Flip the Script with Pastor Noel Laws

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name is Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoyed today's message.

Well, alright, MetaCurch.

How's everybody doing this morning?

Awesome, man.

We are so glad that you guys could make some time to join us for today's service.

Before we get any further, let's just give it up one more time for the dads in the room.

Fathers, we are so grateful for what you do, for your families.

We are grateful for the role that only you can play in the lives of your children.

Roles are super important in our lives.

I actually hold quite a few roles that are very close to my heart.

They inform a lot of what I do in and what I do with my life.

Here's an example of one.

I'm a musician.

Anyone surprised?

No, I lead worship for you almost every single Sunday, right?

But it's one of the things I love to do.

I've almost been playing music for 30 years, which is just a crazy number to me that I could be doing something for that long.

But it's one of my favorite hobbies that I do.

Another thing that I am is one of your pastors.

Again, y'all know this, I'm one of the pastors here at MetaCurch, and I gotta tell you, I never thought I would be in full-time ministry, let alone a pastor, but it is a role that I find so fulfilling.

I get to walk with you through the best times of your life and some of the worst times of your life.

You give me the opportunity to speak over you and to teach you.

It's a role that is incredibly significant to me.

But there is one title that I hold that far exceeds, tops all of the other roles I have combined.

And that role is being a father.

My son's name is Jack, and outside of my relationship with God, there is absolutely nothing more important to me than being his dad.

Now, I don't want to speak for all the fathers in the room, but I do think that as we approach fatherhood, we approach it with somewhat of like unsubstantiated confidence, right?

Like we think we got this figured out, it's gonna be pretty easy, we're gonna be a great dad.

It's confidence that almost borders on the line of arrogance, and arrogance is almost always dictated by ignorance.

And you know this is true because as soon as that kid came into the house, you realized this was not gonna be as easy as you first thought it would be.

I can remember my first night that uh Jack was at home, he had woken up in the middle of the night, so I volunteered as tribute to get up with him.

I picked him up out of his crib, I fed him a bottle, I changed him, I swaddled him back up like a little burrito, and I rocked him in my arms, and he fell right to sleep.

I thought, man, I am pretty good at this.

I knew it.

I knew I was gonna be pretty good at this, and then I set him down in his crib, and guess what happened?

He woke up and started crying.

And so I picked him up again and he fell asleep, and I put him down, he started crying, and I realized two things very quickly.

The first was that I was not going to sleep that night.

That wasn't in the cards for me.

And the second was that it was gonna be very hard to be a father.

It was gonna be much more difficult than I thought.

I love being a dad, but I've had to learn a lot of lessons over the years, and I've had to lean on scripture to guide me into being the best father that I can be.

And what I have to share with you today are lessons that I've learned that I'm seeking to apply to my own life.

Now, before anyone tunes out, let me just tell you just a little bit of my story.

I'm an adoptive father, which just means I didn't make Jack, but I've had Jack since the day he was born.

I m I was married for four years as a father, and I parented as a married father.

Now, currently I parent, I co-parent as a single dad with 50% custody of my son.

I've seen a lot of angles and experienced a lot of different things in being a father.

And I believe what I have to share today will find application with all parents and all future parents.

So again, if you're not a dad, don't check out yet.

The women in the room, I hope that these are things that we learned today that you'll seek to look for in a man, and for the men in the room, I hope that these are things that you will aspire to apply in your own life.

My message today is called flip the script.

Would you guys pray with me?

Heavenly Father, we are so grateful for every father in this room.

God, it's our desire to always get better.

And so we believe that you have something to speak to us today, Holy Spirit, that you want us to learn today.

And so we pray that we would be able to understand it.

Father, I pray for uh clarity of message and thought as I speak today.

Um, we love you and we trust you, and we prayed in the name of Jesus.

And everyone said together, Amen.

Well, as Jack has grown up over the years, we've watched a lot of kids' TV shows, and I was really trying to figure out how to explain like how I feel about kids' TV shows, and the best that I came up with is bleh.

Like they're not very good, right?

Like, not every show that's on is bad, but by and large, it's not like a really great form of entertainment for adults.

But here's the good new if you're good news if you're not a parent, kids only watch things like one time and then they never talk about it again, right, parents?

No! Kids love to watch things over and over and over.

If you're a parent in this room and you've seen Frozen less than 500 times, then you need like some kind of reward.

You're doing something right.

Well, back in quarantine, Jack really got stuck on this show called The Thundermans.

Maybe some of you have seen it at a show on Nickelodeon, and I actually kind of enjoyed the show, it's fun to watch, but I did notice something over time.

And what I noticed is that the father in the show wasn't really painted in a great light.

It got me to thinking about the dads I grew up watching on TV.

Now, this is gonna surprise you maybe a little bit.

I was born in the early 80s, I'm like close to 40 now, and I can remember some of the shows that I watched.

So we're gonna take a quick trip down TV memory lane.

In the 80s, we had fathers like Stephen Keaton from Family Ties, we had Jason Seaver from Growing Pains, and I could go on and on with a list of dads, and there's exceptions to most rules, but generally speaking, dads in the 80s were kind of like really great, right?

Their character had layers and complexity.

They were wise, they were loving, and they were respected in their families, and it wasn't abnormal for them to resolve whatever tension had occurred within the first 30 minutes of that show.

And then the 90s came.

And there was a subtle but significant shift.

And while I could name a bunch of TV dads from the 90s, I'm gonna wrap it up in a neat little bowl with one father, and I want to do a little bit of an experiment.

I'm a worship pastor, and so I really need some participation on this one.

We're gonna put his picture up, and when it comes up, I want you to vocalize the first thing that comes to mind.

And when I say vocalize, I mean do something loud enough to where like the five people around you can hear what you're doing.

So the picture's gonna come up, you're gonna vocalize.

Can y'all help me do it?

Okay, this participation's already not going well, guys.

Can y'all help me do it?

Thank you.

Yes, okay.

We're gonna put the picture up in three, two, one, put it up.

Okay, there's a lot of laughter.

I was expecting a little bit more grunting, right?

Now, I know there was other TV shows that were on in the 90s, but home improvement, home improvement was like the show I could not wait to watch with my family.

If you're not familiar with the show, Tim the toolman Taylor was like connected with this inner caveman, right?

He grunted all the time.

He had his own show on TV where he talked about tools and building things, and he was always looking to get more power.

And usually in his pursuit to get more power, he would injure himself in some way.

Tim Taylor perfectly sums up the 90s TV dad.

He was a lovable idiot.

Like he usually came around by the end of the show, right?

He would mess something up, he'd get some good advice from his neighbor Wilson, and then he'd make things right.

But even when he was making things right, he still usually screwed up the advice that was given to him.

The 90s sitcoms began to chip away at the respect, competence, and parenting skills of TV dads.

But the worst was still to come.

As we got closer and closer to the millennium, you started seeing fathers missing from shows.

Now, whether it was in the show they were divorced and just not a part of the family's life, or maybe they just weren't very present fathers, you began seeing less and less of the fathers.

And now, when you watch shows with kids, what you see in the father is a bumbling buffoon, a man that can only like exist to like trip over things, to eat meat, and talk about sports.

Pay attention as you watch TV this week.

The negative representations of dads on TV far outweigh the positive representations.

And here's the thing about all those TV dads.

They're not real.

They're characters.

They're played by real actors, and these real actors are probably nothing like the characters that they play on TV, for better or for worse.

The reason why these dads act the way that they act is because somebody wrote a script that told them they should act that way.

Now, we don't exist in a TV show as fathers, but we all have things in our life that are helping to script how we live out our own unique stories.

Some of these scripts come from our upbringing, and others are informed by the broader culture that we live in.

Maybe you had a father that had a quick temper.

And so now, as a father, you find yourself with the same trait.

You have a quick temper too, but it's not really your fault, right?

It's in your DNA, it's in your genetics.

If you weren't affirmed as a young person, chances are your life script causes a deep desire for respect or affirmation.

Maybe culture has convinced you that the true measure of success is found within your wealth, and so you find yourself working these 50, 60-hour work weeks every single week so that you can provide for every tiny detail in your kid's life.

And you know what?

You're probably pretty good at it.

You probably do provide your kids with everything they need, except for their father.

Here's one that I think every parent has felt, let alone uh the fathers in the room.

It's that inner narrative that exists within your mind that comes up like several times a year that says, You're I'm not a good father.

A good father wouldn't have done this, or a good father wouldn't have done that.

Man, if we had time, I could tell you many stories from my own life.

That's an inner narrative that I have.

It's these scripts that cause us to sacrifice our kids for our calendars.

They tell us we deserve respect and that people should submit to us while we're unwilling to show that same respect or submit to anyone anybody else.

These scripts cause us to seek every worldly thing so that we can find more purpose or some amount of satisfaction.

Our country is in the midst of an epidemic.

This epidemic is one of fatherlessness, and some of this is caused by divorced fathers who have slowly worked their way out of their kids' life.

Some of it happens within marriages where the father just quits showing up for whatever reason.

Some of it, as Pastor Clayton has talked about, being a stepparent himself, or stepdads who refuse to embrace their kids as their own.

Every problem in society correlates with the absence of fathers from their kids' lives.

Every problem incarceration, drug abuse, domestic violence, school dropout rates, gang involvement, fathers, the role that you play in your family actually matters.

You're living by a script.

So why not live by one that gives you every opportunity to be the man and to be the father that God has called you to be?

You can do it, but you have to be willing to flip your script.

The issue with TV dads over the years is that they've lost their depth, they've lost all their layers, they now exist as these flat one-dimensional caricatures that are the butt of their family's jokes that exist just to like screw up the situations that come up during the show.

And we don't want to be that type of father, do we?

We don't want to be a one-dimensional father.

We can flip the script, but to do it, we have to develop layers within our lives.

I'm gonna talk about three different layers today that I believe if you will apply them to your life, fathers, that you will be the father your family needs and you'll be the father that you want to be.

The first one is the most obvious.

It's how we show love to our kids.

If you want to show love to your kids, then you have to learn how to sacrifice for your children.

The script we so often live by causes us to sacrifice our time with our kids.

Sacrifice isn't anything new to us.

We sacrifice all the time for the things that are important to us.

Unfortunately, we usually sacrifice the time we have with our kids so we can pursue things that we believe will bring us more purpose, that we believe will satisfy us in some way.

It could look like pursuing more money in your job, more power, more influence.

The problem with solely pursuing those things is that instead of sacrificing for our children, our children end up being the very thing that we sacrifice.

This is where we need to flip the script.

Instead of giving up our time with our kids, we need to sacrifice our preconceived notions on what a successful father looks like.

I can't tell you how many times I've had a conversation with a dad who had kids that were older.

And he was expressing this deep regret because he felt like he had missed out on his child's life because he was pursuing all the things that he thought were important.

His career.

They're not bad dads.

They were doing exactly what they thought they needed to do.

But now they had these older kids and they knew they had missed out on some key events as our kids were growing up.

Everybody knows this already, but time only moves in one direction.

It moves always forwards, it moves never backwards.

Your kids are kids once, and then they grow up and they have their own lives.

That means there's a last time.

There's a last time your kids are gonna ask you to carry them from the car to the house because they're too tired to walk.

There's gonna be a last time that they ask you to sit with them as they take a bath so you can play with them.

There's gonna be a last time they ask you for the bedtime story, or to play outside, or to color in a coloring book, and these are the things that we so often overlook because we're tired.

I know you're tired.

I get tired too.

It's the things that we give up because we need more rest.

But these are the very things that we need to sacrifice our time for.

We need to give up on these preconceived notions of what we think is important to us.

Instead, invest in our children's life because they need you.

That's what Jesus did.

In Philippians chapter 2, verse 5, Paul says, adopt the same attitude as that of Christ Jesus, who, existing in the form of God, did not consider equality with God as something to be exploited.

Philippians 2:5

Instead, he emptied himself by assuming the form of a servant, by taking on the likeness of humanity.

And when he had come as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even to death on a cross.

Jesus had everything.

He lived in literal perfection, he lived in paradise, but his children needed him, and so he left perfect heaven to come to imperfect earth so he could live a life, uh, die on a cross for our sins, so that we could have fellowship and relationship with him.

At the end of the day, when your kids are grown, they're gonna remember the sacrifices that you made to spend time with him.

All the things are just that, they're things and the memory of them will fade.

But the memories you make just by being yourself and being present for your kids will last a lifetime.

I read an article one time about the singer Bruno Mars, and they in this interview he was talking about how he grew up very poor in Hawaii.

So poor in fact that they didn't even have a functional bathroom in their house.

If they needed to use a restroom, they would have to walk across the street and use a restroom in the store across from their house.

You may think that he was telling a story to show just how far he had come, right?

A rags to riches story, but instead he was saying that he had a very, very happy childhood.

And he completely attributed that to having a loving father that was present for him.

I was kind of curious as I was preparing for the sermon, so I did a Google search, like every good pastor does.

And I Googled, what do dads want most?

And on almost every list that I read, in the top three was this word.

The word was legacy, as in what you leave behind, what you're remembered for.

And fathers, let me just tell you, if your legacy is gonna be found in the work that you do, the career you have, or the achievements that you accomplish, you're gonna have a legacy that dies out in a relatively short amount of time.

But if you can flip the script on how you think about being a father and realize that investing in your kids' life is the most important thing you can do for them.

You will develop a legacy that will last for generations.

Now you may think that the sermon's over, but I got bad news.

Y'all don't get to leave yet.

We're developing deep character uh layers as fathers.

We're gonna add to the first one.

If you want to show your kids love, you need to learn to sacrifice for them.

If you're going to love your kids properly, you also have to learn to properly serve your child's mom.

That's right.

We're gonna be talking about baby mama today.

And I say it that way because statistically speaking, me included, half of us have been divorced.

Half of us are co-parenting with our ex-spouse.

And if you want to love your children well, you're going to have to learn how to love their mother well, regardless of your marital status with her.

This is gonna be a continuation of sacrificing for your kids because there are probably gonna be hurts, there's gonna be pride that you need to let go of in order to do this.

Just like our pursuit of our children takes sacrifice, our pursuit of their mother takes real service.

So much of parenting, and especially parenting after divorce, comes down to each party trying to get their own way.

They're trying to win.

Pretty soon we're not fighting for our children, we're just fighting each other.

And your relationship with your children's mother needs to be one that cooperates and does the best thing possible for your kids.

Here's what Paul says in Ephesians 5.

He says, giving thanks always for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Submitting to one another in the fear of Christ.

He's talking about relationships.

He's saying that we should submit.

Service requires mutual submission.

And I know, fathers, we don't like this word, right?

Submission conjures up uh feelings of like weakness, like we don't want to tap out.

But submission in this context actually does the exact opposite.

Submission will cause a win for you.

It'll cause a win for your child's mom.

It'll cause a win for your family.

But submitting's hard because relationships are hard.

There's a whole list of things that have happened that may be unresolved.

And so I believe to really serve your child's mom, to really learn how to submit to her, you're gonna have to level the playing field just a little bit.

And I have two suggestions that I think will help us do that.

The first is to forgive.

Forgiveness is strong.

Everyone in this room has been hurt by someone at some point, nobody enjoys it, but what happens so often is we get hurt and we hold on to these hurts.

And I think there's a variety of reasons why we might do this.

One might be just because we're waiting for an apology from that person that hurt us.

If you're waiting for an apology, I have really bad news for you.

You may be hurting for a very long time.

Other times I think we hold on to the hurt because it helps explain why we act in some of our worst ways.

It becomes this scapegoat for all of our negative tendencies as people.

Living with things that we haven't forgiven people for almost exclusively hurts us.

The person that hurts you, they may not even know that they've hurt you.

And even worse, they may know that they have hurt you and they may not care.

We don't forgive people so that they can feel better.

We forgive people so that we can get better.

The act of forgiveness is a personal act.

You don't even have to tell the person that you have forgiven them.

You can live your life unencumbered by the actions of another person.

Forgiveness isn't saying that what happened was right or that it was okay.

Forgiveness is saying, I will not live my life in the light of someone else's actions towards me.

You have a different light that you should be living by.

That light is from Christ.

He gave us a great example of how he should live.

And Jesus forgave completely, and he forgave without qualification.

You want to forgive because you know that you need to be forgiven.

If there's unforgiveness in your relationship, it will keep you from probably uh properly serving that relationship, and that in turn will keep you from fully expressing your love to your kids.

While we're on the subject, not only have you been hurt, but you've probably hurt someone.

It's the second thing that we need to do to level the playing field.

We need to apologize, real, genuine apologies.

And I know it sounds silly, but I don't think most people are really good at apologizing.

Apologizing isn't qualifying why you did what you did.

Apologizing is saying, I'm sorry that I did this, regardless of anything that happened.

You made the choice to act in whatever way you did.

And if you want to restore a relationship, you need to give a real, genuine, heartfelt apology.

You need to make wrong things right.

Put the script on the way that everyone else is parenting.

Be a father of integrity.

We sacrifice for our kids and we serve their mom, but there's one more, even deeper layer to this godly character.

You must seek your heavenly father.

This is a really big one.

I don't think I need to explain that, but God is perfect.

He is our heavenly father, he is the example that we should be aiming towards, and you should be pursuing what it looks like to be more of a godly father for your family.

This is more than just attending a Sunday service, although, just let me say, if you are here, great, it's a great start, but this is even a deeper pursuit of learning more and more about the true nature and character of God.

You know, I'm always so impressed by people who have a workout routine.

This is gonna surprise everybody in the room, but this is not a discipline I currently possess.

Like I've never really been into working out or anything like that, but I do have lots of friends.

Who loves working out.

And here's an observation I made about their fitness goals.

Literally everything they do throughout the day is made in light of what they're going to do for their fitness goals.

Like, for example, don't ask somebody who's training for half marathon to go get a burger and a beer before they train.

Like it's not gonna happen, right?

That would make it a really bad like training day.

Uh weightlifters who are trying to be intentional about building muscle, they are counting every calorie they eat.

Now they eat way more calories than everybody else, but they're super intentional about what kind of foods they take in.

It's a filter in their lives.

And I believe the pursuit of God works the same way.

When you are consistent in your prayer life, when you're consistent in engaging God through the Bible, when you are consistent about worshiping Him, which just means focusing your attention on Him in whatever way you're doing that, it will act as a filter in your life as you go throughout the day, as you make different uh decisions.

Transparently, I'll tell you why.

I've never really been into working out.

This is the truth.

I'm afraid of embarrassing myself.

I have this, I have this like belief that I should just know how to do everything, even though I've never done it, right?

I was a band nerd for Pete's sake.

I didn't take PE, I was took marching band.

So like I don't want to go in there and fail.

And trust me, I'm on the internet enough to know that there are cameras waiting to catch me fail in the gym.

I don't need the help, right?

I I'm doing okay making uh a fool of myself all on my own.

I think we get to be that way sometimes in our pursuit of God.

We look at the people around us, we look at our pastors or our friends, or maybe even our spouses, and we say, I could never pursue God at that level.

And so we stop.

We stop before we ever start.

And the truth is that the only way to fail is to never begin.

Even if you start and fail, you will learn something through that failure, right?

It's trial and error.

Failing is not a terrible thing, but not starting, not starting will never get you to the place that you want to be.

We get so hung up on the expectations we have for ourselves, we get so hung up on the expectations that we think other people have for us.

We turn to like making more money, to getting the bigger house, a better car, the more exotic vacation.

But the Bible says in Matthew 6 33, Jesus is speaking, he says, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided for you.

What things is he talking about?

According to the verse before, literally everything that matters, what you wear, what you eat, where you sleep, God knows what you want and he knows what you need.

If you seek his kingdom and pursue it, you will have everything you need.

You will find the satisfaction in your life that you're looking for.

We have three layers that we've gone over, and we're gonna review them before we go today.

We're gonna sacrifice for your children.

You're gonna serve your child's mom.

You're gonna seek your heavenly father.

If you don't sacrifice for your children, then your children will be the thing that you sacrifice.

Your kids need your time and energy, they need your words of affirmation, they need to hear their father say that they have worth, and they need to hear you say that you love them.

It's important as parents that we have outlets and hobbies and time with our friends, but your kids need to be confident that they come first.

They need to see evidence that you can and will sacrifice real things so you can directly invest in their lives.

We have to learn to serve our kids' mother.

Whether they're your ex-wife, your current wife, or the mother of your stepkids, part of how we truly serve their mother is by doing our part in their upbringing.

If you have the filter of service engaged in your life, you will more clearly see the areas of appropriate sacrifice for your children.

Relationships are full of hurt, and so you need to give the gift of forgiveness.

You make mistakes, and so you need to make the right apologies.

You need to clear the path to service through submission to one another.

And most importantly, we need to seek our Heavenly Father.

If every day you're seeking to be more like God, you will automatically begin serving and sacrificing in all the right ways.

You will not be perfect.

This is something I tell the band almost every week.

We do not strive for perfection on this stage, we strive for excellence.

I don't think passion follows perfection.

I do think passion follows excellence, and that's what we want to be as fathers.

You don't have to settle into the caricatures that TV has made you to be.

God's called us to a higher standard, a better story.

And parenting is gonna be one of the most significant things you will ever do with your life.

Your past, your pain, the culture, they're all gonna seek to write the script of how you should be as a father.

They'll seek to limit to you, to paint you into a flat, non-compelling character.

But if we can sacrifice for our kids, serve our child's mom, seek our Heavenly Father, this Father's Day, we will be able to flip the script.

Would you guys pray with me?

Heavenly Father, we are grateful.

We're grateful that you've given us such an example of what a father is.

God, I pray over every father in the room that they would answer the call to be more, to give more themselves, to sacrifice of themselves, to make sure that their families are supported, and not just financially, God, but through their relationship, that they would be able to love their kids more deeply, to serve their mothers more completely, Father, and that they would seek you with reckless abandon.

Jesus, we love you.

We pray all these things in your name.

Amen.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

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Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.