WBC VIDEO NEWS PRESENTATION: http://signmovies.com/?tab=news&vid=20140610GHFD
This Sunday, Americans will celebrate one of the strangest holidays on the books – Father’s Day. Many other countries celebrate Father’s Day, though the dates vary from nation to nation. This is a day that people stop to recognize, or honor, their fathers – well, for being dads. In the movie Parenthood, a young Keanu Reeves spoke the following line: He said “You need a license to drive, you even need a license to catch a fish – but any A-hole can be a dad.”
But friends, being a father is very sobering business, from the Bible perspective. Fathers have a non-delegable duty to raise their children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord – (parenthetically, that word ‘nurture’ is translated from the Greek word paideia – which means the whole moral training and education of a child, including chastening, instruction, and discipline). A father’s job is not only to teach his children the standards of God, but to hold them to those standards, as long as he holds any sway over them. It is not an ‘outcome oriented’ job, as there is no guarantee that a father’s Biblically-correct teachings and discipline will have a life-long impact on the hearts of his children, as the heart, and its turning from a stony heart to a soft heart that is ashamed of its sin and desires to obey God, is the Lord’s business alone. Nevertheless, it is a father’s duty to teach his children, daily, what the Lord our God requires of each person, and to hold those children to God’s standards without timidity, without ambiguity, and without inconsistency. Failing in this grave, sober capacity as a father is a great cruelty to your children. The result of this great, cruel failure is that your children, when they come to years, are unleashed into this cruel, vicious, immoral world with broken moral compasses. They literally don’t know the difference between right and wrong, because they haven’t been taught the difference in any meaningful way. In fact, they have been taught a perverse morality – one that ebbs and flows with the zeitgeist, or spirit of the times, and teaches only those popularly-held moral rules – which change from one generation to the next.
Fathers, you send your children down a path to hell when you fail to teach them God’s standards – you imperil their souls, and your own soul as well, as you will account to God for the reckless morals that you have instilled in them. My father failed miserably in his duty to raise me by a Bible standard, opting instead for a hail-fellow, well-accepted, lukewarm Presbyterian strain of ‘God loves everybody.’ He was a very likable man – nobody had anything but nice things to say about him. But all of the evidence suggests that he is in hell. He failed in his non-delegable duty to teach me what the Lord God requires of every son, of every daughter, of Adam. I only bring this up to point out to any of you who were not done right by your parents – it is never too late, before you hit the grave, to be given a heart to know your God. No matter how awful your upbringing was – no matter how lenient – no matter how perverse – it is now on you to right that course in your lives – repent of your sins – and seek the face of God. While your fathers bear the sins of failing you, and will answer to God for them, you now have the responsibility to dig in, read the Bible, find out what God requires of you, and call out unto Him in sincere repentance for your sins. It was your father’s fault when you were young – but now it’s on you. The Lord can turn a person’s heart on a dime – I bear that testimony in my life – if you are one of His elect sheep, He will give you a heart of repentance and a heart to know Him.
And as for YOU fathers – even if you have failed miserably in your job to raise your children by the Lord’s standard (which nearly all of you have – let’s be honest), it is not too late for you, if ye be the Lord’s, to repent of your sins. The fact is that a man can do his children wrong and still go to heaven if the Lord grants him repentance before he quits this earth. Another man can teach his children all the right Bible concepts and hold his children to those standards when they are children, and all of those children might still go to hell. The heart is the Lord’s business alone. But that man who taught his children well will still have a clear conscience in answering the Lord on the matter, when he is called to give one, because it is his duty to raise them by God’s standards – regardless of the outcome. And if you have taught them the wrong things in their youth, then reverse your course – read the Bible, reject all that you had previously held as right, and find out what the Lord your God requires of you. And then teach those things to your children – even if they are grown. Read the Bible to them and with them, and explain what those things mean. It is never too late to start obeying God. Only repent – for the time is short – soon either the Lord will require your soul of you in your death, or the Lord will come in glory, judging ALL men by His righteousness. Fathers – the only way you do an honorable job as a father is to teach your children the standards of God. And children – the only real way to honor your father is to honor him in the Lord – which means obeying the Lord in all things in the sight of your fathers and mothers. And you should do that every day – not make a special day to slap a salve on your consciences about failing to do your duty to one another and to God every day.
God Hates Father’s Day.
Amen