The Empty Embrace: When Identity Replaces the Gospel

• The Value of Children in Biblical Context [00:02:41 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor contrasts the ancient Greco-Roman view of children as having no status and being disposable with Jesus' radical affirmation of their worth, highlighting His righteous anger when disciples tried to keep them away.
• The Nature of Jesus' Anger and Love [00:04:10 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor explains that Jesus' anger was 'righteous' and directed at obstacles preventing children from receiving love, acceptance, and worth, illustrated by Jesus hugging the children rather than just blessing them from a distance.
• The Resurrection of Jairus' Daughter [00:05:13 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor details the story of the 12-year-old girl, emphasizing that Jesus raised her from the dead using her native Aramaic tongue ('Talitha Kumb') to show personal, intimate care, and then ensured she was fed, demonstrating His holistic compassion.
• Adoption into God's Family [00:11:41 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor connects Jesus' love for children to the believer's status as adopted children of God, arguing that salvation is about becoming 'child of God selves' and being part of a family, not just avoiding punishment or following rules.
• Overcoming Barriers to God's Love [00:12:36 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor addresses why people struggle to believe God cares for them, citing poor earthly father figures and feelings of unworthiness due to sin, using a rhetorical scenario of someone being 'mad at you' versus 'mad about you' to illustrate God's pursuit.
• Adoption and Divine Fatherhood [00:12:22 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor contrasts being saved from punishment with being adopted into God's family, emphasizing that God is 'mad about' us rather than 'mad at' us.
• Unconditional Love and Identity [00:16:34 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor argues that God's love is inherent to our existence as His creation, not earned by behavior, and that we are 'precious' in His sight.
• Baptism and Beloved Status [00:21:33 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor connects baptism to hearing God's voice declare the believer as 'dearly loved son/daughter,' establishing 'beloved' as the believer's true name and identity.
• Prayer and Relational Intimacy [00:23:38 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor uses the Lord's Prayer to illustrate that the Christian relationship with God is defined by intimacy ('Our Father') rather than religious ritual or location.
• The Lord's Prayer and Early Christian Identity [00:23:38 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor explains how prayer was the primary marker of identity for early followers of Jesus, distinguishing them from other religious sects through the content and vibe of their prayers.
• The Intimacy of 'Abba' [00:25:50 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor analyzes the Aramaic word 'Abba' as a term of extreme intimacy, comparable to 'daddy' or 'papa,' used by small children, which was startling to Jesus' original audience.
• Overcoming Earthly Father Trauma [00:28:33 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor addresses listeners who may have experienced brokenness or disappointment with their earthly fathers, urging them not to reject God based on those past hurts but to view God as the perfect, safe Father.
• Unconditional Paternal Love [00:30:07 ▶️ 📄]
  > Using personal anecdotes about his daughter Rebecca, the pastor illustrates the enduring, multi-generational love of a father, which he uses as a metaphor for God's infinite, boundless love for His children.

• Sermon Illustration [00:03:03 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor describes the horrific historical context of children in the Greco-Roman world, including infanticide, abandonment, and a 'cottage industry' of capturing unwanted children to be gladiators, prostitutes, or professional beggars with disfigured limbs.
• Sermon Illustration [00:07:32 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor recounts the cultural practice of hiring professional mourners, including flute players and wailing women, to make mourning less conspicuous, noting that Jairus, as an important person, would have hired many such mourners.
• Sermon Illustration [00:10:50 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor shares a personal anecdote about how he calls his own daughters 'baby girl' or 'sweet girl' to illustrate the tenderness and intimacy of Jesus' words 'Talitha Kumb' to the dead girl.
• Sermon Illustration [00:13:14 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor uses a rhetorical scenario comparing someone being 'mad at you' (causing you to hide) versus someone being 'mad about you' (desiring to reach out to you) to illustrate the difference between human fear of God and God's loving pursuit of His children.
• Sermon Illustration [00:14:20 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor shares a personal anecdote about his four children, specifically his reaction to learning his third child was a boy despite wanting a girl, illustrating instant paternal love. He also recounts a humorous story about his daughter Rebecca wanting to marry him and suggesting their mother be a cow.
• Sermon Illustration [00:18:25 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor tells the story of Marianne Byrd, a woman with a cleft palate who felt rejected, until her teacher Mrs. Leonard whispered to her, 'I wish you were my little girl,' illustrating God's desire for relationship despite human flaws.
• Sermon Illustration [00:26:35 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor shares a personal story about his grandchildren calling him 'Papa' and running into his arms, contrasting this natural intimacy with the absurdity of a child formally saluting him as 'glorious potentate.' He uses this to illustrate the comfort and safety God desires in our prayers.
• Sermon Illustration [00:27:52 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor recounts his daughters crawling into his lap as young children to tell him about their day and playfully fixing his hair with rollers and bows, illustrating the trivial yet deeply intimate nature of father-child interaction.
• Sermon Illustration [00:30:07 ▶️ 📄]
  > The pastor describes the journey of his daughter Rebecca's life, from her birth and childhood costumes to her senior trip and wedding, emphasizing that while circumstances change, his role as her loving father remains constant, serving as an analogy for God's eternal love.

• Pastoral Charge [00:20:44 ▶️ 📄]
  > To return to God, enter into intimate relationship with Him as a child, and continually rely on His forgiveness and grace.
• Pastoral Charge [00:28:33 ▶️ 📄]
  > Remove negative perceptions of earthly fathers from their minds to avoid rejecting God.

[00:00:00] [SPEAKER SPEAKER_00]
[00:00:00] He gets the pressure, the heartbreak, the doubts we hide, and the battles we face.
[00:00:06] Through powerful moments from the life of Jesus, we'll discover someone who meets us where we are, with empathy, compassion, and understanding. Because no matter your story, He gets us.

[00:00:23] [SPEAKER SPEAKER_01]
[00:00:23] Well, welcome to MEX Online Campus. Last week we started a series on a simple but profound reality. Jesus gets us. He really does. It doesn't just take a powerful commercial to to remind us of it either. It is a truth. And everything about the life and teaching of Jesus
[00:00:40] drove it home over and over again. Last week, we looked at a man who went through one of the greatest moral and spiritual train wrecks in recorded history, and we saw how in the midst
[00:00:50] of that, Jesus got him, chased after him, restored him. Today, I want to turn a page on his life and look at someone else Jesus met, a little 12-year-old girl. But before we look at that story,
[00:01:04] Let's talk a bit about Jesus and children in general, because it really does help provide a good backdrop to this.
[00:01:10] One of the more famous scenes from Jesus' life was about children.
[00:01:14] Let me read it.
[00:01:16] One day, some parents brought their children to Jesus so he could touch and bless them, but the disciples scolded the parents for bothering him.
[00:01:24] When Jesus saw what was happening, he was angry with his disciples.
[00:01:27] He said to them, let the children come to me.
[00:01:30] Don't stop them.
[00:01:31] For the kingdom of God belongs to those who are like these children.
[00:01:35] I tell you the truth, anyone who doesn't receive the kingdom of God like a child will never enter it.
[00:01:41] Then he took the children in his arms and placed his hands on their heads and blessed them.
[00:01:47] Now that scene is always touching to people.
[00:01:50] It's endearing, but there's more to it than you might think.
[00:01:54] It begins innocently enough, you know, with parents bringing children to Jesus so he could bless them.
[00:01:59] Traditionally, that would mean just putting his hand on their heads and maybe saying a word of prayer or blessing.
[00:02:06] But his disciples, the men being trained by Jesus to be his followers, didn't think they were important.
[00:02:13] Maybe they thought Jesus was too busy to mess with kids.
[00:02:16] Maybe they thought children's ministry was beneath him.
[00:02:19] Maybe they thought he was too tired at the end of a long day and they were just trying to protect his time.
[00:02:25] Maybe they were just too many kids to make it feasible.
[00:02:29] Maybe they just didn't think children were important.
[00:02:32] Back then, actually, that would have been an understanding that you would have accepted.
[00:02:39] You would have expected them to have.
[00:02:41] That was the norm because they weren't important.
[00:02:43] In the ancient world, children had absolutely no status.
[00:02:47] You could ignore them.
[00:02:47] You could shut them out.
[00:02:49] You could do anything you wanted, actually, because they didn't have any defenders.
[00:02:54] There weren't any champions for children.
[00:02:56] No one would ever fight for them.
[00:02:58] In the Greco-Roman world, you could literally throw children away.
[00:03:03] Infanticide, as we know it, was not a crime.
[00:03:07] If you had a child you didn't want, you just put them out on the street.
[00:03:10] In fact, there was an entire cottage industry during that era where people would go down the streets of villages and towns and they would find these abandoned, exposed, unwanted, unprotected children.
[00:03:22] They would take them, just literally just take them, and they would raise them to either fight in the arenas as gladiators or to sell their bodies as prostitutes. If neither of those prospects worked, they would physically disfigure them. They would break their leg. They would cut
[00:03:39] off an arm. They would intentionally scar their face so that they could become professional beggars preying off of people's pity. They were so mistreated that six out of every 10 children during the time of Jesus would die before the age of 16. We don't know the reason the disciples
[00:03:57] didn't want to let the children come, at least for sure. What we do know, though, is that Jesus wanted them to, a lot. When Jesus found out what was happening, the Bible says he got angry. Now,
[00:04:10] Jesus, in terms of the recorded biographies we have of his life, didn't get angry very often.
[00:04:15] When he did, it wasn't a sinful anger. It was a righteous anger. And this made him righteously angry that they would even think about keeping children away from him because he wanted nothing to come between them and love, them and acceptance, them and worth, them and him.
[00:04:33] So he didn't just let them come, but said, don't you ever do anything ever to stop them from coming to me. And then to make it clear how much they matter to them, he didn't just do the kind of
[00:04:44] typical rabbinic, you know, placing his hands on their heads, almost like from a distance, You know, no, it says that he just wrapped them up in his arms and hugged them and held them.
[00:04:56] Wouldn't surprise me if he played with them a while, you know.
[00:05:00] To Jesus, these children were everything.
[00:05:03] Which brings us to another scene from Jesus' life, another one involving children, the one I really want to focus on, and actually one child in particular.
[00:05:12] Let me read what happened.
[00:05:13] A large crowd gathered around Jesus on the shore.
[00:05:17] then a leader of the local synagogue, whose name was Jairus, arrived. When he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet, pleading fervently with him. My little daughter is dying, he said. Please come and lay your hands on her. Heal her so that she can live. Jesus went with him, and all the people
[00:05:35] followed, crowding around him. Well, then along the way, something happened. The Bible adds this.
[00:05:42] messengers arrived from the home of Jairus, the leader of the synagogue. They told him, your daughter is dead. There's no use troubling the teacher now. But Jesus overheard them and said to Jairus, don't be afraid. Just have faith. Okay, stop there again for a minute. The little
[00:06:02] girl has died. End of story, right? You can understand the messenger saying there's no point in bringing Jesus now. He's just a teacher. Maybe there was a healing or two attached to him.
[00:06:14] Rumor has it, but nobody raises people from the dead. But Jesus turns to this distraught father and says, look, I know you're devastated by the news that we just got from these messengers, but you had faith that I could heal your daughter. You had faith in me. Don't lose that faith now.
[00:06:31] So you smell it coming, don't you? Jesus is going to raise this little girl from the dead.
[00:06:36] Now think about that.
[00:06:37] Not only would that be the greatest of all miracles, but when done by Jesus, he only did it three separate times that we know of, and it was always a foretaste of what was to come, which was his own resurrection, the final conquering of death.
[00:06:53] And you know what?
[00:06:54] Two of the three resurrections he performed, I don't know if you knew this, a little bit of trivia, two of the three were for children.
[00:07:02] The greatest of miracles, the foretaste of his own resurrection, almost exclusively bestowed on children.
[00:07:08] So what happened next?
[00:07:09] Let's find out.
[00:07:11] Then Jesus stopped the crowd and wouldn't let anyone go with him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James.
[00:07:17] When they came to the home of the synagogue leader, Jesus saw much commotion and weeping and wailing.
[00:07:22] He went inside and asked, why all this commotion and weeping?
[00:07:26] The child isn't dead.
[00:07:28] She's only asleep.
[00:07:30] Okay, a little background here.
[00:07:32] It was the custom of the day that when someone died, you would hire professional mourners.
[00:07:39] We have records from that period that even the poorest man, if his wife died, would be expected to hire at least two flute players and one wailing woman.
[00:07:50] The idea was that it made the mourning of the family less conspicuous.
[00:07:55] It made them feel less out of place, that they weren't the only ones weeping.
[00:08:00] It would make the family at ease in the midst of their own authentic mourning.
[00:08:05] The wealthier and more important you were, the more people it was expected that you would hire to mourn.
[00:08:10] Jairus was an important person.
[00:08:12] So that was what was up.
[00:08:15] And Scripture says that when he walked in, there was much commotion and there was much weeping and wailing.
[00:08:20] There would have been flutes and hand clapping and drums and sobbing and hysteria paid for, but the noise was real.
[00:08:29] Jesus tells them to stop, that she was only sleeping.
[00:08:33] They thought he meant she wasn't actually dead.
[00:08:36] He meant it to say that she was going to wake up from the dead.
[00:08:40] So how did they react to that, the crowd, and him saying that to them?
[00:08:44] Let's keep reading.
[00:08:45] The crowd laughed at him, but he made them all leave, and he took the girl's father and mother and his three disciples into the room where the girl was lying.
[00:08:53] Holding her hand, he said to her, Talitha Kumb, which means little girl, get up. And the girl, who was 12 years old, immediately stood up and walked around. They were overwhelmed and totally amazed, and he told them to give her
[00:09:09] something to eat. There's so much there we just don't want to miss. First, the tenderness of Jesus with the little girl. You know, you weren't supposed to touch a dead person, a dead body. It
[00:09:21] made you ceremonially unclean, defiled.
[00:09:24] Jesus went to her side and instantly held her hand.
[00:09:28] And then he spoke to her.
[00:09:29] The phrase, Talitha koum, was Aramaic.
[00:09:33] That's important in Jesus' day.
[00:09:35] The language of commerce was of business.
[00:09:40] You know, anything meant for mass consumption was Koine Greek.
[00:09:46] That's why the New Testament was written in the Greek language.
[00:09:49] It was the world's language, business language.
[00:09:51] Jesus would have certainly known some Greek, and he would have known Hebrew.
[00:09:55] Every good Jewish boy was raised studying Hebrew, the language the Old Testament was written in, and the language of the religious life of a Jew.
[00:10:03] But what would the little girl's native tongue have been?
[00:10:07] Greek? No. Hebrew? No.
[00:10:10] She wouldn't have been taught it as a girl because girls, sadly, were not considered worth educating.
[00:10:16] In the Palestine area, she would only have known Aramaic.
[00:10:21] Jesus knew that language too.
[00:10:22] He was a child from Palestine once.
[00:10:25] It was his boyhood tongue as well.
[00:10:27] So he spoke to her in a way that she could understand her language, her words, while he held her hand.
[00:10:35] And his heart came through what he said, calling her essentially the name I called my daughters and I still call them, baby girl or sweet girl, like you would wake up a small child from her nap.
[00:10:50] And she got up, but not just from a nap, but from the dead.
[00:10:54] And then he did one more thing.
[00:10:55] It would be so easy to miss, but it shows his compassion for this child.
[00:10:59] He'd raised her from the dead, and in the midst of the joy, the amazement, you could just imagine what was going on in that room.
[00:11:05] He was afraid people would forget that she was hungry.
[00:11:09] Jesus did forget.
[00:11:11] All he was thinking about was her in every conceivable way.
[00:11:15] Now, why was this scene out of all of the scenes of his life preserved by the Holy Spirit that prompted the writer to record it?
[00:11:23] Why is it preserved for us so that we're reading it to this day?
[00:11:29] It's simple.
[00:11:30] It shows Jesus' heart for children, that he gets children.
[00:11:35] But there's more.
[00:11:36] It means he gets us because we are his children too.
[00:11:41] This is all throughout the Bible.
[00:11:43] In the book of John, in Peterson's paraphrase, it says, But whoever did want him, who believed he was who he claimed and would do what he said, he made to be their true selves, their child of God selves.
[00:11:56] In the second letter of the Apostle Paul to the Corinthians, he quotes God saying to the prophet Samuel, I will be a father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.
[00:12:07] And then again, in the book written to the church in Galatia, the Bible says, for you are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. This is such an important understanding. When we come to God, we aren't just saved from some kind of punishment,
[00:12:22] given a set of creeds and doctrines or given our marching orders and told to fall into line. We are adopted into his family as children. For a lot of people I know, it's hard to think about God
[00:12:36] caring that much about us and feeling that way about us. Maybe because I've had enough conversations with people to know one of the big reasons is our earthly fathers didn't exactly flesh that out toward us. And so it's hard for us to think about our heavenly father feeling that
[00:12:51] way. Others maybe because we don't feel we deserve it. Because a lot of us look at the sin and junk in our lives and the moral foul ups and the stupid mistakes. And all we want to do when it
[00:13:02] comes to God showing up on the scene is to crawl in a hole somewhere. And we think that's what God wants us to do too. But you just couldn't be more wrong. I want you to think of two scenarios. First,
[00:13:14] someone is mad at you, okay? Angry. And you hear that they're looking for you, you know, or maybe they're in your area. What's your first reaction going to be? It's to run, right? To hide, to avoid
[00:13:29] the conflict, to stay away from them. But now here's the second scenario. What if they weren't mad at you, but instead mad about you? You know, foolish about you. What if you heard that someone
[00:13:41] like that was looking for you and wanting to be with you and reach out to you, who thought that you were the most incredible person on the planet and you wanted them to feel that way towards you?
[00:13:51] I mean, your secret longing was that they would feel that way. Would you make yourself available?
[00:13:57] Would you want to spend time with them?
[00:13:59] Yeah, you'd run toward that.
[00:14:00] You wouldn't hide from that.
[00:14:02] That's got the father.
[00:14:03] He's not mad at you.
[00:14:05] He's mad about you.
[00:14:07] You really are his child.
[00:14:08] And there's nothing more special than a healthy, functioning, loving father-child relationship, no matter the child.
[00:14:18] It doesn't matter the child.
[00:14:20] I have four children, and the first two were girls.
[00:14:24] So I knew girls.
[00:14:25] I liked girls. They were both daddy's girls. They wanted to marry me when they got older, so it was all set. You girl dads understand. In fact, when my oldest daughter was four, she informed my wife that when she grew up, she was going to be a farmer. My wife said,
[00:14:42] well, that's nice, sweetheart. And then Rebecca said, yep, when I grow up, I'm going to be a farmer and I'm going to marry my daddy. And my wife said, Susan, said, well, if you grow up and
[00:14:51] be a farmer and you marry daddy, well, then what will mommy do? Rebecca thought a minute. She said, oh, you can be our cow. That did not go over very well. Anyway, when number three came, I was
[00:15:06] obviously rooting for another girl. Came time for Susan to get a sonogram. And up until then, we had no idea what we were going to have. When the images first came on the screen, we saw the
[00:15:18] head. We saw the little feet and hands. And then the nurse said, so did you want to know whether your baby is a boy or a girl? We'd already talked about it and said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we want
[00:15:30] to know. With the first kid, a lot of times you don't. In fact, we didn't. We didn't want to know the first time. We wanted to have the fun of the mystery and all that kind of stuff. And this was
[00:15:38] when we had kids, they didn't have reveal parties and all that kind of stuff like they do now.
[00:15:42] But by the third, the mystery is over. And we just said, okay, listen, we got stuff to buy.
[00:15:47] Things just change with multiple kids.
[00:15:49] Like with pacifiers, you know, the first kid, it drops out and you sterilize it.
[00:15:54] By the third kid, you just give it a lick and stick it back in.
[00:15:57] Anyway, she said, all right, well, it looks like a boy.
[00:16:02] And when she said, you're going to have a son, it just, this wave, I'll never forget this, this wave of emotion swept over me.
[00:16:11] I wanted a girl.
[00:16:12] I was rooting for a girl.
[00:16:13] But I instantly had to love that little guy that was just beyond understanding.
[00:16:18] He hadn't been born, never held him, never heard his voice, didn't call him by name.
[00:16:22] I'm not even sure we had a name picked out by then, but I loved him.
[00:16:26] It was just there.
[00:16:28] That was my boy.
[00:16:29] I was his father.
[00:16:31] That's the way God feels toward you, his child.
[00:16:34] You are his precious.
[00:16:36] I mean, you're just precious in his sight and he loves you.
[00:16:40] And there's nothing you can ever do to make him love you more.
[00:16:42] and there's nothing you can ever do to make him love you less.
[00:16:45] He brought you into existence.
[00:16:48] You know, the very fact that you were created is God shouting from the mountaintops, this one, this one, look at this one, I made her.
[00:16:57] Every nook and cranny of who she is, that's my work, my design.
[00:17:01] So don't you say a bad word about her.
[00:17:04] And look at him, look at this one, I made him because I love him.
[00:17:08] I mean, his personality and the way he's wired up, I love that little guy.
[00:17:14] And not only that, but he has always wanted to be with you as a father, a father to a daughter, a father to a son.
[00:17:21] This is important, too.
[00:17:22] Your very existence is God saying, I want to be in this kind of a relationship with you.
[00:17:28] I want a father-child relationship with you.
[00:17:31] This is important.
[00:17:32] I don't just love you.
[00:17:33] I like you.
[00:17:38] No matter how we might view ourselves, God sees us as the child he willed into existence.
[00:17:43] in order to love, and he is foolish over you.
[00:17:47] Some of you really need to hear that.
[00:17:49] It's the most important thing you could ever hear.
[00:17:52] He puts more pictures of you up on his heavenly Instagram feed than you could ever imagine.
[00:17:58] You say, okay, not me, though.
[00:18:03] Can't be true for me.
[00:18:04] I know the pictures from my life, and none of them are very post-worthy.
[00:18:09] It's not true.
[00:18:11] You know one of my favorite stories, and whenever I'm talking about something like this, it always comes to mind. It was a story written by Marianne Byrd. And she wrote about growing up knowing she was different and feeling it. She was born with a cleft palate. I don't know if you've
[00:18:30] ever seen a picture of a child born with a cleft palate. I mean, when she started school, her classmates made it clear to her how she looked to others. I mean, a girl with misshapen lips and
[00:18:41] crooked nose and lopsided teeth and garbled speech. When they would ask her what happened to her lip, she would say that she had fallen and had been cut by a piece of glass. For whatever
[00:18:54] reason, in her little mind, it seemed better to have suffered an accident than to have been born differently. Anyway, she grew up convinced that on the outside of her family, no one on the outside of her family could ever really love her. Then she entered second grade, and she had a
[00:19:10] teacher named Mrs. Leonard. Everybody loved Mrs. Leonard. She was short, round, always happy.
[00:19:17] People even said she kind of sparkled. I've never had a teacher like that, met someone like that.
[00:19:22] Well, every year the school gave all the students a hearing test. It's called the whisper test.
[00:19:29] One day Mrs. Leonard said it was time for that year's test, and she began to administer it to every one of the students. And finally, it was Mary Ann's turn. She knew from the past how it
[00:19:39] worked, that she would stand against the door and she would cover one ear and the teacher sitting at her desk would whisper something and then she would have to whisper it back. Something like, you know, the sky is blue. Do you have new shoes? It was something that no one else could hear
[00:19:55] except the teacher and the student. And it was a way of gauging the test that you're hearing.
[00:20:00] When it came her turn, Mrs. Leonard said seven words as her sentence that she never expected here and forever changed her life. She whispered, I wish you were my little girl. To this little girl with a cleft palate who had felt nothing but rejection her entire life. And that's what God
[00:20:21] says to each one of us. No matter how we feel about ourselves, even if we have wandered far from him, even in the midst of our sin and failure and weakness, he says, I made you because I wanted
[00:20:31] to be in a relationship with you. I love you. I want you to be my child. Now, in one sense, we're all God's children. He created all of us. He loves all of us. But when we live apart from
[00:20:44] him, we break off that relationship. And as a result, we separate ourselves from him. It's as if we abandon our family and change our name. But through Jesus, we can not only receive forgiveness for anything we've ever done, wrong or hurtful in God's eyes, we can also come home and we can
[00:21:01] enter into the intimacy of God's love for us as father to child, and then continually drink from that forgiveness and acceptance and grace, we can become adopted and welcomed back and into his family. We can come home and be who we were meant to be, prized sons, precious daughters to him in
[00:21:21] an intimate relationship with the Father God. In fact, when we come to God as Father through Jesus, we hear from God the Father the same thing that Jesus heard as his son. I don't know if you know
[00:21:33] that or even have thought about that. For those of you who have entered the waters of baptism, when you emerge from those waters, do you know what it is God the Father says to you? It's the
[00:21:46] same thing he said to his son Jesus at his baptism. Let me read it. And a voice from heaven said, you are my dearly loved son, and you bring me great joy. David Taylor writes that this is our
[00:22:02] baptism name. We are named the loved one, beloved. Of all the things God could have said about the son, he said, you are the beloved. And when we are baptized in Jesus' name, we hear the same
[00:22:16] whisper from the Father, calling us our truest name, the loved one, who brings him great joy simply by existing. Someone being a son or a daughter isn't just a title either. It becomes a very beating of God's heart toward us. This is how the Bible talks about it in 1 John. It says,
[00:22:37] see how very much our Father loves us, for he calls us his children, and that is what we are.
[00:22:43] But that's not all. Not only does God offer us that identity, he wants us to live in light of it.
[00:22:50] This is key, because a change in identity doesn't mean anything if it's not allowed to speak to how we actually live. God wants us to live as sons and daughters and to let that new identity form
[00:23:01] the deepest understanding of who we are and how we relate to him. Being a son or daughter isn't just a title, it's a new status. It's how you can now relate to God and how you're supposed to
[00:23:13] relate to God. If you've come to Christ as your leader and forgiver, if you've emerged from those waters of baptism with your new name as beloved, have you embraced your son and daughter role with
[00:23:26] him as father? Is that the basis of your relationship? Jesus went out of his way to teach this to model us. I mean, he went out of his way to teach this and to model this for us, to show
[00:23:38] this. This is the way it was meant to be. For example, when he taught people how to pray, back in Jesus' day, a lot of the different religious sects and groups were marked not by how they dressed or how they did their hair or what they carried. They were marked by how
[00:23:54] they prayed. That's how they were identified. And so, it was very natural for the followers of Jesus to say, so, okay, what kind of prayers are we going to be? What about our prayers and
[00:24:06] prayer life is going to separate us from other groups. Teach us. So Jesus said, okay, I'll tell you how you are to pray. And boy, did it set them apart because it was like nothing they'd ever heard.
[00:24:21] This is the words that he gave them. And it was more of not something to be memorized. It was more like he said, okay, I want you to kind of pray like this, pray along these lines. When you
[00:24:31] talk to God, this is how it should kind of sound and feel the vibe of it. Let me read you what he said. Some of it might sound familiar to you. Jesus said, pray like this. Our Father in heaven,
[00:24:45] may your name be kept holy. May your kingdom come soon. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today the food we need. Forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who sin
[00:24:57] against us. And don't let us yield to temptation, but rescue us from the evil one. So he startled them not only by saying, it's not about where you sit, stand, close your eyes, point north,
[00:25:09] south, east, or west, the kinds of things they were expecting. It was the words and the way you talk to this God. And there's one line I want you to notice that would have been incredibly startling
[00:25:18] among those words to the people listening. It was what set this prayer apart from any other prayer they'd ever heard. It was that very first line, pray like this, our father. Now, when Jesus said that, he said, I want you to pray like our father, pray to our father. The mouths of the
[00:25:35] people just dropped open. If they were standing, they would have sat down. If they had been talking in the background, it would have gotten suddenly very quiet. When Jesus said to begin your prayer by saying father, it was the most startling thing that came out of his mouth. And here's why. It's
[00:25:50] because he used the Aramaic word Abba for father.
[00:25:56] There's that Aramaic again, the language of intimacy.
[00:26:00] He said, I want you to pray this way.
[00:26:02] I want you to begin by saying our Abba in heaven.
[00:26:05] No one had ever used that name for God before, much less than it was a way of addressing him.
[00:26:11] This was spiritual history being made.
[00:26:14] Abba was the most intimate family term there was, used between a very small child and their parent.
[00:26:19] in contemporary English, it's often been suggested that the best translation would be daddy.
[00:26:25] Some linguists go so far as to say it should be translated dada or dada, like the very first words that a baby might say when being held in the arms of their father, or as my grandchildren
[00:26:35] call me, papa. And let me tell you something, every time I hear one of them call me papa, I just melt. No name means more to me. And it's right for them to call me that. Not only am I
[00:26:49] foolish over them, but how weird would it be if one of them came to me and stood at attention and saluted and said, oh, glorious potentate, founder of our family, might I crawleth on my lap in order
[00:27:02] to snuggleth? No, it's Papa. And they see me from 50 feet away and they start running at me with open arms and they jump into my arms from about five feet away, knowing I'll catch them.
[00:27:15] And I want it to always be Papa.
[00:27:17] Jesus said we should pray to God like that because God loves it too.
[00:27:21] That's how he feels.
[00:27:22] He is your Papa.
[00:27:23] He is your Daddy.
[00:27:24] So pray that way, like a child to their father.
[00:27:27] Not childish in the sense of immaturity or in the sense of meaningless chatter, but childlike in the sense of the relationship itself.
[00:27:37] And it's not just with prayer.
[00:27:39] It's every aspect of your relationship with him.
[00:27:41] You're to live, act, breathe, relate to, come to, call, depend on God as your father.
[00:27:47] The way a child interacts with their daddy.
[00:27:52] I remember when my daughters were young, I would come home at the end of the day, and they would first want to tell me all about their day.
[00:27:58] And they'd crawl up into my lap and tell me every single thing they had done.
[00:28:03] And I loved hearing about every single thing they had done.
[00:28:06] I mean, there was nothing too trivial.
[00:28:07] I was all ears and loved it.
[00:28:09] And then they wanted to play with me.
[00:28:11] and that meant fixing my hair.
[00:28:14] For the boys, it meant wrestling later, but if the girls was always fixing my hair, they wanted to put me in rollers or create braids, put in bows and pins.
[00:28:23] This would not enter most people's mind to do to me.
[00:28:26] That kind of intimate interaction only occurs between a father and his children.
[00:28:31] I loved it.
[00:28:33] And again, I don't know what junk you might've had with your earthly father.
[00:28:37] I don't know whether you've been burned, broken or battered, disgusted, disappointed.
[00:28:41] disavowed, how let down, shut down, or beat down you have been. But please, for Jesus' sake, get it out of your head. For your sake, get it out of your head. Don't reject him over what might have
[00:28:54] happened with your father here on planet earth. Instead, imagine God the Father, that wise, loving Father you've always yearned for, walking down a path by your side, his arm around your shoulders, listening, offering carefully chosen words of encouragement, loving unconditionally.
[00:29:12] Unlike your own, this father, you don't feel awkward, and you're totally at ease, and you feel free and safe, and you know that you've never been abandoned by this person, and you never will be.
[00:29:23] God wants that kind of relationship with us. He always has. This is how it's talked about in the Bible. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. So you have not received a
[00:29:36] spirit that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God's spirit when he adopted you as his own children. So now we call him Abba, Father. God gets you. And one of the ways he gets you
[00:29:53] is the way a father, a good, loving, perfect father gets you. My oldest daughter, Rebecca, had a birthday a couple of weeks ago. She wasn't very happy about this one. It was one of those
[00:30:07] ones that you say, okay, I'm going to be this age for a long time. I'm not going to get any older.
[00:30:12] It rhymes with 39, but I'll let you guess. But I'll tell you who celebrated her birthday, not me.
[00:30:19] I remember every detail. The day I found out Susan was pregnant, all the new parent classes related to childbirth and infant care, shopping for cribs and pacifiers, going to the hospital, holding her in my arms a moment after she was born.
[00:30:38] Let me tell you what I see when I look at her.
[00:30:41] I see every day of every year of her life.
[00:30:46] I see the little baby I took home from the hospital.
[00:30:49] I see the three-year-old who read Cinderella from memory and dressed up like a princess for her daddy to come home and dance with her.
[00:30:56] The first grader with bangs who couldn't say her R's very well.
[00:31:01] The little girl in a lion costume at Halloween.
[00:31:04] the dress with the letters ABC on it the day she went to first grade. I see the person who did shows and who did dances, who again put my hair in barrettes and curlers, who built forts in the
[00:31:18] backyard. I still hear giggles from her bedroom at night and a laughing little voice calling me silly daddy. I saw the person I walked on the beach with summer after summer after summer, Walked over the bridge with at Grandfather Mountain.
[00:31:34] Walked around Price Lake with in Blowing Rock.
[00:31:37] Walked around London with for her senior trip.
[00:31:40] Walked around a football field with and walked onto the football field with.
[00:31:44] She asked me to escort her at homecoming.
[00:31:47] And the walk down an aisle where I put her hands into the hands of a good man.
[00:31:53] Many things change in life, but the one thing will never change no matter what, which is her place in my life as my daughter.
[00:32:02] For as long as I live, I will always be there for her.
[00:32:04] I will always pray for her.
[00:32:05] I will always love her.
[00:32:06] It's just what fathers do.
[00:32:09] And I feel that way toward all four of my children and now all 16 of my grandchildren.
[00:32:15] Now take that love, and I want you to multiply it by infinity, literally.
[00:32:25] Infinity.
[00:32:26] A love that has no end, no bounds, no limits.
[00:32:28] It's a love that was once described this way in the Bible.
[00:32:31] This is beautiful language.
[00:32:33] It says, and may you have the power to understand, as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.
[00:32:42] May you experience the love of Christ, though it be too great to understand fully.
[00:32:47] That is the love of God toward you.
[00:32:50] Why?
[00:32:51] You're his child, and he gets his children.
[00:32:57] Okay, let me pray for us.
[00:33:01] Father, thank you for your love for us, a love that is rooted in your love for us as Father and us as your children.
[00:33:10] Let us never, ever forget that love, that when you look at us and all of our frailty and all of our vulnerability, you see exactly who we are and you love us completely.
[00:33:20] You get us because you are our Father and we are your children.
[00:33:24] So thank you.
[00:33:26] Thank you.
[00:33:27] In Jesus' name, amen.