Genesis 2:24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall join to his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

Genesis 4:1 And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived, and bare Cain, and said, I have gotten a man from the LORD.

Father’s Day is fast becoming America’s most socially awkward holiday. The reason is very simple—the culture increasingly sees fathers as accessories, not as necessities.

Until about 1970, our culture fed off the residue of traditional Christianity; since that time we have seen a dramatic and rapid shift to an essentially pagan ethos. Unfortunately, this ungodly framework is being imported into the church by self-avowed Christian leaders through their compromise on the subject of biblical manhood and womanhood.

“Today the primary areas in which Christianity is pressured by the culture to conform are on issues of gender and sexuality. Post-moderns and ethical relativists care little about doctrinal truth claims. These seem to them innocuous, archaic, and irrelevant to life. What they do care about, and care about with a vengeance, is whether their feminist agenda and sexual perversions are tolerated, endorsed, and expanded in an increasingly neo-pagan landscape.

Because that is what they care most about. It is precisely here that Christianity is most vulnerable. To lose the battle here is to subject the church to increasing layers of departure and surely it will not be long until ethical departures will yield to even more central doctrinal departures, like questioning whether Scripture’s inherent teaching about manhood and womanhood renders it fundamentally untrustworthy for the Christian life. I find it instructive that when Paul warns about departure from the faith in the latter days, he lists first “ethical compromises and the searing of the conscience” as a prelude to the doctrinal departures.” Bruce Ware, professor of theology at Southern Baptist Seminary

Ware points out that ethical compromise is followed by doctrinal sellout. We evangelicals care about doctrine; however, if we capitulate to the current ethical reordering, doctrinal unfaithfulness is certain to follow. The church has been called to counter and bless the culture, not to copy and baptize it. Perhaps worst of all, many evangelical leaders claim that if we want to reach the lost, we must become like them. This is a recipe for disaster.

Dorothy Sayers refuted this notion: “It is not the business of the church to conform Christ to men, but men to Christ.” That is precisely the challenge we face in this area of biblical manhood and womanhood. Will the church shape her values to the prevailing cultural mores and norms, or will she positively impact and influence our culture?

For years I have watched with growing dismay, even anguish, what has been happening in our society, in our educational system, in our churches, in our homes, and on the deepest level of personality, as a result of a movement called feminism, a movement that gives a great deal of consideration to something called personhood but very little to womanhood, and hardly a nod to femininity. Words like manhood and masculinity have been expunged from our vocabulary, and we have been told in no uncertain terms that we ought to forget about such things, which amount to nothing more than biology, and concentrate on what it means to be “persons.” Elizabeth Elliot

This is a world that the poets have never aspired to, the literature of the ages has somehow missed, a world that takes no account of mystery. The church claims to be the bearer of revelation. If her claim is true, as C. S. Lewis points out, we should expect to find in the church “an element that unbelievers will call irrational and believers will call supra-rational. There ought to be something in it difficult to explain to our reason though not contrary to it. . . . If we abandon that, if we retain only what can be justified by standards of prudence and convenience at the bar of enlightened common sense, then we exchange revelation for that old ghost Natural Religion.”

Dr. James Dobson has said that he thinks feminism developed in this country, especially in some of its more militant forms, because men were not fulfilling the role they were called to in the home. Neither were they appreciating women for the important role they were playing.

Dr Charles Winich of city university of New York who has studied more that 2,000 cultures in world history, not one unisexual society has survived for more than a few years.

In a society where men are confused about their masculinity and women are confused about their femininity there is only disintegration, disorientation, destruction and death. Eventually the society collapses.

In started in the sixties, gathered momentum in the seventies, achieved politically correct status in the eighties, became the in your face social engineering of the nineties and the door was opened wide open in 2000, and look where we are now.

“If I profess with the loudest and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that point in which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, then I’m not confessing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved and to be steady in all the battlefield elsewhere is mere flight and disgrace if the soldier flinches at that point.” Martin Luther

Where do we Turn when our Fathers are Gone?

The Bible says, concerning the Lord Jesus Christ, in John 1:11–12, that Jesus “came unto his own, and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name.”

John 1:12 But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name:

Matthew 10:29 Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

It means that no sparrow ever died alone; not one of them died alone. Did you know that He’s there with a dying sparrow? I mean, when a sparrow dies, God is with him. “No sparrow falls without the Father.” (Matthew 10:29) That means not only did God attend the funeral, but God was there at the deathbed when a sparrow falls, when a little sparrow falls.

That’s the kind of Father we have in God. He’s the God of the stellar heavens, and He’s the God of that heavenly home that we have there. What a wonderful, wonderful God! So, who is He? He’s our Father. He rules over all, and He’s right here with us.

To be able to go to God as our heavenly Father first of all means the end of fear, the fear that pagans invariably had for their deities.

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. (Exodus 3:14).

The most fundamental thing that can be said about God is that he is. And the most staggering thing to our imagination is that he never had a beginning. He simply is—from all eternity.

Knowledge of God’s fatherhood settles uncertainties and gives hope.

If the best earthly father will spare no effort to help and protect his children, how much more will the heavenly Father love, protect, and help His children (Matthew. 7:11; John 10:29; 14:21)

God says to John in the book of Revelation (21:6), “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” Every human being, great or small, had his beginning in God, but even more important, will have his end in God. God is everybody’s Omega. We will all meet him either as a fountain of life or as a lake of fire.

Knowing God as our Father settles the matter of loneliness.

Even if we are rejected and forsaken by our family, friends, fellow believers, and the rest of the world, we know that our heavenly Father will never leave us or forsake us.

Hebrews 13:5 Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.

Knowing God’s fatherhood should settle the matter of selfishness.

Jesus taught us to pray, Our Father, using the plural pronoun because we are fellow children with all the rest of the household of God. There is no singular personal pronoun in the entire Lord’s prayer. We pray holding up to God what is best for all, not just for one.

He is our Father who is in heaven. All the resources of heaven are available to us when we trust God as our heavenly Supplier. Our Father “has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ” (Ephesians 1:3).

Knowing God as Father should settle the matter of obedience.

If Jesus, as God’s true Son, came down from heaven not to do His own will but His Father’s (John 6:38), how much more are we, as adopted children, to do only His will. Obedience to God is one of the supreme marks of our relationship to Him as His children. “For whoever does the will of My Father who is in heaven, he is My brother and sister and mother” (Matthew 12:50).

Yet in His grace, God loves and cares even for His children who are disobedient. The story of Luke 15 should be called the parable of the loving father rather than the prodigal son. It is first of all a picture of our heavenly Father, who can forgive a self-righteous child who remains moral and upright and also forgive one who becomes dissolute, wanders away, and returns.