The Perfect Father

The Perfect Father

6/19/05

Father’s Day

Lighthouse Assembly of God

Pastor Greg Tabor

Introduction

Today is a day we honor fathers. Perhaps your father is with you this morning or maybe you will meet him for lunch or maybe a card or a phone call is all you can do because of the distance between ya’ll. Maybe your kids will be honoring you today in some special way. For some in here there’s been many Father’s Days, but for others, they are just getting started.

Some in here may have wonderful memories of their dad, while others remember a cold, callous, indifferent dad or maybe even a wicked, hurtful man.

On Father’s Day we try to focus on the good qualities of our dads. The facts are that none of us have had perfect dads. Even the best dad has his flaws. This morning I want to take a look at the Perfect Father, your Heavenly Father. My hopes are that dads would want to be more like Him and that all of us would put our hopes in Him. He’s the best Father of them all.

I want to focus on 5 roles I’ve found that my perfect Father fills:

He’s my provider

In early times the man was the provider and the woman the nurturer. And while culture has changed some things, it is still fundamentally true. The man has the responsibility to provide for his family. He is the head of the family, therefore the buck stops there.

In Matthew 7:9-11 NIV, Jesus says:

9“Which of you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? 10Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 11If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!

A variation of this is found in Luke 11:11-13 NIV, where the gift of the Holy Spirit is mentioned as the provision:

11“Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? 12Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

God will provide the Holy Spirit whom Jesus said would clothe us in power (24:49) and whom he referred to as the ‘promise of my Father’ (ESV). What a promise of great provision!

Granted, there are wicked parents that abuse their children and would give a stone if the son asks for bread. But generally speaking, most parents wouldn’t think of depriving their children of the basic necessities of life. And they surely wouldn’t give them a poor substitute as some kind of joke to mock them. Earthly dads are sinners and far from perfect. But most of them would provide for their children’s needs. How much more so can God give us exactly what we are needing!

In Matthew 6:33 God promises to provide the things we need if we will seek first His kingdom. I know we can say like Abraham in Genesis 22:14, “The Lord will provide.” Like a good Father, He may not supply every single want in our life, He may not supply every need in the way we think it should be provided, but He will take care of His children because He is a Perfect Father.

He’s my disciplinarian

We tend to not like the word disciplinarian. Perhaps you cringe a little because your dad was a staunch disciplinarian. I’ve heard older folks talking about being ‘taken to the wood shed.’ Perhaps you cringe because your dad was abusive and punished you in ways that strike fear in you today. Or maybe we don’t like discipline at all anyways and would rather not talk about it.

The perfect Father disciplines. A great passage on God disciplining His children is found in Hebrews 12. In this passage the writer is encouraging the readers to not give up under the persecution they are experiencing, but to realize that God is disciplining them. That may seem strange to us, but God uses various things to not only punish wrong doing, but to prevent wrong doing and to educate His children in the way they should walk. He is in the process of training us. Sometimes He uses methods we wish He’d bypass. We will go through some suffering. Jesus told us that. But we need to realize that when God disciplines us, He allows things to come against us in order for us to grow spiritually.

John MacArthur, Jr. explains the meaning of the word discipline: “The word is a broad term, signifying whatever parents and teachers do to train, correct, cultivate, and educate children in order to help them develop and mature as they ought.” He also states, “God uses hardship and affliction as a means of discipline, a means of training His children, of helping them mature in their spiritual lives.”