Sermon Tone Analysis

Abba Father Sermon:

Romans 8:15-17 and Heidelberg Catechism Lord's Day 9 Q & A 26

By: Rod Galindo

 

            One autumn morning I was walking down aisle 4 of the grocery store when I saw a man pushing a cart.

The man was a little unkempt, his shirt was hanging out and his beard needed a little trimming.

He looked like he had not had sleep in days.

Sitting in the cart resting her head upon the man's chest was a little girl that could be no older than 3 or 4 years old.

She was very well dressed and her hair was done in a long beautiful ponytail.

Aisle 4 of the grocery store was filled with a colorful array of blue, green and red boxes all saying things like night time sleep aid and cough suppressants.

The little girl would cough every now and then and open her tear soaked eyes.

She looked up at the man pushing her cart and said, "I love you dada -cough- I don't feel so good".

I pondered on how unique this kind of relationship is.

In the world people seem to look out for number one, but here I saw something radically different.

There was no selfishness here.

Instead the aisle was filled with more than what a little green cough medicine bottle could contain.

Despite the coughing and sweat on the child's brow the man looked at her like a priceless treasure.

The man did not care how unkempt he was all he cared about was comforting this little girl that was the apple of his eye.

No matter how disheveled he might look, no amount of awkwardness could extinguish the intimacy and love between this little girl and her father.

As they went towards the registers people didn't notice a sick little girl.

Instead everyone was filled with warmth in noticing the love between a father and his daughter.

I learned that we too often recognize parents as authority figures and disciplinarians.

We don't often think of those intimate moments that their position provides.

Although with parenthood comes authority, it is at heart an intimate relationship born out of love.

The parent-child relationship is not simply one of position, but one of closeness.

In the letter to the Romans, Paul is writing to a community that struggles with their identity as God's children.

Both Gentile-Roman Christians and Jewish Christians love Christ.

The Gentile and Jewish Christians walk together in their love for Christ and yet they find themselves conflicted.

Christianity is the continuation of a historically Jewish religion.

God has moved through the Jewish people and through them gave the world the Jewish Christ.

Jesus has come to call the children of God to enter God's kingdom.

Jewish Christians now find comfort as God's children to enter into God's kingdom.

The gentile Christian hears the same call as God's children to be enfolded into God's family.

The conflict lies in whether God calls people of a particular Jewish identity or whether God's children are of every nation and tribe.

Historically both the Jews and Gentiles have had different experiences with God.

The Gentiles were once estranged and distant from God and His family.

The relationship between gentiles and God was one defined by distance.

This distance led the gentiles to see God as distant.

A view that led some gentiles to view God the same way children view fathers who are either physically absent or emotionally absent.

The distance drove many Gentiles to view God in many ways that were not true.

Paul even faced this when preaching on Mars Hill and saw that the Greek Gentile philosophers had a shrine to the unknown God.

The Jews in contrast believed God chose them and loved them, but had experienced some hard disciplining throughout history.

In disobeying the LORD, the Jews were once exiled from the promise land.

More significantly, to the Jews it felt like they were exiled from the presence of their Heavenly Father.

This Jewish history would still be raw in the heart of the Jew.

In the Jewish mind, recollections of failing to follow God brought about bitter memories of the consequences of exile.

The Jews had learned their lesson.

Although the Jewish Christians loved God and they knew God loved them they struggled with their relationship to God.

The Jewish Christians revered their Heavenly Father with fear and trembling, but they felt distant in their relationship to God.

The Jewish Christian out of reverence for the LORD sought to keep the demands of the law so as to not disobey.

They tried to strictly follow the letter of the law, but did not always follow the Holy Spirit that wrote the Law.

By following the letter of the law the Jewish Christians sought to define the identity of God's family.

To the Jewish Christian, family identity in the family of God was defined by performing the law.

They believed the law defined the family of God and who the children of God are.

Fall out of line and disobey the Lord and your out of the family.

The Jews forgot that the law was set in place to keep their relationship with God.

The strict focus on the law now kept Jews from relationship with God.

Following rules is not relationship.

The cry of the heart is not filled by rules.

Like the need to eat when hungry or quench our thirst, the heart cries out for the need of relationship to be filled.

The cry of every human heart is for the love and intimacy of the one who created it.

The parent-child relationship is one of the most intimate and special relationships in the life of every person, but I hear many stories about distant or estranged parents with their children.

I have heard stories of young people who tell me that they grew up only knowing their mother and never knowing their father.

Now those children struggle to understand who God is as a father because they never knew an earthly father.

I have talked with women who think God is a tyrant off in the distance.

Others think God is divorced from their lives because they relate to God on the basis of their own earthly fathers who were divorced from their families.

I want to tell you about one of these stories.

I talked to a dear woman in the Lord named Margaret.

She started telling me about how she came to have faith in God.

Margaret was my professor in college.

She told me about growing up on a farm during the 60's and 70's and what life was like.

She told me about how she would look back in her life and recognized how she loved waking up early in the morning to help her father feed the horses and chickens.

She said after they finished the morning chores they would have some breakfast with hot cocoa.

She told me that even now after many years of her Father going to the Lord how much she still loved him.

Margaret continued to tell me, "every morning I looked forward to having breakfast with my dad.

I made breakfast for him.

After the morning chores my dad would sit in the exact same spot at the breakfast table.

His head would disappear behind the front page of the newspaper.

Although I loved my father I always felt the tension of feeling and being distant from him."

Then Margaret's voice began to crack as tears ran down her face and she continued, "The only time I ever had a chance to spend with my father was those mornings on the farm.

I would like to think that my dad loved those mornings as much as I did.

Those were really the only moments throughout the day when I saw him and spent time with him.

Any other times I spent with him always felt like the newspaper was still in between us.

I felt distant from him.

The only times we talked was when I was grounded for doing something bad or when he ordered me to clean the horses stables."

Margaret wiped her tears and said, "I feel like I was never really close with my father.

For years I thought that not talking or not saying I love you was normal.

I simply was not raised to say it.

To tell you the truth I couldn't even imagine God saying I love you.

For many years I imagined my relationship with God as Him being with me, but when I looked at Him He was always behind a newspaper.

I never felt close to God.

God existed, but relationally we were distant."

People of God many times we know God is out there, but we see Him as Distant, unreachable.

We know and remember God is holy and awesome in power.

We come to church service and sing hymns about how great God is, but we don't often feel or know how close He is to us.

We know God is Lord, but we struggle to have that intimate relationship with Him as our Father.

There is hope in knowing God is our Father.

In seeing all the problems the Jewish and Gentile Christians have with their views of God and of one another in relationship to God, Paul says something that is radical.

Listen to the audacity of Paul's claim in the letter to the Romans, "you received the Spirit of sonship.g"

Paul is saying this to all the Christians whether Jew or gentile, male or female.

All of you who are here in Christ, no matter what your background, no matter where you come from or who you earthly father is, whether you followed all the rules like a faithful son or broke all the rules like a prodigal son, you are all sons and daughters of God.