Steve's Letter: "The Ultimate Parent!"

I've just stopped working on a sermon in order to write you (you're always more important than sermons). What I was writing in the sermon is still on my mind. I wish I had written what follows to you a month ago. Then I could look at your comments and do some "fixing" of the sermon.

But you'll receive this after I preach the sermon and by then it will have been too late. That's the story of my life. I hardly ever learn important lessons until I've done it wrong.

My friend Ray Cortese at Seven Rivers Presbyterian Church in Lecanto, Florida (where I often preach) asked me if I would teach on parenting.

"No problem," I said. "I can do that."

I have a counselor friend who told me that the way we do good parenting is to look at how God our Father parents us and then do it the way he does it. "This is how God does it," I would say in the sermon, "now go out and do your best to do it his way."

I figured it would be an easy sermon to write.

Wrong!

A funny thing happened to me on the way to the sermon. I realized that I'm not God. God's a perfect parent because...uh...well...he's God and he does everything right. I not only realized that I'm not God; I'm not like God and, frankly, don't even come close. He does it right. Sometimes I don't even know what right is. God knows what he's doing and I hardly ever do. God is a perfect Father and I'm a father who has sometimes screwed it up so badly that I can hardly stand it.

If you've followed Key Life for very long, you know that I don't often teach on marriage or parenting. That's because I'm not dead yet and probably still have a good bit of time to continue to screw it up.

If I knew when I was going to die, that week before I would do some wonderful teaching on marriage and parenting. But there is always the possibility that Anna, after all these years, will say to me, "Enough is enough! I'm out of here!" or that our daughters will decide that they can't handle the religious thing anymore and become atheists.

That's not going to happen but, just as I don't want to sell hair restorer, I don't want to teach on marriage or parenting until I'm finished and can't do anymore damage.

With all of that being said, though, our marriage is really good and we have daughters who are secure and faithful Christians. Why is that?

It's my godliness, kindness, wisdom and love, dummy.

Not!

Did you wear one of those "WWJD" (What Would Jesus Do?) bracelets?

That question is from a little book written by Charles Sheldon in 1886, In His Steps. It was considered a part of the "Social Gospel" movement along with guys like Walter Rauschenbusch and others who wanted to make positive changes (a good thing) by exercising a bit of godly ecclesiastical and personal "elbow grease."

I just wanted to impress you with the fact that I know about these things. And also to say that the social gospel movement had the same problem with it as the question about what would Jesus do had, to wit:

We're not Jesus.

Okay, you say, what are you going to do about the sermon? Seems like it isn't going to be one of the truly great sermons in the history of the church. You're just going to tell them that you're not a very good father and say "You think about that"?

Very funny.

Actually, it was my lack that led me to an astounding truth. It is also the reason I'm still here, I'm still married and I have wonderful daughters.

This is the truth:

While I'm not God, he really is my Father and I have access to him. He is totally sufficient for every need I have.

One of the reasons I teach about God's giving us radical freedom, astounding mercy, unconditional love and amazing grace is because it is only as I experience that from my heavenly Father that I have anything to give to my wife, my children, my church, my friends and my enemies.

The secret of living the Christian life is this: Everything I know and do (when I come close to doing it right) I didn't learn at kindergarten, church, college, graduate school, parenting classes, from books or even from my mentors.

Everything I know and do right I experienced from a perfect Father who loved me when I was unlovable, forgave me when I didn't do it right, allowed me the freedom to screw it up without rejecting me, disciplined me without killing me, cut me slack at every point in my life and whose grace has always run downhill to my place at the foot of the mountain that I tried to climb.

And that's how I became the spiritual giant who is writing this to you.

Okay, maybe not that, but it is the only place where I've experienced any degree of sanctification. Paul said in 2 Corinthians 5:14, "For the love of Christ controls us..."

It does.

Do you know what the love of Christ is? Paul answers that question in the same chapter (vs. 17-19): "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation."

So that's the sermon (or something like that...I haven't finished it yet). It's the "message of reconciliation" for fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, friends and Christians of all sorts.

This morning I read in the news that Campbell Gillespie, a man who lives in the UK, became a father. That's no big deal, except for the fact that it wasn't supposed to happen. He had been hit by lightning and told that he was sterile. But on New Year's Eve, he became the proud father of a baby boy, Brogan, who weighed eight pounds and eight ounces.

Cool. Get hit by lightning and become a father.

But it doesn't work that way, does it?

Being a father—and anything else that is of value in living the Christian life—only happens when you're loved. So if you want to be a reasonably good parent, run to him and let him love you even if you're not a reasonably good parent. And please don't forget that the only people who become reasonably good parents are those who know, if they aren't, God their Father will love them anyway.

I had better get back to the sermon.

But he did want me to remind you.

In His Grip,