Luke 1:11-17. This sermon was preached by Pastor Marty Bonner on June 20, 2021, Father’s Day.
We are celebrating Father’s Day. It is easy in life to let your heart turn towards the things that it wants to turn towards. It doesn’t help when you have a society that elevates following the heart over doing what is right and pleasing God.
Don’t get me wrong. Sometimes, God puts things in our hearts, but the follower of Jesus will wrestle with those things, seeking to be intellectually honest before God. They desire more to follow him than to follow their own heart.
Today, we will look at a man who was grieved by the fact that he and his wife couldn’t have any children, and through his interaction with an angel, we are reminded of God the Father’s heart for us.
Let’s look at our passage.
The Father’s impact
In this passage, we are not told whether Zacharias was praying for a child that day in the temple. He was a priest who had been picked by lot to offer the incense in the Holy Place before the veil, and the Presence of God. We are told that he and his wife were “well advanced in years.” This probably means that his years of praying for a child had long since ceased, and his hopes for such had long since died.
God the Father chose a particular day, when it looked like there was no hope, and in fact he wasn’t even looking to see if there was hope anymore. It was at that moment that He sent an angel to give Zacharias the good news. God had a present for him, a large measure of grace; he was going to have a son! As exciting as this news was to Zacharias, notice that this grace is not all about him and his wife. It is also about the nation of Israel and its need to turn back to God. We must always remember that the grace of God in our life is a present from a loving Father, but it is also intended to bless more than just me. It is our natural tendency to be short-sided in regard to the grace of God in our life.
This is probably the first time that Zacharias has seen an angel. Though we are not given a description in Luke, the angel explains that he is Gabriel who stands in the presence of God. This angel called Gabriel also interacted with Daniel in Daniel chapters 8 and 9. There he is described as looking like a man (no wings). So, it is most likely not what Gabriel looks like that startles Zacharias, but the fact that no one is supposed to be in the Holy Place at that time, but him.
There are things that can make men afraid. Zacharias is a righteous man who has been serving God “blamelessly.” It would be easy to say that a righteous man shouldn’t fear anything, even that we shouldn’t fear God; He is on our side! However, God still does things, or allows things, in our life that we can’t control, and that we weren’t expecting. Fear is a natural response in these times.
Many fathers try to look like they aren’t afraid, but if we don’t keep our heart and eyes turned towards God, we can become entangled in a web of fears. You can spend your life trying to become greater than your fears, or you can turn to the One who is greater than all that you fear. In fact, when we are not living right before God, we often fear things that we shouldn’t. Proverbs 28:1 says, “The wicked flee when no man pursues, but the righteous are bold as a lion.” We can become trapped by a mixture of real things and figments of our warped imagination.
The real problem in life is not that we fear, but that we are truly bad at fearing the right things. There are many fathers today who are not afraid to abandon their children, or they are not afraid to help a girl abort their baby. They aren’t afraid to abuse the woman that they are with. Really, they don’t fear God who has warned those who do such things of the consequences of the things they are doing. We are not afraid to play God in our labs, businesses, and government buildings. We are not afraid of throwing off the time-proven wisdom of the past for the seduction of a future that we think we can control. Yes, the real problem is that we aren’t afraid of running off the cliff with all the other lemmings.
In the end, God is not a danger to those who serve Him in love. I should add a caveat to this. It all comes down to the definition of “danger.” Jesus served the Father faithfully in love, but he died on a cross. Yet, God is showing us through the resurrection of Jesus that any danger He purposefully brings before us, or even allows to come before us, has a way through it that brings us to the good things that He intends for us on the other side.
In truth, He is a danger to our flesh, but He is Eternal Life, Peace, and Joy to our soul, and to our future. He really does love you, and will bless you if you will turn to Him in faithful love. Like Zacharias, we must be those ones who are rare in a land of men who have turned away from God. We must pass that reality on to the next generation, both with our natural children and with the spiritual children that God brings into our lives.
The Father’s desire
As the angel describes God’s purpose for the child that Zacharias will have, we see the desire of our heavenly Father’s heart, and the things that were keeping Israel in bondage.
The term “children of Israel” is used in this context as a reference to generation, and not as a reference to age. It is not talking about everyone under the age of 12, but of the current generation who had been birthed by the generation before. It pictures each generation as Israel giving birth to the next generation of Israel. The nation of Israel, both young and old, were the children of Israel, just as we today are the children of the United States of America.
The problem with any nation is that our hearts get turned away from God the Father. No matter how good our beginning may have been, all nations run into peril as more and more of their people turn their hearts away from God. The Father’s desire was that the hearts of that generation be turned back towards Him.
We must not see God as a Father who is hurt and mad that His children don’t love Him. Instead, we must see the reality of what happens to children who turn away from loving parents, and cast off their godly instruction. Such children turn towards foolish things, and the path of folly always brings ruin to a person and to a nation. God’s heart breaks over the folly that is taking over, not just our land, but all of the nations on this earth. With a Father’s heart, He cries out, “Why will you die? Choose Life, and turn back to Me!”
He also desires to turn the hearts of the fathers towards their children. When our hearts are turned towards God, He teaches us to have our hearts turned towards each other in the right way. There is a plague of fatherless children across our land. Too many fathers have rejected the heavenly Father and His desire to turn their heart towards their wives and children. This is not just a problem for fathers. Mothers and children have the same problems too.
However, men, we must be bold as lions and care for the people that God has put in our lives. Regardless of how they respond, we must love them and seek God’s best for them, by showing them what a righteous man looks like, and how he lives. This world successfully seduces our hearts away from what really matters because it first seduced our heart away from God. This is how Satan plunders us from the goodness and inheritance of God.
Ultimately, the Father desires to turn the disobedient towards the wisdom of the righteous. Israel had become disobedient children. They were fathers who were disobedient to the heaven Father, and children who were disobedient to earthly fathers. They refused to hear the words of wisdom spoken through the righteous men of the past, and written down in the Bible. In short, to turn is to repent. There is a lot of turning going on in this world. People turn from one thing to the next seeking their own happiness. However, it is not good enough to repent of one fleshly pursuit to go after another. The only repentance that will actually do you any good, and even do good for the people around you, is the repentance that turns all the way around back towards God. Finally, when we are truly oriented towards Him, He is able to turn us back around to the people and things in our life in wisdom and righteousness, in a way that gives life, and not death. May God help us to cast aside disobedience, hear the heart of a loving Father, and turn into the path of life!
Pastor Marty