Well… I have to confess that for some time now, I have been harboring a deep-rooted fear. It began several years ago as a 22 year old Summer Youth Worker. Our pastor had left; we were in an interim period, and it looked as if I might have to step in and preach on Father’s Day. But you know you can’t preach Father’s Day sermon without first being a father. Fortunately, an interim pastor arrived on the scene just in time. Move ahead two years. Another church; another pastor gone; another interim period. (I’m starting to get self-conscious about that); Father’s Day was approaching; and again, I was saved in just the last moment.
But this year, I need not run from the opportunity to preach my first Father’s Day sermon, for now, I come prepared having not just one child in the family, but two! Whew! I’m qualified. But that’s where my latest concern comes in. Here I’ve been a father to at least one child for almost two years now. And the truth is, I still have no cotton pickin’ idea what the heck I’m doing… I feel that I should be the expert father. I should be able to stand up with authority and preach one of those 12 step sermons. You know the kind I’m talking about. Twelve steps to raising perfect children, but, I’m not sure if it really works that way. Because you know... just having children does not a perfect father make…
In fact, I remember feeling the cold sweat running down my face just after Connor was born. I have to admit to being a little scared. I mean, he seemed innocent and all. He looked like a little angel. But as so many of you have been so kind as to inform me, little angels can sometimes grow up to be little devils. I’ve heard it… you invest all your time and money in your children only for them to grow up to hate you. You feed them, clothe them, and clean then up when they are messy, only to wonder if when you are old one day if they will feed you, clothe you, and clean you up.
It got me to thinking. I mean, Connor was a good-looking promising boy, but then that’s what Ted Bundy’s mom thought too. And Connor seemed like a nice name. A boy named Connor would have to turn out right, but I’m sure the name Charles Manson sounded innocent once too. You know the bottom line: you can give and give and give, but you never really know how your kids are going to turn out. They may just turn out to be a bad apple. And then, bad apples spoil the whole bunch.
And if they do turn out bad, you know you’ve failed as a parent. After all, a bad child is a result of bad parenting, is it not! How many times have you been in a restaurant when some child was screaming and hollering all through the meal, and what did you say? Same thing I do. Ooooh, those parents! Just give me that child for one week, and I’ll straighten him out!!!
With all this pressure out there to produce perfect children, wouldn’t it be nice to find in the Scriptures a guarantee that if you follow certain principles, your kids will turn out right. But the Scriptures don’t make that promise. There are no guarantees for success. In fact, what we find in the Bible is that even God has problems rearing good kids.
Just look at God’s first children, Adam and Eve. Not long into life, Adam and Eve disobey their Father’s command to eat only of the tree of life and thus stay away from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Don’t touch, God says. But then they start running with bad company. We parents are paranoid about bad company, and Adam and Eve sure found a doozy of bad company, Satan the serpent. Not much time passes before we find the two children, in the garden, eating apples, enjoying themselves like two kids with their hands in the cookie jar when mommy and daddy aren’t looking. Adam and Eve are the classic model of undisciplined children. The passage we read picks up the story when God walks in. In walks dad; they play dumb, like they’ve done nothing wrong. And when that doesn’t work, they start pointing at each other. What parent hasn’t heard that before? Eve made me do it. By eating the bad apple, they end up bad apples themselves.
So, where’s mom and dad while all of this is going on? After all, a bad child is the result of bad parenting, and bad apples don’t fall far from the tree. So then, who’s really to blame for Adam and Eve’s behavior? If we are going to hold hard and fast to the idea that bad children are the result of bad parenting, then it looks like we might ought to point a finger at the Father of Adam and Eve.
I know what you’re thinking. No one in their right mind would point a finger at God in this situation, because God did not choose to eat the bad apple. God did not make bad apples out of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve made bad apples of themselves. Their sin was a result of their own choosing! Of course it is, but how many parents today are feeling unnecessary guilt and responsibility for the choices that their children freely make?
And that is what we must first understand if we are to understand the way God has set up the world. God has given each of us the opportunity, the freedom to choose for ourselves. And if my understanding of God is correct, God very well could have stopped Adam and Eve before they sinned. After all, if God is really all-powerful and all-knowing, then God was certainly powerful enough to stop Adam and Eve from eating the fruit.
But God doesn’t. Because doing so would have prevented us from having a genuine relationship with God. The God who chose to love us chose not to make us love Him. And he certainly could have. He could have done to us what we would love to be able to do to our children - program us to be perfect followers – like robots. But God understood in order to enter into true love and true relationship with his creation, he had to give us humans with the real ability to choose. God invites us into relationship, but only at our consent. God forces himself on no one. If he did, real relationship would be unattainable. Think about it. What kind of relationship would I have with my wife if I could cast a spell on her to make her love me? Where would the joy in relationship be if it were coerced? True love is not forced.
We are all free creatures with free choices. And as parents, when our children leave the house, we don’t have the luxury of their decisions for our children. Our children are free to choose to follow the values we have instilled in them, or they may choose to go their own way. Just as God does not force us to love him, we cannot force our children to love us or our values or our God. True love is entered into freely. This is true not just of the parent/child relationship, but of friendships, work relationships, and marriages.
Someone very close to me is in my prayers right now. I have a dear friend who is a minister near my age and has been married nearly as long as I have to a woman nearly as pretty as mine. He recently discovered something terrible - that on more than one occasion, his wife had been unfaithful to him and it seems that as time passes, she has less and less desire to reconcile the relationship. Now, this not something that any of us ever saw coming. This was not one of those situations where my friend was blindly in love while the rest of us saw the shipwreck coming. I would have called her a model wife.
I’ve talked with my friend for a long time about this, and as we talked, we came to the conclusion that when we enter into a love relationship with someone, we all open ourselves up to risk. To love is to risk rejection. And that risk can bring about great reward or great pain. There are no guarantees in relationships – only trust. I do not know (beyond a shadow of a doubt) that my wife loves me, I trust that she loves me. When I tell my wife that I love her and will never leave her, she has no proof of that. She can’t see into my soul. She trusts that my affections are true. For my friend, he will be a better minister, because he has a greater insight into the love that God has for us and the hurt that God feels when we choose our other gods rather than Him.
All the trouble of the world began in the garden, but the greatest love story of all time begins there too. God’s children may have slipped up in the garden, but God did not give up on them. Just minutes into the Bible, life seems all messed up. Sin infects the world and the world is cursed. We learn to sin with ease. And the problem seems irreversible. But our Bible does not end a few chapters into Genesis. The rest of the Bible is the story of a passionate Father seeking to win back the love of his children.
And that action begins immediately. It begins as God expels them from the garden. Traditionally, we have connected Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden as a continuation of God’s punishment on them. But if you look carefully at Genesis 3, you will see that the expulsion from the garden is indeed God’s first act of grace in the fallen world.
Look with me at Genesis 3 beginning in verse 22 And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." Here God expels them from the garden not as a means of punishment, but as a way to protect them from living eternally in their fallenness.
By eating the fruit, Adam and Even learn good and evil and themselves enter a fallen world. If they would have stayed in the garden of Eden and would have eaten from the tree of life, they would have lived forever in their fallen state.
Let’s continue in verse 23. So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. The cherubim is the sign of God’s mercy as God begins there in the garden preparing the way to redeem his creation. God protects them from living forever in their fallenness giving God a way to save them from their sin.
Centuries later, the Apostle Paul sees this clearly. Look with me at what Paul says in I Corinthians 15:21, For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. Beginning right there in the garden, God prepares away for the second Adam, Jesus Christ, to redeem the world from their sin. The story of the Bible is the story of God’s relentless pursuit to win back his creation.
And God so loved the world that he took the greatest risk of all. He gave his one and only Son so that whosoever believes in him will not perish, but will have everlasting life.
But is it really worth it to God? I mean, what is it about a relationship with us that would make God give his one and only Son in die and then to have to endure all the mess of our lives in the meantime? After all, wouldn’t the world have been better if God had exercised his power to control our decisions – to make us love him. The world would certainly be a less violent. By preventing the sin in the garden, we would be unable to choose sin. And it is our ability to choose sin that produces a world with such violence, greed, and immorality.
This relentless pursuit of God to win back his creation is symbolized in the parable of the prodigal son - the story of the son who squandered the family fortune and the father who in response to his son’s return throws a magnificent party. John and Mike so wonderfully portrayed the message through music. This story helps us answer an important question. Why would God go to all the trouble to endure our bad choices and our flagrant sinning in order to have relationship with us.
I want to read the story of the lost son to you, but this time, I want to share it in a different way. Listen to the story again in a modern setting as told by Philip Yancey in his book What’s so Amazing about Grace?
Yancey tells the story of a prodigal daughter who grows up in Traverse City, Michigan. Disgusted with her old fashioned parents who overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, the length of her skirts, she runs away. She ends up in Detroit where she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. The man with the big car – she calls him “Boss” – recognizes that since she’s underage, men would pay premium for her. So she goes to work for him. Things are good for a while. Life is good. But she gets sick for a few days, and it amazes her how quickly the boss turns mean. Before she knows it, she’s out on the street without a penny to her name. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, and all the money goes to support her drug habit.
One night while sleeping on the metal grates of the city, she began to feel less like a woman of the world and more like a little girl. She begins to whimper. “God, why did I leave. My dog back home eats better than I do now.” She knows that more than anything in the world, she wants to go home. Three straight calls home get three straight connections with the answering machine. Finally she leaves a message. “Mom, dad, its me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there, I‘ll understand.” During the seven hour bus ride, she’s preparing a speech for her father. And when the bus comes to a stop in the Traverse City station, the driver announces the fifteen-minute stop. Fifteen minutes to decide her life.
She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. But not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepares her for what she sees. There in the bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and a great-grandmother to boot. They’re all wearing goofy party hats and blowing noise-makers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads – Welcome Home!
Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She stares out through the tears quivering in her eyes and begins her memorized speech. He interrupts her. “Hush, child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies. We’ll be late. A big party is waiting for you at home.”
So I ask: Is a relationship with us really worth it to God when he has all the mess of our lives to deal with? Praise God the answer is yes! You see, it’s all about the party. God knows that on the other side of forgiveness is a big party! It’s a party much better than anything you’ve ever known. It’s a continuous party that brings about intimacy with God, security for our soul, and purpose in our living. It’s comes with no strings attached.
What about you? Are you here today thinking that you are beyond being forgiven? Are you wading in the garbage of this world wishing you could just go home? Are you standing on the outside of a relationship with God wondering what it might be like to an insider with God? If you think that God wouldn’t want you, you’ve got it all wrong. God is ready to forget every sin you’ve ever committed, even the kind of sins that you and I would never forgive in each other, just so he can take you in his arms and throw you the greatest party he’s ever given. God craves this party so much that He gave his only Son to die for you. It’s not a question of God wanting you. It’s a question of you turning to God.
And what about those of us who maybe have forgotten how to forgive others the way God has forgiven us? What would our world be like if those of us who call ourselves Christians came to understand our own sinfulness in light of God’s magnificent graciousness? I’m wondering if we would be so quick to condemn those who do us wrong? Maybe, we’ve been too long the arm of dis-grace?
And dad. Are you worried about whether or not you will raise the perfect children? Worry not; you won’t! That’s OK, because just as God majors on the work of reconciling relationships, we can be instruments of grace in our families. We can learn to loosen our tight grip of control and open our arms to receive our children no matter what choices they make. It is God’s way with us, after all.
And today, we can all praise God that when we fail in life, God does not greet us with a lecture, “I hope you learned your lesson!” Instead, the Father declares “My son was dead, but now is alive again. He was lost, but now he is found.” The fact that God is making something of us bad apples may sound like a story too good to be true; or maybe it’s a story so good, it must be true.
