Chariot October 2006 - Norm Wakefield  

Norm is teaching through the book of Hebrews in a small group Bible study and these messages can be downloaded for free at: http://www.spiritofelijah.com/newmp3/mp31

The Spirit of Elijah – Part 2

          Blueprints are vital when constructing a building. From the foundation to the finishing touches, the blueprints provide standards necessary for sound structure. God's Word also provides a blueprint for receiving four blessings He promised in Deuteronomy 6. The four blessings are:

·        You, your children, and your grandchildren may fear the Lord.

·        Your days will be prolonged on the earth.

·        It will go well with you.

·        You shall multiply greatly.

          As God prepared Israel to enter the Promised Land, He spoke to the men through Moses. As you read Deuteronomy 6:4-9 notice the direction of the heart that God says is necessary for the men if these four promises are to be experienced.

    Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. And you shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. And you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

Hearts Turned Toward God

            A father's heart must be first toward the Lord. When the Holy Spirit spoke of John the Baptist (Luke 1:16-17), He said John would come in the spirit and power of Elijah. His ministry was two-fold: "And he will turn many of the sons of Israel back to the Lord their God." The heart direction is clear in both Deuteronomy 6 and Luke 1. God intends to give His blessings to men whose hearts are entirely His!

          What does such a man do when His heart is turned entirely to the Lord? He loves God's Word. Our minds are a part of our hearts, and it is through His Word that He enlightens our minds and thus directs our hearts. Why does the man who wants God's blessings love God's Word and put it on his heart? Because He loves God. When we love someone, we long for intimate relationship. We want to know their thoughts, desires, what pleases them, and what offends them. It is no different in relating to God.

          As a father reads and meditates on God's Word out of love for God, he discovers that God is a father. Jesus came for the specific purpose of revealing the heart of His Father, as well as making a way for us to gain instant and constant access to Him. It is through our intimate relationship with our Father in heaven that we learn how to be fathers to our children. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, "Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect" (Matt. 5:48). We learn what God is like through His Word. Speaking through Moses, God drew the most important part of the blueprint: The man, family, church, or nation that loves God entirely may expect God's blessings.

          I don't believe this is possible without the Spirit of Elijah, the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit's work in the hearts of men is to turn them to the Father! The Apostle Paul wrote this to the Galatians: "Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba! Father!" (Gal. 4:6). The Holy Spirit enables us to recognize God is our Abba. He's the source of everything we need.

          Lest you think God's promise and work of the Spirit is only for men, the Holy Spirit does the same work in women. In fact, if wives are to express the heart of their husbands to their children on a daily basis, they too must love God with all their hearts and have His Word on their hearts. However, in this passage where God lays out the blueprint for blessing His people, we should not miss the point that this message is distinctly to the men and their sons. Not that women are not important, they are! I don't know any husband/father who can fulfill the responsibilities of leading and teaching his children without a capable, God-loving wife.

          But the world has gone to great lengths to communicate the message that men are not that important. On Sept. 21, 1992, an important cultural moment occurred in the United States. Two powerful media entities communicated the same message: fathers are not all that important. The CBS sitcom Murphy Brown took revenge on Vice President Dan Quayle's criticism of the show "mocking the importance of fathers." (Earlier in the year, the show's heroine, Murphy Brown, had decided to bear a child outside of marriage.) She reminded viewers (41% of that night's television audience tuned in), "families come in all shapes and sizes." The same message was reinforced on the front page of The Washington Post that morning: "Important, but not that Important". The article relied heavily on a flawed study by Frank Mott, senior research scientist at Ohio State University (From Fatherless America by David Blankendorn, pp. 69-71). The message screamed on the culture stage was the opposite of what God's Word teaches in this passage in Deuteronomy.

          In contrast to the lies foisted in the media on Sept. 21, 1992, the importance of a God-loving father is revealed in the following statistics. I'm sorry I cannot site the source of this data, but I've heard it several times. The research study revealed the following:

·        If a child is the first in a family to be converted to Christ, there is a 3% chance of someone else in the family being converted.

·        If the mother is the first in a family to be converted to Christ, there is a 7% chance of someone else in the family being converted.

·        If the father is the first in a family to be converted to Christ, there is a 93% chance of someone else in the family being converted.

          When God told Moses to gather the men and their sons in order to give them the blueprint for the family, He was thinking of the most effective way of transferring His Word form one generation to another. Fathers have a tremendous influence, responsibility, and privilege. This underlines the idea that as the man goes, so goes the family, as the family goes, so goes the church, and as the church goes, so goes the nation. Not only must men's hearts be turned toward God, simultaneously they need…

Hearts Turned Toward Children

          The second responsibility of fathers if families are to receive the promised blessings has to do with hearts being turned toward sons: And you shall teach them diligently to your sons…. The Apostle Paul affirms this plan in the New Testament. "Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord" (Ephesians 6:4).

Fathers who love God have the privilege and responsibility to teach their sons to love God and His word. As we live our lives with God's Word on our hearts, we want to teach our sons that God's Word is sufficient and relevant to everything in life. As situations arise we want to think and act according to God's Word. Just as God commands us to love Him with all our hearts, He instructs fathers to teach their sons diligently at every opportunity. That's what is meant by "when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up." We are to take every chance we get to teach our children the relevancy and truthfulness of God's Word. We teach them when they get up; we teach it to them when they go to bed; we teach it to them when we're sitting in our houses and then when we're going places. This is a great plan!

Let's not overlook the word diligently. My functional definition is: we can't take a vacation on this one. We must be intentional about teaching them God's Word on a daily basis. This is not going to happen by accident. Our sons, especially, need to see our dependence upon God's Word as we live daily. The son whose father teaches him to love God's Word is the son who will become a father who loves God's Word and teaches the same to his son.  

Can Someone Else Do This?

As a general rule, a generation of fathers creates culture. If fathers don't teach their sons to teach their children, then God's vision and order will be lost. And it won't be long before there arises a generation who will forget God. As we'll see in future articles, this is exactly what happened in Israel.

No one else can be a father to your sons or daughters. The most sincere and dedicated pastors, youth ministers, Sunday School teachers and Awana workers cannot exemplify and teach the relevancy of God's Word daily. Furthermore, a son's identity course is determined by what his father does or doesn't do, not what his youth minister does or doesn't do. God never intended ministers in the church to replace fathers. They are to equip and supplement their ministry to their families.

For instance, Sunday Schools were created for the children of parents who were not Christians, who would not teach their children God's Word. Could our children's and youth programs be causing more destruction than good? I realize even raising this question places me in suspect of being a flaming radical heretic. But consider the results of a 2005 Barna survey mentioned last month.

        A new study by The Barna Group (Ventura, California) shows that despite strong levels of spiritual activity during the teen years, most twenty-somethings disengage from active participation in the Christian faith during their young adult years – and often beyond that. In total, six out of ten twenty-somethings were involved in a church during their teen years, but have failed to translate that into active spirituality during their early adulthood.

Is it possible for well-intentioned people to enable lazy or ignorant fathers to neglect their biblical responsibilities? And sometimes in so doing, ministers have not encouraged or taught the men of the church to gain their children's hearts by loving God and teaching them daily. Additionally, spiritual destruction may occur if children, whose parents have forsaken their responsibilities, are allowed to spend time weekly with children who are untrained, untaught, and foolish. If parents don't have the hearts of their children, then the children are looking for someone to identify with who will make them feel significant. Fathers who abdicate their biblical responsibilities because they think their children are being taught at AWANA, Sunday School, Youth Program, or Boy Scouts will tragically find God's Word to be true. They've ignored God's blueprint!

          Please don't get me wrong. I'm not saying all of these ministries are bad. To the degree that they encourage, facilitate, and supplement the father's biblical responsibilities, they are good. To the degree that they supplant them, they are bad. It seems that the shepherds of the flock of God need to be intentionally aware and alert to these dynamics. Sadly, I've heard of elders and ministers criticizing a father whose heart is turned toward his children, who does take his teaching and shepherding role so seriously that he doesn't place his children in the church's programs. In most cases, the ministers are more interested in the numbers in their programs than they are that a dad is actually looking to follow God's blueprint stated in Deuteronomy 6.

My concern is that we men have abdicated our teaching roles because we think, "They're going to get it in Sunday School." Or, "They're going to get it at church; they're going to get it at the Bible study—the youth Bible study." Have you heard or know of parents, who naively placed their young boy or girl into a group of what they thought was a "safe church bunch," only to see them led astray? Or sent them to a "Christian college," only to lose them?

God's plan was for fathers to be responsible for teaching God's Word. My observation after 30 years of ministry is this: If a father lovingly teaches his children, his children will pay attention when they are in church. On the other hand, if sons are not taught daily by their fathers' examples and instructions, as a general rule, the sons won't listen to the ministers of the church. These children typically develop hard hearts due to their bitterness and neglect. Consequently, their hearts are not be prepared for the Lord. And that's the key thing: God's plan was to prepare the hearts of each generation for the Lord through the example and ministry of fathers.

Where is Your Heart Turned?

        God's blueprint is clear: Fathers' hearts should first be turned to Him, and then turned to their children. He tells us what this looks like.

·        A man has God's Word on his heart.

·        A man diligently teaches his children daily. 

        How important is God's blueprint to you? Do you realize how important it is to God? In the upcoming articles on The Spirit of Elijah: God's Blueprint for the Family, we'll discover that God had this on His mind for over 1000 years! If it is still on God's mind, and we know it is, how exciting to think that if we follow His blueprint, we can be confident God will manifest Himself in our families and pour out the blessings He promised that day on Mt. Horeb.

        Please take some time today to talk with God, your Father, about your own heart. If you've not followed God's blueprint, there's no better time to start than "today." "TODAY IF YOU HEAR HIS VOICE, DO NOT HARDEN YOUR HEARTS, AS WHEN THEY PROVOKED ME" (Heb. 3:15). If you have turned your heart toward God and your family, what a great time to thank God for His wisdom and the blessing of having His blueprint.

        I also recommend you teach this blueprint to your sons and daughters. God's Word tells us to act on what we read from His Word, and there's no better time to do so than "today." I know you'll be encouraged as you turn your hearts more intentionally toward God and toward your family. And they will, too!

Hide God's Word in Your Heart

        In continuing this study of the Spirit of Elijah, think about leading your family in memorizing some of the key scriptures involved (like some of Deut. 6, Mal. 4:4-6 and Luke 1:15-17). Hiding God's Word in your heart and meditating on His Word will help make the Bible alive and relevant in your heart and in your children's hearts. An excellent resource to help you and your family memorize can be found at http://www.memorizehisword.com/.

Would you like to be on the Elijah Ministries Prayer Team?

        The backbone of Elijah Ministries is the prayer team who pray diligently for God to turn the hearts of men to Himself, their wives, and their children. Before I leave to speak, I send out a prayer team invitation to those who will intercede for God to work for His glory in us as a team for the Kingdom. Not only is it a blessing to those whom I speak and myself; but it is also a reminder to the team about the direction of their own hearts. If you would like to enter into the labor together with me, you may go to my website and click on "Prayer Team".

        If you haven't visited our website, www.spiritofelijah.com, please stop by sometime. You'll find:

*   Resources to equip you and your family

*   Previous Chariot articles

*   Norm's speaking schedule

*   Free MP3 downloads  

*   Various pages translated and available in Spanish  

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