This sermon is from the Rev. Charles G. Dennison sermon archive, part of the “Sermon on the Mount” series, and was preached at Grace Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Sewickley, PA, during a worship service on Sunday, September 13, 1987.
About this sermon
Getting God’s Fatherhood right matters more than it might seem, because God the Father is a person and no impersonal force behind the universe. Believers follow after Christ’s own Sonship, a specific inheritance. To be children of God is to stand in a specific, personal relationship with him.
Sermon transcript
This morning we begin our scripture reading from Matthew 5, reading two passages. First of all, reading verse 9, then from verse 43 to the end of the chapter, and then we’ll be turning over to Matthew 11 once more to look at some verses there. This is Matthew 5, verse 9. are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.”
Then verse 43, “…he hath heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you, that ye may be the children of your Father who is in heaven. For he maketh the sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust. For if ye love them that love you, what reward have ye? Do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? Do not even the publicans so?
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father who is in heaven is perfect.” Then chapter 11 in Matthew, verse 25, at the end of the chapter. At that time, Jesus answered and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in my sight. All things are delivered unto me of my Father, and no man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whosoever the Son will reveal him.
Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn of Me, for I am meek and lowly in heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light.” Pray briefly with me now.
Our Father, wherever your word is proclaimed today, may it be proclaimed with that sense that already the mission is accomplished. Well up within the hearts of those servants of yours that sense that realization that you have accomplished all things and that truly your word has even proceeded from you to precede the servants whom you have called. Therefore Lord as your servants speak May there be no boasting at all, not in their accomplishments nor in their dreams or goals, but may there be singularly a boast in you and in Jesus Christ and his cross. May it please you by your spirit to refresh hearts of servants proclaiming your word in the knowledge that they proclaim Christ. and Christ alone. We pray it in his name. Amen.
This morning we come to the fourth and final message in this present series on Jesus preaching. The theme of Jesus preaching. We have looked at the theme, the kingdom of heaven, and seen how central that theme is to the proclamation of our Lord. We have looked at the theme, righteousness, and again we have seen how central that message is to the preaching of Jesus. And now we have been considering the theme, the Father in Heaven, and once more, the centrality of that theme for the proclamation of our Christ. Throughout these messages, it would appear that there is a similarity of development and thought by Jesus as he presents these themes. And it is this development, his approach to these things, that interests us in conclusion.
But as we work toward that conclusion, I wish once more to move through the material that we considered last week, in order that we might have that firmly fixed in our minds, and also consider the seriousness of the situation that faces the Church regarding the proclamation of Jesus. Is the Church faithful to that proclamation? Or does she find herself struggling to recapture that proclamation, to stand in its light? Or is she ignoring it, pushing it aside, forgetting it, even altogether? Last week, we noted that there has been what we might call, if we were to think about it a bit, a surprising loss of the Father to our faith and for our proclamation.
This fact has been recognized recently by some who have written on the subject. I mentioned to you an English theologian by the name of Thomas Schmale, who wrote a book entitled The Forgotten Father. You may recall what I said about Mr. Schmale. He makes the observation that we’ve had a charismatic movement, one that emphasizes the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and we’ve had a Jesus movement. Some of us lived through that. Some of us even lived in it.
But Mr. Schmehl says, what we need now is a father movement, as if a movement for the father would right the wrongs and correct the imbalance. Well, there may be a tendency in us not to take to take the comments of Mr. Schmale too seriously, thinking that surely Father, our Father, the Father in Heaven, does not need a movement in order to assert his claims for his rightful place.
But we did take note of the fact that it seems, however oddly, that the father is sort of placed in a position that is a position of confinement, or he is relegated to some particular province and there forgotten, and in our approaches to him put in places where we don’t ordinarily or even often think of him.
We consider what has become true of Bible study, for instance, as it pertains to the Father. And we saw that when we think of the Father, our habit has become to relegate Him to the Old Testament and to connect Him with the doctrines of creation and providence. As if when we pass into the New Testament, The Father then was forgotten, and taking center stage was the Son. The Son then specifically identified with the Gospels, and if we were to go further into the Acts and the Epistles, we would there claim that the One who has the greatest importance is neither the Father nor the Son, but the Holy Spirit. So we move through our Bible as if the Father is united or connected with the Old Testament, the Son of the Gospels, and the Spirit with the Acts and the Epistles.
We move through it in something of a chronological fashion, in terms of our doctrinal understanding from creation, that’s the work of the Father, to redemption, that’s the work of the Son, to sanctification, that’s the work of the Spirit, and we’re satisfied with that. Now, if that isn’t bad enough, we have also taken a look at the situation as it pertains to the development of the Church, Church history and the development of doctrine in the Church.
And here again, we observe a similar phenomenon. I would say that for the last 300 years, at least as historians have been explaining things to us, we have been in an age of the spirit, so to speak. And the Father has been truly forgotten, by and large.
We have entered the era of enthusiasm and unbridled mysticism. We have entered the era of an irresponsible irrationality, as it pertains to the faith, where all kinds of excesses are recognized as being normal for the Christian Church. Not only normal, but desired. Not only desired, but essential. And if that enthusiasm and these irrational excesses are not present, so we are told we are not in the faith, and we lack the spirit.
Well, that’s the last 300 years, and before that, for about a thousand years or better, It seemed as if the Church concentrated exclusively on the Son. First of all, back in the time of the Nicene Creed, back in the time when the Apostles’ Creed was being formed, the question of who the Son is took center stage. And then you moved into the Middle Ages and the latter Middle Ages, and the questions about what did He do? Well, you had the development of the doctrine of the Atonement, and then there came the Reformation and the marvelous realization on the part of the Reformers that Christ’s death 1,500 years ago, from where they were standing, had significance for the forgiveness of sins presently. Again, though, as we’ve seen, the Son there taking center stage and, as it were, the Father forgotten. Before those Before those years in which the Son took center stage, the Father was considered, but He was considered narrowly.
He was considered specifically in relationship to the doctrine of creation. And therefore you have the opening of the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed, that speak about, I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. The Father is connected with the work of creation, that says it all, and having said it all, we’re done with it.
We don’t consider it anymore. even beyond the superficiality of Mr. Schmale’s analysis. Theologically, we are in a fatherless situation. The father not being appropriated properly. We may not have sat down to figure all this out, Intellectually, you may not have gone through all of the things that I have just described, and even as you sit here this morning, the relevance of it all may not be immediately apparent to you, but consider it if you will. If, in fact, the doctrine of the Father in Heaven is central to Jesus’ preaching, how can we neglect that and be faithful to Him? But even if you were to move things onto a psychological line, or onto a psychological level, the impact is overwhelming. You see, if the father is not properly grasped, appropriated, neither is your sonship. Neither is the fact that you are the children of God.
Now I put it to you, psychologically, spiritually, what is the impact of that fact? The impact of that fact, whether you have analyzed it or not, whether you’ve gone through the intellectual exercise or not, whether you’ve grasped it that way at all, the impact of living in a fatherless situation spiritually is that you begin to sense that you’re an orphan. You begin to feel like an orphan. You begin to feel Disoriented? Desperate? Frantic? Out of control? Nervous? Anxious? Distressed? Lacking confidence?
Biblically conceived, there’s plenty of confidence as far as the world is concerned, it’s available to you. Lacking confidence, however, biblically conceived and understood. Now, you see the prediction. I mean, do you understand that the great deal of your personal distress, psychologically, may simply be because you don’t take the Father seriously. You simply don’t take Him seriously. Now I understand all the problems in our modern era. We read a lot about child abuse and how rotten fathers can be. And I don’t mean to minimize that.
And how it is that the church and the people in the world can no longer identify with this doctrine of the father because most people have rotten fathers. And when I think of father, they think of, ah. The doctrine of the father simply doesn’t register culturally. You see, the answer to that difficulty is not forsaking the Father or forgetting about the Father, but realizing as bad as the Father that you had may have been, there is one who is perfect in heaven.
And he more than compensates. He more than compensates. Now I want you to seriously think about this matter, because it’s just simply not true that only non-Christians are nervous and anxious and distressed about the world. But recovering a sense of our equilibrium and gaining a bit of serenity will invariably include grasping afresh the Father in heaven. And Jesus knows that. Read Matthew 6. Read Matthew 6. Why are you concerned about what you’re going to eat or what you’re going to wear? Don’t you know that your father in heaven knows that you need these things and he will give them to you? Alright.
The loss of the father. But then there have been attempts to recover the father. And we can’t ignore those attempts. And as strange as it may seem, those leading the charge in recovering the Father were not Orthodox Christians, not conservative evangelicals. They were liberals, blank liberals. See, in God’s providence, even the liberals have a purpose. They drive us to remember things we forgot, or have ignored, or lost our perspective on.
So the attempt was made at the end of the last century, the beginning of this, amongst the liberals, to recover the lost father, or to deal with this fact that central to Jesus’ preaching is the father who is in heaven. They recognized that, and they recognized that that was a unique feature of his preaching. He being unlike other preachers who were wandering around in the first century world, even unlike all those who had preceded him among the prophets of Israel, for none of them had that message. Jesus came on the scene with a unique and revolutionary message, and that message was our father who is in heaven. So, the liberals went to work on the doctrine of the father. They saw the father as proclaimed centrally by Jesus. But that father for them, this is important understanding, exactly where the liberals were coming from and where they were going. That father was the indiscriminate, benevolent, divine force.
Think of Star Wars. Divine force. More force than person. The indiscriminate, benevolent, divine force which hovers over and dwells within all men. All men. That’s why I said indiscriminate. You see, he hovers over and he dwells within all men, thus making all men into a universal brotherhood in which there are to be no distinctions whatsoever. None.
Gone, therefore, is the doctrine of the elect and the reprobate, the saved and the damned, the covenant and those who are in and out of the covenant. Gone is the doctrine of the supernatural redemption. accomplished by Christ, a supernatural Savior. After all, mankind, said the liberal, under this proclamation of the fatherhood of God, has no need of a Savior. All that he needs is a Father kindly disposed.
And the Father is kindly disposed, Jesus has told us, to all men, indiscriminately. So there is no difference between you and the pagan horde assembling itself today at Three Rivers State. None. We all have the same father. And if there is any place to go, be there in heaven, who knows, we will all be there.
That was the liberal proclamation of Jesus’ proclamation of God the Father. Now, thank God there has been a reaction to that. on the part of Bible-believing Christians, who would have none of it. Now, a lot of their reaction has been inadequate, for many of them simply reasserted the doctrine of the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and said, that’s enough. It’s enough for us simply to reassert that doctrine of the Trinity. And having done so, we have proclaimed the Father in the same sense in which Jesus proclaimed Him, and that should satisfy the Church.
But you see, even the Bible-believing Christians had missed the point, a point which the liberals had seen, namely, that the message of the fatherhood of God, our Father in Heaven, was a radical, a radically different and unique proclamation by Jesus, something distinctive of His preaching. And therefore, many missed the significance. None missed the significance.
How is Jesus able to come on the scene and proclaim God the Father? And God never having been proclaimed as such before? Because, because Jesus is the Son. Because Jesus is the Son. The revelation of God as the Father and the proclamation of Him as such cannot, cannot precede the revelation of God the Son. So when the Son comes, The Father is distinguished, and He is seen clearly, as if for the first time, we didn’t see Him clearly before.
And what shames us, what shames us, is the fact that those who lived prior to that revelation were able to live with such confidence, and we who live after it, seem to live with such ramidness, as if it hadn’t happened at all. Something new has taken place. The revelation of the Father has been delineated because the Son has come. And now, whatever confidence and boldness there may have been for saints of old, we have much more. But invariably we live as if we were still in the Old Testament without the Father and the revelation of Him. As if we were still living in a time before Jesus had come, the Son had come, to reveal to us our Father in Heaven.
There is something else here as well. The reality, the reality of our sonship, that we are children of God. This point missed, you see, by the liberals. The fact that we are sons of God, children of God, cannot precede the fact, the reality, the revelation that Jesus is the Son of God.
Our Sonship is predicated upon His. You may recall, in trying to explain this to you last week, I called your attention to all those passages in the Sermon on the Mount that speak about God as our Father. Our Father. Our Father who is in Heaven. But that’s Matthew 5-7. Before we have arrived there, we’ve already traversed Matthew 1-4. And what is Matthew 1-4 all about? It’s about God the Son, Jesus Christ.
So that what Matthew is doing is building all our considerations about our Sonship upon the fact that Jesus is the Son, and it is by virtue of His Sonship that we are made sons, are called sons, are called the children of God. That being the case, only those who have received Jesus Christ are the children of God. Only those who have received Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior are the children of God. Finally in this regard, the eventual blessing, let me say, the eventual blessing as well as all present blessings, for us as the children of God, cannot precede the blessings that Christ now possesses. All future blessings, all present blessings, which we are to enjoy and do now enjoy, cannot precede the blessing that has been given to Christ. because of what he has done. We can’t end our story of Jesus the Son by just reading Matthew 1 through 4. We have to read the whole Gospel. And when we arrive at the end of the Gospel, we realize that what is in view in terms of his Sonship is his death and resurrection, and by virtue of his resurrection, an entrance into the security of heaven above.
That security now mediated unto you in your present life, as it shall certainly be yours in life eternal. So how is it that you are to endure in this life? How is it that you are to walk? How is it that you are to behave? How is it that you are to are to keep control of your feelings and your spirit and keep down the trauma that rises within you that seeks to destroy you and eat you up like a cancer.
Is it not by a grasping hold of that fact that the blessings that are yours as sons of God and the confidence that comes to you because of that are due to the fact that Christ died and rose again. And the blessings that we find surrounding him in heaven, not the least of which is this magnificent relationship with his father, that those blessings are mediated unto us in our present night. Isn’t it interesting that we read Psalm 57 today together?
My heart is fixed. My heart is fixed. That’s an Old Testament saint saying. Well, he could say it. How much more can you say it? Your heart is fixed. and with what confidence do you approach this father who is in heaven though unseen he delights in giving you things that are seen and like as he is unseen he shall surely give you the unseen blessings in glory for you you are the children of God. Now, O Lord, the harvest is coming forth as the laborers have gone forth and what a harvest, a harvest for you in righteousness and peace and joy. Oh Lord, we, your children, look to you and receive from you blessings presently and surely those blessings that are promised to us eternally. through Jesus Christ the Son, the glorious Son, who has taught us about yourself, the Father.
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