Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
Morning Worship · June 17, 2007
Third Sunday After Pentecost
Prayer of the Day
Creator of all, the One Jesus called “Father”, be with us in this hour of worship, we pray, as we commemorate our fathers, and seek your wisdom and guidance. Amen.
A Prayer Commemorating our Fathers and Fatherhood
[Editor’s Note: In celebration of Father’s Day, the congregation spoke this prayer as part of worship.]
Leader: Let us pray to the Lord.
Unison:
For our fathers, who have shared in giving us life and love, that we may show them due respect and love, we pray to the Lord…
For fathers who have lost a child through death, that their faith may give them hope, and their families and friends support and console them, we pray to the Lord…
For men, though without children of their own, who like fathers have nurtured and cared for us, we pray to the Lord…
For fathers who have been unable to be a source of strength, who have not responded to their children and have not sustained their families, we pray to the Lord…
God our Father, in your wisdom and love you made all things. Bless these men, that they may be strengthened as Christian fathers. Let the example of their faith and love shine forth. Grant that we, their sons and daughters, may honor them always with a spirit of profound respect. Grant this, we pray, through Christ our Lord. Amen.
SCRIPTURE READING
Ephesians 6:1-4
Children, do what your parents tell you. This is only right. “Honor your father and mother” is the first commandment that has a promise attached to it, namely, “so you will live well and have a long life.”
Fathers, don’t exasperate your children by coming down hard on them. Take them by the hand and lead them in the way of the Master.
[Editor’s Note: As part of worship, an aid was provided for assimilating the sermon. It is provided here for the reader’s use by completing the phrase and to conduct a self-inventory.]
A Christian Case for Dads
1. ACCEPT THEIR _____________________________________
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10
2. TRUST THEM ________________________________________
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10
3. EXPECT ____________________________________________
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10
4. AFFIRM THEIR _______________________________________
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10
5. CORRECT WITHOUT _________________________________
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10
6. NEVER _____________________________________________
1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10
Rick Frost
A couple weeks ago - some of you were here - I talked to the moms in the house. Today I want to talk to the dads. The rest of you may want to listen in. That would be fine. I’d love that. If not, coffee and doughnuts are right out there in the fellowship hall. We’ll be finished in a few moments.
I want to talk to our dads. I want to talk to our dads, because dads are a hot issue today. Fatherhood and fathers are being talked about, written about, toasted, and roasted as either the cause of many of the social ills of the culture in which you live, or they are being served up as the cure for many of the social ills in the culture in which you and I live. Interesting. Fathers. Fatherhood.
Now, I could talk to you today about the fact that about 40% of America’s children are going to go to bed tonight without a father in their home, and for some of those children that will be a good thing. I could talk about the link that has clearly been established between children growing up without a father and teen violence. I could talk about the clearly-established link between children growing up without a father and teen pregnancy. I could talk about the rather unpopular belief in some circles that a good father is foundational to a stable home, that a good father is foundational to stable neighborhoods, that a good father is foundational to a stable church, stable communities, indeed, an entire society – a whole culture. I could, but I’m not.
Now, of course, many of you saw the parent job description that was floating around in cyberspace this week. How many? [No hands were raised.] OK, we’ll skip that.
We could talk about that, but we’re not going to. This is Father’s Day, as you know, and, therefore, I want to take my opportunity today to do some teaching. I want to lift up… I want to put on your screen six principles for dads. These are six biblical principles that say to you dads and to me, as a dad, that there are things that you can do to bring out the best in your children. Indeed, I think there are six principles that, not only help you bring out the best in your children, I think they are principles that teach you and I as Christian men how to bring out the best in anybody, whether that be a friend, a spouse, a family member, an employee, a fellow worker, a brother or sister in Christ.
So, let’s get started. There are six points, which are going to be the six principles I’m going to lift up. There is a rating chart provided for you. If you want to follow along, I encourage you to do that.
Principle Number 1: If you want to help bring out the best in your children, dads… If you want to bring out the best in anybody, first you have to accept their uniqueness.
Now, this is not great news to many of you here. You cannot bring out the best in others until you first accept them. The fact is that God made everybody, as you know, different. None of us are alike. Even twins are different. I know because I’m married to one. They are different. Our children, my goodness, are different. The three Farr girls are different. At our house one is a healer; one is a climber; one is a princess. I’ll let you decide which you think is which.
I Corinthians 12 says God works through different people in different ways. One of your great responsibilities, Dad, is to teach your children they are unique, that God put each and every child on this planet for a specific purpose, for a specific reason, and because of that, they don’t have to compare themselves with anybody else. They don’t have to be just like everybody else, and that’s a tough sell in today’s culture where everybody and everything is constantly being compared. We compare clothes, cars, homes, gadgets, grade point averages, bank accounts, haircuts, dress sizes, waist sizes, waistlines. Compare, compare, compare.
I remember in graduate school wanting to know what my I.Q. was. Why? Because I genuinely felt like everybody else around me was smarter than I was. Now, it turned out that wasn’t true, but I felt it. That’s the point. I really wanted to know. Give me a test. Give me a number. Give me a measurement of my smarts. Why? So I can compare myself.
Of course, I learned that I.Q. tests – the ones they give--simply measure one thing that you’re born with. Now, some of us are born with athletic I.Q.s. They are just naturally coordinated people. Some are born with artistic I.Q.s. They just see light and space in ways that other people just don’t see, and they create amazing art. Some people hear sounds and arrange it’s parts into a whole, and they compose beautiful music. Some people are good with numbers. Some are good with words. Some are good with people. Some are natural-born leaders. Nobody is good at everything. Everybody is unique.
Years ago, (you already know this) there was a young kid. He was a rather shy, retiring, unsociable high school dropout, really, but he was pretty good with a computer, and today we know him as Mr. Microsoft. When Bill Gates was a child they called him “nerd,” “geek,” “freak,” and now they are saying, “We are not worthy. We are not worthy.”
Principle Number One: Accept your children’s uniqueness. How do you know when you have accepted their uniqueness? Simply, when you stop insisting that they be just like you. Look, Dad, when God made your kid, God did not make a carbon copy of you. Thanks be to God. We don’t need another you in the world.
Proverbs 22 says, “Train up a child in the way that she should go, and when she is old she shall not depart from it.”
That is one of the most misunderstood Scriptures in all of the Bible. Many think it means bring up your children as a Christian, and they will always be Christians. Now, we know that’s simply not true. We, in this room, know that. What it really says literally, Hebrew scholars say, is that you should bring your child up in the way that they should go, which means in the way that is this child’s way, this child’s natural bent, their giftedness, their abilities, her talents, the ways she’s going to be good in this life, things that she’s going to be good at. That’s how it translates. In other words, if your kid is good in athletics, steer them toward athletics. If they’re good in music, steer them toward music. If they’re good at science, steer them toward science. If they’re good at making money, steer them towards me. I’d like to talk to them.
Point: Don’t try to make them you. Let them just be them. You know that.
OK, now go back to the little rating chart [printed earlier]. Whether you’re a father or not, it doesn’t matter. You can take a look at #1, and I want you to rate yourself. How do you rate yourself? If you’re a person who is constantly trying to get other people to think like you, and act like you, and feel like you, give yourself a 1. If you’re a person who basically says, and most of the time encourages others to be themselves, whether it’s your style or not your style, that’s not the issue, give yourself a 10. Just wherever you’d like to put yourself. Let’s move on.
Principle Number Two: You must trust others with responsibility. Nothing brings out the best in your children, or anybody else, than when you believe in them, when you trust them, when you trust them with responsibility.
Luke 16 says, “Whoever can be trusted with a little can be trusted with a lot.”
Hey, Dad, one of the most important life skills you can teach your children is responsibility, because we are living in a country full of irresponsible adults. Why is that? Because they never learned responsibility as a child.
How do you learn to be responsible? You only learn one way: by somebody entrusting that responsibility to you. Overprotection, folks, is really a form of rejection. Did you know that? It’s saying to that child, “You are not competent. You are not capable. You cannot be relied on to do this.”
Are kids going to make mistakes? Sure they’re going to make mistakes. Know why? Because you did. And you do, and I do. It’s part of the game.
I went to a church growth conference years ago, and they told us pastors, “Don’t make all the mistakes yourselves. Let your people make some of them, too. Delegate, release, empower people.”
Why? Because when you trust people, when you trust your children appropriately, they blossom. They develop. They grow. People respond to responsibility. You take away that responsibility, or worse, take the responsibility yourself for their actions, and you know what you create? You create a co-dependent, and we’ve got a ton of them.
Dads, the last thing your kid needs is a safety net that is so all-encompassing that they can never fail. They have to learn just like you had to learn.
When Ted was a boy in junior high school, he stole a candy bar at the 7-11 on his way to school one day. It was sort of a slow day, I guess. The manager caught him and called the cops. They took him in cuffs to the Juvenile Justice Center, and they called his mother, which was probably a wise thing, because she happened to be at work. She also happens to be the daughter of a Marine. That’s right. My wife, Jan, has a mother who was one of the first female Marines in the United States.
Long story short, Ted spent the day stripped down to his jeans in juvenile detention, and his mother, after she put in a full day’s work, dropped by to say “hello” and to pick him up and to drive him to the 7-11 where he apologized to the manger face to face and paid for the candy bar. Now, to my knowledge, Ted has never been in trouble with the law since. In fact, he graduated from U.S.C. Law School. I’m sure there is some link there, but he makes more money in a year than most of us make in five or ten.
Principle #1 - Trust your children’s uniqueness. Principle #2 - Trust them with responsibility.
Now, rate yourself. Are you an overprotective person? Do you keep a really tight rein on your kids? If so, put 1. If you’re a person who trusts other people, particularly your children in significant amounts of responsibility that’s appropriate, give yourself another higher rating.
Principle Number Three: Expect the best. If you want to bring out the best in your child, expect the best from them. Why? Because people tend, as everyone in this room knows, to perform at the level they are expected to perform. Often times, we don’t realize it as moms and dads, but we set up our kids for success or failure by the kinds of expectations we have.
If you’ve heard all your life that you’re no good, you’re nothing, you’re just a cheap this, that, and the other, you’re never going to amount to anything. Let me tell you that expectation will rule. If you have a positive expectation, and that message is heard over, and over, and over again, it’s amazing.
On the day before our son, Ted, graduated from high school, Jan and I were not sure we were going to attend that event. That’s because Ted’s grades were so poor, it wasn’t clear whether he would graduate or not. He did. We went. We have pictures to prove it.
But it was very clear, also, that Ted was not ready for college. Or shall I say that we were not ready to pay for Ted to go to college. We were not ready to pay for that level of performance, you see. So, we sat down and had a little chat with Ted.
“Ted, we do not pay for Fs, Ds or Cs, because we know that you are not a C student. In fact, we know that you are smarter than all of the rest of us in the family. So, here’s the deal. When you are ready to go to college, we will help you, but we only pay for Bs or better. And, since you barely got out of high school, you’re going to need, however long it takes, to work and save up enough money for your first semester’s tuition, your room, your board and your expenses to show us, and you have to show us, that you can do B or better work. In other words, show us the Bs, and we will show you the money.”
Well, it took two years – two years of working in a car wash and hanging out with a crowd with the ambition of a lamppost before the call came. But it did come.
“I’m ready,” he said. “I want to go to college now.” He went to M.U. He signed up his first semester for 17½ hours, with four hours of Japanese. And for fun, he pledged Sigma Chi Fraternity, which I can tell you is no longer in this community for a variety of reasons. He had a part-time job at the Student Union. First semester grades? 3.75. Four years later: Magna Cum Laud.
Point? The power of positive expectations is for real, folks. We expected the best of Ted, and what was cool is that Ted came to expect Ted to do the best. That’s what we wanted, and we got it, and we’re grateful.
Rate yourself on #3. Are you a person who expects a great deal of those around you, or are you a person who basically doesn’t expect much at all? Just rate yourself. It’s between you and God.
Principle Number Four: Affirm their value.
Psalm 1: 39. If you haven’t memorized this one, please do. It tells what the world you and I live in does not know, and that is that every single individual, every single human being is valuable. “For you, O Lord, created me, my whole being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because you made me in an amazing and wonderful way.”
Parents, your children do not belong to you. I know they tell you that. Your child is not an accident. You do not have a child that just happened randomly to appear. Your child did not just get lucky and come into this life higher on the food chain than a frog in your pond.
The Bible says God used you and is still using you to create a unique, amazing, wonderful individual – a human being. Indeed, it says God formed your child in its mother’s body, and your child was formed for a purpose, that God knows your child’s gifts and abilities. God knows what your child will look like, the kinds of things they are going to be good at, and the kinds of things they need to stay away from. Indeed, it says God had your child in God’s mind even before you knew you were going to be a parent. That, folks, in the Bible, is what makes every single child – not just your child but also every single child in all creation – valuable.
So, how do you affirm that value?
(1) You first of all need to know and believe what I just told you, which came right out of Psalm 139.
(2) Give your children attention when you relate to them.
They tell me that at Cornell University several years ago they did a study, and they discovered the average father in this culture spends 37.7 seconds in direct communication with their preschoolers on a daily basis. I can’t even fathom that. Look your child in their eyes, and pay attention to them, and listen to what they have to say as preschoolers. Take an interest in what they are doing. Pay attention, because when you pay attention to anybody, folks, they feel valued. That’s what you say when you pay attention.
Know. Pay attention. Express affection.
Romans 12 says, “Love one another from the center or who you are.”
Dad, it’s not enough to just love your kids. You have to tell them. Now, here are the key words for you to remember: “I love you.”
You can’t just tell them. You have to find a way to help them feel it. That means appropriate hugs, and appropriate touches, and appropriate kisses. Did you know that in this culture today children get six times more affection from their moms than they do from their dads? Why is that, Dad? Some of you say, “Well, we just weren’t raised to be affectionate.” Well, perhaps, but you can change. Even if your kids are 30, 40, 50 or 60 years old, it’s never too late to start showing them affection. Why? Because it communicates. It communicates in ways you cannot imagine. It says, “I value you.”
OK, do your rating.
Principle Number Five: Correct without condemning. We all stumble. We all make mistakes. We all fall. We all need correction.
I looked up “correction” this week. It means, “to change.” It means to change what’s harmful. It means to change what undesirable, what’s not true. Correction.
Proverbs 13 says if you refuse to discipline, if you refuse to correct your children, it proves to them that you don’t love them.
Discipline, correction, is what we all need. It’s what helps us grow, and children, certainly. How do you do it without condemning? That’s the key.
Never, ever correct or discipline in anger. Why? Because most of the time when you’re angry, all you’re doing is getting even. Right? You know it, and I know it. They are a lot smaller than you are. When you’re frustrated and when you’re angry, you need to let off steam. And we all get frustrated and angry.
I know a guy in this church who has a huge punching bag down in his basement. Get one and work it over. I have a colleague who goes to the driving range. He’s got a whole bucket of balls, and in his mind each ball has an image of the person who has made him angry, and WHAM! He feels so much better.
But if you disciple in anger, you’re setting yourself up for a problem. That’s the good news. Your worse case scenario is that you’re setting yourself up for serious, serious rebellion. The Bible says that you will reap what you sow.
Rate yourself. Are you a scolder, a put-downer, a nagger? Do you spank? Are you sarcastic? Are you always comparing? Are you a person who is learning to attack the problem and not the person? Rate yourself.
Finally, we’re almost there.
Principle Number Six: Never give up on them.
I Corinthians 13 says, “Love has no limits. There is no end to trust, no fading of hope.”
Love – the kind we’re talking about between a parent and a child – that kind of love, the Bible says, can out last anything. Dads, one of the most important things you can teach your children is how to forgive themselves.
You see, we all do stuff, and sometimes what we do is wrong. Later, we feel sorry about that. Even after we have gone to God and asked for forgiveness, even when we’ve gone to the other person and asked for forgiveness, and God and the other person have given us that forgiveness, we don’t sometimes forgive ourselves. So, if you want to be a good dad… If you want to be a good parent… when your kid fails, don’t rub it in. Rub it out. Why? Because your Creator gives you grace, gives you chance after chance after chance. God certainly has for me and I know for you. That Creator, folks, wants you to give that same grace to your kids.
I know there are times and there are kids when it would be just a whole easier to give up. God knows better than that, and God will give you what you need to never give up on your young ones. Don’t give up on those young ones.
OK. Those are the principles. I want to ask you to do something today that I’ve never asked anyone in this church to do before. You don’t have to if you don’t want to. Since it’s Father’s Day, I want to challenge the fathers in this place today. I want to ask you to do something I’ve never asked to have happen in a worship service. I want to ask you to make a public commitment, in front of God and all the people in this worship service, to these six biblical principles I’ve given you. If, in your heart of hearts, you would say, “Lord, I want to become the father God wants me to become. I want to learn how to accept my children’s differences. I want to learn how to trust them with responsibility. I want to learn how to expect the best of those that I love. I want to affirm their value. I want to learn how to correct them without condemning them, and I want to make a commitment to never give up on them.” If you’re a Christian dad in this assembly today, would you simply stand? If you would say in your heart what I have just said, if you’d do that, I’d ask you to stand right where you are with me, right now. Just stand up. I want you to let me, let us, pray for you.
Lord, I thank you for these men. I thank you for the men in this community of faith. Lord, we’re men who are not perfect, but we’re trying to head in the right direction. Help us when we make mistakes, but more, help us to become the kind of men, the kind of dads you want us to be. We humbly ask it in the name of Jesus.
And we all say together… “Amen.”
Benediction
Heavenly Father, hear our prayers of thanksgiving for our families. Hear our prayers of gratitude for these walls where we share your home. Help us to create and maintain a more loving home where the hearts of all your beloved children will be nurtured to grow. Amen.
