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00:00:00 Speaker: And this is the third in the series of The Father's Love series. It's entitled Defend the Fatherless. You may want to see if you can track through the scriptures. We'll read in a moment. But if you can't, just if you can't get your Bibles going that quick, just write them down and you can look them up later. Let's begin with prayer. Gracious Lord, we thank you that you have been just ushering us into the presence of the father all day long. And I thank you, Father God, for you've given me a vision of you just reaching and enfolding each one of us into your arms and taking us onto your lap and just holding us and loving us. And we know that there is none of us Who doesn't need that? And we want to become like a little child. And so enter the kingdom. And so we do. Bask in your love, Father God. Now be here to instruct us and let the Holy Spirit be our teacher. Praise you Lord. Amen. Throughout the scriptures, one of the most recurrent themes has to do with defend the fatherless, plead for the widow. So Paul and I are just going quickly to run through some scriptures for you. The first is Deuteronomy ten seventeen through nineteen. For the Lord your God is the God of gods, and the Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God who does not show partiality nor take a bribe. He executes justice for the orphan and the widow and shows his love for the alien by giving him food and clothing. So show your love for the alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt. Psalm ten verses twelve through eighteen. Arise, O Lord, O God, lift up thy hand. Do not forget the afflicted. Why has the wicked spurned God? He has said to himself, thou wilt not require it. Thou hast seen it. For thou hast beheld mischief and vexation to take it into thy hand. The unfortunate commits himself to thee. Thou hast been the helper of the orphan. Break the arm of the wicked, and the evildoers. Seek out his wickedness until thou dost find none. The Lord is king forever and ever. Nations have perished from his land. O Lord, thou hast heard the desire of the humble. Thou wilt strengthen their heart. Thou wilt incline thine ear to vindicate the orphan and the oppressed. That man who is of the earth may cause terror no more. Psalm sixty eight four through six sing to God, sing praises to his name. Lift up a song for him who rides through the deserts, whose name is the Lord, and exalt before him a father of the fatherless and a judge for the widows is God in his holy habitation. God makes a home for the lonely. He leads out the prisoners into prosperity. Only the rebellious dwell in a parched land. Psalm one hundred and forty six, verses five through nine. How blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever, who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free. The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord raises up those who are bowed down. The Lord loves the righteous. The Lord protects the strangers. He supports the fatherless and the widow, but he thwarts the way of the wicked. Proverbs fifteen twenty five the Lord will tear down the house of the proud, but he will establish the boundary of the widow. You know, in this day and age in which men want to appear magnanimous and even more liberal and kind than God, it has become fashionable to think of all religions as similar. And what difference does it make if you believe in this God or that God? But Jesus said, ye shall know them by their fruits. My study in seminary, among other things, was in foreign missions. And I would report to you that wherever Christian missionaries have gone and wherever the church has gone, hospitals and orphanages have been built. And here is the startling fact in no other faith, no other religion on the face of the globe has there been a building of hospitals and orphanages. Only Christians have built orphanages around the world. Isaiah one sixteen and seventeen wash yourselves. Selves. Make yourselves clean. Remove the evil of your deeds from my sight. Cease to do evil. Learn to do good. Seek justice. Reprove the ruthless. Defend the orphan. Plead for the widow. We could read many, many other scriptures that have to do with the calling of God's people to defend the orphan and plead for the widow, the prophet thundered, when Israel failed to provide for the fatherless and the widow. James one twenty seven so that we will see that it is carried forth in the New Testament as well. This is pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father, to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. Throughout the Old Testament, provision was very carefully made for widows. When a woman lost her husband. Call it out, body of Christ. What was to happen next? What married the next brother? The next brother was responsible. If he would not marry her and provide issue in his brother's name, he was disgraced. You remember that Boaz could not have Ruth until the other man refused her, and then he could marry her. So very careful provision was made. Provision was made another way, and that was that all tithes were to be brought to the temple, and everything was to be tithed. Wheat, corn, whatever the produce, even the first of the lambs, or the first goat, or the first oxen, or the first donkey was to be brought to the temple. There it would be cared for by the temple priest, and it was to be there for the use of the poor. Anyone who needed food. Any fatherless or alien person could come to the temple and take what food he needed, because we in America have not tithed. Therefore, government has filled the vacuum with all the fallacies of the social security and aid to dependent children. If you wonder what is wrong with all of our governmental doings trying to care for dependent children, it is because the church failed to do it that the vacuum was filled by the state, that careful provision was made. You remember when Jesus said, you'll find a colt tied? If anyone says, why are you taking the colt? You are to respond. The Lord has need of it. And that was the response which was always to be made when you took an animal to use from the temple. The Lord has need of it. Any person who had need of it represented the Lord, and that's why that was tied there. You remember that the first battle in the church's history, the first disagreement was over what RM distribution to the widows. The Greeks said, hey, you're forgetting to distribute to our widows. Remember? Also, when there was no near relative to marry a widow and care for her, then the city elders carefully provided. What they did was to tack up a message in the city gate, inviting men to apply for the position of being an overseer, and several men would apply, and it would be like candidating as pastors for a church. They would present their credentials, they would answer questions, and then the elders would make a decision. And that is why you find in the scripture Jesus saying, who for a pretense make long prayers and devour widows houses. Some of the candidates would come, and when under the test, they would make long prayers so that the elders would think this is a pious, good man. Then appoint that one to take care of the widows finances, and then they would plunder the widows house. Now what I have to tell you is a sad thing. Counseling, as we have for twenty five years, the grief we have on our hearts is that very, very often widows and divorcees come to us and the money they received has been plundered. And do you know who has done the plundering? Christian businessmen, men and their church that they trusted. Almost universally we have almost come to the place of saying to a widow. Don't trust a Christian in your church. Go to a layperson whose heart is true. And the church must hang its head in shame. And the church must repent, because there's nothing which brings the judgment of God more quickly, more sternly than when we plunder a widow's house instead of taking care of the widow as we should. The church is tardy in taking up its responsibility to appoint for women a deacon or two, or a elder or two, or an elder and wife team over any single woman for whatever reason, whether divorced or whether widowed. Every single woman raising children should have given to her a couple. And that couple advise her that couple keep her from making financial decisions. What happens is that men come in and they say, here's this good financial opportunity. You've got to make it right now. And they make her make a decision. She makes the wrong one. They plunder her house. But if she were in consultation with wise Christian businessmen, the wise man could say, don't make that investment and protect her from being plundered. And second, what happens to Christian or non-Christian women is that before the husband dies or before they're divorced, they move about in the social circles. They're accepted. They have a good time there, visiting with all their friends. Now the husband dies or she's divorced. She goes now to the same meetings and she feels like a fifth thumb. But worse than that, now, every one of her women friends she recognizes is protecting her own husband from her. Every one of them is watching, and she is now suspect. And she feels it. And then she feels that she must not go where she used to go. And the church must overcome that. The church must be the kind of place where that woman doesn't become an outcast. And the same thing happens to men. Because men feel the same weight when they've lost a mate. There are a lot of singles groups that are being formed in many of the churches, and I don't mean to put singles groups down. I think they fulfill a good purpose, but they don't do the same thing for the single parent within the church that a mixed group will provide. A singles group is not a family. You don't find families made up of all singles. You find mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and uncles and aunts and cousins in a family group, and a woman who is raising her children alone, or a man raising his children alone need that kind of emotional support in a family. When we say that it's good to appoint a husband and wife team to look over, um, a young woman who has lost her husband, that does not turn her back into being a child. They may give advice. She still makes her own decisions, but they provide the kind of input she's not likely to go and bother somebody, knock at their door and insist on their time. But if it's given in the first place, she knows it's hers. Then she doesn't feel like she's an intrusion, and she can really benefit from that. The church needs to become aware much more than it has of the needs of children within the congregations. You know that in the public school classrooms, the greater percentage of the children are from broken homes, and it affects the ability of the teacher to discipline the class. It affects the whole quality of the classroom studies because these are hurting children. They've been wounded deeply in their spirits when their families have broken. And the Lord is calling the churches to be healing instruments. I know of some individuals who go to public school playgrounds to be there for children at lunchtime, and I don't know if they even know what they're accomplishing by being there. But children will relate to somebody they can look up to. And if mother is so busy at home that she can't give the hugging affection that the child needs for the healing of the spirit, if the father is off the scene and he doesn't have opportunity to heal the wounded spirit of his own child, the child can identify with people who are willing to give time. Grandmother, grandfather. Figures. And the Lord can touch in very real ways and restore wounded hearts. All of us are adopted by the father. Every one of us has suffered some kind of wounding. The adopted child has been wounded more deeply than any other. This little booklet that we have available, New Life for Your Adopted child, was written at the insistence three years of insistence by an adoption agency in Seattle because they said that parents come wanting children so badly, they've been praying that they might have a child in their family, and then they adopt the child, and they're so eager to pour out love, but the child is unable to receive it. They'll say, I try to hold him. I try to love him and hug him, but he pushes me away. Won't receive. Can't believe that he's loved. And some of those children will steal and some children will lie. And they say, Maybe God didn't intend for us to be parents after all. Maybe we've made a mistake because we're having so much trouble with our children. And so they wanted a booklet that they could put into the hands of adoptive parents to say, there's healing. Here's the way of understanding that your child was so wounded in his spirit before you ever got him. It isn't what you're doing wrong. But here's something more that you can do with your understanding. You can handle your own frustration and keep offering love with your prayers. You can invite Jesus to touch those deep places of woundedness in the spirit of the child, all the way back to the beginning of the child's life. And you can heal him to the point that he's able to reach out and receive what you have to give in simple ways. In our churches, we can touch the wounded spirits of little children if you're aware of them, and especially you daddies if you're aware of them when they come out of the Sunday school classrooms and you just take a moment to say, let me see that little picture you drew. Isn't that beautiful? I'm so proud of you. You did such a wonderful job on that. If fathers in the church will look at these little children who don't have parents, and they'll just scoop them up in their arms and hug them whenever they have the opportunity. The Lord Jesus will use that opportunity to minister to that wounded spirit. Those are simple ways of ministering, and we don't have to get complicated as the body of Christ. We just need to be tuned in to needs and willing to risk ourselves with those who have need. Not so much for speaking of the church's responsibility to minister to those who are real widows and real orphans. But there is another sense in which the same word applies to every one of us, because there is a sense in which we all are fatherless children when we are born anew. We now have a father, and that father is God, and yet none of us can physically sit in his lap. None of us can physically sit down and talk with that father. He's away, and we are all our fatherless children. And when we are born anew, our sins are washed away, and we are dealt a death blow. But not every part of us has come to that death. We have died. And so we are now babies and going through the process of wrestling with everything we were before we received Jesus. And while we're in that process, we need to be parented. We need brothers and sisters, and we need parents in the faith. We need to be held in arms of love. And that means that all of us need to be in a small group. Because you cannot love three hundred people. You can only meet and love eight, ten, or twelve only with them if you get with them once a week in a small group and you're really committed to them, and you wouldn't miss that meeting for anything, and they're your opening of your hearts. Only there is that little child within you being ministered to and touched and healed. And the Lord said, except you become like unto a little child, ye shall not enter the kingdom. A few years ago we had a small group going. I think the only person, uh, in this room who was in that group was Tom Bates back here. Yeah. And Bruce Austin, these two can remember being in that group. Ah, and Mary Mott. So I got three verifiers for the stories that I'll tell you. We formed that group, and we've covenanted that we would meet with one another once a week, and we covenanted to be open to one another. And we would not hide from one another. We would speak the truth to one another and face one another. We would love one another. We would carry one another in the heart. And after we had met for two or three months, some in the group, all of us in the group were saying, but some voiced it and they said, you know, this is the only place that I can be. Anything that I am, I can relax, I can let down, I can blow off, and I'm still going to be loved and accepted. If I did that at work, I'd lose my job. If I did that with my friends, they'd quit me. But here I can be the worst. And you'll still love and accept me. You see, when we come to the Lord, we are to do what first Peter two one says, you have been born anew. Now desire the sincere milk of the word, that you may grow thereby. And by feeding on the word we grow. But as we grow, we also must be confronted, healed, prayed for, dealt with, carried in the hearts of others. And our group became such that. I remember one time we were meeting in Mike's home and Mike got all out of sorts, and Mike got up and went in his bedroom and lay down on the bed, and I, we all said, if he's going to be like that, we'll just go on without him. So we tried to worship and pray. I couldn't worship and pray. Finally I got up and I said, I can't, I can't do it. And I walked in his bedroom and I sat on his bed and I said, Mike, I know it's your house and you can order me out of here, but I'm not going to obey you on that, and I'm not going to leave you. You can spit in my face, you can hurl insults at me, but I'm not going to leave you lying on this bed. I'm going to be right here. I'm going to love up on you till you come out of that. Pretty soon, everybody else had filtered in the room until we were all gathered around his bed, just loving up on Mike until he came up out of his hurt and his anger and his depression and came back to life. I remember one night, one in the morning, got a call from Tom Bates. He had just gone by Patch's house and there. Yeah, he's nodding out. And patch, what had happened was that he had been divorced before, and he wasn't able to pay his child support payments, and he had just gotten a notice from the government they were going to arrest him. And so he was going to flee out. And he had in the, in the yard a, a U-Haul rental. And he was packing things in at one at night. Tom called us. We called everybody else in the group, one in the morning. We all got up. By the time we got there, it was two o'clock. By the time we got there, the dining room was all empty and we all gathered around. Patch sat him down in the middle. We're all standing, sitting on the bare floor, leaning up against the walls, and we're saying to patch, why were you going to flee out without telling us? Says, well, it's my I'm going to jail. You aren't. Well, Pats, you can't leave. We're your brothers. Well, if I don't leave, I'm going to jail. I haven't got any other choice, Pats. You do have a choice. And right there. That group that night got up three thousand dollars. We didn't have the money, but we got up three thousand dollars between us. Tom had to carry a lot of that by himself. Well, we got that money up and we paid that debt and Pat stayed. And from then on, he knew that he didn't didn't have brothers in lip service. He had brothers who would pay the price that brothers who would stand there for him. And we had a lot of occasions like that where one brother after another was hurt or one sister after another was hurt. And we went and we went. Lauren and I were called out late one night and Margaret. just called and said, I think she's possessed. She's just babbling strange things. And so Lauren and I came out to her house. When we came in, we found out that Margaret had gone into a complete regression. She was five years old, and she was just babbling. Oh, I'm so cold. Doesn't anybody love me? Won't anybody like me? In a little girl's voice. So Lauren and I sat there one thirty, two thirty. We're just visiting with that little girl, and we're telling that little girl that we're going to love her. We're telling her that the whole group is going to love her, and nobody's going to leave her. And it's going to be alright. Then there came a kind of a change. She kind of blinked her eyes and she opened her eyes and she said, oh, John and Lauren, how long have you been here? And we said, Margaret, we've been here for an hour and a half. She had come out of her regression, but in the middle of that, she, her little child, learned she wasn't going to be alone. She wasn't going to be deserted. She was going to be loved. And she began to open in the group then and get stronger in the Lord. That's what we need. We're all little children, and we all need that kind of ministry to happen in the group. I think this would be a good point to insert something that we all need to understand, and that is that ministry goes on and on and on. When you open yourself to prayer in ministry groups such as you have today. And I've heard that some very beautiful things have been happening sometimes that will take care of it. It depends on whether you're ripe for an overnight miracle most of the time. What that does, that initial prayer is to give the Lord entree into a depth of your heart where you have not invited him before and the initial work is done. But there's an ongoing work that is the beginning of something that is primarily in the Lord's hands, and he will accomplish it. And we read that in Philippians one verse six, for I am confident of this very thing, that he who began a good work in you will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus the Lord is in charge, because you've invited him to be there. But there is a necessary walking out of the healing that you receive. And when the Lord knows it is good for you, he will ask you to exercise a discipline. And usually it's good for us to walk in a discipline and we resist that. We live in a push button age. We want everything to happen to us instantly, if not before. We don't want to go through the pain and discipline of learning to walk anew. And the Lord speaks to that in the sixth chapter of Romans. He says, even so, consider yourselves to be dead to sin. Another version says, reckon yourselves as dead, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body, that you should obey its lusts, and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness. But present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. Now that decision about where you're going to present yourself and where you're not going to present yourself, is one that you make again and again and again. Before anybody prayed for you, that something in your heart be dealt with, brought to the cross, healed. You practiced many years acting in the old way. It's a part of your automatic response system when you pray. The Lord breaks the power of that old thing to push you, control you. But you're going to have to catch yourself in the power of the Holy Spirit when the old thing triggers into you. It'll trigger. You may go into instant gear before you think about it. But you have the Holy Spirit there to make you aware. And he's faithful. And you have a flicker of a moment to decide what you're going to do about what just triggered you. And you have the power in the Lord Jesus to say no. That old thing doesn't have any more claim on me. I choose not to act in that way. Lord, I give myself to you as an instrument of righteousness. Empower me now to walk in the new way. And then you take the first step forward. And the more we exercise that kind of a discipline, the more the new way becomes a part of our new automatic response system that belongs to our newborn life in Christ. But let's not make what God does cheap. Let's not refuse to cooperate with him. Let's be willing to exercise the discipline. Now I'm reading from Ephesians chapter four. Verse fourteen, you know, all of us are still bound up in childish ways. We think we're all grown up. We think we have it together. We've received a lot of ministry. We've given a lot of ministry until we're pushed a little bit too hard and then we find, oh, yes, we still have some of the childish ways in us. And I don't think we're ever going to get beyond needing some ministry in this life. We are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves, and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming, but speaking the truth to one another in love. We are to grow up in all aspects into him who is the head, even Christ, from whom the whole body being fitted and held together by that which every joint supplies, according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love. Speaking the truth to one another in love. That's what we're to do in our ministry groups, here at our in our churches, wherever we are. Now, we're not talking about confronting one another. We have seen so many groups do destructive things because they get the idea that we're to call it to one another's attention when we're acting in childish ways, and we're to let the other fellow know so he can do something about it. And so they sit around and get into a, a critical kind of exercise, just picking, picking, picking. And what that does is reinforce any wounding that the person has had in the heart about a critical parent, because here you got a whole bunch of them. Speaking the truth to one another in love is identifying sensitively with the person according to his need to receive ministry, according to his readiness to receive ministry according to the invitation that he has given. And then we speak according to the way the Lord gives us to speak when he calls us to speak in his nature and by his power. We have a couple of clues in Scripture about how we're to speak to one another in love. Galatians six one brethren, even if a man is caught in a trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness, each one looking to yourself, lest you to be tempted. And in John the fifth chapter. The nineteenth verse. Jesus therefore answered and was saying to them, truly, truly, I say to you, The son can do nothing of himself unless it is something he sees the father doing for whatever the father does these things, the son also does in like manner. So that's our touchstone. We may see something wrong in our brother. We may see that he needs to hear a word of correction. But what we have to say is, is this what the father is doing and saying right now, at this moment? Or have I seen this because I have a critical nature? Or have I seen this because the Lord wants me to intercede for this person to pave the ground for some direct speaking. If Jesus the Son did nothing but what he saw the father doing, then it's very presumptuous of us to do something that we don't see the father doing. So we have to walk close enough to the father to know what he's doing. A lot of times the truth isn't spoken in love. It's just simply spoken in this group that John was talking about earlier. I experienced some of that, and it was my opportunity to cop out from what I heard, because they didn't do it right. I can remember being backed into a corner one night and this great big guy, not Tom Bates, somebody else. There's a great big guy had his finger right in my nose, and he was wagging it at me, and he was telling me what was wrong with me. And this happened several different times. I remember one time they said, I feel sorry for you. You don't know what it is to have a savior. And I thought, what on earth are you talking about? I was raised as a little Baptist girl. I knew what it was to have a savior. From the time I was eleven years old. And here you guys are trying to tell me this. And they kept telling me that. And then they confronted me about my defensiveness and all related subjects, and they weren't nice. I mean, there was nothing gentle in the the attitude. This big guy got some help, you know. And I just felt really cornered. And I could have said they didn't do what the father was telling them to do. They didn't do it in a spirit of gentleness. Therefore, I don't have to hear it. But the Lord spoke to my heart, and he let me know that I needed to hear the truth that was coming through them, in spite of the way that they were doing it. And that's what we all need to hear. What is God speaking to us through cracked vessels? You know, God doesn't have anybody but cracked vessels to work with. So we need to hear the voice of God despite what or how the ministry comes. John used to be a very clever, private individual. Um, he's still working on this, but. He had an unusual talent for seeming to receive ministry that was coming to him, but very deftly turning it around inside out and upside down and dumping it back on the people. So he was forever the teacher, forever the minister. And that was his own special way of fleeing. Bruce is sitting back there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. Tom and Bruce back there. You're not supposed to say amen there. But again and again, they had not only to speak the truth to human love, but to hit him with a soft club until they really cracked through him. Just saying to him, how come you always wind up the teacher? You're. You say, you're so tired. You're borne down by the ministry, but you don't let us minister to you. And John finally saw it, and he has to be reminded. Now, most of the things that we have received healing for in our heart, we have to be reminded of. And I can't tell you where it is. You can look it up in a concordance. But there's a scripture that speaks about that. It says, The Holy Spirit will teach you all things. And the Holy Spirit will remind you of all things. And oftentimes, his reminding comes through the strangest sources, the people that we would least likely choose to minister to us. But it's God speaking for our good. Now, finally, in this lesson, I wish you would turn with me to Isaiah sixty six seven. While you're doing that, let me ask you the question. Have you ever wondered why, when prophecies have been given and meeting after meeting after meeting, that the church is going to rise up in this day in awesome power. Why don't we see it? Why haven't we risen into the power that's been prophesied? Here, I want to give you the answer. It's right here in Scripture. Before she travailed she brought forth. Before her pain came, she gave birth to a boy. Now you know that that's about the mother of our Lord and Jesus. It's about the Israel Israelite nation and the coming of Jesus. The Israelite nation didn't travail. They didn't seek the birth. God just gave Jesus, and Mary gave birth to a boy. Okay, but now watch how it turns not to be about Israel and Jesus, but about us. Who has heard such a thing? Who has seen such things. Can a land be born in one day? Can a nation be brought forth all at once? And we learn in first Peter two the tenth verse that we are that holy nation of God. That's the nation which is to be born, the church. And the question is, can it be born all at once? Now listen to the answer. As soon as Zion Travailed, she also brought forth her sons. The church has not yet travailed. Therefore, we haven't brought forth the mature sons of God. What does it mean to travail? Galatians four nineteen. Saint Paul said, with whom I am again in travail, until Christ be formed in you. What we need to have is small groups, and in small groups the Holy Spirit causes us so much to fall in love with one another, with those aliens, with those hurting, fatherless children that their life is now on our hearts. So much that we say with Saint Paul, if you stand, I live in verse. If you fall, I fall. We need to be so much in love with one another that we are spending ourselves to give birth to each other. And since the church has been fellowshipping the back of each other's necks instead of really face to face, loving one another, we haven't entered into travail because we have an intergender travail we haven't brought forth the mature sons. See, Paul and I are being brought forth in some wisdom. But how did that happen? It happened because guys in our group carried us, yearned over us, prayed over us, Carried us again and again when we couldn't carry ourselves. We're brought forth and given birth in the church. The church hasn't come into the fullness of power because we haven't been willing to let go of rugged individualism. We have been trained in rugged individualism, which is not Christian, and we've deified it as though it were godly and rugged. Individualism says, I'm my own man. I'm a self-made man. Well, I guess I only hurt myself. What do I do? Don't bother nobody else but me. No, that's not your business. That's my business. You keep your nose out of my business, and I'll keep my nose out of your business. That's all rot. Sheer rot. There is no such thing as a private sin. The sin of any brother destroys every other brother. The blessing of every brother blesses every other brother. Whether we like it or not, we are interdependent. Because if one suffers, all suffer. And if one rejoices, I rejoice. But we haven't been willing to let go of our private life and really open it up and give it into the hands of the brothers and sisters. And when we do really get into that and really become corporate, then there is going to come forth a mature church and just listen to the rest of it. And this is where we'll close. Shall I bring to the point of birth and not give delivery? Says the Lord, or shall I, who gives delivery? Shout the womb, says your God. Be joyful with Jerusalem, and rejoice for her all you who love her. That's for the church. Be exceedingly glad with her. All you who mourn over her. Haven't you been mourning over the weakness of the church? But be glad for her that you may nurse and be satisfied with her comforting breath that in a second. Be delighted with her Bountiful bosom. For thus says the Lord, behold, I extend peace to her like a river, and the glory of the nations like an overflowing stream. And ye shall be nursed, you shall be carried on the hip, and handled on the knees, as one whom his mother comforts. So I will comfort you, and you shall be comforted in Jerusalem. Then you shall see this, and your heart shall be glad, and your bones shall flourish like the new grass. And the hand of the Lord shall be made known to his servants, and he shall be indignant toward his enemies. Then he goes on to say that then the Lord will bring judgment, and then the church will be that fire that will go over the whole world. That's what's needed. We've got a bunch of fatherless children in the churches who need to be held and loved in close fellowship. If you aren't in a small group, get there. And if in that small group you're just playing games, cut it out and start being real. Open up the thing that bothers you to one another. After we were in that group for a while, I don't know whether Thomas, Bruce, or Mary might justify the same way, but my testimony is this that if there was anything in my life which the brothers and sisters in that group didn't know to that degree, I was uncovered and I had no protection. You understand that if the brothers and sisters knew about it, they could pray for me. If they didn't, they couldn't. So I don't want any secrets from the group. And I don't know that I that there was anything in my life that the brothers and sisters didn't know. After a while. Let's bow in prayer. Heavenly Lord, We confess that in both areas we have been lax as a church. We have not appointed elders and wives for the sake of thee, the destitute and the widows and the divorcees. Forgive us, Lord, and prompt us to action. We confess, Lord, that we have been too private. But we have not been willing to open up and share with the small group. Lord, get us there, cause us to carry one another so that we can bring forth the mature sons of God. Cause it to happen, Lord. Amen. That whenever we've opened up this subject, one of the questions we get is, okay, how do we get from here to there? How do we get small groups going? And Lauren wants to answer that question. I'm not sure I can tell you how to get small groups going really quickly. My intent is a little bit wide of that. We brought up a few minutes ago the admonition that the church needs to appoint, um, men to watch over the widows and orphans. I don't like the word appoint. And the reason that I don't is because that's a kind of an institutional word. And if you go home and you get your church to institutionally appoint men to watch over widows, and you assign men to watch over widows, you will end up with ravaged lives. Now what I'm what I'm going to say about appointing men isn't as well baked as I as I'd like it to be, because it was popping off in my mind. I was looking at I was looking at what we've done in our church. And I'll tell you the story behind this. About eight months ago, our denomination encouraged our church to do what they call a CMI. That's a congregational membership inventory, and we kind of resist almost anything the denomination says we ought to do, you know, because it's kind of a lot of times. And so in our foolishness, we decided we will humor the denomination. We will do this CMI. And it turned out to be a very good thing. You know what we found out that we hadn't really realized, um, to its fullest extent was that we had in our church more than twice the number of divorcees and singles, percentage wise, than there are in our census area. And so I've begun quietly, subconsciously, to brood over why that is. And the denomination came to me about four months ago and they said, you you've got all these singles, you got all these divorcees in your church. How are you doing that? And I can stammer a little bit and they say, well, we don't have a program. So I begin to wonder what we did. And some of the answers that I've come up with. Are that key to it. And we said this so often is the home fellowship program. But that's not all there is to it. Before there's a home fellowship program, there has to be the nurturing of the men. You have to be giving men what they need. You have to be putting men in positions of authority, nurturing them to those positions, spending time with them. I can think of well, there's some of some of the elders in our church are here, and Cliff and Audrey are over there to the left. They come into our church about three months after we opened, and I can remember that, especially in the first couple of years, they bent my ear and they bent my ear and they bent my ear, and they'd ask me a question and I'd answer it, and they'd have another question after that and just squeeze me for all the juice I had. And now have become a place where widows and orphans come. I can look around this audience and see some singles that are all the time in Cliff and Audrey's home, squeezing them for all the juice they have. Jim, Tiffany's sitting out there, Jim and Marsha. And their home is a place where a lot of the singles will come and squeeze. And I've spent a lot of time with Jim. I remember times when Jim was so low, he'd come over to the house, we'd get in the car, we'd go out to drive in the weeds, and he didn't even know what he wanted to talk about. All he knew was he was so low he couldn't see, you know, and we talk about that. And a lot of the other guys and families and couples in the church, we've done that with some of them. I haven't done it so much. One on one, some of it. We've just done it through being fellowship together until by sowing that nurture into men and into couples. You have people who then become capable of sowing that in to other people. So I guess what I'm saying is, you begin to throw that nurture around, and then you begin to see what kind of a crop rises. And what happens is that you get people who, because of what's been created in them, attract people to themselves. Because they inspire confidence. We've never had to appoint men to oversee widows in our church. That's never been done. But I can list eight or nine of them to whom the singles and the widows regularly come because relationships are established. Trust comes out of those hearts toward those people. And Katie Cranford sitting down here, she and I have a long and checkered history. And I remember Katie. Can I tell a bit of your story? Okay. Now, how much of it do I tell? Katie came into the church about four years ago. The day it opened. Yeah. Okay. The day it opened four years ago. She was a mess. And she was a mess. Largely because of the mess she was married to. And I watched Katie go through confusion. After confusion. She'd come and cuddle up under my arm and get loved on. And then pretty soon, the husband would begin to get weird and Katie trot after him, be weird with him, and begin to say weird things about me. This can sound crazy to you, but finally, one of the most blessed things that ever happened to her happened. He left and she began to get well. And now our relationship is such that there are two of us that Katie likes to come to. Katie comes to just when she needs some balance, and then she needs some wholeness. She'll come and hug up on me when she needs the little kid in her to get loved, and then she'll come hug up on God when she needs the teenager and her to get loved. And she knows that we're safe kind of people. But over a period of years, I just refused to be turned off by Katie unless I was talking to Beth, my wife, and then I would say, Carl, darn her. But my commitment to Katie was to be there for her no matter what she did to me. Now, that's a history. Because she knew that I was a safe man who wouldn't violate her church, didn't appoint Katie to me. And people that come to Jim Tiffany, I didn't appoint them to Jim, Tiffany and the people who come to Cliff. I didn't appoint them to Cliff. It happened because some nurture was given in the church. It was sown into the fellowship and where it began to ripen. Trust for trustworthiness began to come out of the hearts of men and couples. And so singles began to have places where they could come. Artificial relationships very quickly sour. And I think that's why you had Pharisees giving pretense in long prayers so they could devour the widows houses. The institutional thing allowed them to do that. Now, the home fellowships were good in the nurturing of those singles because it did create family. It created a place, um, where there was safety, where there was a place to share. And we worked just by the grace of God, not because we set out to do it, but we've worked very hard at, um, not making a distinction between those who are married and those who aren't. Um, Mike Durkin, who's not here today, is one of our elders. He's another one of those one of those safe men has the permission of his wife to minister to a lot of singles. You come in to church on a Sunday morning, you're likely to see somebody tucked under Mike's arm. Safe place. Earned relationship. We try to put men in leadership of of home fellowships because of the need of, particularly the single women to find that kind of nurture. We have two groups that are led by women in those groups. We've tried to make sure there are strong men because they undergird that woman who's leading, and they are a place where advice can be gotten. One of the Katie leads one of our groups today. We have another woman. The other woman leading the group is one who's lived through hell in the last couple of years. Regularly, she beats a path to my door, telephone in the office and a couple of others that she bounces things off of. But we didn't. We didn't set out to create that program institutionally. Um, the nurture, nurture the men to do this. Wait to see what kind of crop rises And don't don't start assigning widows to men who aren't ripe. You'll know them by their fruits. Wait until you see the fruit. Then bless it. Now, first question from the group here, when you were talking about the father giving the blessing to the children. When a father refuses to give a daughter her blessing at her marriage, uh, what can be done for the daughter and healing? Both she and her husband are very bitter in the case that I'm thinking of. It used to be that a couple would not even get married if the husband refused the blessing. They would then conclude there could be no blessing on their marriage so they wouldn't marry. It was that crucial. I do not say in this confused age that we should return to that. I think it would create chaos. That's ideal. And I hope we go back to the place where that gets feasible. Right now, that's not feasible. What then do you do? You must then counsel with the couple to enable them to forgive the father. And then we have in our ministry put blessing on marriages when the father didn't know to do it. We have assumed that position. We feel a little guilty, as though we're usurping the rightful father's place. But in Christ we are fathers, and so we may place a blessing when he would not do it. That's about the only way I know how to answer that. It isn't the best, but it's what we've done. It occurs to me that if the Scripture says the unbelieving partner is consecrated through and sanctified through the believing partner, else your children would be unclean. But as it is, they are holy. That if the father is not giving his blessing. Blessing for one reason or another. But the mother feels that she can put her blessing on that. Then I think she could go ahead and put the blessing on it on the couple, and the Lord would honor that. The beginning teachings that you have is how the sins of the father are passed down from generation to generation to generation. And many of us now having gone through a lot of healing and, and, you know, having been healed by the Holy Spirit, unfortunately, we weren't healed before our children picked up some of these same sins. What can we do with our children in two circumstances? A lot of us still have our children in our home, and there's a lot of us that have our children out of our home now, where we don't have access to them. What can we do in those situations? I think our discovery come when the children are gone, and now the Lord shows us something, and it's too late to sit down and talk with them. What we've found is that if we ourselves repent before the Lord, and we ourselves talk with others in confession and repentance, and the Lord deals fully with the heart, we can believe the message which was given to Cornelius. If you, the centurion, if you will believe you and all your household will be saved. We can believe that as we are cleansed, that light of God will flow to the children. And our forgiveness means that already the mercies of God are flowing to the children. Now that isn't the best. The best would be if we could sit down with the children, talk with them, eat some humble pie, make confession, ask for forgiveness. So if we can't do that, we can at least get our own heart clear and believe that already the Lord is changing the children and we can pray that prayer stopping the descent of harm on the cross so it doesn't come to our children. And we can believe that, and it will affect them for good. But if we can talk with them, eat humble pie, lay it all out, let them know how we goofed. Many times, as we have learned things, we have come to Lauren and we've come to Mark who are here, and we've said, we see now how we blew it. And we sat down. We prayed about it. We've gotten forgiveness. Uh, I'll give you an example. Long after Amy left the home, what was happening was that people, men were coming and beaming in on her, and Ron was getting angry about it. So we dealt. She's a beautiful gal, and we dealt then with those things in Ron, which expected her to be unfaithful from his experience with his mother, but after that was dealt with, then he continued to say to Amy, no, there's something in there. And then one day she came to us, to me, and she said, dad, I found out that people are coming to me and beaming in on me wrongly, and I'm causing it and it's your fault. And so I said, would you lay that out for me? And she said, you know, you could never give me a compliment directly if I look beautiful. You couldn't say it. So what you did. I used to overhear you at church talking to the men at the church about your beautiful daughter. And so I learned to get my compliments and affirmation from other men out there. So what I was doing was beaming out to all the other men to get affirmation from them, and they would take it. I was flirting for sexual reasons and they came on in wrong ways. So I said, oh, I see, I did do that, I repent, please forgive me. And then we prayed for the healing of that. Ever since then, men don't beam in on her wrongly because she isn't seeking for affirmation out there, because now she has it from her dad. But you see, we have that. Of course, what you were talking about, Tom, is when you can't have that kind of talk, I understand that. So all you can do is to repent before the Lord. Intercede before the Lord every day for the children. Uh. Two questions. The first one is I've seen a correlation between in counseling women with permit. Excuse me, PMS. Um, I've seen a correlation between that and, um, a bad. Premenstrual syndrome is, um. Well. The the body. The woman's body doesn't produce the progesterone. And because of that, there's all kinds of side effects such as, uh, depression, um, psychotic breaks with reality, uh, suicidal tendencies, so forth and so on. Anyway, I've seen a correlation between PMS and, um, a bad father image. Do you have do you have any more insight on that? Yes. Do you want to answer that? Do you want me to? Let me answer the first part about the father. If the father affirms his daughter and affirms her as a daughter, then she feels that she's beautiful. She is able to accept her body. able to accept with equanimity the changing cycles of her body, but to the degree that the father does not make her feel like his princess to that degree, she may be at war with her own body, and especially if she has been trying from her birth on to please her daddy by being like a boy. Then when menstrual cycles come on, it's affronting to her because she can't keep up the delusion that she can be her daddy's boy. John already said what I would have said about that, so I'll tack on something that's related to that. And that is that many women have difficulty in childbirth for the same reason that they've been unable to accept themselves as feminine, as being holy and clean, and all of their bodily, bodily functions being holy and clean. And so there's a kind of a scrambling the body responds to what's in our spirit and what's in our heart and what's in our mind. And if we're confused about our own sexuality and we we really don't appreciate our own life enough, then we aren't really going to wholly want to bring forth life. We're going to have tension in us, and that keeps our body from doing what it was really designed to do, not only concerning PMS, but many other psychosomatic illnesses. What we have found is that we always want to ask the questions such as, did you happen or were you planned? What number child were you? Was it a good time for the parents to have a child? Did they want a boy or a girl? And you were being formed as the other sex? And when we do that, what we're looking for is any kind of message given through the mother's womb into the baby in the womb. I'm not wanted. I'm a mistake. I ought not to be here. And whenever that has come across to the baby in the womb, then the ability of the child to accept being a body is affected. And when that's affected, then all the bodily functions are affected and you have many psychosomatic ailments. I wanted to add one more layer to the PMS thing, and I wanted its live to me right now because it's happening right now. Little girls are just sweet little girls, and at least mine have been pretty even emotionally. They don't have high ups and low downs until they begin to change. Uh, my daughter Charity is now ten and about two thirds. She's begun to bud. And what that means is that her emotions are up, and then her emotions are down. And there are times when, um, I'll be sitting watching television in the family room and I can hear her crying in her room, just quietly, and she's trying to choke it back. And I'll go in and I'll. I'll say, Charity, what's the matter? I don't know. Would you just like to cry? Yes. And she'll sob on me and sob on me and sob on me. And I'll just sit and rock her in front of the television set and just hold her and love her. And the point of all that is that when her body begins to change and the chemistry begins to flow, and her emotions begin to become a little bit weird, if she learns that daddy's a safe place to be, if she learns that that's okay, and that that's a lovable place, then later in life, when the chemistry changes once a month, that's not the end of the world. I'm still loved, still cared for. I'm okay. My emotions aren't ultimate because my dad accepts me. Any other questions? Do you have another one, John? Another one? Yeah. Another question is, um, there's been a teaching, um, that, uh, in spanking a child, you need to, uh, break his will and not his spirit. And that. And what they're propounding is to spank the child until, um. It's not a an angry cry, but it's a a sob. Could you comment on that? In the main, we don't agree with that teaching. We do not believe that the function of spanking is to break the will or to break the spirit, especially not to break the spirit. However, there should be a stopping place. There is a contest which goes on between father and son, which the son must not win, and if he wins, he will be insecure and he'll be a bully and he'll be a a trauma to a lot of people, because he must know there's a stopping place. Now, I don't think that means to break his will. I just don't like that word to break the will. I think it means that the will has to be harnessed or the will has to learn. There's a stopping place. Uh, I think the best answer on that one could be given by Lauren. If you talk about what you did in your battle with Nathan. My son Nathan is, is is a or was or still is a classic strong willed child. Um, takes after his father. Yes. Somehow I knew that was coming. Yep. And there were kind of two episodes that are illustrative here. The first one is that whatever I used to tell Nathan to do, he would find a way to do or not to do. He would find a way to do. And he used to become more and more angry with him. And each time he'd commit the same sin, I'd become more angry with him and spank him harder till I was frustrated. And so was he, and we never got through it. And finally the Lord came to me and he very quietly said, son, your function is not to make him obey. I can remember disciplining him, disciplining him, and saying, you will obey. You know, that's the old break the will thing. The Lord said, your function is not to break his will. Your function is not to make him obey. Your function is to train him in the law. And the law is that every sin brings forth a reaping. And what he had to learn that was more important than anything else was every time you sin, there will be an immediate and painful reaction that set me free. Then he didn't have to react to my anger. At that point, it was Nathan. You sinned. Here comes the consequences. And I'm calm and I'm okay. You deal with them. He and I had a much happier relationship after that. We're not in the business of breaking anybody's will. Jesus doesn't break our will. He invites us to surrender it voluntarily. The second episode that's illustrative and this is illustrative of father has to win when the son declares war. Don't you let him win? Nathan got into this thing when he was about, gosh, how old was he? Three or four. Where? When he was sent to bed, he didn't want to remain in the bed. Guess where he got that? Now they're both in the act. Nine months? Yes, I can remember sending Nathan to bed and two minutes later, up, out. I have to go to the bathroom. Now, you gotta honor that the first time. So go to the bathroom. You have until I count to thirty. And so go to the bathroom. Run back two seconds later. I'm thirsty. This time. By this time, you're becoming suspicious. But you let him get a drink anyway. You have until I count to twenty. It takes less time to drink than to pee. So you. The next time he comes out, he says, I am scared now you know he's lying. And you say, Nathan, go to bed. The next time you come out, there will be a Swat. Sure enough, two seconds later comes out. I'm scared. Swat, back to bed. Well, this after about three episodes of this next time he just comes out and he just stands. No words, no excuses. He just stands with that look in the eye. I have declared war. Now, Nathan. Nathan is an exceptionally stubborn child. And. Why was that so funny? Oh, okay. And what went on for the next two and a half hours? Was Nathan coming out? Me delivering a stern spanking, putting him in bed, coming out and sitting down, Nathan waiting about two minutes and coming back out again. Over and over and over again. Until my wife was in tears and saying, please stop. And I said, I can't stop if I lose this battle. We've lost our son. And so I did that with tears. And he knew it. Not with anger. I just knew I couldn't let him win until finally, at about ten thirty that night, he cried himself to sleep. And he got up the next morning a very different little boy. I very seldom see that kind of defiance in his eyes anymore. There's a peace and a rest in him that wasn't. I'm going to tell on them in turn. They were good parents, but they weren't perfect. And, uh. And one of the things, one of the things that that happened as I was growing up is that they didn't catch up to a lot of what I did, and I didn't get stopped. A lot of times I was run amok in the heart and hated myself for it. And I grew up hating myself most of my childhood. Run away. Emotions run away. Actions got into all kinds of garbage that they're still finding out about in family discussions. It took me a lot of adult pain to get self under control because of that instance with my son, because I know what was in my heart and therefore I read what was in his heart. Nathan has been stopped and caught and he's a lot healthier little boy than I was growing up. A lot happier because I could see what was in his heart and stop him. It when the kids declare war, you better win and you better keep it up until you do. Without anger, but with some sternness. And in the end, it will hurt you worse than it does him. We are now at the place where I wanted to stop. But I'll have one more question. Thank you very much. I really appreciate your teaching, and I witnessed my spirit witnesses very much, even though I don't totally understand it. But there is one question that really hinders me, and it's not directly related to what you're talking about, but it's about the spirit. In the born again experience, I've been taught that the spirit becomes perfect according to Second Corinthians five seventeen, and that the soul and flesh have to be taught to come into submission through renewing of the mind. I pick up from your teachings that that isn't true, that our spirit is not perfected. Can you explain that for me? Yes, yes, I'm glad to do so, because that is a present heresy which is being taught and many teachers have taught that once you're born anew, your spirit is perfect. But that's not scriptural. Psalm thirty two one and two. Blessed is the man whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered. And to whom the Lord imputes no iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no deceit. Psalm fifty one ten through twelve create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. Ezekiel thirty six twenty six I'll take out of you the heart of stone, and give you a new and right spirit. Now you say those are Old Testament. When we receive Jesus, he's saying that the spirit was washed clean. Listen to this one second Corinthians seven one writing to Christians, brethren, let us cleanse ourselves of all filthiness of flesh and spirit. In the King James Version, James four five. Do you not know that the spirit in man he was writing to Christians? Do you not know that the spirit in man lusteth to envy, so that we can tell you from years of counseling that in our spirit we can and do sin? There is no area of us which is righteous. If it were true that our spirit were made righteous, then you see, we would have some righteousness, wouldn't we? But we don't have any. All all my righteousness is as filthy rags. The Lord is my wisdom, my righteousness, my redemption, and my sanctification. Philippians three. Not having a righteousness of mine own, dependent on the law, but that which is through faith in Christ Jesus. None of us has any righteousness of our own. And what that really comes from is that desire, which is in all of us to feel good and righteous in some area. But the Lord won't allow that. First Corinthians one thirty one so all boasting is excluded in the presence of the Lord. He will not let us have an area of righteousness about which we can be proud, and about which we can boast. We wear righteousness, his robe of righteousness. Underneath it is that filth, and all we need to do is turn away from the Lord, and that old carnal nature will resurrect in our spirit, in our soul, in our heart, and in our mind. One of my favorite scriptures is from Philippians three, where Paul is saying, it's not that I'm already perfect, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus has already taken hold of me.