The Prodigal's Father Series

We live in the age of the marvelous machine. In Washington D.

C. the traffic for a half mile around the White House is controlled by

a computer system. The system is constantly telling the lights when to

change to move the traffic according to the need. 450 buses have a

transmitter which is linked to the master computer, and if the driver

needs to set up a serious of green lights to keep moving on schedule he

can tell the computer what he needs. If the computer decides it is a

justified request, he will get his green lights. If the request will only

create problems for others he will be denied.

The machine makes the decisions and this is great, for no man

can know enough to know what the best decision is. The machine is

taking over more and more of man's life. A machine wakes us up in

the morning; a machine makes our breakfast; a machine takes us to

work where we spend the day working on or with a machine, after

which we reverse the process to get back home where we spend the

evening being entertained by a machine. We live in a mechanical

monarchy where the machine is king. This is certainly not all bad,

and we cannot be anti-machine, for God is the creator of the most

marvelous machine of all-the entire physical universe. The problem

comes when we get so enamored with the machine that we forget our

Father in heaven, and begin to worship the creation rather than the

Creator.

Dr. Ron Doly, a family life specialist, asked 50 thousand children

to choose between their TV set and their father. Fully half of them

chose the machine rather than the person. Fathers play second

fiddle, not only to mother, but to machines. This role of second fiddle

is not new. The Prodigal Son chose living with dad as the last choice.

His first preference was for the far country, and the pigpen was his

second choice. Only in desperation did he go home to dad. The elder

brother didn't mind living with dad, but he sure didn't want to

cooperate with his father's value system by welcoming his brother

home. Here is one of the best fathers in the Bible, and he can't get

first place in the hearts of his children even without the competition of

machines.

Fathers need encouragement for their egos, but there are not a lot

of resources devoted to this goal. Even Paul says in Eph. 6:4,

"Fathers do not provoke your children to anger." In Col. 3:21 he

writes, "Fathers, do not exasperate your children that they may not

lose heart." But who is telling the children not to provoke their

fathers to anger, and exasperating them so they lose heart? Most of

the literature is either degrading, or else it puts such a burden of

responsibility on fathers that it leads to despair.

Sam Levenson is saying it as a joke, but the only reason its funny

is because it is so often true. He said, "When I was a boy I had to do

what my father wanted. Now I have a boy and I have to do what he

wants. My problem is when do I ever get to do what I want?"

Fathers react in frustration and go to one extreme or another. They

escape by just letting their children do as the please and give very

little guidance, or they try to demand total conformity to their will

regardless of how unfair and unreasonable it is. Both extremes lead

to the same reaction. Children come to feel that their fathers do not

care. They don't care and so they let us do anything, or they don't

care so they won't let us do anything. In the book of children's letters

to God one little girl wrote, "Dear God, my father said kids is the

best time in life. Please tell him what good is it if we never get to stay

up and watch anything."

Society blames fathers for not being strict enough, and the kids

blame fathers for being too strict. One boy said, "When my dad says

he wants me to have everything he didn't have when he was a kid-he

means A's in school." Fathers are the scapegoat of our cultural

desire to find blame for the mess the world is in. Fathers need some

encouragement. There are two things I see in the parable of the

Prodigal that can be an encouragement to fathers, for these two

things make it clear that fatherhood is hard, but that there is hope.

The two things I see here are the intricacy and the intimacy of

fatherhood. Let's look first at

I. THE INTRICACY OF FATHERHOOD.

By intricacy I mean what Webster's Dictionary defines it to be,