Father's Day - A Man’s Place in the World

 

This is the manuscript of the Father's Day sermon June 20, 2021, at Christ Church.

Men in general have become reluctant warriors in a social revolution. Men everywhere are wanting to find their places in the world. Most of us, here today, grew up in a world that was quite different from the world today.

 
At church, our fathers went to the men’s Bible class and debated the Last Days, while our mothers sang in the choir, helped in the nursery, and were the Sunday School teachers for the little kids. In church business meetings, our fathers argued over whether to paint the church, buy new pews, or fire the pastor, and our mothers sat at their sides in dutiful — biblical — silence.

The world and the church are changing. Women are no longer silent. Men no longer make all the decisions. We men see the changes and reluctantly agree but that doesn’t mean we really want to. Most men will move over and admit women’s voices to the important decision-making processes of the church, but that doesn’t mean they really want to.

It makes us men wonder, just what is “a man’s place in the world” nowadays? What is the domain of man in the world? Does he have an exclusive role anymore? If so, what is it?

For an audio recording of the sermon click the image icon at the end of the manuscript.  

For a video of the entire service click this link https://youtu.be/2J6vocNsKpQ


Scripture

Judges 7:15‭-‬21 NIV When Gideon heard the dream and its interpretation, he bowed down and worshiped. He returned to the camp of Israel and called out, “Get up! The Lord has given the Midianite camp into your hands.” Dividing the three hundred men into three companies, he placed trumpets and empty jars in the hands of all of them, with torches inside. “Watch me,” he told them. “Follow my lead. When I get to the edge of the camp, do exactly as I do. When I and all who are with me blow our trumpets, then from all around the camp blow yours and shout, ‘For the Lord and for Gideon.’ ” Gideon and the hundred men with him reached the edge of the camp at the beginning of the middle watch, just after they had changed the guard. They blew their trumpets and broke the jars that were in their hands. The three companies blew the trumpets and smashed the jars. Grasping the torches in their left hands and holding in their right hands the trumpets they were to blow, they shouted, “A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!” While each man held his position around the camp, all the Midianites ran, crying out as they fled.


Father's Day was inaugurated in the United States in the early 20th century to complement Mother's Day in celebrating fatherhood and male parenting.

Father's Day was founded in Spokane, Washington at the YMCA in 1910 by Sonora Smart Dodd. Her father, the Civil War veteran William Jackson Smart, was a single parent who raised his six children there in Spokane. After hearing a sermon about Mother's Day in 1909, she told her pastor that fathers should have a similar holiday honoring them.

It did not have much success initially. Americans resisted the holiday for a few decades, perceiving it as just an attempt by merchants to replicate the commercial success of Mother's Day.

In 1957, Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith wrote a proposal accusing Congress of ignoring fathers for 40 years while honoring mothers, thus "[singling] out just one of our two parents".

In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamation honoring fathers, designating the third Sunday in June as Father's Day. Six years later, the day was made a permanent national holiday when President Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972

I am always amazed at how we treat Father’s Day. On Mother’s Day we often hear sermons exalting the role of the mother in the family. Mothers are encouraged, praised and lifted up as the most important person in the home. And, we should thank the Lord for godly mothers.

Then there’s Father’s Day. Dad comes to church and hears a sermon on how he does not measure up as a father. He is told about some biblical father and the perfect life he lived, and dad leaves feeling like a failure who will never measure up as a dad. Well dad, you are a special person too! You are just as important as mom. Many experts now believe that fathers can be just as nurturing and sensitive with their babies as mothers. As their children grow, fathers take on added roles of guiding their children's intellectual and social development. Even when a father is 'just playing' with his children, he is nurturing their development. 

Today I want to talk about a man’s place in the world.

Men in general have become reluctant warriors in a social revolution. Men everywhere are wanting to find their places in the world. Most of us,here today, grew up in a world that was very different from the world today. 

At church, our fathers went to the men’s Bible class and debated the Last Days, while our mothers sang in the choir, helped in the nursery, and were the Sunday School teachers for the little kids.  In church business meetings, our fathers argued over whether to paint the church or buy new pews or fire the pastor, and our mothers sat at their sides in dutiful — presumably biblical — silence.

Today, middle-class lifestyles require two paychecks, not one. And the working mother — who in more and more cases is bringing home half, and in many cases more than half, of the bacon — is beginning to expect the working father to change half the diapers, wash half the dishes and clothes and run the vacuum half the time.

The church is also changing — much more slowly but just as surely. Women are no longer silent. Men no longer make all the decisions. We men see the changes and reluctantly agree but that doesn’t mean we really want to. Most men will move over and admit women’s voices to the important decision-making processes of the church, but that doesn’t mean they really want to. 

The reason for the reluctance is that so many women sitting in places traditionally reserved for men, and so many men having to sit in places traditionally the domain of women, frankly makes us men uncomfortable. It is threatening. It is challenging. It can be humiliating. And it makes us men wonder, just what is “a man’s place in the world” nowadays? What is the domain of man in the world? Does he have an exclusive role anymore? If so, what is it?  

Well let’s talk about a couple of things today and we are going to use the experience of Gideon and his army.

I. A Man’s Place is to be a Volunteer for the Betterment of Life

In Judges 7:15-21, the scripture that Jean read, every man there was a volunteer. The Midianites were threatening Gideon and the children of God. The people of Israel had done what was evil in the sight of God, and God had placed them under the thumb of Midian. Now Midian was bearing down upon them to wipe them out; and they were camped in the Valley of Jezreel, preparing for the final onslaught. 

When God called upon Gideon to sound the alarm, 32,000 men showed up at Mt. Gilead to answer the threat. Now there’s what it means to be a man, volunteer to fight for your people! Sadly, however, not all of them proved to be real men.  Here’s what I mean;

Judges 7:1‭-‬3 NIV Early in the morning, Jerub-Baal (that is, Gideon) and all his men camped at the spring of Harod. The camp of Midian was north of them in the valley near the hill of Moreh. The Lord said to Gideon, “You have too many men. I cannot deliver Midian into their hands, or Israel would boast against me, ‘My own strength has saved me.’ Now announce to the army, ‘Anyone who trembles with fear may turn back and leave Mount Gilead.’ ” So twenty-two thousand men left, while ten thousand remained.

I figured it out.  Of the 32,000 that volunteered only 32.25% stayed, so 67.75% showed no firm conviction, and were permitted to go home, leaving 10,000 men.

Gideon himself knew what it meant not to have strong convictions, because he didn’t volunteer either he had to be drafted into this service by God.

It's in Judges 6:11‭-‬23 we're not going to read it all but I will summarize.

Judges 6:11‭-‬23 NIV The angel of the Lord came and sat down under the oak in Ophrah that belonged to Joash the Abiezrite, where his son Gideon was threshing wheat in a winepress to keep it from the Midianites. When the angel of the Lord appeared to Gideon, he said, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” “Pardon me, my Lord,” Gideon replied, “but if the Lord is with us, why has all this happened to us? Where are all his wonders that our ancestors told us about when they said, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up out of Egypt?’ But now the Lord has abandoned us and given us into the hand of Midian.” The Lord turned to him and said, “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand. Am I not sending you?” “Pardon me, my Lord,” Gideon replied, “but how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.” The Lord answered, “I will be with you, and you will strike down all the Midianites, leaving none alive.” Gideon replied, “If now I have found favor in your eyes, give me a sign that it is really you talking to me. Please do not go away until I come back and bring my offering and set it before you.” And the Lord said, “I will wait until you return.” Gideon went inside, prepared a young goat, and from an ephah of flour he made bread without yeast. Putting the meat in a basket and its broth in a pot, he brought them out and offered them to him under the oak. The angel of God said to him, “Take the meat and the unleavened bread, place them on this rock, and pour out the broth.” And Gideon did so. Then the angel of the Lord touched the meat and the unleavened bread with the tip of the staff that was in his hand. Fire flared from the rock, consuming the meat and the bread. And the angel of the Lord disappeared. When Gideon realized that it was the angel of the Lord, he exclaimed, “Alas, Sovereign Lord! I have seen the angel of the Lord face to face!” But the Lord said to him, “Peace! Do not be afraid. You are not going to die.”

Gideon was drafted but he realized that his army needed to be all-volunteer. A volunteer army, you see, has greater motivation and commitment than an army of draftees. Volunteers believe in their cause and step forward without being coerced.

God wants men to be volunteers, not draftees. Of all of the whining that may be heard today, probably the loudest and longest comes from us men who complain about women taking our places. 

They’re only doing the same work that we’re doing, and they have the gall to expect the same pay! And just because we expect them to know about retail sales and computers and 40-hour work weeks, they think we should learn about baby formulas and even how to load the dishwasher! What ever happened to the days when a man’s home was his castle, and his throne was the recliner in front of the television? Is nothing sacred anymore?

Let me make this perfectly clear: if any woman has occupied any place that God had really intended for any man to have, it has been because that man refused to step forward and volunteer his services.

God’s purposes will not be defeated because men expect to be begged, or because men want special places to be reserved for them. In the home, or in the church, or in the world, if a man won’t do it, then a woman will!

So If we men want to find our places in the world, we must surrender all notions of our great necessity and our profound privilege. We must admit that God in His redemptive way has used the failure of us men to gain for women a bigger piece of the action. This is God’s justice and God’s business. We are not going to turn it around and head it in the other direction. 

Men need to re-enlist in their true places in God’s world. Because women are finding their place in the world, too, it is not likely that we will ever return to the old days, in terms of male-female roles. But men can take places of productive service to the world and to the family and to the church and to our Lord!

II. A Man’s Place is to Remain on Spiritual Alert

Gideon’s army was alert, equipped and ready to go. God insisted that the army be vigilant. God had to trim its ranks far below the 10,000 figure, in order to display His own strength. The test He chose to have Gideon administer was a test designed to determine who among the 10,000 was alert. After all, the Midianites lay encamped only a few miles to the north. A man must remain watchful.

Judges 7:4‭-‬7 NIV But the Lord said to Gideon, “There are still too many men. Take them down to the water, and I will thin them out for you there. If I say, ‘This one shall go with you,’ he shall go; but if I say, ‘This one shall not go with you,’ he shall not go.” So Gideon took the men down to the water. There the Lord told him, “Separate those who lap the water with their tongues as a dog laps from those who kneel down to drink.” Three hundred of them drank from cupped hands, lapping like dogs. All the rest got down on their knees to drink. The Lord said to Gideon, “With the three hundred men that lapped I will save you and give the Midianites into your hands. Let all the others go home.”

When most lay aside their weapons and put their faces down to the water to drink, Gideon knew they were not God’s men for this task. Only the 300 men who kept their heads up and drank from their cupped hands while they kept the watch were acceptable.

Then Gideon equipped the 300 men strangely. As 9,700 men headed for home, he appropriated their earthenware jars, their torches and their trumpets. He placed a torch inside each jar, and issued a jar and a trumpet to each man. These would be the weapons that the force of 300 would use against their mighty enemy. This tactic seemed unusual and ineffective in the face of such an adversary but it was God's choice.

God wants us to be alert to His voice and prepared for action. The failure of men today is not that we do not have our eyes upon our enemies but that we do not have our eyes upon God. Prayer and meditation are the means by which a man will see God; but these are activities that men, by and large, have surrendered to women. 

Is it any accident that most  prayer chains in our churches are handled by women?  Or that most of the people who sing in any choir beyond an early age are female? Or that the groups that gather to pray for missions are women’s prayer groups? Prayer is no longer a man’s fixation. We men have our eyes upon something besides prayer because we have our eyes upon something besides God.

Gideon’s men must have looked with intense suspicion upon those jars with torches inside them, and upon those trumpets. Wouldn’t these be puny, anemic weapons against a formidable foe like Midian? Christian men today look with intense suspicion upon prayer, upon music and praise, upon missions, study and upon the power of the preaching and the teaching of God’s Word.

Not that we never practice any of it or don’t believe that it should be done — just that all of it appears to be inadequate ammunition for facing the worldly foes that we daily encounter. Better to rely upon our own manly intelligence, our own powers of persuasion, our own willingness to work 60 and 70 hours, our own dogged determination and high blood pressure to get the job done!

Gideon’s 300 men demonstrated the fact that they were real men, and that Gideon and the Lord had not made a mistake in their selection, this little army of big men dutifully shouldered their trumpets and their clay jars, and began the march down the mountain, and into the valley.

III. A Man’s Place is to Set His World according to a Standard of Obedience to God

Judges 7:21 NIV While each man held his position around the camp, all the Midianites ran, crying out as they fled.

Every man in Gideon’s army found his place. At the outskirts of the Midian encampment, there was to be no charge, no fuss and fury; there were not even any swords for the overcoming of the adversary! On cue from Gideon all 300 soldiers blew their trumpets, broke their jars and held their lighted torches high. Together they sounded the battle cry, “A sword for the Lord and for Gideon!” This sound-and-light show so shocked, startled and confused the Midianites that they all started running, drew their swords against each other and hacked each other to pieces!

The important thing to notice is that each man in Gideon’s army did exactly as he was instructed. Obedience is the most essential part of faith. To trust is to obey. In the final analysis, a man’s place is the same as anybody’s place: obedience to God’s call and claim upon his life.

“I don’t know my place anymore,” we men say. “I don’t know what’s expected of me. I don’t know where I fit in.”

God’s Word teaches us men our place. God’s Word calls a man to spiritual headship in his home. That doesn’t mean he makes all of the decisions, any more than it frees him from giving baths to babies and reading bedtime stories. It does mean that he sets a standard of obedience to God for his family! If anybody in the family is faithful to God, he is. If anybody wants prayers to be said and scriptures to be read, he does. If anybody insists the family rise up and attend the church that Jesus loves, he insists. If anybody tithes the family income, he tithes.

The Lord created fathers to play a formidable role. He charges them with the hefty responsibility to raise their children in the Lord. Fathering done right transforms boys into servant-hearted gentlemen and girls into confident women who know their worth.

God calls a man to responsible manhood under the headship of Jesus Christ. Children and youth, whether they have a faithful father back home or not, need for Christian men to set the standard of obedience to God. If the young ever learn what it means to relate to God as a father, they will learn it by relating to one of God’s faithful men.  It would make all the difference in the world today if all men would be men of God.

A volunteer, man or woman must be equipped for the work and the Holy Spirit equips us. To get that equipment you must 

Romans 10:9‭-‬10‭, ‬13 NIV If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Sermon Audio