Father Revealed Through Jesus

The FIRE Values

This month we’re sharing on the values of our church, on what we believe and why we believe it. There’s what we call the FIRE values, and I’m not going to do the entire introduction, because Jonathan is going to do the rest of the introduction on this particular topic.

Good morning. How many people know that we, The River Community Church, are part of a network of churches called Harvest Alliance? It’s not something you see all the time. It’s not a very visible part of our day-to-day here, but it is very much something that Alf and Pam have been involved with for a really long time. Our lead team sends some people every year to South Carolina to meet up with other church leaders that are involved in Harvest Alliance. It’s something we really value. They’re extended family to us, and sometimes when they’re around, they drop in.

As John mentioned, we have the FIRE values, and we’re going to go through these over four weeks, one value each week. It’s an acronym. The F stands for the Father revealed through Jesus Christ, and we’re going to be talking about that today. So I won’t give you the bird’s eye view on it.

The I is for intimacy. We don’t believe in a dry religion where you just go do stuff. We believe in an intimate relationship with the Father, with Jesus, with the Holy Spirit, where you can hear their voice inside of you. You can feel their love and experience them for yourself. It’s a personal, intimate relationship.

The R is for restoration. Jesus came to reverse the curse, to bring us back to God’s intended design, to bring creation and to bring us as his sons and daughters all back to that design. There’s a lot of restoration that needs to happen, so we believe in all kinds of restoration: physical healing, emotional healing, spiritual and soul healing, you name it. We believe God’s power is there for that, and he intends to accomplish it through his people.

The E is for extending the kingdom. I often think of this as equipping too, because it’s related. When you come into an intimate relationship with your Father and you begin to see your own life being restored, what do you want to do? You want to share that with other people. You want to invite other people into that same experience. So we extend the kingdom, and that has practical implications. We talk about how to prophesy, how to pray for healing, how to do the work of the kingdom. That’s where we’re going over the next four weeks. Today we get to talk about the Father revealed through Jesus Christ.

God Revealed in Many Ways

It’s interesting, if you go all the way back and go through the Bible, God begins revealing himself in different ways. He reveals himself as God Almighty, as Yahweh, the Lord, the Lord who heals you, the Lord who provides. There are very deep revelations in all of these names of God. He did call Israel his son as a nation back in the Old Testament, referring to them as “my son Israel.” But Israel did not have a revelation of God as their personal Father. God saved that revelation to be revealed through his Son, Jesus Christ.

So as you go through history, he keeps on revealing different aspects of who he is, and the aspect that Jesus got to reveal was Father. God is Father. The Israelites didn’t have a grasp of him as Father. They had a grid for serving him as God, as someone to serve. They had the whole sacrifice system and everything, but they didn’t know him as one would know their father.

Show Us the Father

In John 14, Philip says, “Show us the Father.” He’s starting to see that it would be amazing to know God as our Father. I’m going to read that, John 14 from verse 6.

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him.” Philip said to Him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is sufficient for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father in Me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on My own authority; but the Father who dwells in Me does the works. Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father in Me, or else believe Me for the sake of the works themselves.”

So what’s he saying here? First off, Jesus is saying that he’s the way to what? To the Father. The Father is the destination. Nobody can come to the Father except through Jesus Christ. Then he goes on and says that if you have seen me, if you have known me, then you have known the Father. That is an incredible statement. If John were to tell me that he has a friend, and say, “By the way, I act like him and talk like him,” I might learn a little bit about John’s friend, but I wouldn’t know his friend. I wouldn’t know how he would think about me, how he would respond in certain situations, or how he might act in a random situation. I wouldn’t know that, because John is not a perfect representation of whoever that person is.

So it’s very incredible that Jesus was able to say that if you have known him, you have known the Father. It carries so much in that statement. It tells us that if we can see Jesus and understand how he acts, it literally tells us how the Father will respond in every situation. What the Father thinks about you in every situation, how he will speak to you in every situation. And Jesus doesn’t appeal to his own authority either. He says, if you don’t believe me, then look at all these miracles I’ve been doing. That’s the Father doing them through me.

Eyes, Ears, and Heart

So how was Jesus able to represent the Father so perfectly? In Deuteronomy it talks about a matter being established by two or three witnesses. I’m sure you’ve all experienced this. You hear one person’s point of view and you think, “Oh, yeah.” Then somebody else comes along and you think, “Okay, there’s a broader picture here.” Then a third person jumps in with another point of view, and all of a sudden you get a very deep understanding of what’s going on. You have dimension, you have context, all kinds of stuff.

Well, we actually have three different aspects of how Jesus aimed himself at the Father. In John 5:19, Jesus says, “I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner.” So he’s telling us that he is always watching what the Father is doing with the eyes of his heart. His eyes are set on the Father.

Then in John 8:28, Jesus says, “I do nothing of Myself; but as My Father taught Me, I speak these things.” So we learn that his ear is always attuned to the Father, and whatever the Father teaches him, that’s what he speaks.

And then in John 6:38 it says, “For I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me.” So we learn that Jesus’ heart, his will, was centered on the Father as well.

His eyes, his ears, and his heart: that gives you a very rich understanding of how Jesus positioned himself toward the Father. He didn’t save off a little part and say, “On Saturday afternoons, that’s my me time.” No, this was 100%.

From the Father and Back to the Father

He was also very clear about where he came from and where he was going. In John 16:28 he says, “I came forth from the Father and have come into the world. Again, I leave the world and go to the Father.” Jesus started off with the Father and came down to earth. He had his mission on earth, and while he was here, his hearing, his seeing, his heart, everything was pointed 100% at the Father. He came to reveal the Father to us, and when his mission was complete, he went back to the Father. The Father is central to that entire mission.

1 Corinthians 15:24 says, “Then comes the end, when He delivers the kingdom to God the Father, when He puts an end to all rule and all authority and power. For He must reign till He has put all enemies under His feet. The last enemy that will be destroyed is death. For ‘He has put all things under His feet.’ But when He says ‘all things are put under Him,’ it is evident that He who put all things under Him is excepted. Now when all things are made subject to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subject to Him who put all things under Him, that God may be all in all.”

That’s a little bit tricky to follow, because there are a lot of “he” and “him” going on and it’s referring to two different people. But in a nutshell, Paul is saying that God the Father has put all things under Jesus’ feet. Jesus is the Son, and when that is accomplished, Jesus will in turn take all things and hand them back to the Father, that God may be all in all. That is the story arc of all of history.

James Jordan said that if you had to put the whole Bible in a nutshell, you could explain it as the story of a father who lost his kids in the garden, and of a Son who came to return us to the Father. That’s the story arc of all of history. It’s very simple. It’s clear.

Nothing Hidden

One thing that struck me about Jesus: over the years I’ve looked into various other religions every now and then, just a little bit to learn about them. There are these so-called mystery religions, and they’ve got all these layers of so-called truths. When you sign up, you learn one thing, and as you get a little bit deeper, they say, “Actually, we’ll give you a cooler truth.” Then you start progressing and you think you’re getting better and better. You get to a certain point and you think, “Those guys on the outside, they don’t know what’s going on. I know what’s going on.” You keep going, they’ve got dozens of layers, and by the time you get deep in, it’s totally different from what’s on the outside.

But Jesus said, “I spoke openly to the world… and in secret I have said nothing.” That’s John 18:20. That whole setup of layered secrets is how the world does things. Knowledge puffs up. Knowledge is used as a weapon, or to protect, or for things like that. That’s not how Jesus approached his mission at all. He said, “I spoke openly.” No secrets. Yes, there are deep things of God. There are deep secrets of God. But those things don’t change the core truth.

The amazing thing about Christianity is that the deeper you go into the heart of God, the more precious the primary truth becomes. This simple nutshell I told you, the children returning to the Father: the deeper you go in Christianity, the more precious that becomes to you. It never becomes a secondary thing.

The Same Love

I spoke about John 15:9 in more detail last weekend, but in the Passion Translation, Jesus is talking to his disciples and he says, “I love each of you with the same love that the Father loves me. You must continually let my love nourish your heart.”

This is another incredible statement he makes about himself. Imagine: we know that God is love. How much of that love do you think is pointed at his perfect Son, Jesus Christ? All of it. So Jesus is saying that all the love of God he has received, he in turn passes on to us perfectly. The same love that the Father loves me, I love you. He is the perfect conduit of the Father’s love to you and to me. That means all of God’s love is aimed at each of us. Oceans, more than oceans, universes of love are pointed at each of you. Jesus does not restrict it. He does not distort it. He does not twist it. He does not hinder it in any way. And he’s saying, “Let that love nourish your heart.”

The Father Drawer

When we talk about Father God, sometimes we can get a little bit hung up. People are very comfortable with Jesus. He’s the friend of sinners. He’s non-judgmental. Even the world thinks, “I could probably hang out with Jesus.” He’s not a threatening figure. And the Holy Spirit is the Comforter, the Counselor. Those are good things.

But think of your brain as a chest of drawers. You’ve got a drawer for God. The Israelites had this understanding of God. But as soon as you say Father God, you don’t go to the God drawer. You go to the father drawer. And as soon as you open that father drawer, you find that it’s already filled with a whole pile of stuff from our earthly experiences with fathers. That’s why we can sometimes get a hang-up when we begin to talk about God the Father. Your brain doesn’t know how to separate those things. It has to go into that same drawer, and then it bumps into all the baggage.

That’s why we spend so much time talking about healing up that baggage. We’ve all had imperfect fathering. They might have actually hurt you. They might not have been there for you. They might not have taught you certain things. Whatever it was, we’ve all had imperfect fathering, and those things color our perception of God when we start to think of him as Father God.

Jesus didn’t have that baggage that we do. He came to cut through it and demonstrate to us who Father God truly is.

How Jesus Showed Us the Father

The Israelites had all this history with God. He’d saved them, provided for them, healed them, done all this stuff. But they didn’t have an example of who he was as Father for them personally. So here are four quick things that help demonstrate it.

He delights. Before Jesus even started his ministry, at his baptism, the voice came from heaven. His Father spoke and said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” Jesus hadn’t done a whole pile of stuff yet. He hadn’t done anything at all, and yet God said, “I am pleased with him. This is my beloved Son.” He delights in his children simply because they’re his children. If you’ve had a child of your own, you know: it could be one minute old. That kid has not done anything in the world. Does that change anything? No. You say, “Beloved son, I am pleased.” That’s God the Father’s heart toward us, and it was demonstrated through Jesus.

He runs. Think of the story of the prodigal son. John shared with me a picture he had of the Father recently, where the Father is on the starting blocks, just waiting. The instant you turn your heart, he’s running. That’s what Jesus was demonstrating of the heart of the Father. He’s not a distant, uncaring God. He says, “No, I’m there.” Boom. We can sometimes get into our own shenanigans, but the instant you turn back, he was running for you.

He doesn’t condemn. I think of the story where they brought the woman caught in adultery before Jesus. They got all the people there, and Jesus says, “Which of you who has no sin, cast the first stone.” They all leave, because they’re convicted that they have sin in their hearts. So Jesus is left alone. Why? Because he did not have sin. He didn’t have to leave that circle. By his own words, he could have cast the first stone, and yet he chose not to. That is the heart of the Father. We can get this image of a God who’s just waiting to dish out judgment, and yet when push comes to shove, we find out that he’s there in compassion. He says, “I prefer to extend mercy.” That’s the true heart of the Father that was demonstrated through Jesus.

And he touches. “Then Jesus, moved with compassion, stretched out His hand and touched him,” the leper, “and said to him, ‘I am willing; be cleansed.'” Do you know how leprosy transfers? Through touch. Jesus demonstrated the heart of the Father. Remember, he didn’t do or say anything apart from what he saw his Father doing. So he had a leper there, and most people would say, “If you touch him, you’re going to get leprosy.” But his heart was so moved with compassion that he reached out and touched him and said, “I am willing; be cleansed.” It doesn’t matter how dirty you are, how much mud you’ve been dragged through over the years, how broken you might feel. It does not matter. He is willing, and his heart is moved with compassion. That’s the heart of the Father that is demonstrated through Jesus.

My Father and Your Father

And then he invited us into the relationship he has with his Father. In John 20:17, he has just been raised from the dead. He’s in the garden talking to Mary, and he says, “Do not cling to Me, for I have not yet ascended to My Father; but go to My brethren and say to them, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and to My God and your God.'”

At this point it was accomplished. It was done, and now he was able to say “my Father and your Father.” He was giving us the same relationship that he has with his Father. He’s saying, “Now it’s yours too.” That’s really cool. His Father is now your Father, and that makes you a son or a daughter.

So how do we walk out being a son or a daughter? A lot of times in the church, we can get caught up in performance mode, in doing mode: checking the boxes, serving, doing different things, out of obligation. Jesus didn’t demonstrate that at all. He demonstrated serving through love, which is a totally different motivation. How many of you have ever done something for somebody just to see the smile on their face? No obligation. You just want to make that person truly happy. That’s a valid motivation. Sometimes we get so stuck on “I just have to do this stuff.” Being motivated by love is valid, and it’s far better.

God never gave Jesus a to-do list when he came to earth. Can you imagine? “Okay, you’ve got to go to earth. Do these ten things, and when you’re done, I’ll let you back in.” That’s not how it was. The entire thing was through relationship.

Aim at His Heart, Not His Hand

So our goal is to become an expert at receiving God’s love, as Jesus demonstrated for us in John 15. Nourish your heart on his love. That’s what will grow you and mature you to become a son and a daughter. And aim at his heart, not at his hand.

I think a lot of times in the church, people can get aimed at what God can do for me. “I’m stuck in a jam. God, help. I need this, I need that.” That’s not a bad thing. God cares about that stuff. But if you’re always aimed at his hand and what he can do for you, then you might experience the power of God, you might experience all that, but you’re not going to know why. And you’re not going to be able to flow in the same why that he does. That’s the part that produces a mature son, not just someone who knows how to do this stuff.

We talked a few weeks ago about forgiveness. Forgiveness is something you’re invited into as an aspect of the character of God himself, and you don’t have to do it just because you’re a Christian. His character, his nature, is to forgive. But if you’re just doing it to check a box, you never grow in that character yourself.

So Jesus aimed his eyes, his ears, his will, and his emotions at doing the will of the Father. In Proverbs it says, “My son, if you receive my words, and treasure my commands within you.” Jesus demonstrated that. Whenever the Father would say something, he meditated on it, he treasured it, and it formed who he was. That’s our task as well, because as we treasure God’s words and the things he’s doing, it aligns our hearts with his, and we begin to grow and mature in that same direction.

Romans 8:19: “For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God.” I really like this verse. I think we all want to be mature sons, but you can’t be a mature son if you’re disconnected from your father. You can work for your dad. If your dad had a business, you could go to work for him as an employee, and you could have a great working relationship and all the rest of it. But that relationship does not teach you who he is as a father. It will teach you who he is as a boss. It’s too easy for us to relate to God from a working relationship. If we want to be a mature son, we have to learn to relate to him outside of the work, in a father-son relationship. That’s the only way that sonship will mature in us. You could become a mature servant, a mature slave, a mature whatever. But to become a mature son, you have to relate to God as Father. Yes, God is healer, he’s provider, he’s all those other things, but we mature as sons by knowing him as Father.

The Point of Everything

So the next time someone asks you why we talk about the Father so much, you can say it’s literally the point of everything. Jesus came from heaven, from the Father, and came to earth. While he was on earth, he was wholly positioned to do the will of the Father: eyes, ears, heart, will. He alone was given the ability and the authority to reveal the Father to people, and that’s what he chose to do. He revealed him through his actions, through everything he did. Then he invited us into that same relationship that he has. And then he returned to the Father. One day, when all things are fully put under his feet, he’s going to pull all of history, all of creation, all of everything, and give it back to the Father. The Father is literally the point of everything. Becoming mature sons is literally the point of everything.

So my question to you, as we close, is this: does hearing how Jesus positioned his heart toward the Father stir a hunger in you to do the same thing, to walk the same way that he did? This morning during worship, I sensed there was that hunger in the room. I believe that’s something God wants to increase in this place. So let’s pray.

Father, thank you for sending your Son, Jesus Christ. Thank you that he showed us who you are as a Father, that he demonstrated your love, your character, your heart toward us, your thoughts toward us, your actions toward us. Thank you that you have called us your sons and daughters, and that we can relate to you intimately and personally. We can hear your voice speaking to us. We can experience your love in our hearts. Thank you for these things, Father. Would you grow that heart of a son and of a daughter in each one of us, that we can learn to love your character and your nature and to value things the way that you do, that we can fulfill your plan and become mature, and look more like you. In Jesus’ name, amen.