Well, a pastor called me a few days ago. This fellow is not a youngster. And he said, you know, he said, sometimes I just don't feel like I'm worthy to pastor. And I said, brother, I would worry about any man that thought he was. Any of us that feel like we're worthy of the Father's love. What a mystery that God loves us. This is something that just causes me to bow before the Lord in worship. The Lord knows everything about me, and He loves me anyway. Isn't that wonderful? He knows everything about me, and He loves me anyway. It knows all of your frailties, all of your feebleness. And this little verse in 1 John goes along with our belief in God, calling God as our Father. But let me read it over to you. In 1 John, we've got it marked here somewhere. bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God. Therefore, the world going to stop because of you. What manner of love, Father, bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God. Now, the theme of this conference is problems in the modern day church is that we have too low a view of who God is. I don't think we have the concept of who God is the way that we should. And we'll never, listen, our little minds can't wrap around who God is. But I'll tell you, we can dabble in the shallow end of the pool. And we ought to. And we ought to want to swim in the depths of it. We ought to want to let that overwhelm us once in a while. You ought to dive into the things of God and don't be afraid of the deep things of God. You're never going to comprehend all of them. You're never going to grasp all of them. But you can just dive into them and enjoy them. I think Brother Ross said a while ago, some things that we can't comprehend but we believe them, don't we? Some old preacher said years ago, he said, I don't understand electricity, but I'm not going to sit around in the dark till I do. I don't know how H2O, you know, can freeze at 32 degrees and it can boil at 212 and go out into steam. And in all three of those capacities, it's still H2O. It's as liquid as water and steam, and then it's as solid as ice. But I believe it and I know it. And I know that God loves me. I know that. Now, our assignment tonight, and thank you, by the way, Brother Jack, for inviting us. Thank you, Church, for being here. Ladies, for the food. Thank you for the cards of encouragement. That's a very sweet thing, Church. I don't know who started that, but I just can't tell you what it means to go out there and get those little cards out of the box. and an encouraging word, and it just, it blesses my heart. Now, Matthew chapter 6. Here is a portion of scripture that we all are familiar with. But I want us to look in verse 9, and there are two words here, obviously you'll see them, that are our theme tonight. Jesus is about to give what we should call the model prayer. Some people call it the Lord's Prayer. I was brought up hearing it called the Lord's Prayer, but you know that more properly, the Lord's Prayer is in John chapter 17. And this is a model given for prayer. Now, Jesus is about to give a pattern for prayer. You ladies that, if you do any quilting or anything of that nature, my wife still loves to do that kind of thing, and she'll have a pattern to go by. in carpentry work. I don't know what you guys call it up here, but I heard the old carpenters, when I was kind of learning the trade a little bit, they'd be cutting rafters or whatever, and they would have one that was cut, and that was the one they used to cut the others by. You know, you didn't cut each one, you used one. And they called that, oddly enough, they called that the preacher. I said, you know, when I was just a young guy working with this guy, he said, hand me that preacher over there. And I thought, I don't see any preacher around here. And I found out that was the pattern. That was the pattern. And so Jesus is giving us here this standard, if you will, for prayer. You know, you know this already, but it blesses me to say it again. Do you know that a hundred pianos tuned to the same tuning fork will all be in tune with each other? You know that? You don't tune one piano to another piano. You tune them all to the same tuning fork. And when they're tuned to the same tuning fork, they'll all be in tune with each other. You wonder why there's so much discord among the people of God. We need to get tuned to the same tuning fork. We need to be in tune with the Lord, and we'll automatically be in tune with each other. So Jesus is going to give a pattern for prayer. Now this is not a message on prayer. It's going to kind of, I guess, have to have some of that in it because of the subject matter. But it's interesting to me that the Lord begins this pattern with two words that are our subject tonight. Jesus said in verse 9, Matthew's Gospel, chapter 6, After this manner, therefore, pray ye. Our Father. Let's pray. Lord, we are awestricken tonight that you love us with such a love. That you're so long suffering to us. Lord, that you look upon us with favor. Lord, that you would save us is beyond our ability to comprehend that Christ, the eternal one, would die for us. That you would choose out of people for your own namesake. And then, Lord, that you have allowed us to have a part in your work, the labor in your vineyards. Help us tonight, Lord, to be faithful servants. Thank you for the message we've already heard. Thank you, Lord, for the songs, the time of worship, for stirring our hearts. Speak, Lord, I pray, as your Holy Spirit wheels the great sword of the Spirit for a little while tonight. May hearts be blessed, helped, convicted, revived. Lord, we pray that we might look to you, our Savior, and find that you are the great I am. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen. A wrong view of God. I think that modern man has made the mistake of trying to start down here with men and we look around us at society and then we try to build our concept of God out of it. We're exactly backwards when we do that. We have to start with God and we work our way back down to man. When we look at men, we're going to be always looking at people that are flawed. Now, I had a father that was a good dad, just an old country farmer. lived his life working on a farm, fought in World War II, lost a brother. He and his brother were both serving in France at the same time his brother was killed there on the battlefield, and my dad made it back home and lived his life that way, but he was a strict disciplinarian. And you could be sitting in church kind of in the back, you know, And if I got to moving around a little too much or making a little too much noise, you'd see Dad do one of these numbers. Boy, when he'd look over his shoulder, I knew. I mean, he didn't have to say a word. I knew what was coming after church. And so that was the home I was raised in. But I had a healthy respect for my dad. I don't want to say I wasn't afraid of him, because I was, Brother Tom. I kind of was. And I don't mean that in the wrong way. I didn't sit around and shake every time my dad pulled in the driveway, but I had a healthy fear of him. Because I knew that he was a disciplinarian. I knew he loved me. My dad wasn't one of the guys that always said, hey, I love you, son. As a matter of fact, I really think that he went to the extreme. I could count easily on one hand the times that dad ever said, I love you. And I've made it a point to tell my children that often. I want them to hear it. I don't think there's anything unmanly about saying to your family, I love you. You pass up those opportunities. There will probably come a time that you'll wish that you had. But here's the thing. A lot of us have had good dads. And we had a good relationship with our dad. And so that can carry over when we consider God as our father. But if you didn't have a good dad, if you didn't have a good relationship with your father, then that's a problem. Because some of the bitterness that you may carry or the misgivings you may have in your heart about your earthly father can, if you're not careful, be carried over into how you look to God as your Heavenly Father. And I thought this was a wonderful statement. It was up on the screen earlier by Philip Graham Rykin. He said, America has now embarked on a foolhardy experiment to discover what happens to a culture in which nearly half the children do not live with their fathers. One result is that many people do not know how to call God Father Nor do they want to. They don't know how to approach God as Father. Father, for many in our society, is a foreign concept. The Father's gone. He's not in the picture anymore. He was there at the conception of the child, but only God knows where He is now. And so the children grow up in a home where the father is in absentee, and then they, maybe by the grace of God, are called into the family of God, and they hear the preacher or the Sunday school teacher talk about God being the father, and they have no concept of that. Don't you think the enemy has done his job well? The family has been under attack in this nation, especially in the last several decades like never before. There is such an attack on the family unit. And listen, we're never going to recover from it in this nation if there's not a move back towards God. We're only going to go down the tubes farther and swifter unless there is a moving in the hearts and souls first of God's people back to God in real revival, that the Spirit of God sovereignly, graciously, generously bestows upon us a revival. I'm not talking about a laughing revival. I'm not talking about a barking dog revival. I'm talking about a move of God that we know beyond all doubt that God has come down. Our Father. Jesus is about to give this pattern for prayer, and He opens it with these two wonderful words, Our Father. You know, the thing that strikes me about this prayer is that I, me, my, or mine are not found in it. Nowhere. It's all about our, or us, or we. And the very first word of this great pattern in prayer says, Our Father. Our Father. So, we can't pray just for us, me. I can't just pray for me. I have to include you because the family of God, the redeemed, are all in this thing together. Now, it's a marvel to me. One of the things that I can't wrap my little mind around, that God can be and is concerned with my problems and my situation, and when I go to Him in prayer, He can personally take care of my concern while He's taking care of all yours. And He's not distracted. by the multiplicity of prayers that are being prayed around the world. He's not overwhelmed by that, and we can't plug into that because we're not God. Somebody said there are two great things that everybody needs to learn in life. One is that there is a God, and two, that you're not Him. We need to get that in our crawl. We need to get that down into the heart of our being. God is this being who is beyond our ability to comprehend. But again, we can know what the scriptures say about it. Now, three little things tonight, very simple thoughts, but I want to talk about the name and the relationship that it speaks about. I want to talk about respect and responsibility. Relationship, respect, and responsibility. The word father obviously talks about a relationship, and I've mentioned some of that with our earthly fathers. But I want you to see tonight that when Jesus came on the scene and He introduced this phrase, this wording to the people of His day, that was so foreign to them that they were aghast at what Jesus was saying when He addressed God as Father. Israel would never address God. Now, they would as the Father of the nation. But no good Israelite would dare think of approaching Yahweh as my Father. That was just foreign to their thinking. It's foreign to the thinking of the nation of Islam tonight. They think that we are blasphemers to approach God as Father. to come to Him and say, My Father, what kind of irrational person would do that, that you would approach the sovereign being of the universe and you would address Him as Father? Well, Jesus did that. In the Old Testament, it was a foreign thought. But in the New Testament, someone said that more than 70 times in the New Testament's Gospels, you'll find Jesus addressing God as Father. And so when the crowd, the religious crowd especially of that day, when they heard Jesus address God as Father, they were taken aback by that. And the Old Testament saints, and even the New Testament people that were religious of Jesus' day, they had the idea of the Old Testament God as being a stern judge seated behind the bench of justice and law. And He's this God who comes down hard on the people who are bending and breaking below. But Jesus comes on the scene and He brings this Old Testament God out from behind the bar of justice and He shows Him as merciful God. Now, I will tell you tonight, I rejoice in that. that God tonight is not looking upon Kaufman and saying, boy, I can't wait to pronounce judgment on you, but He is merciful to me, and His mercies are new every morning. Every day, every moment, every hour, His mercies are extended to sinners like us. and we can come to the creator of the universe and have a relationship with him. Now let me quickly go back to something. If you did not have a dad who was good to you, or if your dad was an absentee father and you never even knew your father, don't try to look at mortals and create your concept of God the father. Go to scripture. Go to your prayer closet and somewhere on your face before God, in the privacy of your prayer closet, cry out to the Lord and help Him, ask Him rather to help you to see Him revealed as the true Father. A Father that has a relationship. While I was traveling up here, my granddaughter, seven years old, had her tonsils out this morning. She's just a little tiny thing. And, of course, obviously I wasn't able to be there. And my son, I was talking to him on the phone, I don't know, 30 minutes or so from here. I was asked if this happened this morning, and I don't know, probably 4.30 or so, I was talking to him, and he said, we're still in the hospital. And I said, man, why aren't you home? And he said, well, she can't keep anything on her stomach, and they're not going to let us go until she can. And they're afraid, you know, with the upset stomach and the vomiting, that she'll break something loose, and, you know, they want to have her there close. And I was listening to the distress in his voice. You know what it was? It was a father's concern. And he said, Dad, everything went well. He said, the doctor said it all was just as it should be. She's just having this reaction to the anesthesia, and she can't keep anything down. But here's what he said. He said, I'll tell you. He said, I had to come out and sit in the car a while. And he's so much like me in that respect. It's scary because I knew what he was getting at. He said there was a little nurse there, and God bless you ladies that are in that profession. What a wonderful field. But you know, this particular little gal said, now she's going to have to stay here if she keeps something down. And my son, being a Kauffman, he said, I didn't say this, but I thought, she don't have to stay here. She don't have to stay. I can take her home. She's mine. And I'm paying for a service. You know, this is what he was telling me. He didn't tell the nurse that, thank God. But I can relate to that. I don't have time to go into a story that we had with a grandson once, and that was an ordeal, at a hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. I had to walk out the door and said, Lord, I said out loud, Lord, you're going to have to do something and help me right here. I'm getting ready to do something that I don't need to do. And so I listened to this and I said, well, son, I said, hold it together. And I said, I'm praying for you and for her. And he said, I know you are, dad. And I thought about what I was preaching tonight. And I thought, there's a father who's concerned about his child. to the point that even sometimes the people that are tending to her, he says, don't you forget she's mine. You may be here doing a service. You may be taking care of her. And you may be doing a good job. But don't you forget who she belongs to. She don't belong to the state. She don't belong to the hospital. She belongs to this family. She belongs to this daddy and this mama. And I believe tonight that I have a God in heaven who, when the accuser of the brethren stands up and says, look at Kaufman. Look how he failed. Look how he failed today. Look at what a miserable wretch he is. And he claims to be a child of yours. And he claims to preach the word. My advocate stands up and says, he's still mine. He has been bought with a price. He has been redeemed by blood. He is mine. I've bought him, I've purchased him, and he is mine forevermore. That's my father. And the relationship that we have with each other is an ongoing, growing relationship. You've been married 50 years, you're still learning some things about your spouse. I'll promise you that. You get married and you say, well, if we make it through the first year, you can make it through the first 50. You'll learn things about your spouse from now on until you're both planted in the ground, or Jesus comes. I am ever learning about my Father. So when Jesus speaks to us about this great communication vessel, this tool that he's given us, this privilege of prayer, he says that we approach God as our father. Now, let me quickly say something about this second thing of respect. Now, I respected my father. I had a healthy respect for him. Sass didn't exist in our house. Dad had never read Norman Vincent Peale's book. Wasn't it Norman Vincent Peale wrote the one on how to raise children or something? I know he wrote the one on positive attitude, positive thinking, and all that. But Dad never read the book on how to raise children. True story. When I left for the military, We had a big willow tree in the front yard about three steps out the front door. You could get through a willow tree. About three steps out the back door was a big willow tree. Both of these things were like this big around. I used to climb up in those trees. And I left to go to the military, just me and my brother there. And he had already married and left. And then I went to the military and was gone while I came home. And both those trees were dying. They had died. I said, Ben, what happened to the willow trees? He said, they died. I said, they didn't die, you killed them. He said, what do you mean? I said, you pulled too many switches off those things. I said, no tree can survive that. I said, you pull so many switches off of them, whipping us boys, you kill those trees. You know, I thank God they're gone, but I mean, you know, I never loved those trees. Dad was a disciplinarian, and I learned to respect him, but now here's the thing with God, it's different, it's different. Some parallels there, but the very first petition of this prayer is, Hallowed be thy name. And what's Jesus just addressed him as? Our Father. And he quickly says, hallowed, sacred, set apart, holy is your name. Now, let me quickly say this, and I heard Alistair Begg preach a message that really spoke to my heart about taking the Lord's name in vain. Most of us think that taking God's name in vain is when people take his name and use it loosely, and that is one thing, that is one way of taking God's name in vain. But Baig brought out something that I think is tremendously important and that a lot of people miss. He said, we're taking God's name in vain when we attribute things to God that God's not necessarily in. In other words, have you ever talked to somebody and you could almost see that they're going down the wrong road? I mean, they're just doing something goofy and crazy and you try to talk to them and they'll say, well, I feel like God, I feel like God's told me to do this. I've had people run, Jack, tell me some of the dumbest stuff and say, well, I feel like God told me. Really? But let me ask you, how do you argue with that? I mean, what do you, what do you come back with when somebody says, well, you know, I feel like God wants me to do this. Now, obviously God's not going to tell you to do something that's contrary to scripture. We know that. But, but what about the person when it's that area that's kind of gray and we don't really have scripture for it, you know, completely. And they said, well, I feel like God is in this. How many times have we, we said, well, you know, I think God wants me to get that car. I think that God wants me to have this. I think that God sent this to me. I think that God put me here or that God's sending me there. We'd better be careful what we accuse God of telling us to do. Now, if He did, that's a whole different ballgame. If He did, thank God for it. Wonderful. But did He? I have to tell you tonight from an honest heart, there have been times in my life I've had to pray and say, Lord, is this You or is it me? Is this something you really want me to do, or is it something I just want to do? Is this something, Lord, that you're pressing in on me with, or is it just my emotions running away with me? I think it's a valid question. We need to come to God with the respect that we come to a good father in our childhood days, we come, listen, nothing wrong with you coming to the Lord to say, Lord, I don't understand what you're doing in my life right now. There's nothing wrong with that. Don't ever feel like it's a sin to ask God why. I've heard this so many times, and I tell people, I try to tell them gently, but I've had countless people say, well, I know we're not supposed to question God. Can you give me a chapter and verse for that? I want to tell you about the sinless Lamb of God and what He said on the cross. By the way, He always addressed, in the New Testament, He always addressed God as Father, except for one time, on the cross. And He cries out, My God, My God. What's the next three-letter word? Why? Why hast thou forsaken Me? Don't think that it's an offense to your Heavenly Father when you come to Him and say, Lord, I just don't get it. He's not an unapproachable God because Jesus has torn the petition in two. The way has been opened up for you and I to be kings and high priests. You let that soak in on you. We've heard it so much that it doesn't really sink down into our soul. That we can make our petition to Christ, our mediator. We make our petition to our Father. We make our petition to the Holy Spirit. He's God too, you know. And we cry out and we make these petitions. Now, when my children come to me as they were growing up, There were a few times they would come and they'd say, Dad, I don't get this. How come you have this particular thing set? My son, we went through a thing one time when he was about 14 or 15, and there was one little thing he wanted to do, and it wasn't a terribly bad thing. It wasn't an end of the world type thing. But he came to me, he talked to me about it, and I said, no. He said, how come? I said, because no. I said, no, you're just not going to do it. Well, I don't understand. And I said, well, you know, I'm sorry you don't understand, but you don't have to understand. I said, you have to understand this. You're living under my roof, and that's just one of my rules. And I said, good, bad, right, or wrong, that's just the way it is. So we had that thing between us there, and when he wanted to know, I tried to explain it to him. I wasn't mad at him. I was glad that he came and talked to me about it. And I want to tell you something. If he'd have come in there and slammed his fist on the desk and said, why? We'd have had a fight right there, probably. Because his attitude was everything, you see. I wouldn't care for a child or grandchild to come up to me at any time and say, Dad or Pawpaw, how come this? I'd be glad to sit down and try to explain it to them, but don't come in there and stomp your foot and say, why? Nothing wrong with asking God, why? Be careful that your attitude's right. What do you do? Be careful that you're asking the Lord that you want light on your situation because you need it for your own personal growth spiritually. You want some insight into the problem and you'll learn not only is there responsibility, there's this relationship and respect and the last thing is this responsibility that will come along and all three of these just kind of grow together. We learn about the relationship that is ours between God as our Father. We learn something about respect when we keep going back to God. And there are times, we know this, that God just says no. You know, the old adage is that God answers all prayer. He says either yes, no, or wait a while. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. And by the way, let me say this. Have you ever thanked God for the unanswered prayers in your life? You ever thank God that He didn't answer them all? If you're having trouble remembering, some of you ought to think back and remember what you prayed for in high school. And God didn't let you have all of that. And you ought to thank Him tonight that He didn't let you have it. That person, that thing, that whatever it was, and, you know, the older I get, the more I realize, Lord, I don't think I know anything. And I mean that from the depths of my heart. Just about the time you think you kind of grabbed onto a truth here, something happens and your whole world is shook. I have a good friend tonight. I just learned this week he had a situation that came up. They took him to the hospital. They found a spot on his brain. They did surgery. They said, we don't know what it is, but it's not cancer. We think everything's going to be fine. Three or four weeks passed. He woke up one Sunday morning getting ready, wanted to get up and get to go to church and couldn't get out of bed. They took him back to the doctor, took him to the hospital, ran more tests. I found out Wednesday. They said it's brain cancer and it's an aggressive cancer. I want to tell you, that'll shake anybody's world. That'll shake anybody's world. I had a fella call me on the way up here about an hour or so down the road fighting lymphoma cancer, about 50 years old. taking a chemo pill a day. He's already been through one chemo treatment, one set of treatments, and now he's on another set. He told me, he said, and he was a big stout hunter, outdoorsman type guy, never been sick a day in his life. He told me a few years ago, he said, I've never had heartburn or a headache in my life. I don't know what it's all about. And now he's fighting for his life to live through cancer. He told me about passing out the other day. He said, I was just sitting in the chair, I got nauseated, and the next thing I know I was out. He said, they think now it's my heart. So, why are you telling us that? Because, listen, there are going to be some things, church, that are going to shape your world. We're not immune from cancer. We're not immune from heart attacks. We're not immune from family problems. We're not immune from financial loss. It's what sickens me. And pardon me for saying something about Joel Osteen tonight, but your best life now, really, I wish he'd been around to give that to the Apostle Paul, don't you? Paul, I want you to have a signed autographed book that I've written here on your best life now. And Paul is in a dungeon somewhere, and his head's getting ready to roll. This ain't my best life. I know better than to say ain't. I just said, I guess I think it sounds good. This ain't your best life. For the child of God, listen, this is as close to hell as you're ever going to get. And for the child of the devil, this is as close to heaven as you're ever going to get. Several years ago, there was this thing that went around about the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. And so the liberal crowd really wanted to pick up on a few verses that talked about God as Father, and they wanted to say, we're all brothers and sisters, all the race of humanity, we're all brothers and sisters. And God is the Father of all men. No, He's not. He's not. He's the Father of His own that know Him through the redemptive act of Jesus Christ on the cross. And if you doubt that and don't have time to take it, But Jesus told a group of religious people one day, He said, you are of your father the devil. He said, if Abraham had been your father, you'd have heard me. You'd hear what I got to say. But He said, you are of your father the devil. So don't swallow this thing that says, well, you know, we're all going to the same place. It doesn't really matter what you believe. It doesn't really matter how you worship, just as long as you believe in God. You guys know better than that, and I know you do, and thank God that you know better than that. But there's a whole vast group of people out there that don't know any better. And they think that all roads lead to heaven. What a silly thing. 422 Button Knob Road. You think every road going out of Cleveland will get you back to 422 Button Knob Road? I got news for you, my GPS has trouble getting me up here. You're going to find that if you're going to end up at the right destination, you're going to have to get on the right road. If you hope to go to heaven, you have to know God is Father. Our Father. I didn't even get rid of that responsibility. Not on His part, but ours. There's a reciprocal responsibility there, but I'm glad that The weight is on my father. Great responsibility. And I want to tell you, he's been a faithful father. He doesn't always give me insight that I want. He doesn't always explain it to me. But when my world is shaken, I can know beyond a doubt that he's still my father. I know that he still loves me. I know he's still responsible for me. He cares for me. I think it was old Vance Havner years ago that said he may put some of his children the bed in the darkness, but he'll wake us all up in the light of the morning." In other words, we may not have all the answers here. God may not tell you everything that he's doing and why he's doing it and why he allows it to come into your life, but nothing can touch me that doesn't pass through his hand. Now, I believe that. I believe that. I believe it was Charles Spurgeon that said the sovereignty of God was the great pillar on which he rested his head, his spiritual head, and I say amen to that tonight. I'm glad that I have a Redeemer for the time. I'm glad that I have a Heavenly Father. Let's pray. Father, thank You, Lord, that we can call You Father. We are so weak, Lord. We're so prone to wander. We're so easy to sway. We're so easily discouraged. Our world is so easily shaken. Lord, I'm so glad that you knew us and loved us before the foundation of the world. That because of Calvary, we can know you in the relationship of the Father. We pray, Lord, that we will show our proper respect and that we will do our part in the responsible things that you've given us to do. We pray, Lord, that you'll help us to grow as we live this life and as we Learn from Your Word and fellowship with the brothers and sisters in Christ and pass through this wicked world. Help us, Lord, in all of those things to learn who You are and about our relationship with You. Father, help those that are here tonight that are hurting. Help those that are here tonight, Lord, that maybe they're beginning to become prideful. Help those that are in the throes of some temptation, something that's been dogged in themselves. that they might remember whose child they are, and that they must not bring reproach upon your great name. Help us, Lord, that have been in the race for a while, not to stumble now. Help us, Lord, not to mess up in the twilight years. Help us, Lord, not to say or do something that will cast a shadow in somebody's eyes over you as Father, that it might be a bad reflection, Lord, upon Christianity as a whole. Help us to finish well. Thank you, Lord, for your great love for this place and for this meeting. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.