Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript

We’ll read the first 18 verses of John’s Gospel. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. John 1, beginning at verse one.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And the light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it.

There was a man sent from God whose name was John. This man came for a witness to bear witness of the light, that all through him might believe. He was not that light but was sent to bear witness of that light. That was the true light which gives light to every man coming into this world. He was in the world and the world was made through him and the world did not know him. He came to his own and his own did not receive him.

But as many as received him, to them he gave the right to become children of God. To those who believe in his name, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor the will of man, but of God. And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. John bore witness of him and cried out, saying, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me is preferred before me, for he was before me.’” And of his fullness we have all received grace for grace.

For the law was given through Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has seen God at any time. The only begotten son who is in the bosom of the father, he has declared him.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the advent of the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you, Lord God, that through Christ we see you. Help us, Lord God, attend to the exegesis of Jesus of the Father that the Son gives us in John’s gospel as we consider fathers and sons, heavenly and earthly, today. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

You know, if we have an epidemic in this country and the causes are known, we try to attend to those causes with all diligence in terms of physical conditions. That is, but we have an epidemic that is rather clearly given to us through the statistics of our culture and also by the word of God. We have a situation that goes on in this country today that is absolutely wreaking havoc upon our nation. We have a situation in which a particular condition is the root of most imprisonments, most crime, most insanity, most civil disorder.

Now, if we could identify that cause and then attend to that cause, we would go a long way toward fixing society’s ills. That cause is not genetic. It’s not physical. It is the absence or broken relationships between sons and fathers. The statistics are quite clear on this.

Charles Colson said that he’s gone to the prisons for many years and many things have changed in the prisons. But what has not changed is that at the root of most people in prison is an absence of a father from the home or a very bad, broken relationship with the father.

Last week we considered our union with Jesus Christ and the resulting freedom from death and sin that it brings to the Christian. And that union with Christ has produced this liberty not to sin. One of the problems we have, however, in the context of our culture more and more is that people don’t know what sin means.

You know, there’s a poet, Leonard Cohen, and in one of his songs when they said repent, I wondered what they meant. People don’t know what it means. They don’t even know what sin means. And all too many of us gathered here together today—to receive the wonderful gifts of God, of assurance of salvation and knowledge and life, and to give God our service of praise to him—all too often we don’t know what sin is.

Sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of God. And that’s why Paul could say last week that it’s ridiculous to think that somehow this freedom that we have from sin would result in lawlessness. No, the law is not a savior. The law pointed to the coming of the savior. But the law is also the whole 66 books of God’s word—a picture to us of what righteousness, justice, and restored relationships are. And sin is a violation of those—a falling short or a transgression of them.

Today, most people don’t even know how to go about correcting. What does it look like, a proper father-son relationship? These things are no longer mirrored as they once were in so many of the multitude of the households in our country. As a culture moves away from Christ, it moves away from knowledge and understanding. It moves away from a patterning of correct relationships.

And I want to take some time today to go through a multiple number of references in the Gospel of John to letting us see what this father-son relationship is that we talk about, and it seems from the statistics given by Colson and others, is so important for the bedrock foundation of a good, godly culture. What does it look like? How does it seem?

Now, we could turn to the Old Testament. The psalm we just sang was chosen because it references the fatherhood of God. “As a father pities his children, so God pities us.” And there are other places in the Old Testament that do refer to God as a father. Israel is his son. He says, “Out of Israel I have called my son,” speaking of their deliverance from bondage in Egypt. There are some direct references by God.

For instance, in Jeremiah 31:9: “I am a father to Israel and Ephraim is my firstborn. Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he a pleasant child? For since I speak against him, I do earnestly remember him still. Therefore, my bowels are troubled for him. I will surely have mercy upon him, says the Lord.”

So the Lord is saying that in his actions toward his people in the Old Testament, there is fatherly compassion and yearning and love for Ephraim—that first chastises him but then brings him to repentance.

And so there are references, a handful of references in the Old Testament talking about God as father. But surely in the incarnation of the Lord Jesus Christ, we see the delightful blossoming forth of this picture of the father-son relationship that exists in the context of the triune God. And we also see reflected in this in the gospel accounts our relationship to God the Father.

As we go through these texts today, we’ll go through them briefly. But as we go through them, I want you to do a couple of things. One, I want you to think about your relationship to your heavenly Father. Ultimately, our union with Christ that we spoke of last week from Romans 6 is a union with Christ who is the true Son of God. He is Israel. And we, as we are united to Christ, can claim God as our heavenly Father as well.

Surely if Ephraim could look at God as their father in the Old Testament, this side of the advent of Jesus Christ the Son of Man as well as the Son of God, we can look to God our heavenly Father with renewed appreciation and understanding. Really, it is this side of the cross that we are fully and finally moved into that new epoch that we spoke of last week—that the coming of Christ established the new humanity. And this new humanity can surely see itself in relationship to the heavenly Father as it looks at Christ’s relationship to the heavenly Father.

So number one, as we go through these things, I want you to think about those aspects of your heavenly Father that maybe you doubt, maybe you haven’t thought about, but are very important for your well-being. To be assured of the Father’s love and relationship will guide us in terms of how we live our lives as Christians.

But the second thing, obviously, I want to do with these texts is particularly for parents and even more particularly for fathers—although all parents can do this. What I want you to look at is: where have I fallen down as a father? Maybe I didn’t know this was the emphasis in scripture on what it looks like to be a Christian father. But this is an area that I repent of before God, my failures, and I want to strive harder in this particular area.

Pick out two or three of these things that the Lord God speaks to your heart through the spirit and the preaching of his word today and then act on it. Right? Don’t just go away and think, “Well, that was interesting.” Act on these things. Commit yourselves to faith and belief in your heavenly Father. Commit yourselves to changed actions relative to your children. And children, as you’re sitting here today, commit yourselves to changed actions in relationship to your parents.

This is not really about children so much as it is about fathers. But lessons for children are rather implicit in it as well. And children, if you see something in the heavenly Father’s description here in relationship to Christ that you would like to see more of in your parents, it is proper for you to pray to that end. And it is even proper for you to respectfully entreat them to be more of that for you as a child.

So let’s talk about these 19 points. No subpoints—don’t worry. We’ll go through them quickly. But I do think it’s an interesting summary. The Gospels, of course, are the fulfillment of the Old Testament. I’ve made this point over and over. John is the concluding gospel, and it is the great fulfillment of the gospel message.

This is where we see this exegesis of Jesus of the Father that we read of in John 1: “We’re children of God. It says to as many as received and to them he gave the right to become children of God.” Okay? And so we’re God’s. God is our Father. Jesus exegeted the Father to us particularly in his advent as incarnation as recorded in the gospel accounts. So there are particular focus. We could go to the epistles and look for instructions for fathers. We’ve done that in this church any number of times.

But a summary, preview, and an overview of what John’s gospel says about these relationships will help us. Almost all of these—but maybe a couple of them—are direct references of Jesus’s relationship to his heavenly Father. Couple are not that, and I’ll explain those as we go along. But most of them are, including this first one.

**The father is self-giving toward the son.**

John 3:35, which reads this: “The father loves the son and has given all things into his hand.”

So the Father is portrayed as loving the son, and the explanation of what that love means is the Father has given everything into the son’s hand. Now there’s something to this that is only true of father and son. Jesus Christ is the Lord of all creation. All authority, power, dominion, everything has been given into the hand of Jesus Christ. That’s why we look forward with great optimism to the future. In spite of being in a little valley presently in our culture, we know the future is bright because Jesus rules. He’s asked for and received the nations as his inheritance.

But it’s also true that the church is in union with Christ. And Psalm 2, that talks about Jesus ruling the nations with the rod of iron, is directly applied to the church in the seven letters to the churches in Revelation 2 and 3. We are seen as ruling with Christ. Our union with Christ’s humanity means that we have been given all things, so to speak, from our Father in heaven as well.

And this should produce quite a confidence in us as we go about doing our tasks. It should produce quite a sense of royalty. We’re children of the King. We should behave ourselves as children of the King. All things have been given into our hands. We are united with Christ. We have been made priests and kings. As we saw last week from Romans 6, we’re freed from sin. But not just that—we can exercise dominion over sin and say no to the sinful urges that we have.

And in fact, in doing that, in giving the members of our bodies all that we are to service to righteousness, the scriptures say the end result of that—Romans 6 says—is holiness and dominion. An increasing change to the world through the simple dominion exercised by God’s people as they see themselves freed from sin and free to exercise restraint against sin and to hand over all that we have to the King. And that’s how the world changes. Those simple acts of obedience.

All things. In other words, we have not just life, we have rule. We don’t just have the ability to be forgiven of our sins. We now have dominion over them. We have been given instruction and dominion. All things have been given really into the hands of the church in this sense of looking at it.

And I think what this means is that earthly fathers should give all things to their sons as well, to their children. They’re in the business of progressively giving them all that they have. And I’m going to make this point in a material sense in a couple of minutes, but I want to do a little flip here as we start from Romans 6.

Remember we said in Romans 6 that when we’re to give the members of our body to righteousness to Christ, that’s covenantal language that doesn’t just speak of our physical being. It speaks of all the assets that we have—our thoughts, certainly our abilities and gifts, but whatever material resources God has given to us. These are members of our body. They’re extensions of who we are. That’s biblical, covenantal language. All that you have is yielded to Christ.

We don’t just want to think about our bodies in Romans 6. But here on this side, I want to flip it just a bit. I want fathers to think that they are responsible to be self-giving toward their children. And that certainly means our assets—progressively giving them what the Lord God has given to us as stewardship for. We’re progressively handing that onto them. That happens definitively at our deaths. But it means our bodies. It means our presence. It means who we are.

If there is one thing I want fathers to come away from the sermon with it is a sense that the Father delights to give himself to his son. And we know that even from the Old Testament—God told Abraham, “I am thy exceeding great reward.” And that’s true with us. God, the greatest possession that we have, is relationship with God. The Father delights in the son.

You know, in the Old Testament even, we see this. For instance, in Isaiah 42:1, God says, “Behold my servant whom I uphold, my elect one in whom my soul delights.” God delights in the objects of his election. The doctrine of election is not some Calvinistic dry doctrine. It’s a doctrine that tells us that God delights in us because we are in union with Christ who is the Elect One, the chosen one, the chosen servant by the Father.

In Proverbs 8, you know, Wisdom speaks. Jesus is the Word of God. “In the beginning was the Word. The Word was with God. The Word was God.” That seems to be a direct allusion back to Proverbs 8, where Wisdom is possessed and is part of the eternal Godhead. “I was there. Wisdom says the Lord possessed me at the beginning of his way before his works of old. I have been established from everlasting, from the beginning, before there ever was an earth.

When there were no depths, I was brought forth.” Now that means begotten. It doesn’t mean created. Jesus is eternally brought forth of the Father. When there was no fountain abounding with water—no birth, I think, was what that’s a reference to—”founding fountains abounding with water, no birth, but he is eternally begotten, eternally brought forth.”

We could spend a lot of time on verse 24 of Proverbs 8 and watch very interesting information, but the point is just that this is a description of the eternal begottenness of the Son. And we go on to read: “Before the mountains were settled, before the hills I was brought forth. While as yet he had not made the earth or the fields or the primal dust of the world.

When he prepared the heavens, I was there. When he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he established the clouds above, when he strengthened the fountains of the deep, when he assigned the sea its limit so that the waters would not transgress his command. When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him as a master craftsman, and I was daily his delight.”

He was beside the Father—the son eternally begotten—as a master craftsman through whom he made the world. Hebrews 1 tells us, “And he was daily his delight.” The Father delights in the presence of the Son. And the Father doesn’t just give the son possessions. The Father is self-giving of himself to the Son. The Father gives of himself to the Son.

The wickedness of sin is destruction of relationship. Sin wants us to think, and our culture increasingly does think this, that we’re little individuals walking around the world. But God says no. God says we are individuals in some sense certainly, but we have relationship, and delighting in those relationships is what the Father-son relationship given to us in John and also in the book of Proverbs says is the model for our community relationships as well.

Do you know that the Father delights in you as his elect? He knows about your sins. He knows about your weaknesses. But he’s brought you into the new humanity of Jesus Christ. And Christian, I am here to proclaim to you today the good news that God delights in you and he is giving himself to you. The door doesn’t close from his side. Sometimes it closes from our side.

And secondarily, earthly fathers, I tell myself and I tell you that if there is nothing else we walk away from this sermon with a renewed commitment to do, it should be to give ourselves—all that we have, our estate certainly, but our physical presence, our knowledge—to our children.

How will the future be built? You know, kids don’t come with built-in computer chips and they don’t get programming updates regularly from some kind of mystical sense of the universe. They receive instruction and training from you, not from lots of other people, but primarily the father. You have to tell them what it looks like for a Christian to behave. You have to know these things and you have to communicate that to them not just by word but with your presence as well.

God says that we are fathers. That’s a term, as Calvin said, borrowed from God the Father. It’s not that God is using common language to speak of his relationship to us—”Oh, you have fathers and sons, so I’ll relate to you by talking about myself as a father.” It’s just the reverse. There is an eternal Father-son relationship in the triune God. And God, you know, incredibly gives us this tremendous gift of this term “fathers and mothers”—to share in this covenantally in relationship to our children. We are images of God the Father to our children, and may we image this delight in them and this giving of ourselves to them.

**Number two: The father prays for his son.**

Now I’m going chronologically, or going through the sequence of John’s gospel, and this particular verse is not talking about the heavenly Father. It’s one of the two exceptions of the Father-son relationship in the Trinity, but I needed to put it in here anyway.

We read that the father—now this is John chapter 4. What happens here is there’s a man who has a sick son, and he goes to Christ and beseeches Christ for his son to be made, to be brought back from near death. And verse 53 says, “The father knew that it was at the same hour in which Jesus said to him, ‘Thy son liveth,’ and himself believed and his whole house.”

So the idea is that there’s the father. He’s got a son that’s dying to death. He goes to Jesus. Jesus says, “Please come and heal my son.” Jesus says, “I don’t have to go. I can just say the word and it’ll be so.” The father believes it, and then the son is raised up from the dead. At the same hour, at the same time that Jesus says this to the father, when he travels back home, he’s told at the same time that he was there with Jesus, the healing of his son happened.

Now, what this instructs us as earthly fathers is to take our children to Christ, to take our children to Christ. And specifically in terms of this verse, to take them to God in prayer. This is an obligation of fathers to regularly pray for their children—for the well-being of Christ upon them, for the forgiveness of their sins, for the healing of their diseases. We want to bring our children to Christ.

In Job 1:5, we read that when the days of their feasting—family feast days—Job, his sons and their children and their spouses, when the days of their feasting were gone about, Job sent and sanctified them and rose up early in the morning and offered burnt offerings according to the number of them all. For Job said, “It may be that my sons have sinned and renounced God in their hearts.” Thus did Job continually. Job prayed for his children to God. He brought his children to God in prayer, asking that God would forgive them and bring them to repentance for whatever sins they’re engaging in.

Fathers, clearly our obligation—and mothers as well—is to bring our children to Christ in prayer. Of course, it would be wrong to bring them in prayer if we didn’t also bring them to the sacraments of the Lord, if we didn’t bring them to the preaching of Christ in his word, if we didn’t take them to Christ’s word throughout the week as well. We have an obligation to bring our children to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Abraham, we are those who have been given the faith of Abraham. And in Genesis 18, when God commends Abraham, he does it in this way: “For I know him that he will command his children and his household after him, and they shall keep the way of the Lord to do justice and judgment, that the Lord may bring upon Abraham that which he has spoken to him.”

God chooses Abraham because he knows that Abraham will be faithful in bringing his children to Yahweh, in commanding his children to pray for them, to teach them Yahweh’s ways. And that’s the same faith of Abraham that we have. And surely earthly fathers are to regularly and systematically pray for their children and bring their children to Jesus Christ and his word as well.

**Three: The father shows himself and his work to the son.**

John 5:19-20. Jesus says, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, the son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the father do. For what soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise. For the Father loveth the Son and showeth him all things that himself doeth, and he will show him greater works than these, that ye may marvel.”

So Jesus says that the Father in some way and in some fashion shows him his work. And in showing Jesus that work, he prepares Jesus for his work. And if we want to see what the Father is showing the son, Jesus says, look at what the Son is doing. So we say that the Lord God instructs us in what he is doing. The Father shows us what he’s doing in history. As we read the scriptures and ascertain the times in which we live, we understand what the Father is doing.

And so the Father has relationship to us in that way. But the implications for Christian fathers is this: you are to show your children your work. You are to show your children what you do. And this is really a subset, a corollary of the earlier one. You’re to give yourself to your children. And part of that means showing them the work you do.

You know, fathers tend to fall into two ditches. One ditch is to do stuff—for instance, chores around the house—and not be with the kids because it takes too much time to train them. Or on the other hand, just give them the task to do, and the children never see the father doing the work. And that has two problems. One, it tends to put a stumbling block in front of the child in terms of your labor and your diligence. And two, it doesn’t show them how to do the task.

Fathers are to show themselves and their work to the children. And I think we can take this vocationally. I think in whatever way possible, it is good for our children to be brought into a knowledge of our vocation, our work—whether it’s, you know, mothers or fathers—to see that. And certainly in terms of work around the house, work in the context of the church, we want to do this as much as possible, showing our children the work that we do.

**Four: The father gives the son work to do.**

So now we move on from the Father just showing the son work to now the Father assigns work. John 5:36: “I have greater witnesses than that of John, for the works which the Father has given me to finish. The same works that I do bear witness of me that the Father have sent me.”

So here you know Jesus has just said the Father shows him his work, but here the Father is said to send Jesus with particular work to finish. The Father has sent the son to finish his work. And indeed in John’s gospel Jesus says that his very food is to finish the work that the Father has given him to do.

So by way of correlation, we have to understand first of all in terms of our heavenly Father that God has placed you on this earth for a particular purpose. He has given you work to do, and not just work to do but work to finish. That’s what our savior says: “The Father has given me to finish. The work which the Father has given me to accomplish.” You have work to accomplish. That’ll be the truth, Christian, no matter how young or old you are. You have been sent into this life with work to accomplish for the Father, and you should want to finish that work.

Be a finisher the way Jesus was a finisher. Your relationship to your heavenly Father is a recognition that he has given you a job to complete.

And the implications for earthly fathers is this: we are to give our children tasks to do and not just to do but to finish. Children are imaging the heavenly Father when we tell you “take out the garbage” and finish that task. Don’t just say yeah I’ll do it and not do it. Don’t do it halfway. Finish the task. Fathers give children their presence. They pray for their children. They show the children their work that they do. But they also give the children particular tasks to finish and to do.

**Five: The father gives sustenance and strength to his son.**

John 6:32: “Verily, verily say unto you, Moses gave you not that bread from heaven, but my Father giveth you the true bread from heaven.”

Now, so this is a little bit out of the ordinary for this list of verses. This is not really about the Father and the eternal Son. Jesus is making a statement of what your heavenly Father does for you. He gives you the bread of heaven. He gives you sustenance that is not just come and go and will only last you for a little while. God gives you bread from heaven that sustains you on your particular path.

We can make implications of this for the Father giving the Son the ability to carry out his work through the coming of the Holy Spirit at his baptism. But here, in terms of our heavenly Father, what we want to focus on and reinforce in our minds is that the Lord God sustains us on our way. We may feel impoverished. We may feel without strength. But Jesus says, believe this: that the Lord God sustains you. He gives you the bread of heaven. He gives you unity, union with the Lord Jesus Christ to sustain you in your work.

And fathers, earthly fathers, ought to do the same for their children. We are to give sustenance and strength to our sons. And you know, if we think of what Jesus is talking about, that doesn’t just mean food on the table. It means that we need to have our daily bread. We need to have food. But we’re to sustain and strengthen our children by ministering what? The bread of heaven to them. By ministering to them the Word of God. By ministering eternal truths of the application of that word in their lives. We’re to sustain, maintain, and strengthen our children because that’s what our heavenly Father does for us.

**Six: The father sustains the life of the son.**

John 6:57: “As the living Father hath sent me, and I live by the Father, so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me.”

And this could be linked to the last point. But here the Son says that his life is maintained by relationship with the Father. “I live by the Father. He that eateth me, he shall live by me.” So the heavenly Father sustains the life of the eternal Son. And the heavenly Father sustains your life through the ministration of Jesus Christ.

And earthly fathers also then should sustain the life of their sons. Our children live by us certainly in the greater sense, as we minister Christ to them. But they are—rather, we are—the ones that God normally uses as a secondary means to sustain their life.

**Seven: The father teaches the son.**

John 8:28: “Then Jesus said unto them, When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then shall you know that I am he and that I do nothing of myself, but as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things.”

So the eternal Father teaches Jesus Christ. And in his incarnated humanity, he teaches Jesus Christ things. The Father is a teacher or instructor. And the Father teaches you. And the implication is that earthly fathers are to teach their children.

You know, presence is good. Assigning of tasks is good. Having them see what you do is good. But here we go another step further into formal instruction. And ultimately the instruction of children is the responsibility, ultimately, of fathers. And fathers should be teaching their children. And I think we could think of that in all the different ways that teaching occurs—informally through presence and observance of what you’re doing, instruction. But here, formal instruction is probably intended as well.

And so fathers instruct their children, or they at least see to their instruction. The Father teaches the Son. Earthly fathers are to teach their sons.

**Eight: The father speaks the truth in the presence of the son.**

John 8:38: “I speak that which I have seen with my Father. Ye do that which you have seen with your father. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own, for he is a liar and the father of it.”

So Jesus is drawing a correlation between those whose father is the serpent, those whose father is the heavenly Father. And the serpent is he that speaks a lie. The clear implication that Jesus is making is the Father always speaks truth. The Father will not deceive you. Your eternal Father and heavenly Father speaks truth to you—pre-eminently in his word. This is a faithful, true word. You can bet your bottom dollar that the scriptures are a faithful and true word spoken to you by the Father who always speaks truth.

And the implication for earthly fathers is the same. We should strive with all of our effort, fathers and mothers, to always speak the truth. Now, you know, the truth is the truth. The truth is not embellishment. The truth is not positioning the truth to make a particular point that may be useful for you. The truth is truth, and our children should look at us. They should be able to look at their fathers and say that guy’s always told me the truth. I didn’t know it a lot of times when I was young and foolish, but I can trust him because he’s not going to deceive me in an attempt for my own well-being. Even he’s going to speak the truth to me.

Fathers, may we recommit in the power of the Spirit to be images of our heavenly Father by speaking the truth in the context of our homes. How important it is—the words that our children hear us saying. How important that is. As we by the grace of God commit ourselves as much as in us lies to speak the truth. Now, when we fail, when we speak inappropriately, may God grant us the grace to repent verbally to our children for our improper speech. But in the meantime, commit ourselves afresh to speaking the truth in the presence of our children.

**Nine: The son honors the father.**

Jesus answered, “I have not a devil, but I honor my Father and ye do dishonor me.” Now, this is son to father, but the Father acts in a way that is honorable—at least the implication. Jesus honors the Father fully because that Father acts honorably totally. Children, you have an obligation to be like Jesus the Son.

Jesus was a child. Jesus grew up. And Jesus grew up honoring his earthly father because he was honoring his heavenly Father. He had Joseph and he had his heavenly Father. Children, you have an obligation in all of your speech to honor your parents. When you grumble, when you dispute, when you kind of take a tone with your parents, you are violating your true image, which is that you are united—remember—fused together with Jesus Christ. You are to be like him in honoring your parents.

And parents, we are to be honorable. The implication of the fifth commandment that Jesus says he obeys here is that parents are to act honorably. Children always owe some degree of honor to their parents. But that honor is on a scale. If parents act foolishly, the children cannot honor you as much as if you acted wisely and with true piety.

So children ought to honor their parents. But the next point, number 10, is that the Father honors the son.

**Ten: The father honors the son.**

John 8:54: “If I honor myself, my honor is nothing. It is my Father that honorteth me.”

Your heavenly Father honors you. He gives you glory and weight. He does it in our worship service every Lord’s day. Right? That’s what the first of the three gifts of worship is all about. What are the three gifts? Glory, knowledge, life. God gives you glory or honor by assuring you that your sins are forgiven. All men have sinned and fall short of the glory or honor of God. God restores that glory and honor. And he honors you. He treats you as his heavenly, holy people. He sees you united with Jesus Christ, and he honors Christ, and therefore he honors you. He gives you honor. You know, it’s an incredible truth, but it’s true.

And the implication for earthly fathers is this: we always want to quote the fifth commandment about how our children should honor us. But are we taking the same pains to honor them? Our Father in heaven honors his Son. Our Father in heaven honors us. Fathers on earth and mothers on earth are to honor their children. They’re to look at them as children of the King, and they’re to treat them very carefully and with a great degree of honor.

God says that we’re to be like our heavenly Father, and we’re to honor our children. Think of your lives this last week. How many times did your children dishonor you? Did you set up that dishonoring through your dishonorable action toward them, or through your dishonorable action toward your Father in heaven? You see, parents, we have a great obligation, tremendous opportunity, and a great responsibility to honor our children and to honor our heavenly Father at the same time.

**Twelve: The father gives things to the son.**

John 10:29: “My Father which gave them to me is greater than all, and no man is able to pluck them out of my Father’s hand.”

Jesus is talking about us. The Father gives us to Jesus. But the Father also gives items in stewardship to us, right? He gives us possessions. And this is kind of obvious, I suppose, but again, I just made a list of these father-son interactions that our savior portrays for us in John’s gospel. And this is on the list. The Father is to give things to his son, or he does rather.

An earthly father should give things to their children. Giving things to them. Gift them. Give them things progressively as they mature. Give them things.

**Thirteen: There is a unity of Father and son.**

John 10:30: “I and my Father are one.”

There is to be—well, there is a unity that we have with Christ. That means that we’re united and at one with the Father as well. We don’t have access to the Son and somehow not to the Father. The Son and the Father are one. And our unity with Christ means we have unity with the Father.

And so it’s a great blessing. No matter what you do this week, you do so in the context of your unity with the Father. Jesus said that “I am with you always” at the end of the Great Commission. And the implication here is that the Father is with us always as well, by the indwelling Spirit. So the triune God is our regular companion in all that we go about doing. Tremendous comfort to us. We’re never alone. We’re never alone.

And our children should recognize by way of implication that this is our desire for our relationship to them. We should seek after a delighting in our children that yields presence with them, time with them, teaching them, training them, showing them things, giving them good gifts, praying for them. And there should develop, then, over the course of a child growing up, a unity between father and son that images the unity of the eternal Son and the eternal Father. A unity in the context of the home.

Genesis 44:30: “Now therefore, when I come to my servant my father, and the lad is not with us. Now this is talking about Joseph and about not sending back the youngest son back to the father, Jacob. So verse 30: ‘Now therefore, when I come to thy servant my father and the lad is not with us, seeing that his life is bound up in the lad’s life, it will come to pass when he has seen that the lad is not with us that he will die.’”

Okay. So what is it telling us? Jacob is a godly man. Jacob is a righteous man. The Bible makes that clear. And Jacob—there is a unity of him and this youngest son of his that is, I think, a model for the kind of unity that the eternal Son has with the eternal Father and that we have with our children as well, or should strive toward.

Could you say this about your children? “His life is bound up in the lad’s life.” His life is bound up in the lad’s life. So much so that if the lad doesn’t come back with us, the lad is perceived as dead by the father. He will die and will kill himself. He will just wither away because his life is so bound up in the life of his son.

Now, you know, it’s speaking, you know, with hyperbole for emphasis. But the basic point should not miss us. This is the kind of relationship that covenantal fathers and sons, covenantal parents and children, are to have. Our lives are in reality bound up with the lives of our children. They are in reality bound up in the lives of our children. And God wants us to know that, and he wants us to move toward that in terms of our relationship to our children.

There is to be a unity between parent and child.

**Fourteen: The father sanctifies or sets apart the son.**

John 10:36: “Say ye of him whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world.”

So Jesus is saying, well, you’re talking about me. You’re talking about the one that the Father has sanctified, set apart, and he has sent into the world. Christian, your heavenly Father has set you apart from your former sinfulness, from the old humanity, and he has sent you into this world to bring life, that the dead world might blossom forth with the life of Jesus Christ. You have been sanctified and set apart for a particular task.

The Father sanctifies, sets apart, his son. And the same things are to be true of earthly fathers. We are to sanctify or set apart our sons and our daughters for particular tasks. We guide them and direct them as the heavenly Father guides and directs us.

**Fifteen: The father sends strength to his son.**

John 14:26: “But the comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name. And the verse goes on. But the point is Jesus is saying that the comforter, the Holy Spirit, will be sent by the Father to those who are one with the Lord Jesus Christ.

And remember that word comforter might be better translated—we talked about this when we preached through John’s gospel—but the word comforter could be appropriately and maybe better translated strengthener. The idea is not that the Holy Spirit comes and just says, “Well, all is okay.” No, Jesus says the Holy Spirit comes to strengthen his people for the tremendous warfare that they’re going to face—through those members of the Jewish community who would oppose him, for the coming tribulation and difficulty, for the warfare.

The Father sends the Spirit to us as a strengthener. So the Father sends strength to his Son. And as our sons go about doing their work, as they grow up in their independent spheres of influence, as they begin to have their own callings in different places—whether it’s education or vocational—our eyes should still be upon them, and we should still desire to strengthen them as much as in us lies. A godly father sends strength to his children. He tries to strengthen them for the very difficult and real battles that they’ll face in their lives as they mature.

**Sixteen: The father prunes the son, making him more fruitful.**

John 15:1: “I am the true vine, my Father is the husbandman.”

Now here the heavenly Father, in Jesus, the pruning that goes on is not because of any sin in Jesus’s part. But the implication for heavenly and earthly—or earthly fathers and children—has more to do with that, although it has the same kind of truth that’s being talked of here. The Father, the heavenly Father, prunes the Son. And the idea of the Father pruning the vine is that the vine might be more fruitful.

So the Father has particular purposes in mind, and for those purposes to happen, that vine might bud. He prunes the vine. And certainly earthly fathers are to see the same thing. Well, first of all, we’re to understand that our heavenly Father, as he puts us through difficulties, as he cuts us—sometimes it’s in relationship to our sin, but sometimes not. Either way, when the Father prunes us, makes it difficult for a season with us, we should believe that we are united with the Son. And because of that, the Father is doing to us what he did to the Son, the true Vine. He is pruning us that we might be more fruitful for him.

And by way of analogy, earthly fathers are to prune their children. They’re to discipline them. In fact, in the Old Testament, when it talked about God as the Father and other instances of God chastening his sons, Proverbs 3:11 and 12: “My son, despise not the chastening of the Lord, neither be weary of his correction. For whom the Lord loves, he corrects, even as a father, the son in whom he delights.”

Now, that’s hard for children who are being disciplined by their parents to hear. But it is true that if this father is not disciplining, pruning his child—and in this specific application for sin—it’s really because he doesn’t delight in him. It is our delight in our children and in our relationship—it’s our unity that we’ve developed with them—that provides the basis for the discipline that we then bring to them.

And what this means is that when we do discipline our children, we should remind them of this particular verse: “Don’t despise the chastening of your father. Don’t get weary of us correcting you because it’s as we correct you that we show that we are as one to you, in whom we delight. In whom we delight.” It is our delight for you that is explicitly linked in the scriptures to the pruning and to the chastening that we bring into your lives.

So the true father, the earthly father, disciplines or prunes his children for increased fruitfulness.

**Seventeen: The father gives all he has into the possession of the son.**

John 16:15: “All things that the Father has are mine. Therefore said I, that he shall take of mine and shall show it to you.”

So the Father gives everything into the hand of the Son. And as I said earlier, this can certainly speak of physical possessions. But there’s a sense in which whatever we have as earthly fathers, all of that is our children’s now, presently. They’re the transmission belt for the transmission of capital—both intellectual, moral, as well as physical capital. It all belongs to the next generation.

We don’t use it for ourselves, ultimately. You know, there’s this horrific bumper sticker, 15, 20 years ago: “We’re spending our children’s inheritance.” Well, you know, to decapitalize yourself by spending your money primarily on your own delights in your later years seems like a direct denial of the whole picture that’s given to us—that the heavenly Father gives all things over to the Son.

And this is a great picture of how cultures, how cultures mature. There is a transmission of wisdom, intellectual capital, moral capital, and physical capital as well. Earthly fathers are to give whatever they have to their sons. Now, it’s to their godly sons. There’s not a blood right to this, but by and large, this is what men do. They have their children inherit their physical treasures.

And what we should be thinking, speaking about, is that you’re transmitting the intellectual and moral treasures you have, or not, to your children as well.

**Eighteen: The father is always with the son.**

John 16:32: “Behold the hour comes, yea, is now come, that ye shall be scattered every man to his own and shall leave me alone. And yet I am not alone because the Father is with me.”

The Father is always with the Son. And that is true of us. As I said earlier, the heavenly Father is united to us through Christ. The heavenly Father is always with us. We’re never alone. The devil wants to whisper in your ear sometimes, “You are completely alone in this. Nobody understands. Nobody can get through. You’ve isolated yourself.” But no, the devil is a liar. God says that he is always with us.

The Father is always with the Son. We’re united to the Son. The heavenly Father is always with us. And our children should have a well-developed sense that our hearts are with them, no matter how many years they’ve been away from the home, no matter how many miles they are away, no matter what different paths they might take from us. Our children, I think, should have the same sense that our hearts—the hearts of fathers and mothers—are with their children.

**Finally, the father gives the son difficult tasks to accomplish.**

John 18:11: “Then said Jesus unto Peter, put up my sword into the sheath. The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?”

Well, this last picture of father-son relationships is certainly, ultimately, only true of the eternal Father and Son. Ultimately no one else can take that task that the Father gave to the Son to take upon himself the sins of his people. But the basic principle of course is still in place. The Lord God gives you tasks to do. We said that earlier. But now the point is that the Lord God gives you difficult tasks to accomplish.

He has called you to faithfulness in areas that are difficult for you to follow through on, for whatever reason. And in like fashion, earthly fathers are to give their children—to train them for the Father’s difficult tasks. We are to give our children difficult tasks in their youth in our love for them, and train them for the heavenly Father as well.

But undergirding all of that is a recognition that we are never called to suffer the way the Lord Jesus Christ suffered for us. He has purchased the love of the heavenly Father for his children. He has brought us into relationship to the Father by taking upon himself the difficult task of providing redemption for our sins—through him who knew no sin becoming sin for us. That undergirds whatever difficult tasks we have to accomplish. They are done in relationship to the Son’s most difficult task of providing our salvation.

It’s been cursory. It’s been quick. But John’s gospel gives us a picture of the eternal relationship of Father and Son. It assures us of some wondrous truths about how our heavenly Father relates to us, and it provides us a model for how earthly fathers and mothers should relate to their children as well.

I want to close with a paraphrase I wrote last night from the song “Take Time to Be Holy.” I hope this doesn’t strike you as a little saccharine, but I think based on the truths of this text instead of taking time to be holy and being alone from people—that can be good, in its proper place—but I want to read some words that I’ve written as a paraphrase on this old hymn in terms of taking time to be father:

“Take time to be father, be your son’s guide. Run not thou from him, whatever be tied in joy or in sorrow, point him to God’s word. So looking to Jesus, he’ll trust in the Lord.

Take time to be father, be calm in thy soul. Each thought and each motive beneath God’s control. Then led by God’s Spirit, show your son God’s love, so he shall be fitted for service above.

Take time to be father, speak often. Spend time with him often in work and in fun. Make him friends with God’s people, helping those that are weak, forgetting in nothing God’s blessing to seek.

Take time to be father. The world rushes on. Spend much time in private with your son alone. By living for Jesus like you, he shall be his friends in his conduct. Your likeness shall see.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this high privilege of being fathers and sons. We do pray, Lord God, that as we come forward now, you would help us commit ourselves afresh to whatever area your Spirit brought conviction on in terms of our failings as fathers, mothers, or children.

Help us, Lord God, to commit ourselves afresh to believe these tremendous promises you’ve given to us who, in union with Christ, are in union with you. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.