Reconstructing Dad

Chuck Ammons, Overflow Church  |  Guest message at The Resting Place  |  Psalm 73, Exodus 32, John 14, Hebrews 1:3

THE RESTING PLACE IS THE NERVOUS SYSTEM OF THE CHURCH OF TAMPA BAY

Thank you so much. Good morning, TRP. It is good to be in the house. Listen, there are many congregations in our city, but there is just one church. Jesus is coming back for one bride. And if a letter were being written by Paul today, it would not say to the Resting Place, or to Overflow, or to Abide. It would say to the one church of Tampa Bay, the one banner under the one name of Jesus. And we get to exist as these many different tapestries of grace that get to see hell shattered and the orphan brought home to the Father.

I am so thankful for this house. As I was thinking about a word this morning and praying about a word for this house, first I wanted to say that the Resting Place is like the bleeding heart within the body of Christ. And the Father said, “Yes, that is true, but actually…” He stopped me and said, “The Resting Place is the nervous system of the church of Tampa Bay.” And I was like, “That sounds intriguing, but I do not remember my biology.” So I actually had to go look up what the nervous system in our body does.

I want you to hear this. It says the nervous system senses vital messages that are necessary for the health and the wholeness of the body, and sends those messages so each part can do its part. Let me say that again. The nervous system in the body is a sensing part of the body. It feels and experiences messages deeply. It lives them out, but then it cannot hold them to itself. It senses and it sends so that each part of the body can do its part. And I want you to know, TRP, that is who you are in the body of Christ.

We are so, so, so thankful for you. When I look at how God is moving in the midst of this, I see it in the prayer canopy that is happening at TRP, standing for this region in Tampa Bay. I see it in your provision room, which is unstinkin’ believable to see, what you are doing. And I see it even in a senior leader who, on his birthday, says, “I do not really want to talk about me. I want to talk about King Jesus. And I want to see the neediest people in our city fed.” Five thousand dollars raised on Caleb’s birthday for the church of Tampa Bay and the people of Tampa Bay. That is who you are in the body.

I GOT BAPTIZED IN THE BELOVEDNESS OF THE FATHER

I am just so thrilled to be here with you. For those I have not met yet, my name is Chuck. I am the lead pastor over at Overflow Church across town. Last Sunday I celebrated twenty-five years at Overflow, serving in that place, so I have been in the family a long time. I am married to my best friend, my high school sweetheart, Jill, which is Jesus and jeans, basically. I am a father of five children whom I adore. I have twins who are my youngest, and Andrew is here with us this morning. I want you to know, more than anything else, what marks my life is that I adore Jesus.

All of that said, for most of the days of my life, if you were to ask about the relationship status between me and God, it would have read, “It’s complicated.” Though I cannot remember a single time I did not absolutely adore Jesus, I have spent most of my life trying either to climb ladders out of my shame or to run hamster wheels to finally become something for God.

Much of my existence, until God did something pretty radical, was climbing ladders to escape my shame. What that means is that I am looking all the time. It is my past. It is the hidden things. It is the thing I thought. And when you are climbing ladders, your eyes are not on the Father. Your eyes are on the brother and sister next to you and how you are doing in the game. And if I was not trying to climb out of my shame, then I was running on a hamster wheel.

We have a modern version of those. Every time you go to the gym, it is called a treadmill. When you get on the treadmill, here is what happens. You run and you sweat and you go and you go and you go and you strive and you get exhausted, and then you step off in the exact same place where you started. You have moved exactly nowhere.

For much of my life, that would have been my existence with God, until a radical series of experiences about eleven years ago. And listen, this was after Bible college. This was after seminary. This was after many years serving within ministry. Eleven years ago, God met me alone in a hotel room in Naples, Florida, in room 120. In a radical moment, I got baptized in the belovedness of the Father. And somehow I knew: I am a hot mess, and he absolutely adores me. My shame was broken. My ladders were destroyed. There were no more hamster wheels to run. I am my beloved’s. He is mine. And it changed everything.

But what it meant was a whole lot of re-education from the religion behind the veil. When God started to re-educate me in who my Father has always been, the first place he took me was not a worship center under bright lights with wonderful, beautiful music. No, I found myself in a sweaty gymnasium under bright fluorescents, in a white plastic folding chair, as my oldest son Bradley was practicing karate on his way to getting his junior black belt.

I Was a Son Who Had No Concept of His Father

I found myself sitting on a normal Tuesday afternoon, the way I always had, reading this book that was going to lead our college students through to know intimacy with the Father. All of a sudden I opened to a page in the book, and I read and reread these questions that I had no answer for. It said this. It said, “What was your father like emotionally? What did he like to do? Was your dad a man full of fun, or was he serious?” And for the first time, I had to admit it to myself. I did not have a single moving picture memory of my dad.

My parents divorced when I was four. My dad tragically died when I was six in a car accident. My very first memory, the very thing I can access from the vault of my mind, is sitting in the back of a station wagon as my mom told me and my sister that my dad was no longer with us. My second memory was me, standing six years old at his funeral, passing out tissues to grieving guests. Everything before that, and for quite some time after that, is nothing more than faded snapshots.

And here on this Tuesday afternoon in that sweaty gymnasium, suddenly I snapped back to reality as I looked at my son looking back at me in warm admiration. And it hit me for the first time. I was a son who had no concept of his father. And that fact had shaped everything about how I had come to view God as Father.

I want to share a message this morning called Reconstructing Dad. It is how we come to see God, and specifically God as Father, through the lens of Jesus. In the next few minutes, this is what I want to share. I want to share how there is a universal ache in every heart, regardless of our personality, regardless of our culture, regardless of our expression. We all have the same universal ache. I am going to call out the aim of our enemy, which is nothing more than to keep us living as orphans, though we are deeply beloved. And then I want to point us once again, but I want us to see it deeper this morning, to how Jesus came not just to save us, but to remove the veil of who our Father has always been, so that we could finally live in rest as beloved and spend our lives being love.

THERE IS A UNIVERSAL ACHE CALLED THE ORPHAN SPIRIT

First, what I want to share this morning is this. I believe there is a universal ache in humanity called the orphan spirit. Our universal ache is the orphan spirit. Let me unpack it this way. My theology is simple. I believe that all of humanity is hungering full tilt, all the time, for the glory of God, and he alone is the bread of life that can satisfy.

We have this thing that we do sometimes in our church culture, and I get it. We say things like this: “We just need to be hungry for God. We just need to press in in this moment.” I get what we are trying to say. But can I tell you, I do not think the issue is a hunger that some people have and other people do not. I actually believe all of us are hungering full tilt all the time. The question is not if we are hungry. Humanity is starving. The question is, what are we trusting in to satisfy?

All of humanity is hungering for God. And I agree with the words of St. Augustine, who said it this way: “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our heart will be restless until it rests in you.” All my life I knew that ache. But eleven years ago, I gave up trying to chase my own sustenance on ladders of climbing out of my shame and hamster wheels of trying to become something. And finally I joined the psalmist, crying out this in Psalm 73:

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth I desire besides you. My heart and my flesh may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Come on. My old heart, your old heart, our old flesh, which by the way, if you are in Christ, is dead and buried. We are not called to necromancy, to dancing with the dead. We are new. My old flesh and my old heart failed me. But praise God, what I could not fulfill, God did. He is the strength of my new heart and my portion forever.

Here is the truth. If we went back to our original fall in the Garden of Eden, we would see that the core of humanity’s problem is that we were made for intimacy and we chose independence. That is the core of the whole thing. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil: the problem was that we already had half of the equation. We already walked with the knowledge of goodness himself. We knew him in the cool of the day. The only thing waiting on that tree was brokenness and the pride of believing that we knew reality better than our Maker. What we lost in the Garden of Eden was our view of the Father. And humanity has been reeling ever since.

Presently, right now, there are 20 million children in the US, nearly one in four, who live without a biological, step, or adoptive father in the home. It is a number that has tripled since 1960. And the issue is this. We were made for intimacy with God, and we have chosen independence. What does that mean? It means we took the hunger within us and we chose our own way. The particular brands of sin that we have may vary. There are eight billion people on the planet. There might be eight billion different brands of sin, but I am telling you, it all comes from the same root.

The problem I see from us as Christians is this. We tend to want to judge people because they sin differently than we do. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. So even today, what you need to know is you are a saint. You are a most holy place for his dwelling. We are saints, not sinners. We are saints who sometimes sin because we are learning to see our Father in reality. But in that, one of the greatest ways I think we sin, which means to miss the mark, is that we judge people who sin differently than we do. If somebody struggles with what I struggle with, well, we are just working out our salvation with fear and trembling. But as for those freaks over there… Is this not where we get caught? And this is where I want us to start today, in an age of scapegoating and blaming and cancel culture and pointing fingers. I want to tell you, there might be eight billion different brands of sin, but there is only one root of sin. The universal human ache is the orphan spirit.

Now, our terms matter, so I want to tell you what I mean when I say orphan spirit. I believe it is the universal propensity of mankind, this drive within us that we never even speak aloud, to believe that when push comes to shove, we are on our own in the world, needing to protect ourselves, to provide for our own welfare, and to promote our own agenda in the world.

I believe all of our worries, all of our fears, all of our struggles, all of our sins are somewhere in those three. Somewhere we begin believing in independence, that it is up to me to protect myself and who matters to me. It is up to me to provide. If it is to be, it is up to me. And it is up to me to promote. I have this dream in my heart, but I am restless and I cannot sleep. Why? Because somewhere, when push comes to shove, I do not believe anybody is looking out for me.

For many of us, what can happen is this. We can bow the knee to Jesus and still walk as Christian unbelievers. The reality is there is some place where I believe with my mouth but have not yet made that eighteen-inch journey to my heart. And by the way, that is not condemnation. That is an invitation to ever-increasing levels of glory, to know your Father better. But we cannot know him better unless we actually know where we started.

There is a universal ache called the orphan spirit. When I talk about this loss of fatherhood, I want to share this. It is a respected political science scholar, Stephen Baskerville. He is talking about what happens when you lose the image of father. He said this, and get this:

Virtually every major social pathology has been linked to fatherless children: violent crime, drug and alcohol abuse, truancy (that is, dropping out of school), unwed pregnancy, suicide, and psychological disorders, all correlating more strongly with fatherlessness than with any other single factor, surpassing even race and poverty.

Let this sink in. What he is saying is that statistically, nothing more deeply affects our struggling, our striving, and our straying than a deficit or a distortion in our view of father.

Now, just like me, I want to say to you that our experience with our earthly fathers, for better or worse, has shaped the way we view God as Father. Let me go a step further. Any parents in the room? Moms and dads, I want to tell you this. The way you are presently parenting your children is a direct reflection of how you think God the Father is presently parenting you. Every action of anger or patience, of intimacy or distance, of grace or threat is saying something about who you think your Father is and how you think he sees you. Out of the overflow of our hearts, our mouths are speaking. And I want to tell you that I believe the universal ache of humanity is to be fathered.

PRISONS OF OUR OWN MAKING

The second thing I want to share this morning is this. There is a universal ache called the orphan spirit, but the universal aim of the orphan spirit is to isolate us into prisons of our own making. If there is an orphan spirit, what is it wanting to do? It is wanting you to live as if it is all up to you, to lean on you.

I want to share briefly two stories from Scripture, two cries of two men who came out and said the thing that all those years I was crying that I did not have words for. What they said was this: God, would you show me? Would you show me you are real? Would you show me you are here? Would you show me you are good? Would you show me my Father?

The first one comes in the book of Exodus, and I will set the scene. Israel has just escaped slavery in Egypt. They have crossed the Red Sea. They have arrived at Sinai. And Moses has gone up the mountain to meet with God for Israel. This is a time of unprecedented victory, and yet the orphan spirit is hard at work for their undoing. In Exodus 32, we read this:

When the people saw that Moses had delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves to Aaron and said, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.”

I want to tell you, the orphan spirit longs to isolate us in prisons of our own making. I believe those prisons are one of three things: fear, shame, and pride. I would call these the three S’s of the orphan spirit. The way the orphan spirit can come, if I believe silently that it is up to me, is this. I want the Father, but I cannot see access to him because I think I have to climb a ladder to get out of my shame or run on a hamster wheel. How could it show up?

First, it could show up as scarcity. This is what I would call the fear-based life. The fear-based life says there is not enough to go around. So I lie in bed at night and I cannot fall asleep because I do not yet have what I believe I need, and I am not sure it is going to work out for me to have it. I am constantly thinking on that ladder, “Well, what do they have that I do not have yet? And where do I need to climb? Well, at least I am doing better than that one.”

It can go from there, from scarcity into striving. Striving would be the shame-based life. If fear says there is not enough, striving believes there is enough, but perhaps I am not enough. God can bless you in this place. I can pray all day long and bless all day long because you are working the system and performing. But when I look in the mirror, I am afraid that I have not done enough, and I find myself living after shame.

The final one, scapegoating, is where it turns external, and it is the pride-based life. If fear says there is not enough and shame says I am not enough, then scapegoating shows up and says you are not enough. And then I find myself pointing at everybody else. By the way, scapegoating can show up just as much by you pointing out everyone else’s sins as by you showing up everywhere being the perpetual victim. You are scapegoating yourself. So this is the way the orphan spirit works.

The reason I share this is that all three of these are on display in Exodus. Let us look at it. First of all, it starts with scarcity. The people have been miraculously freed. They are awaiting orders. And the God of the universe is talking to Moses on the mountain. They have seen him show up miraculously. They have heard about all of the plagues. They have watched it all. But they are in a desert. And now fear sets in. Moses is gone. They begin to wonder, “Where are we headed? Where are we going to get food? What if an enemy sees us?” The first thing that starts to happen is this scarcity, this fear. And where does it immediately lead? Where it always does, into striving. There is an urgency to do, to fix, and to move. And it is insane to me in this story how quickly it escalates with Aaron.

Aaron is the one who was holding the staff for the first three plagues. I do not know about you and what it would do for confidence in your relationship with God, but if you went home today and had a stick in your hand and put it in your swimming pool and the whole thing turned to blood because God said it would, I think it would be an ego boost. Aaron sees God move this way. And what is fascinating to me is they come to him and they say this: “As for this Moses…” A little side note: sometimes when we get in religion, we turn into “What have you done for me lately?” Yesterday Moses was the hero. Now Moses is a scapegoat. “As for this Moses, we do not know what has happened to him.” And then at this point they say, “What are you going to do?” And without hesitation, he says, “Bring your earrings. Let’s throw them in the fire.” It is like the ancient equivalent of “hold my beer.” And I think, Aaron, what are you doing? But is it not precisely the same thing we do?

Moses hears the commotion. He comes down from the mountain and rebukes Aaron. You know what Aaron’s response is? They started in fear. Then they moved into striving. And Aaron moves straight into the third thing we do as orphans, into scapegoating. He shifts the blame. Moses says to Aaron, “What did you do?” And Aaron’s response, you can read this later in Exodus 32, is this: “Do not be angry. You know the people and how set on evil they are. They came to me and asked where you went, and I said that you went up the mountain. And then they said, ‘What are we going to do?’ And I said, ‘Well, just bring your jewelry here.’ And I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.” It is as if to say, “I am as surprised as you are.”

But I want you to try this today. If you want to know how long it would take to form melted gold into a calf, go home, take your jewelry, throw it in the fireplace, poke it around, and see what happens. Because this was not a momentary lapse of judgment. This was a fixed declaration of an orphaned spirit that did not believe who the Father said he was.

From here, Moses goes up the mountain and meets with God, and we hear the first cry. The first cry Moses makes is this. He says, “God, it is not enough to have your commandments on stone. I need you with us. If you will not go with us, do not send me.” And then Moses gives this cry that has shown up in many of our worship songs. He says, “God, would you show me your glory? I want to see you. I have got to know you as you truly are.” That is a beautiful cry. Who in the room would say, “I want to know the glory of God”? God, show me your glory. It is the best prayer we could pray. But what did God tell him? He said, “Moses, what you are asking is impossible. You cannot see me and live.” So what he did instead, he hid him in the cleft of the rock. By the way, the rock is Jesus. He hid him in the cleft of the rock and covered his body with his hand. And Moses only saw a little bit of his backside. And yet this veiled image of the glory of the Father was so great it made Moses shine like a human light, bright for months to come.

He comes down from the mountain, and I want you to get this. When the people saw the only revelation we had of the glory of our Father, they asked Moses to put a veil over it. And that is what religion has been doing ever since.

The Father comes to show us his glory. We yearn for him, but we have these fears and this shame and this pride, and we cannot see our way to the Father. We have this ache to be fathered. We have an orphan spirit that wants to lock us up into prisons of independence, of fear and shame and pride, so that we will be always running to arrive, but never resting and abiding. But somebody say, “Praise God.” If there is an ache called the orphan spirit, and if the aim of that orphan spirit is to isolate us, praise God. Jesus came as our universal answer to show us our Father and to bring sons and daughters back home to him.

WOULD YOU SHOW ME THE FATHER?

Now I want to go forward to one other passage. I told you what happened with Moses. Let us go all the way forward to John chapter 14. It is the second “show me” cry. Jesus is there before the disciples, and he is talking to them. It says:

Jesus said, “If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and you have seen him.” Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it will be enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”

Philip’s cry to Jesus is, “Would you show me the Father?” And I love this, because in Greek it literally means to put him on display so that I can touch and experience who he is. Does anybody remember back in the day of middle school when you would have science experiment day in the gymnasium, and they would bring that trifold cardboard board, and you would test if Duracell was better than Energizer, and you would watch somebody almost blow up the gym with their volcano? And then they would have that electricity ball that would make my four-foot-two seventh-grade frame feel like the most powerful man on earth, because I put my hand on this and all this energy just harnesses. Science experiment day comes because you have been learning all this stuff in a textbook about science, but now they say, “I want you to put your hands on it and actually see how it works.”

That is Philip’s word. He says, “I have been learning. I know all about Moses. I know what has been said. I know all about the law. But what I am begging for is this, Jesus. I have been with you. I have seen miracles.” Can you imagine what it would be like to be with Jesus? This is Philip, who would have watched all of these healings and all these miracles. He said, “Jesus, it has been amazing to be with you, but I need the Father to be in me. Would you show me my Father?”

And here is what I find insane about this. Philip is a good Jew. He should know how inappropriate his request is, because this question has already been asked before by the hero of their faith. Moses already came and said, “Would you just show me the Father? Would you show me your glory?” And what he was told was, “No, out of bounds. You cannot handle it.” The only thing more shocking than Philip’s request is Jesus’s answer. Moses was told, “You cannot see the Father and live.” Jesus tells him, “You already have.”

Something has shifted. Something has changed. And here is what I find incredible, because when you go other places in the New Testament, you find it is affirmed. Let me give this to you. Hebrews chapter 1, verse 3 says this:

He, Jesus, is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature.

If we were to say that today, we would say Jesus is the Father, hashtag no filter. You know filters. We go on social media. You see your friend from high school you have not seen in a while, and they put up a picture and they say, “Feeling pretty today,” and you think, that is a powerful filter, because that is beautiful, and you are beautiful, but that is not what you look like.

And the problem is this, friends. I think there are many of us walking around, and we do not say this out loud, but we believe Jesus is the filtered image of the Father. So when Jesus comes, “Jesus my Savior,” oh man, I can cry out to Jesus my Savior, but I still cannot fully rest. Why? Because I believe there is an unfiltered image of this other God that is distant and angry and disappointed.

When Hebrews says that Jesus is the exact imprint, I love this, because it is talking about this picture being the exact imprint. Back in the ancient days, when a new emperor would come, the very first thing they would do is print new currency. The new currency would have the image of the emperor on it. The reason it did that is that nothing would be bought, sold, or traded that did not bear the imprint of the one on the throne. Now listen to me. In the kingdom of God, when Jesus shows up and tells Philip, “You have already seen who the Father is. I am the full image. I am the exact imprint,” what he is trying to say is this: Philip, everything you have heard before was from behind a veil. But right now, when you have seen me, you have seen who the Father is. And nothing the Father will buy, sell, or trade will ever be anything different than what you see directly from me. Right now, I have come to unveil who your Father has always been. And everything else is veils of religion that are filtered through shame and striving and scapegoating.

Jesus would show up in Luke 24, on the road to Emmaus after his resurrection, and he said this: everything that was written in Moses and all of the law is actually all referring to me. And it says that he [inaudible] them from the beginning of the story.

Now this becomes very important, friends, because for many years I had been worshiping two very different images of God. On one side I worshiped Jesus, who saved me, my Redeemer who found me and forgave me. But on the other side, I was quietly terrified of the Avenger of the Old Testament, who was so angry at my sin. I was told in some rooms he could not even bear to look at me, had it not been for the Son’s sacrifice.

And I know the reasons we say things like this. We are trying to make much of the severity of sin, and I get it. The wages of sin is death. But in trying to make too much of sin, we have not made enough of the adoring love of our Father. What I need you to understand is this. When Jesus comes and says, “I am the reflection of the Father, and everything else was behind a veil,” what he is saying is that if you read the Old Testament and you do not see Jesus with his arms stretched out, if you do not understand that your adoring Father’s stretched-out arms are the exact same arms as your Savior’s arms stretched out on the cross for you, if you do not see it, you stay behind a veil that keeps you trapped in prisons of your own making.

How do I know it is true? Well, the Pharisees were the best students of Scripture around. They had studied and even memorized the Scriptures. In fact, let me just go ahead and tell you, most of us are interpreting the Old Testament the same way the Pharisees did. And when Jesus came, it was not just that they did not recognize the fullness of the Father. They crucified him as a son of the devil. That should get our attention. Religion wants to keep you buried behind a veil. Jesus has come to unveil who the Father has always been. And the Father is inviting us out of a schizophrenic faith into the one Father who has always adored us.

Jesus ends this Scripture in John 14, after he says this about the Father, and he says this:

I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you, and you will know that I am in the Father, and you are in me, and I am in you.

THESE FOUR ANCHORS

In the months following that awakening in the gymnasium, the Bible began to leap off the page, because suddenly I started seeing the Old Testament through the lens of Jesus. The reason we say reconstructing Dad and not deconstructing: there is one form of deconstruction that is good. It is just discipleship. We do not see clearly as we should. We see dimly, as through a glass. And God is taking us to ever-increasing levels of glory, which means there are some views you and I hold right now that are not worthy of God. When we lay them down and step higher, we can step into something. That does mean sometimes we need to deconstruct something. But there is this other form of deconstruction that is just following the God of our own image.

In the months that followed this, God took me back through the Old Testament and showed me four things. I am just going to say this briefly because I want to lead into a moment of ministry here. There are these four anchors that began to leap off the page, and this is the very thing I spent eight years writing this book, Reconstructing Dad, on.

Number one is this: Jesus is the perfect reflection of the Father. Number two: the whole story of the Bible is about Jesus, and it will only ever make sense through the lens of Jesus. If you are reading any passage in the Old Testament and you do not see Jesus, you have not seen it clearly yet. Number three, and this is where it changes, listen: God is unchanging. Who Jesus is, the Father has always been. Period. We do not use the laws of Moses to argue with the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus came as the unveiling to tell us about everything that happened behind the veil. And so number four, this is the truth: how the Father approaches, loves, judges, and feels about people looks exactly like Jesus.

Everything before Jesus is still behind a veil. Paul would later say that all of those who read the Scripture and cannot see Jesus still read from behind a veil. But the reason the Son of God came was to destroy the works of the devil, to set us free from an orphan spirit, and to bring us back to the heart of a Father who has always wanted us.

Friends, there is a universal ache to be fathered. There is a universal aim to keep us striving as orphans. But if we have eyes to see it this morning, we would understand that the outstretched arms of Jesus on the cross are more than a ticket to heaven when we die. They are the very wide-open arms of the Father, who welcomes prodigal sons home, who has always adored us, and who is inviting us today to live.

GOD, WOULD YOU FATHER ME?

Can I ask you to stand with me? I am just going to ask in this moment if you would close your eyes and lay your hand on your heart. The reason I want to do this is you have heard something out there right now. Let us step into a moment just about you. Just center yourself for a minute, and let us not look at anybody else. We have not come today for an intellectual exercise. We have come to encounter our Father. So can I ask, hand on your heart, where are you aching to be fathered, friend? That ache wears a lot of different faces.

It looks like the anxiety you cannot turn off. Two-thirty in the morning and you cannot fall asleep because of everything you think you need to do, you need to fix. It looks like the shame, saying things in your head that you would never dare say out loud about yourself. Some of us are our own worst critics. Our worst enemy could never say such cruel things as we say in our soul to ourselves. And some of you have believed that is the voice of your Father.

It can look like striving, always trying to assess and fix and solve. It can look like that addiction that you keep turning to, to comfort or hide or numb or distract. And it can look just as easily like the exhaustion of doing all kinds of wonderful Christian things because somewhere you are still chasing an approval that you have never been able to satisfy.

Friend, maybe you had a great dad, or maybe, like me, you grew up feeling fatherless. Maybe there is somebody in the room right now who grew up with a split view of God. You are able to embrace Jesus, but you feel God the Father is angry or disappointed or distant. You cannot even connect emotionally with this idea of a Father who adores you right now in the midst of your mess. But the reason Jesus came was to destroy the works of your enemy and to unveil the Father who has been waiting to baptize you in belovedness.

How great is the love the Father lavishes upon us, that we would be called children of God.

And that is who we are. Even when our hearts, 1 John says, try to condemn us, God is greater than our hearts. He knows everything. Right now, if we could see in the Spirit, we would see that he is rejoicing over you with singing and dancing. So for somebody this morning, with your hand on your heart, the simple cry would be this: God, would you father me? Would you father me?

There are two ways this can look. Right now, with everybody else’s eyes closed, I never want to miss an opportunity. If there is somebody here in the room who says, “I have been to church. This might be the first time or the thousandth time, but I see that I have only known a religion of striving. I have been trying to make a contract with God that I follow the rules, and if I behave well enough, then he will bless me. And today what I am hearing is that there is a place where the Father just desperately wants my heart, and I want to surrender and be fathered. I want to know him. I am tired of religious hoops that I jump through. I am tired of my exhaustion. I am tired of my shame. I am tired of my anger, scapegoating everybody else. I just want to know the Father.” If that is you, friend, the international sign of surrender is just to lift both hands over your head to say, “Here I am.” With nobody else looking around, if that is you, would you just right now lift your hands and say, “Father, I want to know you. I want to know you.”

Right where you are, you could say something like this. You could say, “Father, I know where I have fallen short. I know where I have blown it. I know where I have missed it. I know all about my shame. I need to know your love. Would you come and father me? Would you come and remove every veil? Would you come and set me free of my striving? Would you come and remove my shame? Would you come and be the strength of my heart and my portion forever?” Friend, that is all it is ever going to take.

One last question for anybody else in the room who has known the Father. If you are honest, there are things in your relationship that are complicated. There are things you try to keep in check or keep buried, or you are very much caught in that fear, in that shame, in that striving, in climbing ladders or running hamster wheels. Right now, friend, if you are holding something that is keeping you from the Father, can you just let it go? Can you just once again breathe in deep, breathe out? And would you just say, “God, here I am. Would you father me?”

Lord, I pray for my friends. I pray with my friends. You, the adoring Father, are waiting with arms wide open, with more than we could ask, with more than we could imagine. Would you father us? Amen.

Transcript of a message delivered at The Resting Place Apostolic Family, Tampa Bay, FL, trpfamily.org

Watch the full message by clicking here