The Element of the Father

The first element of our faith, the blessing we were made to give away, and the idols that quietly take it back.

Scripture: Deuteronomy 6:4-5 · Genesis 12:1-2 · Galatians 4:4-7 · 1 John 5:21 · Adapted from a sermon preached November 13, 2022.

I have been looking forward to this for a long time. Every Sunday a room fills with people who are not the same. Some are brand new to faith, some come from another tradition entirely, and some have been Nazarene their whole lives. And out of all those differences, all those histories and temperaments and wounds and hopes, we are asked to make one song. Not a tidy song, a true one. It is no small thing to take that many unique lives and bring them together into a single act of adoring worship. So I want to slow down and look at what actually holds us together, the foundations underneath the words we say so easily.

We say Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We say sin, and we say grace. We know these are the key words of our faith. But I am not sure we always understand why they are the foundation, or how they work together once they are combined.

Here is the picture that will not leave me. Think of the periodic table. It is only an arrangement of the elements, ordered so that scientists can predict how things will behave when you put them together. Take hydrogen and oxygen. Two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen give you water, and water sustains life. But add a second oxygen and the very same elements become hydrogen peroxide. One you can drink and live. The other you drink and it can kill you. The same building blocks, a different combination, a completely different outcome.

Our faith is like that. The truths we confess, when they are combined the way God intends, create a beautiful and unified song, an environment where Christlike unity can actually grow. But those same truths, combined carelessly, or mixed with things that do not belong, lead not to life but to misunderstanding and division. So I want to use the table as a frame, and take the elements of our faith one at a time, to show that we can actually predict the outcome when we place our lives in the hands of God. And we begin where Scripture begins, with the first element, God the Father.

So let me put the question plainly. What is a father, and why does Scripture reach for that word to describe God? Some of the earliest places we meet this are in the writings of Moses. In Exodus 4, God tells Pharaoh that Israel is his firstborn son. In Deuteronomy 1, Moses reminds the people how the Lord their God carried them, as a father carries his son, all the way through the wilderness until they reached the place he had for them. And in Deuteronomy 6, the great confession of the faith, hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, and love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength. These are among the oldest words we have that speak of God as Father, and they tell us three things.

The Father protects. He heard a people groaning in slavery and he did not give up on them. He broke the thing that held them and let them taste freedom. The Father guides. He went before them and carried them through their troubles toward a good gift, a liberated life he had already prepared. And the Father teaches. Through Moses he showed them how to live, not by force, but the way a good parent does, by showing the way. That is what fathers are for. Or, if I am honest about my own story, these were the things my mother did for me. Good parents protect and guide and teach, working to give their children freedom from whatever holds them back. Solomon knew it. Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.

Why do parents do that? One reason is legacy. We all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves, and one of the ways a family reaches for that is by handing something down to the next generation. In the world of the Old Testament the father would love, and protect, and teach, and then give his blessing forward to his children. Billy Graham once said that the greatest legacy we can leave is not money or the things we accumulate, but a legacy of character and faith. John Wesley put it more bluntly, do not send your children to hell by leaving them your wealth, have pity on them. I do not think there is a single person who would turn down a blessing from God. But here is the question I cannot get around. What would you actually do with a blessing if it came? Be honest, because you can fool me and you can fool the person next to you, but you cannot fool the Father who knows your heart. Would you share it, and take none of the credit?

Listen to what God says to Abraham in Genesis 12, before Abraham leaves everything he has ever known to follow him. I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you, and I will make your name great, and, here is the turn, you will be a blessing. The blessing was never meant to stop with Abraham. Our heavenly Father blesses us so that we might be a blessing to others.

That truth cuts straight across a lot of what passes for Christianity today. I used to laugh at Israel in the wilderness. The sea split open, water came out of a rock, fire lit the night and cloud covered the day, and still they grumbled. The moment Moses stayed on the mountain a little longer than they wanted, they gathered their own gold, shaped it into a calf, and bowed down to it. Isaiah later marveled at the strangeness of it, a man who cuts a tree, burns half of it to bake his bread and roast his meat, and then takes what is left and bows to it, feeding on ashes and never stopping to ask whether the thing in his hand is a lie. How odd, to make something with your own hands and then worship it.

And then I stop laughing, because we are no different. When God wants to bless us, how often do we take matters into our own hands and build an idol instead. We make red elephants and blue donkeys and hope one of them will finally save us. We put our trust in documents and rights and amendments and expect them to keep us secure. We hold onto traditions that were good once but now quietly keep people from ever exploring their faith. We build altars around our families, our finances, our weapons, our politics, and we bring them our loyalty and our endless sacrifices, hoping they will give us the security and direction we are aching for. The first commandments God gave are dominated by warnings against this very thing, and for good reason. Anything in this world that successfully competes with our love for God is an idol.

Which is why John, of all the ways he could have ended his letter, ends it like this. Little children, keep yourselves from idols. It is strange, because he never mentions idols anywhere else in the whole letter, and then out of nowhere comes this last line. I think the key is back in chapter two, where he writes, do not love the world or the things in the world, because the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and the pride of life are not from the Father but from the world. He may well mean the wooden idols, and he would be right to. But I believe he also means anything that competes with our love for God. And here is the tragedy of it. God wants to give us blessings, and our idols take them away. In a world where God says he himself is enough, idols always ask for more. They require our time. They require constant maintenance. They demand endless sacrifice to keep them happy. And in return they hand us earthly comfort and an immediate response, and we get so used to that arrangement that we carry the same expectation into church. God, my job gave me comfort, my success gave me satisfaction, what are you going to give me, and I would like it now. But the blessing of God was never meant to be spent that fast. It was meant to be an inheritance, something we receive and then pass down. And the greatest inheritance of all, the one so many of us are trading away for lesser things, is Jesus himself.

There is a verse that undid me this week. Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Do you hear how tender that is? Abba does not mean Father the way we say it in a formal prayer. Abba means Daddy. Because we have been adopted through faith in Christ and made heirs of the kingdom, God has put the Spirit of his own Son inside us, so that our hearts would cry out, Daddy, I love you. So let me ask you gently. Does your heart cry Abba, Father when you worship? And if it does not, is it possible there is an idol standing in the way?

I had one of those hard father decisions this week. My daughter got the chance to practice basketball with the older girls, and I know from my own days as an athlete what that kind of practice can do. Scrimmaging against players who are taller and stronger makes you quicker and sharper and better, and her mother and I wanted that for her. But it landed on the same night as our midweek gathering, the night our family loads up a van of kids to go and worship and learn alongside others their age. When we told her we would not be skipping church for basketball, she was disappointed, and I understood why. But then something happened. Two of her friends, who also play, decided on their own to give up basketball so they could come with her instead.

As parents, the truth is that we want what is best for our children. We want to protect them and guide them and teach them how to live, the same way the Father does for us. But we also know what is better than best, and that is receiving the blessing of Jesus so that we can turn and give the blessing of Jesus to someone else. We are called to share what God has given us. But you can only share Jesus if Jesus has first been shared with you, and if he is the one crying Abba, Father in your heart while you worship.