What is it with our infatuation with having kids? Why do we do it? What is that desire, that passion that burns within us that makes us want children?
Is it our desire to see ourselves, literally, in another person? Is it our desire to love and be loved? What is it? Its mysterious to me.
And yet, here I found myself, a few years back as Tiffany and I got married, wanting kids. I couldn’t explain it. I still can’t explain it, but you have that desire deep within you, or at least, many of you for children.
God blessed us with the most beautiful little girl in the world in November of 2006. Nearly everyone in here knows her, has held her, and cares for her. My little girl, Peyton, has been a tremendous blessing to Tiffany and I. We love watching her laugh and giggle. We hate seeing her cry. And we would gladly protect her with every ounce of life we had if she was ever in danger.
How do you explain that except to say it is instinct and mysterious and leave it at that?
I know one thing, and anybody here who is a parent, and there are a lot of you, knows that maybe nothing more in this world will make you appreciate your own parents more than being one yourself. Whether it be the culmination of responsibilities that come along with being at a child bearing age or the maturity that comes along with it all, something makes you realize that your parents aren’t crazy and they weren’t crazy when you thought they were.
I am so blessed that I get to spend Father’s Day with my dad. He and my step-mom, Elaine, were gracious enough to make their way up to Chico from Livermore, where they live so that I could spend some time with them. I’m sure, for them, getting to see their grand-daughter is where the majority of the value in such a trip lies, but I hope that I might be a sufficient consolation prize.
Of course I am kidding, but isn’t it bizarre, this desire to have children?
I remember wrestling with my faith several years ago as I was still trying to figure out who I was as a Christian. I was struggling with some difficult questions surrounding our faith and I remember asking this question to Mike Crowley who is the preaching minister at Davis Park Church of Christ in Modesto.
I asked him something along these lines, "Why would God even bother to create us in the first place if He had the foresight to know that many of us would choose not to follow Him and He would be forced to condemn many of His creations?"
Basically, why even bother; weren’t we better off never to have existed at all?
And you know how sometimes you get an answer to a question that really resonates with you; it really sticks with you as being profound. I can almost guarantee that he has no recollection of what he said or ever even having this conversation with me, but he gave me, what I think is, the best answer anyone could have given me.
And here is the intriguing part, he never even answered my question. He responded to my question with a question of his own. Rhetorically, he said, "Why do we have the desire to have kids?"
What a brilliant answer…or question! He didn’t explain anything at all, but I knew exactly what he meant, and it made sense to me. We were created in the image of God and I have to believe we share a lot of similarities in terms of our personality with Him.
He is other-worldly and yet entirely relatable. So when we try to understand why we were created, we can understand in terms that cannot be put into words by realizing that we have the same innate desires for a creation of our own, if you will. We want kids, we want something that is part of us, to be created from us.
Now mothers have a very special relationship with their children, and with good reason. They grow the children, they feed the children, they provide them with everything they need to physically survive for quite some time. There is no denying the importance of a mother with her kids. It is something that men will probably never understand, but certainly respect.
In honor of Father’s Day, however, I wanted to spend some time to talk about what makes a father very special. Unfortunately, we live in a culture that has really tended to devalue the role of a father in a child’s life.
We seem to have been programmed, if you will, to believe that mothers can do it all. They can work, they can be the homemaker, they can be super mom and no Dad is needed. Just look at the statistics regarding custody battles and we can begin to see just how devalued the father is.
Television shows have been built around this theme. Look at the likes of Malcolm in the Middle, Everybody Loves Raymond, and many others and what do you see? We see the man taking on the nature of a buffoon, while the Mom is the smart, witty and rational glue that seemingly holds the family together, while simultaneously insuring that Dad does not kill the kids.
Dad is, unfortunately, often viewed, as one of the kids. He is no more than an immature burden on the family. I suppose this stereotype is not entirely false or mythical for men are often very immature with regard to being caretakers for their families, and especially their kids.
The fact of the matter is, however, that a Dad, a good Dad is one of the biggest indicators of whether or not their children will grow up to be faithful, loving, self-respecting people.
Take this statement as an example,
"Children who live absent their biological fathers are, on average, at least two to three times more likely to be poor, to use drugs, to experience educational, health, emotional and behavioral problems, to be victims of child abuse, and to engage in criminal behavior than their peers who -live with their married, biological (or adoptive) parents." http://www.fatherhood.gov/statistics/index.cfm
I don’t want to hit you with too many mind-numbing statistics because I doubt that anything I have said or will be saying will really come as a shock or surprise to you, but I want you to pay attention to what I am about to say, nonetheless.
* 85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes.
* 90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes.
* 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes.
* 75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes.
* 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes.
* 80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger come from fatherless homes.
* 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes.
* 85% of all youths sitting in prisons grew up in a fatherless home.
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Are you seeing something common there? It would seem that a large part of problem in our society regarding the confidence and respect of a child is as a result of the absence of a father in a child’s life on a consistent basis. There is something about a child that craves or needs something from a father.
What is it? I couldn’t say for sure; that’s not my area of expertise, but it seems to me that a child often seeks or needs the approval of their dad regarding their development and growth. That is not to say that mom’s approval doesn’t matter, but there is something intrinsic in a child that desires to find favor and approval from a father.
I played a lot of sports growing-up and I watched a lot of my teammates who maybe were the most gifted athletes disappoint their fathers with their lack of athleticism and focus on the game. Often times, these kids were the coaches sons. They could never do enough to make their fathers happy.
Now I know that their dads were happy for them and proud of them, but they just never showed these kids and so these kids would try and try, but would get so discouraged and become disinterested when they weren’t praised for their successes.
And I’m not just saying this. I think the life and ministry of Jesus demonstrates the need for approval from his Father. You know, we read about the birth of Jesus in the gospels and then we read very little about Jesus doing anything between birth and thirty years of age, but when Jesus does sort of resurface, he does so dramatically.
In Luke 3:21ff, we read of Jesus’ baptism by John and in v. 22, we begin to read that Holy Spirit descended on Jesus like a dove, and a voice, presumably God’s, came down from Heaven saying, "You are my Son, whom I love, with you I am well pleased."
How awesome! This is how Jesus begins his ministry, by encouragement, love, and the pride from his Father. God knew what the Son needed to hear. I wish my baseball coaches knew the same thing. For that matter, I wish all children could hear those words from their fathers.
I consider myself to be immensely blessed because my parents were never short on their compliments of me. I was always encourage; I was always lifted up and I always knew they were proud of me. I may not have realized it at the time, but looking back, I see it. I see how much it affected me. I see how confident I am in myself as a result of it all.
You could almost argue that they took it to the other extreme and maybe gave me a false sense of achievement, I don’t know. I appreciate and love them for it. As my Dad is here this weekend, that is one of the things that I look back on with appreciation and gratitude.
So, its important for a Father to build up his children, to give them confidence, to make them believe in themselves, but as I have said before, it is not intended to be a false sense of confidence in themselves, rather, the earthly father’s duties involve raising up their kids and teaching them the ways of the Lord. They are to show their children how to be confident through their faith in God.
That is what Paul is saying in Ephesians 6:4 when he tells fathers to bring their children up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
That is also the essence of Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, when he tells them that he and the other apostles tried to deal with them the way a father deals with his children, by encouraging them, by comforting them, and by urging them to live Godly lives.
You see, today should not just be a day that we honor our earthly fathers. This is a day that we honor our heavenly Father, not only today, but everyday, we are to honor Him with our lives, our service, and our devotion.
We truly are His children and what a glorious thing to be, Amen? We are told that God is the King of kings, the Lord of lords, and guess what…we are his children.
The Bible tells us that we are heirs to the throne. Listen to what Paul writes to the Galatians in Galatians 4:6-7, "Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts , the Spirit who calls out, ’Abba, Father.’ So you are no longer slaves, but God’s children; and since you are his children, he has made you also heirs."
Listen to what 1 John3 says,
1 See what great 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. 2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, [a] we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
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Do you see? We are eternally blessed as God’s children. We are the parable of the lost son that we read earlier. We have all fallen short of the glory of God, and yet when we return to our Father in heaven and we show Him that we actually want to be one of His children, he celebrates, he throws a feast because we were lost and now we are found.
In the parable, the son comes back to the father asking to be nothing more than a slave, yet he receives everything despite squandering his inheritance and then we read Paul say in Galatians that we are no longer slaves, because we are heirs.
Make no mistake. For those who are fathers and for those that will be fathers, I want you to know just how special you are to the lives of your children. I have grown and moved out and moved on from my childhood and yet I still look to my father for his acceptance for his encouragement and I suspect I always will. It is part of who I am.
I suspect the same is true for all of us. Fathers, it doesn’t matter how old you are; it doesn’t matter how old your children are; you never stop being a father. Your kids never stop needing you, they just need you in different ways.
As parents, we were put here on earth and given the duty to raise up our kids in the ways of the Lord. From right now, until the time the good Lord calls us home, we have a responsibility to set an example for our kids, to live a life worthy of our calling. Make sure you do that, not only for your sake, but for theirs.
The statistics speak for themselves and I believe the world does as well. It is no mystery that the role of the father has increasingly dwindled in the lives of their children and we see the results.
I can think of an NFL football player, whom I will leave unnamed who has 9 children by 9 different women and I have to believe these kids need their dad, but how does a dad in that situation give them what they need? He can’t; he can give them money and that’s it and my heart hurts for those kids.
We have seen financial benefits called "child support" replace the role of the father all too often in this country because fathers aren’t stepping up and because they aren’t valued for who they are and what they do.
There are a lot of really great dads in this room this morning and I think that my dad is one of them. I just wanted to take sometime to tell you how much I value you and how important you really are. The world may not realize; maybe they don’t want to, but perhaps nothing dictates more, the course a child will take in life, than having a great father and I believe with all my heart that a great father looks a whole lot like our heavenly father.
If you are a father, a grand-father, a great grand-father, or a great great grand-father, I want to ask you to stand up where you are.
Children, wives, mothers, will you show your appreciation for the men in this room on this father’s day for the hard work, and dedication they have shown as fathers?
Men, again, thank you. Dad, thank you. We love you. We need you.
You know, some of us don’t have the luxury of growing up with our fathers or being with our fathers. You know what though, you still have one. We heard Paul make the statement "Abba, father" earlier. That is an Aramaic term of endearment with regard to a father. It would be comparable to the term "daddy."
If we surrender our lives to Christ, we are told that we will be filled with the Spirit that cries, "Abba, father." This is the same Spirit that was within Jesus in his time on earth.
You may not have a father, and that may be difficult, but you have the Father, and it doesn’t get any better than him.
If you want to know more about Him this morning, then we would love to talk to you about Him. As heirs, we can inherit the Kingdom if we desire to. Do you want that kind of inheritance this morning? If so, then will you come forward this morning as together we stand and sing?
