MIMICING AND MODELING HE WHO IS ‘BETTER THAN THE BEST FATHER!’

PASTOR’S PERSPECTIVE: MIMICING AND MODELING HE WHO IS ‘BETTER THAN THE BEST FATHER!’

One little boy’s definition of Father’s Day went something like this…”it’s just like Mother’s Day, only we don’t spend as much!” One little boy’s definition of Father’s Day went something like this…”it’s just like Mother’s Day, only we don’t spend as much!” Well we father’s can concede that, usually due to our own frugality and insistence! Someone else has said, “A father is someone who carries pictures where his money used to be!” The phone company tells us that calls on Father’s Day are not nearly as high volume. And before the day of unlimited cell phones, most of the calls to “dear ole dad” were usually collect! And so it is!

Being a father is a sobering assignment. God has chosen the father to be a “role model” to teach his children how to relate to Him. Jesus told us when we pray we are to say, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hollowed be Thy Name” (Mt. 6:9). Paul said that the “Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are Children of God…whereby we cry Abba Father”. (Rom. 8:15). Paul himself saw his role to the Corinthians as being their spiritual father. He said, “you may have many teachers, but not many fathers!” (I Cor. 4:15), identifying himself as the human agent responsible for their new birth into the Family of God. In I Thessalonians Paul refers to his role in their lives being parallel to that of both a mother and a father! In I Thes. 2:7 he says, “we were gentle among you, like a nursing mother caring for her little child” As a mother his role was to NOURISH them, not just with milk by nursing them, but love and affection caring and relating to them. Then in I Thes. 2:11-12 he says, “we dealt with you as a father deals with his own children, encouraging, comforting, and urging you to live lives worthy of God”. The role of the father is not so much to NOURISH, but to NURTURE! That involves at least three things in Paul’s mind. One is to PROVIDE for them. All they needed to grow up as mature children of God, were provided by the Lord, through the ministry of their Spiritual Father. He too saw this role as one of a PATTERN to them. He could exhort them to “follow him, as he followed the Lord Jesus Christ”. The word follow is the Greek word “mimeteo”. We get our word “mimic” from that. He told them to mimic him and he mimicked God the Father! Harry Chapin quotes the son saying, “I’m gonna be like him!” i.e. dad. The song, (Cat’s in the Cradle), concludes with the father disillusioned, as he hangs up the phone, after being told by his son that he did not have time for ol’ dad, “He’d grown up just like me, my son was just like me!” Good or bad…that is usually reality! Paul rejoiced when that was true of his spiritual children. How about us dads? If our sons and daughters turn out to be just like us would we be rejoicing? Paul also saw his role as one of PROTECTING. He wrote letter to reclaim them when they strayed. He prayed for their well being daily. He loved them; He entered into spiritual combat for them. He was willing to die for them. He trained them, by his life, how to “fight the good fight of faith”. He told them, as he did Timothy, to “continue in the Scriptures which is profitable for them” (II Tim. 3:15-16). When being asked if we can compare to that kind of man-that kind of father-the response would probably be “silence!’

Robin Hardy, in her book The Chataine’s Guardian, writes “The talk at the table turned to what women found interesting in men…One girl said she liked a man with dark eyes…Another said she like a man with dark eyes…Another girl said she preferred strong, muscular men…Another said she was attracted to men with beards. Then someone asked, ‘Deirdre, what do you like in a man?’ They fell silent waiting. She paused and replied…’it is good for a man to be strong…a strong man can do so many things. But the man who is both strong and gentle is wonderful. A man must be intelligent, of course, but if he is also humble that makes him all the more appealing…a man who is strong enough to live a disciplined life, but who is tender enough to overlook the faults of others…a man who is honest above all, but kind…a man who has the courage to stay at the same task year in and year out, even if it is boring, tiring or painful, simply because it is his duty…a man with courage of faithfulness. I love all these things about a man.’ THERE WAS…SILENCE!” That is why C.S. Lewis wrote, in God in The Dock, “It is painful, being a man, to have to assert the privilege or the burden which Christianity lays upon my own sex, (that is men). I am crushingly aware of how inadequate most of us are, on our actual and historical individualities, to fill the place prepared for us”. IT IS OK TO RECOGNIZE WE HAVEN’T ARRIVED YET…WITH OUR SILENCE. Today is not a good day to be a man. High profile men…President Trump…Bill Cosby…Hollywood and Business moguls have been highlighted as those who have been degrading to women. Society puts a lot of pressure on us. That great theologian… (ha ha) …Garrison Keillor reminds us of that. In an op-ed piece in the Sunday New York Times he writes, “This is not a great year for guys…Guys are in trouble. Manhood, once the opportunity for achievement, now seems like a problem to overcome. Plato, St. Francis, Leonardo da Vinci, Vince Lombardi-you don’t find guys of that caliber today. What you find is terrible gender anxiety, guys trying to be Mr. Right, the man who can bake a cherry pie, go shoot skeet, come back, toss a salad, converse easily about intimate matters, cry if need be, laugh, hug, be vulnerable, be passionate…go off the next day and life them bales onto that barge and tote it. Being perfect is a terrible way to spend your life, and guys are not equipped for it anyway. It is like a bear riding a bicycle: He can be trained to do it for short periods, but he would rather be in the woods doing what bears do there!” Joseph Stowell, President of Moody Bible Institute a few years ago, summed it up better for us. He said, modeling God, as a spiritual father, is difficult but rewarding. “Many of us fear that…if we fully yield the reins of our life to Christ, He will take away our manhood. Victims of a demasculinized portrait of Christ, we have forgotten that He was a perfect blend of divinity and humanity. He was the perfect expression of manhood. While that meant that he was compassionate, He also displayed strength and power…enough to attract manly men as followers. They even gave up their careers to follow Him. Jesus does not diminish our manhood…He energizes it making our maleness a fuller and richer express of what a man can be!”

That is the kind of man that our boys need to model for their generation. Preston Gillham, in his book Lifetime Guarantee, writes “boys become men by watching men, by standing close to men. Manhood is a ritual passed down from one generation to another with precious few spoken instructions. Passing the torch of manhood is a fragile, tedious task. If the rite of passage is successfully completed, the boy-become-man is like an oak of hardwood character. His shade and influence will bless those who are fortunate enough to lean on him and rest under his canopy.” Being a man is more caught than taught. It is modeled and mentored in a lifetime of good example, Happy Father’s Day. Be the best model you can be! God will make you the best Mentor! Give it your best shot…with His model and His power!