Becoming The Person God Created Me To Be
Part #4 Who’s Your Daddy?
Last couple of weeks we’ve been exploring why we get hung up in our spiritual development.
Why our progress is rather stunted if not stopped in becoming the
person that God created us to be.
When God accepts our little faith in the gospel,
The Good News of Jesus redeeming the world and reconciling us back to
God.
2 Corinthians 5:17 tells us that God transforms us into a new
person.
Ephesians 1:5 tell us that God adopts us as His child.
Philippians 4:13 tells us now we can do all things through
Christ who gives us strength.
And Romans 8:31 tells us that if God is for us nothing can stop
us.
We’ve discovered even though we are off to a good start in learning this new way
of living, we carry some of our old issues into our new life.
Those issues can trip us up, and beat us up,
effectively halting our spiritual transformation into the image of
God.
We learned that we all have Issues,
If you don’t believe that you have issues
Ask someone who doesn’t like you,
They will fill you in.
Issues are indicators of wounds.
We discovered that it is easy to get wounded.
We get wounded when we are most vulnerable
The season of greatest vulnerability is childhood.
We tend to underestimate the severity of our wounds.
We think that they are only minor, mere flesh wounds,
when in actuality it has incapacitated our growth in grace.
Wounds cause pain.
They hurt because they are shaming.
Sticks and stones can break bones, but words can shatter your soul.
When there’s “Shame on you” all our relationships are affected.
You know that your relationship with God is the key to living life to the full.
If that relationship is good, then we grow in faith,
Becoming more and more like Jesus.
If that relationship is bad,
our issues keep coming around and around,
And hinder this transformational process we call
discipleship.
Not only that but if our relationship with God is not right it affects our relationship
with others and our selves.
And since we know that everything rises and falls on relationships,
When we are struggling in this area,
Living our lives to the full is just the HBCC mission
statement and not a reality in your life.
Today I want of focus on our relationship with God.
I would like to clear away some of our distorted thinking about God.
I want you to leave here today with the idea that God is for you,
not against you.
Once again let me remind you that even though we are going to talk about parents,
And specifically fathers,
This is not an exercise to blame them for our issues.
I think parental wounds are almost unavoidable.
We live in a world polluted by sin.
Sin is always about deterring, damaging and destroying
right relationships.
Sin is unavoidable.
We know that sin hurts people.
We know that hurt people, hurt people.
We know that the people we tend to hurt are the ones closest to
us.
So we are not going to dishonor our parents by blaming them for our problems.
They may indeed be the source of our issues and our distorted thinking about
God,
But what we are concerned with is not what has happened,
We are concerned with where we’re going now.
Now parent, if something said along the way makes you think that you could
have wounded your child,
I suggest that you go to them, lay the cards on the table, and ask
them to forgive you.
A sincere parental apology can be incredibly liberating
for both parent and child.
During this series I have asked you to engage in three spiritual disciplines:
Bible reading, prayer and fellowship.
Fellowship is vitally important because you have to be loved out of
your shame.
You need to see that God has put people in your life as
His representative to love you, to accept you.
Today I’ll ask you to start practicing the spiritual discipline of
contemplation.
The stuff we’ll cover today has to do with the deep things of the heart.
I may reveal to you some ideas about God that my sound very strange to you
or contradict some of your long held beliefs about God.
What I am asking you is that you take that stuff and engage in that 7th
spiritual discipline—Contemplation.
I’m going to ask you to take these new thoughts of God and wrestle
with them,
go to God with them, think about them,
and ask God to help you sort your thinking out.
So that you can know Him as He has revealed Himself in scripture.
Let’s get to it.
How we relate to God often starts out looking like how we relate to our earthly
fathers.
It was Sigmund Freud who popularized the notion the our idea of God is nothing
more than a child-like “longing for a father.” (Freud, The Future of an Illusion, p. 18)
God is nothing more than our notions about our parents defied.
I am a firm believer that every great lie has an element of truth in it.
The truth in Freud’s thought is that our parents, particularly our fathers
“significantly mold our concepts of God that directly impact
our present relationships with God.” (Wilson p. 172)
In other words we tend to default to relating to God as we related to our
parents.
Ephesians 6:4 (MSG)
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.
Paul’s instruction to dads isn’t by accident.
Our perception of who God is, what God is like, the things we can expect
from God are greatly influenced by our relationship with our earthly
dads.
I believe we naturally default to the idea that God is like our parents.
We think that God is going to treat us like all the significant people in
our lives have treated us.
For some folks that’s not a bad thing.
In their family they learned about real love,
And being authentic, and relating rightly.
They kept the fun in dysfunctional.
But we know about issues and wounds, pain and shame,
How easily they can crash into our world.
How they can distort our idea of who we are, and who God is.
How they get unintentionally created even in the best of
Families;
Let alone what happens in soul shattering
families.
Could we subconsciously have ingrained patterns of thinking
that cause us to fear intimacy with God?
You are not going to become like what you fear because what you fear you
avoid.
No wonder you’re having a tough time in being a disciple of Jesus.
I know I certainly have had that problem.
I feared that God was eventually leave me and blame me for His
leaving. I expected to be abandoned.
Maybe you have some expectations of God that have been forged in the fires of
Dysfunction and sin.
Let me ask you five questions about your father
You’ll want you to answer these questions based on your childhood
experience of your dad.
So how would little you have answered these questions?
1. How close were you to your father, how approachable was he?
2. Did your father show you unconditional love or did you have to perform in certain ways to earn his love and acceptance?
3. Did your father have time for you?
4. Did your father keep his promises?
5. Were you punished in anger for being bad or disciplined in order to improve your character?
(Wilson p. 172)
“Fathers …create expectations about the treatment their children will receive from
God.” (Wilson p. 172)
Our thinking defaults unconsciously to the notion that God will treat
us like our dads treated us.
I have run into folks who will tell me that their parents were perfect.
Kinda of reminds me of when my mom told Carol that I was perfect.
Maybe all 5 of your responses to the those questions are positive and
affirming.
Congratulations you had the gift of a great dad.
If not maybe your earthly dad issues are sabotaging your relationship with
your heavenly Father.
Let me ask you another set of questions.
These questions are about your relationship with God.
Do you feel that you are a favored Child of God,
That you can come to your heavenly Father with any problem,
And He will work with you to solve it, to fix it?
Do you feel that you are loved by your heavenly Father or do you have to
earn His love and acceptance?
Do you feel cherished by your heavenly Father,
Does he delight in you seeing someone special,
Someone valuable to Him?
Do you feel that your heavenly Father comes through for you,
That He keeps His promises to you?
When you mess up do you feel your heavenly Father is angry at you,
Ashamed of you, punishing you because you are bad
or do you feel that even if He is angry and needs to correct you,
that He wont reject you?
Did you notice that the questions about your earthly father and the questions about
your heavenly Father are essentially the same.
Where I hope these types of questions will lead you is to an understanding that we
tend to relate to God in a very similar way we relate to our fathers.
That’s our default setting.
If dad was harsh, aloof, emotionally shut down, absent, abusive,
then we tend to take that baggage and unpack it in our relationship with God.
If we felt that we could never make dad proud,
that we could never really please dad,
that we couldn’t be what he wanted us to be,
then we tend to take that relational baggage into our
relationship with God.
If there was no dad for you,
You may think that God won’t be there for you either.
Or maybe you created a fantasy Dad,
Who is everything that your real dad wasn’t.
If dad was perfect but you’re not sure about God really being for you,
I suspect that you may have some dad issues.
And don’t realize it.
But that’s ok, we’re looking forward.
Jesus was speaking to a group of men, as to how they should relate to God,
He tells them:
Matthew 7:9-11 (MSG)
If your child asks for bread, do you trick him with sawdust? If he asks for fish, do you scare him with a live snake on his plate? As bad as you are, you wouldn't think of such a thing. You're at least decent to your own children. So don't you think the God who conceived you in love will be even better?
Dads are supposed to model to their children the love of God.
Some dads do well, but no dad can do the job perfectly.
Jesus is telling us that the normal dad is going to try to take care of His children.
How much more, says Jesus, will God take care of you,
The God who conceived you in love.
Conceived in love.
I find a whole lot of comfort in that thought.
In the practice of the Christian faith we use that term born again often.
John 1:12-13 (NIV)
Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God-- children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.
When I think about not only being born again, but conceived in love the 139th
Psalm comes to mind.
Psalms 139:13-16 (MSG)
Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out; you formed me in my mother's womb. I thank you, High God—you're breathtaking! Body and soul, I am marvelously made! I worship in adoration—what a creation! You know me inside and out, you know every bone in my body; You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculpted from nothing into something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you, The days of my life all prepared before I'd even lived one day.
Intellectually, with your head, you may be able to grab a hold of that thought,
I am conceived in love, born anew because of love,
and right now the recipient of the love of my heavenly Father.
but experientially, in the heart, you’re thinking:
“Well, if God loves me why doesn’t He give me a break?”
Or any of the other host of doubts we can have
concerning God’s ability to take care of us.
Tevye Talks To God http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKFFbZ_77aI&NR=1
02:18-04:50
Tevye Chosen People http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcR4c9mrRf0&NR=1
09:26-10:00
Jeremiah 29:11-14 (MSG)
I know what I'm doing. I have it all planned out—plans to take care of you, not abandon you, plans to give you the future you hope for. "When you call on me, when you come and pray to me, I'll listen. "When you come looking for me, you'll find me. "Yes, when you get serious about finding me and want it more than anything else, I'll make sure you won't be disappointed." God's Decree. "I'll turn things around for you.
Can you entrust yourself into God’s care and plans for you,
Or does the thought make you nervous?
Do you expect God to do what He has decreed,
Or are you worried that maybe,
Somehow, for some reason, God is going to disappoint you?
Is your thinking about God keeping you at arms length?
Sunday only length?
Times of trouble only length?
Can you trust God to love you today?
Can you trust God to have your best interests in mind?
Can you trust God enough to follow?
Are you angry at God,
For not doing what you wanted Him to do?
For not making life easy for you?
For not coming through when you needed a miracle?
Maybe we expect too much from God.
God has created this incredible planet for you.
God has, conceived you in love.
God has overcome the penalty of sin and redeemed you from eternal death.
God has empowered you to live your life to the full.
God has called you to be his representative,
his ambassador to the people that fill your life.
To be about meeting their needs even at the cost of a personal
sacrifice.
All for one single purpose,
That He could fellowship with you.
That together love, and intimacy,
Acceptance and belonging,
Joy and happiness can be experienced,
Can be shared.
And maybe that’s all that matters to God.
Maybe God’s omnipotence,
His being all powerful
Is not power to control and dominate others.”
(Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding, p 86)
Not power to bend, to force, and to coerce everything according to
His will.
But rather power to create, redeem and bring His creation into
fellowship with Himself.
Maybe God’s omnipotence is in His power to save. (Migliore, p. 86)
1 Cor 1:24 (NLT)
“…Christ is the power of God…”
Maybe God’s omniscience
Is more than just merely knowing all things (1 John 3:20; Psa.147:5; Heb.4:13. )
past, present, future including
what has happened, what is happening,
what will happen, what "could" happen.
(http://www.theopedia.com/List_of_God%27s_known_attributes)
Maybe God’s all knowing means that He gives you and I and the other guy,
“…space and time to develop our own existence and to respond freely
to his love,” (Migliore, p. 86)
revealed to us through Christ.
Maybe we should equate His all knowing with His wisdom.
And then define it as the scripture does.
1 Cor 1:24 (MSG)
“…Christ is God's ultimate miracle and wisdom all wrapped up in one.”
Jesus is God’s wisdom, His knowing everything necessary to bring us
into fellowship with Him.
Maybe God’s omni-benevolence, God’s love,
isn’t about being nice and fair and kind to everyone,
bestowing health, wealth and prosperity and any other worldly
blessing upon people, even His people,
but rather offering everyone the opportunity of entering
into a right relationship with Him.
Then maybe that familiar scripture in the letter to the Roman Christians:
Romans 8:28 (NIV)
And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.
Maybe that good, is simply God being able to use all things,
The good and bad circumstances,
The plenty and want,
The rejoicing and suffering,
To draw you close to Him.
The good is to be in fellowship with Him.
Hopefully I have raised a lot of questions for you.
A desire for the answers is what motivates a person to contemplation.
I’ve likened Contemplation as a heart to heart talk of discovery with
God.
If you are not sure about God being for you,
Not sure of His love, not sure you can trust Him,
You’re going to be hindered, hampered and halted in your spiritual
development,
in becoming the person that God created you to be.
It’s my prayer that as you contemplate,
As you seek answers to the questions raised this morning,
that you will encounter God, and
that God will convince you that He is for you,
that His love is steadfast,
and that He would never betray your trust.