Auto Transcript from the sermon Overcoming the Orphan Spirit Part 1.

So, this was an interesting week this week.

I know that seems to be a reoccurring theme whenever I preach, but normally it's interesting just in my personal relationship with the Lord.

Whatever the Lord brings to me, He puts me through that test personally first.

And so, this week, He put a lot of people in the church's leadership through these tests.

It was a pretty tough week.

I sat down multiple times to write this sermon and had just nothing.

No answers from the Lord.

No direction from the Lord.

Nothing.

Just kind of beating my head against the table saying, all right, Lord, I know what you told me to preach on.

Now, you've got to put a direction here.

And then took down the Yurdak's this week.

The Yurdak's are down sick.

The last 24 hours, they went down.

My wife went down sick this morning.

So, I know there's others.

Some people are suffering with the Boomer Sooner-ites this morning as Oklahoma is playing at 11 a.m., which is 10 minutes ago.

So, I appreciate you giving me your attention rather than Dylan Gabriel this morning.

I can promise you, as somebody who's lived in this area for nine or ten years, the Word of God will return in your life far more than the Sooners ever will.

And I like the Sooners, don't get me wrong.

But, you know, man, it seems like any team in Oklahoma or in Dallas, man, they will raise you up.

They will tear you down.

And then you go to Houston, and all they do is win, win, win, no matter what.

So, I don't understand it.

But this is going to be a multi-week series on the orphan spirit.

This is not going to be all roses, so I apologize for that up front.

Because we have a really big issue in the world, and if it just was in the world, that would be okay.

But for thousands of years and multiple generations, we have seen a compounded issue that no longer is just in the culture of the world.

It's permeated the culture of the church.

And I'd like to say that it's other denominations, it's not us.

But after 17 years in this corner of Christianity, we have some serious problems in our homes.

We have some serious problems in our marriages.

We have some serious problems in our communities.

And we don't like to talk about them, because we like to talk about the Torah.

We like to do the Torah portions every year.

It's like, hey, we're coming up to Bereshit, or if you're really holy, Bereshith, or whatever Hebrew you made up that week, we're really holy and we're there, or Hebrew.

But we don't like to talk about the fact that we have a massive problem in our homes, in our churches, in our marriages, in our lives.

We like to cover them up with, I'm observant, I'm proficient in the Word.

But let's be real, a lot of times we're just present.

We just check the box.

We're here.

Good.

I'm awesome.

I showed up.

That's not God.

That's not sonship.

That's not family.

I can tell you this, I only get to see my personal blood family about once a year.

If it's twice a year, it's huge.

But normally once a year around Thanksgiving time.

And when we go back for Thanksgiving, it's exciting.

It's exciting.

I get to see my brothers, I get to see my sister, I get to see my mom, my stepdad, I get to see all of them.

I'm excited to go see them.

I'm also ready to come home after the week to two weeks of being there, but going in, I'm ready to be there, I'm ready to spend that time with them.

How many of us approach our everyday life with that same mentality?

I can tell you this week, it was interesting for me to sit down and say, why am I so excited about going back to Ohio to see my brothers and sisters, and I don't wake up in the morning and I'm that excited to get up and do my job and get up and just do everything over and over again.

Why?

Because things become commonplace.

Men, especially today, it's not exclusive to men, but today I'm going to hit you pretty hard because let's be real.

It started in the garden when there was a mistake that happened.

And what was the first thing that the man did?

It was the woman you gave me.

We blame shifted.

We didn't take responsibility.

Well, guess what?

That hasn't gotten any better corporately.

It hasn't gotten any better.

We have a problem in the world.

We have a problem in the country.

And I can tell you just from what I've seen over the last year, the profession of people coming clean from sin, people coming and walking through repentance, people doing these things.

We've had a problem in this church, and I know we've had a problem in this movement, but this movement has swept things under the rug to act like they don't exist.

Awesome.

That's exactly what the culture has been doing for thousands of years.

This is why we have the problems we have.

This is not going to be a church that sweep things under the rug.

We're going to take responsibility to be doers of the word, not just hearers of the word.

And that includes me.

And that includes Brent.

Even though Brent is sitting in Greece right now.

Some probably beautiful Mediterranean looking out over it, but we're going to be doers of the word.

I'm sure he's doing something biblical there too.

Like he's probably looking at something like, he's like, I'm standing here where Paul talked to Timothy or something like he's doing something like that, but also probably eating well, looking at the Mediterranean.

So hi Brent.

Hi Tanya.

Shabbat Shalom to you guys.

I'm going to rattle off some facts to you.

Not my opinion, just some facts.

18.

3 million children live without a father in their home.

One in four children in the US don't have a dad in their home.

One in four.

We have like, I don't know, a hundred kids up here.

Let that sink in just visually.

One in four in the United States of America do not have a dad at home.

80% of the single parent homes are led by a single mother.

Children from a single parent household are twice as likely to suffer from mental health and behavioral issues.

Children with a father who is engaged in their household perform better in school than a child who does not have a father at home.

43% of those children are more likely to get A's in school.

Only 43%.

I had a father in the house and I think I got A in P.E.

I was very consistent.

My mom named me Chris so that I could get C's.

So I just, just average, just average.

I showed up for tests.

They didn't show up for anything else, but 43% of those children are more likely to get A's in school.

18% of all school shooters were raised in a stable home, which means 82% of the mass shootings that we see in schools came from individuals who grew up in an unstable home life.

53% of children were born to women under 30 and were born out of wedlock with no father at home.

More than half the children are born without a father in the home.

More than half for women who are under 30.

When a baby is born out of wedlock, the divorce rate is twice as high than people who were married prior to having a baby.

I mean, we start reading through these facts, we start looking at these numbers and we could say, man, this world is jacked up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think all of us know that.

It doesn't matter whether you watch CNN, it doesn't matter whether you watch MSNBC or Fox News or God forbid you get your news from Rumble, but it's jacked up.

The world's jacked up.

The problem is, is that some point in time, and we're not talking about in the last five years, we're not talking about the last 10 years, the last 30 years, at some point in time, the doors of the church no longer became a safe haven for these statistics to be the world.

Divorce rates in the church, through the roof.

Sexual assaults inside churches.

Southern Baptist Convention when they're hiding years and years of these things.

And it's not just Baptists, it's all different denominations.

In the messianic side of Christianity, we had a real swing of masculinity where all of a sudden, well, we have to be the leaders of our home.

And every man I've met, every man I've met.

So if we haven't dialogued about this, I'm not projecting onto you, but every man who I've talked to who had that initial swing, that meant they were stolen.

Like they just immediately went from more passive in their approach to their household to, I'm going to lay down the law.

I'm the man of the house now.

Like, awesome.

I can tell you, if you're the leader of your house, if you're the leader of a company, if you're the leader of a church, if you're a leader someplace and you have to tell them that you're the leader, you're not the leader.

I'm the man.

You're supposed to submit to me.

The husband is the head of the wife.

You submit.

You already lost.

You ain't the husband and you ain't the head.

You already lost.

If you've got to tell your wife that, she's like, okay, awesome.

Awesome.

Thanks for letting me know.

This is a problem inside the church as well.

63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes.

85% of children with behavioral disorders are from fatherless homes.

71% of children who abuse drugs or alcohol come from fatherless homes.

Children without a father in the home are 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances.

Children without a father in the home are more likely to struggle with low self-esteem, abandonment issues, anxiety, social withdrawal, depression, self-harm, suicide attempts.

Girls whose fathers were no longer in the house before they turned five years old were eight times more likely to be pregnant as an adolescent.

66% of all juvenile delinquents experience fatherlessness in their home.

66% of juvenile delinquents didn't have a father in their home.

Another study showed fatherless children are 20 more times likely to be incarcerated.

If you do not have a father, you are 20% more likely to be incarcerated as a child.

One out of every three pregnancies to a fatherless home ends in abortion.

One out of every three ends in abortion.

These aren't my statistics.

This is data that came from multiple different routers, multiple different sources.

None of it paints a good picture.

Now, why is that important?

Because merely being present in your home isn't enough either.

Did you know that data suggests that even if a family has a father in the home, that the average school-aged boy, kindergarten to 12th grade, a school-aged boy, only spends 30 minutes a week talking to their dad?

30 minutes a week talking to their father.

To compare that, the same exact child averages about 40 hours per week on a device.

30 minutes, half of an hour versus 40 hours per week on a device.

Another study found that the average father who is in the home only spends 1.

83 hours per week actually engaged in their child-related care or activities.

Actually engaged.

Being present doesn't count.

It might be an inch better, like an inch better.

But sitting on the couch with AirPods in, completely engulfed in your own environment, not being involved in what's happening in your home, that's like one step above awesome you showed up.

That's it.

Our kids can't tell whether they're male or female.

They can't even decide what marriage is anymore.

And men, we've not taken responsibility for generations of spiritual, mental, and physical orphans that we've created.

Some of us don't even know.

Some of us don't even know how to be a good father or what it means to be a good father, to be a good husband, because we didn't even have an example in our own home.

And this is in the church.

This is somebody who got up today and found value in being here versus watching football or running errands or grocery shopping or whatever people do on Saturdays.

I don't even remember.

It's been so long.

It's weird when you're out on a Saturday or when we're traveling and you look around and you're like, oh, there's a circus in town.

Like, cool.

Didn't know.

We have to start taking responsibility because in this room there's men whose fathers made them orphans, spiritually, mentally, physical.

A lot of times when we talk about the scripture, we talk about, especially around the feast time, we talk about the sojourner or the widows or the orphans.

And we're talking about the people who legit don't have a, they don't have a dad or a mom.

That's the context we're normally talking about.

Or the sojourner, it's like, oh, when somebody's come to join us for a feast or when somebody's come to join us for fellowship or whatever, we need to treat them with hospitality.

But what about those who, they had a dad in the home, but he wasn't there.

What about the ones who had a dad in the home and he's the reason why you have the sin that you struggle with?

There's a whole gamut of issues, even if the father is present in the home.

In this church and as believers, our goal is to raise you to walk in the way that the Bible says God would bless you, that God would fill you in your homes and your marriages.

And if we're projecting our earthly father's failures onto our heavenly father, we're operating in an orphan spirit and it needs to go.

For the sake of your children, for the sake of your children's children, for the sake of you breaking those curses, it needs to go.

Now, how do you do that?

With God.

That's literally the only way.

And so we're going to look over the next couple of weeks at what this spirit is, at what this kind of heaviness is.

And I know it's not a feel-good message.

It's not rah-rah.

But we have to be serious about how we approach God in our homes, in our lives, in our hearts.

And if you're operating out of an orphan spirit, every time you talk to God, you cannot receive the fullness of who God is and the promises he's given to you.

And I would be void as a shepherd to not want to push you towards that.

I would be void as a leader to not want you to experience the greatness of a father who is not bound by the box that you might view a father.

Church, I struggled with this message this week.

I sat down many times to try to write it.

I got angry.

I got sad.

At points in time in doing the study for the message, I was like, well, this isn't me.

And some of you in the room might say, this isn't me.

I had a great father.

Awesome.

I had two.

We're not competing.

It's not a competition.

You had one dad.

I had two dads.

Somebody probably had four dads.

Somebody probably had seven dads.

It's not a competition.

One good father outweighs 35 okay fathers.

But I wrestled with it this week because there was things when you start to look at the orphan spirit and you start to look at God as a father, there's things in there that even in my own life and I like to consider myself a decent father, I'm on the C range.

Like I said, I'm not shooting for A's here.

I'm just shooting for passing grades.

But this week, there was a lot of things I looked at that I definitely don't see God in that light.

And I haven't at times.

And then there's also things when you look at God as a father that I can see were present this year more than they've ever been.

And I had no idea what they were, but they were just God, being God, doing what he said he was going to do.

Why is that so revolutionary?

I mean, he sent his son, he hung on a cross, he died, he resurrected, he outpoured the Holy Spirit.

Why is it crazy that he would do what he says he's going to do?

Like if you believe that, then you should believe the smaller things, right?

Well, what if some of the smaller things are some of the most revolutionary?

What if understanding how God is the perfect father is revolutionary?

What if, what if you understood that all those statistics, let's go back to one, 63% of you suicides are from fatherless homes.

What if in 10 years that was 20%?

What if there was a 40% swing towards people who kept their life and what if it was because rather than not experiencing the love of a father, they could experience the love of a father through God and through other people who would step up in the community?

What if we could save 40% of those lives?

These statistics have actually increased since 2009.

Most of these studies were done in 2018, 2019, but in about a 10 year period of time, the statistics have gone through the roof.

We have a global pandemic with father figures.

And guys, once we understand God as a father, it helps us understand how we can be an earthly father.

Ladies in this room, once you understand God as a father, then you can understand, you can forgive and run to him if your earthly father wasn't always there, if there was mistakes.

And I can tell you as good of a father as I tried to be, I promise you when VH1 does Behind the Music on me, I'm not going to want to hear what my kids have to say.

Because there's a whole season of life where all you see are the negatives of your parents.

All you see is when I'm older, I'm not going to do it that way or they don't know.

And then right around 40-ish, you wake up and you're like, huh, they're right.

It's funny how that goes.

It's that cyclical.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this day.

Lord, I ask that you would come, that you would move, that you would speak, that you would heal, that we would experience your presence in this room, Lord, that we would experience your presence by hearing of your word, by growing closer to you.

Lord, for those who have experienced hurt from fatherly figures, whether it is their father or leaders in the church, in corporations, in life, Lord, teach us how to see you as the perfect father.

Teach us how to be healed and how to fall out of agreement with any bitterness that we might have towards earthly people who have failed us, Lord.

In Yeshua's name, amen and amen.

Yathom is the Hebrew word that's used 38 times throughout the Torah and the prophets to describe an orphan.

It comes from a root word meaning to be lonely, a bereaved person, or one who is fatherless.

That's important.

If you hadn't picked up on kind of where I was going with that already by mentioning fathers and dads and calling you out, ladies, pretty much got a free pass today.

It would be a little weird if I'm standing up here like, you need to be a better mother, and this is how you're a better mother.

You're like, when have you been a mother?

Like, I haven't, so I'm not going to speak on that.

A biblical orphan is fatherless.

If you were without a mother, you weren't considered a biblical orphan.

So that's something in context as we go through the next couple of weeks.

An orphan was somebody who was fatherless.

Lamentations 5, 3 says we have become orphans, fatherless.

Our mothers are like widows.

Orphans in Hebrew were considered helpless.

They were liable to injury and exposed to danger.

For us, there's a call to walk in God's nature to love the helpless.

In Psalm 68, 5, it says, father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God and His holy habitation.

So to be a father in the light of God is to be the father of those who don't have a father.

To protect the widows, those are a couple of things we need to do.

So when we talk about widows and orphans, we talk about fatherless.

Sure, there are ones who have no parents, and yes, this can be put in for them as well, but somebody who doesn't have a father is more than somebody who just doesn't have a biological earthly father.

This is somebody whose father might be there but isn't present.

We already saw, we already heard the statistics.

This is mentorship.

It is something for us to sow into people's lives.

This is also something that a church should be doing.

You know, back in the old days, churches were rooted in communities, and you grew up together, you parented together, and at that point in time, everybody knew the healthy lines, and then all of a sudden, it just became cult, and it became weird, and then it became seeker-friendly.

But you did life with each other.

You had a barter system on goods and grains.

You parented together.

So if one dad lacked in an area, the other guy was over there hanging out with his buddy, and the dad was teaching him how to be a mechanic.

And you know, all these different types of things.

They did life together.

They were father to the fatherless.

In Hosea 14.

3, it says, Assyria shall not save us.

We will not ride on horses, and we will say no more, our God, to the work of our hands.

In you, the orphan finds mercy.

In Hosea, he's talking about the fatherless are constantly looking for other things to save them, other things to build them up.

They're constantly looking.

I didn't even realize this, but I've got a good, close, personal friend of mine who's a pastor, and when everything was going down in January with me and my family and our work and changing ministries and everything, one night I'm on the phone with him, and I'm whining and crying like a little baby, like, I did nothing wrong.

Why is this happening?

Why is this happening?

And he goes, Can I speak into your life?

And I said, Yeah, of course you can.

You've known me a long time speaking of my life.

He goes, Don't go looking for somebody else to fill your fatherless void.

And I said, What are you talking about?

That's literally nothing to do with what's going on in my life.

And then he said, Really?

Really?

So, back some time ago when you started that ministry, you went and got an older man and you put him in this position, and basically you were his son and he was your father.

I know because I was his son and he was closer to you than he was to me.

And then all of a sudden here in a whole new environment, a whole new place, basically it was the same type of thing all over again.

So, when you're the common denominator and every other dynamic is the same, Oh, right.

So, I'm the problem.

I'm creating it.

And so, he was like, Don't do the same thing.

And I didn't realize that I had done that, but I had.

Grew up with two fathers.

Both fathers were completely different from each other, and both fathers were present.

They were engaged.

You would think if anything, because I had two fathers who had two very different personalities, two very different ways of going about things, and they were both actively engaged in my life.

They were around.

They were there.

They took us.

We did things.

They were there.

It wasn't just like they were in the house.

They were actively involved in the things we did.

You would think that I would not have daddy issues.

No, I have daddy issues.

This is part of this whole new trend.

Daddy God.

Daddy God.

It's this whole, I have daddy issues, and we have daddy issues in the church.

And so, now we're going to look to daddy God as the perfect God.

In one hand, that's exactly what we're doing today.

We're looking at how to be the perfect father.

How to accept God as father, rather than God the abusive sky God.

Which a lot of people in this room have walked in a portion of Christianity where we are so worried about God the judge, that we've never looked at what it says about God the father.

And that's important for us moving forward.

We are not to father a lead by the way that the world does, but we're to look to God for his mercy and his grace and his healing to lead.

And through that, we should also lead in a way that offers healing, grace, and mercy in what we do.

Deuteronomy 24, 17 through 21.

You shall not pervert the justice due to the sojourner or the fatherless, or take a widow's garment and pledge, but you shall remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord your God redeemed you from there.

Therefore, I command you to do this.

When you reap your harvest in your field and forget a sheep in the field, you shall not go back to get it.

It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow, that the Lord your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.

When you beat your olive trees, you shall not go over them again.

It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.

When you gather in the grapes of your vineyard, you shall not strip it afterward.

It shall be for the sojourner, the fatherless, and the widow.

Even when God instructs us to go and to work, He instructs us to remember the fatherless, the guests, and the widows.

And it doesn't even say there in the Word, it doesn't say whether it's referencing back to the Scripture that says, if you don't show up, you're a widow.

So it doesn't specify whether this is somebody who actually lost their job or lost their family.

It doesn't say whether this is somebody who lost their spouse or whether this is somebody who has a spouse who isn't doing their job.

It doesn't specify in the Scripture one way or another.

So there could be a lot of people, we could be looking around this room right now, and you could say, hey, there's a lot of whole families here.

Not a lot of divorces, not a lot of this type of things, there's no blemish.

But when you peel back the layer, present.

That's as far as we go.

That's as far as we go.

Anything you do, you must remember the fatherless.

How many of us do that on a regular basis?

How many of us look around and say, am I making my kids fatherless?

Am I showing up?

Let alone looking to other people in the community and saying, hey, do they need help?

Do we need to walk together?

Are we empowering men to lead in their home?

Are we empowering them to lead in the community?

In doing it in a way that's in accordance with the Scripture, not just in accordance with the patriarch system that we've created that says, well, I'm man, and men can do this, and women can't do this.

Let's get back into the Word and start doing what God says and leading the proper way, rather than bowing up for this masculinity and toxic masculinity and toxic femininity.

Like, hey, let's just keep going back and forth with this whole pendulum.

Or let's get into the Word of God.

God gave a call to Israel to protect, provide, and help bring justice to the fatherless.

A lot of talk always is on the sojourner and the widow, but the fatherless are not always included in this.

And when they are, it's normally considered people who've lost their parents.

It's not somebody.

.

.

we're not thinking about, like, the people who have two parents in the home and, like, hey, are the parents actually present?

Are we actually doing what we're supposed to do?

Are we actually doing what is our first ministry?

And then on top of that, without having those open dialogues, we then say, hey, well, come on in the church, and we wonder why there's problems in the church.

We wonder why there's a lack of discipleship or mentorship in the church.

We wonder why a lot of churches are like, well, the women are the ones who are really engaged in the church.

It starts first in the home.

It starts first in your prayer closet.

It starts first before you walk out to have your family meeting.

You need to be fathered by God the Father so you can father well.

If you're out there on your own, and it's by your power and by your spirit, we're all in trouble.

If it's my power, my spirit, y'all in trouble.

A father who wasn't present spiritually, mentally, emotionally is harmful.

It's not okay to not show up.

It's not okay for you to sleep with your wife and get that type of benefit, and then not show up for the rest.

It's not okay.

This is bare minimum godly behavior in our home.

It's not okay for us to not show up anymore.

We show up because God shows up.

We're supposed to be the image of God on this earth.

You don't get to go to bed with your wife and reap the benefits of that if you're not going to do your job of being a good father.

You don't get to post pictures of your children on Facebook and talk about how little Timmy is awesome, and that's literally the only show up you get.

You don't show up to be a part of their life.

You don't show up to be a part of what they do.

You're not sowing into their life.

One half hour is the average amount of time that men speak to their children in a week.

One half hour.

Well, they average 40 hours a week on a device.

What is the device teaching them?

What in the world is the device teaching them about being a father, about being a son, about being a daughter, about being a wife?

What in the world?

Are you letting Arthur be their daddy?

Are you letting Bugs Bunny be their daddy?

Or worse, and don't tell me they're blocked, they only can get YouTube kids.

Hmm, y'all ever watch some YouTube kids?

Might as well turn on Dumb and Dumber or Ace Ventura for them.

At least that's funny.

I mean, who else would think about turning a van into a dog?

It's genius.

Genius.

Best movie ever.

It's a great movie.

Exodus 22, 21 through 24.

You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.

You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child.

If you do mistreat them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, and my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.

Okay, so if you don't father well, if we don't hear the cries of our children, if we don't hear the cries of our wives, God gives us a promise.

He said, you can rest assured I will show up.

I will come with wrath that God will become the father.

He will be the perfect father, and you can bank on that.

Exodus 22 should wake guys up a little bit.

God wants you to father.

He wants you to lead.

He wants you to hear the cries of your wives, of your children.

He wants you to listen and then lead.

But it comes with a promise.

If you don't, He will.

If you don't, He will.

It's important to understand that promise as we go through the next couple of weeks.

I'm guessing, based upon statistics in this room, the majority of you could easily tell me right now something you felt like your earthly father didn't do well that you've struggled with.

Maybe it was emotional abuse.

Maybe it was sexual abuse.

Maybe it was mental abuse.

Maybe it was just neglect.

Maybe it wasn't even abusive.

Maybe they just weren't present in your life.

I'm guessing most of you can't.

So when you're wrestling with those things to overcome, to forgive, to forget, to do those things, Exodus 22 says when you're wrestling with those with God to be healed, to be set free from those things, God will show up.

He will hear your cries, and He will bring justice to the orphans.

It says He will kill them with the sword, and their wives will become widows and your children fatherless.

Guys, if you don't do your job, God will hear the cries of your wife and your children.

Daughters who've cried out for years because their fathers did things that they should never have done, God will hear you.

He will show up.

He will show up when we don't do our jobs.

We see this same type of concept in Jesus's time that an orphan was extended not just to somebody who was fatherless, but somebody who didn't have a teacher, who didn't have a guide or a guardian or a protector.

So it extends from just being a child who doesn't have a father to actually being somebody who didn't have a mentor, didn't have a teacher or a protector.

If somebody lacked a protector, that was the same concept of an orphan during the New Testament time.

And next week, we're going to look specifically at the traits of the orphan spirit.

We're going to look at scriptural references of that, and we're going to look at what God says about sonship and adoption.

Is God the perfect father?

But this week, I want to give you some spiritual references, and if you have to go back and pull them up again, that's fine.

Because I can stand here, and I can apologize for whatever wrong that's ever happened to you from your earthly father, from whoever that role model was.

I can do that.

And it might, for a moment, you might cry, and we might be, thank you.

Thank you for saying that.

I really needed a male figure to take responsibility for all the hurt I had.

But that's all temporal.

Okay, great.

Yay, we had an awesome moment together.

God is the only one who can actually heal you from that.

And if you aren't actually healed from that, then you aren't currently walking in the way you were called to walk.

And if you're not currently walking in the way that God has called you to walk as a father, you're creating a bad cycle.

That cycle has gone over and over and over and over again.

When husbands don't lead and don't show the image of God the father, it's partially why we have the chaos that we have in this world.

When a daughter grows up and their dad doesn't tell them that they love them, or that they're beautiful, or doesn't take them to do things, she will struggle in her marriage with her husband.

She will somewhat, depending upon your environment, be looking for that in any teenage boy in those years.

And when teenage boys grow up in a household where their father doesn't spend time with them, doesn't model godly behavior, and doesn't present himself as God the father in the home to their child, you tend to have boys who can see the wounded girls and they go after them.

And you can see that.

Some of you in this room were that aggressive guy.

Some of you in this room were that wounded female.

And when we're 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years old, if we have not found healing and we have not found God, we're walking in an orphan spirit.

Romans 8, the apostle Paul says, he didn't pour out his Holy Spirit on us so that we could be slaves.

He didn't pour out his Holy Spirit upon us so that we could walk in a slavery mentality, a bondage mentality, that he brought us into his family through adoption and sonship.

We're going to look at Jesus, the perfect son.

What was that example?

How do you walk as sons and daughters?

And hopefully the Lord will reveal to you if you are operating in an orphan spirit.

And if you're operating in an orphan spirit, I believe the Lord wants to heal you.

I believe he wants to get it out of you.

And I believe that he wants to break the generational curses in families.

The generational curses that cause you to wrestle with pornography.

The generational curses that cause you to wrestle with anger, with pride, with apathy, with all the lusts of the flesh, but also keeps you from growing in your relationship with other people.

How can you walk in the calling that God has put in your life if you can't even get intimate enough with God to understand that he has a calling on your life?

How can you see God as a father if all you know is your earthly father?

You can say, oh I know God is loving, God is loving.

But you can only experience so much.

Because what loving was, was well my dad beat me with rulers.

Or my dad never told me he was proud of me or that he loved me.

Or that my dad, my dad never came out of his room.

Whatever those experiences are.

And so this week, Exodus 22 verses 21 through 23, I just want you to commit these verses to some reading time, to some prayer time.

Just commit them.

Look through them.

Start to understand what God said in the Old Testament about the fatherless.

The promises he gave and what he called us to do.

And how does that apply to your life?

How does that apply to your walk?

Deuteronomy chapter 10, 18.

Deuteronomy 14, 29.

Deuteronomy chapter 16 verses 11 through 14.

Deuteronomy 24, 17 through 21.

Deuteronomy 26, chapter 26 verses 12 through 13.

Psalms chapter 10 verses 14 through 18.

Psalm chapter 68 verse 6.

Psalm 94 verse 6.

Psalm 109 verses 9 through 12.

Psalm 146 verse 9.

Malachi chapter 3 verse 5.

Isaiah chapter 1 verses 17 through 23.

Isaiah chapter 9 verses 16.

Isaiah chapter 10 verses 1 through 3.

Ezekiel 22 verse 7.

And Lamentations chapter 5 verse 3.

I don't normally give people homework.

As a guy who's already admitted to you, I average C's.

I didn't do my homework.

I average C's because I did well on tests.

So I'm asking you to do something that I'm not good at myself, which is to do homework this week.

But part of this series is not for me to stand up here and to tell you about how bad you've been or how wrong you've been.

It's to push you back into the Word of God throughout the week so that the Spirit of God can empower you to understand how to walk, not as an orphan, but as a son or daughter of God.

And that doesn't just come because I can teach you something.

That's not discipleship.

That's not leadership.

Just sitting up here and saying, hey Stephen, if you go do these three things this way and you do exactly this way, that's not discipleship.

It's modeling what happens when things go sideways.

It's doing life with each other when things.

.

.

well that doesn't fit the manual.

That doesn't fit.

You know what to do.

So if you're going to be a son and a daughter of God, you have to start doing something with God.

You have to start talking to God.

You have to start praying to God.

You have to start being engaged with God.

Just like if you want to be a husband, you got to start doing it.

And next week we're going to look a little bit more of what that looks like.

Because I believe from what I've seen this year, not only in my own heart and my own life, but for many in this room, there are many who are really, really wrestling with the orphan spirit because the father they had was barely present at best.

And I don't want that for the hundred and something kids we have here.

I don't want that for my kids.

I don't want that for your kids.

I want them to understand what it means to be a son and daughter of God.

I want them to understand God as a father.

I don't want them to grow up and every time something happens, they feel like God's going to come down and drop a punch.

If I mess up Sabbath this way, we've had that as a movement.

And at best, those kids are in a Sunday church.

At best, most of them don't go to church at all.

The majority of our young adults ministry happens at bowling alleys and at restaurants because they won't go to church.

Because we created an environment that said, if you screw this up, God's going to judge you.

If you don't do this, God's going to come down with an iron fist.

Worship team, you can start coming.

Generations, hundreds, thousands of kids who saw Jesus in the Torah as demonstrative.

As if I walk this way and I don't do it right, God as a father is going to beat me.

And so as soon as they get old enough to make decisions on their own, they say, well, if that's my father, if that's God as a father, I don't want anything to do with that.

And thankfully, God, some of those kids, God brought people from different denominations and said, hey, guess what?

Even though right now you're struggling with substance abuse, God loves you.

Hey, guess what?

Even though you don't want to wear a tzitzit anymore or you don't want to wear a kippah anymore, God still loves you.

Hey, guess what?

It's okay to sing and listen to somebody other than Paul Wilber and you're still saved.

These types of things, you laugh and you say, like, these things don't exist.

They 100% exist and they're the undertone of where the majority of this roots of Christianity has come from.

If you're not Jewish enough, you're not saved.

If you're too Christian, you're too pagan.

We have lost thousands of sons and daughters of God because we've modeled the wrong father.

I was a part of it.

I helped do it.

I thought it was right.

I was wrong.

And so, and part of this season of God transforming and doing things, I have to introduce you to the God I have experienced because that's a true father.

And as a father standing before you today, I can tell you and I can promise you, I am going to mess up.

I am going to screw up.

I am going to stumble.

I do it all the time.

But God never did.

And so when the scripture talks about God being a father, God being a resting place, God being this person, why do we constantly talk about God being the abusive daddy?

Why can't God be the dad who throws the baseball in the backyard with the kids?

Why can't dad be the one who curls up with his daughters or his sons and watches a movie?

Why can't we look at God through the positive attributes?

Because that's what the scripture actually says, is that's who God is as a father.

But every week I get an email or I have a conversation with somebody who asks a question about, well, if I do this, am I really in line with what God's telling me to do here?

And most of the time we're talking about we're down to the 1 16th of an interpretation of scripture.

And if this is truly where we're walking, if this is where you're bottled up in your relationship with God, then I can promise you you're operating in an orphan spirit because you're not seeing God as a father, as somebody who says, by the way, if you cry out, if you are oppressed and you cry out because your dad didn't do his job or your church leader didn't do his job or whoever was the father of that group, I promise you I will come.

I promise you I will hear your cry and I promise you I will show up.

And some of you in this room, ladies, especially some of you in this room, you had a bad father figure.

He hurt you in some way, mentally, physically, you were abused.

And then God heard you and brought you your spouse who doesn't do the same things to you.

He heard you and brought you a spouse.

And if we keep spiraling in what was rather than seeing what is and then looking at what God wants you to be, you're missing crucial years of your life of blessings.

But the scripture is clear.

And just like any father I've met, when you're teaching your children, you want them to work for what they're doing in order to receive the blessing.

Most fathers I know, when a kid comes and says, hey, dad, I want 20 bucks, they're not just like, okay, dad, I want 20 bucks.

Okay.

$10,000 later, they're okay.

Dad's like, well, what are you going to do with the 20 bucks?

Oh, I want to do this.

Yeah, we're not spending 20 bucks on that.

We'll do something in the future.

They teach them how to be smart with money, how to do life.

God's been trying to teach creation since the dawn of creation, since the Spirit hovered over the water, how to have life, how to do life.

But we're not starting as a new creation.

We're starting as a creation that has a lot of years of baggage.

Some of that baggage is not your fault at all.

You did nothing wrong.

But they still hurt you.

I believe this is why God says over and over and over again, under the narrative and the motif of God the Father, because He knew, God knew that even when He flooded the earth, that still we would have problems.

Send a son, Jesus, to provide a way back, to show us God the Father, God the Son.

Son only does what the Father does.

So if we are truly sons and daughters of Jesus, of God, would Jesus do that?

Hey God, I need your help.

I'm struggling in my life.

Hold on a second, son.

I'm on a work phone call.

And then forget about you.

I've been guilty of that one.

Hey, Dad, Dad, I need you.

I don't have an answer here.

I'm really struggling.

Well, can you get back to me when the football game's over?

What if God fathered you like you father your kids?

The next couple of weeks, we're going to look at what it means to be a son and a daughter of God.

What God promises us and exhibits as a Father.

But as we go through the scripture, it's really relevant if you're going to be a father.

It's really relevant if you're going to be a son.

But as we go through the scripture, it's really relevant if you're not willing to lay down your hurt, lay down your brokenness, and lay down the healing that might be still necessary.

The forgiveness that needs to be afforded to somebody.

I get it.

Your dad screwed up.

My dad screwed up too.

My dad can tell you the story of right after I turned 18, where I started the conversation, Dad, I love you, but I hate you.

And we had a good, honest, transparent conversation.

And I was fortunate because at that point in time, my dad could have said, well, son, the only way we're having a relationship is if you do what I tell you to do.

Some of you have experienced that in this room.

Your dad is so narcissistic.

He's so egotistical.

He's so wrapped up in his own arrogance, in his own orphan spirit, that he basically just told you, hey, I don't even need a relationship with you unless you do it the way I want.

And so you have no relationship.

Part of you experiencing God as a true father is you have to first forgive your earthly father.

You have to first lay down that bitterness, that hurt, and that healing in order for you to even be open to the fact that God doesn't have some of the same characteristics that right now might even be triggering you in the pew.

And so today, as we have this response time, as we go to table fellowship, as we go to this week of giving you some scripture references, if you want to be set free of the orphan spirit, start reading about what God says as a father.

As a father, here's what I can promise you I will do.

As a son and daughter, here's what my word says, because God upholds his word, and he does it by his spirit.

And so understanding what your promises are important, but also allowing the spirit to come in and heal you and empower you is important too.

But you have to want it.

You have to want to have that type of a relationship.

You have to be vulnerable enough before the Lord to say, Lord, I'm hurt.

Lord, I don't know what I'm doing.

I need you to come.

You have to submit yourself and be humble.

It's not an easy thing to do for men.

But if you want to be free, you're going to have to do exactly what your father did.

He modeled for you by sending his son that he would humble himself, that he would submit himself under the will of his father, under the will of the hands of angry, bitter men who had daddy issues too, I'm sure.

All the way to being crucified on a cross so that someday you can be completely set free and be restored back as sons and daughters of God.

He did not give you a spirit of slavery.

He did not give you a spirit of bondage.

He did not give you a spirit to say that because your dad sucked, you have to suck.

No.

He said, there's a way back to my family.

You can be set free from all that.

So what you get out of this series over the next couple of weeks is going to be directly involved into what you do in your private prayer time.

If you need to be healed, if you need to get over some things, if you need to understand who God is as a father, I encourage you to get in the Word and get in prayer the next couple of weeks.

If you already do that, I encourage you to study deep down into these scripture references and to pray specifically and explicitly, God, I want you as my father to expose anything in me that has an issue with my earthly father, that has an issue with anybody who's ever been in those positions.

Maybe it was your uncle, maybe it was your grandparents, maybe you were raised by them.

Expose those in my heart, expose those in my mind, set me free from those, heal me from those, so that I don't perpetuate that in my relationship with you, and I don't perpetuate that in my relationship with my wife and my children now.

Sooner or later, guys, the people who say that God is their father, that Jesus Christ is the Son, and He is their salvation, we need to stand up and take responsibility and say, I know somebody hurt me, I know they were a bad example, but it's not going to go any further than me.

Because see, that's the type of leadership Jesus showed.

He said, I know this world sucks, I know that you can offer blood of bulls and goats and everything all year long, but I'm going to come and I'm going to take the responsibility for it, I'm going to put it on my shoulders, and I'm going to bear it for you, because I am the way, the truth, the life, and no one comes to the Father but through me.

So if He's going to take that burden off you, and He already has taken that burden off you, then why are you still walking around with it?

On top of that, why are you wearing it as a badge of honor?

My dad hurt me.

Yeah.

Set your dad free and set yourself free from what's happened, and let God step in and fill the void that He promised us a long time ago that He would.

He would be our deliverance, He would be our salvation, He would be our Father, and He would hear our cries.