Notes on Father’s Day.

It is Father’s Day in NZ, and I wonder if this will be the text preached upon this day. I doubt it: I can here the feminists grinding their teeth for this is not sex positive: it is ‘misogynist’, and heresy of heresies, it does not see women as the glory of this world.

I am not righteous and wise. I am not a prayer warrior. My father is both: he is his eighties and continually jokes that he may end up in prison because he counsels men about living righteously, particularly those with sexual difficulties. The one regret I have in living in Dunedin is that he is a thousand miles away.

The biggest drive that would get me living back in Auckland would be if I need to care for him or my Mum.

The Lamb and the 144,000

Then I looked, and behold, on Mount Zion stood the Lamb, and with him 144,000 who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads. And I heard a voice from heaven like the roar of many waters and like the sound of loud thunder. The voice I heard was like the sound of harpists playing on their harps, and they were singing a new song before the throne and before the four living creatures and before the elders. No one could learn that song except the 144,000 who had been redeemed from the earth. It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins. It is these who follow the Lamb wherever he goes. These have been redeemed from mankind as firstfruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found, for they are blameless.

The Messages of the Three Angels

Then I saw another angel flying directly overhead, with an eternal gospel to proclaim to those who dwell on earth, to every nation and tribe and language and people. And he said with a loud voice, “Fear God and give him glory, because the hour of his judgment has come, and worship him who made heaven and earth, the sea and the springs of water.”

(Revelation 14:1-7 ESV)

There is a glory in this world: we see it in nature, in the works of man, in the best and greatest things that we make. But the glory of the next life is greater. I worry that the church has forgotten this.

For we have a hope in Christ. I look to the generation that raised me, who were not Baby boomers nor war veterans but those who were in high school in the 1940s and 1950s and I see how far we have fallen. I see love and concern despite whatever we have done is a different thing from celebrating our sins and calling them normal, natural, and praiseworthy.

And I see, above all, leadership. My Mother can and does lead — she probably has a better CV than Dad — but Dad leads in the end: including at times sacrificing what he wanted because it was driving Mum to distraction.

And we have never felt that we were not loved. We have been told we are foolish, wrong, and need to change. We have never been without the love and prayers of Dad and Mum.

I know that they will be blessed when the time comes for them to go to Christ, but I will then miss them.

UPDATE.

Church did not look at this passage, but instaead Matthew 5. And, since it is Father’s Day, my boys on the post Kirk Walk, avoiding the sea as one minute and your feet were numb.
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