed and restored, it would be our relationships with our fathers.
Now, some of you have great dads, or you had a great dad, and your memories of your dad are fond and they are cherished. But for many of you, you did not have a great relationship with your dad, and some of the greatest pain in your life comes. Your relationship with him. Maybe he was never there. Maybe he abandoned you when you were very little, or maybe you never even knew him.
You know, maybe it wasn't even his fault. Maybe he died early and he wasn't there during some very pivotal moments when you really felt like you needed him. Or maybe he was physically present, but he wasn't really there, if you know what I mean. He was always too busy for you and he never really paid that much attention to you. Or maybe all you can remember is how disappointed he always seemed to be with you, or maybe how angry he always seemed to get towards you, or maybe you never really just felt any connection to him.
It's the kind of relationship that you have now where when you call home and he answers the phone and he hears that it's you, he immediately calls for your mother because he doesn't know how to have a meaningful conversation with you. He doesn't have a significant relationship with you where you can actually talk about meaningful things. Or maybe he was abusive. For whatever reason, there's a lot of pain that gets brought up when you think about him. And so when I say to you that Jesus wants to be your everlasting father, if you're honest, that doesn't do a lot for you.
One of our church members who attends the downtown Durham campus, his name is Jonathan. He wrote a great article that got picked up by the Gospel Coalition website about the difficulty that he has had personally in learning to call God Father because of the difficult relationship that he had with his father. He says, and I quote: I was 25 years old before I could say the word father while praying because of the kind of relationship or lack thereof that I have with my dad. Father did not just roll off my tongue the way it did for many of my Christian friends. How could I come to God without fear when I'd been scared to go home whenever dad was there?
How could I understand God's love and faithfulness when dad left town because he loves something or someone more than me? How can God be a mighty fortress of protection? When dad hit instead of hugged. Unfortunately, this is the experience of a lot of people in our society, and as Jonathan indicates, that ends up having a powerful shaping influence on your understanding of God. Eric Metaxas points out that almost all of the famous atheists of modernity, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hume, Bertrand Russell, Madeleine Murray O'Hare, all of them had one thing in common.
You go back and read their biographies. They all either had an absentee father or a father with whom they had a very traumatic relationship, a father who was abusive or abandoned them. Beyond just the development of our faith, our relationships with our dads can be the most shaping influence on how we approach life. National statistics show that 71% of high school dropouts come from fatherless homes. 75% of teenagers and substance abuse centers are from fatherless homes.
One of these studies claimed that almost every social ill faced by America's children, almost every single one, is related to fatherlessness. What I want to do this weekend is identify for you four different types of father wounds. And show you how Jesus came to heal those and how He came to become to us our everlasting Father. I'm going to borrow these from a book called Father Factor: How Your Father's Legacy Impacts Your Career. This is a little unusual of a sermon because I'm going to use His four types of dysfunctional fathers as anchor points.
But when I read this book, I thought there seems that's a perfect way to illustrate the problems that many of us have experienced in relationship with our dad and how Jesus came to redeem that and restore that, and why, of all the different names he could have chosen, he chose to come as everlasting father. And by the way, I realize that for many of you, this might be a little difficult for us to walk through, and it might bring up some painful memories. But I want you, if you can, to stick with it because my point this weekend is not to try to dredge up your painful past. It's not to try to beat up your dad. It's to try to point you to the good that God offers us in Jesus and the kind of salvation that He extends to you and what you can experience today.
Now one really quick little theological thing I want to clear up just so it's not confusing. At first, calling Jesus the everlasting Father may seem odd since the Bible clearly teaches us that Jesus is the second member of the Trinity and usually referred to as God's Son. But here now in Isaiah 9, the Son is called the Father. This does not mean that he has switched places with God the Father in the Trinity, just that Jesus, in his relationship to us, would be like the Father that we have always longed for. This is a term not indicating his position in the Trinity, but the kind of relationship he would extend to us and the wound he would address and the kind of Savior that he would be.
All right, here's the first of those four categories. Number one, Poulter, Stefan Poulter, who is the author of this book, Father Factor, identifies the never satisfied dad. This was the dad who, no matter what you did, never seemed to be proud of you. I knew a pastor's wife who said that her dad was this way. He was not unkind or abusive.
He always provided for her. He never left the family, but she said, I never heard the words from my dad, I'm proud of you. That's what I always craved. She said, I was the first person in my family to ever go to college. Not only did she go, she got a 4.0 and got all kinds of academic honors.
As her graduation day approached, she said, you know what I was dreaming about? I wasn't dreaming about walking across the stage and hearing the crowd cheer for all these academic honors I got. I was dreaming about walking down from the stage. And I had this mental kind of dream, this fantasy that when I walked down from the stage, there I'd see my dad pushing his way through the crowd and he'd have tears coming down his face and he'd grab me and hug me around my neck and say, oh, sweetheart, we love you so much and we are so proud of you. She said, when my graduation day came, she said, it actually happened just like in my dream.
And at least at first, I was walking down from the stage after graduation was over, and there I see my dad fighting his way through the crowd. But when he comes up to me, he didn't say, I'm proud of you. He said, he said, hey, your mom and I, it's getting late. We got to go home and try to beat the traffic. And that's all he said, and he left.
She said, I was crushed. I was absolutely crushed. Years later, she says, My counselor tells me this still affects how I approach my job. It affects how I relate to my husband. It affects what I expect from my friends.
You see, for kids who grew up in this kind of home, Often, proving themselves to others became the dominating theme of their lives. And understandably, they carry this perspective on themselves into their relationship with God.
So that whatever you do, you've got this nagging, unspoken doubt that asks, Have I done enough? Or you think, I bet God would be happier with me if I were a better Christian, or if I were a better witness, or I were a better wife, or a mom, or a dad. You constantly compare yourself to others, and you're like, Yeah, I bet if I were like him or her, I bet then God would be happy with me. But see, your Heavenly Father could not be more different. than the never satisfied dad.
Isaiah goes on to tell us in chapter 43 that we as God's children are precious to Him. Precious is a strong word. Then he goes on to tell us in the next couple chapters in Isaiah that God pays more attention to us than a mother thinks about her newborn infant. In a verse many of you probably know, Isaiah 45, he says, or 49, can a woman forget her nursing child? Could she really have no compassion on the son of her womb?
I mean, just ask the question, you ladies that have had children, could you go a whole day without thinking about your newborn child? That ever happened? Could you go five hours without thinking about your newborn child? I mean, Veronica, my wife, I feel like she couldn't go more than 10 to 15 seconds without thinking about that child. It's almost like Isaiah has to leave the realm of fatherhood and go into the realm of mothers because, in general, mothers tend to be more attentive to their children than fathers are.
It was always amazed me how meticulous Veronica was in her attention to the smallest physical characteristics of our children. She would say, JD, did you notice that Allie has a new freckle behind her right ear? And I would be like, now Allie's our second one, right? Is that Allie? No, I'm just kidding.
I wasn't that clueless, but she just was so aware. You know, what Isaiah is saying, it's possible that maybe even a mom... Could forget, but see, God is more in tune with you. He's more connected to you than the most love-stricken mother has ever been. Jesus tells us in the Gospel of Matthew that not a single hair falls from our head without his knowledge.
My wife is attentive, but I would say there's not a single mom in here that counts the number of hairs on their children's head and knows when one is missing at the end of the day. That's how attentive your heavenly father is to you and how connected he is to you. Maybe my favorite description of this is Psalm 139, where David just revels in the knowledge of the heavenly Father has toward him. Psalm 139, oh Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know me better than anybody else has ever known me.
You formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you because I'm fearfully and wonderfully made. There's not one accidental thing in me. Beyond that, wonderful are your works.
My soul knows them all very well. Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In other words, when I was just called a fetus, when I was a fetus, I was a person to you and you knew exactly who I was and what was coming. In your book were written every one of them, every single day that was formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. And you had planned these days and you'd planned experiences and you had planned my life out.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It's high. It just blows my mind. I can't really get my mind around it. I can't get my mind around.
Where could I go from your spirit? Where could I flee from your presence? If I ascended to heaven, you're there. If I made myself, My bed in Sheol, you'd be there. Sheol, by the way, is a Hebrew word for hell.
Oh, and by the way, we literally did make our bed in hell, didn't we? We made our bed in hell, and even there, we couldn't get away from God because God came to earth to take hell in our place. And on the cross, he slept in the bed that we had made. He took hell into himself, and we pounded nails in his wrist. And he said, Father, forgive them if they don't know what they do because he says, You can't get away from me if I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea.
Even there your hand shall lead me and your right hand shall hold me. Do you ache to be special to somebody? Do you ache to be precious to somebody? You're special and you're precious to God. You yearn to matter?
You matter to him. Do you know how much and how often God thinks about you? Before anybody else knew anything about you, he had fashioned you and designed you and laid out every single one of your days, and there has not been a single day of your life that he has not been present. Do you know how valuable you are to him? My goodness.
He would go through hell itself to be able to redeem you so that you could be with him forever. And that love, that love is deeper and greater and better than any love that you failed to get from your father. I don't know how to say this to you, but he is crazy about you and more attentive to you than the most love-stricken father. Zephaniah 3.17 is a verse that is... I've always loved this one.
The Lord will rejoice over you with gladness. He will quiet you by his love. He will exult over you with loud singing. Yeah, I know a lot of great dads. I really do.
I'll be honest with you, maybe you know somebody like this. I don't know anybody that sings. like about their children. You know, I mean, it's just, it's almost a little hokey, like, oh, Allie, I love you, Allie, I love you, Karis. I think about you all the time.
I mean, it's great, but it's just almost like a little, like, wow, you know, calm it down there. Jack, you know, if that happens, but here is God. I don't know how to say this, but God is crazy about you. Because everything that you always wanted in a father. This is what God the Father is.
He is described in the most incredible ways. And by the way, before I move on to the second father wound. I mean to say something to those of you who are dads. If you want to be a good Christ-like dad, I've got one piece of counsel for you. It's very simple.
Be crazy about your kids. and let them know that.
Some of the best advice that I ever got about being a parent was given to me by an older pastor who just knew me and was speaking into my life. And he said, Let me tell you the mistake that you're going to make as a parent. He said, I know guys like you. He said, the mistake you're going to make as a parent is you're going to be first of your kids a pastor and second a dad. But your kids don't need a pastor.
They need a dad. I said, what do you mean? He said, a pastor is always in their life telling them what's wrong with them and how to fix it. A dad is just really excited about who they are. A pastor is somebody who lays out a spiritual progress plan and then is always trying to get them to the next stage in the spiritual progress plan.
And a dad is the person who's at their games beaming with pride and yelling his head off. You remember that study that I referenced earlier, Families and Faith? They point out that the single greatest factor in determining whether your child adopts the faith is the quality of your relationship with them, not the quantity of what you teach them. They actually set those two things in contrast. And they say, yeah, religious instruction is important, but the quality of the relationship between the child and the dad is even more important than the amount and the quality of what you teach them.
Which means, let me just make this really simple. It means that the quality of the devotions that you do with them is not as important. As the kind of relationship you have with them, where you just go out and you have a good time and you're emotionally connected to them.
Now, you guys know I'm all for family devotions. I'm all for you fathers being the primary religious instructors of your children. But I'm just telling you, you've got to focus on the depth and the beauty and the quality of that relationship. You be crazy about them, and you show them that you're crazy about them because that is the way that you emulate the Heavenly Father. Number two.
The author talks about the time bomb, Dad. The time bomb dad. This is the kind of dad he says you just never know quite what to expect from him. If he's got a bad day at work, then the smallest thing would set him off. And maybe drugs or alcohol magnified those outbursts, but.
More than once you got hurt, verbally, emotionally, or physically. And of course, you never really learn to love this kind of dad because it's hard to love somebody that you're terrified of. Stefan Poulter says that the negative ramifications that come from this are manifold. He says an incredible number of anxiety disorders have their beginnings in this style of fathering. For example, he says, kids who grow up like this often become control freaks as a response.
Because you see, when their dads exploded, their lives crashed.
So now they want to control everything that's going on in their lives to try to keep that from happening again. In counseling, that's called hypervigilance. Psychologists say it's similar to PTSD, you know, post-traumatic stress disorder, where you went through some trauma. And so now you're always on the lookout trying to make sure it doesn't happen again. Poulter compares it to the U.S.'s response after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
The U.S. military put in a radar system so sensitive and so sophisticated it could detect the slightest movement within a 5,000-mile radius of Pearl Harbor. That's the way a lot of these kids grow up, he says, always on the lookout for whether the next blowup might happen and scared to not be fully in control of every detail. And this, of course, has to affect how you see your heavenly father. You have a hard time trusting him or leaving things in his hand because how could you trust that he'll actually take care of you?
What happens if he's in a bad mood? What happens if he's not consistent? Just like with your earthly dad, you're always trying to figure out what you got to do to contain him, to stay at his good side. And when something goes wrong, you wonder, well, what did I do now? What's he angry about now?
But see, your heavenly father could not be more opposite than the time bomb dad. David said, King David again, he says, the Lord is compassionate and gracious. He's slow to anger. Then he is abounding in steadfast love. By the way, some of you grew up with dads that were exactly the opposite, they were abounding in anger.
and they were slow to show affection. David says, the heavenly father, he abounds constantly. He is constant in this tenderness and steadfast love, and he's slow to anger. Yes, he will get angry, but it takes a lot to get him going. In fact, I love this in Hebrew.
What it literally says here is, of long nostrils. Which is just such a great Hebrew metaphor. You're like, how do big noses? What does that have to do with not having being angry? Here's how it works: when you get angry, What tends to happen?
You start breathing, right? You're getting mad. Your nostrils get flared. And if you're quick to anger, your nostrils get flaring right away. If you're trying to calm yourself, what are you supposed to do?
You're supposed to take deep breaths and breathe out slowly and long way through your nose, and say, goose for a bar or whatever you say to kind of calm yourself down. What he is saying is, here Heavenly Father is of long nostrils, not literally, but God is slow to anger and he abounds. In love. You can see this in the story that Jesus told about the father who, when his son was wandering and he had every right to be angry, instead stood out. At the gate of the home every day, longing after his son, just waiting on him to repent, ready to receive him when he comes home.
Yes, your heavenly Father will sometimes discipline you, and sometimes he will allow painful things to happen to you. But listen to me, it is never done in anger for those of us who are his children. It is always for our good. The writer of Hebrews says that even the best earthly dads, Hebrews 12, 10, even the best earthly dads will sometimes discipline their children. for reasons that come from irritation or selfish anger.
The writer of Hebrews says, But your heavenly Father never disciplines you in anger. Not a drop of anger affects how he relates to you, because all the anger he has towards your sin, he poured out on Jesus. And Jesus suffered condemnation and judgment and anger in your place, so none of it is left for you.
So every single thing the Father does in your life is done with tenderness and love for your good.
So Romans 8, 28 can boldly declare, all things are working together for good in my life. Nothing is done in wrath. Nothing is done in condemnation. Nothing is done to pay me back. All of it got put on Jesus so that now what comes to me is the Father's loving control of my life and he's using everything for good.
In fact, if you're writing stuff down, maybe write this down. If you are God's child, not one thing has ever happened to you or will ever happen to you that God does not intend for good. We'll return for the conclusion of today's teaching in just a moment. As we celebrate the birth of Jesus, we're reflecting on how God has moved powerfully throughout summit life in 2025. God continues to use this ministry to multiply the gospel because of the generous donations from those who've stood with us before, helping people go deeper into the gospel and carry it wider into the world.
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So thank you. How How would your perspective on your life changed if when you look backwards, you realize that not one thing had ever happened to you that God didn't intend for good, and not one thing is happening now in your present that God did not intend for good, and not one thing will happen in your future that He does not intend for good? That is the assurance that you have with the Heavenly Father because He is the opposite of the time-bomb dad. He is a dad who took your anger, took the anger that you deserve, so that He could give you tenderness and love. Let me use this moment to say That for some of you, the key to to understanding all this is going to be that you're going to have to stop viewing your heavenly father through the lens of your earthly dad.
And you're going to have to start viewing your earthly father and evaluating him through the lens of your heavenly dad. My friend Jonathan said this was the turning point for him in his development of a real trust in God. He started to realize that God was the real father, God was the one he was created for, that his dad was just a temporary stand-in. God was the original. His dad was the replica.
He said, My earthly dad is supposed to be like a training wheel that teaches me about the heavenly father. And I had some really bad training wheels. They were terrible. But now, but now I know the real Father. And that was the point the whole time, which gives me now.
the ability to cope with the ways that my earthly father failed me.
So, again, for many of you, you got to reverse the order. You've got to stop viewing your heavenly father through the lens of the failures of your earthly one. And you just start evaluating your earthly father through the lens of the heavenly one. He's the real father, he's the one you're created for. And here's what's going to happen: when you do that, not only are you going to become healthy, and not only are you going to heal.
But you're also going to develop the ability to love and forgive your earthly father for the way that he failed you. Because you're going to realize that his failures, though they were painful, they weren't ultimate. And they don't have to be devastating in your life because he was just a temporary stand-in. And the arms that you ache for were the Heavenly Father's arms. The security you longed for, the attention, the love, the unconditional love that you yearned for was things that the Heavenly Father would give you.
And your earthly Father was supposed to teach you about that, but he didn't. And now you've got the Heavenly Father, and so you can forgive the Earthly Father for the way he failed you. Number three. Third kind of dad here is the emotionally distant dad. The emotionally distant dad.
This is the kind of dad who may have been stable and consistent. He never abandoned you or abused you. He just never expressed. Emotion to you. He never made you feel special or told you that he was proud of you.
The author said that this fathering style made up approximately 50% of nuclear families between 1945 and 1980. Cause him to leave it to bever dad. This is dad's And that generation often just didn't know they were supposed to be emotionally engaged with their children. It just wasn't part of the package, how you understood what a dad did. Chances are that a lot of you in this room, especially if you're a little older, you grew up with a dad like this.
One book that I was reading said that there are three things that every child needs to hear from his or her father. He needs to hear, she needs to hear, I love you. I'm proud of you. And then number three, you are really good at...
Something. You need to hear the Father declaring that into your life. But you never heard those. And that left you with an insatiable desire to prove yourself so that you could hear that from somebody. You wanted to hear from somebody what you longed to hear from your earthly father.
Years ago, I filed away the most incredible quote by Bo Jackson. 20 years ago, many argue was the greatest athlete to live in modern history. was professional in both football and baseball. In this Sports Illustrated article I was reading, he said, My father has never seen me play a football or baseball game, not a single one. Can you imagine?
Here I am, Bo Jackson, one of the so-called premier athletes in the country. And after the game, I'm sitting in the locker room. And I'm looking around at my teammates, some of whom didn't even play, and envying the ones whose dads have come into the locker room to talk with them and take them out after the. the the game to get a drink. I never experienced that and I always wanted to.
Stefan Poulter said that kids who grew up in an environment like this not only failed to develop a healthy relationship with their fathers, they often struggle to develop healthy relationships with others. Because they've never learned to open up emotionally with other people, not their spouses, not their kids. Better really have close friends. And so when people like this go through pain, they tend to go through it all alone. They might be extroverts with lots of acquaintances, but they don't really have friends that they go deep with.
They don't have friends that they depend on and who depend on them. Tragically, He says this often plays out in a repeating cycle. You end up creating the same kind of emotional distance in your children. But see, I want you to understand your Heavenly Father isn't like that. Your Heavenly Father is so emotionally connected to you that Again, you think about Jesus' story in Luke 15 of The father, whose prodigal son has wandered away, there's a detail in there that I never really noticed what was being communicated here, but it says that the father stands at the gate of the home every day looking and longing in the distance of the way that his son went.
Now, here's what occurred to me: the father is an adult, he has a job. If he's standing every day looking in the distance of his son, what is he not doing? He's not doing his job. He can't do his job because he is so emotionally connected to his child. That listen, he cannot be happy until his son has been restored.
Do you understand that you have a heavenly father that is so emotionally connected to you that he has bound up his emotions in yours so that he cannot be happy until you have been redeemed and restored, and when you come home? Jesus tells us in this story, the father in Jesus' story lifts up the edges of his robe and he sprints after his son, which was a sign in those days of receiving ridicule and shame that he was willing to undergo to bring his son back home. That's how connected your heavenly father is to you. By the way, John Piper. Points out that almost every single parable that Jesus tells ends with an action step.
You know, he'll end the parable by saying, and go and do likewise. This is one of the few parables Piper says where there is no action step. Because you're supposed to end this parable not with something to do, but you're supposed to end it in wonder. You're supposed to end it worshiping. You're supposed to say with the Apostle John, Behold, what kind of love the Father has bestowed on me, the one who ran away, the one who scorned him and humiliated, the one who pounded nails into his wrist, the one who betrayed him, the one who put all this shame and pain on him after I had murdered him.
That he looked after me and he was so connected to me that he couldn't be happy again until he had restored me, and you're supposed to be consumed with wonder and worship. Such knowledge is too wonderful to me. It is high. I cannot really get my mind around it. He's the Heavenly Father I've always craved and always looked for before.
I move on to our last one. If I could just say this one more time to you dads. Maybe the most significant thing you can do for your kids is just be emotionally connected to them. In Stefan Poulter's book, he says that emotionally distanced dads Said the tragedy is most of them have no idea. The damage that their emotional distance is causing their children.
They think, well, I'm doing my job. I'm providing for my children. I'm taking care of them. I'm protecting them. I don't abuse them.
I'm being faithful to their mom. They're clueless, he says, that part of being a good provider, the most important part, includes emotional nurturing and active involvement. And I've told you before that, I mean, I've said that to you before. I told you, most Christian men feel like they're being good dads if they provide food and shelter for their families. And I always want to be like, really, that's the standard?
Possums provide food and shelter for their offspring. Is that the bar we really want to give for godly fatherhood? I mean, you're supposed to be present in their lives. Maybe the most present person. You're not supposed to turn over all the discipline to your wife.
This is not something she's supposed to do by herself. That's your job. You ought to show the same intentionality and ownership of their development and their involvement that you ever would as your job. Because you are the one who represents the tenderness of God the Father to them. And in many ways, the way they learn to think about God is the way they relate to you.
The attention that they get from you reflects the attention they believe they'll get from God. Here's the last one, number four, the absent father. This is the dad, of course, who just wasn't there. 40% of children in America live in fatherless homes, almost half. In some places, of course, that number is much higher.
And here's what happens: kids often interpret subconsciously the absence of their dad as a personal rejection. They think that they weren't important enough for dad to stay. They weren't good enough. They may never articulate it. Nobody ever says that to them, but that's what they end up thinking.
Counselors say this often manifests itself as a. a background sadness. This is like a soundtrack. That plays in the back of their hearts, which is a great metaphor. You know how sometimes you're watching a scene of a movie, and the soundtrack tells you how you're supposed to interpret it.
You could change the soundtrack and feel something totally different. You could play ominous music and feel like something bad's about to happen. Play giddy music and you feel like something funny is going to happen.
So for these kids, the background thing happening in their heart in every situation is sadness. This is probably going to lead to rejection. Any good thing they're experiencing, they're just waiting on the other shoe to drop. They've got this nagging suspicion that life is going to end up alone. Often, this sadness and fear starts to express itself as anger.
For many fatherless boys, in the absence of a father figure who could demonstrate to them what real masculinity was, they turned to some other way to try and prove their masculinity. Rebellion, athletic or sexual prowess, sometimes even violence or gang activity. One author said that fatherless young men often gravitate toward aggressive heroes like violent action heroes or gangster rap stars because these guys represented a masculinity they never saw in their fathers.
Now it's a skewed masculinity to be sure, but it's what they gravitate toward in the absence of authentic masculinity. They never had a dad who got down on the carpet and wrestled with them and showed them what strength under control looked like and showed them how you could leverage strength not to dominate, but to protect and empower. And so because they've never seen that, they think that they got to show their strength by dominating others and by using it violently.
Some guys who grow up without a present father figure become overachievers, always trying to be the man that their dad never was, trying to prove themselves so they can receive from others the affirmation they never got from their fathers, to have somebody tell them you're worth something and you're good at something. Girls with absentee fathers can manifest all this in similar ways.
Sometimes they struggle to develop respect for themselves or confidence in their careers.
Sometimes, in the absence of a father's love, they crave the attention and care from a man that they never got from their dad, and they become willing to do whatever they need to do to get it. Listen to this. One study. Showed that 90% of female porn models. were sexually abused as children.
Doesn't that break your heart? By the way, guys, when you're tempted to look at one of these images, why don't you just. Realize that this image that you're gazing at, most likely she's there because of some kind of sexual trafficking. 'Cause the majority of them came that way. But the ones that chose that career path did so because For most of them, they developed such an unhealthy attitude toward their body when they were a kid because a father figure who was supposed to protect them instead abused them and taught them that they were what they were really good for was the exploitation of their bodies for the satisfaction of a man.
And maybe when you're tempted to look at it, what you ought to think is: maybe I wonder if it was her father or her grandfather or her uncle. I wonder which one it was that first taught her she was nothing but a sex object to be used and then discarded. You see, many of us come out of places where May not be that extreme, but there was a wound, there was an open, gaping wound that was left by the absence of our Father. And what I hope that you will see is that Jesus Could not be more. opposite than an absentee father.
In fact, he tells us in Hebrews 13, 5, I will. I will never. Never leave you or forsake you. The Greek word here means... Never.
Never. Never ever for any reason whatsoever. He wouldn't leave you when you had spurned him. He wouldn't leave you when you humiliated him. He wouldn't leave you when you took wings and flew to the ends of the earth.
He wouldn't leave you when you made your bed in hell. Far from being the kind of dad who would walk out and need to pursue a better option, he wouldn't be happy until you had returned home. and would give away his life. And in many ways, his honor.
So that he could take your pain and bring you back home. Far from using you or abusing you for his own pleasure, he allowed himself to be abused and tortured for you so that you could have eternal life. And as you pounded nails into his hands and wrists, and you said, I don't want you, and I don't want to be around you, and I don't want your counsel, he looked back at you and said, Father, forgive them, for they don't know what they're doing. That's the heavenly father that you crave. That's the heavenly father that Jesus came to be.
That is the one that you've always been searching for. You know, even if you had a good dad at some point, At some point, even the best dads disappoint. At some point, even the best ads fail you. Here's another reality. Even the best dads die.
They won't be around forever. And when they die, they can leave this big gaping... hole in your heart that you don't know how to feel. That's why I love that word that Isaiah uses. Everlasting.
Father. This is a father who Never leaves. Never disappoints. never fails. Never abuses.
Never dies. He's everlasting. From the beginning of your days, he has paid attention to you. And from the time you were in the womb, he's known all about you. And there's not been a single thing that's happened to you that he wasn't watching over and intending for good.
There's not a single feature of your life that he did not know in great detail and delight in and cherish. He is the Father that your heart has always craved, whether you've known it or not.
So see, I repeat again to you. Do not judge your heavenly Father by your earthly one. Evaluate your earthly Father by your heavenly one. He's the replica. Your dad was the original.
And your dad failed you. Even the best dads film. But you've got to direct your attention and turn your eyes now upon Jesus. Because Jesus is the Heavenly Father that you were created for, and when that happens. You're gonna be healthy and you're gonna be whole.
and the most remarkable thing might happen. You're going to be able to love and forgive your earthly dad. And you might be able to call them up and say. And I want you to know I love you and I forgive you. Because even though there was some strain in our relationship, even though you caused a lot of pain.
I know the Heavenly Father now and he's forgiven me and I forgive you. By the way, if you're a dad who's sitting here feeling overwhelmed by how you have failed. And you're realizing how poor of a reflection you've been of the Heavenly Father. One of the things you can do is you could call up your son or daughter. You could sit them down and you could say, I just want to tell you, I'm sorry.
I have failed you. I was supposed to be this to you, but I wasn't. What I really want to teach you now is that you have a Heavenly Father who was everything to you that I never was. And one of the things you can teach them is You need a Savior. They need a Savior.
And you can say, I'm looking now to the Heavenly Father to forgive and restore the mistakes that I've made. This same Heavenly Father can mend and heal and restore the mistakes that you have made. You see, what I realized coming into this place today is that Jesus wants to heal. As the everlasting Father. He wants to heal the wounds that have been left by your earthly father.
And he wants to heal the wounds that life has. inflicted on you. Zephaniah 3.17 he Rejoices over you with gladness. This morning he quiets you by his love. He exalts over you with loud singing.
I love that phrase. He will quiet you by his love. Sometimes I'll be at home, I'll be sitting in my office working, and I'll hear I'll hear a distant cry. Coming from a long way away. Yeah.
And I listen more, and it gets closer. It just gets louder and louder. I'm like, what is going on? In fact, this happened a little while back and Cry gets louder and louder and louder, and I'm like, it's coming for me. Riot burst through the office door.
Tears coming down her face. She's crying. She got bloody knees and bloody elbows. And she jumps up in my lap. And I'm like, what's wrong?
And she's like, I'm like, just tell me what's wrong. Tell me what's wrong. And she can't. She can't talk.
So I just squeezed. and I'll hold her for a minute. I'm like, it's okay, it's okay. Daddy's here. That is here.
She keeps, you know, kind of breathing deep and crying. I'm like, geez, I start praying for her in her ear: Jesus, take the alleys away. Take the hours away. And I can feel her body just start to... to relax.
And she starts to breathe because she's in the arms of her earthly dad. You see, here's what I know is happening for many of you. Today. See, life has brought you in here and it's left you with. bloody knees and bloody elbows.
And here's the thing, nobody sitting next to you has any idea. The pain that you come here with. You don't even know how to express it. See, here's what's going to happen. I can tell you what's going to happen.
When you jump up into the arms of your heavenly father, he is going to. Quiets you by his love. He's going to start saying things to you like As high as the heavens or above the earth, that's how great my love is for you. All things in your life are working together for good. That I will protect you, I will keep you.
That nothing will touch you that is not a part of my plan. Nothing can separate you from my love. As high as the heavens are above the earth, that's how great it is, and not height or depth, nor principality, or power, or anything in all creation can separate you from my love. I knew the end from the beginning. I have turned back all your enemies.
No condemnation belongs to you. You are cherished in my sight. I will never leave you or forsake you. I will pursue everything in your life for good. I am your heavenly father, and I am always on your side.
And you can be quiet in my love. Because no matter what life has done to you, the love of the Heavenly Father is greater. This is eternal life, Jesus says, to know Him, the Heavenly Father. and to embrace the love that he has offered to us in Christ. Here's a question: Do you know the love of the Heavenly Father?
Do you know that love? Because if not, you can this very morning. You can this morning. It's very easy. The gospel is this: the gospel is that the heavenly Father, Jesus Christ, left God's throne and he came to earth and he suffered in your place and died for you so he could put away your sin and restore you to the Father.
But you gotta choose that. You have to choose to receive his love. He won't force it on you. You can receive it by Yeah. coming home.
By surrendering to Jesus as Lord. And by receiving Jesus into your life personally as Lord and Savior and everlasting Father. Have you ever done that? You see, you don't get that by growing up in church. You don't get that by becoming more religious.
You get it by choosing. to let Jesus Christ enter your life. and take control of your life. And be your Savior and your Lord and your everlasting Father. If you've never chosen that, you can do that this very morning.
Why don't you bow your heads at all of our campuses if you would? Uh If you've never received Christ as Lord and Savior, and everlasting father here's what you could say you could say a prayer just like this one These are not magic words, but If they come from your heart, God will hear them. You can say, Lord Jesus, I know. I can sense your love coming for me, and I surrender. I surrender to you as Lord and Savior.
And I receive you into my life right now. Say it to him. I receive you into my life right now. A sager. And Lord.
An everlasting Father. I don't know if you noticed, but Christmas is here, people. We know this is a busy time of year, and we're so glad that you set aside time to join us today. This podcast is here because of friends like you. Summit Life is listener funded, which means your gifts are the driving force that enables us to reach people with this gospel-centered Bible teaching.
Don't just listen, be a part of the story. Invest in the mission at jdgreer.com. Thanks for hanging out with us. We'll see you next time. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.
