Good morning and blessed Sunday! Happy Father's Day to all the dads listening to the message. I'm praying today that together with your families that you would have a wonderful day and that you would be able to reflect upon all of the goodness of our heavenly Father.

This week I was praying about the message that I wanted to share with all of you and Chris Tomlin's, “Good Good Father” was on repeat in my mind and the lyrics are just singing to the Lord about “that's who you are”, and you know, that is who I've come to know Him to be. Our Heavenly Father truly wants to bestow all of His goodness upon His children and withholds nothing from us. It is His desire to bestow an inheritance on us where our children are blessed by the Lord. He provides a place for us to worship Him and He promises the gift of salvation for us and our families, for those who would receive His Son Jesus Christ.

God has been faithful at all times, withstanding any obstacle and has moved mountains in the way to help us when we call out to Him. You see, God is going to be revealed to those who search and seek Him out. And so today, I invite you to come to the good good Father and experience His goodness for yourself. First Peter 1:3 tells us that the Lord Himself has begotten us, and it’s with those Fatherly chords of love that attach a child to its Father that brings us back every time. And although you may have times in your past where you have gone astray, maybe you tried to do your own thing or make your own way or follow the wayward ways of the world, God has called us back and pulls us with those cords of love back to Himself with an amazing strength. And He is there with His arms open wide, waiting for the Sons and for the children to come back to God.

Perhaps you've been living your life without purpose and without having a goal in mind, but I tell you today, our true destinies is to be with God the Father; and so let us throw off everything that entangles us and run to God the Father. Let the church today join in spiritual maturity together, remaining in the Father as the Father and the Son are one. Not wavering and being tossed about by every new teaching, but making our abode in the Lord through faith, being shielded by the Father's power until the coming of our salvation. Amen.

So today, I’d like to open up our Bibles up to John 14 verse 6. And Jesus says, “‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’”. And so I probably quote this Bible verse more than anyone else, and so I know my youth group kids have heard it a lot, but this is the layout that God has provided for us to come to the Father. In His infinite wisdom, He has made a way for us to be reconciled back to Him. And it’s spoken so clearly from the mouth of Jesus, that we see that God reconciles people back to Himself through His Son Jesus Christ. Jesus says, “I am the way to the Father”.

And we can see that Jesus displays the way back to God through His life of obedience. And you know, this obedience, we’re not going to see through the eyes of the world. The kind of obedience that world teaches is the one that's about ‘when it's convenient for us’, it's about ‘our timeline’, it's a mixture of ‘His will and ours’ and we will do these things that God has called us to do just when we see the benefit out of doing it. And this is not the kind of obedience that Jesus has shown. The Lord demonstrates what obedience looks like through first seeking out the will of God. He often would bring Himself to a place of solitude where He would pray. We know that He went through great periods of fasting. He worshiped the Lord and He fellowshipped with other believers so that He would be able to know the will of God and that He would be sure to obey every word, every direction that God gave Him.Secondly, He humbly elevated God's will above His own. And so, He would not run by the carnality of our bodies; when He was hungry He didn't necessarily stop to eat if there was a family to visit or somebody to heal or somebody to touch— He elevated God's will above His own in every circumstance and every instance. And finally, He upheld that will in action. It's easier to say that we can be obedient to God and really to make it ‘lip service’. But God is looking for the ones who are not searching to cut corners, but that are willing to fulfill His desire here on earth.

"God's will overtaking our own desires...shows that we are the children of God"

And so Jesus, throughout His ministry, took the opportunity to show us about what obedience really looks like before His disciples, before His critics; they could see Jesus’s dedication to the Father's will. On one particular occasion that I can recall, the Pharisees were accusing Jesus of doing a miracle performed on the Sabbath day. And Jesus plainly responds to them that He does nothing on His own will. John chapter 5 verse 19 says, “the Son only does what He sees the Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son does also.” Jesus sought not to please Himself, but the One who sent Him. And so, the Pharisees were priding themselves on knowing and having all of the Scriptures memorized, doing all of the rituals that the Word calls for, but yet when obedience is clearly being displayed right in front of them, they were not able to recognize God's will being performed. And so, if we are truly trying to come back to God the Father, we are trying to show ourselves to the world as the children of God. The way that we’re going to be able to do that is by living the life of obedience that Jesus displayed to us.

He said, I am the way to God the Father. And what is that way? That way is the life of obedience to God's will. We must be taking the time to seek out God's will and then be able to let it overtake our own desires. And that is showing that we are the children of God, that we live not according to our own self, that we do not necessarily live the life that we want to live, but that we had given Lordship to God the Father and that we belong to Him. Amen.

It’s through the example of Jesus that we can see how to not let personal agendas get in the way. He was pressed in this confrontational situation with the Pharisees when they were wrongly accusing Him, but He did not take up His own defense and stray from God's plan and purpose. And so, we can see that obedience to God is going to be a daily decision where we are laying down our own will each and every time and choosing to prioritize His will over our own. So obedience isn't always something that's mechanical; it is a daily decision and this shows that we are the children of God. Obedience is not about when it's most convenient or when we feel our strongest. Because we saw that Jesus, when He was at His weakest moment on the cross, having not slept, was alone, beaten, stripped, scoffed and crucified - that He was able to display His will to be obedient to God and to glorify the Father above Himself.

So we must follow the way of Jesus by laying down our own will and choosing to obey God. For a lot of us, that means not just in the areas that are easy, but in the places that we still need to give Him Lordship. For a lot of us, that's our thought life and maintaining the purity that God has called us to. We also need to focus that it is not just about being right in an argument, but that we must humble ourselves and maintain being in the Lord and our communion with Him rather than winning the fight. God is looking to see how we can be obedient and how we spend our time, and not just spending time on our phones and social media and watching our favorite TV shows, but really making the time to meet with God and having those special times of communion and in prayer with the Lord. We are really called to show obedience to those who have been put in authority over us and this shows our obedience to God.

So in all of these areas that God wants us to be obedient to Him, some of us may still not feel like we have been in disobedience to God. And I ask you: Have you followed the way of Jesus to discover what God's will is? You may not know that you're not being obedient because you may not be seeking out the will of God. And so today I ask you: Have you asked Him? Have you sought Him out through communion? Do you open His Word with an open heart or is your heart hardened and not willing to receive His Word? Are we too tired? Are we too stressed? Are we too busy to seek out the will of the Father? Because Christ, in the midst of any obstacle that He was going through, through all of the hardship that He endured, He sought to know and to do and to fulfill the will of God the Father. So today church, may we boldly approach the throne of God as we come to Him, living the life of Jesus unto God, the way of obedience.

So in our main verse today, we saw that Jesus is the way, and now we see that He is the truth of the Father. John chapter 8 verse 46, Jesus is speaking and He says “If I am telling you the truth, then why don’t you believe me?” And this week, these words were resonating in my spirit— Jesus asking us this question: “If I'm telling you the truth, then why don't you believe me?” And these words challenge me to take a deeper look to see if our walk reflects the message of Christ. Have we accepted His message? Have we taken it deep inside of our spirit? And do we maintain it in all things? Jesus's message or His truth, is that He was sent by God the Father, coming to cleanse us of all sin and unrighteousness. And what we have to realize is this is not meant to be poetic or an exaggeration or abstract. This is the Lord's message to us that's going to bring us to the Father, that He has come to bring about a cleansing within us, baptized life, a new life in Him. And after that initial cleansing of receiving the Lord, which He relates to a ‘rebirthing experience’, we know that then we are in need of a daily cleansing from the Lord.

John chapter 8 verses 31 to 32 says, “‘If you hold to my teachings, then you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’” We see that it's not enough just to know the truth, but we must receive them in our heart and when you do they will bring about change. It brings about the change of a new life. And that is how we know that we have received this truth and that truth brings us to God the Father. You see, there are instances in our life that we have acknowledged the truth of a sinful lifestyle, or a sinful mentality. And we in that instant know, that according to God's Word, that there are major changes that need to take place, physical changes in our life. But then do we stop and allow the viewpoint of the world to come in and water down that truth? Are we allowing it to bring in a lie that God is going to accept that sin, live with it, deal with it, that it's no big deal, that it's really not going to stop me from moving forward in my Christian walk? These excuses go on. Though we live in the world, we are not supposed to live the way the world does. We are supposed to remain in truth. And so the struggle to push these things under the rug and not deal with them is not God's way. And so we must be of those who love the truth, who embrace the truth, and who live in truth.

I’d like to just give you a little scenario and I ask you in these two scenarios who is better: The person with one sin who ignores it and goes on with their life as though nothing is wrong or the person with a list of issues and acknowledges them before God and brings them to Christ for cleansing? We know that it is the latter person that is actively pursuing truth because the truth is the Lord and that person is the one who is seeking God out.

In my parents house, the truth reigns supreme. It doesn’t matter if dinner is piping hot and just layed down on the table to be eaten or if we’re on a holiday vacation or if we’re in the car; if something is found to be off or needs to be said - in love it is discussed, it is exposed, it is acknowledged. Once that takes place, we are able to continue in truth, in love, and communion with each other and God the Father. In our family we've had plenty of practice, and it's been a lifetime of learning how to receive truth in the joy of knowing that it brings us closer to the Father. We've actually gotten pretty good at it because it's really like a chorus of everybody playing the same note so beautifully, even if it's with a different instrument. And then as soon as we hear something or if something comes up in our heart that wants to deny, hide, lie or cover-up, it is like nails on a chalkboard in the symphony of worship unto the Lord. And so I encourage you in your own families to begin to tune yourselves to the voice of the Lord. Tune yourselves to the way God speaks and then as soon as someone in the family is speaking in an untruth, you'll all be able to hear it and you'll be able to love them back into the truth of God. And so you do it in a way that lifts them up, in a way that brings them back into the grace of God, it brings them in a way that they are able to bring it to the Lord for cleansing, for forgiveness and it undoes the work of the enemy in our lives— so it's so powerful.

Truth brings freedom because when sin is exposed, you’re no longer hiding away from God. So this is the scenario that we saw in Genesis from the beginning; as soon as Adam and Eve had taken of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they knew that they had sinned and they hid from God. So when God came walking in the evening in the garden to find them, they were found hidden and hiding from the Lord. Ulterior motives, scheming, surmising are the result of a lack of truth in our life - these things separate us from the Father. So today we need to see: Does the truth of Jesus have a place to land in you? Or even our children? Or have they been raised to be in their own right, never being able to receive the Word of the Lord? So today, let us truly practice receiving the truth of God; it is a lifetime pursuit. And we must break open the rocks that are unpenetrable to the Word of the Lord and receive the truth of God this day.

So Jesus is the way to the Father, He is the truth of the Father, and He is also the life of the Father. Jesus enters the scene of creation as the spoken Word or the breath of God. It was when God spoke His Word over the darkness that creation came to be, and so Jesus was that very breath or the life source of all created things. And when God held the dust of the earth in His hand, He breathed upon that dust and it came to life. That breath, that wind, that life was Jesus Christ. So Jesus has not only come to give life to our mortal bodies, but also (and most importantly) to give us new spiritual life in Him.

When Nicodemus goes at night and visits Jesus, He tells him that he must be born again— no longer of the flesh, but of the Spirit, for “Flesh gives birth to flesh, but Spirit gives birth to Spirit.” The carnal nature of man is not going to be able to connect with the Spirit. You see, the carnality or our fleshiness is what makes a person react based on the way they feel: I'm hungry, so I eat; I'm tired, so I’m not going to pray, I'm going to go to bed; I'm mad, so I act out. A man is born in the flesh. And the truth is that the flesh is incapable of understanding spiritual truths, it can't be compelled by the Spirit to move and do anything, and it denies the power of God, and in Romans we see that it is also hostile to God. Because the flesh causes us to serve ‘it’ rather than God. Jesus really was the first man that was able to show what life by the Spirit, living in an earthly body, was going to look like.

On another occasion, Jesus was on His way to go eat dinner with the disciples when a group of people came for healing and to be ministered to by the Lord. And so the disciples told Him: Well, we can’t do this right now. We have to eat. You know, we’re weak, we’re hungry, our stomachs are grumbling. But Jesus said, You don't even know about the food that I have. And even though His belly was empty, He was able to minister to them through the power that God gave to Him. And so our minds sometimes are so limited, we can’t even grasp those sorts of truths because they are heavenly, they are not of this world. We know that in this world we are limited by our bodies: they feel weak, they feel tired, they feel fatigued. And so we end up serving those things more than we serve God and we elevate those. But the Lord is calling us to be born of the Spirit so that we can connect with God. He does hold His children accountable to be able to serve Him, even above our bellies when they're telling us that they're hungry— and this is the reason why Christ has come. He had to come to die so that His Holy Spirit could be left behind to live in those who would receive Him. And for those who receive this new life, this new spiritual life, we are able to please God the Father by laying down the desires of the flesh on a daily basis.

When we look at the vices of the world like sexual immorality, selfishness, drunkenness, those things, we know that these people are weakened and they are only obeying what their flesh is telling them that they need to do. But this is not the way that it should be in the church. We are supposed to have mastery over our bodies, being able to be elevated over our flesh and come into the spiritual, where we’re seeking out the will of God. Romans chapter 8 verses 14 through 16 says that, “Those who are led by the Spirit are the children of God... And by Him we cry ‘Abba, Father.’ The Spirit testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.” From this verse we can see that the evidence of knowing God is having the Spirit-filled life of Jesus Christ upon our own.

So today in mainstream Christianity, the question is often: How can I be saved? But we see that this question can really be misleading because it's not supposed to be about who wants to be saved —everyone wants to be saved, everyone wants to go to heaven and have this “free ticket”— but the question really should be rephrased. The question is: How can I receive God the Father? And this may really bring down the numbers of who wants to receive the Lord. But for those that do, who want to be called the children of God, we know that we are not saved to a place, but that we are reconciled to the holy and righteous Lord. And in order to serve Him, we must have His very same Spirit living inside of us. We may receive the Spirit of the Lord by making a confession of faith in the work of Jesus Christ on the cross to cleanse us from our sinful flesh and take on His spiritual life as our own. Amen.

Christ has come not that we would just have life, but that we would have abundant life. What is this abundant life? This life is the life that we received when we were truly walking as the children of God, and when the promises of Him are “Yes” and “Amen” for those who trust in Him. When we live our life praying about everything because we know that God intervenes on our behalf. The abundant life is going to be when the cares of this world begin to fade into the background and we yearn to be in the presence of God Almighty. What is the abundant life going to look like for you? And the answer is truly transformation! For those of you who struggle with being weak-willed, you will be unbreakable; for those of you who find yourselves being cynical and doubting the Lord, you will be full of faith; for those who have anger, there will be an exuberant joy among you; lovers of the world, you'll be sanctified and set apart.

The abundant life is when we really get to live out the pages of the Bible. And in the life of Christ, we saw that when He would have compassion over the sick and the weary, that He did amazing miracles: He fed the 5,000, He raised Lazarus from the dead, He healed the lepers and the skin became white as snow. He said to us that we would do even greater works than these - yet church, I have not seen the full outpouring of this joy, of this gratitude, of this power and it's because we’re still coming to understand that we cannot remain in ourselves as we come to God the Father. We must come into “the way the truth and the life” of Jesus Christ. And when we receive those things from Him, and we take them upon ourselves, and we bring them down on earth, they will manifest themselves in a greater way than even Jesus Himself performed upon this earth. That was His promise for us and that is the abundant life! It is through the life of Christ that we manifest the power of God.

And finally, the greatest demonstration of the work of the Father in our lives does not come until the end, but it is the eternal life that is found in Jesus Christ. After a life of victory overcoming the world, we are called home to the Father to spend eternity with Him. John 6:40 says, “My Father’s will is that everyone who looks to the Son and believes in Him shall have eternal life, and I will raise them up in the last day.” What a glorious day it will be, church, to see all the overcomers gathered around the throne of our great daddy, singing with shouts of jubilation that God has brought us to Himself!

I trust that this Father's Day message has touched your heart as much as it's touched mine in setting my sight on my great Father in heaven. I’m going to leave you with this today: “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.” (John 1:18). Let us trust that God, in His infinite wisdom, has known the best way for us to come to know Him. He has chosen that way, and that way is through His Son Jesus Christ. Let us be of those who receive His Son and receive Him for the gift that He is. I trust that He knows the way to the Father and that He will bring us with Him, also. Amen.

So let me just pray for you guys as a final blessing for today's message. Father, it is my prayer that today, that the children would come back to you. That we would recognize our need for you to be in our life and that we would know that the purpose of our very life was to serve you and to be with you. We thank you that you allow us to share in your glory, that you have called us co-heirs with Christ Jesus the Lord, that you have brought us to yourself Father, with cords of love and that we can be forgiven for our sins, washed clean and made new in your sight. You are gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Let your love fall over us this day. May it be true love that compels us towards you and may our lives bring you glory. In the name of Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.