Times of Refreshing: Summary and Application
Series 1: “The Kingdom of Heaven and the Church on Earth.”
Topic 3: The Heavenly Father
Key Text: Matthew 6:9-10; Hebrews 12:5-11
1. Fatherhood is Foundational
- From an earthly perspective the state of the church (compare Romans 1:24- 31) would suggest it is exposed to God’s anger.
- Paul’s first point in preaching to pagans was about God’s fathering, not about wrath (Acts 17:28- 29).Loss of the knowledge of God as Father leads to all sorts of anxiety, depression, addictions etc. (Matt 6:25- 33).
Application Questions
Is there still a memory of God’s true fatherhood resident in our culture?
2. Fatherhood is Heavenly
- Jesus teaching and actions revealed that God was a benevolent heavenly Father (Matt 6:26, 32; 14:19 -20).
- From his own experience he knew that the heavenly Father gave the Spirit (Luke 3:21- 22; 11:11 – 13).
- Jesus focused on God’s kingdom, rather than his own satisfaction, prosperity or comfort.
Application Questions
Because of his relationship with the heavenly Father, “Jesus begins on the assumption of abundance (as in the feeding of the five thousand).” (Sam Olsen). Do we struggle in this area (e.g. about finances)?
3. Fatherhood is Holy
- God as a holy Father is not a common father. He does not discipline as limited or selfish human fathers do (Heb 12:9,11).
- God’s discipline is “spiritual” (Heb 12:9 – 10). This means it is purely for our good and it is of eternal benefit.
- Jesus is most conscious of God as a holy and heavenly Father on the eve of the cross (John 17:1, 11). This is because God is about to destroy sin in him.
Application Questions
“Tell me the faults in your parents discipline regime and I will tell you how you see God as a punishing Father.” To what degree have you thought and prayed this through in your own life?
Relate where you believe God is disciplining your life at the present time.
4. Failure in Fathering
- Despite renewed interest in human and divine fathering something is not working.
- People have split the “Holy Father” and his judgement from a therapeutic image of “Abba! Father!”
- The biblical vocabulary of sin and judgement has been replaced by a language of error and dysfunction. This robs people of a sense of their eternal significance before God.
Application Questions
How do you suggest we can recover a spirituality of divine retribution without stirring up images of abuse?
“The love of a human person for God will always, always, be in direct proportion to the realisation of the enormity of what it means for God to forgive them (Luke 7:47 cf. 2 Cor 5:14).” Prayerfully reflect on this in your group and then discuss what the Holy Spirit seems to be saying.
5. Fathering in the Cross
- God is most Father where he seems to be least Father, in the cross. Therefore all spiritual fathering is fathering in the cross.
- Jesus’ spiritual agony in the cross is that he is cut off from an awareness of God’s holy justice against our sin (Isa 42:19; Eph 2:1, 5; 2 Cor 5:21).
Application Questions
Have you ever prayed consistently for a deeper understanding of the cross? Explore your answer in the group.
Has anyone ever “fathered you in the ways of the cross”?
6. The Father’s Judgement is our Joy
- “Judgement is joy because judgement destroys guilt.” (Friedrich) Only the revelation of God’s enacted holy judgement in Christ can free us from the universal fear of death.
- Genuine spiritual maturing comes when you desire God despite feeling deserted by him. This is the Holy Father applying the holy power of the cross to your life to make you holy.
Application Questions
Discuss the ways you think we as affluent Australians are spiritually disadvantaged when it comes to holding on to God in times of seeming spiritual desolation?
Times of Refreshing:
Series 1: “The Kingdom of Heaven and the Church on Earth.”
Topic 3: The Heavenly Father
Key Text: Matthew 6:9-10; Hebrews 12:5-11
A: Revision
The first week of our series was designed to give a heavenly perspective on God’s great goal in Christ – that the life of Jesus might come to fill every dimension of society and culture. Last week we saw that the old securities that are being removed by God through natural disasters, social crises and various judgements that destabilise nation and church. These judgements are an answer to our prayers that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Last week I made the claim that “all the signs of the wrath of God against idolatry recorded in Romans 1— immorality, homosexuality, gossip, slander, rebellion against parents…” (Rom 1:24-31) are common in the church today? From the outside, or from a non-heavenly perspective, it looks like God is angry Father. That confusion over Fatherhood is the foundational cause to the crises in the contemporary church is my subject tonight.
B: The Heavenly Father
In teaching us how to pray Jesus made two great claims, God our Father is heavenly and he is holy.
The first thing that Paul preached to the idol-worshippers in Athens was not a word of judgement but “we are his offspring” (Acts 17:28-29 cf. Eph 4:6).
When I first started taking funerals in the early 80’s virtually everyone could join in the Lord’s Prayer by heart. My thinking about this was triggered off by a scene after the naval battle in the film “Master and Commander”. Draped bodies are on the deck ready to be committed to the sea and Russell Crowe prays out “Our Father in heaven” in unison with the whole crew. Even the nominal knowledge that there was a just and benevolent Father in heaven gave to Christian civilizations a sense of responsibility and destiny.
The cost of the loss of this awareness in terms of hopelessness, depression, anxiety, suicide, substance abuse and so on is incalculable (Matt 6:25-33; Eph 2:12). This terrible loss of direction is also being borne in the church.
[Impact by analogy: fatherless families U.S 6 times more likely to be living in poverty, 2x more likely to drop out of High School, twice as likely to use drugs, crime rates in community proportional not to poverty but fatherlessness, U.K. all major crimes positive correlation, many national studies— positive correlation between absence of father and psychiatric illness. Enormous inconsolable father-hunger that has its origins and healing in God.]
The Father in Heaven
1. Jesus Knowledge of the Father
1.1 The Father is Heavenly
Jesus always had direction in his prayers. At the feeding of the 5,000, he “looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves… and all ate and were filled” (Matt 14:19-20).
I was indelibly impacted by a Venezuelan [Sam Olsen at a World Evangelical Fellowship Conference] who told the story of the church feeding thousands of poor, setting up micro-enterprises, mass evangelism and being asked by the government to effectively supervise the education system. What struck me most was his statement, “Jesus begins on the assumption of abundance” (God will provide). Jesus always acts as though God will provide for the need because he is a heavenly Father.
In 1987 I was facing a year of time study with four children and a student allowance half of which went in rent. As I was out praying one morning and in despairing I entered a field where swallows were flying about and the words of Jesus came to me, “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you of not more value than they?… Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ 32 For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things.”(Matt 6:26, 32).
The heavenly Father is a Father of immense benevolence and rich generosity. “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks fore a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? 12 Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? 13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:11-13).
Jesus spoke these words about the heavenly Father giving the Spirit because they were first true of his own experience:
Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heavens were opened, 22 and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” (Luke 3:21-22).
[“Being therefore exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you both see and hear. 34 For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says…” (Acts 2:33)]
Jesus received the Spirit because in his heart he was praying: “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” (Matt 6:10; 1 John 5:14-15) From this time he begins to preach the Father’s kingdom and operate in his power (Luke 4:14-15).
[The topic of the kingdom of God was the last thing Jesus discussed with his disciples before going to heaven and sending the Spirit at Pentecost.]
Jesus focused on God’s kingdom – rather than his own satisfaction, prosperity or comfort because he knew that the Father is holy.
1.2 The Father is Holy
Our great danger as the earthly children of God is to ask for the Holy Spirit when we have lost connection with the Holy Father.
The Holy Father is not a common Father— he is essentially different in his character to natural fathers and mothers. Hebrews 12 understands this difference to come in the way God disciplines his children. We have all had “fathers of our flesh” who “disciplined us for a short time as seemed best to them” (9, 11). The character of our parents exerted in discipline is always “fleshly” [ “flesh gives birth to flesh” (John 3:6)] imperfect, limited, and at times, selfish and wrong. The entire sphere of disciplining and disciplined flesh is the sphere where human beings are reminded by unjust pain of their mortality. Every element of imperfect love exerted by the punishing parent on the child is a sign in a world fallen and under the judgement of God and that both the punisher and the punished must die the death of a sinner (Rom 6:23). Tell me the faults in your parents discipline and I will tell you how you see God as a punishing Father.
J.Y. example— struggling to please God, every time I thought of his perfection I felt this was unattainable. I was being counselled in relation to issues to do with the demands of my own father, and as I was praying one day I had one of the clearest experiences of idolatry in my own life. Projected out from my body as an almost tangible object was an image of my earthly father’s demands that I had put between me and God the Father – this was a horrible realisation. When I repented of this idolatry and asked God to forgive me something wonderful happened. As I was walking home I was overwhelmed with a marvellous sense of God’s goodness saturating the whole of creation— everything was full of God, not as a demanding person but as a giving Father.
In Hebrews 12, God is the “Father of spirits”. Jesus said, “That which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6)— “spirit” is the realm of the unlimited and the immortal (Heb 12:23). The Father’s discipline is spiritual, he “disciplines us for our good, that we might share in his holiness” (12:10). His discipline leaves us with a sense of being free from condemnation and possessing eternal life.
The heavenly nature of the Father and his holiness come together in a uniquely powerful way under the shadow of the cross. In his “High Priestly” prayer of John 17 Jesus “looked up to heaven” and said, “And now I am no longer in the world…and I am coming to you. Holy Father…” (John 17:1, 11). As Jesus approaches the cross he is becoming increasingly aware that he must die as someone who has taken on our “flesh” (John 1:14; Heb 5:7). In Gethsemane he is almost intolerably conscious that when the holy meets the unholy the result is the destruction of all that is fleshly (Matt 7:13; John 17:12; Rom 9:22; Gal 6:8 etc.). God hates evil with the full weight of his being and it cannot co-habit with his own pure presence. “Your eyes are too pure to behold evil and you cannot look on wrongdoing.” (Hab 1:13)
Sin means judgement, not because God is an “angry Father” like our earthly fathers and mothers (this expression is never found in scripture) but because he is a Holy Father
2. The Failure of Fathers in our Day
Perth Christian Bruce Robinson’s book “Fathering in the Fast Lane” has been receiving international recognition, the “Fatherhood Foundation” has been launched in Canberra, counsellors lay great stress on healing the wounds from our fathers/mothers and preachers exhort us to come to the Father’s lap. Despite all this something is not working.
P.T. Forsyth, the “prophet of the cross” said, “Judgement is an essential element in Fatherhood and not a corrective device.” Peter grasped the intimate connection between the Father and the Judge when he said , “as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written, ‘You shall be holy, for I am holy. If you invoke as Father the one who judges all people impartially according to their deeds, live in reverent fear during the time of your exile.” (1 Pet 1:16-17).
Much of the church today treats the Fatherhood of God as a split image. They see the “Holy Father” revelation as part of the Old Testament and a traditional Christianity that was legalistic and abusive. The “Abba! Father!” revelation is supposedly New Testament, contemporary and therapeutic. But the person who taught us to cry out “Abba!” is the same person who taught us that our Father’s name is holy.
At the core of the spiritual and moral chaos in the church is an absence of “Fathers of Discipline” who image the holy justice of God. You will have noticed the omission of a whole biblical vocabulary in much of the church today— sin, righteousness, judgement, holiness, wrath, destruction, punishment and hell, to name a few.
We don’t seem to believe in human evil any more (with the exception of paedophiles and terrorists), people make “mistakes” (preacher at SPCC), they’re “dysfunctional” or “do the wrong thing”.
God does not seem serious about human behaviour any more. We seem to fail to understand that it is the revelation of the intensity of God’s holy judgement that communicates the immensity of heaven and hell. The revelation of Father cannot be separate from the revelation of judgement because God first confronts us as guilty persons whose sin must be destroyed in order that we might have fellowship with him. This is why the statement, “Judgement is joy because judgement destroys guilt.” (Friedrich), is absolutely true.
Unless we are exposed to the seriousness with which God views our sin we can never grasp that we matter eternally to God, that we impact him absolutely and our decisions are of infinite significance. When people are made to feel that God is indifferent to sin – which actually destroys them – they become indifferent to God. They lose “the eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor 4:17) associated with being in the image of God. Without the proclamation of the holy judgement of the Father the miracle of forgiveness is de-radicalised and the marvel of grace is trivialized. The love of a human person for God will always, always, be in direct proportion to the realization of the enormity of what it means for God to forgive them (Luke 7:47 cf. 2 Cor 5:14).
[This is why the first phase of every revival is necessarily consciousness of guilt followed by an experience of grace.]
Where the mighty things of divine judgement and human responsibility are neglected the core being of churches is untouched by the Word of God and you have a culture of insecurity where people must be constantly reassured they are OK with God by sensory stimulation and promises of prosperity and peace. In such a state pastors and people are unconsciously colluding in order to be left in their own sin.
Let me illustrate this with a story: a mother said to her son as she picked him up from school, “How’s school?” “Bad!” “Why?” “The teacher’s terrible.” “Perhaps the problem’s with the student?” “No, the student’s the same as last year. My teacher doesn’t care, she never marks my work.”
In other words, she doesn’t care enough to bring me to the test.
The Father “disciplines us for our good, that we might share in his holiness” (12:10). As long as the people of God do not realise that God’s ultimate intention in creating was that we might share his holy nature, and so his infinite joy, we will run amok. If the Father is to have fellowship with the children they must share his character. To the degree that we are presented with an image of a Father who is indifferent to the inner quality of our lives our hearts and consciences will inevitably come to the conclusion that we are bastard children. “If you do not have that discipline in which all children share, then you are illegitimate and not his children.” (Heb 12:8).
Left to ourselves we will always drift away from the terrible reality of the cross. In the church of God we have many “sugar daddies”, leaders who are not reproducing children of the cross.
3. Fathering in the Cross
All spiritual fathering is fathering in the cross, for God the Father is most Father (most Holy) where he seems to us to be least father.
The utter emptiness of the cross for Jesus is that he must share the blindness, deafness and deadness (Isa 42:19; Eph 2:1, 5) of humanity’s inability to know God as a holy Father. In his anguish of becoming our sin (2 Cor 5:21), there is no sense that sin is being opposed and punished in him, there is only an experience of purely reasonless abandonment – this splits the very ground of his holy being. Here, Jesus fully shares in the dreadful impact of how every human father, mother and all authority figures have abandoned their children in giving them less than the absolute, perfect and constant love that God designed us to receive. This absence of the intense presence of God as holy goodness— this experience of a derelict God— is the judgement on human guilt that Jesus endured to the full in the cross.
[In the words of Isaiah (Isa 28:21), the cross is God’s “strange” or “alien” work. It plunges the heart of God into an experience entirely in opposition to his very being— if Jesus’ anguish is Fatherlessness, the Father’s anguish is to be without his Son.]
What is the most unimaginable horror you could ever imagine? It is to be without Jesus. This is the sort of emptiness that God experienced at the cross; this is why the death of Jesus teaches us that God loves us more than himself.
There are three pieces of art in my study given to me by students and friends, this week I noticed for the first time that each one of them represents the cross. Why is this? [It is because when I was a young man God put me under the teaching of someone who in both intellectual and spiritual content was someone was very difficult to listen to. A man who in wartime when he looked down at his maimed and bloody leg was given a superimposed vision of the cross. He was the one who first taught me to love the cross and to understand that all things were both judged and are to be judged by the cross.]
Conclusion
“Judgement is joy because judgement destroys guilt.” (Friedrich) When and to the degree we see our guilt and alienation taken away by the judgement of the cross we will understand that the heavenly Father is holy so that in Jesus we can no longer fear death and no longer live in fear of the deprivations of this world, o longer live bound to the tyrannies of comfort and pleasure and possessions and human approval.
God is seeking to raise up [in his own image a leadership not of title, privilege, position or power,] a genuine spiritual leadership, a generation of holy fathers and mothers (whatever the age) who can take others where they have been, with Jesus, on the journey of the cross. You know you are moving in this company when you feel deserted by God and yet want him more than anything else, for this is the Holy Father applying the holy power of the cross to your life to make you holy.
As John Chrysostom said, commenting on Hebrews 12:8, “See, it is those very things in which they suppose themselves to be deserted by God that should make them confident that they have not been deserted.”
[It is this deep brokenness that Paul echoes in saying:] “But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumphal procession, and through us spreads in every place the fragrance that comes from knowing him.[For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing; 16 to the one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is sufficient for these things? 17 For we are not peddlers of God’s word like so many;f but in Christ we speak as persons of sincerity, as persons sent from God and standing in his presence.”] (2 Cor 2:14-17)
In this fallen world the stench of death is everywhere— you may try to drown it with money, sex, human approval, religious experience or anything else, but because it is embedded in your own guilt you never can. A great preacher once said, “Not the stench of the pigsty but the memory of the father brought the prodigal back.” (H. Thielicke).
What will bring the prodigals (Christian and non-Christian) back to Jesus in their thousands is the revelation of a Father who is heavenly and who is holy, who could resist that?