This sermon was preached at Cornerstone Baptist Church in Cherry Log, Georgia on June 16, 2013 by Pastor Paul Mims.

Ephesians 6:1-4
A newspaper ran a contest just before Father’s Day entitled, “My Pop’s Tops.” They asked children to write in saying why they considered their Pop was tops. Here are some of the responses. “My Pop is tops because he’s not got a bad temper. He doesn’t get mad easily but when he does, he always has a good reason – me.” Another kid said, “My Pop is tops because he lets me help him in the garden – even if I don’t want to.” Another one said, “My Pop is tops because he lets me take accordion lessons and practice outside. When I practice outside – he goes inside. He can tell better at a distance.” Another one said, “Every child should love their father because if it were not for their father, where would they be? Nowhere – that’s where they would be. If it wasn’t for fathers you wouldn’t hardly see any children around Charleston.”

I’m going to try to tell you why God made fathers. Everyone has two fathers. We have an earthly father and we have a Heavenly Father. The reason that God made fathers is the same reasons why we need God. I want to suggest to you four reasons why God made fathers.

I. GOD MADE FATHERS BECAUSE HE KNEW WE WOULD NEED SOMEONE TO BLESS US.
We all want the blessings of God upon us. A part of your daily prayers concerns the blessings of God upon you. The Heavenly Father knew that in much the same way we would need the blessings of our earthly father upon us. The two are inseparably linked.

Two psychologists, Smalley and Trent, have written a little book called THE BLESSING. They made a study of Genesis 27: 26-29. It is the story of the blessing of Jacob by Isaac. The blessing was so coveted that Jacob stole it from Esau. He says everyone of us need the blessing of the father upon us. There are several elements to the blessing. “Then his father Isaac said to him, ‘Come here my son and kiss me.’ So he went and kissed him. When Isaac caught the smell of his clothes, he blessed him and said, ‘Ah, the smell of my son is like the smell of a field that the Lord has blessed. May God give you of heaven’s dew and of earth’s richness – an abundance of grain and new wine. May nations serve you and peoples bow down to you. Be lord over your brothers, and may the sons of your mother bow down to you. May those who curse you be cursed and those who bless you be blessed.’”

This is an ancient ritual they did back in biblical times when the father would give his blessing to the firstborn son. There are four elements to this. We need to be blessed by God and our father in each of these four ways.

First – MEANINGFUL TOUCH. Every child need to be touched by his or her father every day. I made it a habit of hugging Joe and Jenny when they would get up in the morning, when they left for school, when I came home at night, and when we put them to bed. That continues today when we are with them.
The second element of the blessing is SPOKEN WORDS. Children need to hear their father speak to them words of blessing and encouragement. Sometimes a life will pivot or turn or will blossom or fade on the words from the father. These are powerful things. Just as our Heavenly Father speaks to us and His words to us in our inner being determine the course of our lives, so do the words of our earthly father determine the shape of our futures. Words stick in our memory like glue.

The third element in the blessing is EXPRESSING HIGH VALUE. Isaac placed a high value on his family. Every child needs to know that he or she is of high value to the father. That needs to be demonstrated in daily life. This is known by the intangible sensory perceptions that a child perceives from day to day. Children should never feel that they are a burden or that they are a disappointment or a problem to the father.

The fourth element in the blessing is PICTURING A SPECIAL FUTURE. Here was a vision of Isaac for the future of his son. Every one of us, as children and young people, need to have in mind a mental picture of what our future is going to be like. It is the privilege of parents to help children paint a mental image of what their future can be. The father should not try to live his unfilled dreams through the child, but should help the child envisage what is appropriate for him or her.

The fifth part of the blessing is AN ACTIVE COMMITMENT TO THE CHILD TO HELP ALL ALONG THE WAY. We want to know that our Heavenly Father has a commitment to us and that our earthly father will not forsake us. Being a father is a life long undertaking.

Some children are blessed to have all of these elements of the blessing from their fathers. Others hunger for it all of their lives.

II. GOD MADE FATHERS BECAUSE HE KNEW THAT WE WOULD NEED SOMEONE TO NOURISH US.
The Apostle Paul was very strong on teaching about the family. He said to the church at Ephesus: “Fathers, provoke not your children to wrath, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.” We need to be nurtured by the father’s presence. Our daily Bible Readings and prayers nurture us in God’s presence. We need our earthly fathers with us when we are growing up.

There are 168 hours in a week. An average man works forty hours, with another fifteen hours surrounding work, commuting, overtime, and so forth. Another eight hours for sleep – that is 56 hours. All of this adds up to 111 hours, leaving dad 57 hours to do something with his children.

One group of 300 seventh and eighth grade boys kept records for a two week period. The average time they spent alone with their dads was kept. Of the 168 hours each week the average they spent alone with their dads was seven minutes.

Another study included almost 2000 boys and girls. Some had strict parents and some had permissive parents. There were some surprising results. The children that were highly disciplined had higher self -esteem and were higher achievers. Just the opposite was true with children of permissive parents. They had lower self- esteem and were lower achievers. Those who were highly disciplined said that they loved the adults who made and enforced the rules that they lived by. The children were made to feel secure when reasonable boundaries were given them. This requires balance. Not too loose and not too strict.
That is the way the Heavenly Father nourishes us. His discipline is true and balanced. W. Bradford Wilcox, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Virginia, conducted an extensive amount of research in this area for his book Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands. From it, the familyfacts.org site pulls this eye-opening finding:

“Frequency of church attendance is a stronger predictor of paternal involvement in one-on-one activities with children than employment and income, and its effect is comparable to that of race, ethnicity, and education. Both active conservative and active mainline Protestant fathers have significantly higher one-on-one and youth involvement scores than their unaffiliated counterparts.

Yet where are the fathers that we so desperately need? Despite clear evidence of the positive difference that they make, we’ve seen their numbers drop precipitously over the last few decades. According to family expert Patrick Fagan of The Heritage Foundation, in 1950, 12 out of every 100 children born entered a broken family — four were born out of wedlock and eight saw their parents divorce. Fast forward 50 years, and the number quintuples: For every 100 born, 60 wind up in a broken family — 33 born out of wedlock and 27 see their parents divorce.

As Fagan concludes, in the space of one half century, America has transformed itself from being “a culture of belonging” to being “a culture of rejection.” And the children caught in the middle pay the price. As Fagan writes: How much of a difference do these absent fathers make? Plenty. Survey data from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), for example, show that teen-agers without a dad around are almost twice as likely to be depressed as teen-agers from an intact married family. They are more than four times as likely to be expelled from school and three times as likely to repeat a grade. Drug and alcohol abuse is much more common. On top of that, they are also more likely to have sex before they are married-setting the stage for yet another fatherless generation.”

Life without a father also is a good way to miss out on the American Dream. The poverty rate for all children in married-couple families is roughly 7 percent, NIH data show. By contrast, the poverty rate for all children in single-parent families is 51 percent.

III. GOD MADE FATHERS BECAUSE HE KNEW WE WOULD NEED SOMEONE TO PROTECT US.
How many times recently have you placed yourself under your Heavenly Father’s protection? When you travel you ask for his protection to have a safe trip. When you do things that have some measure of danger you pray, “Father, I ask for your protection.”

We have had a lot of severe weather across the nation. One day, a tornado touched down in West Texas near little Paul’s home. He was only three years old at the time. At the first hint of trouble his father brought all the children inside and put them on the floor, along with their mother, and put a mattress over them. Then he went and stood over at the window to see what was happening outside. But as they waited for the tornado, little Paul realized that his father had not climbed in with them under the mattress. He looked out and saw his father standing at the window, watching the cloud turn and twist over the prairie. Little Paul climbed out from under the mattress and went over and stood by his father and grabbed on to his leg. As he told the story years later, he said, “I recall that something told me that the safest place to stand in a storm was next to my father.” That is true about life. The safest place for all of us to stand in a storm is next to our Heavenly Father. “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress…” (Psalm 91:1-2).

IV. GOD MADE FATHERS BECAUSE HE KNEW THAT WE NEEDED SOMEONE TO GUIDE US.
We pray, “Father, please guide me in the decision that I have to make.” So much of his guidance is through our earthly fathers.

Philip Harrelson tells this story of a father. “There once was a shepherd that lived in the Scottish highlands. This shepherd had a daughter and he would take her with him when he went out on the moors to take care of the sheep. The thing that the little girl liked best was to hear the call of shepherd. His voice sounded so free and beautiful as carried across the valleys of the moors. As the years passed the little girl became a beautiful young woman and went off to one of Scotland’s great cities, Glasgow. It was there that she was determined to build a life. On her arrival, she would write back home to her parents every week. But as life began to take her by the hand, her letters soon dropped off in their frequency and soon there were none. Rumors begin to filter back home to that shepherd and his wife that their daughter had started hanging out with some unsavory characters and they were having a very negative influence on her life. One day one of the boys from back home ran into her in the city streets and she acted as if she did not even know him. When the old shepherd heard this, he gathered a few things together and dressed in his rough shepherd’s clothes went to the city to find his daughter. For days on end he looked for her. He looked everywhere; the slums, the rows of houses, the markets, the taverns, and everywhere in between to no avail. So after all of this searching he became very discouraged with the thought that he had lost his daughter to the evil city. As he started the long trek back home, just as he was on the outskirts of the city, he remembered that his daughter had always loved to hear the voice of the shepherd calling out to the sheep. So he turned around and on this quest motivated by his sorrow and his love, he began to stalk the streets. His voice rang out the shepherds call. The citizens of the city all looked at him as if he had lost his wits. It wasn’t too long as he walked the streets of one of the degraded neighborhoods that inside of one of those houses, his daughter sitting among the vermin who had led her astray, heard his voice. With great astonishment on her face, she heard that call of the voice of the shepherd, the voice of her father calling out to her. She leaped up and rushed out to the street and ran into the arms of that old shepherd, her father. It was then that he took her back home to the highlands of Scotland and brought her back to God and to decency and modesty.”

Can you hear the voice of your Heavenly Father calling you?

PRAISE BE TO HIS NAME!