One of the best things about being part of the team at CVM is being part of a ministry which is not ashamed to keep Gospel proclamation front and centre of our cause. We live in a world that is literally falling apart at its seams. We have been very used to using terms like ‘broken’ to describe our culture and society, but after two years of pandemic lockdowns, now seeing the War in Ukraine unfold and heading deeper into a cost of living crisis, the word ‘broken‘ seems to be more accurate than ever.
But here is the thing, we are living through another pandemic too. Men right across this world are looking utterly fatherless. You see this in the everyday stuff of life. Men, we look dazed, confused, angry, and lost. We have no real sense of purpose, we endlessly pursue significance and when we think we have found it, the pursuit just starts all over again. We let our pasts haunt us, our presents frustrate us and our futures frighten us. We regret what has been, we are apathetic about the now and we have no hope for the future.
It really is little wonder that in Britain today around 80% of the crimes committed are perpetrated by men. We live with a constant sense of pressure to be more, to be different and that pressure explodes when we just cannot work out what being more, what being different, actually looks like.
Guys, just step back for a moment – this is what life looks like without the Gospel!
So, on this Father’s Day, as much as I want to celebrate fathers, father figures, and men generally, I really want you to discover what it looks like to be fathered by God Himself. I cannot begin to describe what it required of God to allow His own son, Jesus Christ, to become the price for you and me to become sons of God. I love that quote in The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe:
“when a willing victim who has committed no treachery, is killed in a traitor’s stead, the stone table will crack, and even death itself would turn backwards.”
God has always been our real, true Father. The physical fathers that we have had, or that we are to our children, have only ever been waymarkers pointing us to God Himself. But, as we have said above this world is broken and some of our fathers have been good, and some have not been so good. Some of us, as fathers, have been good and some of us have not been so good.
But whether we are fathers or not, we are all sons. And we all have something else in common, we have all committed some kind of treachery–the Bible calls this ‘SIN’. So, when we wonder why God was put in the position of having to sacrifice His own son so that we can be truly Fathered by Him, it is simply because there was no-one else who had never committed treachery. None of us could ever be good enough to bridge that gap.
The brokenness in this world, the endemic problem of being a fatherless generation could never, can never be fixed by any of us. For this we need Jesus. For this we have Jesus.
The definition of a good father is someone who loves his kids more than life itself. A good father is someone who will do whatever it takes to rescue his kids and keep them safe. A good father loves his kids just the way they are, but he loves them too much to just leave them as they are. A good father spends all his energy doing whatever it takes to give his kids the best future possible. For all these reasons God is a good father, and even though we have all royally messed up, and we all have a long history of treachery and sin, God still did the one thing which would reverse all of that (and even death itself); He gave us His Son so that we could all become sons of God and so we could be properly fathered throughout this life and forevermore!
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
John 3:16
I hope you have a great Father’s Day this year, whether you are a biological father or not. We are all father figures to those around us. But more than this, I pray that you discover Jesus Christ and that today is the day that you become genuinely fathered by God.
If you would like to make that commitment to following Jesus for the rest of your life, and you do not have anyone to speak to about this, please do contact us at the office and we will join you in this life changing moment and we will help you get the support you will need going forward.
Image credit: Ante Hamersmit via Unsplash
