Sermon Tone Analysis

Challenges of being a father

Today is Father day - a day we can celebrate what it means to be a father.

I’ve now been a father for a bit over 10 years and so in that time I’ve experienced many of the joys and struggles that go with it.

Admittedly, I haven’t yet arrived at the teenage years but I have no doubt that this too will come with both the joys and struggles even if slightly different in nature.

But it is the struggles that I want to speak about today.

Now I’m going to give examples of the struggles of fatherhood.

The reality is that what I’ll talk about today actually applies to everyone regardless of your situation.

But as I focus in on dad’s I want to go back to when they first become parents.

Now for the vast majority of new dads, this is a time of great joy and happiness.

I can still remember when I first got to hold Elise when she was first born.

It is one of those cherished memories that I hold dearly.

But during this period there can also be struggles for the new dad.

Now obviously during the early period, it is the mum that the biggest challenge occurs.

And I hope as I describe the challenges of the father I don’t diminish in any way the enormity of what the mother goes through.

Now of course, Father’s will normally help the mum during this time, and there are challenges with this, but the challenge that many fathers experience is stress related.

Beyond Blue commissioned a study in 2015 looking at new fathers and found that the idea of the father being the “rock” of the family caused 47% of dads a lot of stress ad anxiety.

The study also found that 39% of first time fathers experienced high levels of psychological distress in the first year of their child’s life.

Unfortunately what I think happens is that we have these really high expectations as fathers.

We want to be able to provide.

We want to be the best father we possibly can be.

But the reality is, we’re not able to.

This study was just for new dads.

The reality is, as your children get older, while we might not feel it as acutely, but the same thing happens.

The children get to an age where we need to apply discipline.

But we go too hard.

Or too soft.

Their behaviour doesn’t improve and we feel we’ve failed.

Well, this is father’s day and I’ve started on a bit of a downer.

Thankfully as we start a new series in the book of James, we find that James has some advice for us that can really help us think about this in quite a different way.

James’ letter

But before we do that, let’s try and sort out some of the basic parts of the letter.

We can start with the first verse to point us in the right direction.

Author

From this verse we learn that the author is James.

But even this isn’t quite as straight forward as you might think.

You see, there are a number of people in the bible called James, including James son of Zebedee which was one of the disciples who were in Jesus’ inner circle of three.

However, it was unlikely to him give that we read about him being martyred in Acts 12.

While there is much that has been written on this, for most of church history it has been assumed that this book was written by James the brother of Jesus who was one of the early church fathers.

While some people might doubt that today, as the evidence to doubt it is not altogether convincing, I’m going to assume the traditional authorship as James, the brother of Jesus.

Recipients

Verse 1 also tells us who the letter is intended for, but unlike many of Paul’s letters, the designation is rather broad.

He addresses it to the “twelve tribes scattered among the nations”.

Basically, this broad address indicates that it was intended for all Christians, noting that they are everywhere.

Date of letter

Unfortunately we don’t know exactly when the letter was written.

It has been suggested by some that of all the letters we have in the New Testament, this is one of the first, dating it only a bit more than a decade after the death of Jesus.

The reality is, that any date we place on it is going to involve some big assumptions, so I’m not going to waste any more time speculating now.

Purpose

More importantly, it is the purpose of the letter that is more relevant to us.

If we look at the overall letter we see that there are actually quite a number of different issues that James addresses, but what is very clear is that it is highly practical.

He’s concerned with what it means to live a Christian life in the real world.

And so while he jumps around in the specifics, there is an overarching theme of Christian living in a non-Christian world.

With this in mind, James dives straight int a problem that they would have keenly felt - the trials and temptations of living in a world that does not acknowledge God.

Admittedly this theme is much bigger than the issue I started with, namely, the struggles that father’s face, but as I mentioned, we could essentially insert any struggle that the Christian faces living in the world.

Joy in suffering

So let’s look at James’ word to us regarding the trials we face.

Well, he doesn’t beat around the bush at all, rather giving us some words which when we’re in the middle of a big trial sound rather strange.

He says: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds”.

Now I don’t know about you, but when I face various trials, I face a range of emotions, but joy is not usually one of them, so what’s the go?

Or to put it in the context of what I’ve been speaking about - imagine if we said to the father who is feeling high levels of anxiety because he feels inadequate as a father, if we just say ‘hey don’t worry, consider it joy my friend’.

How do you think he would react?

Well as strange as it might sound, when we begin to understand the joy that comes from a Christian faith, we can begin to understand that there is wisdom in this - although point of warning, when said in a glib, uncaring manner, trust me, telling someone to just cheer up is not good advice.

You see, the joy of a Christian is a deep seated joy.

It is not a superficial happiness, the type that everyone feels from time to time.

Rather it is the joy of knowing that you have been redeemed.

That nothing can separate you from the love of God.

That you have been chosen and are being transformed into the likeness of Christ.

A lot of bad things can happen.

Some of our own making.

Some from circumstances not of our making.

But regardless, for the Christian, those deep truths remain.

And for this reason we can have a lasting joy.

The reason for joy

But James explores another reason for joy in suffering.

We don’t just have the joy because we know there is something bigger than the trial we are facing.

Rather as James explains, the suffering itself can produce something amazing.

James talks about our trials as testing of our faith, and that when we are tested, it produces perseverance.

A perseverance that results in maturity and completeness.

If you were here last week when I concluded the series on Abraham we looked at a very big test of faith that Abraham went through, and without repeating it all now, we saw that his passing through this test strengthened the whole situation.

For father’s who are struggling one of the first things we need to recognise is that the reason we struggle is because we care.

And because we care, we can know that we will become better fathers because of these struggles.

It is the refining fire, and the end result is going to be beautiful.

The need for wisdom

But to go through tough times, whatever the nature of it, we need wisdom.

And this is exactly where James takes us in verse 5.

He tells that if we lack wisdom that we should ask God who will give it to us.

Now it is important to note that wisdom is different from knowledge.

There’s a little saying I’ve heard a few times now - ‘knowledge is knowing that tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad!’

You see, wisdom involves putting knowledge into practice.

And here is the thing.

We can know on a theoretical level that the struggle we are going through will make us better people.

We can know that we should be joyful because of what God has done (and is doing) in our lives.

But we need wisdom to apply this to our lives.

The wisdom to make that happen, won’t come from just listening to this message, rather it is going to come through the generous giving of God.

You need to ask, and he will give.

Why we don’t get wisdom

Now, I suspect many here would have heard this idea from the Bible that we can just ask for wisdom and get it, and have probably thought - but I have asked and I don’t feel any wiser.

Certainly I know that I have felt this frustration from time to time.

But I think there is an important clarification here.