Faith-Full Fathers

Our text this morning is Hebrews chapter 11 and verse 7.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

And I'm really glad we could have a little bit of fun at the first part of the service because this is kind of a heavy text.

Um it's a story of Noah, the example of Noah, the man uh of God in his generation and the kind of father that he was.

We'll be looking at Hebrews 11:7.

Hebrews 11:7

Social scientists talk about something they describe as the crisis of father absence, that it's an actual thing that they can they've documented, they've shown correlative studies to see the impact, negative and positive, of fathers being absent versus fathers being present in the lives of their children.

In 1995, a man named David Blenkenhorn uh led a bunch of uh research, and he uh came to a conclusion at the end of looking at uh fatherless homes and the impact on the lives of their children, um, and he concluded that father absence was the most destructive trend in our generation.

That's pretty powerful.

You might think, well, it's you know, prison reform, it's it's we need more social assistance, it's we need to have a better education, better schools, maybe better training for teachers, more funding, we need all these social programs.

And his research said the single most great, greatest tragedy in our generation is that of father absence.

But that was 1995.

I mean, who remembers the 90s?

I mean, that's hard to even remember back then, right?

Dave back there remembers the 90s.

How about the 2020 census we had last year?

It turns out that 18.3 million children in our nation don't have a father in the home.

That being an adoptive father, a biological father, or a stepfather, no dad in the home.

That's one in four children don't have a dad.

Can you imagine?

25% of all the children that you see, you meet, you work around, maybe some of you teachers teach, coaches, coach, don't have a father present in their lives.

And so when we think about verses of scripture like Ephesians chapter 6 and verse 4, where God, through the Apostle Paul, tells fathers to bring up your children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord, we need to understand that God has a high calling upon the lives of fathers.

Ephesians 6 · chapter mention

You are not just someone who had a child and then sort of the rest is just the rest is history.

The work begins when you bring that baby home from the hospital.

And even before then, as you pray them into the world and through development, as we're doing now for our second child.

With this in mind, I want us to look again at Hebrews chapter 11 and verse 7.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

Our text reads By faith, Noah, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, in reverent fear, constructed an ark for the saving of his household.

By this he condemned the world and became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.

This morning we'd like to think for a little bit about faithful fathers.

Fathers that are full of faith.

You see, as we said before, we who believe in this God who has called us to be fathers are most equipped to be all that God called fathers to be.

And we can do so, like Noah, by being moved by faith.

I want you to notice in this verse before we move too far beyond it, that it begins with the words by faith and it ends with the words by faith.

This is the only verse in Hebrews 11 that mentions that phrase twice, doubly emphasizing the fact that Noah did everything he did by faith, that God, through Noah and his faith, brought about great redemption for his family.

I love to think about the phrase here.

That is, he was moved by his faith.

Noah was moved by his faith to take redemptive action in the life of his family.

And by this, he condemned the lack of that in all his neighbors.

All the people around him that were kind of mocking him for what he was doing.

Like, what kind of idiot is this building a huge ark in the middle of the fertile crescent?

I mean, the rivers aren't even that deep in the middle of the Middle East at the time.

But here he was, by his faith, he shone a light on the unfaithfulness of his neighbors, and he became an heir of the righteousness that comes by faith.

What a testimony Noah is to us today.

Here at Sacred Mission Church, we define biblical masculinity as this.

Biblical masculinity is men taking redemptive responsibility for the people and things around them as pastors, providers, and protectors.

And Noah is a wonderful example of that thing, taking redemptive responsibility.

A man that hasn't taken responsibility for his family is has only fathered a child and is not acting as a father to the child.

We are called to take redemptive responsibility for the people and things around us, as pastors, that is shepherds and nurturers of souls, as providers, that is providing and bringing to the family things that wouldn't be there otherwise, and being protectors from all that can harm our children.

So I want us to look for a little while at the idea, at the story of Noah, and at the man, Noah, the man of faith, and to be inspired and instructed by his example.

This is, in fact, the reason why this story was given.

If you look in our text in Hebrews chapter 10, I'm just gonna read a couple verses here.

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

I was just gonna mention them, but in uh in uh second thought, I'm gonna read them for you here.

Hebrews chapter 10 is the context for Hebrews chapter 11.

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

And what happened in Hebrews chapter 10 was the fact that these Jewish Christians, that's why it's called the letter to the Hebrews, because they were Jewish Christians, they had a Jewish background, but they'd come to know Christ, they had surrendered their lives to Jesus Christ, their Messiah.

Hebrews 10 · chapter mention

They were starting to suffer for their faith.

Their countrymen, their family members started seeing them as being a part of some little weird cult.

And what happened is these their Jewish family members and neighbors began to sort of kick them out of their cities, began to uh oust them out of their own homes.

What happened was that some of the Christians were put in prison.

And the writer of the Hebrews in chapter 10 goes on to say that when their brothers and sisters went to visit them in prison, they then were either put in prison or had their houses taken from them.

He says, Sometimes you were publicly exposed to reproach and affliction, and sometimes you were partners with those who were so treated.

For you had compassion on those in prison, and he joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an enduring one.

Therefore, he says, and here's the context of Hebrews chapter 11, therefore do not throw away your confidence, which is which has great reward.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

For you have need of endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what is promised.

Allah Noah.

He mentions Enoch, he mentions Noah, he mentions Abraham and Sarah, who by faith did things, God empowered them supernaturally to do things that they couldn't have done otherwise.

Remember Enoch by faith, he was translated, kind of was beamed up to heaven by faith, he didn't die.

They looked around for him, they couldn't find him.

The Lord took him.

That's what Hebrews chapter 11 and the first few verses of our chapter say.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

By faith, Abraham and Sarah, being old, conceived a child.

By faith, Noah did the unthinkable, um, excuse me, Moses did the unthinkable and left behind Egypt, and then as a shy man with a stuttering speech impediment, he led God's nation for 40 years through the desert into the land of Canaan.

By faith, Samson was so strong he could he could push pillars that a huge house was based upon, and he could rip a line into.

By faith, dads and fathers can do supernatural things that without faith they cannot do.

When we look at the testimony of Noah, it's not about a man who was just a superb guy with a great character who just stood out in his generation.

He was a man of faith, and through that faith, God did miracles, namely building the ark.

When's the last time you thought about him building the ark and you thought, wow, God did that through him?

We tend to give him all the credit, don't we?

And he must have been a really, really enduring kind of guy.

By faith, he endured to the end.

By faith, he built that ark to the saving of his house.

That is the context for these words here, and why he says everything he does in chapter 11.

To give us an example, to inspire us to believe, and by believing, to see God's power unleashed in our lives as fathers.

The story of Noah itself has captured our imaginations for probably since the time we were old enough to notice the stenciled drawings around our crib, right?

Some of us had had uh the giraffes and the elephants sort of stenciled on our walls.

You don't really see in those pictures um, you know, people clinging to rocks as water is washing them away.

You know, we tend to focus on the happy parts of the story.

But the fact is the story of Noah was not some happy story that was all about the animals, contrary to the children's books, right?

It's a story all about God's judgment on a wicked generation.

A wicked generation that God describes that all of their thoughts were only evil continually.

They were people who were they were hell-bent on power, on money, on sex outside of God's will, on violence, God specifically mentions in our passage.

You have all kinds of wonky things happening early in Genesis chapter six.

And God, it even says, regretted that he had made man.

We would understand that as being uh sort of in human terms the way God would relate to these people.

In other words, it were better that they had never been born.

What a generation in which Noah lived.

But we have in the person of Noah, in this story of tragedy and judgment that God purposed to wipe the planet clean and through one man and his family to, in a sense, recreate humanity.

Not in the same way he spoke Adam into existence and formed out of the dust of the earth and that sort of thing, but he's sort of a new Adam.

He's a second man Adam.

If you think about all the animals that he had Noah preserve, it kind of reminds us of Adam, naming the animals and sort of uh um uh shepherding all the animals like Noah did.

He's a second Adam in a way.

He's pointing to the fact that God is going to uh wipe the slate clean and begin with a new person, a man of faith.

And as part of this, God commissions him to build the ark.

God told Noah, Noah, build an ark.

Now the ark was a huge structure.

If we take the uh the dimensions that are given us in Genesis chapter six, it turns out it's 550 feet long, 510 feet long.

That's one and a half football fields, essentially.

It's 85 feet wide, and it's 50 feet tall, which was about a four-story house, even though there were three tiers of the ark that God describes.

So we're talking about a huge, huge uh uh floating edifice.

Um, if you see, if you've ever been to the uh the Ark Encounter in Northern Kentucky in Hebrew in Kentucky, you've probably seen the actual size, the replica of Noah's Ark, right?

I still haven't been, I really want to go.

In fact, the other day I floated the idea by Brandy of visiting the Ark.

Yeah.

But she didn't get on board.

Good call.

I like it, I like it.

I like where your mind's at.

Oh man.

You know, uh the other day, I have to say this, you know, it was a couple weeks ago, Chris Massey was preaching, and he actually mentioned my dad jokes.

He's he was talking about groaning, and he mentioned my dad jokes, which reminded me of the dad joke that a joke is not full grown, or excuse me, the joke is not a dad joke until it's full grown.

Hmm.

Okay.

There you go.

Yeah, I think that's how it goes.

A dad joke is not a dad joke until you mess it up three times, and expect people still to laugh.

All right.

Let's move on to our main idea this morning.

The main idea.

Moving on.

Our main idea is this Noah built an ark to save his family.

That's that's really what the text is all about.

He, by faith, moved by um his his fear of God and his concern for what God said was going to happen, he built an ark to save his family.

He didn't just build this ark sort of as a as an art display.

Look at this, hey.

Because he was a fool for doing this.

Everyone thought, what kind of crazy guy is that?

There's old crazy Noah, but for years, just every day, saw I mean, this guy didn't play golf, he didn't do anything.

All he's doing is building that ark for nothing.

But he did it to save his family.

I wonder what we would do as men to save our families if God told us, I need you to get up, get out of bed, maybe get out of the recliner, put down the remote chair, the remote control, get out of your chair, and go do something to save your family.

Well, the fact is God actually does tell us to do that.

Think about the amount, the amount of faith it would take to build an ark.

Never had he seen it flood before, in fact.

We're gonna see two reasons in the story of Noah for why we should be so inspired by his example.

First, Noah had never never seen a flood.

Now imagine God coming to you and telling you about something that you'd never seen before.

After about 20 years, you start wondering, I wonder if I missed something.

I wonder if that was a something was lost in translation.

You know, I had an earache that day, maybe uh I misheard God.

He said to build a huge boat because there's gonna be a water that's gonna destroy the earth.

In fact, God was very explicit.

God said that over the highest mountain peak, the water would rise 15 cubits.

In other words, the entire earth was gonna be flooded.

Of course, there are some people today, like like Noah's neighbors who didn't believe it.

There are people today that said, well, you know, there was a flood, Noah's flood was actually just a regional thing.

You know, because of this tectonic plate shifted and some stuff broke up and and uh it sent, you know, it doubled the height of the river and it flooded the the Fertile Crescent Valley and regional flood, you know, flooded the crops.

But why did Noah have to build a huge boat that would house thousands of animals that'd be 510 feet long for a regional?

Why wouldn't God just say, hey, by the way, in a year there's gonna be a regional flood?

I need you to take your family and go and live on that hill over there.

You see, God's word is what God's word is, and we need to take it for what it says.

Um I will say this, because if you're as we're reading the story, it may come to your mind that, you know, can we really believe this story?

You know, some people have have said they don't believe in the Bible because of Jonah's uh Jonah and the whale, because it said, you know, I can't believe that uh that a whale could could swallow a man like that.

And so I can't believe the Bible, the rest of the Bible, or the story of Noah.

These are things people cite because it sounds so extraordinary.

For example, people would say today, how could how could um, you know, how many thousands of species are there known today?

I mean, there's there's species we haven't even detected yet or haven't even found in the jungles of Amazon.

How can all those things have fit on the ark?

It just doesn't make sense, right?

Well, the beautiful thing is if you actually look into the science of genetics, you realize that you know what equine is?

The equine family horses, that includes things like zebras.

That includes all sorts of horses from all different statures, and built within DNA that God designed is an enormous amount of variety.

And so as things uh mate and as they migrate, you have different variations forming all the time.

You have the dog family, the canine family, the cat family, the feline, and I'm pretty sure that chihuahuas would not have survived if there had been chihuahuas in Noah's day.

He wouldn't have let them on the ark.

So that proves that there must have been a prototypical dog that he saved with all the genetic potential in it that turned into dingos in Australia, turned into jackals in Africa, that turned into wolves and coyotes and all the different kinds of dogs that we know and love.

Noah had never seen a flood, but he says in Hebrews 11:7, being warned by God concerning events as yet unseen, he built an ark to save his family.

Hebrews 11:7

What about us today?

Does God actually call us to do more than provide, you know, put some food on the table, uh, bring home the bacon, so to speak?

Does he call us to do anything and be anything and in a unique way as fathers, besides help bring them into the world and then keep them from getting from killing themselves, you know, as they're climbing stairs and trees and things.

Teach them how to drive one day.

The fact is there's so much that God calls fathers to do.

Specifically along this point, of the fact that Noah had never seen a flood before, we need to realize that a lot of us have been lulled to sleep in our lives because of the seeming predictability of life.

We think, you know, life's pretty good right now.

Yeah, there's things we would change, and but overall we're doing pretty well.

And we get lulled to sleep into thinking that life's always gonna be pretty good.

Our circumstance, by life, I mean our circumstances are always gonna be pretty good.

And the fact is, all you have to do is work in a hospital like I do, or um work in um, well, all different kinds of fields.

Work in the in law enforcement or the medical fields.

And you learn very quickly that tragedy strikes people all the time.

And we live in this illusion that if it hasn't happened yet, it's not gonna happen, kind of like Noah's neighbors.

It's never flooded before.

We're good.

Have fun building your ark while we make fun of you.

But God calls fathers to act proactively towards things that haven't happened yet, but that probably will.

And in fact, if we think about tribulation, things that absolutely will.

Jesus said, In this world you shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer.

I've overcome the world.

God is actively at work in our lives, and we as fathers need to prepare our families for seasons of life that lie ahead of us, that may not be upon us yet, but that are coming sooner than you know.

We could say it this way: a flood is coming to a home near you.

I don't want to get dark, but let's be realistic.

We're talking to men here, right?

Your family's a car wreck away from you being swept away, from your family being swept away with unimaginable grief.

A diagnosis away, a career loss away, an economic disaster away, your all their retirement you save for, it wouldn't be the first time in the world people have lost everything they saved.

And so, how do we prepare for this?

Am I simply talking about saving up so much money that even with hyperinflation you still have enough to live on?

I'm talking about something even better than that.

Preparing your family and your own soul so that your faith is not shaken in the midst of it.

Preparing your children and building into their lives a faith that floats so that when the flood waters rise, their faith stays on top, as it were, in the ark.

A flood is coming to a home near you.

What am I talking about here?

I'm talking specifically about developing when things are going pretty well, developing a biblical worldview of God's sovereign dominion over the earth and in your life.

So that when tragedy strikes, you're not left reeling thinking there's no meaning and purpose of this.

Why didn't God do this?

Where was God when this happened to me?

With a robust understanding of God's meticulous providence in our lives, by reading the story of like of Joseph in the Bible.

Everything was going great for him.

He was a dreamer, he was this visionary, God had great plans for him.

One day, even his family was going to bow down to him.

Things were going great, right?

Until he got cast into a pit by his jealous brothers, until he was then put in prison and sold or sold to the uh the Ishmaelites down in Egypt, and then he was lied about and framed and put into prison, and then he was there, and one of his friends who got out promised to tell the uh put in a good word for him, forgot about it for a couple years.

It gets worse and worse and worse and worse and worse.

And then you see God's providence bring Joseph out of that and make him even secondhand, second uh in power to Pharaoh himself.

By by wrapping our minds and our hearts and our children's minds and hearts around those kind of stories, we prepare ourselves for the seasons of life when we're in the pit, when we're in the prison, when we're forgotten, so it seems.

The story of Job.

That's not just a story, so you can say, man, wouldn't want to be him.

That's a story that Romans chapter 15 and verse 4 says is written for our learning, that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures ourselves might have hope.

Romans 15 · chapter mention

James mentions Job and he says, You've heard of the sufferings of Job, the endurance of Job, and the mercy of God, that the Lord is full of tender mercy.

We're supposed to learn from these Bible stories how to prepare for when things aren't going well with our circumstances, fostering in our families a sense of hope so that when tragedy strikes, we don't hit rock bottom.

There's a story of a pastor named Donald Barnhouse who was in his own generation.

Maybe some of you, some of you older fathers might remember or mothers might remember that name.

He was an evangelist who went around and preached, and as the story goes, he was visiting this church, and this young pastor invited him to preach to his congregation because this young pastor's wife was great with child, and at any day she could have the child, and so he wanted to have this evangelist there to sort of as a backup.

Well, it turns out the day came and the young pastor had to rush his wife to the hospital, and they had their baby, and and uh Donald Barnhouse was preaching that day, and he preached the word, and this young pastor came into the end of the service by himself and and he looked really distraught.

And so they finished the service, and as soon as the service is over, this young pastor took um uh uh Dr.

Barnhouse out of the room and into the pastor's study and said, I don't know what to do, I'm at my wit's end.

We just had our child, but when the child was born, it was obvious this child had.

Severe disabilities.

And we just, this wasn't what we planned for, this was what we prayed for, this wasn't what we've been hoping for.

And I don't know what my wife doesn't even know it.

She was sort of knocked out because of some anesthetic they gave her.

And so she doesn't even know it.

And I don't know how to break the news to her.

And Dr.

Barnhouse, without breaking uh uh strides, said, Brother, this is from the Lord.

And he opened his Bible to Exodus chapter 4, verse 11, where God tells Moses, who was complaining about his speech impediment, as I mentioned a little bit ago.

Exodus 4:11

Then the Lord said to Moses, Who has made man's mouth?

Who makes him mute?

Who makes him deaf or seeing or blind?

Is it not I the Lord?

My brother, this is from the Lord.

And the young pastor, according to the story, was kind of taken back that he had sort of left God's providence out of the equation.

He was seeing his pain, he was seeing his misfortune, as we would typically see that, as something that was just it was bad luck.

And this pastor Barnhouse showed him though, this is God at work in your lives, and this is a gift to be received.

And so he went to the hospital.

And that young pastor went and grabbed his wife's hand as she was kind of waking up.

He said, Honey, I've got something to tell you.

The Lord has blessed us with a child with disabilities.

Isn't that amazing?

He chose us to be this child's parents.

I didn't have crying in my notes.

Isn't it amazing that God, in his infinite wisdom, chose us to be this baby's parents?

And they brought the child to the mother.

And she cried and she wept for a while, but then she she came around and she was like, that's right.

And so she got on the phone to her mother and she called her mother.

She said, Mother, guess what?

The Lord has called us to be parents to a child with disabilities.

The next Sunday, that young pastor filled his pulpit again.

And according to the story, 70 nurses from that hospital showed up and filled the back of that church because of that testimony of faith.

You see, I wonder what kind of legacy we're weaving into, what kind of narrative we're weaving into the mentality of our families so that when things happen that we didn't plan on, maybe our worst fears are realized, our faith floats.

Because we see, we serve a big God who is on top of things and who is sustaining our faith in the midst of the storm.

He'd never seen the flood, but he trusted God and he prepared for the flood.

Secondly, we learn from Noah that Noah played the long game.

Noah played the long game, in other words, God called him to something that took a long time to build.

It wasn't something he could sign up for, like a weekend course, fatherhood and 24 easy hours, two brief sessions, mail in some uh certificate and you're good to go.

This was something that took him the better part of his the later years of his life.

There's something that was really interesting that I had not realized until studying this passage this past week, but we often think about it taking Noah 120 years to build the ark, don't we?

120 years, right?

Because early in Genesis chapter 6, God says, This generation is so wicked, they're destroying each other.

Genesis 6 · chapter mention

I'm gonna beat them to it.

I'm gonna wipe away and begin with you, Noah, a new generation.

And it says that God in verse 3 said that 120 years would be the time, the timer God set then, for 120 years to the end of the world as they knew it.

But it's not until verses 13 and 14 that God tells Noah to build an ark.

This was really fascinating to me.

Verse 13 and 14, God speaks about the flood, because early in verse 3 he didn't say a flood.

He just said, I'm gonna destroy all flesh that breathes.

Verses 13 and 14, God speaks about the flood and he commissions Noah to build an ark.

But then here's the deal.

In verses 17 and 18, he says, And you, Noah, this is when he was commissioning him to build the ark, you, Noah, shall go into the ark, you your sons, and your sons' wives with you.

So when he was commissioned to build the ark, he already had sons who had wives.

But you see, whenever God told him initially that there was going to be a flood, he was 500 years old.

When the flood came, it was only um uh he was uh let's see.

I'm sorry, Noah didn't have his first son until he was 500 years old, and the flood came a hundred years there thereafter.

So what this means is God promised there would be a judgment, but it wasn't until maybe 50 years later that he actually told him to build a flood.

Fascinating.

You can Google it and read on answers ingenesis.com for more information.

So basically, according to their analysis of the dates given for when babies were born and the fact that when he was commissioned to build the ark, he already had sons who had wives, he probably had only about 70 years, seven zero years to build the ark, which is quite a long time.

But it does make me wonder why didn't God tell him when he first announced 120-year in the future judgment to build an ark at that time?

He waited, I think, we now know this, he waited until he had just enough time to build the ark, I think.

He didn't give them so much advanced notice that he had extra time on his hands.

And I think for fathers, this certainly is true for us, that we have a set amount of time with our children.

We have a set amount of hours with our children.

There's only so many times you can put your little baby to bed, read your baby story, pray with them.

There's time is finite.

You don't have near as much time as you think.

Why did he wait so long?

My guess is that that's how long Noah would need to build it.

And when God calls you as a father to prepare your family, you only have a certain amount of time to build into your family.

So many ways and so many things we can think about this being the case, but I want to just mention a few.

A flood is coming, my brothers.

A flood is coming, the challenges of adulthood and the need to prepare your children for adulthood.

And so often we think preparing our children for adulthood really means, you know, making them sure they get a good education so they can uh have a good college experience or whatever they do to train for the future and then get a good job and then eventually build a house, et cetera, et cetera.

But preparing for adulthood as a believer doesn't just equal preparing for having a good, comfortable life in the future.

But so often that is the temptation, isn't it?

Because that's how the world lives.

You're a good dad if you teach your kids how to make money one day.

And certainly that's part of it, preparing your kids for providing for themselves and being independent.

But as fathers, it goes so much further than that as believing fathers.

There's a word that is really kind of a nasty word.

It's the word indoctrination.

If you go into universities and everything, they'll talk about Christian parents, how they indoctrinate their children, and they'll say that with a sneer, right?

I've heard professors say that Christians often will indoctrinate their children.

They should let their children go up and make choices freely of their own.

Richard Dawkins actually talked about religious indoctrination of parents, he thinks it's called, or he thinks it's a form of child abuse.

But the fact is, and the kind of the funny thing is, the ironic thing is that indoctrination is not a one-way street.

If you are not building into your children robust worldviews about who God is and who we are, and what God's call upon their life is, and what sin is and what salvation is, and how they can grow in character and virtue so they become the kind of people that do the kind of things God calls them to be and to do, other people are indoctrinating them.

Every time they turn on the TV, they're getting indoctrinated by sitcoms that are teaching your boys that, you know, uh men when they grow up are really just kind of like older boys that are still hypersexual, that won't grow up, that are kind of deadbeats, that are living off someone else.

That's what the sitcom culture says about men, or they're the other stereotype of men who are just, you know, uh power hungry and they're cutthroat and everything else.

Rarely do you see a beautiful picture of what God calls men and women to be.

And so when it comes to things like marriage and money and work and sexuality and sexual freedom and manhood and womanhood, who's gonna teach your children if you don't?

Who's gonna teach your children the way they should be taught if you aren't?

It's tempting to think, well, you know, their mother will do it.

Um, the teacher will do that.

They'll teach them how to be a good kid.

You know, it's enough that I provide for them.

Man, God wants fathers to be elbows deep in their children's lives, day in, day out, speaking to them about what's on their minds, what's on their hearts, speaking to them about things that they haven't even heard of yet.

Man, I think it's whenever they go to school or they open up their science textbook, you know what they're taught?

The dogma is that they're evolved animals.

How's that for indoctrination?

When they when they take a psychology course, they're taught that they're the center of the universe.

That truth is really at the level of social construction, that it really is no truth.

And we as we as people groups kind of decide what's true for us.

They learn that in sociology class.

In history class, they are learning these days that either you're an oppressor or you're a victim.

And if you're an oppressor, you ought to uh harm yourself.

And if you are a victim, you ought to harm other people.

That's probably an oversimplification.

But the fact is, if we're not teaching our children the truth of the matter in frequent, meaningful conversations and by our example of how we just talk about what's going on in the world with our children, the result is not that they're free to make up their own minds.

The result is that they are discipled by the fluctuating dogma of the day.

That they emerge from childhood, indoctrinated by a confused and schizophrenic society that turns on itself constantly, that is devouring itself, much like Noah's generation, that is intent on destroying itself as fast as we can say.

Identity crisis.

When it comes to cultural indoctrination, my brothers, the flood isn't coming.

The flood is here.

The waters are rising.

Our toddlers, our tweens, our teens are being discipled before your eyes by every other in an unbelieving world, by every other force around you, except those that are of faith.

And I wonder what we are gonna do about it.

There are two ways that we as fathers can fail to live up to this calling of fathers.

The first is this our story is that we are unconcerned often.

And so we leave our kids vulnerable and unprepared.

Maybe that's where you are this morning.

The things I'm kind of talking about, you're like, hmm, I haven't really thought about that recently.

The fact that my family in God's providence is gonna undergo potentially severe trials.

Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe next year, maybe 10 years from now, maybe in our later years, we're gonna endure things that are gonna shake us to our core.

What am I doing to prepare about that?

We often have no urgency that because we see we we feel like we're gonna have an indefinite amount of time.

We don't realize that time is so fleeting and our children are gonna be out of the nest, so to speak, before we know it.

Or maybe you're here and you're like, I don't know when she's talking about this indoctrination stuff.

I think people in general are good people, they mean the best for my kids, and um and uh you can believe everything on the internet.

We ourselves, maybe men, are people are men here who have been sort of skirting by making up our minds about the issues of the day.

Maybe you don't know how to answer all the issues of the day when it comes to defining manhood and womanhood and marriage, when it comes to thinking about what it means to be a Christian, what it means to be a church member, what it means to be someone who has given them their lives for the mission of Christ in the earth.

Maybe you haven't come to a place where you even know what that means in your life, and therefore by default, you haven't even begun to disciple your children towards that.

Maybe that's where you're at this morning.

If that's the case, you're unconcerned, and you're leaving your children vulnerable and unprepared, they're gonna become a product of their generation.

Man, I'm reminded of a study that um Answers in Genesis Ken Ham did a number of years ago.

I want to say 10, maybe even 15 years ago, it was called Already Gone, and they did a bunch of research and they found that that children who were raised in the evangelical church, that is believing in things like the inspiration of scripture and miracles and those kinds of things, that 70% of them after they go to college emerge not believing in Jesus or in the exclusivity of the Christian religion anymore.

They couldn't be called evangelical Christians any longer, 70%.

And his argument that he makes in that book is not that it's college doing it, because that's the sort of the old thesis.

You know, they're really good until college.

College is what's evil in it, runs them off the rails.

He says they're already gone because they're not being trained in their homes.

The seeds are already there.

They're unprepared, they're not ready for college, they're not ready for trade school, they're not ready for unbelieving coworkers, they're not ready to make these decisions on their own, and they just go along with whatever's happening around them in the culture, the cultural zeitgeist.

And he says, they're already gone while they're in your home.

I wonder how true that is of our families here today.

Those little kids, two years old, all the way up to 18 years old, are they already gone in their hearts because they're not being prepared to be followers of Jesus?

Another way to approach this is sort of the other end of the spectrum.

You say, Man, I'm right with you, Tim.

I'm right with you.

Though the sky's about to fall in, this generation is wicked and evil, and I think we should buy you know a one-acre plot on the backside of Montana and live off the grid, right?

We can live, yeah.

Some of you are like, that sounds awesome, man.

I tell you.

Um it does, in a way, right?

As long as it's for the right reasons.

Some of us are afraid.

We're afraid.

We're not living by faith, we're living sort of afraid because when we look around us, our generation is stronger than we are.

We can't imagine trying to wrestle our children away from the crocodiles.

You all all seen those uh animal geographic videos, right?

Hmm.

The crocodiles of our generation trying to wrestle them away.

It's not a good thing.

And so we shelter instead of prepare our kids, we shelter them.

I was a homeschooled child back in the day, and I feel like my parents did a good job of preparing me for the world.

And I say that because I know they're gonna watch this sermon at some point.

No, I love my parents dearly, and I think they did an awesome job uh of trying.

And I was the problem.

Whatever didn't work out was with me, not with them.

Um but I did meet a lot of kids in my circle of acquaintances that were sheltered instead of prepared.

Maybe you've met some.

Maybe you were one.

Sheltered instead of prepared.

There's a huge difference between sheltering your child in its innocency and having age-appropriate conversations where you're bringing up stuff to them, whether it's objections to the faith, they're hearing it from you first before they hear it from their friend who at 15 years old declares himself to be an atheist, or the college professor, or their boss, or their neighbor.

Having conversations with our children that disciples them.

And we're talking about not necessarily family meetings where it's like, okay, break out the Bibles and the notebooks and lectures in session, all rise for the honorable father, say the Pledge of Allegiance, and sit down.

Okay, so the fact is we should be weaving these things into our lives just in conversation with the children, things that you probably aren't comfortable talking with them about.

Because you know what?

They're gonna hear about it sooner than you realize.

The average child, I think, sees pornography at like 10 years old or something these days.

Have you brought that up to them before they saw it?

Homosexuality, distortions, a myriad of distortions of what God designs men to be, women to be, the family to be, the church to be?

An understanding, a biblical understanding of Jesus and of the gospel.

Noah was warned of God.

In a reverent fear, he constructed an ark.

Noah was concerned, but he wasn't afraid.

In fact, a good translation of the fact of his reverent fear is circumspection.

The Apostle Paul used it a couple places in the New Testament.

It means to be looking around, kind of having your head on a swivel.

Noah wasn't terrorized by it, he wasn't living in dread.

We don't get any indication of that.

He was someone who was just steadily building that ark.

He knew he had 69 more years, 68 more years, 67 more years, and he was just steadily building that ark.

We don't get a hint that he was scared out of his mind.

But he was concerned.

We as men of faith are not to hunker down and shelter in place.

It's not what the church is called to do.

It's not what men are called to do, it's not what families are called to do.

Some fathers are so worried about their kids picking up bad ideas from other people that they're just, you know, it's like locked down all the time.

And instead of being proactive and building into their children a correct understanding of the world and fortify them against every idea that exalts itself against your knowledge of God, all there are is a long list of taboo topics you don't talk about around dad.

But you probably do around your friends.

And kids end up developing unhealthy and warped worldviews in secret that dad may not even know about.

I believe dads and moms, but I think especially dads, should be the first person children hear about so many things that we would tend to think of as taboo.

There's a story early in the uh in the 1900s and 1933 of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his very first inaugural address.

He he uh gave a very um striking quote that many of us can probably remember.

He said these words So, first of all, let me assert that my firm belief is that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror, which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

The only thing we need to fear is fear itself.

Now, you might and probably would disagree with his politics.

He was there at the end of the Great Depression and he was basically ushering in big government and people that resisted him.

He said, You're just scared.

But that aside, I think he is right to think that there is a type of fear that doesn't lead to action, but leads to paralysis.

And I wonder if there's any fathers here today that when it comes to, when it comes to your children being raised in a rather distorted and sinful generation, that if you're really honest, you're just more afraid.

And you're wanting to shelter, you're wanting to delay the inevitable, kind of kick the can down the road instead of heading on it, uh facing it head on, and training your children and preparing them for what lies ahead.

You know, I drive a truck because I'm a man, and just kidding.

One of these days in God's providence, I'm probably gonna be driving a minivan, you know, the seat back, just like that's right.

Um and you know what, I'm not afraid of having a flat tire.

There's a reason.

It's not because um I've got superpower, it's just because I have a tire iron in my truck, I've got a jack that works, I have a tire that I check every month or so that is still full of air.

And so I know how to change a tire.

I've had to do it a few times along the side of the road, and so I don't have fear, but I am prepared.

I'd be foolish if I was just paralyzed in fear of what, of, of, of running out of gas or of the tire going bad or something, and I'm in the middle of nowhere.

But I don't live in that fear.

And you probably don't either.

Because we have a plan.

When it comes to our children, often I think we have this fear because we aren't proactively preparing our children, and the next best thing is just to kind of freak out and be afraid or to ignore it and not be concerned at all.

And neither is a good option.

Preparation by faith for what lies ahead is what God wants out of us.

So we've thought a little bit about Noah, his faith, what God's calling in his life, and sort of how that parallels, some of the ways it parallels our own roles as fathers in the lives of our children, and some of the ways we fall short.

And maybe you're on the spectrum leaning one way or the other, maybe you're sort of between the two.

But the fact is, all of us here don't get it just right.

In fact, if we're honest with ourselves, we're probably our own worst critics.

We can look back on the week and be like, I didn't faithfully pray with my wife as often as I should have.

She was, she came to me or my child came to me, and they were hurt about this or sad or something, and I didn't take their hand and listen to them and then pray with them.

I was too busy, I was too distracted, and we we can live with these kind of regrets.

We haven't done it as we should.

And so that's why we rejoice this morning in our gospel conviction.

Our gospel conviction is that God in Christ Jesus, God has made Christ the ark for us.

Christ is the ark our Father prepared.

And what I want to do is look in Hebrews chapter 12 for just a minute or two and show you that the the culmination of all the examples in Hebrews chapter 11 led not up to us saying, we need to be super Christians, we need to be cut above, we need to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, but rather all these stories of faith were meant to culminate in the person of Christ, the one who is the author and the finisher of that miraculous faith.

Hebrews 12 · chapter mention Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

And so look in Hebrews chapter 12 and verse 1, we read this.

Hebrews 12 · chapter mention

Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.

Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.

Scarcely are there more powerful verses in all of Scripture.

Here we have all of these people.

From chapter 11, all the people, he says, of whom the world was not worthy, because their generation persecuted them, their generation belittled them, their generation opposed them.

They went about, he says, they were stoned, sawn in twain, they were killed with the sword, they were in skins of sheep and goats, that is because they were stripped of all their clothing and they had to fend for themselves.

They were destitute, afflicted, and mistreated, of whom the world was not worthy.

But all these, though commended through their faith, they did not receive what was promised.

In other words, what God had promised them in Christ Jesus, they only saw the foregleam of in Jesus Christ.

They only saw, like Noah, in that ark.

It was just a foreshadowing of an ark that was to come, prepared by a father for his people, a faithful father.

And so we see in all these people a cloud of witnesses surrounding us as if we're being let into a stadium.

Just think about the imagery here.

We're being led into a stadium, and we're athletes, and there's the track, and there's the race, and there's the starting gun, and there's the flag, and in the stands are all the people from all generations who've been believers in Jesus Christ, whom God has shown himself faithful to.

And you know what they're doing?

They're cheering you on.

And they're cheering the one Jesus Christ on because he was the one that helped them to endure.

And so he calls us to run with endurance the race that is set before us in our generation.

We can't go back 4,000 something years and relive the flood, but we can live in our generation.

And you know what?

Noah is in those stands and he's cheering us on, saying, keep trusting the God who's faithful to you.

His word is true, it'll come to pass.

And man, this week I was just thinking about how surreal it would be if you were Noah and you spent all those years, let's say 70 years building that ark, and then that day that first raindrop hit your cheek.

And you started hearing a rush of water, and you looked in the distance, and the earth was splitting because the fountains of the deep came up, and then the sky started falling, and water started rising, and you heard this voice said, Noah, get in the ark.

Can you imagine being in the ark and seeing all those animals come in by God's providence?

I mean, Noah wasn't some amazing shepherd.

These things came in the ark by God's providence, two and two.

Well, we can barely keep our dog in the yard, let alone, you know, a couple thousand animals.

All right?

Come on, Mr.

Elephant, let's go this way.

No.

God in his providence was marching those animals two by two into the ark.

Can you imagine the feeling of Noah, who'd been mocked for generation for his entire generation?

70 years of being the butt of everyone's joke in his city.

And to see that ark closed, as God shut them in the ark, that door must have been huge.

And God sealed them in there as if his hand was protecting them.

And then to feel that boat rise off the ground, can you imagine his heart swelling with gratitude that he had trusted God's word?

You see, maybe in the middle of those 70 years, there were times when he was like, I don't man, I sure hope this pans out.

This is gonna be really embarrassing.

I spent all my retirement on this gopher wood that God told me to build this thing with.

Can you imagine the joy and the inheritance of righteousness it was for him to be in that ark when it lifted off the ground, and all of the unbelieving neighbors who were shut out in God's providence, God shut them out of the ark, were being punished for their unbelief.

Oh, that you and I would have that experience as we were called to run our race, that we wouldn't be faltering in our race.

We wouldn't be so loaded down with doubts and concerns and the cares of this life that we are too busy, too preoccupied, too unconcerned, or too paralyzed by fear to run our race with endurance.

And so he tells us the secret right here in verse 2: looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.

It's so crucial as we read the story of Noah and of Abraham and Sarah and Gideon and all those people in Hebrews chapter 11 that we don't come away with thinking, man, I want to be a great person like them.

Hebrews 11 · chapter mention

They were pointing to someone greater.

Their life, their testimony, their faith was pointing to one who was the author of their faith.

Their endurance in the midst of a difficult generation was pointing to the one who was the finisher of our faith.

And the same is going to be true of our fathers here today.

If you are a man and you're trying to live by faith, it's not about you just trying really hard and having a good game plan.

It's about you being a man of faith and trusting and walking in lockstep with a God who will cause you to endure in your race.

Oh, look at Jesus Christ.

Look at the one who's gone before us, look at the one who has purchased for us everything necessary to keep us in the race.

He, our founder and our finisher of our faith, for the joy that was set before him, endured the cross.

Do you realize that he endured the cross before his father sent him to the cross?

The father made Jesus Christ an ark so that you could enter that ark by faith and be saved.

Saved from what?

Saved from your sins as a father.

Saved from your sins as a man, saved from the sins of thought, of action, the sins of what you should have done and didn't, the sins that you shouldn't have done and you did.

All the sins that right now would condemn you apart from Jesus Christ.

You know what?

In Jesus Christ, by faith, you were spared the flood of God's wrath.

Wow, what a gospel we believe.

And not only did Jesus do that for us in the past, it's that sacrifice of Jesus Christ, his victory over death, his satisfaction of those flood waters of God's wrath that will sustain you in your journey as a father.

Because not only did Jesus endure that cross and be clothed in shame, it says that he is now seated at the right hand of God.

All authority and dominion being given to him.

And you know what?

If you're a Christian, his spirit, his very presence is in you right now.

You're not working for him like an employer.

You are living with him inside you, living his life through you.

And so I close with a few thoughts about gospel vision.

Our gospel vision is that faithful fathers, they build a legacy one day at a time.

How do we run this race?

There's no way we can take a giant leap and be at the end of our race.

We build this legacy.

We run this race one day at a time.

One time of prayer with your family at a time, one time of listening to your wife and your children at a time.

One sacrifice of getting to hang out with the guys because it's your child's birthday.

Sacrifice, right?

One time where you could have stayed late at work and made overtime, but you decided to go home and be with your family, whatever the case may be.

One decision at a time.

You're building a legacy that at the end of those 70 years, there's going to be this huge arc that saved your family.

I wonder if you can envision this for your own life.

But you're not called to do the bare minimum.

You're called to devote your life to this calling as a father, to be faithful in the small things, to be a pastor in your home, to be a provider in your home, to be a protector of your children and your wife.

To pray with them often, to be attuned to what they're facing, what they're fearing, and what they are following, to lead by example as a man of integrity, to be the kind of man you want your daughters to grow up to marry, to be the kind of man you want your son to grow up to be.

This is the life of faith in the life of a father.

It looks a little different in the life of fathers than it might in the life of mothers, in the life of children, in the life of an employee.

This is a hat that God calls many men, not all men, but many men to wear.

And I pray that this church would be a church leading the way with men of faith, faithful men who follow in the steps of Noah as they look unto Jesus.

Let's bow in a word of prayer.