It redefines what it is to be called a Christian. It's not just a going to church on Sundays. It's not just a going and hearing a band play. It's a daily realigning of our hearts. It's a daily realigning of what we say we believe. It's something that we do.
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Following literally only happens when you move. If you don't move, you're literally just standing still. So in order to call yourself a Jesus follower, you have to follow his lead and follow where he walks forward.
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Loving others is the evidence that we're actually following Jesus. Jesus said, a new command I give you, that you would love one another as I have loved you. And then he later says, you are to love one another, and by this all men will know that you are my disciples. Without that, it doesn't really work.
[00:07:13]
I've learned a few things over the years. Even before I had kids, I started seeing things in a little bit different light. And here's what I've learned. One big, bold mistake in culture. We have a flawed understanding of what fatherhood is. In our culture, we see fatherhood as someone...who helps to conceive a child, and that's where it ends. That's fatherhood. Fatherhood goes well beyond that.
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What a father actually looks like is way different than what our culture has taught us a father is supposed to look like. And even churches, even this church, even I've made it too one -dimensional. Because in church world, what do we typically say a father's responsibility is? It's your responsibility to talk about Jesus in the home and to teach your children to love God. And that's where we stop. But it goes way beyond that. That's just a small part of it.
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How does a man of God act as a father? That's the question. That's what we have to dive down and dig down into.
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Blessed is the man who fears the Lord, who greatly delights in his commandments. Right off the bat, we jump into this like, okay. A blessed man is a man who fears the Lord and greatly delights in his commands.
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A blessed man is the man who uses everything about who God is. He reads the commands, he reads the scriptures, he saturates himself in what God is saying and what the scriptures teach that we're supposed to be day by day.
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Greatly blessed is the man who goes above and gorges himself on the word of God. That's what a blessed man looks like.
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When you pour in and you are gorging yourself on the Word of God and you're gorging yourself trying to figure out who God has called you to be and you're becoming that godly man, the darkness can't be around you because you are so inundated by the Spirit of God that when you walk into a room people can't help but take notice. There's something different about that guy.
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Be generous with what God has blessed you with because when you are generous with those things, it allows you to be, that's how you begin to be able to show the grace and the mercy of God because we're able to step into a role that other people aren't filling.
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When we live the life that God calls us to live, our legacy is cemented in his grace, his mercy, his generosity. Because we delighted ourselves in him. This is not a look at me, look at me. This is a God, I love you and I have delighted myself in your commandments. I have done, I want so much to be a picture of who you are. That the righteousness of God becomes our legacy. That's what our kids remember. That's what our families remember.
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A man who just saturates himself in the presence of God, and I say this as someone who is still figuring this out, okay? I'm just telling you what the Scripture says. As someone who saturates themselves in the Scripture and understands the promises and understands, really grasps the grace and mercy of God, God, you don't fear the bad news because you begin to trust God.
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The man that just delights himself in God and reaches and chases after God's righteousness, he's not afraid of the bad news because he knows that God is a man. It's his protector, his shield, that God fights his battles for him. And in those moments, he will not be afraid because his heart is steady and locked on to the foundation of the word of God and God's promises.
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When we are living, when we're living out the generosity of God, day by day, it makes people angry. When we are living the example that Jesus calls us to live, it makes people uncomfortable that are in the other camp. It makes them angry. But here's the deal. I love this. He gnashes his teeth and he melts away. Their desires are going to perish. We don't need to concern ourselves with their anger. Because we delight ourselves in the commandments of God.
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If you will live out those first two verses, and you will fear the Lord, you will hold him in his right place, and you will delight yourself in his commandments, do you know what will happen? You'll become the father that God...called you to be. Because what we delight ourselves in, we can't help but talk about.
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When, as dads, okay, so you men in the room that are either dads now or are hoping to be dads in the future, when we live this way, confident in who we are because of what we believe, when we live selflessly, when we live fearlessly, we change the temperature in the room around us.
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It should be godly man, godly home. In the culture we live in now, and this is not a knock against anybody, in the culture we live in now, ladies, you control the temperature in your home because of that statement. Your husband is exhausted and he comes home, and you've had to do, you've worked hard too. How you respond to him will dictate what the temperature in your house is. It will affect the behavior of your children, it will affect the mental health of your children, and it will absolutely affect the strength of your relationship with your wife and everybody else in your home and in your family.
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If you genuinely fear and respect and honor God and you delight yourself fully in his commandments and you saturate yourself with it to the point to where the light of God penetrates into every every single aspect of your home you allow him to work inside of you to build everything up to be a carbon copy of who you you here.he is and to bring you back restored to the relationship that he wanted with you from the beginning. If you do those things, you rewrite the DNA of your family. You've been made new by Jesus. Why shouldn't your family be made new too? Let that sink in for a second.
[00:31:40]
Part of the goal of a father is to create a home steeped in the love of God. I specifically use the word steeped and I'll tell you why. When you make tea on a stovetop and you're using bags, you don't just dip the bag in and then pour it out. That water has to penetrate every molecule of those tea leaves in order to make it tea. Dads, you can't bring your kids to church one time a week and then expect them to understand who God is.
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We as parents need to create that place especially as fathers where when our kids come back home they know what to expect because we're controlling the temperature of our home.
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When God created mankind, he created us out of the dust of the earth. Dust has no DNA. It doesn't. It has mineral makeup, but it doesn't have DNA. When God breathed into us, what if he imparted us with his DNA, the DNA of the sun? Because Scripture says that the sun was there. In the beginning was the word, the word was God, the word was with God. And through him all things were made, and without him nothing was made. He was there. What if when God breathed life into mankind, he imparted it? his DNA into us, just a small part of it, because we were made in his image.
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When we live the life that Jesus calls us to live, we look more and more like our father, because we're made in his image. And if we will love our families, we will love him and keep him in his right place, and we will delight ourselves completely in his commandments, then we allow his DNA to be passed from us to our children.
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If you will delight yourself fully in him, and obey his commands, and take up your cross daily, and deny yourself, and follow him, then the temperature in your house, and in your home, and in your family will be right where it needs to be.
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We've got to take back what godly manhood looks like to where we are living the life that Jesus called to. Listen, we are warriors at heart because we want to protect our families at all costs. We want to fight for our families, but do we set a temperature in our home that lets them know we're willing to do it, but that as long as they're home, there's no fighting that has to happen?
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If you will put him in his right place, and if you will delight yourself in his commandments, everything else will fall into place. Jesus said, seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and then everything else will follow.
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