Video Transcript: God is a Father and the Church is His Family

Welcome to lecture three in practical ministry skills. Our key verse For this  section is I John 3:2, beloved. We are God's children. Now what we will be has  not yet been revealed. What we do know is this, when He is revealed, we will be like Him, for we will see Him as He is. We are God's children. Now, the title of  this section is God is a Father and the church is his family. It's based on Chapter One of the book pastoring the nuts and bolts. What does it mean to say that  God is a Father? Well, it does not mean God is male. God created human  beings in His own image. In the image of God, He created them, male and  female. He created them. It takes both males and females, men and women, old people, young people, all kinds of people to begin to demonstrate some of the  image of God. The Of course, none of us could fulfill the Total Image of God.  Demonstrate the Total Image of God. No body can be an exact picture of God.  Jesus, the Bible, says, was the picture of God that even so, not only in those  aspects of God that a human male could demonstrate. Jesus in His human  body, for instance, did not exhibit omnipresence. Part of God is omnipresence.  That means he's always everywhere. When Jesus confined himself to a human  body, he was only in one place at a time, like all the rest of us humans. So it  took at least male and female to represent the part of God's image that even  needs, even can can be represented by humans. So when we say that God is a  Father, we're not saying he's a male. We're saying he's a parent. We're saying  he is the ideal person that you would want to be in charge of your life, and as  we're children in general growing up that day. What would the ideal father look  like? The ideal father would provide love, would provide protection, would  provide provision the material needs, food and shelter and all of that, would  have wisdom to give you, to help you out. Would always be there for you. Would always have time for you. Father is the human term that in almost every human  culture most closely conveys the ways that God relates to us. God is a Father.  Jesus told us to begin the Lord's Prayer with our father, Paul tells us that the  Holy Spirit leads us to call God Abba, which in English would be daddy or dada.  The most languages have a name for Daddy that is very similar to the first kind  of sounds that a baby can make, Abba, dada, daddy. It's all very similar a baby's kind of babbling comes out to a name and Paul Says that the Holy Spirit leads  us to use that language to refer to God. God wants to relate to us in that way  with love and protection and provision and wisdom, always there for you, always having time for you. Now that doesn't mean that everybody who was created is  a child of God. Our key verse says, Beloved. We are God's children now, but  John is writing to the Beloved, who are Christians who have put their faith in  Jesus. He wrote in the beginning of his gospel that to those who believed in him, he gave the power to become children of God. To those who received Him, He  gave the power to become children of God. Everybody is a creature of God.  Everybody is a potential child of God. God wants everybody to receive Him and  allow Him to adopt us into the family, but God has given us free will, so 

everybody does not some people reject God and never become children of God. So God is a father, and those who believe in him are his children, his family. God is a Father and the church is his family. Why did God invent church? Church  didn't just spring up. It was God's idea. God guiding the people through the Holy  Spirit. Who received the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, started coming  together in certain ways, and we'll be looking at those further. Why did God do  that? Why did God create this family that we call church? What is the most basic essential characteristic of God that the Bible tells us. The Bible describes him  using a number of adjectives. He is wise, he is holy, He is good, but only one  noun that I know of that says God is this, and when you're you're comparing two things with the word is that's like an equal sign. God is love. The Bible says God  is love. Now, love is an interesting thing, because one person, all by themselves, can't love. You have to have somebody to love, something to love. There must  be an object of the love. I think in English class, if I'm remembering  remembering this, right, they call that a transitive verb. When you were using  now love as a verb, it can't exist by itself. It has to relate to somebody else. Love must be shared. In other words, there's no love if there's not something to love  or to be loved. And that tells us, incidentally, something really interesting, if God  is love and love must be shared, then that means God, in God's self, must be  more than one person to share that love, and so the Trinity, Father, Son, Holy  Spirit from eternity, sharing love, an understanding of God that does not  understand God as being three persons in one cannot fit with the statement that  God is Love. God is love, and love must be shared so God from eternity, was  sharing love within the Trinity. But God is infinite. God's love is infinite. God's  love was overflowing. God wanted more to share the love with. And so he  created people. So he created you and me. I believe that's why God created he  might have done it just because he thought it would be fun, but I think he really  did it because it's God's nature as love to share. And so he wanted to share that  love more broadly. And so he created somebody to share the love with. He  created you and me. He created people. But now something else about love, not only must it be shared to really be love. But love is only real if it is free, if it's  forced. If you say to somebody, you better love me, or I'm going to do so and so  forced. Love is not real. Love. God could have forced us. God could have made  us robots with no choice but to love. But would that really be love. You make a  robot. You don't give it any choice. It has to act toward you that way because it  has no it can't act any other way that that would not be fulfilling, that wouldn't be  love. Love wants to be shared. Wants to be reciprocated. Love is only real if it is  free, and that means we have to have free will. We have to have the freedom to  reject and that's what happened in the fall in the Garden of Eden, when Adam  and Eve doubted God's love. They did not respond to the devil's temptations by  saying the serpent's temptations by saying, No God would God loves us too  much. He would not have given us the commandment, if it wasn't the best thing 

for us, the serpent tempted them to doubt God's love and to believe God was  only protecting himself. Serpent said, No, if you eat that tree, you'll be like God.  The implication God doesn't want anybody else to be like him. He's trying to  hold you down. They could only have believed that if they doubted God's love,  and so they freely chose to doubt God's love, to reject God's love, in that sense,  and buy what the devil was selling. And God experienced the heartbreak of a  father whose children turn against him and get lost in the world. Some of you  may be parents who whose children have done that. You know what I'm talking  about. Some of you may be children who put your parents through that before  you came back to the Lord who came to the Lord God experienced the  heartbreak of a father whose children turn against him and get lost in the world  that happened in the third chapter of Genesis in the Bible, the whole rest of the  Bible, except for the last couple chapters of Revelation, that describe what it's  going To be like when it all comes back together. All the rest of it is God's love  describing what God has done to get people to use their free will to come back  to him. He started off working with the whole world, and that didn't work, all of  Adam and Eve's descendants and so on. Just everything got totally messed up  to the point where there was only Noah and his family left. And so God started  over, wiped them all out, started over with Noah and his family. It same thing  happened again. Started off these godly parents who knew God and had lived  through all of this and somehow drifted away. And so God divided him up. He  said, This is not working. Working with the whole world all together. I'm going to  divide them up and work with just one small group, one family, so Tower of  Babel, different languages. They were different places. God says. I'll just start  with one family that will grow into a nation to demonstrate my love, to  demonstrate how good it is to trust me and to follow me, and that way all the  rest of the world maybe will be drawn back. And so, of course, that was  Abraham and his children, the children of Israel. And now it's the church, our  jobs, all people of Jewish or non Jewish descent who put their faith in Jesus.  Now we are the family of God, the children of God, experiencing and  demonstrating his love to the world. God is love. He wanted to share love, so he created a family and became the father. Relates to us His creation as a father,  adopted father of all who will will put their faith in Him. Now, where does the  father want to live? Father? A loving father doesn't want to live off someplace  else, some big mansion, some Castle in the Sky while all the children are  struggling along some down elsewhere, a father has to live with his children.  God's desire is to live among his people, as a father lives among his children. I  heard a loud shout from the throne saying, Look, God's home is now among his  people. How did that get small? That's supposed to be very good. There we go.  Look, God's home is now among his people. He will live with them, and they will  be his people. God himself will be with them. This is from Revelation 21 the next to last chapter from the Bible. This is after. It's all worked out, after, after the 

struggle is over, after God has won. This is the way God wants it to be. And the  way God wants it to be is to have his home among his people, to live with his  people. God himself will be with them. So three purposes for the church, for  God's people, and we'll be looking at these in a little more detail as we go along. The three purposes God had in mind when he created his people and when he  invented Church, the purpose, the first purpose, of church, is to be to create and become and be that loving family home for God. God wants to dwell among his  people, and so we need to be that loving family that if you can picture God as  the Father who's been out at work and he wants to come home and he wants to  sit down and wants to rest and relax and be among his children, that's what  church ought to be like when we worship, when we invite God to to come, to  make himself comfortable. We'll be talking about that next time. But the church  is also not just to be God's children. The church is to raise God's children.  Picture a family with lots of children, and the older children help raise the  younger children. The older children have grown up. They're in the process of  growing and becoming like their father. And when I say all of this, I'm not in any  way discounting the role of mothers. But, and there are some who would say the Holy Spirit kind of is in the role of the mother, and they're there this and that  about that. So I don't want to go into that. But God the Father. God, the parent,  creating the loving family home and the older children, raising the younger  children, the males and the females, to grow up into the full image of God who  created them in his image, male and female, He created them. So the church is  to create a loving family home for God to raise God's children in the way that he  wants them to be, to carry on the family name, the family characteristics, and to  bring other people, to invite other people, because unlike any other family on  earth, God love is infinite. His resources are infinite. He wants everybody he  created, I'm knocked over my water bottle. He wants everybody he created to  come into the family, to be adopted, to be a part of that. So first, purpose, create  a loving family home for God. Second, raise God's children to be what God  created us to be. Third, bring everybody else into the family so they can be what God created them to be. Everything we do as a local church, in fact, everything  we do as Christians should contribute to fulfilling one or more of these three  purposes. If you're doing something that doesn't contribute to this, then maybe  you ought to rethink whether you ought to be doing it, because this is what it's all about. Thank you, God, bless you, see you next time you.