Online Service / Oct. 3, 2021

good morning church on the hill community those of you watching online we're glad to have you with us this morning hey this morning we have a guest speaker by the name of tj gilroy he's an author and the speaker and he's going to be sharing this morning out of a book that he wrote called father fracture the thrust of the book is how our relationship with our earthly father affects our relationship with our heavenly father and so i want to invite you this morning to tune in to just settle down and focus and see what god your heavenly father might say to you through our speaker this morning well i want to thank pastor bruce for that introduction and i'm just going to jump right into things so um i'm really more of a teacher than a pastor as you're going to learn as we go through this so i'm going to use some slides to help represent things visually as well as listening to me talk so the first thing i want to hit you with is most of us are not the person god created to be why is that well part of it's because we go through life thinking it's a struggle we struggle with our kids we struggle with money we struggle with our relationships we might struggle with our careers with money and if you got really honest sometimes you would have to admit you struggle with god and it's like if only i had some kind of a superpower to help me with these battles i'm facing all the time well you do but why don't you find those you know if if you've heard that you're a child of god well then an heir as well and if you're an heir of the king of the universe with all the power and assets and things that he has at his disposal are you really living like the son or daughter of the king of the universe and you know a lot of people would just have to say no i'm really not well why is that well first off i want to tell you who this tj guy is who's talking to you today i'm not a pastor i'm not an evangelist i'm definitely not a psychologist and i'm not really here to sell you something in case and just in case maybe you want to get a book at the end of the uh the presentation because this is hitting a soft subject for you then i might encourage you to do that but that's about it so my background is i'm a former marine officer um i'm self-employed and i really like my boss and actually she's not here right now that's my wife in case you're wondering um but really like you i'm a spirit-filled christian who god gave a message to and this really isn't the message this is the foundation of the message you know a lot of people today would say that we're in a time with some serious truscious trust issues and um there's a really awesome cartoon that i put up here that i found that has to do with moses having a conversation with god about could you maybe sign these because people don't trust me well fortunately moses isn't around right now but if he was he might have those kinds of issues to have to deal with but you know a lot of us today if you stop and you think about what proverbs has to say about trust where in proverbs 3 verse 5 it says that we have to trust in the lord with all of our heart and lean not on our own understanding can you really say that you do that do you really trust god a hundred percent with all of your heart i think most of us at least i would have to say i can't really confess that i trust god a hundred percent i don't i know i should i want to but i don't well why is that part of it has to do with the relationship you had with your father can you say honestly that you trust your dad a hundred percent with everything now some of you right now are thinking yes i love my dad my dad loves me i can trust him 100 some of you are thinking i never knew my dad so i have no idea what you're talking about some of you did not have a good relationship with your dad and you'd fill in the blank blank no i wouldn't trust my dad as far as i could throw him so can you see how some of this may have some beginnings in a relationship with your father i read a little while ago that to to really make a point come home you need to have one big idea that you're trying to press through here so part of the the one big idea i'm trying to impress upon everybody as i talk a little bit today is that a lot of us have this nagging feeling somewhere deep in our soul that something is missing we may not know exactly what that something is but there's definitely something that's off so my big one idea that i have for you today is if you did not receive the unconditional love protection provision and those sorts of things from a father an earthly father you don't know what you're missing and you probably are going to struggle to trust god or anyone else for that matter because that's missing in your life so the subject today is father fracture and um father fracture is a tough subject to talk about it's um it can definitely rip off some scabs that you may not really even want to go to go there with but what i would tell you is when when i'm talking about father fracture i'm not talking about you having to feel guilty about being a parent i'm not trying to um make you feel guilty about anything i'm not trying to get into issues about how important men are versus women i'm not trying to delve into issues of um trying to be a better dad that's not what i'm talking about today today's talk when it comes to father fracture has to do with your very identity how did your dad affect your identity and he did in one way shape or form so what i'm really all about is a message that i think the lord gave me which is that everybody everybody has a special gift and employing that gift is your purpose and you're never really going to make the big difference in life that you want to make until you employ your gift and a purpose but you can't find those you can't find your gift you can't find your purpose if you don't really know who you are and you're not going to know who you are until you deal with this basic issue that i call a father fracture i think it's the biggest reason people never find their gift never find their purpose it's called father fracture so i was in a church in the chicago area and our pastor in the middle of a sermon started talking about this whole idea and in the middle of the sermon he says you get your identity from your father i almost fell out of my chair um and my wife definitely fell out of her chair because for her she had a huge father fracture she didn't know what it was we had never heard it called that before so it really impacted her but for me what it did was it filled in a blank that i had been looking for why people weren't looking for purpose why they didn't know their gift why they didn't really know themselves and it had to do with this whole thing about father fracture so if you're following along on the slides here whenever i bring this whole subject up of you get your identity from your father this is kind of the reaction i get from people it's like a bomb went off so it's it's usually not a good reaction when i bring that up now if you had a good one because you had a great dad good for you but just realize that's no longer normal so a little warning here the father fracture issue that i'm going to chat about right now is very personal and it's very sensitive but it's a message that can absolutely set you free and it's not just for men this is about both men and for women in fact if you take a look at the book father fracture you'll notice in there it says with mary gilroy so my wife put comments all throughout the book because her perspective from a woman's side of you is um absolutely fundamental to this whole thing so again it's not a guy issue both men and women have been affected by their fathers and their identities are definitely affected by it so what exactly is a father fracture father fracture is if you've had or currently have a bad relationship or no relationship with your dad that leads to having a really difficult time having a good relationship or any relationship with god the father there's a lot of aspects to this issue and i kind of touched on some of them before but i'm not addressing the idea of how to be a better father i'm not helping you to try to figure out how to fix your dad that's not the issue the issue again that i'm really dealing with today is how that relationship has affected your personal identity because once you get that right then finding your gift and your purpose becomes so much easier okay so the whole subject of father is all throughout the new testament in fact what did jesus call god he didn't just call him father but he called him abba and abba there's no great transliteration between aramaic which is abba into english but it kind of has a connotation of a very familiar loving relationship with your dad maybe like daddy or papa or something like that so jesus was talking about god the father in a very intimate term and he did that for a very specific reason why do you think that was well it's because he needed to get that point across that that's how close you were supposed to be with your father but you know today for most people father doesn't necessarily mean love for a lot of people you say the word father and the first thing that comes into their mind is abandonment or maybe abuse or definitely mistrust they can't relate to god the father in any loving sort of way because they've never seen that in their own lives so when you say god the father a lot of people tune out they probably don't have a problem with jesus or the holy spirit but again when they when you say father it just doesn't compute so um part of what i discovered on this whole subject came from a book by a guy named david blankenhorn and he wrote a book called fatherless america in 1995 and part of the stuff that david discovered is it's only gotten worse it's not gotten better and to sort of drive this point home i just want to read something to you from what david blankenhorn said so forgive me for reading but this is this is kind of important tonight about 40 percent of american children will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live before they reach the age of 18 more than half of our nation's children are likely to spend at least a significant portion of their childhoods living apart from their fathers never before in this country have so many children been voluntarily abandoned by their fathers the united states will be a nation divided into two groups separate and unequal the two groups will work in the same economy speak the same language and remember the same national history but they will fundamentally have divergent lives one group will receive benefits physiological social economic educational and moral that are denied to the other group the problem the primary fault line dividing these two groups will not be race religion class education or gender it will be patrimony one group will consist of those adults who grew up with the daily presence and provisions of fathers the other group will consist of those who did not by the early years of the next century which would have been the year 2000 the two groups will be the same size how prophetic that was 1995 and that's exactly where we're living today so let me just give you some statistics that have been updated from david blankenhorn's day till to today 24 of children lived in father absent homes in the year 2019. that's according to pew research solo motherhood is now common 56 percent of black moms 26 percent of hispanic moms 17 of white moms and 9 percent of asian moms are solo mothers percent of all children will live in a single parent home at some time before they reach the age eighteen forty-one percent of u.s children were born to never married parents and half of all children living with single mothers are in poverty that's five times higher than children living with both parents children of single-parent homes are two times more likely to become obese those are horrible statistics so having said that what i want to do right now is kind of walk you through some of the different indicators that you might have a father fracture and as i'm reading through this any one of these can be devastating to you so it doesn't mean you have to have all of them checked off just one of these could have had a huge impact on your identity so here we go you never knew who your father was maybe he abandoned your family or he died when you were young your father was in the home but not there for you your father never played or roughed house with you the the whole idea of your dad playing with you has massive impacts on you your parents divorced your father never or rarely rarely told you that he loved you maybe he hugged you or kissed you or somehow another communicated to you that he loved you you felt that you had to earn his approval his affection or his love your father never corrected you your mother didn't respect your father now some of you might be thinking what does how my mom looked at my dad have to do with a father fracture and i would tell you everything you have feelings of insecurity or you had feelings of insecurity as a child you were physically or emotionally abused and you know i shouldn't have to say that because it's really obvious but some of you honestly need to hear that you're promiscuous either as a guy or a gal you're always angry you have gender issues gender issues always stem from a father fracture you feel offended you find it difficult to admit your weaknesses to anybody and here's the big two you lack confidence and you find it really difficult to trust anyone so those are indicators okay so again you don't have to have all of them you don't have to have most of them one of them will do so root causes that the the father fracture is the root cause of there's a bunch of them too so i'm going to cover some of these for you too so if you have any of these and you know you're dealing with these issues the root cause of it is this thing i'm calling father fracture low self-esteem depression you're thinking about suicide loneliness dependence inability to make decisions lack of commitment either to other people like in a relationship or to the job or anything like that poverty for men anger is a huge root cause it causes anger in most guys who are dealing with that issue promiscuity is how it shows up in a lot of women immorality lack of respect disregard for authority into the law low productivity and again the two biggies these are root causes father fracture is the root cause of these lack of trust and lack of confidence so um i i was reading through some stuff and watching some youtubes by a guy named miles monroe and he said something that just really caught me and i thought it was important to share with you here you don't know what wrong is until right is defined most people have no idea that they have a father fracture issue because they've never seen what right looks like so what does right look like what does a real honest-to-goodness good relationship with your dad what's it supposed to look like so they've never experienced an unconditional love from their dad they have no idea what they've been missing and they don't know how much better their relationship with god the father could be because they just have nothing to base that on so a couple of stories just to reiterate this point a friend of mine who was a high d personality which means he was a dominant directing leader kind of a person who also happened to be a pastor he and i were talking and we were initially talking about the different types of personalities and i just kind of described some of his personality traits and then part of the discussion because i was just starting to learn about this father fracture issue i asked him i said so how was your relationship with your dad he said oh man i had a great relationship with my dad so i was just sort of curious because it didn't really sound like that and i said so your dad hugged you told you how proud he was of you and told you he loved you and stuff like that and he goes oh no i didn't have that kind of relationship with my dad which caused me to think well if you had a knight and say this if you had a good relationship with your dad what did you think it was supposed to look like he had no idea he'd never seen it so then um also relating to on the female side i had a co-worker she was a manager and i was i was sort of her manager and um very intelligent lady very i mean she was a math wizard and just left me in the dust with a lot of statistical type stuff that we needed to do and so she had six kids all from different fathers and she wasn't married and she was quote unquote a christian she had no concept that anything was amiss no no idea and i was just and i i had no idea how to even discuss the topic with her i tried a couple of times i could tell it wasn't going to go anywhere but she didn't have any clue that a relationship was with a father was important to her children to her or to her relationship with god so obviously she didn't understand the issues involved either so when i when i talk to people about getting your sense of identity from your father what's it really supposed to look like so here's tj's interpretation of what a good relationship with your father is supposed to look like he's supposed to be your source good word there to remember when you're talking about god your source of protection of provision and of trust so if your dad lacked any one of those three he's not setting a really good example he's supposed to teach you how to play how to take risks and how to empathize with others he's supposed to love you unconditionally where you don't have to perform to get that kind of of love providing you with confidence and who you are and a real sense of worth so that's what right is supposed to look like and most people again have not experienced that so to really sort of drive this point home and this is kind of where i wanted the whole talk to head i put together something called what i call the love triangle and the love triangle starts off with god the father so it doesn't start with you doesn't start with me it all starts with god so the father first thing that he does is he shows you how much he loves you and he does that because he chose to create you yet you could take the rest of your life and just ponder the thought of how much god loved you to choose to create you that's just amazing and if you read um psalm 139 it starts talking about how you're fearfully and wonderfully made and how his thoughts are to you and how how pervasive they are he loves you so much that he chose you where you were born and when you were born he says he know he knows you before you were born um he knew exactly what he was doing when he made you like i said the time and place you can find that in acts he won't leave you or abandon you he wanted you for the object of his love forever and when jesus heard from god that god the father that he was his beloved son in whom he was well pleased had jesus performed any miracles had he done any services that we're aware of to have the father ever tell him that no so honestly my prayer for you out of all of this is that this first part of the love triangle resonates with you that you literally hear god the father tell you you are my beloved child in whom i am well pleased that will change your life so this first section of the love triangle is the most important this is foundational for everything once you've got a good idea of how much god loves you your natural response is to want to love him in return so that's how you're supposed to do it so in fact in john 1 4 18 it says that god loves us first and then we love him back again it's you don't love god back because you want to perform or because you think you're supposed to it's a natural response that just overflows because of how much he loves you but how do you do that how do you show this infinite king of the universe who loved you so much how can you possibly show him how much you love him back it's like what could you possibly do to to show god how much you love him well about the time you start to ask yourself that question you begin to realize that god doesn't just love you like this he loves other people's the same way not more not less he doesn't love you more than somebody or less than somebody else but he loves others just as much as you do i mean just as much as he does so he loves others as much as he loves you that's the second part of the triangle and then um the the third part is the way that you end up showing the father how much you love him is by loving what he loves which is other people so that's the third part of the triangle which is exactly what jesus was telling us and commanding us to do is to love one another as he loved us so that completes the triangle but you know loving others as much as he loved us if you don't have a firm understanding of how much god loves you in the first place which you won't have if you have a father fracture it all starts to fall apart so this whole thing about god loving you you recognizing how much he loves others and then your your natural response is to want to love god by loving others it doesn't flow if you have a father fracture because what happens is that first step the one that goes from the father to you where the father loves you that gets interfered with and it's broken through this thing called a father fracture so the whole thing just starts to fall apart if you don't have that that's what this father fracture is all about so if if something interferes with that very first step the love that god the father has for you the result is there's no trust how can you trust something where it's been interfered with there's no confidence you won't find out what your gift is um you won't know what your purpose is you may get angry you might have confusion in your life and the result of all that is you just sort of drift through life and you just whatever happens happens so how do you heal this the first thing you need to do in healing this father fracture thing is to recognize the fact that you have one you can't fix what you don't know is broken so in the second part of it is to recognize it's okay to be who you really are you don't have to fake it you don't have to prove something to anybody you certainly don't have to prove anything to god he knows you better than you know yourself and you don't have to earn your dad's love or approval you don't need to earn your abba's father god love or approval and even if your father blew it your dad your earthly dad your heavenly father doesn't he loves you unconditionally um you can't perform well enough to ever earn anything he has for you and he you don't have to perform at all he loves you even when you don't love him so how do you know again that the father loves you like this well first off he created you he chose the time and place of your birth he gave you your personality and he gave you your gift they're not mistakes he sent his son to restore your relationship with him he gave you your purpose and then he sent the holy spirit to be in you not just with you to help you every step of the way and the beginning i talked about you know wouldn't it be great to have some kind of superpower you do have a superpower you have the power of the holy spirit in you right now to make all this stuff work he gave you the power you need to fulfill your purpose but again if somehow or another that relationship with god the father and you gets fractured all of this falls apart but knowing how much your father loves you should help to start to restore some of this so if if there were some takeaways and hours in your shoes and there were some takeaways i'd be looking to get from this it would be that the father fracture actually blinds people to his goodness if you can't trust your dad who do you trust so in in romans it says that it's the goodness of god that leads people to him so this whole subject of father fracture is fundamental to that so who did god create you to be think about that who did he create you to be how has your father fracture and you have one i mean we all do to some degree how has that affected your image of yourself how has it kept you from knowing the desire of your heart and the one that god put there not the one that you made up for yourself how has that kept you from finding the desire of your heart how's it kept you from discovering the gift that he gave you the one that you're supposed to use to overcome this world for his kingdom all of those are important issues and again they stem from this father fracture issue so the good news is that he's the father to the fatherless and we know that all things work together to good to those who love god which is part of what we're just discussing and to those who are called to his purpose so those are that's great news for you who believe and are trying to figure this stuff out that's great news final thought for you on all this um i think a lot of people today would it one way or another would be able to say that we're approaching or we're in the last days and last days can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people so just however you take that that's fine but what's interesting is the very last scripture in the old testament has a prophecy about the second coming of jesus so i put two different scripture passages up here one is the translation from the esv version and the other ones from the net version just to give you two different flavors for the same verse so malachi 4 verse 5 and the esv version says behold i will send you elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the lord comes and great and awesome day of the lord that's code words for the second coming and he will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers lest they come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction so this verse talks about something's tied to the second coming where the hearts of the fathers will be turned back to their children and the hearts of the children will be turned back to their fathers so that's one interpretation powerful so and the the second translation is from the net so again malachi 4 verse 5 says look i will send you elijah the prophet before the great and terrible day of the lord and again that's that's old testament code for the second coming and he will encourage fathers and their children to return to me so that i will not come and strike the earth with judgment so regardless of which translation you prefer and regardless of how you interpret the the second coming unfolding it's obvious that what the the prophet was talking about was the need for fathers and sons to reunite and how important that was in reconnecting mankind with god the father so that's pretty much what i had to share with you um it's been a pleasure speaking with you and i know now pastor bruce has some some concluding remarks that i think he will do an awesome job tying this all together thank you you know when jesus was getting ready to leave his disciples philip said lord show us the father and jesus said philip have i been with you this long he said he that has seen me has seen the father what jesus was saying there is that he was the exact representation he came representing this god of the old testament but now it was this god who walked among us this god that the writer john would say our hands have handled our ears have heard our eyes have seen we want to invite you as you go into the week to just contemplate what you heard this morning and that maybe your heavenly father is different than you've imagined him to be maybe he's more present than you thought maybe he has an opinion about what has happened to you but listen your heavenly father sent his son jesus to be the flesh to represent him on the earth and jesus said listen my peace i give to you my peace i leave with you in the world you're going to have tribulation but listen i've overcome the world you have a heavenly father who's on your side [Music] you

Channel: COTH

Views: 293

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Keywords: church on the hill, coth, community, jesus, christ, bible, sermon, bruce stefanik, jason treadwell, gospel

Id: Bf7DC2ILEBU

Length: 32min 39sec (1959 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 03 2021