Friday, February 16, 2018

Turning the hearts

Malachi 4:6

And he will turn The hearts of the fathers to the children, And the hearts of the children to their fathers, Lest I come and strike the earth with a curse.

I grew up fatherless.

Fatherlessness is a condition created by the absence of a father or father figure in the life of a child or youth.

In this context, father is not limited to the biological relationship, for this father could be the biological or foster father, stepfather, or any other male, related or not, who plays the role of a father in the life of the growing child or youth.

By absence, we do not speak here of mere presence. Fatherlessness can exist even where a father is physically present. Fatherlessness is more an absence of a critical relationship and function rather than an absence of physical presence. It is the absence of the guidance and support at the emotional, spiritual, physical, social and cultural levels of the life of the growing person.

[Well, before we go further let me explain. Yesterday’s devotional “Conditional forgiveness” generated many questions and comments from several readers. Some of those readers were persons asking about forgiveness related to their father. I thought, therefore, that I should share my experience in that regard, in the hope that it would be a blessing to some. What follows is a condensed chapter form a book that I have left half written for many years, with material added since the death of my father.]

My father was alive for all my life except the last few months since he died. But from birth to 40, I was fatherless. By the time I was getting married in my mid-twenties I could still count on my hands the number of encounters I had had with him, and have fingers left back. I even refused my mother’s request to send him an invitation to my wedding.

As a preacher and teacher of the Gospel, I had been calling on people to be reconciled with God but there had been no reconciliation between my father and me. Over time, I began to feel that I hadn’t qualified myself to truly say these things to people. This crisis deepened with a reading of Malachi 4:6.

Malachi ends the Old Testament. God throughout the OT dealt with matters of redemption and reconciliation, and when God paused the written scriptures, for about 400 years, the thing He chose to focus on is fathers and children. And He focused on fathers and children as an issue of emotion saying that he would turn hearts.

There is, apparently, in the mind of God, a special and necessary emotional relationship between fathers and their children. I didn’t understand that for a long time and I didn’t understand how I was affected by it. I didn’t understand how, no matter the other relationships I had, the absence of that relationship with my father and my failure, over time, to secure an emotional relationship affected the way I thought, the way I behaved, and my whole outlook on life, for a period of my life. I didn’t understand the wound of fatherlessness.

Malachi warns that if that emotional relationship between fathers and their estranged children is not restored we leave the earth susceptible to a curse from God. It is a remarkable thing that the earth was in trouble, that humanity was in trouble because we couldn’t fix the relationship between fathers and their children. And so, after my mother died, I went looking for my father and found him in 2007.

Jesus died that we might be reconciled with God, the Apostle Paul writing to the church in Corinth said, in 2 Corinthians 5:18, “Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” We, the people of God, have been given the ministry of reconciliation, but we can’t go about attempting to bring people into reconciliation when we ourselves are not reconciled in the most significant relationships of our lives.

Critical to what John the Baptist was supposed to do, Luke 1:17, was to prepare a people who were open and active at reconciliation because Jesus was coming to reconcile us to God. We are not ready for that level of reconciliation if we can’t work at reconciliation with each other.

It took me some time to recognise that there is a maturity that is required to fix some relationships. My faith, therefore, was strengthened and sharpened when I got to a new place because I was able to forgive and establish a real emotional connection with my father that lasted a decade.

I learned too that reconciliation teaches us about ourselves and about those from whom we were estranged. But reconciliation also teaches us about relationships in general. Through reconciliation, we learn what things we should avoid in order to maintain and preserve our relationships.

My father died at a good age of 96 in a remote rural hospital where he was taken after he was found marginally responsive in his cottage where he lived alone. As I was preaching at his funeral, I focused on the critical lesson of our faith that I learned through the estrangement from, and reconciliation with, my father. That fathers and their children must be reconciled. It is when that ‘turning of the hearts’ has taken place that we can get to a place to fully understand what God is doing when He is reconciling us to Himself.

Think on these things:

1. Do you or did you have a good relationship with your father?
2. Do you or anyone close to you carry the wounds of fatherlessness?
3. Is there any opportunity to work for a turning of the hearts in these circumstances?

Prayer focus:

Let us pray today for those we know who carry the wounds of fatherlessness and ask God for an opportunity to minister healing to them through reconciliation, where possible, and through the fatherhood of God..

In His Grace

Pastor Alex