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HOW DOES DAD FEEL? #3
GETTING MAD AT JIMMY
If you happen to be traveling through Georgia on vacation
or business and are there on a Sunday morning, you might want to stop
and worship at a place called Maranatha Baptist Church. It's not a very
big place — about 45 families is all. But they have a fair number of visitors,
and sometimes even entire Bible classes from other communities will come
by, so they'll certainly be glad to welcome you as well.
One of the reasons why visitors stop by, I'm sure, is that there's an
adult class that's taught by a very nice gentleman named Jimmy Carter.
That's right. The 39th president of the United States is the regular leader
of this class which meets there in the town of Plains, Georgia.
President Carter's recent book, Living Faith, is filled with marvelous
family stories and also a very eloquent expression of his own personal
Christian faith. And this week as we continue with our Bible series, HOW
DOES DAD FEEL?, he shares an anecdote that has real meaning. As a boy,
young Jimmy — "Hot," his dad always called him — went fishing
with a friend, and they caught an enormous snapping turtle. He could hardly
wait to drag it home and show it off to his dad. Unfortunately, as the
two of them were hiking along with this great big turtle suspended from
a sapling, it began raining pretty hard. Soon they were traveling in circles
in the dark and recognizing their own tracks. They were lost.
Leaving the turtle behind, they concentrated on going in a straight line
from that point on. And young Jimmy, whose dad had taught him a few things
about navigation and astronomy, finally spotted the planet Venus and steered
through the trees, vines, and swamps the best he could using that distant
planet as a guide to keep going west.
And Jimmy writes about his mixed emotions. He couldn't wait to see his
dad again; he knew Daddy loved him. (Even today President Carter refers
to his late father as "Daddy"; it's a very endearing touch to
the book.) And yet at the same time, he was kind of ashamed that he'd
been dumb enough to get lost. What would Dad say?
Well, they finally saw some lights and recognized a farmer's cabin, which
was still ten miles from home. The man agreed to take the two kids back
to Plains with his mule and wagon, but after just a couple of miles, there
was Dad coming the other way in his pickup truck.
As Jimmy tells the story, they rode those last few miles home over the
dirt roads, and he could tell his dad was more than a bit upset. Finally
when they got to the house, Dad couldn't help but put in a fatherly word
of chastisement. "I thought you knew more about the woods than to
get lost," he said. And for just a moment, those plain words hung
in the muggy interior of that old pickup truck.
And then the senior Mr. Carter did something else. Without another word,
he reached out to his boy, to hold him. And President Carter confesses:
"I rushed to embrace him. I knew I deserved
to be chastised, but just being in my father's arms was one of my most
joyful and memorable experiences. For a few hours, without either of us
knowing where the other was, there had been a vacuum in our lives."
Now, friend, as we think about the love of God for
us, as we picture our heavenly Father as "Dad," the parent in
the story of the Prodigal Son, this isn't a perfect picture, an airtight
parable. And President Carter would be the first to say so in his Sunday
School class at Maranatha Baptist Church. God always knows where we are,
doesn't He? And His patience and forbearance with us transcend the goodness
of any earthly dad's. But I love to consider how, at the end of our journeys,
when our lostness comes to an end, there's always that moment where Dad
reaches out to embrace us. That's God, isn't it?
A bit later in this same book, Living Faith, President Carter has a chapter
entitled "Finding Peace at Home." And he writes at some length
about the two Christian concepts of confession and forgiveness. Why is
it, he asks, that we're afraid to confess our mistakes to each other?
Especially if it's a serious mistake or even a crime? Why do we flee from
the law, try to outrun that police car with its red light flashing? Why
do people commit perjury, lie under oath, instead of freely confessing
their mistakes? Why do we hide things from our spouses or our parents?
Well, the two factors that keep us in denial ought to be obvious, Carter
writes. Number one, a fear of punishment. And number two, an equal fear
of condemnation, having others look at us and condemn us for our sins.
We can't stand either of those two things; in fact, sometimes we fear
the condemnation more than the penalty itself.
As the president puts it, these fears are natural ones. They're built
in to us; they're instinctive. No wonder we often blurt out lies even
before we plan them. This is our human condition. But then Carter goes
on to make this observation about punishments and condemnations:
"For a Christian, assured of God's mercy,
this reluctance need not exist!"
Have you ever had that realization actually take root
in your life? Friend, God loves you! He really does! And there are two
things that are never going to happen to a believing Christian: punishment
and condemnation.
Carter tells the story of King David, who certainly deserved punishment
and condemnation. And the disciple Peter, who denied Jesus three times.
And of course, there's the classic story of the woman caught in adultery.
You can read it in your own Bible in John chapter eight. This wayward
woman had been caught in a sex scandal, a sting, and they had her right
on videotape, so to speak. I mean, she was guilty. And they dragged her,
mascara streaks and all, to Jesus and flung her down in the dust. "What
should we do with her?" they demanded. "The law says she ought
to be stoned."
Well, you can read how Jesus quietly wrote in that same dust quite a detailed
chronicling of their own sins. And then the famous sound bite:
"He that is without sin among you, let him
first cast a stone at her."
That seems to end the lynch party right there, and
most of the crowd suddenly decides they have business in another part
of town. But Jesus is left alone with this weeping, shamed, embarrassed
sinner. And we still wonder about those two pillars of fear: punishment
and condemnation. Maybe Jesus didn't want the Pharisees to mete out punishment
because He was planning to do it Himself. After all, it was His law she
had broken. But here's what happens, and I love how this is rendered in
the King James English:
"He said unto her, ‘Woman, where are those
thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?' She said, No man, Lord. And
Jesus said unto her, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more."
Let's not miss two beautiful points. First of all,
when we come to the God who loves us, and submit to Him, call Him Lord,
is there a punishment waiting? No. Is there condemnation waiting? No.
"I don't condemn you," Jesus said. And of course, Jesus is speaking
for God here. "God doesn't condemn you either." Back about five
chapters, we can read the sentence that follows the most famous verse
in all of Scriptures, which is John 3:16, of course. But what comes immediately
afterward?
"For God did not send His Son into the world
to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him."
You know, I can't peek into the living room windows
of every one of our listeners, and know how things were between you and
your dad. Some of you have written, and we get many slices of human experience
that way. And I think with real fondness of my own relationship with my
father, Joe Melashenko. It's not a perfect relationship; he's not a saint
and neither am I. But I can say this: I've at least glimpsed what it means
to know I can go to Dad and confess a mistake, and know that I will receive
neither punishment or condemnation. At the age of 50, I'm too big to be
punished anymore, but to know that Dad doesn't condemn me is still important.
And I have that with my own father.
And friend, if that's true with these imperfect family scenarios here
on our scarred old planet, how much more so is it with God? HOW DOES DAD
FEEL?, we ask. How much does God love us? Please do hang onto this answer.
He loves us so much that we need never fear those two twin elements that
keep so many people away, lost out there in the rainy swamps of Georgia.
Fear of punishment. Fear of condemnation. With God . . . never.
Have you ever found yourself committing perjury, so to speak, in your
prayers to God? I know I have. I tell God I love someone I don't really
love, or I don't mention certain sinful feelings and resentments. I'm
unwilling to confess. We've all done that, haven't we? And friend, that's
the most unnecessary, foolish coverup a man or woman can engage in. We're
talking to Dad! The Father who loves us so unconditionally! The loving
Parent who already knows our heart, who already knows the full story,
who has all the details better than we do . . . and loves us anyway!
If you ever get the chance, read the book The Unselfishness of God, the
spiritual autobiography of Hannah Whitall Smith. We'll have to mention
more some other time, but the publishers put in the foreword this comment:
"Herein lies the central message of Mrs.
Smith's faith story: the personal revelation that God is not an oppressive,
self-centered tyrant, but an unconditionally loving and benevolent parent."
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