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00:00:00 Speaker: The single most formative thing in child raising is the affection and attention, discipline and love of a father. That doesn't mean that mothers aren't important. That doesn't mean that brothers and sisters and grandparents aren't important. It means that the most telling thing, the most formative to a child, is the attention and love of a father. Now, we didn't know that in the beginning. In fact, in seminary, I was not intending to be a counselor. I was studying to be a minister, and I was studying in the Religion and personality department of Chicago Theological Seminary. In that seminary, we were required to write a thesis, and I chose as my thesis to develop a method of testing young people's grasp of Christianity. By that, we wanted to find out what had young people learned in Sunday School. We chose a sampling of six different denominations two fundamental evangelical, two liturgical and two liberal, six young people from each of those denominations. And we put them through a test. And the test had about six parts. We wanted to find out if they had a grasp of the facts of the faith. And did they have a grasp of the history of the faith then? Were they able to live the faith? So we had some living skills tests in it, and then we had what is called a semantic space test. Now, semantic space test is just a big word for saying that we were testing what were their attitudes towards father and mother and their bodies and the church and Relatives and friends and the Lord and all kinds of things. We wanted to find out what kinds of attitudes have they formed? What we found out when we did the test, it turned out to be a very good test. We developed, we found out that the evangelicals and fundamentals and the liturgical had they had really learned the facts and the history of the faith and the and the Congregationalists and the other liberal church didn't know from beans about anything. We found out that concerning the ability to live the faith, in terms of being able to forgive and in terms of being able to love the evangelicals and fundamentals didn't do so good, nor did the liturgical, but the liberal ones were able to live it. But then the thing that shocked us was to discover something we hadn't looked for at all in the semantic space test. It was revealed very, very clearly that all the young people who marked their parents, especially their fathers, but father and mother as and they were to grade them on a scale. It went like this at the highest of worthy, somewhat worthy, averagely worthy, neutral, somewhat unworthy or average, unworthy, somewhat unworthy and very unworthy and clean and all down the scale and many other things. They ranked them like that. And the young people who marked their parents down in any category and rated them as unworthy or untasty, or unlikable, or as passive or as undesirable, who marked their parents down universally, had trouble in every other area in the test. And that was the most startling thing that was revealed. And it was that At, which plunged Paula and me into studying the relation of parents and children, and how formative that is, because it revealed that any child who had trouble with his parents had trouble everywhere else in life. We began with that understanding to minister about forgiveness, about the necessity, forgiveness, about how forgiveness is never a nice option, but that we can never change our attitudes. We can never really change our lives by just simply striving to make things better. But forgiveness has to happen before the blessing of the Lord can come in any area of our lives. A number of years ago, when we were here, first here in Coeur d'Alene, we had a Bible study and prayer group that met in our home, and at one of those meetings, a man came to visit. A man named Carl Foss. And he wanted to share with us about the ministry that he was very much involved in. It was a prison ministry. He had been instrumental in determining what the rules and regulations would be for those who came to visit prisoners in the prisons, and he had made it his job to get people, Christian people from the churches, to make commitments, to come and visit these prisoners, to bring some kind of nurture to them, to minister to them about the Lord. And he'd been at this quite a number of years, and he told us that ninety to ninety five percent of the inmates in prison have never known any kind of real father love. They've either had absent fathers or they've had violent fathers, but they've never known what a nurturing love from a father has been. He told us the story of a lawyer, a prison lawyer who had studied while he was there in prison, who had graduated with honors, and he was somewhat of an artist. And he had designed a Father's Day card that he tried to sell to his fellow inmates, and nobody would buy it. He just didn't have any takers at all. And so he lowered the price, and he still didn't have anybody who wanted his card. He lowered the price again, finally offered to give the card away, and nobody wanted the card. And it was beautifully done. And he came to Karl and he says, what's the matter? Nobody wants my artwork. Nobody wants this card. And Karl asked him just one question. He said, do you mean to tell me that you have been in this prison for twenty years and you don't know that there aren't any prisoners here who have any use for a Father's Day card, because they've never known the love of a father. About two years ago, John and I were in Missouri, and we had the privilege of speaking at the Missouri State Training School for men. And there we were, sharing about the importance of a father's love, and about how the lack of a father's love causes all kinds of things not to happen in our lives. It means that we will have a lot of angers that we can't identify. It means that we'll be blocked in our relationship to God, because we tend to see Father God in the light of who our natural father was. And we emphasize to them the importance of forgiving the father. Those men came up to us afterwards and said for the first time, almost the first time I've heard a sermon that makes sense to me, that speaks to my heart. That's where I am. I've been angry all of my life, and I haven't known why I was angry. And people try to rehabilitate me, but I've never really known that it had to start with the forgiveness in my own heart. Since then, we've had volumes of orders from prison inmates for the father's Love series, and we don't know how they even hear about it. There must be some kind of a big prison system, because we keep getting orders from all over the place. But the truth of God is speaking to the hearts of men who have been deeply wounded, and they're beginning to have hope when they hear that there's a Lord Jesus who can empower us to forgive. To get our hearts cleansed so that we're no longer blocked. About the same time that Carl Fox came to visit with us, another young man came to visit with us whose ministry was to young men in Reformatories. And he said that what he would do is that he would go in to talk with the young people. And when he got done talking with them, he would just give one simple invitation. He said, I am going to go back into the other room. I'm just going to sit there and if any one of you wants to come and just talk about your troubles, you come and talk. He said, it took a while. I have to sit there five or ten minutes, and then one by one, these young people would come back and sit down. He said every time they sat down to open up and talk about their troubles, they wound up crying. Men, young men who are trying to be tough and say they had it all together and never let anybody see them cry. They wound up crying because they didn't have a father who ever loved them. And here I was, being as a father to them, and that love so touched them that they had to cry. Not one of the young men in the reformatory had had a father who loved him. Now, in nineteen sixty five. There were at that time three million women raising their children without fathers. In nineteen seventy five, there were ten million women raising children without fathers. I have no statistics for nineteen eighty five, but I would bet that it's over twenty million. Way over. Now consider that without the love of a father, children are raised susceptible to crime. In fact, let me kick it off for you. What we now know is that when a father's love is not there, children are more susceptible to disease. Children are more susceptible to crime. Children are more susceptible to aberrational forms of sex. Children are more susceptible to homosexuality, and children fail to come into their destiny and purpose without a father's love. Now, maybe you're ready to understand the desperateness of the Scripture in Malachi four five and six behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord, and he will turn the hearts. Notice not the minds, the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. Did you know that? Of course you know. In San Francisco the whole city is practically ruled by homosexuals. Millions upon millions of homosexuals. In all of our major big cities. Crime rates rising, divorce rates rising. That's the curse. The curse is already beginning to come. And the curse? Causeless does not come. What we are revealing to you is that the most important reason for the crime rates, the divorce rates, all these other things is the lack of a father's love. We've been speaking mainly about the importance of fathers to men. I want to talk to the women for a few moments. We all love to read what Proverbs thirty one says, beginning with the tenth verse. An excellent wife who can find for her worth is far above jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. That's the truth. If the heart of a woman's husband can trust in her, he will have no lack of gain. But she has to have some sense of worth. She has to know that she was designed by God to bless the heart of her husband. If she doesn't know that, then she will present herself to her husband with an apology. She won't be able to present herself to her husband as a beautiful gift, as a blessing for him. hymn, as John likes to say, she'll give herself to him like an old limp dishrag. And how does that honor him? That's not going to turn his heart on. It's not going to make his heart sing. It's not going to call forth appreciation and delight from the husband. But a wife learns her worth, her beauty, her identity as gift and blessing from the kind of relationship that she has with her father. If her father makes her feel beautiful because when she's a little girl, he says wow. When she comes out wearing a beautiful dress instead of where did you get that? And how much did it cost? And don't you think you're overdoing it? If he makes her feel beautiful with a wow, then it doesn't really make any difference what she looks like physically. She is going to communicate beauty and worth to her husband, and he's going to cherish and treasure that beautiful gift of her. We've had a lot of gorgeous women come to us for counseling who when we say, are you pretty? They say, no. Are you lovely? No. Are you lovable? No I'm not. And it's because that's what was trained into her heart. By the way, her father responded to her. We've had a number of women who, if you just looked at their physical attributes, you'd think she's really kind of homely. And yet, when you ask these women if they're pretty, if they're beautiful, if they're lovable, they'll say yes, because that is what was written on their hearts by a father who brought forth that sense of worth and beauty and blessing in them. Mark, while he was in seminary, introduced us to a book which is a collection of just purely secular studies about the relationship between young people and their fathers. It's a book by a man named Marshall Hamilton, and it's just simply called Fathers Influence on Children. I want to just read a couple of excerpts from that book, because these studies have shown the truth of what the Holy Spirit has been revealing to us for years regarding the young woman. She must learn paternal trust during infancy when she learns maternal trust, especially from her father. Does the infant girl need confirmation of her desirability as a female, an affirmation of her value as a different and separate person? His gentle tenderness communicates to her his pleasure in her femininity. Father, by comparison with mother, has a sharper eye, a firmer grip, a rougher cheek, a deeper voice. He's nonetheless equally tender, loving, warm and safe, and the infant girl can feel herself lovingly cradled by a man's arms and comforted by a man's voice. And then they go on to talk about how the way the father relates to his infant daughter prepares her for her, accepting herself as a blossoming young woman and of entering into a wholesome sexual relationship when she grows through adolescence and to the point of being married. About Fathers and Sons. This book says that where the father is interested and involved with the son, both generally accepting him and appropriately monitoring his behavior and where the father provides a successful model of behaviors for his son. The son generally will acquire many of the characteristics of the father, and use his father's example as a guide to his own career. To become like the father, who's reasonably admirable and desirable, is regularly associated with appropriate masculinity, popularity, and general good adjustment to the boy. And then they go on to say that if the father fails in any of these aspects, the risks of the son's incurring such problems as homosexuality, psychological disorders, or a delinquent pattern are very much increased. Which is just exactly what John was saying a few moments ago. The difference between the secular studies which describe relationships and problems, and what we're teaching, is that we have a living Lord Jesus who says, you are never stuck with what you are. You are never just simply formed by what has happened to you. You have an ability to make a choice in response to what has happened to you. And if that choice is a sinful one, the Lord Jesus is there offering you forgiveness, and the Lord Jesus is there in power to reach to the depths of the wounded, sinful heart and affect a change through forgiveness and through his abiding presence. And that's what we as Christian people are learning to do, to apply that forgiveness and that power to change through our prayers for one another. Psalm twenty seven ten says, Though my father and mother forsake me, my God will take me up. And so what we bring you may be painful to hear as you think, oh my, my kids didn't have enough from their daddy or I didn't get enough and how did I fail? And so on. The good news is, Jesus Christ is the remedy. We just need to see our sin. We need to see what has happened. Now, I want to talk with you about law and how that relates to a father's love. In short, you can reduce all of our counseling, at least in terms of diagnosis, to four basic, simple scriptures. In fact, to one only. And that Scripture is Deuteronomy five sixteen. In short, honor thy father and thy mother, that it may be well with thee. Now I want you to understand that the Word of God is not a bunch of rules somebody made up, and if everybody obey them, it'll be a better world. That isn't what it is. The Word of God is God's description of the way reality works. The Ten Commandments are reality. They are going to work whether you believe in them or don't believe in them. Like them, don't like em, love em, don't love em. The Ten Commandments are going to work. You are not going to influence the Ten Commandments. They're going to influence you. So understand when it says, if you honor your father and your mother, life will go well with you. That's an exact description of the way life runs in any area that you could as a child. Honor father and mother. Life will go well with you. But turn it around. It's an absolute law in any way, area, shape or form, hidden or not known, known or known inside the heart. You could not honor your father and your mother growing up. Life will not be well with you in that very area. That is absolute law. All of life operates on law and that goes with Matthew seven one and two. Judge not, lest ye be judged, for with the judgment you mete out, it shall be measured to you again. That's absolute law. Whenever you judge somebody, you mete out that judgment. It's going to come back to you the same way you meted it out. It's got to come back. That goes with Galatians six seven do not be deceived. God is not mocked. That which ye sow, ye shall surely reap. So anytime that you dishonor your father and your mother as a little child, you're sowing a seed. You're casting out a judgment. That judgment must be meted back to you. That seed must be reaped. Now understand this. How many of you as little tiny children, when your dad spanked you, said, oh, thank you, daddy, for spanking me. You're making me into the best citizen. I'm just going to be such a good citizen who spank me anytime I need it bad. Is that what you said? You aren't fair. You didn't treat Ben like you treated me. Not hate you. That's what we said. How many of you said when mother made you do the dishes again? Or make your room up again, or make your bed again? Oh, thank you mother. You're training me to be the best husband or the best wife. That's just so good for me to do that. And I sure appreciate that. Is that what you said? Uh, you didn't make Mary do hers over again. You play favorites. You aren't fair. And I hate you. That's what you said. You know, kids are just sin with angelic eyes and skin wrapped around it. And that means that we are continually in rebellion and anger and resentment against our parents in our hearts. But we don't yet know Jesus. So what we're doing is setting in motion forces that have to come back on us. The fourth scripture is Romans two one Twenty one. Therefore, you have no excuse, O man, when you judge another, for you yourself are doing the very same thing. And the rule is that anytime you judge somebody, you doom yourself to do it. There came a young man in to see me, and this young man had a father who was alcoholic and continually was adulterous. And that wasn't to hidden. The kids knew it. Now, that isn't important, because what we're talking about is not conditioning. It isn't that the parents conditioned us. What we're talking about is our sinful response to what they did. He judged his father for being like that. Well, then he grew up and he forgot all about that. He met a lovely young woman he got filled with. He got born anew. He got filled with the Holy Spirit. He loved his wife. He loved the Lord. He loved the Word of God. He studied the word of God. Then he found himself compulsively going out to drink. He didn't even, like drink, but he found himself compulsively going out to drink. And he loved his wife. Didn't even like the women he met in the bars. Found himself compulsively going out and had already committed adultery. Came crying to me. What is it? I don't even. I love my wife. I don't like adultery, I do it, I don't like to drink, I do it. Why? Because laws of God are absolute. He judged his father. Therefore, until he forgave his father, he was doomed to do what his father did. So therefore he did the same thing, had the same thing with many young women who found themselves doing well. You can understand it. How many of you said when your mother was shouting, I'm talking to the women now. When your mother was shouting at the kids, how many of you said, I'm not going to be like that? And what do you do? You shout it to kids because you judged your mother. You doom yourself to do the same thing. See, all of life operates on law. Now. I said, we'll show you how that relates to father's love. Here's the simple thing. We have found that if fathers give attention, come home and our home with the kids, play games with them, romp on the floor. If they hold them, the children can apprehend law in a real way. Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against thee. It hides the word in the heart. It becomes real. They become a people who can live it, and they believe it. But young people who received no affection from the father, and very little attention for them. Getting Ahold of law in a real way is like trying to climb up a greased pole. They just can't make it. It slips out of their hands. They can't really lay hold of the law of God. It doesn't have real ness to them because they weren't given the tools for apprehending it. Now, I want to show you historically what has happened before eighteen forty. Now you know why I say eighteen forty. In eighteen forty began the Industrial Revolution. Before eighteen forty, fathers shops were in the home. If he was a clockmaker, he lived at the back of the shop or up above it. And he his storefront was where his shop was. And then up above they lived. Or behind? If he was a carpenter, as Jesus father was shop home behind. If he was a farmer, the kids worked alongside. So fathers worked at home with their sons and their daughters, and at the elbow of the father they received instruction and father had wisdom to teach. He didn't just teach about the thing they were doing. He taught himself. He taught morality. He taught principles. He instructed life to his child. Now I want to I want to just run through some scriptures with you right now. I'm going to do them as quick as I can with this voice of mine and Proverbs one. I'm going to read them as quick as I can read them. And what I want to do is inundate you with awareness about whose job it is to teach children. Proverbs one eight hear, my son, your father's instruction, and do not forsake your mother's teaching. Indeed, there are graceful wreaths to your head and ornaments about your neck. Proverbs two one. My son, if you will receive my sayings and treasure my commandments within you, make your ear attentive to wisdom. Incline your heart to understanding. For if you cry for discernment, and lift your voice for understanding, and so on. Proverbs three one my son. Do not forget my teaching. But let your heart keep my commandments. I want you to notice from now on how many times the word life appears in relation to this. Let your heart keep my commandments for length of days and years of life and peace. They will add to you. Proverbs four one hear, O sons, the instruction of a father, and give attention that you may gain understanding. For I give you sound teaching. Do not abandon my instruction. When I was a son to my father, tender, and the only son in the sight of my mother, then he taught me and said to me, let your heart hold fast my words, keep my commandments and live. Proverbs four twenty my son, attention to my words. Incline your ear to my sayings. Do not let them depart from your sight. Keep them in the midst of your heart, for they are life to those who find them, and health to all their whole body. Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life. Proverbs six one my son, give attention to my wisdom. Incline your ear to my understanding. That's a five one. Proverbs six one my son, if you become surety for your neighbor. Proverbs seven one my son, keep my words and treasure my commandments within you. Keep my commandments and live now. Body of Christ. Whose job is it to teach children? Call it out. Body of Christ who has not been teaching children. Body of Christ. What's the matter with the world fathers? So the fathers were teaching in the home. They were working alongside the children. Then what happened was that the Industrial Revolution came along, and now men went away from the home into a factory to work, and they were given some demeaning little thing, chink, chink, chink. Here. They didn't do the whole job. They just did part of the assembly, so they had nothing to share at home with the children. No way to inculcate pride and artisanship. No way to inculcate strength and wisdom in what you do. They were a part away from the home when they came home. Mama would say discipline the children. They've been bad. But now when he disciplined the children, it had no relation because he didn't know what had been going on all day. He couldn't understand. Then after that happened, what happened was that in our generation, just think of all the TV programmes which have denied the father's role. Some of you might be old enough to remember William Bendix life with Riley. You remember he's the bumbling idiot. Mama has to straighten everything out. How about growing up with Dagwood and Blondie, huh, Blondie? He's an idiot. Blondie knows where everything is. See that? How about this one? I forgot the name O. All in the family. How about Archie Bunker? See, Edith knows where it's at. She isn't too bright, but at least she has a heart. And Archie is just an idiot full of prejudice. And that has pictured what fathers are to this generation. Thank God for such programs as The Waltons and Little House on the Prairie, where father is still strong and imparts wisdom to the children. What? Lower him to share something here at this point. Before seminary, I was a music major in college, and I remember as I studied the history of the arts, both music and other forms of arts that I used to puzzle. Why, after about eighteen seventy, seventy, there were no grades. We've never again seen somebody of the stature of a Bach or a Beethoven or a Mozart, which are some names that I know are familiar to you. Never again. Never again. Seen someone of the stature of Leonardo in this century. Now there are some who like Pablo Picasso. I think he scribbles. But I think maybe Mark would disagree with me. But I haven't seen that kind of stature since about eighteen seventy. Then I get into seminary, and I began to notice a similar kind of phenomenon in theology and in the history of the church. I began to say to the Lord, kind of quietly in the back of my spirit, why have we not had anyone of the stature of a John Wesley? If you know anything about church history, you know that John Wesley was one of the greatest evangelistic powers that's ever moved on the face of the church. Not not just United Methodism descended from him, but half a dozen other movements as well. Jonathan Edwards, great Congregational preacher, fired a great awakening that woke this whole nation up. And there are a lot of people saying good things in the twentieth century, but we haven't seen anybody of that stature. Not somebody that shook the whole world, not anybody that turned an entire nation around. And I and I said, why not? Why not? And the Lord revealed to me the very thing that was just taught, and that is that fathers didn't spend time when the Industrial Revolution came. Fathers didn't spend time working with kids. And it isn't what the father says so much as who he is. Just the fact of having been with him. I when my children get on my chest, they drink from me something that could never be put into words. There's a strength and a power, and I feel the current pass from me to them. And it's as much food to me as it is to them. A head start on life. Even if my son isn't a minister, I think he will be. But even if he isn't, even if he isn't, he'll have a head start on whatever it is that he does because he'll have been given a. There's a real piece of father's strength that goes into the heart of a child when you spend that time on dad's chest. Now, when I was twenty seven years old, I began to travel around the country and teach, and people would come to me. I'm always embarrassed by the question. I never know how to respond, but people would come to me and they'd say, where'd that young man get all that wisdom? And my answer was usually kind of twofold. And the first answer was pain. And the second answer. The second answer had to do with the presence of a father who somehow. I don't even I don't even know if he knew what he was doing in those days, but who somehow made us feel, somehow made us feel like it was our ministry. And I can remember that the that the ministry would come into the home, we'd, we'd have people there, we'd have drunks drying out at home. And somehow we were always made to feel part of that. I can remember four or five grown men trying to hold down a teenage kid that had gone berserk because the alcohol drove him nutty. And I was standing in the doorway watching him flop around in the living room. And afterwards, an explanation to us little guys about what that was about. I can remember dad saying, hey, you want to go visit at the hospital with me? I'm thirteen years old. And you go and you watch dad pray with people, and you watch him listening to the hearts. And I remember the talk around the dinner table always centered about the work of the church and what was happening, and who was kicking up his heels and being rotten. And what were we going to do about that, you know? And all of that made you feel like you were alongside him. And it gave me a head start on ministry that's enabled me, I think, to learn and do some things that people don't learn until a lot later. Sometimes that's what's been missing from our society. The strength that a father gives to the heart of a child by being with him, working with him, making that kid part of his world. It makes our hearts glad to see a lot of young fathers beginning to catch hold of the idea of how important they are to their little ones. Our youngest grandchild now is just barely two years old, and when his daddy takes off his shirt, he takes his shirt off when his daddy sits in his sock feet. Feat. John Tyler has to sit in his sock feet when his daddy sprawls out on the floor. John Tyler is there in the same kind of a position. That's how influential fathers are. What really grieves us today is to find so many people who have known the Lord for a very long time, who have asked the Holy Spirit to fill their hearts, and yet they're still unable to come into the presence of Father God and abide in his presence. And we found that invariably it has to do with the simple fact that they couldn't abide in their natural father's presence. They were afraid of him because there was so much anger coming from him, or they felt abandoned by him because he was never around, or they felt constantly under criticism by him because he could never say a word of affirmation, and they have transferred all of this image that they have of natural father onto Father God. And with their mouths they can say it with their heads. They can think it that God is love, and God is ever present, and God cares for me. But at the heart level, no way are they really resting in Father's God, in Father God. And it takes ministering prayer to reach to the depths of the heart, to open the heart, to give the heart an ability to trust, to really relate to Father God. So many Christians say to us, I can relate to Jesus, but I can't relate to Father God. And when we start asking them questions about their family life in their formative years, they had a big brother that they could run and have fun with, but father was not close to them. They just couldn't relate. And so they put that on Jesus. They put that on Father God. There is healing. And I want to share with you a this is a brand new story. We just collected this one just this last week. I want to share with you about a young woman who came to us for counseling just very recently. She was all intellect, a brilliant young woman, and yet she was incapable of nurturing, of loving, of really sharing herself. And when I sat down with her to ask her questions, as we always do, what was your mother like? What was your father like? How did you relate to them? I found that she was born to parents who were very much older. She was a surprise. They had long since given up any idea of having children if they'd ever wanted any in the beginning, there was no attention from her father at all. He didn't know how to relate to a daughter. The mother treated her like a little doll image, dressed her up, showed her off to people, but never really held her, never loved her, never rocked her, never read her stories. There was no real affection from either parent. The little girl was kept in a kind of an isolation because they wanted to keep the house clean. She could never have any friends in. She always played by herself. She suffered a lot of humiliation at school because she didn't know how to get along with other children, because she hadn't practiced at home at all. She wasn't allowed to express her own opinion. She did what her parents said. They told her every move to make, and it was only their opinion that was important. She was never allowed to make a choice about anything. She wasn't allowed to express an emotion. She was shushed if she cried. And so she learned to control her emotions in order to please her parents. She said she could sometimes remember just wanting to die, but she didn't know how to do that. So she developed a strong intellect in order to handle what was going on in her world. We have found very often times that when a child is so starved, so bereft, that the Father God will just simply seek them out. And that's what he did with this young woman. She had married, but she wasn't able to nurture her husband. She found herself piling all kinds of demands on him, wanting him to fill the empty places in her that her father hadn't filled, so he couldn't be a husband to her. And he didn't want to be a father, so he just simply withdrew. Proverbs twenty seven ten says that when my father and mother forsake me, the father, God himself. Will seek me out. He'll choose me. We'll adopt me. The father, God himself, will be there for me. That's what the Father God did for this young woman. She went to a large university. We call that university Egghead University. I won't identify it any more than that. But it's where the intellectuals go to be stimulated and to spar with words and to fill up their head tanks. She earned three master's degrees at that university. But she said the really important thing that happened to her there was that when she first entered the school As a student of art history. She had an appointment with a professor, and she went in to his office and he gave her a series of paintings to look at, and he said, what do you think of these? And she said she was just absolutely bound up, just speechless. She had nothing to say. Nobody had ever asked her what she thought of anything before. She'd just learned to parrot, to hand back knowledge. And finally she stumbled. She says, well, I don't know. I don't know how to talk about the way I feel about things. And he says, you have all the time you need. I want to know what you think about it. I want to know how this makes you feel. And he made her come in day after day and sit there and talk with him until she was open to begin to let her feelings, her opinions, her ideas flow out. And she said, what really happened between her and this professor was that he became the father that she had never had. She began to see him as a caring, loving person who really cared what was going on in the inside of her. And that fed her hungers. And so she began to identify that paved the way for healing. She said if that hadn't happened, she wouldn't be able to come to a counselor or to get into a a study group and a prayer group in the church and say, I need healing for my inside. She wouldn't be able to explore, she said. I wouldn't have had the courage no matter how much I wanted to. I wouldn't have had the courage to say, Holy Spirit, search the innermost parts of me and make me to know what's really down in there. Make me know where my areas of unforgiveness are. Teach my heart. But she did learn this. It was the breakthrough with that father figure. Caring. And he didn't even know the Lord. I mean, so far as we know, he didn't know the Lord. He didn't talk about the Lord. But that lay the groundwork. It's not that we love, but that he first loved us. It was while we were dead in our trespasses that Christ died for us. That's the kind of a loving heavenly Father that we have. One will who will take the initiative toward us, who will seek us out when we don't know how to look for him? Who will open us up when we don't know how to open to him, and who will put us in a place where we are beginning to know how to ask for that which we need to feed our hearts. Tomorrow we'll be talking with you about the functions of a father. And in that we'll be talking more fully about discipline. But I want to talk with you about how it relates to a father's love. I was very fortunate in that my father was a gentle, affectionate, big, strong man. And when he disciplined us, he could fly into a rage and he could whap us a good one. But we always knew it was for our good. And I remember that when my father disciplined us, he would send my older brother and me. Somehow he always got in trouble together. You know, we both got spanked the same time, and he'd send us upstairs to bed. And Hal and I knew that we could count. It'd be just about a half hour, and we would hear dad's feet coming up the steps. Dad had walked into the room, and he'd sit down on a chair, and he'd take Hal on one knee and me on the other, and he'd say, you know, that hurt me more than it did you? Don't you? And we'd think you mean old thing. It did not. And then he just take us and just gather us in, and he'd hug up on us and hold us, and he'd say, you know I love you, don't you? And sometimes he was so tenderhearted. Sometimes a tear would fall down off his cheek onto us. And we were not only held to account and disciplined, we were loved. So discipline was never excommunication. Discipline was always in our hearts connected with love. And that's what's important, is that that happens to every child, a child whose discipline needs to have father and mother loving that child immediately. But now I want to share another thing we've discovered. I have threatened to give a whole talk entitled fathers who? Mother? We knew one young man. Paula, went to high school with him. We went to college with him. We went to seminary with him. He was raised. Uh, did he have one or two sisters? Paula. He had one older sister and a mother. Father was gone, so he was raised by an older sister and a mother. He had no father figure as a model. So he had no father figure as a model for discipline. And we came to visit him with his children. And I was appalled at what I saw him doing, because what he was saying to his child is, oh, honey, you you don't want to do that, do you? That will hurt daddy if you do that now, it may be alright for a mother to trade upon a child's emotions, but children don't need that from a dad. Children need from a father. Cut that out. That's clean, that's sharp. It says I'm in charge here. It doesn't plead with the child and put the child in charge. So he was cajoling and pleading with his child. He was mothering his child. He didn't take over and just put that child over his knee. Whap whap whap. You're not going to act like that now. I love up on you. He didn't do that. He would send the child off, and then he'd go sit down and he'd talk with the child a long time. That might seem to be wise. It might seem to be gentle. But his children were afraid. Why were they afraid? Because daddy wasn't there to stop them. With strong male authority. They were afraid of what was in themselves. Because he was mothering. That's alright for a mother to sit down with the children and talk. It's good for a father to do it too. But fathers must do it in a way that doesn't abdicate authority. It says I'm the boss here, and you can rest because I'm the boss. But he didn't convey he was the boss. See, he'd grown up learning how to put himself under the mother's authority. So the real authority in the home was his wife. He didn't know how to take over authority, went to visit another man, and he had a teenage son. And the teenage son wanted to go out camping. And I listened to the way they talked about it. And what this man was doing was what a woman would do over protecting. Well, have you thought about this? And this could happen to you? Men aren't that way. You know, men say, son, take your risks. Go out there and learn. I'll give you a little advice. But you learn the hard way, you know. Woman over protects. Woman gets too concerned if you got this in the right place. Well, have you thought about rain? Have you thought about. Do have you thought about. You know. See, that's alright for women. But that's not alright for men, you know. And finally I took him aside and I said, Paul, you are not fathering your son, your mothering your son. Now let's sit down and talk about where that started. Let's cut that out. He needs a father, not a mother from you. And when we have seen this happen, when fathers didn't have a father as authority and they mother the family, it's sick and it produces sick results. We need fathers to be fathers. Now then, let's just go right on into the healing. Paul is going to talk about reconciliation through forgiveness. I want to talk about two other things. What we are hoping you will see by this whole talk is found in Matthew three. I think it's the tenth verse, but it won't hurt you to read around a little bit. And it says, John the Baptist is saying, lay the axe to the root of the trees, people. If you've once got the idea that we are formed in our first six years, that's our roots, and the trunk of us is formed in the next four, so that by the time we are ten, the roots and the trunk of us are formed. And the word is to lay the axe to the root. So always go back to formative years. Don't chase golden apples out there. Don't chase other ideas out there. Always look back. Where did it get started? Because if you want to change a stream, you don't just get in there with a bucket and keep throwing the water out of it. You can do that forever and never change a thing. If you're going to change it, you gotta go up and dam it up and then make some changes. You gotta go to the source where that started that stream and dam it up. So in the same way the streams of things happening in the child must always be dealt with where they started and where they started was always primarily with the father, secondarily with the mother, and always in those very first years. Don't get your eyes off of that. Fasten your eyes on that. Don't get deluded into nice things to talk about out here, because all you're doing is lopping off branches. And anybody who way to produce bigger and better sin. You understand that you prune a tree, you get bigger and bigger and better fruit. You prune the tree of your life, you get bigger and better sin. Go back to the root, deal with root. Second, and this is our. And what we need is be reparented. What we need is for the body of Christ to put into us that fathering and that mothering we didn't get. We need to be in small groups. We need to be. We need to be confessing once a week and put in the hot seat once a week. We need that kind of protection and nurture about us that we didn't get as little children. And so every person you counsel should be advised to be in a small group. And there he should be advised to be relating to some of the older Christians, as he would relate as a child to a father and mother. Saint Paul said, to whom I became a father in Christ, as it were. And you have many teachers, but not many fathers. Galatians four nineteen with whom I am again in travail, until Christ be formed in you. So it isn't. This is the main point of this. This kind of counseling is not a detached. I pray for you and you go on your way. It is an involved relationship, one on one with people where you are putting in the kind of nurture they didn't get. And you can. Your counseling will be barren if you don't understand that, because they need that relationship with you as a person to put in that fathering and mothering. They didn't get. It's a very important lesson to learn. As though God were entreating through us. We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. Now, not very many of us want to admit that we have any kind of angers toward God. And yet, if we have areas of unforgiveness toward our natural fathers, or if we just have images in our mind about what father is, what authority is that is keeping us from really seeing what God is, and from coming to him with open arms and receiving the fullness of his fatherhood into us. Then we have need of being reconciled to Father God. And that's what we're called on to do with one another in the body of Christ, to beg one another on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God. First John four nineteen and twenty. We love because he first loved us. If someone says, I love God and hates his brother, or his mother or his father or anybody else, he's a liar. For the one who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. Now we can celebrate that when we came to the Lord, our sins were washed away. And that's a good and true and right kind of celebration. We were washed clean. We were made new. But we need also to believe what the Scripture says in Matthew six, verses fourteen and fifteen, If you forgive men for their transgressions, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men, then your father will not forgive your transgressions. We are forgiven all of our sins, but we, if we have not allowed the Lord to deal with our heart at a deep enough level that we can be reconciled with our brothers, with our fathers, with our mothers, so that we can express forgiveness so that we can embrace them so we have nothing keeping us from one another. If we harbor unforgiveness toward them, we will project that unconsciously onto God and will not be reconciled to him. One of the reasons we have the Holy Spirit is so that he can search the innermost parts of our being and let us know where we have roots that still have to be dealt with, so that he can lead us into forgiving and to being forgiven. And that's not a scary thing. It's it may be a little bit painful for a while, but it's good news. Mark four twenty two says nothing is hidden except to be revealed, nor has anything been secret, but that it should come to light. And Ephesians five thirteen says, all things become visible when they are exposed by the light, for everything becomes, becomes visible is light. For this reason it says, awake, sleeper, and rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.