The Fatherless

We are in the second week of a three-week series about God's heart for the needy, focusing on widows, fatherless, and sojourners, three categories of vulnerable people that God holds very close to his heart.

And because they are close to God's heart, he wants them to be close to ours.

So he has expectations for us in regards to these three categories of people, but I love the songs we just sang, and I love how this psalm begins by focusing on our good, good Father and what he has done for us before he gives us anything to do.

He first reminds us of what he has done for us.

If the blood in our veins does not pass through the heart of Christ, then the work of our hands will not be guided by the mind of Christ.

And so we come to worship to have our minds transformed.

The first and last words of this psalm are hallelujah, translated praise the Lord into English, but hallelujah is what it says.

And so let's come with an attitude of praise as we read this psalm and see what the Holy Spirit wants to communicate to our hearts this morning.

Reading Psalm 146.

Praise the Lord or hallelujah.

Praise the Lord, O my soul.

I will praise the Lord as long as I live, I will sing praises to my God while I have my being.

Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man in whom there is no salvation.

When his breath departs, he returns to the earth.

On that very day, his plans perish.

Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever, who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry.

The Lord sets the prisoners free.

The Lord opens the eyes of the blind.

The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down.

The Lord loves the righteous.

The Lord watches over the sojourners.

He upholds the widow and the fatherless.

But the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

The Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, to all generations.

Praise the Lord.

Let's pray.

Father, thank you for your word.

Jesus, thank you for being the word made flesh.

Holy Spirit, thank you for imprinting the truth of the word on our hearts.

May the word not only penetrate our mind, but our soul and motivate the work of our hands that we might glorify you in all we think and feel and do.

In Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.

Alright, so four points instead of the usual three today.

I just couldn't make it fit in three.

So first one, hallelujah and heed this warning.

Second, meditating on God's fatherly love.

And then what God does for the fatherless before we talk about what he wants us to do as his children.

So hallelujah and heed this warning.

Point one.

Hallelujah.

Many psalms begin with praise.

Before getting to the main point that the author wants to communicate, very many psalms begin with a shout of hallelujah.

And you know when you are using the GPS on your phone, have you ever noticed how sometimes when you pull out of the driveway, your phone's confused for a minute at first.

It's not sure whether it's going north or south and it has to reorient itself?

Or you make a churn and then it says recalculating route?

Our hearts need the route recalculated regularly.

Our hearts get disoriented.

And so many things challenge our hearts and minds for their attention.

And so the beginning of the psalm is intended to reorient our heart in the proper direction.

And so praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul, is meant to reorient our hearts.

And then in verse 2, the author says, I will praise the Lord as long as I live.

It reminds me of David's plea for mercy when he was sick in Psalm 30.

And he says, Lord, what profit is there in my death if I go down into the pit?

Can the dust praise you?

Will it tell of your faithfulness?

He's saying, Lord, let me live so I can praise you each day.

And so all of our life, our words, our deeds, our actions, are intended to be devoted to God's praise, to know and enjoy Him forever.

That as long as we have breath, this is my story, this is my song, praising my Savior all the day long.

And so once our hearts are reoriented by repeating praise the Lord, we're ready to hear the warning that is there in verse 3.

Put not your trust in princes.

Now we don't have princes in the United States, but we have human beings that seem worthy of praise.

Maybe because of their talent, their wisdom, their good looks, their power.

Princes might also be translated influential.

When you're in trouble, when you have a problem, who do you go to for help?

Who is that man or woman that you think might help you out of the problem?

And of course, many people can help us out of problems, and we're intended to help one another in times of adversity.

But verses three and four remind us not to put our ultimate trust and hope in any human being, because when they die, they return to the earth.

On that very day, their plans perish.

So whatever a person may plan to do for you tomorrow, whether for good or for evil, if they die today, their plans die with them.

But not so with God.

Not his plans.

Jesus, the Prince of Peace, is the one we can put our trust in.

And he did die, didn't he?

He died on Good Friday.

But he rose to everlasting life on Easter Sunday.

And we can have that everlasting life in him because that was his plan.

And his plan did not perish with him.

There is no mortal man or woman who can help you with this problem, with the sin problem that plagues our souls.

Only Jesus can do that.

So put not your trust in princes, but in the Prince of Peace.

When we cling to him in faith and repentance, his plans are fulfilled in our hearts and everlasting life.

He brings us into his father's house to dwell there forever.

And Jesus becomes our older brother, and he disciples us, teaches us how to live as the children of the king.

And so let's look at point two.

God's fatherly love, his fatherly love for his children.

Verse 5 says, Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob.

Blessed.

Blessed is such an important word in the Psalms.

The first Psalm has as its first word, blessed.

And blessed means truly happy.

And that still doesn't quite get to the depth of what the psalmists mean when they say blessed.

A blessed person experiences well-being in every area of life.

You see, God is not concerned only with saving our soul and then ignoring the rest.

But our good, good Father cares about the condition of our soul, but he also cares about our emotional, our relational, our physical, our mental, our psychological, our financial well-being.

And because he cares about us that holistically, the body of Christ ought to care that holistically about one another.

Let's look at the comprehensive loving care of God for his children.

I mean, I'm going to read through verses 7 to 9 and just look over them with me and pay attention to the active verbs.

I was an English major, so I noticed things like that.

But I want your heart to hear the active verbs about your father's love.

He who executes justice for the oppressed, verse 7, who gives food to the hungry.

The Lord sets the prisoners free.

The Lord opens the eyes of the blind.

The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down.

The Lord loves the righteous.

He upholds the widow and the fatherless.

Hundreds of years later, after this Psalm was written, the human being Jesus of Nazareth came and said he did these same things too, which is why they wanted to kill him.

In Luke 4, they wanted to throw him off a cliff before his ministry has even begun.

There's two reasons in Luke 4 they wanted to kill him.

One was they said, he said that the promises of God were not only for Israel, but were for the Gentiles.

That God was the Savior of all people, all nations.

And that's what we're going to talk about next week in worship.

About how even foreigners, immigrants, non-Jews would come and worship and know Yahweh for themselves.

The second reason they wanted to kill Jesus is because he claimed that the same things God is doing in Psalm 146 were the things he came to do.

He said then in the synagogue, the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.

You see, the ministry of the Son of God reflects the heart of his Father.

And therefore the ministry of the body of Christ should reflect the Father and the Son.

We are the hands and feet of Jesus.

We are his only physical presence on earth because his physical body is in heaven.

But we are his physical body on earth.

So when verse 9 says, the Lord watches over the sojourners, he upholds the widow and the fatherless.

It's your hands that uphold the widow and the fatherless, that care for the sojourner.

We're the ones who make the love of God tangible to those people.

So we're talking about these three categories of people in this sermon series because they show up over and over in God's Word.

They tell us something about who God is.

Psalm 68 says, father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation.

God is father of the fatherless.

That's how he describes himself, right?

If I say Kira is a NICU nurse, DDA is a bus driver.

I'm telling you something about their activity.

I'm just telling you what they do on a daily basis.

Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God.

This is the heartbeat of God the Father.

And children should resemble their father, right?

People should look at you and say, He has his father's eyes.

She has her father's hands.

They have their father's heart.

How we care for the sojourner, the widow, the fatherless.

It's like a spiritual litmus test.

It measures what's going on in our heart.

Specifically these categories of people, because when you love someone sacrificially who cannot pay you back, then it must be motivated by some type of alien generosity that came from outside of you.

Grateful, grace-filled people are going to be generous people.

And so I want to read again verses seven through nine, but I want to stir up the gratitude in our hearts as I read them this time.

I'm going to apply them to you and me as I read through seven through nine.

The Lord executes justice for you when you are oppressed.

He gives food to you when you are hungry.

The Lord set your imprisoned heart free.

The Lord opened the eyes of your blind mind.

The Lord lifts you up when you are bowed down.

The Lord loves the righteousness of Christ and makes you righteous.

The Lord watches over the sojourners here at APC, refugees and immigrants.

He upholds the widows and the widowers, the single mothers, the orphans and the fatherless.

And he blesses us.

Amen.

When you absorb into your heart God's generosity to you, then and only then are we ready to think about how he might ask us to be generous towards orphans, fatherless, children in foster care.

So let's think now.

Who are the fatherless?

Some translations of the Bible, you'll find orphan in the place of fatherless.

The Hebrew word really is better translated fatherless, and it's an important distinction because in English, orphan means someone who has no parent, right?

Has lost a mother and a father.

But we find in the Old Testament 50 times fatherless and widow appear together in a phrase.

So what we're talking about is single mothers who have lost their husbands, single mothers and their children.

Last week in the sermon, we heard about Elijah who helped a widow and her only son.

It was a widow and a fatherless child.

And so the fatherless are particularly vulnerable in Israel, because in Israel only men could own land.

Only Israelite men could own land.

And so if you were fatherless, if you were a widow, if you were an immigrant who had come to live there, you did not have access to the wealth of the land.

You did not have financial security.

In the eyes of the biblical authors, a child without a father lacked a protector, a teacher, a provider.

And life for the fatherless in Israel was often very dark.

If you read Psalm 109 and Job chapters 22 to 24, you find mentions of the fatherless and their plight.

Job 22 · chapter mention

We find references to the fatherless begging for food, losing their homes, losing their property, suffering violence, even fatherless children being treated as property to be gambled for.

Now that was thousands of years ago in Israel.

I just dug up an old Washington Post article that came back to my memory because it still haunts me.

It's about advertisements put up for children in foster care, advertisements to find their fathers, fathers who have abandoned their children, and these public notices are required by law to be posted.

Posted on, I quote from the article, they're posted on a bulletin board of silent screams.

In a windowless corner of Washington, D.C.'s Superior Court, the Family Court Bulletin Board hangs, covered with public postings that no one sees.

Each document provides a glimpse into the lives of children in foster care.

The postings must stay up for two weeks, but they often linger much longer.

On the bulletin board, as in life, the stories of children in foster care remain invisible and easily forgotten.

This is what some of them say.

Unknown father, you have a six-month-old girl born HIV positive with cocaine in her veins.

Her mother has abandoned her.

Unknown father, you have a newborn son whose schizophrenic mother left him at the hospital and moved into a motel.

Unknown father, your one-year-old has been found with an ankle burn and such hunger pains that when she was finally fed, she did not stop to chew.

Unknown father, your child's mother has told social workers she has problems remembering where she leaves the baby.

Unknown father, you have a baby girl born seven weeks premature.

When your daughter was two days old, her mother left and did not come back.

Unknown father, you have a one-week-old daughter.

Unknown father, you have a 13-year-old son.

Unknown father, you have a newborn baby girl.

Each of these children, abandoned by their fathers, was made in the image of God.

The all-powerful, all-holy, all-knowing God who invites us to call him daddy.

We are all orphans apart from him.

We could all appear on a bulletin board.

Until you are born again and adopted into God's family, we are just as much orphans as those children spiritually.

We're enslaved by our own sin and by the spirit of this world, and we are helpless with only one hope, and that is rescue from the outside.

Imagine if your child was missing or was taken from you.

What would you do to get your child back?

What would you not do?

You would do anything, everything to rescue that child.

And so God the Father and God the Son came up with a rescue plan to come and get you, to redeem you from enslavement and bring you into the Father's home to make you a son, a daughter, an heir.

It was very costly.

Never forget the cost it took for you to be called a son, a daughter.

I was a lost sheep, wandering so far from God, wanting nothing to do with him.

An orphan by my own choosing, but the good shepherd came and tracked me down and brought me home, threw me over his shoulders and brought me into the Father's house.

But to bring me in, the shepherd had to die.

Love compelled him to die for me and for you.

And so what do we do in response to this?

How do we love the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner?

What should God's children do in response to such love?

We don't need to die to help a fatherless child.

Although parenting sometimes feels like death, doesn't it?

Sometimes parenting is really hard.

Anyone say amen?

Right?

I mean, what your priorities have to die.

Your preferences have to die.

Your plans have to die.

You lose control of your schedule.

You lose control of your budget.

Sometimes your sanity.

Parenting is sacrificial love.

Naomi and I were just licensed as foster parents.

We are going to bring her nephew into our home, hopefully later this month, once all the paperwork is finalized.

Is it going to be hard to have four teenagers in our home?

Yes, it will.

We need your prayers.

But I am convinced that God will not leave us on our own because it is his heartbeat that David, our nephew, be brought into the home.

He is father of the fatherless.

He sets the lonely in homes.

And so God does not practice unfunded mandates.

If you're new to DC, that's a very DC kind of term.

Unfunded mandates.

An unfunded mandate is when the federal government passes a law and tells the states they have to do something.

But then the federal government doesn't give the states any money to comply with the law.

So it's an unfunded mandate.

God doesn't do that.

In Deuteronomy 15.4, Moses tells the people before they go into the land.

He says, There will be no poor among you, because the Lord your God will bless you in the land.

He also says in Deuteronomy 10, it says again, God executes justice for the fatherless and the widow.

He promises to send rain in Deuteronomy 11, if the people are obedient to God's law, then he will send rain, which provides food and clothing for the people.

But he says, if the people fail to be generous, if they fail to leave the edges of the field unharvested, so that the widow and the fatherless and the sojourner can glean, if they're greedy and keep all of God's blessings for themselves, then God will shut the heavens, stop the rain, and there will be no harvest for anyone.

But you see, God has endless resources, and he is willing to share them with us if we are imitating his heart in caring for the needy.

So, because God has endless resources, if anyone is not being taken care of, it is because of hard human hearts, not a lack of resources.

In the United States today, there are 400,000 children in foster care.

400,000 children without permanent homes, not knowing if they'll be able to return to their birth parents, if they'll be adopted, or if they'll remain in foster care until they're 18.

And for children who remain in foster care until they're 18, that's when they age out.

And they are adults, so they're no longer in foster care.

And if they age out while in foster care, their future can be very, very hard.

According to the National Foster Youth Initiative, after age 18, 20% of children who are in foster care become immediately homeless.

Half of kids who age out at age 18 abuse alcohol or drugs.

Half.

Only half of them will have gainful employment by age 24.

Guess how many children who age out of foster care at age 18 earn a college degree at any point in their lives?

3%.

And 70% of girls who age out of foster care are pregnant by age 21.

However, if a child is brought into a stable, loving family environment, it doesn't have to be a rich family, it doesn't have to be a perfect family, because there ain't any.

But if they're brought into a loving family, they can beat those statistics.

But they need a loving community.

They need to know that they matter.

Imagine what it's like to be a child who's been in the system for a period of time, especially as they get older.

To be 10 or 12 years old, and you see the other children around you getting adopted, getting chosen, and you get passed over.

You remember not getting picked for the kickball team?

I was always last to get picked.

How about you?

Doesn't feel good.

Imagine if you get left behind over and over as a foster child, you begin to absorb into your heart the belief that there is something defective, something wrong in you.

Maybe I am not worth anything.

And that's why no one chooses me.

But remember that before God even made the world, he chose you in Christ Jesus.

He picked you for heaven's kickball team.

And he didn't wait to choose you last, but he chose us first to be sons and daughters.

And so as God's chosen dearly loved children, we are uniquely equipped to shower upon children who feel unwanted and unworthy of love, to show them the kind of love and affirmation that we ourselves have received from our Father in heaven.

There are no unfunded mandates.

I said there's 400,000 children in foster care.

There's only 350,000 churches.

The insert in your bulletin brings the statistic even closer to home.

Those big numbers are hard to absorb sometime.

How about this?

In Northern Virginia, there are 600 churches.

600 churches in Northern Virginia, and there's only 550 kids in foster care.

Less than one per church.

So what if one or two families in every church, in this church, fostered a child, adopted a child, and then other families rallied around that family.

Because you can't do it alone.

You need a break.

You need help.

You need people to work in the nursery.

If you have a special needs child, you might need someone to sit with that child during Sunday school so you can get a break and go to Sunday school.

It's especially challenging if the child has special needs.

Our nephew David, who's coming to live with us, has high-functioning autism.

And so when he's here in worship, he might be disruptive.

He's not good at whispering.

He's not good at regulating his energy.

A recent study found that children with some special needs, some special needs, including autism, ADHD, developmental delays, anxiety, brain injuries, are less likely to attend religious services regularly.

Less likely than children with some other medical challenges like asthma, diabetes, hearing and vision problems.

They attend religious services at the same rate as children without those medical needs.

But see, that first list are all behavioral challenges, right?

That can create friction or challenges in social settings.

And so many churches visit with their children with special needs.

They don't come back because they don't feel welcome.

Because someone turns over their shoulder and maybe gives them a look.

Or sometimes even invites them to say, maybe you'd be more comfortable in the foyer.

I believe our churches should have a higher percentage of special needs children than exist in the population as a whole.

Because churches are especially equipped to be a place of refuge and help for all.

In fact, the body of Christ is handicapped.

We are missing body parts if we do not reflect the full diversity of our community.

We're missing parts of the body.

In the city of Alexandria, 31% of children live in a single-parent home.

Why aren't 31% of the families in our church single-parent families?

Or even more?

I mean, I'm not shaming the single-parent families.

It is hard enough to get your children out the door on Sunday morning with two parents, right?

To keep up with chores and life.

It's hard to do it as a single parent.

So don't single parents need the extra help that a body of believers can provide?

Verse 9 reminds us the Lord watches over the sojourners.

He upholds the widow and the fatherless.

And so we need to be a church that upholds single mothers and their children, to actively welcome children with special needs.

Actively welcome.

That means to accommodate.

To accommodate, to make room, to make changes.

When we found out several years ago that some of you were not taking the bread in communion because of gluten intolerance, we immediately put gluten-free crackers on the tray.

We accommodated that need so you could participate fully.

Now that was an easy accommodation to make.

But we're going to do a parents' night out for foster parents to give them a break.

I want to close by sharing something my Aunt Polly said to me years ago.

I love my Aunt Polly.

She's an atheist like I used to be.

And soon after I became a Christian, she and I had some conversations about my changing perspective on things.

And abortion was one of the things we talked about.

Aunt Polly said to me, If you Christians are going to be against abortion, you better be ready to adopt all those children.

She's right.

If Christians argue, as we should, that all children have a right to life, then we have a duty to give them a good life in a home where they will be loved.

Perhaps not in your home specifically.

I'm not twisting any individual arms or laying a guilt trip on any single person, but I'm saying corporately as the body of Christ, we have a responsibility to fight for the lives of children in and out of the womb.

If we believe in the sanctity of life, then we need to be just as concerned about a child six months in the womb and six years old and sixteen years old.

God, our Father, adopted us solely because of his mercy and grace.

His love for us motivates our love for the widow, the fatherless, and the sojourner.

And he gives us the resources, the mental, emotional, financial, physical resources we need to do what he commands.

So would you pray to him with me now?

Father in heaven, we did not choose you.

You chose us.

You didn't choose us because we're better than other people.

You chose us because of your sovereign love.

And you paid a terrible price, witnessing the death of your son for our sin.

The only way that we could become your children.

And now that we are your children, our lives should reflect our Father's heart.

Holy Spirit, help us imitate our older brother Jesus.

He came to rescue the slave and heal the sick and give sight to the blind, to set the lonely in families, to care for the widow and the fatherless and welcome the stranger.

Father, I know that you will provide the resources needed to obey your commands.

You will not leave us without the support and help we need when we do what you call us to.

But it will stretch us.

It will stretch us to love children from hard places.

Help us remember the arms of Jesus stretched wide on the cross, loving us out of hard places, into the Father's home.

Help us as the body of Christ to put our Father's big heart on display for all the world to see.

To do that for the good of those we help, for our own sanctification and joy, and for your glory, Lord.

Amen.