Open your Bibles to the book
of Luke, chapter 10. I've titled this message, The
Relationship with the Father. I want to discuss relationships
tonight as it pertains to the Bible, to faith, and I hope to
help us see what kind of relationship we have with each other, with
Jesus Christ, and with God. So Luke chapter 10, starting
in verse 21. It says, on that hour, Jesus
rejoiced in the Spirit and said, I thank you, Father, Lord of
heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the
wise and prudent, and revealed them to babes. Even so, father,
for so it seemed good in your sight. All things have been delivered
to me by my father, and no one knows who the son is except the
father, and who the father is except the son, and the one to
whom the son wills to reveal him. Now the Bible describes
believers by, it's like in terms of their relationships with others. That's how it defines them. For
example, it's collectively the bride of Christ. That's the relationship. It's not the bride of anyone
else. The only one to whom the bride or the church is betrothed
is Christ Jesus. That's how they are known, the
bride of Christ. Believers are sometimes likened
as sheep to their great shepherd. No other person is their shepherd.
They don't belong to anybody else. and they don't hear anyone else's
voice because they're his sheep only. And sometimes God refers
to them as the children of Israel. Israel. Because they are descended
from Israel and his twelve sons and grandsons or which is important
to us, because they are his spiritual descendants, Israel's spiritual
descendants. If a person does not have a spiritual
or genealogical connection to Israel, then that person will
not be known by God as a child of Israel. Every person who calls
themselves Christian, desires to have some sort of relationship
with God. The problem is that their idea
of a relationship is not one that God accepts or will even
enter into. That's false Christianity out
there. The Jews in the Old Testament, they made trouble for themselves
by attempting to have a relationship with both God and with man-made
gods. God said they played the harlot.
It says in Jeremiah 2 verses 4 and 5, Hear the word of the
Lord, O house of Jacob, Israel's descendants, and all the families
of the house of Israel. Thus says the Lord, what injustice
have your fathers found in me that you have gone far from me,
have followed idols, and have become idolaters? They were comfortable
worshiping God and Baal. God and Baal. And then they were
you know worshiping just God alone But the problem is God
won't share in the glory. God won't share in the worship
all glory all worship is do him He says in verse 13 of the same
chapter for my people There's the relationship my people have
committed to evil to evils number one is they have forsaken me
the fountain of living waters It says, notice who he is talking
to and who he is not talking to. Verse four is pretty clear. It says, hear the word of the
Lord, O house of Jacob and all the families of the house of
Israel. He's not speaking to the Gentiles. Basically it's
them, it's the Israelites and no one else. That's all he's
speaking to. He's got no relationship with
the Gentiles. He does not know them like he
does the children of Israel. And that word know is full of
meaning when God talks about knowing his people. He knows
the children of Israel, but at this point when he's talking
about them in Jeremiah, he knows that they're wicked and that
they worship man-made gods that do not profit. Now, God is not concerned about
what God the Gentiles forsake. Or in other words, that's not
on His mind. They weren't worshiping Him.
Perhaps some were. But in this instance, He's talking
to the Jews. Now He, God, desires the worship of His people. It
is the relationship between God and worshipers. God and worshippers,
a kind of relationship that works only when the worshippers are
faithful to God. And as we've seen in the Old
Testament and the New Testament, there's not a lot of faithfulness
there. Not on the part of the worshippers. The children of
Israel forsook God and worshipped the Gentile gods, which the God
says is an evil thing to do. Now that relationship failed. God said, you are my people,
and they went off and worshiped someone else. But the Israelites, God says,
committed a second evil. In the second half of verse 13,
it says, and hewn themselves cisterns. This is after he said, you have
forsaken me in the fountain of living waters. They have hewn
themselves cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold no water. In other
words, they forsook the fountain of living waters and created
for themselves cisterns that can't hold any water, any water. Not only did they act unfaithfully
toward God, they were dumb, as foolishness as we would see it.
And of course, you forsake God and foolishness follows. Now,
why does God care if his people are evil anyway? Can't he just
get more? That's a human argument. Can't
he just get more? It's because he chose them. He chose to go
through and spread the word through the Israelites. Those were his
chosen people. He said in Isaiah 41 verse 8,
but you, Israel, are my servant. He wasn't talking to the Gentiles.
He said, you, Israel, are my servant. Jacob, whom I have chosen,
the descendants of Abraham, my friend. He defines his chosen people
through their relationship to Israel, who was once known as
Jacob, the, I think it's ankle grabber, and who was the son
or grandson of God's friend, Abraham. That's how they're defined. That's that relationship. And
as I mentioned earlier, this is not just for the genealogical
descendants of those people. You know, none of us could probably
trace our heritage way back to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It's
for the spiritual descendants as well. And Paul makes this
very clear in Galatians 3. He says, Christ has redeemed
us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us,
for it is written, cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree,
that the blessing of Abraham, the blessing of Abraham might
come upon the Gentiles who could not trace their lineage to Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, might come upon the Gentiles
in Christ Jesus that we might receive the promise of the Spirit
through faith. Spiritual descendants. And those who are the spiritual
descendants of Abraham also received that promise. God will have a
relationship with them too. That promise is found in Christ Jesus. Paul
says now to Abraham and his seed were the promises made, yeah,
were the promises made. And that seed is Christ. Now what is God's relationship
to Christ? Father and son, father and son. What, sorry, who, who
does the father love? The son. Where are all the saints, all
the believers right now? In the Son. And whatever relationship
the Son has with the Father, so do His people. That's the
way it works. We are co-heirs, co-heirs with
Christ. Whatever He has, we have. Now
the Son calls Him God. calls Him Father, but He also
calls Him God. And so, He is also our God. He's also our God. The Lord said in Psalm 50, hear,
O my people, and I will speak, O Israel, and I will testify
against you. I am God, your God, your God. And He declares to the people
who call Him God to call upon Me in the day of trouble. and I will deliver you, and you
shall glorify me." Now, do you know who will call
upon God and He will not answer? Who's the person that will call
upon God and He will not answer? If someone truly calls upon God,
He answers. That's a promise. But some who cry, Lord, Lord,
He will not answer. They're the wicked. They're the
unbelievers. And frankly, they're not calling
upon a God of the Bible. They're calling upon a God of
their own imagination. They have no relationship with
God. They are not his elect. They
are not his people. They are not his children. Now until my parents had me,
I had no relationship with anybody. We're all born relationship-less,
so to speak. And it wasn't until I was born
or conceived that I was known by anyone. The first relationship
I had was with my parents and my older brother, and I was known
by them because I was a member of that family. So that was the
first one. So I was born into that. Now
my granny, my grandmother, was there at my birth, so she knew
me as her grandson. But, you think about it, the
receptionist down the hall in that hospital, what was I to
her? Or him, I don't know who it was.
I had no relationship with that person. I was just another baby. If I came back to that same hospital
20 years later and went up to that receptionist and said, take
care of me, that receptionist would think I'm crazy. She wouldn't
know me from Adam. But there are many types of relationships,
from acquaintances to friends to family, and they all have
varying degrees of closeness. You're closer to your children
than to Jake at the office. And you'll loan money to a friend,
but you may not, you might not give money to a stranger. Because
there's a relationship in one and not with the other. Now you do nice things for people
that are close to you. That are close to you. You know,
I tell this story when Bruce and Jackie didn't even know me
or Sarah, but they put us up for a few nights in the winter
of 2006. But they did that because, I'm
assuming, we were members of a sister church. And that's usually
good enough, you know? It's usually good enough. There
was a relationship there, but of course it grew over time after
we moved here. But as far as closeness goes,
You may do things to a stranger that you wouldn't do to a family
member. You can curse at a stranger, but not at your mom. Now, we treat people nicer, more
politely, the closer they are to us, and that is why it hurts
so much when someone who's close to us treats us badly. In a relationship, a close one
anyway. There's intrinsic trust and that's
a hard thing to make. It's got to be earned and it's
very, very fragile. It's very fragile. And if it's broken, it stains
that relationship. A long time ago when I was a
teenager, one evening I was just hanging out in my room with a
close friend And I had a little hobby back then of collecting
pens. To this day I can't remember
why. I've been trying to figure it out. But I just had a bunch
of pens. I would find some on the road. I would buy one or
two. I just thought they were neat. I had one that was all shiny
black and then it had a swirl of gold at the pointy half. and you would twist that pointy
half and the pen would come out and you could write with it. That felt like somebody, like
a master craftsman had made that because it felt so good. I would
sit there and twist it back and forth, open and close because
it just felt good. It's not like I had a giant pen
collection. I'm not a hoarder. I just had
a few pens and that one was my prized possession. But anyway,
the next morning it was gone. That pen, my favorite pen. And I looked everywhere, under
my bed, to the side of my bed, dresser, floor, whatever, it
wasn't there. And I knew that no one else had been in my room
except me and my close friend. And unless I had misplaced it,
it must have been my friend who took it. So anyway, I confronted
my close friend and he confessed, he took it. I got it back. I couldn't forgive him. I mean,
I tried, but it broke trust. I mean, I implicitly trusted
this person because they were my friend, and you don't do that
to friends. And I wanted to forgive. I wanted everything to go back
to the way it was, but it never felt the same again. He just
didn't. I said all that to say this,
in the Garden of Eden, Adam took something that did not belong
to him. God said, you can have anything
you want in this garden, but that one thing, that's not yours. And by taking it, he ruined the
relationship that he had enjoyed with God. Now God hadn't done
anything to break this relationship. He had created Adam, he'd given
him many good things, he created a suitable companion for him,
and Adam forsook God to eat a piece of fruit. Now it sounds silly, just like
my story's a little bit silly. Why would I get upset over a
pen? It wasn't the pen, and it's not the fruit. It's what was
yours and wasn't yours. Did God do something wrong to
make Adam take the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good
and evil? No. God did nothing wrong. Adam acted on his own and he
broke the relationship with God. Now God's holiness and justice
won't allow, that's the best word I can describe, won't allow
that relationship to continue in that form. In its initial form, there was
no sin in Adam. But after Adam took and ate of
that fruit, it was no longer that same relationship. It had
been broken. The communion Because of God's
holiness, the communion must be broken, lest He utterly destroy
the human race. It was right there. Two people
would have been wiped out unless God had broken off communion.
But, thanks be to God that He desired some to come back to
Him, and chose some to be with Him again, and elected some in
Christ Jesus to be His people again. Basically what it boils down
to is we broke it and God fixed it. Now what kind of relationship
do believers have with God the Father? I'll close with this
because I really enjoyed this part and didn't think it needed
to go any further than this. What kind of relationship do
believers have with God the Father as sons, as sons, just like his
son. What about the relationship to
God the Savior as sons? To God the King, the ruler, as
sons, always as sons. He will never say to them, no
mercy, as he said in Isaiah 47. Believers will never be called
not my people, as he said in Hosea. Our relationship with
God our father is sure in his son, in his son. May the Lord bless us according
to his word. Drew, will you pray for us, please?