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DO YOU KNOW IF YOU HAVE A DAD?

YOU - have a wonderful and perfect and loving Dad. “I do?” you ask. “Tell me another one.” But the Bible actually teaches that we DO have this perfect and infallible and tender Father. What’s more, we can’t begin to comprehend Christianity unless and until we begin to understand THIS.

In the stunning book, Fatherless America, author David Blankenhorn tells about a kid named Joseph. Still an adolescent, this young man was arrested more than 16 times since the age of six. Every kind of trouble you could get in . . . he was in.

But why? What were the sociological factors that made Joseph a jail-bound delinquent? Well, the title of Dr. Blankenhorn’s book gives it away. Fatherless America.

“Joseph’s mother, Yvonne Jackson,” he writes, “is thirty-six years old, has never been married, and has three sons, each by a different man. None of the boys ever really had a father or knew his own father. Mario’s father is currently in prison. Jovon’s father recently died of AIDS. Joseph’s father is married to another woman. All three boys have been in constant trouble with the police.”

And all through this blunt book, brimming with real-life stories to back up the stats, Blankenhorn makes one point over and over:

“There are exceptions, of course,” he writes, “but here is the rule: Boys raised by traditionally masculine fathers generally do not commit crimes. Fatherless boys commit crimes.”

He goes on to predict that, early in the 21st century, the leading demographic “dividing line” between the haves and the have-nots won’t be education or money or race or what side of the railroad tracks you lived on. It will be this simple issue: was there a dad in your house? Did you know your father?

In a fascinating and thought-provoking way, what Dr. Blankenhorn is suggesting on a sociological level is absolutely paralleled in the spiritual realm for the “Christian adolescent” — and really, we are all just children as we try to make our troubled way back home to the kingdom of God, aren’t we? Our topic this week is adoption, and we’re borrowing very gratefully from the Christian classic, Knowing God, by J. I. Packer. And he echoes, nearly word for word — it’s actually uncanny — what we just heard from Fatherless America. Here’s what Packer suggests for the Christian believer:

“You sum up the whole of New Testament religion,” he writes, “if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one’s holy Father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father.”

Isn’t that something? It’s very plain. Do you, as a child of God, really understand that this is what you truly are — a child of God? Do you remember standing in the delivery room, you dads, and seeing your child emerge into your life? There’s no spiritual moment like that in the whole world. You mothers, of course, experienced it a hundred fold: carrying your child for nine months, singing to it, talking to it, feeling it move and squirm, looking forward to the day of birth, of the new beginning. You went through labor pains, you sweat and cried, and then rejoiced when you held that little bundle. You were so in love at that moment you could hardly bear it. That’s what being a parent means, and friend, this is precisely how God feels about us. We are His children! He loves us that much . . . in fact, He loves us a hundred times more because He’s God and because He’s holy and perfect! We’re His kids! Do we get that? Do we think about it and comprehend it?

And on our end, God is a Father! We want to talk about that all this week and next — what that really means — but Packer suggests here that understanding Christianity means, first of all, understanding THIS. God is our Father!

In fact, he makes bold to suggest this:

“If this is not the thought that prompts and controls [a person’s] worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all.”

None of us like to be told that we don’t understand this plain message called the Christian faith — especially if we’ve been preaching on the radio for seven decades! But as Packer puts it in such plain English, do we worship with the knowledge that we are connecting up with Dad? Our songs, our giving, our prayers, our promptness in getting to church — ouch! — our faithfulness in daily devotions, our seizing of witnessing or sharing opportunities . . . do we really understand that all of this is involving Dad? The most wonderful and generous Father in the world?

It’s interesting that James Packer calls this concept of adoption a “summing up of the whole of NEW Testament religion.” And sometimes students of the Word get the sense that there is one gospel in the Old Testament and something different in the new. Legalism in the B.C. era, and grace when we get beyond Calvary and move to A.D. Well, friend, there is only one plan of salvation, and it began in Genesis 3:15 and goes right through to Revelation 22. And the love of God for His children starts with Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and continues right down to this April Tuesday. Both of those things are constant. However, Packer insightfully describes how in the Old Testament — the time of the kings and prophets and the wandering in the wilderness — adoption and “God-as-Father” were not the clearest of principles.

“Though Yahweh was His covenant name, it spoke to Israel of what their God was in Himself rather than of what He would be in relation to them.”

Yahweh was a king’s name, he explains: regal and reserved and enigmatic. And all through the Old Testament there’s also an emphasis on holiness as one of God’s most important virtues. Isaiah 6:3:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty; the whole earth is full of His glory.”

That’s awesome and good, but it doesn’t really make a lonely shepherd in the hills of Judea think of “Dad.” And often we respond to Yahweh and “Holy God” and “Almighty King” the same way the children of Israel did. Packer concludes:

“The basic idea which the word holy expresses is that of separation, of separateness. When God is declared to be holy, the thought is of all that separates Him and sets Him apart and makes Him different from His creatures.”

Most of us don’t think of our dads as being particularly holy, and would probably be put off if we did. And many of you listening today may have had fathers who were decidedly and unfortunately UNholy . . . and are having to deal with that in your own Christian walk. We’ll study that very dilemma tomorrow, by the way. But Moses’ troops in the wilderness faced this same metaphor challenge.

When we get to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, though, things seem different. How? Here’s a bit of the essay:

“But in the New Testament,” he writes, “we find that things have changed.” Now this point is important. Listen: “God and religion are not less than they were; the Old Testament revelation of the holiness of God, and its demand for humility in man, is presupposed throughout. But something has been added. A new factor has come in. New Testament believers deal with God as their FATHER. Father is the name by which they call Him. Father has now become His covenant name — for the covenant which binds Him to His people now stands revealed as a family covenant.” Then he adds this, and it’s just terrific: “Christians are His children, His own sons and daughters, His heirs. And the stress of the New Testament is not on the difficulty and danger of drawing near to the Holy God, but on the boldness and confidence with which believers may approach Him: a boldness that springs directly from faith in Christ, and from the knowledge of His saving work.”

We chose this as our radio series title: THE PERFECT ADOPTION. If you could be adopted by the absolutely perfect father, would that be a good thing? To be perfectly loved and adored and cared for and nurtured and supported in all you wanted or needed to do? To be stoutly defended at all times, protected, kept in safety? That would be good, wouldn’t it? And the reality of the Christian faith is that this is what we have! In fact, Packer asserts:

“‘Father’ IS the Christian name for God.” Then he adds: “Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption.”

I go back to that kid: Joseph Jackson. He doesn’t know his dad. He hardly knows he HAS a dad. He has no concept of Dad, of being in a family, of being loved, of having a paternal influence in his life. And so life is tragically messed up for him. Blankenhorn helplessly writes:

“We will put this little boy in jail, hoping that a prison will do what no father in his life was willing or able to do: keep him off the streets and teach him what it means to be a man.”

We could add: “Or simply love him and be with him.” It’s the same with every son or daughter of God, friend. We are adopted. We have a Dad. But do we “get it”? Is our theology formed — I mean, completely shaped and formed — within a framework of knowing that we are everlastingly and infinitely loved by Dad? Your Christianity and my Christianity can rise no higher than our comprehension of, and daily basking in, that reality.