Father’s Day! Hooray!
Honor your father and mother, as ADONAI your God ordered you to do, so that you will live long and have things go well with you in the land ADONAI your God is giving you. Deut 5:16. (Complete Jewish Bible).
A while ago somebody asked me, ‘Pastor, what is the main thing God is saying to the church today?’ my reply was as I always speak… ‘Brother, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing!’ I have a feeling he did not understand the depth of what I was saying!
The main thing God is doing with each one of us is to conform us to the image of His Son. The Lord is using everything that happens in our lives to bring us to this one purpose of heaven…being conformed to the image of Jesus.
Jesus is the most powerful and clear revelation of love, forgiveness and mercy that will ever be to all mankind. The main driving force of Jesus in our lives every day is to honour His Father. We must understand this connection, otherwise we will miss the entire plan of God. Here it is…the only commandment with Promise is that if we will honour our own fathers and mothers, and it will go well with us and we will live a long life.
Some years ago the Lord spoke to me in a dream and showed me that the society we live in today has a horrible problem. Since they do not honour their own parents…a gate of hell was opened for them, and that they cannot stop the onslaught of the demons of hell by any other way, but by coming in repentance and beginning to honour their fathers and mothers as the Bible teaches.
I have talked with many ‘church going’ Christians who have told me that it was easy for Jesus to obey His Father because He had a perfect Father.
Please hear this…the Promise of the Commandment did not specify that our fathers need to be perfect, or even good, so that we can honour them. Let me share with you, that the worse our parents are the more power our honour needs to have. I have learnt this in my own life.
So where do we start..? We start with forgiveness! Forgive all their failures and shortcomings. Regardless of what we went through when we were young, or even at present…this attitude will surely work for good to you. Have you suffered in the past? I am sure everyone has in some way!
Let me be realistic and say that every bad and unjust thing that has happened to you can become an authority in your life to bring healing to others. But forgiveness is the key.
Forgiveness is the foundational fundamental that will free you forever. Remember that in the Old Testament the priests could not have scabs or unhealed wounds on their bodies when they came before the Lord. Neither can we serve in the priesthood of believers we are called to until we have been healed of our wounds, which comes by forgiving those who did things to us.
The second step is repentance. True repentance opens the gates of His ‘shalom’ and it erases the record of dishonouring as we start again with a clean slate. Remember God does not keep scores…neither should we! God desires we keep our hearts right and be conformed to the image of His Son Jesus.
Now let me go further. In honouring our fathers and mothers we then learn to honour others, especially the spiritual fathers and mothers that have been instrumental in our lives in loads of ways. This is when the local church becomes a family not just another ‘church’ technically speaking.
When we start becoming more of an organisation than a family we lose the essence of who we are, hence honour plays a vital role in the family or community! We see in Scripture, even hundreds of years after King David, when Israel appealed to God for help He would frequently say that He would help them for the sake of His servant David! David had been dead for centuries, and yet God still so honoured his memory that He would help his descendants for his sake. Isn’t that powerful?
But it all starts with love, forgiveness and mercy, both to our own parents and then to the spiritual ones God has given us.
Be conformed to His Son…He looked down from the cross and said with true love in His heart, ‘Father forgive them…’
Blessings always
