The Father's Voice Part 1

Reason for us. Jesus phone remember from the race of life may not realize why our fathers, much of our inner pain and retraced relationships with our dads today revealing why your father is so important in your life even if he's passed away from the Moody church is this running to win when Sir was clear teaching helps us make it across. Esther loser is the family breaks down the father figures disappear. Is this why so many youth tragically turned to crime Dave, you're absolutely right. And if I could shout across the United States of America and for that matter around the world. I would show to fathers and say that you have a powerful impact on your children. Therefore, it is so important for you to be in a home to help guide them and direct them. My heart breaks because the breakup of the family in a moment were going to be talking about the importance of fatherhood and those of you who didn't have a father that you knew you listen as well. There is hope here for everyone you know I've written a book entitled managing your emotions. God's good gifts gone wrong. There are many people who deny their emotions. There are many people who live by their emotions. How do we really manage them. I think this book will help you and you know something else. Every chapter has questions at the end. Questions for discussion.

Adding this to be a great book for you and your small group.

Here's what you do go to RTW offer.com because for a gift of any amount. This book can be yours RTW offer.com or call us at 1-888-218-9337. I'll be giving you that contact information after the message. For now, listen carefully and think of the implications of God in your home. I live in a vacuum that is as a lone lie is a radio tube when the batteries are dead and there is no current to plug into those of the words of Ernest Hemingway before he committed suicide in 19 XT one was you know this is a series of messages titled why good people do bad thing and we talked about issues such as shame and anger and desires how they deceive us today were going to talk about the impact of the family on us, particularly the impact of a father.

Ernest Hemingway actually married four times. He lived a life of debauchery. He was in love booze and traveled the world without conscience rebelling against his Christian upbringing.

The question that we want to ask is why his grandparents on his father's side were graduates of Wheaton College.

They attended in the eight days his grandfather Anson was a good friend at DL Moody and actually was the secretary to the YMCA and his famous grandson Ernest was born in 1899, the very year in which DL Moody died, his wife, Adelaide Anson's wife was in love with nature, and she communicated that to her grandson Ernest. They moved to Park were very active in Christian ministry and in the church on his grandmother's side. His grandparents were equally committed. In fact, they called it that grandfather Abba just to kind of indicate their great respect, as if he was almost a God they so reverenced him and appreciated him. Ernest's father was named Edward he was a physician and a very strict disciplinarian. For example, if the kids were playing together and does suddenly there would be some kind of an infraction, he would take them to the room they would be spanked, they would be on their knees asking God to forgive them for what they had done. One day he took the kids to the Joliet correction Center, the prison, and he showed them the huge gates in the barbed wire and the guards and said that's what will happen to you if you pursue a life of sin. The problem is that for little Ernest. The standard seem to be too high.

Though he went along. He was a good Sunday school pupil. He read the entire Bible in the King James version was the treasurer of the church in Oak Park volunteered for ministry and sometimes gave speeches in behalf of the church. Later on he became involved in journalism World War I he came back he went to northern Michigan where he began to write his stories and at that time his parents began to reject him. They said why don't you get a real job. He was having some difficulty getting his stories published and so he went from job to job and then he wrote a book that was published and his parents interpreted it as disgracing them and so the breach between him and his parents was complete. Later on, add to his father being one of these high strung, perfectionistic people who had all these high standards for his kids as well as himself. No longer could put up with his depression, which sometimes happens to those who live such a tightly wound the life that he took the pistol that is father had given him who was an alumnus of Wheaton and shot himself. Ernest relationship with his mother now even grew more strained if that was possible. And then when his mother finally sent him a birthday cake.

On one occasion she took the pistol that her husband and used to commit suicide. She put it in the cake hinting for him that he should do the same. Which he did in 1961.

But my question to you today is how things go bad.

Here he is, he's dedicated to the Lord in the Oak Park First Congregational Church the evening of his baptism, his mother wrote in her diary. We have dedicated him as an offering to the Lord to receive his name and to be counted as one of his little lambs. What went wrong will, of course, Ernest Hemingway is going to be judged by God in accordance with God's standards and I do not want to make excuses for him, but at the same time we would be amiss if we didn't see a connection between his home life and the man eventually turned out to be.

Let me suggest some lessons when the standards in a home are so strict when parents are so determined that their children are going to tow the line. The children become so exasperated, so discouraged that they often end up reject their parents and everything that their parents stand for. I think that's what Paul meant when he said in the book of Ephesians.

Fathers do not exasperate your children imagine high standards that are unattainable no matter how high the bar is when you try to jump over it, it becomes an inch higher. Later on in this series of messages I'm going to speak up, preach a message on controlling people. People want to control and I'm going to suggest at that time that the reason that God can't do a work in the adult lives of children is often times because their parents get in the way they keep manipulating congealing controlling and God does not work until the controllers give up their charade.

I think there's a second lesson and that is that children who are rejected by their parents.

Children who are rejected tend to reject everything that their parents stood for now. Of course you say. Well, his parents couldn't have approved of his behavior.

I mean after all four marriages a life of booze and and writing things that were to be denigrating the Christian upbringing that he had understand that but at the same time his parents could have said to him, Ernest. We want you to know that we love you we will always love you. You are our child until the day we die will love you and even beyond you like what you're doing, but our affection will never be withdrawn. What a difference that might've made is another lesson also and that is the impact that parents have one offs, particularly the impact of the father for good or for ill. I had intended to speak briefly about fatherlessness in our society.

Let me say that 40% of all those who are being reared in America today are in homes where there is no father or if they are in a home where there is no father. He may be an absentee father in the sense of being totally passive, totally disconnect from the emotional and spiritual life of his own children and then of course we begin to think also of those who are abusive fathers.

The list could go on what happens in a home like that is there's a tendency, it is not inevitable, but there's a tendency for a boy to grow up without the restraints without the model and he works out his anger with violence that he works out with with sexual exploits. Whenever I find a man who is very angry, and you know I've met some people like that you meet them and you know that they are angry.

I always say tell me about your relationship with your father there very angry. They are either into evil or they are strongly driven in the life of a young woman, a daughter, they, the effect may be different than that, but she she does not know whether not she is beautiful to manage. He wants to prove herself so she goes from man to man seeking somehow the approval from men because she did not have a father who would approve of her and love her tenderly and righteously and in a pure way.

A young woman working in what is sometimes called a gentleman club said that we as girls are dancing for the fathers we never had, you know, Princess Diana, I think is one of the saddest stories, the late princess, but a recent biography says that her need for attention was all-consuming, and few people could produce the affirmation in quantities required she had avoided that no one could possibly feel good. I simply say that if you are a person who grew up in that kind of an atmosphere. It may be true of you, not necessarily as we shall say, but it may be true of you that you have an unlimited number of unmet needs, perhaps a bottomless pit of unmet needs. Now can you imagine what that does going into marriage when all those expectations when you actually get married thinking that the person you're going to marry is actually gonna make you happy or people who get married thinking that you can understand the deep disappointment is the need are never met.

Now I had intended. When I was preparing this message a few weeks ago to speak about how to be connected and make peace with our fathers, no matter what they were like as I began to think about it I change the focus of my message and I want to speak primarily about peace with our heavenly father and this message is intended to motivate you to seek God and to find in God did the fatherhood that all of us need whether we have come from a good home or a bad home. God is into fatherhood. The word father occurs 1180 times in the Bible.

But before we open the Bible and one more question to ask, why is it that somehow we know that God loves us intellectually, but we just don't connect. I've had people say I know that he loves me because the Bible says that he does. But I don't feel anything why this disconnect between what we know in our heads and what we experience in our hearts. Why is it that we can read the Psalms were David said even though my father and mother forsake me.

The Lord will pick me up and why is it that somehow the Lord doesn't seem to be picking some people up and it seems that that bottomless pit of on net needs continues all of course I'm glad we don't have to be whole and perfect before God blesses us and uses us, but I believe that the key is found in the fatherhood of God and the reason that we sometimes do not buying that fulfillment in God is first of all, because we think that God thinks about us and feels about us the way we feel about ourselves. We feel like failures.

We feel condemned, we feel so wretched at times we feel so disappointed in the way in which we live and we thank God thinks that way to let me pass this word of wisdom on to you. Feelings are not facts. Feelings are not facts.

God does not think of you the way you think of yourself.

Let me give you a second reason. That's because were dishonest about our feelings. You see, if you were brought up in a home and all of us to some extent, had to always bottle our feelings, but some homes more than others where it had to be pretend pretend pretend pretend because appearances were everything your brought up in an atmosphere like that you soon discover that that you can't express your feelings and you get older and you're emotionally numb. The answer to that I think is again found in the Psalms where we find that, David, for example: 10 Ulee was coming before the Lord ends filling out his heart before God has to do with honesty when the mass gets taken away when all of the pretense and's and we are who we are and all of our reality in all of our failure and in all of our limitations in the presence of a God who knows, who cares and who understands is another reason to. And that is that we probably were brought up in homes where performance dictated love. Certainly Ernest Hemingway was in a home like that if you perform if you get that good job. We will love you if you do something that we think disgraces the family, we will reject you when we ask your question. What if you were to fall into sin this next week, serious sin not have to clarify that I certainly don't recommend it as a matter of fact I warn you against it, but if it happened with that drive you away from God or would the knowledge of your sin cause you to rash in the direction of Jesus Christ outstretched arms.

Do you think that God's love for you is dictated totally upon your performance. You understand he loves you because he loves you because he loves you because he loves you. What I'd like to do in the next few moments, and they shall be few is to list four or five graces that God gives to us and this outline I trust is going to be a motivation for you to seek God all of us must we have to take a page from the life of David who said as the deer pants after the water brooks, so my soul pants after the oh God, let me give you some of the graces that God does toward us and I'll give you verses of Scripture that you can write down and in some instances read later. First of all, he begets us he begets us. It says in James chapter 1 verse 18 by his own will he be gas by the word of truth. It says again in first Peter 123 that we are born again, not of corruptible seed, but of incorruptible, by the word dog to which a lives and a by forever my dear friends, just like in natural birth.

You have the sperm and the egg coming together so it says in John chapter 3 that we must be born of the spirit. So watch this God takes the word of God and combines it with the spirit of God, and the result is the life of God when we are born again and we become partakers of the divine nature.

In fact, there is a part of you. If you're a believer in Jesus Christ.

There's a part of you that cannot sin, and the reason it can't is because it is righteous.

It is the nature of God. I think that the way we should interpret those verses in first John the give us so much trouble were the Scripture says that he it is born of God is sin if not he cannot sin has to do with the new nature looked at just from the standpoint of our new created nature it cannot sin, and this means that there should be a family resemblance right you beget a child.

The child looks like you do. God begets his children and his children should somehow represent him and that's why the Scripture says that we should also be followers of God, and imitators of God because he begets us by his own will. Let me give you a second grace that God gives to us and that is that he adopts us. You know it says in Galatians chapter 4 it says because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out Abba father.

So you are no longer a slave but a son, and since you are a son, God has made you and heir. The whole idea of son ship in the Bible is very interesting because what the Lord says here in Galatians is that a child grows up can inherit a lot of money but he doesn't enjoy it till he gets old enough guts is that, like Israel, they didn't enjoy their inheritance because they were like a child places you the minute you accept Christ as Savior. You are a son of full-fledged son with all of the rights and privileges and honors pertaining thereto. That means that you can enter into your inheritance immediately.

You could have accepted Jesus Christ as Savior yesterday and begin to walk in the inheritance that is yours is a son of God, and now that you are a son of God. God is not going to abandon you. You're not to be part of a child custody battle is you're gonna belong to him for ever. He adopts us human for that story of Peter Dina because he was coming from Russia in the 1920s by boat and if you know anything about Europe in those days nothing was ever included in the price of the ticket that way.

Today we flew a number of years ago on Aeroflot. One of the airlines and I think it's float, but it sounded flat and you had to buy the the orange juice that was served on the plane. So here's Peter Dina, thinking that he had to bring his own food on the ship's parents prepared all of this rye bread they dried it out so that it wouldn't get moldy on the ship and he took it when everyone else went to the dining room. He went to his room and he ate his moldy bread and some of the soldiers said to him you know will even give you some of our food. If you help us and so he was working just to get a little bit of desert.

It was not until he arrived in America. He said he realized that the meals were included in the price of the ticket. My dear friend. It's possible for us to live without recognizing that the blessings of son ship are included in salvation. You are an adopted son you're an adopted daughter before God. Third, he loves us, and for this I do ask you to turn to first John, it says how great is the love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are the reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

How great is the love of God toward us. That's a good question to ask and you know my friend. It's very important that you listen to running to win next time to find an answer to that question. It will be beneficial for everyone who is listening. You know, I've written a book entitled managing your emotions. God's good gifts gone wrong.

Sometimes we as evangelicals so emphasize the deity of Christ. We forget that he was also fully human.

Read the New Testament and you'll discover that he experienced anger, sorrow. Also, amazement and joy Jesus experienced the same range of emotions as we do. I think even maybe theater in Gethsemane of what the cross would mean how do we manage our emotions.

How do we understand that God has blessed us with them but at the same time they cannot control us. Those are the kinds of issues I discuss in the book, managing your emotions. God's good gifts gone wrong.

Here is what you do for a gift of any amount you can go to RTW offer.com that's RTW offer.com or you can call us at 1-888-218-9337 I'm going to be giving you that contact information again but let me thank you in advance for your support of this ministry together. We are making a difference and you are helping us there interested in the book, managing your emotions. God's good gifts gone wrong, you can contact us@rtwoffer.com or if you prefer. 1-888-218-9337 critical study of who we really are and how we manage our emotions.

You can write to us running to win 1635 N. LaSalle Boulevard Chicago, IL 60614 what many Christians may not realize is the provision God has made us is our heavenly father on tomorrow's broadcast more reasons why the father's voice can give you peace in the midst of your storms for Dr. Erwin Linzer this is Dave McAllister running to win is sponsored by the Moody Church