Father’s Day Message by
Pastor E. David Stegmeier
God’s Acres, Newark, Ohio
June 18, 2017
The Father’s Presence
Since this is Father’s Day, I would like to wish every father here: “A Very Happy Father’s Day!”
According to one young lad’s definition of Father’s Day, "It's just like Mother's Day only you don't spend as much."
Here is what one individual says about a father: "A father is a man who carries pictures in his wallet where his money used to be."
In August, it will be fifty-four years that I have been attending camp meetings here at God’s Acres. I want to thank you for the privilege of bringing our family here for all of that time. This has been our “second” home. Also, we appreciate the marvelous way in which you have kept these grounds looking. In my vocabulary, it is awesome!
With the help of the Lord, we are going to touch on some of the duties that are spelled out in the Word of God about the daily life of: parents, children, servants, and masters. No matter where we are, we need to keep in mind that there is a God to whom we are answerable.
We are going to focus primarily on the duties of fathers. Our message title is: “The Father’s Presence.”
Scripture Reading: (Ephesians 6:1-10)
“Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. (Children are not duty bound to obey any directive of their parents which would be contrary to the will of God for their lives. Orders and commands that are in line with the Word of God are to be obeyed.) 2Honour thy father and mother (That is what this day is all about. However, it should be every day. Honoring our parents by showing them great respect should be every day of the year!); which (or this) is the first commandment with promise;3That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth. 4And, ye fathers, provokenot your children to wrath (Be careful not to aggravate your children, or nag them. When you tell them to do something, follow through with it. See that they do it!): (but)bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord(Help your children grow spiritually! First of all, be the best example you can be of a genuine Christian! Be serious about the things of God! Remember, your children have eternal souls!). 5Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ;6Not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; 7With good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: 8Knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free. 9And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening (Don’t threaten your servants, or “anyone” for that matter, with abusive language.): knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him. 10Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might”
I would like to make a strong and forceful statement this morning (a confident and powerful assertion of fact or belief). The greatest need in this country is for strong Christian fathers! Perhaps this is quite a bold statement! However, the destiny of the church and our nation is contingent upon the integrity of our homes. According to the well-known saying, “As goes the home, so goes the nation.”
God said, (Genesis 18:19) “For I know him (Abraham), 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 hath spoken of him.”
Command is a strong word. According to the dictionary, the word “command” is to “give an authoritative order.” (synonyms for command: direct, instruct, or require something) An individual must be in a strong enough position to give a command. A Godly father occupies that place.
Church, we need to pray for our fathers. They have a very serious, grave responsibility!
Could we say that the condition and state of a nation is a reflection of its homes? We could say that of a congregation as well. A congregation is a replication or reflection of its homes. A home that is built according to the principles of the Word of God will be a backbonein the nation and in the church. Likewise, a home “in tune” with God and His Word will be a strong pillar in the congregation.
The nation and the church are weakened when homes are not what they should be, and the father has a great part to play in this. If the church and the nation are to be strong, the homes must be strong.
Fathers, your greatest responsibility in life is the moral and spiritual training of your children!
The home is the basic center for instruction in morality and the things of God. Paul wrote, (Ephesians 6:4) “And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the LORD.”
(Ephesians 6:4, Amplified Bible)“Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger [do not exasperate (irritate) them to the point of resentment with demands that are trivial or unreasonable or humiliating or abusive; nor by showing favoritism or indifference to any of them], but bring them up [tenderly, with lovingkindness] in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.”
Here is a similar injunction. “Fathers, do not provoke (aggravate, or needle) your children, so they will not become discouraged.” (Colossians 3:21)
Fathers, be careful in your disciplining and correction that your children never doubt your love for them. If they do, it will be doubly hard to get them to be submissive and obedient. Always reassure a child that you love them after you have corrected them.
There is a great misfortune among parents today in that they are placing the responsibility of training their children morally and spiritually on the school and the church. God has assigned that work to the home—the parents.
When children grow up without a father in the home, they have a more difficult time and are at a far greater risk when making the difficult challenges of life. There is a definite connection between curses in our nation and the negligence of its fathers?
Let us look at some of the disturbingstatistics:
Incarceration Rates. "Young men who grow up in homes without fathers are twice as likely to end up in jail as those who come from traditional two-parent families...those boys whose fathers were absent from the household had double the odds of being incarcerated -- even when other factors such as race, income, parent education and urban residence were held constant." (Cynthia Harper of the University of Pennsylvania and Sara S.)
McLanahan of Princeton University cited in "Father Absence and Youth Incarceration." Journal of Research on Adolescence 14 (September 2004): 369-397.)
Suicide. 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes.(Source: What Can the Federal Government Do To Decrease Crime and Revitalize Communities? - see link below)
Behavioral Disorders. 85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes.(Source: What Can the Federal Government Do To Decrease Crime and Revitalize Communities? - see link below)
High School Dropouts. 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes.(Source: What Can the Federal Government Do To Decrease Crime and Revitalize Communities? - see link below)
Educational Attainment. (Children) living in single-parent homes or in step-families report lower educational expectations on the part of their parents, less parental monitoring of school work, and less overall social supervision than children from intact families.
(N.M. Astore and S. McLanahan, American Sociological Review, No. 56 (1991)
Juvenile Detention Rates. 70% of juveniles in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes.(Source: What Can the Federal Government Do To Decrease Crime and Revitalize Communities? - see link below)
Aggression. In a longitudinal studyof 1,197 fourth-grade students (a research conducted on the same children over several years), researchers observed "greater levels of aggression in boys from mother-only households than from boys in mother-father households."(N. Vaden-Kierman, N. Ialongo, J. Pearson, and S. Kellam, "Household Family Structure and Children's Aggressive Behavior: A Longitudinal Study of Urban Elementary School Children," Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology 23, no. 5 (1995).
Achievement. Children from low-income, two-parent families outperform students from high-income, single-parent homes. Almost twice as many high achievers come from two-parent homes as one-parent homes.(One-Parent Families and Their Children, Charles F. Kettering Foundation, 1990).
Delinquency. Only 13 percent of juvenile delinquents come from families in which the biological mother and father are married to each other. By contrast, 33 percent (of juvenile delinquent) have parents who are either divorced or separated and 44 percent have parents who were never married.(Wisconsin Dept. of Health and Social Services, April 1994).
Criminal Activity. The likelihood that a young male will engage in criminal activity doubles if he is raised without a father and triples if he lives in a neighborhood with a high concentration of single-parent families.(Source: A. Anne Hill, June O'Neill, Underclass Behaviors in the United States, CUNY, Baruch College. 1993)
Drug Use. A study from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services concluded that fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse.(Source:U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. National Center for Health Statistics. Survey on Child Health. Washington, DC, 1993)
God’s plan for the home cannot be improved upon.
“4And he (Jesus) answered and said unto them (Pharisees), Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female,5And said, For this cause shall a man leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife (“let no one split apart what God has joined together” NLT: and they twain shall be one flesh? 6Wherefore they are no more twain, but one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.” (Matthew 19:4-6)
If a home is built according to God’s pattern, it will be in fellowship with God. We should want our homes to have a direct connection with our heavenly Father; we never know when we might need Him.
Moses spelled out the requisites, or essentials, for a godly home. He wrote:
“And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart: 7And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.8And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine eyes.9And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:6-9)
The following numbers have been provided by the Department of Health and Human Services in 1996, and so these figures may be even worse today.
These were the last statistics available.
- Only 1 in 4 children live now with their paternal fathers.
- In 1996, 42% of female-headed households with children were poor, compared with 8% of families with children headed by married parents.
- Girls without fathers in their lives are 2 & 1/2 times more likely to get pregnant and 53% more likely to commit suicide.
- Boys without fathers in their lives are 63% more likely to run away from home and 37% more likely to use drugs.
- Boys and girls without father involvement are twice as likely to drop out of school, twice as likely to go to jail and nearly four times more likely to need help for emotional or behavioral problems.
- The average American father spends only 7 ½ uninterrupted minutes per week with his children but 32 hours a week watching TV. (We never owned a TV set; therefore, I did not sit watching TV shows or movies. In looking back, perhaps there were times when I neglected my family because of church situations. If I were able to do it again, I would be more careful about putting my congregation ahead of my family.)
When a father is “out of touch” with the family or absent from the home, the family is at risk in life-changing, life-challenging experiences that often affect a child throughout his or her entire lifetime. Even more disastrous is that these cycles repeat themselves when the children affected by an absent father grow into adulthood and have children of their own. Could we say that history repeats itself?
On the positive side, Christian fathers produce Christian children. There is incredible evidence that when a Christian father attends worship service on a regular basis, the rest of the family follows.(Consider the allegory, Pilgrim’s Progress. After Christian had passed away, his family followed in his footsteps.)
In a 2000 study, it was determined that when both fathers and mothers attended church regularly, about 41% of the children would go to church when they reached an adult stage.Sad to say, when the father attended church on an irregular basis,60% of his children reaching adulthood will also be “hit-and-miss” attendees or drop out all together. When a father never attended church, only 2% of his children growing into adulthood wouldattend church and almost none of them would become a Christian.
The influence of the mother is not as extreme. According to that study, we couldcome to the conclusion thatfathers have the greater influence on their children’s lives and affect them to more of a degree in becoming a Christian and attending church regularly as adults.
What the study shows is that when the father takes church and Christianity seriously, his children will more likely do the same. When he is indifferent about Jesus Christ, the Bible, and the church, then the overwhelming majority of his children will be lackadaisical as well.
This shows you the importance of a godly father.Not only do we see how critical role modeling is, we see also the necessity of the father being the spiritual head of the home.
Could this be why, Malachi wrote, “And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction” (Malachi 4:6)
Through the preaching of John the Baptist, and for that matter, all ministers of the Gospel, fathers and children are converted and reconciled. When they are saved, they love each other and get along in peace and harmony.
When there is a lack of unity in the home, often there is a great disaster. We have considered some of these curses earlier in the message.
According to the true saying that we have already quoted, “As the home goes, so goes the nation!” Also, “as the home goes, so goes the church!”
Additional Scriptures:
Deuteronomy 4:9
Moses wrote,
“Only give heed to yourself and keep your soul diligently, so that you do not forget the things which your eyes have seen and they do not depart from your heart all the days of your life; but make them known to your sons and your grandsons.”
Deuteronomy 11:18-21
Again, this Great Leader of Israel wrote,
18“Therefore shall ye lay up these my words in your heart and in your soul, and bind them for a sign upon your hand, that they may be as frontlets between your eyes. 19And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. 20And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates: 21That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.”
Psalm 78:1-4
The Psalmist wrote,
“Give ear, O my people, to my law: incline your ears to the words of my mouth. 2I will open my mouth in a parable: I will utter dark sayings of old: 3Which we have heard and known, and our fathers have told us. 4We will not hide them from their children, shewing to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, and his strength, and his wonderful works that he hath done.”
Proverbs 4:1-4
The wise man Solomon wrote,
1“Hear, ye children, the instruction of a father, and attend to know understanding. 2For I give you good doctrine, forsake ye not my law. 3For I was my father's son, tender and only beloved in the sight of my mother. 4He taught me also, and said unto me, Let thine heart retain my words: keep my commandments, and live.”
Proverbs 22:6
Solomon gives us some added advice:
“Train up a child in the way he should go, Even when he is old he will not depart from it.”
2 Timothy 3:15
About young Timothy, Paul writes,
“From infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.”