The Heart of the Father

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Welcome to The Masculine Journey. We are very glad that you're with us this week. This is the last week before boot camp. Next week we'll be coming live from boot camp and that's one of our favorite shows to do so we'll be doing that, hopefully.

If we have a good internet connection and everything works. If not, you'll be listening to another show. That's it. An olden show.

It'll be the best of The Masculine Journey. Yeah. Which we haven't done that often. Andy, are your headphones working now? Alright, we're good to go. You're shaking your head.

I thought maybe they were. But no, we've been doing this series on boot camps. But before we get to that, Robby, I would normally ask this question, but he's not here tonight and I'm sure we'll make fun of him at some point. But I asked him how many Eves there are. You know, what's the Eve? And we are five Eves away from boot camp. So if you haven't registered, go register now.

MasculineJourney.org. The boot camp is April 29th through May 2nd. Alright, I think I got the dates right. That's coming up very quickly. And we'd love to have you there. There's still space.

Register now. Just get it over with. I know you're busy, but I'm telling you, God's got some amazing things for you. So we're continuing our series on boot camp talks, you know, and just kind of touching on them a little bit.

Can anybody here run through the talks that we've done so far? Andy? Core Desires. Core Desires, that's one.

Posing. Yeah. That is in order, right? I think so, yes.

The Wound. Yes. Spiritual Warfare. No, we missed one. New Name. New Name.

Should have had that one. Yeah. Spiritual Warfare.

And today we're talking about Jim. Sonship. Yeah, Sonship. Sonship.

I want to enunciate that well. Sonship. We're talking about Sonship. Being a son of the Heavenly Father, right? I mean, it's one of those things you kind of grow up, if you grew up going to Sunday school, you kind of knew God's Father and all that. But it meant something different to everybody growing up. Well, and often, you know, how we project the image of God as the Father often affects our relationship with Him. And how we see, you know, I grew up, I thought I was in a Christian faith, I won't tell you where that came, where that was. But I saw God growing up more as somebody waiting for me to screw up. You know, the nasty Santa Claus with the baseball bat, waiting to beat me if, you know, I did something wrong. Yeah, I envisioned with lightning bolts. Ooh.

You could just throw them right down and hit you, right? I get a really sad joke I could tell, but I'm not going to. Same thing for me, Jim. I grew up in a great church, and they taught on a lot of really good things. And to be honest, they may have taught about God as Father and God as love, and I wasn't paying attention. You know, but that would have been several years I wasn't paying attention, which is possible. Right.

But I did hear all the fire and brimstone stuff. So, you know, I'm kind of thinking they left out some of it. Right. Right. And so growing up, I just thought God was just, like you said, sitting there to judge me. Right.

Right. And so when we look at God that way, you know, the question becomes, where does that image come from? You know, does it come from us reading the Bible?

If it was like me growing up, get me to open up, you know, the Bible for Sunday school was probably the best we were going to do. But we all get these images of what the Father should look like. And a lot of times that comes from our own fathers, how our own fathers treat us, how our own fathers, you know, or, you know, maybe your father was absent or, you know, abusive. You know, and often, you know, those are really the hard battles to overcome because you see God as absent or abusive. And so, you know, even in those times, you know, one of the things we talk about at camp is that it doesn't matter what your father did or failed to do. God is going to father you through other men.

You know, we talk and often talking to the boot camp. The only way to learn how to be a real man is from other men. You're not going to learn it from a book. You're not going to learn it from mama. Sorry, guys. You're only going to learn it from another man, and God will send us people to father us through different things and help train us and overcome. And I'll talk more about that at the camp.

But I think we'll open up for our first clip. So the first clip comes from Shawshank Redemption. And Andy is at Shawshank. He's the only innocent man in Shawshank. And he was basically framed for a murder for what he did. Sorry, spoiler alert.

If you haven't seen the movie, you got to see it. But one of the things he's doing is trying to figure out what else to do with his life. And there's a young boy named Tommy who is kind of growing up. And he's, you know, not doing so well. And Andy takes Tommy under his wing to help him out.

And so we're going to listen to that clip. And this is basically one of Andy's friends narrating this read as they go through and they talk about how what fathering might look like if God were to send us someone to help us out. As it turned out, Tommy had himself a young wife and a new baby girl. Maybe it was a thought of them on the streets or his child growing up not knowing her daddy. Whatever it was, something lit a fire under that boy.

I was thinking maybe trying from a high school equivalency here, you helped a couple of fellows with that. You don't waste time with losers, Tommy. I ain't no loser. You mean that? Yeah. You really mean that? Yes, sir, I do. Good.

Because if we do this, we do it all the way. One hundred percent. Thing is, he, uh, don't read so good. Well.

You don't read so well. We'll get to that. R. S. So Andy took Tommy under his wing, started walking him through his ABCs. Tommy took to it pretty well, too. Boy found brains he never knew he had. And now if Robby could only find brains, you never knew he had. Yeah.

No. So as we look at this clip, we notice a couple of things. We notice that there's a need. And almost, you know, instantly, Andy starts to the fathering process, you know, correcting his English. You know, we grew up here in the south. So, you know, our English is, you know, needs help anyways.

Southern English. So anyways, as we go through the, you know, God sends us people to help us in our lives. For me, that looked kind of like a rainbow of men that, you know, mostly fathers of other friends who, you know, notice. Now, for me personally, I didn't have a abusive father.

He was, you know, home every day. But he was getting older in age. And there were some other things going on in the background I was not aware of that I'll be more than happy to share at camp. From when I was growing up and things that I went through and the image that I projected on God. You know, a lot of that was that, you know, God was going to let me down.

That, you know, he wasn't going to be there when I needed him most. And I still fight with that every day. And so, Andy, tell us a little bit about your story and how you saw God.

I think I'm with everybody. I mean, you read the Old Testament, you saw God as the mighty spider and that kind of thing. But, you know, I think really, I mean, I got close to God in my 20s. And I still, there were some things that I knew he came and he spoke to me. And he actually told me I was his beloved son at that point in time.

But then other things got in the way. And, you know, life has a way of beating God out of you or beating the idea that God is accessible, I think, more than anything. That, yeah, he's a heavenly father. And that means he's the father of all these children all over the world, all these people for every generation. And he just doesn't have enough time for us individually. And that's the crazy thing.

God created the heavens and the earth. I mean, he can do anything. It's more of, really, does he really do all my mess up, separate from him from wanting to really spend time with me and be accessible? And I think that's probably what I've learned more in the boot camp. I mean, you guys know, they allowed me to do the sonship talk three times in a row.

Sam says 13 or 12 or something like that. It felt like it. I concur. It all depends on how long it was.

Yeah, exactly. It was a journey for me. And it was one where I feel like I walk through the process of being healed, of learning how to do spiritual warfare, of getting my new name.

But I feel like the gold at the end of the rainbow was having an intimate relationship with Father. And it made a huge impact on me. And now it changes my whole concept of how I choose to live my Christian life. Yeah, growing up, being young at church, God was the judgmental guy with the lightning bolts, as I talked about earlier. And as I became a Christian, and I knew God loved me, the traits of my father, I really did project on him.

And I didn't realize it until I learned it at a boot camp. My dad was very loving. I knew he loved me.

That was never a question. But he never had time for any of my activities. He very rarely went to a baseball game when he was a huge baseball fan, types of things. He went to three games, I think, the whole time I played over six or seven years. He didn't go to any scouting events.

He didn't do anything. And so I grew up with this impression. And when I first became a Christian, though, I believed God loved me. He has to. He's God. He loves everybody, right? So he loves me. But he's got busier things to do, man. He's got world hunger to solve.

He's got wars somewhere over there to deal with. You know, what I want's not important. You know, and that was so far from the truth. And when I went to a boot camp and learned about that and God started unpacking a lot of that, I could put away the way my dad was and no longer think that's the way the father is. Right? Right. And we all kind of get that way, right? That realization that you can have a relationship with God.

Yeah, we'll come back right after the break, talk more about it. But in the meantime, some time today, go to MasculineJourney.org. Register for the upcoming boot camp going out next week.

What if one weekend wasn't up to you that you could go and God would orchestrate it all? Masculine Journey Boot Camp, basic training designed to give men permission to be how God made them. Passionate warriors for the kingdom based on John Eldridge's wild at heart. Experience four days purpose for God to come after and perhaps reawaken dreams and desires he uniquely placed in your masculine heart. Masculine Journey Spring Boot Camp coming up April 29th through May the 2nd. Go to MasculineJourney.org and register today. Hi, this is Sam with Masculine Journey.

I'm here with my son Eli. We're going to talk about ways that you can help support the ministry. One way you can go to smile.amazon.com.

Go to smile.amazon.com. There's information on our website there on how to do that. You go to facebook.com and click the donate button or you can go to MasculineJourney.org and find the donate button. MasculineJourney.org. Or if you want to mail something in, mail it to P.O.

Box 550, Kernersville, North Carolina, 27285. So Andy, I know you were ready to hand the microphone over to Rodney, but I want to ask you about this. This is your bump. Well, first of all, I thought that was like a LP or something that was stuck because it was like again and again. Yeah, exactly.

You're dating yourself. No, that's how important it is, though. I mean, we can go to the Father again and again and Lord knows I have gone to the Father. Once I knew that was much more accessible, that he was much more accessible.

Not that he never was, it's my acknowledgement of that. I go to the Father again and again and again and again. But that's not why you picked that bump. No, I picked that bump because I actually went to Ohio recently to an advanced boot camp with some friends of the ministry. A friend just from Ohio invited me up and that was one of the songs they played for worship.

And I think I had heard it maybe once or twice, but they had the lyrics up there. And man, it just got into my spirit and I'm like, yeah, that's what I've been talking about. Yeah, as it plays, what it was doing for me in that little snippet was it feels like I'm running home. Right. I'm going to a place of rest.

I'm going to a place of less stress, a place of hope. Yep. Right. And that's what's conveyed even in that little snippet. Yeah, my heart needs a surgeon and my soul needs a friend.

It's awesome. Yeah, and so as we continue traveling down this journey, Sam, one of the things that struck me when I was at boot camp is that my relationship with God had improved greatly before I had ever come to my first camp. Through much wailing and gnashing of teeth, you might say, and finding different avenues of worship for me personally. But I think what, you know, one of the things that I realized more along the lines when I was at boot camp is I came to the realization that, wow, I have really screwed up my kids. And being, so many of us in the room have played both sides of that coin. We've been the son that, you know, wants to be our, you know, daddy's favorite, if you will. And then we've been on the opposite side of that coin where we've had children that we've had to father and life just gets in the way.

You know, bosses make demands, the wives want things done around the house. And, you know, and you find that it becomes very difficult to balance a lot of that. And so that kind of leads us into our next clip. And I kind of laughed. I stumbled across this by accident this week. And it really just kind of, you know, at first it jabbed me in the side going, see, you've fallen short, dude. But then I realized that we're not machines.

We're not perfect, but God is. And so this comes out of Terminator 2. Sarah's out there in the desert with her son. Arnold comes back, you know, as the Terminator.

But this time he hasn't come back to, you know, wreak havoc and kill everybody. He's come back to protect John from the other Terminator, who's been new and improved, of course. But it was funny to hear Sarah as she's journaling, you know, and talking about this Terminator that comes through and how this Terminator has become a father. Yeah, and John's her younger son.

Yes, John is her younger son. Give me five. Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. And it would never hurt him, never shouted him or get drunk and hit him or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there.

And it would die to protect him. Of all the would be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine was the only one who measured up. It was the sane world.

It was the sanest choice. Yeah, so I go through that clip and the first thing that comes to my mind is, oh, how many times did I tell my kids I didn't have time for them? Or how many times that I have a bad day at work and, you know, they wanted to share something with me and I bit their head off or yell at them, you know, you're supposed to be in bed already, you know. So we're not perfect fathers. And it makes me realize that my father could have never been a perfect father.

He wasn't a machine. And, you know, Andy said earlier this week or earlier today, hurting people tend to hurt people. And so, you know, as a father, I have to remember to kind of take it easy on myself. Recently, I found myself in a conversation with my daughter and we were talking about them growing up. And she has an entirely different picture of who I was as a father than I have towards her. Yeah, for me, it was I had one set of kids and then later on had another set of kids, right? I've been married twice and I had two daughters. And after they were kind of grown, for the most part, I got into this message, you know, and really my heart really started to change. And so I feel like I've actually been two different fathers, you know, through it, you know, actually probably four different fathers to each kid, you know, a little different.

But I really had a lot of hurt over the mistakes, right? And so we were doing a show on God's glory, you know, that we each have a piece of God's glory, right? And so God reminded me of something about my youngest daughter, you know, about how she really carries this righteous thing that, you know, she wants things to be right in the world really well. I mean, she really mirrors that and I shared it on the show and I thought, well, I'm just going to tell her about it and send her the show, right? And I sent it to her and it opened up into this great conversation with her and her fiancé about, you know, her fiancé is asking me, what's my glory?

And I said, well, I'll look for it, you know, and we'll talk about it, right? And so it's never too late when you're walking with God as he's fathering you, he'll continue to help you father your kids even when you did mess up, you know, because we aren't perfect and life does change. And as we become closer to him, then we're going to radiate things differently to him and got to open those doors if we really let him. Yeah, I know that you guys talk so much about I radiate, you know, onto God what I got from my father. I'm one of those weird ones, I guess, because I never did. I was just more, I guess, along the apathetic lines. I just, yeah, God's God and other than that, I didn't really go any deeper. I grew up going to church basically to please my mom and was supposed to be learning something but never really did, just kind of was there. And after all these years, you know, something finally sunk in when I was listening to the truth from somebody who could exposit it much better. And finally, you know, you look back and you're like, what did I ever learn in church?

I was going all the time and I never learned anything. And I think a lot of that comes with the connection when, you know, we talk about being a screw up and we talk about agreements and stuff. But that's not the truest thing about us. And I think when we realize that we are sons and daughters of the King of Kings, that he has adopted us in this family. That's when we start making the closer connection of, you know, the son to the father in the case. But it's very immature when that connection takes place. You know, God becomes the wishing genie, if you will. God, I want this or I want that. And that's not the relationship God wants. No.

Yes, he wants to bless you. But that's not the relationship he's looking at. Yeah, there's no material objectivity in any of this. It's all relational. It's about the heart. And that's where, in being able to walk in this message, like you said, we talked last week about how all the different talks build and grow and go together as a full story.

And that's where you guys hopefully are seeing this over the last few shows, is that that's where this is. And that's what I love because when you're talking about warfare and agreements, and then you step into sonship, you know, if you break those agreements, it allows you to step in there. And just this last year, having the relationship with the Lord that I've had has just been so awesome because it's actually the closest I've ever been. And we've had one of the most craziest years, and I've got my own personal story and all that too, that you're sitting there going, Well, it'll be okay. I'm a son of God.

It's okay. Yeah, you think about, you know, how much we're all fathers, right? And our kids do things that just drive us nuts, right? I mean, obviously, you know, they drive us nuts. There's things they do that just frustrate us if we're honest, right?

Because they're learning, they're doing stupid things, you know, whatever that is. But your heart, you love them just tremendously. It overcomes all that. And then when you think about, why can't I project that on God, right? That, yeah, I mess up.

I mess up every day, right? But his capacity for love is well beyond my comprehension. And he loves me even though I'm a huge, tremendous mess up, right?

And that's okay. And he wants me. He chose me. He adopted me knowing I was a mess up, right? Not that I always have to be.

Just one quick word. I mean, we actually make ourselves out to be better than God, because we don't hold that against our children. We still love them when they mess up. But then when we mess up, we just think the last thing he wants to do is talk to us.

Well, that's the farthest thing from the truth. Yeah, sometimes we need to have more grace for ourself, like we do have for others at times. Harold, did you have something you wanted to say?

I think we've got a little bit of time here. Well, it's occurred to me that we fail as fathers in different ways. My father, I've mentioned before, he had a problem with alcohol. He failed me in the sense that he had nothing to do with teaching me about God at all. Like you said, Sam, your father didn't go to your ball games and stuff.

Mine didn't either. I didn't know what it was like to play games with my father. And so he was very lax in that respect. I failed my oldest son by being too stern in the opposite direction.

I tried to force Church down his throat and created all kind of problems. So oftentimes we can rebel against what we had and didn't want. But it takes us in the wrong direction if we're not careful. Yeah, absolutely. And we're going to talk a lot more about this in the after hours. So go to any of the podcast locations you can get Masculine Journey After Hours. If you're already listening to us on podcast, you know that. But in the meantime, go to masculinejourney.org. Register for the boot camp coming up next week, April 29th through May 2nd. Talk to you next week.