First Christian Church, Corpus Christi, Texas

Here we are on Father’s Day. I don’t know about you, but I find Father’s Day difficult. It’s not because I have unresolved family-of-origin issues with which to deal. I was blessed with a fine father. And it is not because I don’t enjoy being a dad. No, I find it difficult because it’s hard to know what to get dear old dad for Father’s Day.

Mom is easy. A sweater, candy or even a knickknack for the house will be greeted with joy. Of course, if all else fails there’s always flowers—thank you FTD. But Dad’s different—and the ads around this time of year reflect it. Oh, we get our share of shirts and ties, but most focus on more manly gifts—power tools, gas grills, sporting goods. But even that is a problem. How many gas grills does one man need? And what do you do after you buy the drill, saw and sander? And how many golf balls can any one human being use?

All of this leaves me, and maybe some of you, wondering: “How do we express our love and gratitude to Dad?”

I’m not sure we feel it as intensely, but we face the same question when it comes to God. “How do we express our love and gratitude to the Father?”

We are God’s children. The Apostle Paul tells us that one of the blessings of the Holy Spirit is that it confirms our adoption as children of God. When we confess our faith in Jesus Christ, when we recognize and embrace him as Lord and Savior, the Holy Spirit comes to each of us and establishes our relationship with God. We become God’s children. We are adopted into God’s family. Paul says that it is confirmed in the fact that we cry, “Abba, Father.”

We may take for granted the image of God as Father. Every week we pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven...." Of course, we have deep in our DNA the parable of the prodigal son, the one whose father waits for him to return, rushes out to meet him, welcomes him home not as a slave but as the full-fledged member of the household. We know that it is a picture of God. Yet our familiarity with the image of God as Father shouldn’t keep us from recognizing how radical that notion is.

Biblical scholar Joseph Fitzmyer points out that in the Old Testament, God elected the people of Israel to be God’s people. They were selected from the rest of the peoples of the earth, chosen the way a Little League coach might select a baseball team. God loves them, even refers to them as his “firstborn,” but they are always the “people” of God. There is always a sense of distance or separation. It is what people sense when they talk about the God of the Old Testament being one of judgment. Because they are only elected, there is a sense of fear in the people of Israel, a distance in the relationship that suggests God will sometime change his mind and cut them loose. But in the New Testament, Christians become the “adopted children” of God. We are, as Fitzmyer says, “taken into the very [family] of God’s household. Through faith and baptism [we] have been adopted into filial relationship with Jesus Christ as brother and with God as Father.”

The difference is significant. God is no longer “God.” God is “Abba, Daddy, Father.” The relationship is no longer that of servant to master, it is son or daughter to parent. The life we live is not one in which we are compelled by fear but one of freedom. Because we are children of God, because we have the Spirit to confirm our adoption, we know that God loves us, forgives us, plans the very best for us.

How do we express our love and gratitude to a Father like that, to not just “a” Father but “the” Father, our Abba?

The Apostle Paul’s answer is simple. The best way to show God we love him is to live for him. That is, it is to live a life that honors him--one that is not driven by what he calls “the flesh,” by our self-centeredness, personal desires, wants and needs, but one that is led by the Spirit, one that seeks to live as God has revealed life to be lived.

I like the way C.E.B. Cranfield puts it. He says that to call God Father “with full sincerity and seriousness will involve seeking wholeheartedly to be and think and say and do that which is pleasing to him and to avoid everything which displeases him.”

How can we express our love and gratitude to the Father?

We can live lives that honor him.

There are obvious examples.

Jesus comes to mind, of course. At his baptism, God declared, you are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. Jesus had lived to that point a life pleasing to God. And he would continue to do so. The same affirmation was offered when Jesus took Peter, James and John up the mountain and was transfigured before them. In the garden, when Jesus had a chance to honor God or surrender to his fear, he honored God by seeking not his will but the will of the Father. And even on the cross, when he wondered out loud if God had forsaken him, he refused to give in to his own desires and in the end honored God even in his death. As the author of Philippians wrote years later, Jesus:

humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend....and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of the Father.

Jesus expressed his love and gratitude to his father by living in such a way as to honor him.

The Book of Acts recounts an incident in the early church when Peter and John were dragged before the religious leadership of the day. They were warned never to again proclaim Jesus as the Christ, the one sent by God to redeem the world. Certainly they had reason to heed that warning. Fear for their life was reasonable. Yet how did they respond? They told the leaders: “Whether it is right in God’s sight to listen to you rather than God, you must judge; for we cannot keep from speaking about what we have seen and heard.” In short, they kept preaching Christ because that was what honored the Father, that was what expressed love and gratitude for him.

Think of those you most admire for their faith. Maybe it was Oliver Harrison, Jim Oglesby or John Long. Maybe it was an elder here or a Sunday School teacher in the church in which you grew up. Maybe it was a parent or a friend. Whoever it was, wasn’t it the manner of his or her life that was so admirable? Wasn’t it through the way in which they lived that they expressed their love and gratitude to their Father?

Of course, there is no formula for expressing such gratitude. Living lives that honor God cannot be reduced to attending church this many times a year or giving that much money to charity or reading so many books of the Bible—although all of those may help. Neither can such a life be simply reduced to avoiding certain behaviors like lying or infidelity or theft—although such behaviors do indeed dishonor God. No, it calls for more. Such a life, Cranfield said, means “seeking wholeheartedly—[note that all- important word]--to be and think and say and do that which is pleasing to him and to avoid everything which displeases him.” It is to live in such a way—in our homes, in our community, where we work, where we play--that at any given moment the Father can look at us and say with pride, “That’s my boy; that’s my girl.”

When we live in such a way, we give the Father who adopted us as his own children, the greatest gift we can give. Every day we do that is Father’s Day—a day we say, “Thank you, Father. Thank you, Abba.”