Sermon Tone Analysis

Sermon

“What comes into our minds when we think of God is the most important thing about us.”

A.W. Tozer wrote that in his book, The Knowledge of the Holy.

And he’s right.

How we answer the question, “Who is God?” determines what we think about everything else.

If God is an overbearing disciplinarian, we will and ought to sit in complete fear of Him.

If God is a cosmic grandpa who sits in the good chair doling out sweets, we will put him out to pasture when his time comes and his weird rules get uncomfortable to our modern sensibilities.

If God is the “Big Guy in the sky,” we will treat Him like a buddy that we can hang out with every once in a while and maybe ask for some money when things get tough.

What we mean when we say the word God reveals everything about our theology, our worldview, and our worship.

If we begin with a wrong conception of God, we will miss the entirety of the Christian faith.

Go ahead and turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 8, which is on page 650 of the pew Bible.

This morning, we are continuing in the Apostles’ Creed with the first full confession of a truth: I believe in God the Father, Almighty.

From the first line, the Creed establishes who God is.

We do not merely confess, “I believe in God,” because we do not believe in and worship an abstract deity or an unknown God or a God of our own design.

The God of the Bible, which the Creed describes, is a God with an identity and character.

He is someone.

We believe in God the Father, Almighty.

We’re going to cover a lot of ground here this morning: the Trinity, paternity, questions about gender identity,

Look at verse 6 of 1 Cor 8:

Let’s pray, and we will unpack what it means that we have one God, the Father who is Almighty.

Our Father, make your Word a swift Word,

passing from the ear to the heart,

from the heart to the lip and conversation;

that, as the rain returns not empty,

so neither may your Word,

but accomplish that for which it is given.

Amen.

One God, Three Persons

As we begin, it is important for us to remember that the One God we believe in is the Triune God.

We believe in one God who exists as three distinct but equal persons: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

This is not a lecture on Trinitarianism, so I won’t delve too deeply here, but it is important for us to keep that in mind.

We will see that God is the father of Israel and he is the father of believers (who are the continuation of True Israel), but both of those are derived from the fact that God is the Father of the Son, both of whom are equally and eternally God.

That’s why Paul can say we have one God who is Father and one Lord Jesus Christ, ascribing divinity to both.

He doesn’t mention the Spirit here, but He is evident in other passages.

One God in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Now, before we move on — we’re going to spend the bulk of our time looking at what it means that God is the Father and our Father — however, I need to address two objections to the language of God as the Father.

There are objections to that language, and it doesn’t do us any good to ignore them.

“That’s what the Bible says and you just need to get over it,” doesn’t open any doors to gospel conversations.

I don’t want us to miss opportunities to engage people because we’re afraid to look at the objections that our world has with the words we use.

First, many have a visceral reaction when we refer to God as Father because of the bad experiences they’ve had with their own fathers.

They may have been absent or abusive or just distant and unloving.

And if you have that reaction when you hear God referred to as Father, if you imprint your painful experience of your earthly father onto God as Father, listen to me: you are normal and there is nothing wrong with you.

You don’t have to beat yourself up for feeling that way.

This morning, I want to show you that God is better than your earthly father.

I want to help you reverse that projection to start seeing God as the template for Fatherhood and that your dad didn’t live up to that, instead of seeing your dad as the template for fatherhood and believing that God is like Him.

He’s not.

Secondly, the language of God as the Father can sound very patriarchal and lend credence to the wrong association of maleness with power and authority.

We need to address the hot topic of God and gender pronouns.

Mary Daly, who was a pioneer of what’s called feminist theology, famously wrote, “If God is male, then male is God.”

I want to work through that, because she’s starting in the wrong place and therefore came to a wrong conclusion.

But, the language of God as Father has been used in the past, and still is really, to place men in positions of authority at the expense of women and prop up systems that are disempowering, demeaning, and potentially abusive to women.

Now, believe it or not, this discussion of the language of “he” is not something that’s new in the Church — though it is relevant to us today in the world with questions about gender identity and pronouns and what it means to be masculine or feminine — these are actually questions that the Church has wrestled with from nearly the beginning.

Remember that the Church of Jesus Christ was established during the time of the Romans with their enormous pantheon of gods and goddesses.

And if you’ve ever taken a class or read a book about Greek or Roman mythology you know that the morality of the gods, particularly particularly when it came to sexual morality, was lacking at best.

And so from early on in the Church, writers and thinkers were careful to make distinctions between the God of the Bible and the morally degenerate gods and goddesses of the pantheons.

And one of those distinctions was to make it very clear that the Bible uses the words Father and he without any connotations of sex or gender.

The One true God transcends gender and the body.

It’s normal to think of a male when we hear the word “he.”

But in God’s case, it’s just wrong.

God is not male nor is he female.

One of the questions from the children’s catechism is as follows:

Q. 9.“Who is God?”

A. “God is a Spirit, and does not have a body like men.”

We read this just a little while ago in John 4, when Jesus is talking to the woman at the well, he says

God does not have a body, therefore he is neither male nor female.

Which means, when we use the word “he” to describe Him, we are merely using the words of His own self-revelation, not ascribing any masculine aspects to Him.

Carl Henry, a very important Baptist theologian and the founder of Christianity Today magazine said it this way:

The God of the Bible is a sexless God.

When Scripture speaks of God as “he” the pronoun is primarily personal (generic) rather than masculine (specific); it emphasizes God’s personality—and, in turn, that of the Father, Son and Spirit as Trinitarian distinctions—in contrast to impersonal entities.

Essentially, when we refer to God as He, we are not distinguishing from “she,” but we are distinguishing from “it.”

Our God is a personal God, not an impersonal force.

This is not Star Wars where we feel the Force around us, we must.

Our God is a personal God who lives in relationship with Himself in the three persons of the Trinity and in relationship with us, through the person and work of the Son, Jesus the Christ.

Don’t let the language of he make you associate God with maleness or masculinity, because that is not how He reveals Himself.

Now, having looked at those objections, let’s turn for the rest of our time to fill in the gap we just made.

If God not a bad father and God is not male, what do we mean when we call Him Father?

The Bible reveals three different but related paternal relationships of God the Father.

First, we see that God is the Father of Israel.

God is the Father of Israel

Turn to the Book of Hosea and chapter 11, that’s on page 514 of the pew Bible.

The major story of the Old Testament is that part of God’s plan to redeem humanity was that He would enter into a covenant with a people from the line of Abraham.

From that covenant, He would create a people in special relationship to Him.

And over and over, He proves his commitment to those people, especially in THE major event of the Old Testament, the Exodus.

Look at verse 1 of Hosea 11:

He shows love and compassion

One aspect of God’s Fatherhood is that He loves His covenant people.

When His people were crying out in suffering, God sent a deliverer to lead them back to Him.

God is a loving Father who shows compassion and care for His covenant people.

Later, when Jeremiah is looking toward the coming Exile from the Promised Land, God reveals that He already intends to rescue them even before they are taken captive:

God is not a harsh master, but a loving Father.

In our good moments as parents we get that, right?

I had a good moment as a parent the other day.

One of my children was doing something they should not, namely leaping from chair to chair around our kitchen table.

I asked them to stop and explained that it was dangerous.

As soon as I turned around, what do you think happened?

Of course, leaping commenced followed soon by a crash and sobs as the child hit the floor.

I could have, in fact my first instinct was to say, “Told you so,” then discipline them for disobedience.

But, again by God’s grace I had a good father moment and simply climbed down onto the floor, took them in my arms and told them how sorry I was that they were hurt.

God loves His people and He is compassionate toward them.

He’s not waiting for you to mess up so He can scold you.