Father's Day 2015 | Guest Speaker: Brad Respess

The thing to me about Father's Day, there's a lot of things, but one thing is it's often a day of great joy as a father when we celebrate ourselves and our fathers or your dad.

It's also a day of great sadness.

And so we'll talk about that some today.

But before we do, just I'll mention Russ is this week at Blue Skies.

He's down at the beach.

If you remember, Melinda Mayton came and talked, and uh she talked about the ministry they have.

They serve families who've got a child with cancer, and they take them to the beach and they let them have a week away.

And Russ is down there, he's the campus or the retreat minister chaplain this week, and he's given a series of talks just to be there to serve them.

And so they're at the beach, but it's not a week of just beach time.

Russ and Christy and the three girls are down there and enjoying their time serving others.

As Brian mentioned, I'm an elder here.

Uh my name is Brad Respus, as you saw.

I've got four kids.

Uh Jack is my oldest, he's wearing blue, and he's 12.

He'll be 13 in about a month and a half.

Uh Teddy is in the green and white, he's my third, he's nine, and he's a little bit crazy.

And Harry is 11 and Wheezy is five.

And I love every bit of being of a father.

Uh last night we went to dinner, and I said to them, I said, What is it, what do you think God gave you a dad to do?

And so Harry gave the answer, and they all agreed.

They said, You're here to take care of us and to have fun with us.

And I thought that was a great answer.

Um and something I want to talk a little bit about today.

But before I do that, I kind of want to give a little bit of a background of an elder.

And this is something that I don't know that I knew much about, and I don't know that we've talked much about it.

So it's something that I want to kind of share with you my thoughts on what an elder does or what an elder is and what it means for it to be elder Brian or Elder Brad or Elder Barry.

Um, and it's and it kind of goes back to my journey on understanding an elder goes back to my journey at Redeemer.

Uh when I was here originally, or maybe say a year and a half or two years ago, I'm thinking my role as an elder is to protect who we are as a church, to protect and to serve Russ, and to do the business of making sure we collect the money and get it put in the bank deposit or whatever we got to do with it.

And and we had um, well, I had kind of a wrong view of what an elder does.

And it kind of goes back to my story at Redeemer.

I'm here because I was a kid who longed for approval.

I longed for my friends to like me.

I wanted my dad to love me.

I wanted people to look to me and want to hang out with me.

I was always seeking other people's attentions.

The story that I remember greatly is when I was, this is crazy, but in the tenth grade, tenth grade, we would sit in class, and I would take a full sheet of paper and I would stuff in my mouth.

Don't do this, Jack.

And I would shove it in my mouth, and I would let my you maybe you did this, Brian, I don't know.

I would let my saliva dissolve it into basically a sheet of like mush.

And I would rear back and I would throw it against the wall in class, in class, when the teacher's not watching or whatever, and it would splatter and it would look like one of those relief maps, you know, like a volcano.

It was nasty.

And I love doing that because the kids in the class would get a big laugh, and they thought I was hilarious doing that.

It was so disrespectful.

I'm sorry, Megan, these are your kids.

I mean, it was crazy the things that we did in class, and and it would later turn into being a teacher's pet.

I was doing whatever I could to get the attention of others.

Well, when I finished college and I started working, I wanted to do that through work.

And so I longed for that through my job and my career, and that was going great as long as things were going well.

And then we got into a summer where it was crazy and everything started going bad.

And I realized that all that I'd done and all this attention and all the glory that I sought really was meaningless.

And in my brokenness, I realized that I could never justify me, I could never prove myself enough, I could never be somebody.

And that's when I realized that in Christ, all that was done for me, and all that's done for us.

And that's the journey that brought me and my family to Redeemer is this is a place where we know and we hear that good news that in Christ, all that's been done, I don't need the approval of others, I don't need the attention of my classmates or the acceptance of the society and Marietta or whatever.

All that I've been given in Christ.

And so that is this Galatians 4, chapter 4, verse 4 through 7.

And I'll read this.

When the full but then I'm reading the the ESV version.

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who are under the law.

And the law for me was proving myself, trying to be accepted, be loved, be be admired, uh get the attention of others.

So to redeem those who are under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father, so you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

And to me, I came to Redeemer, we came to Redeemer to bring the good news, the gospel to Marietta.

We wanted people to hear that.

We felt like it was freedom, freedom for us who were striving to be somebody or to do our own thing, that self-justification project Russ talks about.

And so this to me was my first role as an elder, to protect our church, to prevent us from teaching moralism or performancism or patriotism, uh, to not preach a checklist of to-do things, but to preach Jesus and to preach Scripture.

Second thing was to protect Rust, and finally, my goal, my my thought as an elder was to make sure we got the business of the church done.

So we had to buy the building, close on it this last week, and when we did that, we had to get insurance, and that's the kind of little details of the business of it.

So it's just minor things.

But then we invited Bill Fullove to come and talk to us.

And Bill is uh a professor down at Reformed Theological Seminary.

When you drive down 75, it's on the east side, and so we're very blessed to have him here because he is smart.

I mean, he knows the Bible.

And he came and taught to us scripturally, what does it mean to be an elder?

And I was blown away, honestly, and I told him this before.

Three things he taught us.

Number one was your role is to pray.

That's a gimme.

I don't know what my brain was thinking, why I didn't think about that.

It's to pray for our body, to pray for our church, to pray for Russ.

The second thing that he taught was to shepherd.

And the verse here is in 1 Peter chapter 5, don't go there, I'll just read it.

1 Peter 5 · chapter mention

So exhort the elders among you, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is going to be revealed, shepherd the flock of God that is among you.

And what we talked about was that the role of an elder is almost like the role of a pastor, not the preacher, but the pastor whose heart is to care for the flock, the people, us, our church, our body.

And as our church grows, you might have a need, or I might have a need, and that need, Russ might not have enough time to care for each one of us.

And that's one of the reasons that we have elders.

And so if you have a need or you you want somebody to pray for you, or if you've got going to the hospital, you're gonna have surgery, your kids going through a tough time, that you can call Barry Mathis, who's an elder, or Brian Robinson, or Bo Teague, or me.

Our heart is to shepherd as well.

And the third thing that that uh Bill taught us was that our role is to teach.

And if you read in 2 Timothy chapter 3 and the first part of chapter 4, Paul writes about all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction.

2 Timothy 3 · chapter mention

He says in there, in my brain, is to is to be ready to teach.

So I'll just read this.

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom, preach the word.

Be ready in season and out of season.

Reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching.

And so that's the third thing that I learned was our role is to teach.

And so I share that with you.

Just I want you to know that we're here to serve you, but I really want you to hear that the reason we're teaching is because we believe in scripture.

I don't think that uh Brian or Barry or Bo or I or as eloquent as Russ is, we'll never be as good of a preacher as he is, but we love to come and teach Scripture.

So it's Father's Day.

You may be a father, you may be a daughter or a son, or maybe you're a biological father, a parent, maybe you're an adopted one, maybe you have adopted someone, or maybe you have a uh a father who's adopted someone, or maybe today you're wishing to be a father.

Or maybe you're like me, and some days you wish your father were closer, or maybe you have lost a father.

So Father's Day is a very, very important key day.

Today I want to talk about this John chapter 5, because I'm talking in my brain is is let me go back.

John 5 · chapter mention

When I teach, and and as I'm teaching this, John 5, I ask the Holy Spirit, God, come teach me first.

Teach me about this.

Let me understand what you're saying to me, minister to me first.

And and I really, when I when I read this, John chapter 5, I'm reminded that fathers are not necessarily about fathers like a biological dad.

John 5 · chapter mention

You could be a father who's a small group leader, you could be a father who's a mom and just caring for someone.

You could be a father in that sense as a young life leader.

You could host people for dinner, you could be a boss or a co-worker, you could be a friend.

The story that we talk about today is about the heart of a father, someone who's caring for someone.

You know, I I go back and I think about being a dad, and you see these great pictures of new fathers, and they're in the in the hospital, and they have their firstborn child, and it's so exciting, and they have this picture of their they're uh they're just ear-to-ear grinning and they're holding their little baby boy, their baby girl.

And that's how fatherhood begins, and it's so fun to me.

And then there's this crazy frustration of being a dad.

You know, we went to the beach two weeks ago, and seven hours in a car, it took a few stops, and the backseat of UConn XL, it's a big car, the backseat is little when you put three boys in it.

And so they're squished up side by side, and we're like four hours in the ride, and maybe Teddy or maybe Harry starts elbowing Jack, and Jack kind of starts punching him back, and the next thing you know, they're hitting each other and they're screaming, and and there's seven of us in this car.

So we have a friend with us, and it like it's it's chaos.

The the noise level is crazy, and there's just a point where I want to veer off into a ditch, or I don't really want to do that.

But I pull off to the side, I mean, I just I say, guys, we we can't do this.

And there's this great frustration that comes with being a dad sometimes.

There's also tough choices of being a parent.

I tell you, one of the hardest things I've witnessed was my stepfather, who at when his my my youngest stepbrother was in his 20s, my stepdad told him, You can't come home anymore until you fix your life, until you get off of drugs and alcohol, until you get better, you can't come home anymore.

And uh, I think it was about three or four years later, and they had they seen each other a couple of times, but not much.

He got that phone call that his son had run off the road and hit a tree.

He'd been drinking, and he was dead.

And to see that the pain of him experiencing that, and then also um burying his son that he had pushed off, did the right thing, but the pain of that as a dad is this great frustration, this great pain, and yet there's this great joy being a dad, and you know this.

Um we went down to uh the beach, and so Wheezy and I, I might cry all day.

Um Wheezy and I were in the pool, and we were it was like nine o'clock and we started counting stars, and I can't help but cry.

And um she looked up and said, Well, there's number one, there's number two, and there's like 95 and 99, and it was great.

And we got out of the car out of the pool, and she said to me, Dad, I wish I could hold one of those.

And I just there's this great joy of being a dad, and you see your child grow and you see your children develop, and you see them grow up, and it is such a joy to be a dad.

Um this uh there's a movie, Father the Bride, you've all seen it, and George says in it, Hooper's and this woman, this woman, but she's not a woman, she's just a kid, and she's leaving us.

I realized at that moment that I was never gonna come home again.

See, Annie.

All right.

At the top of the stairs, never gonna see her again at our breakfast table and in her nightgown and socks.

Um, well, so let's go to John 5.

I'll come back and tell that I had a one more story about Harry that's incredible.

I can't do it though.

So if I go back to John chapter 5, and I and I and I'm reading and I'm asking God, teach me as a dad, because here is a scene of a dad and a son, and it's it's like perfect.

John 5 · chapter mention

I mean, it's it's so incredible.

It's not it's not the dad sitting down and saying, All right, son, here's how you putt, or here's how you do your career.

It's a scene of a of a son and a dad who it's just that dad loves his son.

And as it as God taught me, there's really interesting to me because I learn in reading this that fathers give life.

We create.

Maybe it's we start a small group, maybe we teach a class, maybe we're a disciple, or maybe we're a boss, we but we create.

The second thing that we do is we we teach how to live, we model that for our kids.

We instruct them, we show them do this and don't do that.

Honestly, we give our kids the law because that's how you function in our societies you you you get the law.

And and lastly, fathers, we love and we love so we can help bring life to our kids.

Three roles of a father to create, to instruct, and to love.

If you write down that might be one thing you write down in Galatians 4, is the other thing.

We create, we instruct, and we love.

And remember, when I say fathers, it's a mentor, it's a shepherd, it's a helper, it's someone who's there for someone else.

So it's easy to creating, I mean, it's in whatever way you want to say that, it's easy to the starting process, then the instructing process.

And we've got a lot of young families in our church, including ours, and I'm not qualified to teach how to be a dad and what you teach your kids, but I know there's a few things.

So I thought I'd mention these because I think they're they're key.

Keys to being a good dad.

Be involved and be around.

You've heard that quality of time and quantity of time, they're both important.

I mean, I sometimes kids say, hey, I don't want you with me, but I tell you, when you have your kids, you want to be with them.

So young dads, young fathers, be with them.

Be around them.

Teach them about money.

I tell you at our house, we do chores on Saturdays.

And we make our kids do a list of chores, and if you do them, you get paid.

And so for us, let's say Teddy does his chores, maybe gets paid$10.

We say, Teddy, take your$1, you're gonna take it, we're gonna give it to the church.

$2, we're gonna give it into, we're gonna put it into savings.

You'll earn interest in that little savings account.

And then$7, you can do whatever you want to with it.

But be wise about it.

Don't blow it on a bunch of candy.

But they do, they blow it on candy, but whatever.

We teach them about money.

We teach them work ethic.

And if you're a father, you want to teach your kid work ethic.

You want to have them doing yard work, you want to have them clean the room.

It's very important.

As fathers, we take them to church.

We take our kids to church.

I mean, there's a lot of young people in our church, and it's great.

My mom always taught me that she believed that if we gave our kids, her kids, a foundation, they return to that foundation.

That would be their root and they come back to it.

Set clear rules.

If you expect for your kids to do this, then tell them what you expect for them to do.

If you don't clarify that, it's not fair to hold them accountable to it.

It's also important that you hold true consequences.

If you say, hey, if you do your homework for 10 days and you do it well, I'll take you to get ice cream.

And if they don't do their homework for 10 days, don't take them to get ice cream.

Be very clear about the consequences and make sure they're solid.

As a father, read with your children.

Take time to lay in the bed with them at night and read them a story.

Show them how you read.

Pray with them.

Let them pray and you pray and teach them how to pray.

So that one day when they're in that place and they're broken, they know how to turn to God and say, Help me, Father.

You know, I do a terrible this and um I experience and I give this.

Do not exasperate them.

That's one of the hardest ones because I've seen if I lose my temper, my exasperation of them.

But I think that's one that's a key.

Andy Stanley says he gives kind of guidelines in life, years one through five, we discipline them.

Years five through twelve, we train them, years twelve through eighteen, we coach them.

Eighteen and older, we be their friend.

And I say these things because I don't know that we get we hear this a lot.

There's a lot of great people in our church who've got great experiences.

A lot of dads here who've been doing it for a long time, big families.

It's uh it's it's pretty neat to go and ask them, How'd you do it?

You know, one of the things that I early on as a dad read was this book, Wild at Heart, John Eldridge.

I don't know if you've read that book yet or not.

It scared me to death because he talked about these father wounds.

And at first I related, I've been hurt by my dad, we all have.

We've got some emotional scar, some tissue, some baggage that our dad gave to us.

And then as my boys got older, I started realizing, wait a second, how do I not inflict a father wound on my kids?

And I started feeling this great pressure.

So there's there's all this this all these things that you do as a dad, and you've got to be good at it.

You don't want to not be good at it and your kids grow up and be failures.

You sure don't want your kids doing drugs or maybe getting a tattoo, or you sure don't want your kids to not get in a good school or flunk out of high school or you know, get pregnant with everything.

You you don't you you cannot, if if you don't do it right as a dad, your kids are going to fail.

It's kind of the message I kept hearing over and over again.

So I go to Amazon, I did it this week, I said, How many books can I read on parenting and how to be a perfect dad?

It's 39,198 when I searched parenting.

And I think we've got about 5,000 in my house.

That I've read.

When I first got to know Brian and Mandy, Megan and I would go to their house and we would listen to, I don't even know who it was anymore, thankfully, but we would listen to this couple teach, here's how to be a parent, here's how to do it.

And so all this pressure's on us, because two things.

One, it's a big calling to be a parent, but really more than that is my kids reflect me.

I go and I see, we were at the restaurant last night, and one little kid screaming.

And you know the mom's thinking, because the dad went there, the mom's thinking, everybody's looking at me.

Megan took a flight one time with Jack, and I think he was maybe a year and a half old.

They flew from, or maybe he's nine months old, flew from Myrtle Beach to Atlanta.

And imagine if he starts screaming, the pressure she's going to feel.

Like, oh man, they're all looking at me.

It's my kids, it's my fault that I'm here.

What happens when my kid is bad at school?

What happens if I walk down there and Annie Patrella says, hey, Mr.

Respus, your son Teddy, he was tough in class today.

She doesn't do that for you, though, very much.

What about if my kids are mean to their friends?

What if they don't get good grades?

What if they don't make it into the IB program?

What if they don't get into a good college?

What if, what if?

Think of that pressure.

It's the pressure to bear fruit.

It's the pressure for our work to mean something.

They're great tips, they're great, great, great help, but ultimately it's the law.

If I read Romans chapter 7, verse 12, so the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good, but it does not bring life.

Romans 7:12

I go back to verses, Romans chapter 7, verse 10 and 11.

Romans 7:10

The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me.

For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me.

The formula of being a great parent, the formula, if you do this, your kid's going to do this.

If you're this way as a dad or as a mom or as a small group leader, you will have this outcome.

If I share this kind of message with my coworker, he'll become a Christian or whatever it is.

That formula is law, it's pressure on us.

And that is death.

That will become death.

And we need life, and our kids need life.

And that life comes in sonship.

That life comes in adoption.

If you read verse 21 in John chapter 5, Jesus says the Father raises the dead and gives them life.

John 5 · chapter mention

Those that we father, they need life.

And we can give it when we receive it.

And that's the good news of the gospel.

It's to know Christ is to be adopted, is to be loved.

It's to be given life.

Not instructions.

I mean, those things of instructions, those are good.

Those are great things.

But they don't bring life.

Our kids, the people we work with, they need to know Jesus.

And that's our hope as a parent, to know that in Him I am adopted.

In Him I am loved.

In Christ, I'm free to love without needing to get, not needing for my children to reflect me in a good way, not needing for them to achieve something great to make me feel better.

So John chapter 5, and I'll go back to that and then I'll wrap up here in a minute.

John 5 · chapter mention

John chapter 5, Jesus is at the well, and there's an invalid there who's been there.

John 5 · chapter mention

This is right before what's in the bulletin.

The invalid has been there for 38 years.

He can't walk, and Jesus comes up to him and heals him and says, Take, get up, take your mat and walk.

And the Jews are angry because he did it on a Sabbath.

He broke the rules.

Now here's a question I've got.

If you broke the rules, what would you say is, hey, here's my defense.

I would probably say, look at he's walking, I healed him.

What what how can you fault that on a Sunday or what a Sabbath day then?

But how can you fault me for that?

Likewise, we look to the fruit of our labor to justify ourselves.

How's my child doing?

How's my discipleship class doing?

How's my small group?

How's my career climb?

It's a vicious cycle.

It's never good enough.

Jesus, though, he didn't justify himself by his fruit.

He just came back and he said this.

He said, I'm my dad's, I'm my father's, and I'm just doing what he does.

Basically, Jesus is saying, My father loves me, and that's enough.

That was the good news.

And as believers, we too are in his love.

There's no need for self-justification.

We want our kids to be perfect, we want them to be better.

We want them to be good, but the reality is they need life.

They need life because there's death without Christ.

They can never be good enough.

We can never be good enough.

We can never parent well enough to justify ourselves.

Our only hope is justification by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone.

Jesus said, his response was in verse 17 and 18, My Father is working until now, and I am working.

He was even calling God his own father.

He was saying, I'm the Father's.

I'm complete as a son.

I'm free to serve, I'm free to give, I'm free to love because I'm fully loved.

Jesus was made complete by his father's love.

In Christ, we are sons.

We are made complete.

We are made complete as well.

A Christian father is free to parent, free to love and free to give.

There's no need to get from our kids.

We're free from having to get from the fruit of our efforts, from the fruit of our work, from the fruit of our children, from how it all turns out.

We are free to go and live.

Our children's only hope is Christ for them to be adopted as sons and daughters.

And we don't have to do it perfectly.

There's a freedom.

I believe when I said, let's come to a Redeemer, let's do this, this church of Marietta, it was to proclaim the gospel, the good news to parents, too, that we don't have to parent our kids perfectly.

Because you know what?

Our parents didn't do it perfectly.

We won't do it perfectly, and our kids won't do it perfectly because we can never be perfect because of sin.

We can live free to father and be fathered in love because we know that Christ will produce the fruit.

And that's the good news of the gospel.

The burden to bear fruit is over.

It is finished.

We are justified fully in Christ alone.

Yes, as fathers, we create, we instruct, and we love.

But when we live in Christ's love for us, that's where we can be alive and where we can bring life to our children.

In Galatians 4, I'll read this one more time.

God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.

And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father, you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.

There's freedom in being a in knowing Christ.

There's freedom because we no longer have to bear the burden to bear fruit out of our work or out of our children.

Let me pray.

Father, I thank you for the opportunity to worship you this morning.

I thank you for scripture.

I thank you that even when I don't teach well or when I mix up my words, that you speak through Scripture, that you teach through Scripture.

And I pray that you guide our hearts back to a place where we find ourselves reminded daily that we have been adopted in Christ as your children.

Help us live in that place so that we can freely give to our children.

In Jesus' name I pray.

Amen.