Reconstruct – Daddy Issues

This podcast is presented to you by Pastor Jason Burns and Access Church in Lakeland, Florida.

For more information, visit Access.tv.

Well, good morning, everybody.

Welcome to church.

What a day we have already had.

The first Sunday with four services, everybody.

I love it, I love it.

And I'm gonna be honest with you, it's kind of weird for me because we had an 8.30 service already this morning and it was pretty full.

And I thought to myself, well, ain't nobody gonna show up for 9:30.

But you won't stop inviting your friends.

Thank you for being amazing.

The whole heart of adding a fourth service was we want to create capacity for even more people to come to know Jesus.

That is our heart in this whole thing.

And so thank you for being on mission with us.

Hello to those of you who are joining us online.

Welcome.

We are streaming our two middle services, our 9:30 and 11 o'clock service.

So if you're in the room or watching online, you can share it because who knows what God will do to someone through the simple power of a share online.

Hey, this is a big week for us.

If you've been coming the last few weeks, we've been hyping up an event that's coming this Wednesday.

It was revival night, and this is a big deal.

And this is kind of funny to me.

Um, we just sang a song that says, rain came, wind blew, my life was built on you.

I don't know if it's prophetic, I don't know what it is, but um there is a storm coming, and so because of that, we believe school is gonna be closed for a couple days.

It looks like it might be turning away from us a little bit, but these things are unpredictable.

And so, because of that, we've decided to put your safety first, and we are rescheduling our revival night.

We're not canceling it, ain't no way the devil's gonna shut that thing down.

We're moving it to Wednesday, November 9th.

So pull your phone out.

It should have been in your calendar.

Just change the date to November 9th.

That's gonna be a big deal.

Here's the next thing you need to know.

Um, a lot of fun stuff is happening this fall.

On Sunday, October 16th, just a few weeks away, my friend Dr.

Chip Bennett from Sarasota is coming to preach.

He might be the smartest person when it comes to the Bible that I've ever met.

That dude just knows it.

Um, I preached there for him last year, and I was so intimidated.

I would I would say stuff and I'm like, is that right?

Just to make sure, because I didn't really know.

He's so smart.

And we're gonna do something that night that is for those of you who want to really understand the Bible in a new and profound way.

We're calling it Academic Night.

Dr.

Chip Bennett is our speaker.

It's gonna be Sunday the 16th at 6 p.m.

It's gonna be a little bit different.

We're not gonna have worship.

I'm gonna welcome everybody, and I'm gonna say to Chip, just talk to us for an hour and blow our minds.

He's gonna be amazing.

Um, I met Dr.

Chip Bennett when I was doing my doctoral program, and he's so smart that I would ask him questions like, hey, what do you think about?

And I would give him the topic of a 40-page paper that I had to write, and I would pull my phone out and I would hit record.

And let's just say your boy passed, everybody.

That's what happened.

And so you want to be here for that.

It's gonna be amazing.

All right, let's get to work.

We are in week three of a series that I'm loving called Reconstruct, and it's how do you build a faith that is designed to withstand, here it is again, the storms of life.

Like when life throws us storms, how do we have something that will stand on it?

Let's pray and let's get to work.

God, thank you so much for your word today.

We invite you to do what only you can do.

Speak to us, change us, give us the courage to confront some issues that we have head on so that we can take hold of the life that you have for us.

We love you, God, and we thank you for your word.

And God, this is so important.

The Cowboys play tomorrow night versus the Giants.

It's a big game.

Help us strengthen Dak, heal his finger in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Let's get to work, everybody.

Okay.

And nobody cares.

All right, let's get to work.

A couple days ago, uh, my dad called me.

It was around lunchtime, and I said, How are you?

And he goes, You're not gonna believe this.

He goes, I just had the best tuna fish sandwich I've ever had in my whole life.

And said, Dad, these are big words.

What do you mean?

He goes, The way mom makes tuna fish sandwiches are the best.

You ever you ever have a thought and it's like you remember a meal or something you ate as a kid, maybe it was something nostalgic, and you can like you think about it and you can just taste it.

Did anybody have this experience before?

And I don't like tuna fish sandwiches.

I don't.

Like if I go to Publix to get a sub, I'm never choosing tuna.

If I go to Subway, just kidding, I don't go to Subway.

I if I whatever.

And so I don't I don't order it.

The only way I'll eat a tuna fish sandwich is the way my mom makes it.

Now here's the funny thing.

I had people after the first service tell me, Well, you gotta try mine.

Listen to me.

I won't.

I will not do this, it's not for me.

And here's the reason tuna fish sandwiches are polarizing.

They people like them or hate them, fine.

But what's really polarizing is how you make it.

And there are a thousand different ways to make it.

Let me tell you how people have told me that they make it.

People have said they add dill, they add pickles.

One dude said they add corn, anchovies.

Miss me with a double fish.

Get out of here with that.

Uh, tomatoes, onions, celery.

I don't eat celery under any circumstances.

Whatever.

If God wanted water to have hair in it, he would have just had me eat that.

Too much?

I don't know.

Yeah, too much.

Okay.

Grapes, miss me with that.

Um, here's how my mom made it, okay?

And hold your applause, please.

My mom took tuna, mayonnaise, mixed it up, and then she took hard-boiled egg, crushed it up, and mixed it in.

And then here was the secret sauce.

Sliced apples.

I know I said hold your applause, but you can cheer for this.

I'm just kidding.

And people say it's the weirdest thing ever, and you're wrong.

You are entitled to be wrong.

It's the only way I want to eat it.

And so, if I were to say to you, what is the perfect tuna fish sandwich?

My guess is we'd have dozens of different recipes and ways to do it, because we all think of that through a different way.

Okay.

In the same way, if I were to ask you to come up with the definition for this word, I wonder how many different definitions we'd get today.

The word is the word God.

If I were to say to you, what mental picture comes to your mind with the word God?

If I were to pull every single person, every child to adult that comes to our church or joins us online today, I wonder how many definitions we get.

My guess would be 2,000 unique definitions of the way we view God.

You see, the the brilliant theologian A.W.

Tozer said this.

He said, What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

It's pretty heavy.

So what you think about when you think of God really matters.

Why does it matter?

Because there's so many different definitions of God.

For some people, God, the concept of God or who God is, is God is light and energy, and he is some sort of force out in the world, and that's the picture people have of God.

For other people, God is just a sweet little old grandpa.

He's kind and he's cute and he's funny.

The font on his phone is a lot larger than it is on your phone, and he's always got a piece of candy in his pocket, and he's sweet and kind, but he's not really relevant.

His opinion doesn't really make sense anymore, and that's the picture some people have of God.

Some people see God as angry, like he's a cosmic killjoy.

Uh when I was a kid, there was this comic that I just loved called The Far Side.

And this is one that I always think of when I think of that picture of God.

It's God sitting at his computer screen.

There's a man walking with a piano being held by one rope, and God's computer has a button that says smite.

That's a word we should use more often.

And this is the picture a lot of people have of God.

For some people, God, God is the eternal scorekeeper.

And in their mind, God is always keeping score of every bad thing they do and every good thing they do.

And so, conversely, what we tend to do is we tend to also keep score and feel like we have to do more in order to get God to love us or approve of us.

To some people, God is the cosmic butler.

He's like Siri or Alexa, and we don't really use him that often, but we feel like he's always listening in on us.

And then when we need him, we say, Hey God, and we ask him to come to our rescue.

What picture do you have of God?

And here's the reason it matters.

The rest of the quote we just read from A.W.

Tozer says this.

It says, We tend by secret law of the soul to move toward our mental image of God.

So your picture of God matters because according to Tozer, we're becoming more like him and we become like the picture we have of him.

Here's what I want you to get today.

If you have a flawed view of God, you will have a flawed life with God.

The problem is, so many Christians wander aimlessly through this life with a messed up picture of God, and they wonder why their relationship with him never makes sense.

If we're talking about how we build a relationship with God that can withstand the storms of this life, we have to start by getting our picture of who God is right.

We started the first two weeks in the series with this simple imagery of what do we do with our doubt and what do we do with the areas of hurt and pain where we feel stuck in our relationship with God.

Now I want to flip the script and I want to talk about who God actually is because the picture you have of him really matters.

For a lot of people, they would summarize who God is by his characteristics.

He's omnipotent, it's all powerful, he's omniscient, he knows everything.

He's full of justice and he's full of mercy, he's strong and he's mighty and he's love.

And we characterize him by his attributes.

The problem is it's hard to have a relationship with attributes.

So Jesus steps into this world.

The book of John, chapter one, in the message translation says that he put on flesh and blood and he moved into our neighborhood.

He lived among us.

And he talked about God in a different kind of way.

He personifies who God is with this word used 189 times in the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John alone.

The word is the word Father.

He says, God is your father.

Now, why does this matter?

It matters because you can't have a relationship with omnipotence or omniscience, but you can when you understand that all of those attributes that we assign to God of His power and his splendor and his majesty are all embodied in the person of a father.

This is a big deal.

Think of the cortex in scripture.

Jesus teaches his disciples to pray.

He says, And when you pray, pray this way.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Jesus says things like, He, if you have seen me, you have seen the Father.

Think of the prodigal son.

The one son leaves, his father spends his inheritance, lives a wild life, and he comes back, and before he can get his speech out of apology to his dad, his father hikes up his robe and goes running after his son.

It's a father who is passionately pursuing his son.

All of this imagery is the picture of a father.

Even in Jesus' death, his last statement from the cross is, Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.

I want you to see this.

We understand that in theology, we believe that we serve a triune God, a God of the Trinity.

There's God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Jesus comes and he says, If you've seen me, you've seen the Father.

Jesus is a picture to us here on earth of who our heavenly Father is.

But there's a couple moments in the New Testament where we kind of encounter all of them.

And I want you to notice something so fascinating.

We experience God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in creation, and one of the next times we see them all together is in what's called the baptism of Jesus.

Jesus is about to launch his public ministry.

He goes down to the Jordan River and he asks John the Baptist to baptize him.

And I want you to see the imagery here, Matthew chapter 3.

Matthew 3 · chapter mention

It says, as soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the waters.

At that moment, heaven was opened.

And he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, alighting on him.

And a voice from heaven said, and I want you to notice this.

This is my son.

Not servant.

Not slave.

Not worker, not helper.

Listen to the language.

It's his family.

This is my boy.

This is my son whom I love.

With him, I am well pleased.

I want you to notice something, okay?

This happens before Jesus did anything.

Before Jesus walked on water or turned water into wine, before Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead, before Jesus died on the cross, before he rose again from the dead, before all the things that we do to honor and celebrate him, before his ministry, before he had accomplished anything.

This is my son, whom I love, with him I'm well pleased.

Jesus didn't have to earn it, it was already given.

There was affirmation before there was anything that Jesus had done that was even effective.

He just said, You don't have to earn it.

You're my son, you're part of my family.

There's affection, and I'm pleased with you.

What a beautiful picture.

Later in Jesus' ministry, after he's accomplished a lot of stuff, after he's done miracles and raised the dead and healed the sick and all those things in Matthew chapter 17, there's this moment called the transfiguration, and at it, the Father speaks again.

Matthew 17 · chapter mention

While he was still speaking, a bright cloud covered them, and a voice from the cloud said, This is my son.

Recognize this.

Whom I love, with him I am well pleased.

So pay attention.

Listen to him, God the Father said.

And I want you to notice this.

Before Jesus does anything, and after he's accomplished a lot of things, it's the same language from God.

This is my son, identity, whom I love, affection, with him I am well pleased.

Affirmation.

Jesus uses this picture of God.

It's different.

He's not just a cosmic force, he is our father.

He's our father.

And in this moment, when he speaks over his son, again, here's those words.

The words are identity, affection, and affirmation.

These are all of the things that God the Father speaks over his son.

And here's what I want you to understand today.

What I want you to get is all of us need these things.

So many of us turn to our earthly fathers for these things.

And the problem is we don't get them.

It's such a big deal.

Like I remember when my kids were little, sometimes they'd be like, Dad, hey, dad, dad, dad, dad, dad, look, look, dad, look, dad, look.

And I would turn my attention to them.

And you could tell they had no idea what they were going to do.

Dad, look, dad, look.

And I'm like, what?

And they'd go.

And I'm like, that's my boy.

I taught him that.

Like, why?

Because every child needs identity.

You belong, affection, your love, and affirmation you can make a difference with your life.

And what's funny is this just isn't the Bible.

Like, there's so much more.

Social scientists, there was an article written in Inc.

magazine, and it says this.

It says everyone has three fundamental needs according to science.

To feel safe, to feel like we belong, to feel like we matter.

Does this sound familiar?

Here's the funny thing Jesus uses this word father to describe his heavenly father.

And for so many of us, the problem is that word is so problematic.

Isn't it?

Because we view God our Father through the broken filter of our experience with our earthly father.

Don't we?

And it's messed up.

And I just want to say this to you, and I'm going to say it several times today.

God, your heavenly father, is not a reflection of the broken experience you've had here.

He is the perfect embodiment of everything your earthly father could have, should have, and would have been if he was perfect.

It's a big deal.

So so social scientists say that there's six kinds of fathers, there's six kinds of dads out there.

And remember, we see God as our father and we we try to filter it through the lens of our own experience.

Maybe one of these will jump out at you as your experience.

Here are the six kinds of father.

The first one is the absent father.

They were just gone.

Maybe it means that you never knew them.

Maybe it means that unfortunately something happened and they passed away.

Maybe it means that through their own choice of divorce or just abandonment, they just left.

And you grew up without a dad.

And there is that longing in your soul, and maybe you've tried to block it out, but you've got daddy wounds because he wasn't even there for you.

He was just gone.

For other people, their father wasn't just absent, he was abusive.

Physically beat you, hurt you, emotionally spoke words of death over you.

They hurt you, they tore your soul into a million pieces.

That they abuse you mentally.

Maybe you struggle with identity issues today because your father said, You'll never be my child.

I never wanted you.

They're abusive.

Another one that's hard is some dads are what I call performance-based.

And what it means is you can get my love, but you have to earn it.

Yeah, yeah, good game, but you didn't quite score enough points.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You got to be, and that's pretty good, but we're an A plus kind of family.

It's like that you can get love, but the love is on the other side of earning it.

Other people had what I call a passive father.

And a passive father wasn't absent.

He was there, but he was quiet, didn't offer his opinion, would never come into your room and shut the door and say, Hey son or hey daughter, I see something in you.

You're on a road to devastation, and I want to help you and I want to protect you.

And a lot of people think, a lot of kids think they want a passive parent, a parent who says, Yeah, sure, just go do anything you want.

I don't really care.

Just go have fun, just go have fun.

The funny thing is, is that intuitively and intrinsically, children know that if they're sent out with any sort of rules and restrictions, they're not actually loved.

Because real love protects and real love cares.

So some of us we had a passive father, others of us had a different kind of dad.

We had an antagonist dad.

And what this means is it means in order to get to our dreams and to get to our hopes, we had to somehow get through our dad.

And so nothing is ever good enough.

You have to work hard, they're always cutting you down, never encouraging you, never believing in you.

And the funny thing is, many of us, like we have different parts of this embodied in the person that was our father.

Um, I I enjoy teasing my kids.

I enjoy it.

I have two boys that are getting incredibly strong.

Um, my son Joey is like this close to passing me on the bench press right now.

And I I'm working as hard as I possibly can to hold him off, to hold him off, to hold him off.

But can I tell you what's gonna happen the moment he passes me?

I'm gonna celebrate him like nothing else.

Why?

Because I want to push him, but man, I want to celebrate him as well.

Some of you had the dad who only antagonized you.

It's never enough, never good enough, and you feel like your destiny is directly through your dad's approval, and it's hard for you.

Then there's the last kind of dad, the empowering kind of dad.

This is the dad who says, Stand on my shoulders, build on what I've built on.

I have so much faith in you.

You are going to accomplish so many great things in your life.

I have your back for the rest of your life.

I love you, I love you, I love you.

My hope as a dad is that all three of my kids feel so loved.

They feel so empowered, they feel like they can try stuff with their life, and it's okay if they fail, because I'd rather that they swing for the fences and miss than to stand there and not swing at all.

I want the kind of kids who feel loved and who feel empowered to do the things that God has called them to do.

I want the kind of kids who all three of my kids, I hope all of them feel like my favorite.

I hope all of them feel like I love them, and it doesn't matter if they succeed or fail, it doesn't matter how good they do or how bad they do.

I love them.

And when you look up here and you think about your dad, who was he?

Let me say this to you.

If Jesus says that God in heaven is our father, and you were the enemy of our soul, if you were Satan, wouldn't you try really hard to fracture the foundation, to destroy what fatherhood really is?

Okay, listen to me.

You are called the fatherless generation.

More and more dads fit into the first five categories than in the history of the world.

Wouldn't you want to destroy the picture of a father if Jesus calls God our father?

Because I know that I would.

So here's the question what do we do with it?

If we're gonna have a relationship with Almighty God, if we're gonna have a kind of relationship that's going to go the distance founded, that's gonna have the ability to withstand the storms of this life, we have to understand that God is not merely a reflection of our broken experience with our own fathers.

He is the full embodiment of a perfect father.

He's everything your dad was, and so much more.

That's why the psalmist David, when he talks about God, I love, I love how he talks about God.

He says this in Psalm chapter 68 Sing to God, sing in praise of his name, extoll him who rides on the clouds, rejoice before him.

Psalms 68 · chapter mention

His name is the Lord.

Listen to the magnitude and the splendor of this declaration.

He's a big God, strong and powerful and mighty, omnipotent, omniscient.

He rides on the clouds.

I bet you've never said that about your friends.

He rides on the clouds.

That's a big kind of word for God, right?

But I want you to notice who he is.

The next line is he's a father to the fatherless.

And in a fatherless generation, here's what you need to hear today.

You'll never fully understand God until you can understand him as father.

And in a world that's called the fatherless generation, here's what you need to hear.

You have a God who wants to be your father.

He's a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows is God in his holy dwelling.

And listen to this God sets the lonely in families.

This week I was reading over this.

I'm gonna be honest, I don't know why that line hit me as emotional, but I found myself getting choked up over it.

And here's the reason: the reason is so many people feel displaced.

We feel floating aimlessly through this life, wandering through what feels like a myriad of opportunities and circumstances, unable to have any sense of clarity over what we're to do with our life.

We feel alone, and I want you to hear this today.

You are not alone.

You have a Father in heaven who sets you in his perfect family.

He leads out the prisoners with singing, this is the picture of God.

So when Jesus talks about God as Father, I want you to hear this.

He's talking about all the attributes of God, all the good, all the beautiful, all the powerful, all the majesty, all the splendor, everything he is.

God's talking about all of that, but it's all embodied in the person of a father because he wants us to have a relationship with him as Father.

So Jesus talks and he explains this in the book of Matthew, chapter 7, and I want you to see what he says that we do.

Matthew 7 · chapter mention

Here's what you do with it if you're struggling.

Ask.

What do we ask God for?

Ask and it'll be given to you.

Seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.

For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds.

And the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

And we'll pause here for just a moment.

What is God inviting us to do?

If you feel like you're on the outside looking in, if you feel like you can't really approach God as your heavenly father because you've struggled so much with your picture of an earthly father, ask him to heal you.

Knock, and he'll unlock the door of prison that you found yourself in of captivity so you can step into a new understanding of who he actually is.

And then I love what he says.

He says, Which of you, if your son asks for bread, we'll give him a stone, or if he asks for fish, we'll give him a snake.

I love the imagery here, but some of us read that and we think, well, I did ask for bread and I got a stone in this life.

Or I asked for a fish in this life and I got this figurative snake and it keeps attacking me.

I can't understand God in this way.

And then Jesus says, If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more?

And what if those three words were the linchpin that changed your whole life?

How much more will your Father in heaven give you good gifts to those who simply have the courage to ask?

All you have to do is ask.

All you have to do is ask.

All you have to do is seek, all you have to do is knock.

And what it says is that God wants to open the doors for you to understand who He is.

Let me end with this today.

We started with an A.W.

Tozer quote that said that what we think about God, the picture we have of him is the most important thing about us.

Some years later, another brilliant theologian, C.S.

Lewis, he responded and retorted in this way.

He says, I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God.

By God Himself, it is not.

How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important.

Indeed, he says, how we think of him is of no importance except insofar as it is related to how he thinks of us.

Which one is it?

Is it how we think of God that matters, or is it how God thinks of us?

And I want to tell you the answer.

You ready?

Yes.

It's both.

How you think of God matters because we move towards our mental image of who God is.

But I want to say this to some of you today.

It really doesn't even matter what you think about God because it's what God thinks of you that ultimately wins the day.

So I want to end with this three points.

How does God think of us?

How does God see us?

How does God see you?

And I want to end with three I am statements because I want you to personalize this.

I want you to get this deep in your heart.

How does God see us?

Number one, I am loved.

And nobody freaked out.

And nobody cheered in this moment because this seems so elementary.

It seems so remedial.

It seems so easy that I am loved.

Of course, we would say God loves us.

Like Burns, you got a doctorate, right?

That's so simple.

I bet you if we were to lower the lights and to shine a spotlight on every person in the room who would say, I know God loves me, but I don't feel loved.

There would be doctors and lawyers and teachers.

There would be baristas, there would be neighbors, there would be friends of yours that don't feel loved by God.

A spotlight would shine on them and you would be shocked.

People that spend their life trying to earn God's love.

People that have given themselves into exhaustion, serve their way as much as they possibly can to try to earn something that's been freely given to them.

I love John.

At the end of his life, John writes three or four different books that are towards the end of his life that are at the end of our Bible.

1 John chapter 3, I love this.

1 John 3 · chapter mention

He says, see.

Before we can talk about what we're going to talk about, he says, you have to see it.

You have to experience it for yourself.

See what great love the Father has lavished on us.

Poured out with abundance on us.

Poured out to an extreme, extravagant measure.

See what great love the Father has lavished on us.

Here's what it is that we should be called children of God.

And that is what we are.

You want to talk about what love is?

You want to talk about really understanding it once and forever?

Just begin to understand that God has lavished it on you.

Mother Teresa said the greatest disease in the West today is not TB or leprosy.

It is being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for.

And so many people walk through this life, and the natural reality for them is they feel unwanted, unloved, and uncared for.

And for many of us, it's by our fathers, our dads.

But here's what I want you to understand.

When you fully grasp that I am fully known by God and fully loved by Him, you'll never waste another moment of your life feeling unwanted, unloved, and uncared for.

How do you know you're loved?

Because you're valued.

How do you know you're valued?

Because the value of anything is determined by the price someone's willing to pay for it.

How much was God willing to pay for you?

He gave his son to die for you.

You could not be any more valuable to him.

I am loved.

Number two, I am free.

Free from what?

Free from striving.

Free from exhausting myself to earn something that I've already been given.

Free from trying harder, free from guilt, shame, and condemnation.

Once and for all, I am free.

One of the most powerful chapters in all of Scripture.

Romans chapter 8.

Romans 8 · chapter mention

We'll start with verse 14.

Paul says, For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God.

The Spirit you receive does not make you slaves so that you live in fear again.

Rather, the spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship.

And by him we cry, Abba Father.

I want you to see two things in this last verse.

This is brilliant.

He says, by the Spirit, the power of God's Holy Spirit, we begin to understand that once and for all we're adopted.

And I love adoption.

I can't think of a more beautiful sacrificial gift that you can give another person because it says, I choose you.

And I choose that for the rest of your life you will be in my family.

That for the rest of your life you will change your name.

You will identify as a member of who we are.

When you understand that God chose you before the foundations of the earth to enter into his family, it begins to change some stuff for you.

You're free now to once and for all live in freedom.

And he ends the verse by saying, and we cry out, Abba, Father.

Abba is this Hebrew word.

It's intimate and beautiful.

And it literally is the most intimate form that a word that a child could call their dad.

Abba.

It's somehow more intimate than dad or daddy or father.

It's the most intimate, beautiful way that we could express that love.

And here's the third thing.

I'm loved, I am free, and as a result, I am a child of God.

The next verse we just read from the verse we read says this the Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.

We're in his family.

We're his children.

Now, if we are children, then we are heirs, heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ.

If indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.

A few months ago, my wife and I did this really weird thing.

We called it our death day, and I don't recommend this to anybody, but we knew that at some point we needed to have a will because we wanted to take care of our children in the unlikely event that something happens to us.

And so we go to meet with this guy.

Honestly, we met with this super weird guy.

He looked like a character on that TV show, Fraggle Rock.

Anyone remember that?

Anyways, um, so we go there and and there was some weird scheduling conflicts where my daughter Ella, who was seven at the time, had to come with us.

And the man's asking all these weird questions, what do you do?

And what if you died, or what if you die?

And what if and so we're trying to figure out where everything's going to go.

The funny thing is, we leave this meeting and Ella's with us, and she had been playing on her iPad, and I was really hoping that she didn't get it.

Like I was hoping she was just distracted by crossy roads or whatever she was playing on the iPad.

And we walk out, and Ella puts the iPad down.

She goes, Hey dad.

I said, Yeah.

She goes, So what's up?

Are you gonna die?

It's like, oh man, you got it.

I said, No, I'm I'm not planning to, but said, if anything happens to mommy or me, here's what I want you to know.

I want you to know that you're taken care of.

And because you, Joey and Gavin are in our family, we want to make sure you get everything.

Here's what it means: a child of God means that everything that God has has belongs to you.

All of his love, all of his goodness, all of his provision, all that makes God who he is, it is yours.

You are a rightful heir.

Okay, listen to me.

Some of you are gonna need to make a decision today to forgive your earthly father.

Maybe he was abusive or he abandoned you, maybe he walked out on you, maybe he devastated your soul, maybe his words still keep you up at night all these years later.

But I want to say to you that God doesn't just want you to forgive that father, he wants you to turn that pain into something that he can use.

He wants you to begin to understand that when you make the decision to allow him to not just heal the wounds, but to replace that picture you have of Father in your heart once and for all, you get everything, you get all of his perfect love, all of his perfect peace, all of his perfect joy and kindness and gratefulness.

All of it gets wrapped up as a gift to you.

So, what would it look like if all of us just made this decision that from this day forward, I am no longer looking at God the Father through the broken lens of my experience here with my dad?

But once and for all, I'm forgiving that and I'm seeing my identity now once and for all in the perfect love of my father in heaven.

And what if all of us just made this decision that before I can step forward into the new life God has for me, I need to see him the way Jesus told me to see him.

Not some cosmic light force, not the eternal scorekeeper, not a cosmic killjoy looking to smite me if I do something wrong, not the sweet old grandpa.

But once and for all, I see him for who he is.

The embodiment of all the power and all the attributes, all the omnipotence, all the omniscience, all the grace, all the love, all the justice, all the mercy, all of it wrapped up in the person of my perfect heavenly father.

And my earthly dad is not a reflection of who God is.

No, no, no.

God, my heavenly father, is everything my dad was supposed to be times a trillion million billion forever.

He's perfect.

So what if all of us just made this decision?

I'm leaving today different.

I'm leaving as a son or a daughter of my perfect heavenly father.

Will you bow your head and close your eyes with me all across this room?

So, God, today give us the courage to confront our realities.

For some of us, we've had such a broken picture of our earthly dads.

God, today, may we leave changed.

May we leave realizing that you are our perfect Heavenly Father.

You are good, perfect, you're incredible.

For some of us, we've had a flawed view of you because we had a flawed experience here with our dads.

Give us the courage to confront that once and for all, and may we see you for who you actually are, the full embodiment of all of your attributes that we relate to through the lens of Dad, Abba, our Father.