What Does Jesus Think of My Father?

What Does Jesus Think of My Father?

by Barbara Ann Chase

Transcribed from the original recording; may contain errors.

I was sharing last night about creation and about having authority to lift creation unto the Lord. There is that scripture that says, “All creation groans for the manifestation of the sons of God,” for the coming of Jesus. And we know that we won’t have our full glory manifested until Jesus returns, because it wouldn’t be the best thing. But there is also a process by which we go from glory to glory, by which we see the authority and the responsibility that we have in our Father’s world, and we take it. So there is one way in which all creation will groan until Jesus comes back Himself, personally. But there is another in which we can somewhat alleviate that groaning of all creation, to some extent, if we only would. I can see Jesus coming back, or Father looking down on us, and we are filled with excuses. We give Him this little piece of land, or these men’s souls, or whatever it is that He has put within our grasp to present to Him, to give Him His glory. Whether it be people in a rest home, or in a prison, or in a hospital, or in a school, on the road, in a restaurant, whether it be all the waitresses that work in the place that you go to, or three times a week.

And we say, “Well, Jesus, how could? How could I have done anything? Don’t you notice how evil was there? Don’t you notice how everything went the wrong way? How there were forces much stronger than I?” But those excuses just fall flat. Because no matter what all the rest of the world is doing, or even what our brothers and sisters are doing, God gives us a small portion. And then He increases it. He says, “Well done, good and faithful servant. I set you over a little, and you didn’t complain about that, and you didn’t ignore that, but you accomplished it by My grace. Jesus, now I will set you over more. Now I will set you over more. And I will give you grace for more and for more.” And I don’t want Jesus to come back and find what He’s given to me, all destroyed and wasted. I want to have done everything I can in Him to present it to Him beautiful and holy, with His holiness. And we need to, first of all, know what He’s given to our hands, or we can never take responsibility for it. And we have to know that He’s worth it, that Father is worth, using our time on earth this way. I wrote down after the talk last night, an answer to my question.

I said, “When are little children like Donnie going to practice?” And the Lord had me write down, “Earth is a practice session. Earth is your practice for when you’re home with Me. Earth is the training center.” And so just about everything we go through here on earth is practice. But even in the midst of practice, something’s going on, something wonderful. But this is where we’re made strong and where we’re fitted for heaven, where we’re outfitted for heaven, and have that inward fitting, so that we’ll be able to respond to all that God has in store for us, that all that He’s holding within His hands for us. When I wanted to know Father better, except for the time when I knew Him from a great distance as a little girl, to really know Him close, I learned to know Him through Jesus. Because everything about Jesus is like Father. Jesus’ thoughts are like Father’s thoughts, and His words are like Father’s words. His attributes, His gentleness, His wisdom, they’re all like Father. Because He is one with Father. If you see Jesus, you see Father. And sometimes we talk to Jesus, and we’re afraid to talk to Father. And that’s silly. Because everything that makes us comfortable with Jesus, we can feel that way about Father, too, even though they’re distinct.

I was at a camp in California a few weeks ago, and the Lord gave me a most beautiful revelation through a brother there. I’d always had difficulty with three persons and one God. And you have difficulty when you try to explain a mystery, and there’s no way to explain it. And I don’t care if you use triangles or three-leaf clovers or anything. It is lacking. There’s absolutely no way you can compare God to a three-leaf clover or to a triangle. It’s ridiculous. And so we get frustrated when we try. But one of the things that hindered me was I always thought of one God like this. One. The number one. And this man put his hands together like this, and he said, “One. One.” And something leapt up in my spirit because it wasn’t one, but God is one. And we aren’t one together, but we’re one in Jesus. And it’s this coming together. And that doesn’t help explain it anymore. It just sounds truer. It just sounds true to me. I don’t have no idea what this means. This is even more of a mystery, isn’t it? This we can handle. But this is magnificent. And that’s more how God is and how we are together in Him and in ourselves. But what I wanted to say is that I learned about Father by listening to Jesus’ voice.

And I asked Gordon today if he wanted to talk about hearing Jesus’ voice or if I should, because almost everything I learned I’ve learned through Gordon and Em about hearing Jesus’ voice. He probably taught me one or two other things. But I didn’t want to share what had first come from their hearts. But I think I’m going to do it. He said it was fine. And then he’ll probably have this much more to share on it one of the other days. But there are a multiplicity of ways of hearing Jesus’ voice. We can hear Him through creation. Creation won’t speak straight to us about God, but just by who it is. By what God has made we are spoken to. That it is perfect and so unique and such variety. And everything works and fits together. Everything complements the other. And where it doesn’t, that’s not God’s fault. It’s something that we as children, if He gives us that specific authority, can take care of. If you have some bugs eating up your garden, I don’t think God intended that, unless He didn’t want me to have a garden. But He has a solution. I still need more prayer in that area, because first I would pray, and if they wouldn’t all march out of my garden, then I’d ask Jesus to give me the name of a good spray.

And so I need to probably get a little more refined in what to do to bless all of God’s creation. But at least ask the Lord, instead of taking a worldly way, and see what wonderful things He might tell you that are very workable and very practical. We can hear God’s voice through things, through examples. And I asked Bob if he would come up and share briefly what he shared with me at the breakfast table, because this is a good example of how even mechanical things, even things that God indirectly made, can speak of God, and His timing was so perfect in coming up. If you want to come up and share, just very quickly. I always wondered how you’d get on stage from down there. I guess you’d jump. Very good.

About a month ago my wife and I, Bonnie, were praying and we needed a car, and the Lord provided a new car for us, a ’66 Volkswagen, and ’66 cars have problems of their own, but ’66 Volkswagens have foreign problems because it’s all metric.

So this car had a great personality but a lot of problems. And I didn’t know anything about cars, but I don’t know if you’ve ever owned a Volkswagen before. If you own a Volkswagen, you’ve got to be able to fix it yourself or you’re paying a million dollars having somebody else working on it all the time. So this car was getting about, what was I figuring, about 24 miles per gallon when I got it, and that seems pretty good, but it’s not what it’s supposed to be getting. And it took it about 20 seconds to get to 50 miles per hour, and I started reading up on, you know, your cars maybe go 4 seconds or something, mine goes 20 seconds. So the other day I was working on the Lord’s car because we gave it to Him, and reading on the books and everything, and things started making sense to me, and it became clear to me that all you need to make a car go is gasoline and a spark, and the spark lights the gasoline and it blows up and it makes the car go. But the important thing is getting them there at the same time, and that’s what tuning a car is about, because if you get your gasoline there first and then your spark comes afterwards, by the time the spark gets there the gas is going out the exhaust pipe. And if you get your spark there first, then the spark burns out and then the gas comes and there’s nothing to light it, so it blows out.

You know, the same way. So, I tuned the car. And I drove it and then I tuned it again and then I drove it and then I tuned it again. And I’ve had to tune it every day since we got it.

There was one bolt, one little bolt that holds the distributor… I didn’t know what it was until a couple weeks ago, so don’t worry. That holds it tight. And that one bolt was loose. And I thought it was tight, but it was loose. So as I’m driving around, it’s turning and the spark’s coming before the gas and the gas is coming before the spark and it’s making a lot of noise. So I thought of how that relates to our spiritual lives and how sometimes we get our fuel, our prayer and our groups that we go to, and all the spiritual things that we do to grow in Christ. And sometimes we run around and we get a whole lot of fuel and we don’t have a spark. And it all blows out the exhaust pipe and makes a lot of noise, but there’s no power.

And you don’t go anywhere. And you don’t get very much mileage off the fuel that you’re using. And sometimes we have a whole lot of spark. We get the Holy Spirit and we have a whole lot of spark, but we don’t give it any fuel, so we don’t go anywhere either. So we were getting 24 miles per gallon and taking 20 seconds to go to 50 miles per hour. And I tuned it. Now we’re getting 32 miles per gallon. And we’re going to 50 in 11 seconds. Which is still awful slow for normal cars, but for a Volkswagen, that’s really moving.

So yesterday I found the one bolt that was loose and tightened it up. And now it’s running great. But it made me really think of how, you know, in our spiritual lives, sometimes we get God’s timing wrong or we demand, “God, give me tongues right now.” Or, you know, we try and set our own timing. I mean, we try and fill ourselves up with so much fuel thinking that that’s what’s going to make us go. Or we try and fill ourselves up with so much Holy Spirit that that’s what’s going to make us go. And it’s God’s timing of putting the two together that makes us go. Because otherwise we’re going to use a lot of fuel and we’re going to use a lot of spark and we’re not going to go anywhere.

That is a very good example of learning through things. See the value of that ’66 Volkswagen? Just for this. That’s if it didn’t run at all. But it’s going to run. You found that right bolt. Praise the Lord.

God can teach us through creation. He can teach us through things. He teaches us through His Holy Word, as it is enlivened to us by the Holy Spirit. That’s something else like the gasoline and the fire. You can’t have the Word without the Spirit, or the Spirit without the Word. Jesus said, “The time is coming when My people will no longer worship Me in the temple or on the mountain, but in Spirit and in truth.” Not some in Spirit and some in truth, but Spirit and truth together. And so when we have this combination, as we read the Scriptures, we really hear Jesus. We come to know about Him. We come to know about Father. This whole book is about who God is, and how He cares for us, and who we are. If you ever have those basic questions in life, “Who am I? Is there something or someone higher than I am? What is life all about?” These questions. Here are the answers. And there is no other book that has them.

It’s amazing that we have a book that God wrote, that we can touch. So many things about God we take on faith, which means that the evidence, the external sign isn’t there. But here we have something tangible that God wrote. I don’t think we realize what a marvel that is.

We also hear the Lord speak to us through our brothers and sisters. If we are listening, and if God is speaking, we are members of His body. And if, let’s say, Mary is a finger, and John is a finger, and if Mary says something to John, and says, “Thus saith the Lord,” but she never consulted with the head, it’s not going to do a thing for John. And vice versa. Anytime a member of a body responds to another in truth, it’s because they’ve gone through the head. That whole nervous system has somehow contacted the head and sent those messages accurately back. So that if two hands come together and clap, it’s because of up here. The coordination. And so there are many times when we speak to one another when God hasn’t said something. And we have to be free to have opinions. Sometimes why people reject it when we say, “The Lord said,” is because we say, “The Lord said,” when He didn’t say anything. When it’s just our own idea, our own opinion, our own supposition that this might be so. And people are rightly angered when we come into a prayer group, or into a home, or into a meeting, and say, “God told me.” And they get very angry when we say, “God told me you should do this.”

“God told me you had done that, and He was offended.” But if we would be very careful never to say, “God said,” unless He does. And if God says, then let’s not say, “Well, I think maybe, just perhaps. Let’s see if you witness to this.” But if God spoke, then say, “He spoke.” And if He didn’t, don’t. And that would ease up a lot of problems here. Many of us have learned how to hear Jesus through one another. And in some of our churches, this is one of the few acceptable ways. But no matter what way we hear God, if that’s the only way we’re willing to hear Him, we’ll become deceived. If the only way I’ll hear God is through my pastor, or my elders, or my brothers and sisters, sometimes I’m going to hear Him, and sometimes I am not. Or if I’m only willing to hear Him through creation, or only through external circumstances, I’m going to be deceived. If I only hear Him through the Word, if I never listen to Him through anybody else, but I read the scriptures and I look for what I want to find, and take things out of context, and use it to prove my point, then, once again, we’re going to miss God. We aren’t really going to know our Father.

It’s the same, too, for when we have an inner witness in our spirit. Have you ever heard that quote that says, “I feel a check in my spirit”? What that means is that when someone says something, or does something, or when we observe it, we get a little knot inside, or we feel frustrated or lacking in peace. And we say, “My spirit doesn’t quite witness to that.” But I’ve found that many times it doesn’t have a thing to do with spirit at all. There are times when, in the innermost depths of our spirit, we react to something that is ungodly. But very often when we do that, what we mean to say, if we were honest, is that that experience is something that hasn’t happened to me. The first time you see someone fall down under the power of God, you look at them, and you get this little funny feeling in your stomach. And that’s because you haven’t fallen down under the power of God, and you don’t know what they are doing down there. And if it isn’t in your experience, it can’t be good, or God would have done it to you first. And so we start condemning. Instead of saying, “Jesus, is this of You?” If someone speaks in tongues, and no one has done that in our group before, we go tearing for the Bible to find where it says that tongues is the least of the gifts.

And you can look and look, and there is no place that says it. In fact, if you need edifying, it is the most important gift in the world. If you need to be healed, it isn’t. The gift of healing is the most important. If you need a word of wisdom, what is the most important gift? Wisdom. Whatever the need is at that time.

This is brought to my mind, I forget where I heard it, but there was a line of people standing up to be prayed for, and absolutely everybody that was prayed for went down under the power of God. Just like that. And someone, I think the one who was ministering, told me that four people down, this lady with a beautiful suit on and a purse and a hat, looked and saw what was going on. So before the person doing the ministering came to her, she put her purse down on the floor and settled her hat and sat down and then laid down, just to save him the trouble. She was a very sensitive person and thought it would save him time if she just went ahead and laid on the floor. And the people condemned her and thought it was false and everything, but considering that she didn’t know what was going on, I thought it was nice. She needed some instruction, which I believe she got. But we just have to love each other and to let people try different things as long as they aren’t against Jesus, and to encourage them to ask Jesus if this is of Him. But God is going to do more and more surprising things these days. So is the enemy.

And this is why we need to hear God’s voice, and to know what is of Him and what isn’t. One of the ways that Gordon and Em taught me to hear Jesus, and I find that the Lord is doing it more and more, is not really teaching us how to hear His voice, but making us aware of how often we do hear it. The other night when I told you to ask Jesus to show you a way in which He was blessed by your hands, which you could bless others by your hands, He spoke to you. If someone said, “Did God speak to you last night?” you probably would have stopped and said, “I don’t think so. He doesn’t speak to me. I’m unworthy.” But how did those thoughts come to you about what a blessing your hands were? Or the good tidings of the Lord? Or how to love someone? How did that thought get into your mind about taking a casserole to someone who was sick? Or offering to take care of their children? Who do you think that comes from? It’s such a simple thing to hear our Lord’s voice as a thought in your mind, that we ignore Him. And He’d like to talk to us during the day, not just in sentences, but even in paragraphs.

I don’t think I shared with you about the boy in Montana. He was a young boy, and I told him to ask Father what Father thought of him. And he got as far as, “My son. Just My son. Just My son.” And he was so overwhelmed that he didn’t wait for the rest of it. Some of you have had Father say to you, “My son,” “My daughter,” “My beloved.” And you haven’t let Him go on. And I’m asking Jesus to continue to speak tenderly to your hearts today. Now, He will speak correction, too. But in love and in tenderness. Someone asked me a question at another camp, whether I meant that God would never say anything by way of correction. And what I had said was God would never make a negative statement. He would never say anything that was negative. And that person had put negative and correction as being one thing, which shows that we don’t understand correction. But when God corrects us, it’s the difference between night and day to when the enemy condemns us. And it makes us happy that He loves us to that extent.

If we’re going to ask Jesus a question, it’s good to relinquish all our own ideas, to be willing for any answer that He would give us, because otherwise we’ll waver. If I want to go to Hawaii on vacation, and I’ve never been there before, and I’ve always wanted to go, and all my friends have been to Hawaii, and I haven’t. And then I say, “Jesus, do You want me to go to Hawaii?” And if He says yes, I say, “Oh, that’s just me, because I want to go so bad.” If He says no, we think it’s the enemy, because surely God would want us to go. And so we waver back and forth, until we can be open for yes or no or maybe, or later on, or “I’ll tell you later,” or “I’ll tell you through someone else.” If Jesus is speaking to us in our hearts, He’s not going to lead us away from the body. Many times when I’d ask Him something, when I was working with Women’s Aglow, He’d say, “I’ll give you My answer through Margaret.” She is our president. Or “I’ll give you My answer through the board.” “I’ll give you My answer through your pastor.” Or through this little child who’s come to visit you. The Lord gave me part of an answer through Bob this morning.

So when we hear Jesus’ voice, and use that way of understanding Him, of seeking His guidance, and of learning about the wonderful person that He is, then He doesn’t lead us into an exclusive relationship with Him, because He’s not exclusive. He is total. He’s totally mine. I don’t just get part of Him. I get all of Him. But so do you.

And He leads me to appreciate His body. He shows me what’s good about His body, and about each individual. And sometimes you might say, “Jesus, show me my mother. You tell me about my father. Tell me about my youngest brother.

Tell me about my husband or my wife, my mother-in-law. Tell me about my next-door neighbor.” You can think of your next-door neighbor, just a neighbor on either side. There might even be some of you here who have lived next door to someone for five years, and you still don’t know their names. You don’t know where they work. You don’t know what church they go to, how many children, unless their children have annoyed you.

And the Lord would like you to ask about those people next door. Because that’s really your church, isn’t it? I always consider my church whatever that five-block radius is. You can make it one block if you want. Start whatever level you want. Those are the people that God has put around us. Our neighborhood. And in American society, we can live and die in a neighborhood. And someone might read the obituaries one day and say, “Don’t we have a Smith living on our block? I wonder if it’s the same one.” Then they get down to the address and say, “Well, I’ll be at his. That’s an address just a couple doors down. Bet he’s the one we saw going out to his car.”

That’s really sad. And we don’t have to live that way. We can do all kinds of things to get acquainted. Even the world has a neighborhood lady they send around when you move into a new place in the cities. And they come with little samples of all the products and a greeting to the neighborhood. But it’s had to become a professional thing because neighbors aren’t doing it. And Jesus would like to talk to us about our neighbor. Because it’s our neighbor that He wants us to love as ourself. And we can say that our neighbor is everybody. But surely then it’s the person next door.

There are some times when it’s hard to hear Jesus. Sometimes when we waver. What I have found to be detrimental in hearing Jesus is if we have been into any occult practices, wittingly or unwittingly, because then Satan has more of an opening to speak to us. He has more of an opening to send confusion, kind of a static, between God’s voice and ours. Because we’ve given him that permission. Maybe something like reading your daily horoscope or having gone to a fortune teller as part of a game when you were young. He could be playing with a Ouija board. He could be reading books on Eastern religion. All kinds of things. And if this is the block that you have where you ask Jesus something and your mind goes blank, it’s very simple to just ask Jesus to forgive you and to command that thing to leave you, command the enemy from coming against you in that way.

And you can hear Jesus again. It may be that some of your brain cells have been damaged by being on drugs, by having shock treatments. And there is no reason to be condemned about this. Maybe you had shock treatments and usually by the time you get them you are not in control of the situation. Someone else has signed a paper for you. Someone else has committed you someplace. A doctor has said, “Well, if you’re really going to let me be your doctor, you’re going to have to do what I tell you.” But Jesus can heal those brain cells. He can clear the mind so that we can hear His voice.

Now, you don’t need to get worried about this if you’ve already asked forgiveness and been set free by Jesus. And the way to tell is to say, “Jesus, has this been taken care of?” And if it has, He’ll say yes. And if not, He’ll take care of it. I’d say one of the greatest things that stand in our way as far as hearing Jesus’ voice is a sense of unworthiness. Who am I that my God would talk to me?

Let Him tell you who you are, that He’d talk to you. Say, “What if it’s me? It sounds just like my thought.” Well, of course it does. Remember when you first spoke in tongues, you said, “Well, I’m speaking.” Surely you better be speaking. You wouldn’t want anybody else speaking through you. The first miracle is that you spoke. And the second miracle is that God gave you a language. You’re responsible for the speaking, and God’s responsible for the language. So it is with your thought. It’s your thought, but the content belongs to God.

And you’ll be able to tell the difference. And once He tells you something, act on it. Don’t ask Him something that you have no intention of doing. Because once we hear God’s voice, it either brings obedience or judgment. There’s nothing in between.

The Lord told me that once I asked Him for a new revelation. He said, “Barbara Ann, why do you want that? That wouldn’t be good for you. You haven’t obeyed the revelation I gave you last week. And you don’t want them to just all sit up there up in your mind, where they’ll be wasted away.” The thoughts that we have from Jesus, the work that He has for us to do, the spiritual gifts that He’s given us, can be just like a storehouse of grain, rotting away, because we haven’t distributed it, because we haven’t loosed it to His people. We haven’t let them come in. We haven’t opened the doors and say, “Come and take of all that God has given me.” But we store it away for a day when we might be hungry, not knowing that God can give us new bread every day. And we don’t share it. Whatever God gave you yesterday, if you haven’t shared it yet with His body, share it today.

Share all the good things that He’s given you. The Lord’s been speaking to me lately about the Sabbath day, about keeping it holy, and about forgiving each other. That’s part of that, not the Sabbath day, but the seven-year sabbatical. He had me speak at a church in Corpus Christi on a Sunday morning with people I didn’t know. He had me invite them to forgive everyone their financial debts. There was one man in there whose son owed him $3,000. There was someone else who I suspect was owed a lawnmower. You know how you loan your lawnmower and it stays in someone else’s garage for a year? Well, that was to be forgiven. Someone had tools taken. Someone else might have loaned a great deal of money to a friend who promised to pay it back. And that friend hasn’t been seen or heard from in the longest time. There wasn’t even a note of gratitude. Jesus invited His people to take a sabbatical and to forgive everyone their material debts. That took courage. They would rather have forgiven them for murder or adultery or anything, but not those financial debts.

God wanted to give them the grace to do that. And here is a little key to it. He wanted that done without replacing it with a debt of gratitude. Could you hear the father say to the son, “I’ve forgiven you those $3,000. And you know this good school over here where I’ve always wanted you to learn to be a lawyer. I know you want to be a garbage collector, but I wanted you to be a lawyer.” And it puts this real burden on that person. Maybe he wants to be an artist. Maybe he wants to be a writer. Something that doesn’t appear very lucrative.

And that debt had to go to every debt of gratitude for what had been forgiven in the past. Something’s wrong if you say, “I’ve forgiven my brother 69 times. Now I just have one more left.” That something is wrong with that kind of forgiveness. Each time it should be the first time. So that we don’t keep adding up and counting up.

Another part of the Sabbath is to keep the land at rest for a year. And to know that the year before God is going to give double harvest to feed us through that part of the land. And I was speaking to some farmers. And they found that very hard. They rotated crops, but they didn’t know about letting their land rest for one year. And the Lord gave some of them the courage to try it. The courage to do it. And some of us badly need that seventh year rest ourselves. To just take time. And be in the holy place with God. Not to minister to anyone other than Him.

And as He flows through us to see how many people are ministered to. Without going to meet needs. But just by being. Sometimes people say to me, “It doesn’t matter what you say. It is who you are that ministers.” And that is a beautiful thing to be told. Just who we are ministers to people. And I know that. That one instance on a plane where I told you that someone was saved and filled with Holy Spirit. I did not initiate that. I had my eyes closed. And they asked a question. I opened my eyes and answered it. And I closed my eyes again.

And I was not cooperating with God. I wasn’t cooperating with that person. Until I realized that we were in too far. That God really wanted to use me. But that person, even when I was trying to sleep or trying to read, knew that I was different. And they saw Jesus.

And that utterly amazes me. But if we would see ourselves as we really are, we would know it to be true. I want to take a few minutes and have you ask Jesus some questions. And then tell me. I want you to ask Jesus…

Let’s see, what would be a good question, Jesus? I am not supposed to start with what He thinks of you. I like to do that one. He says that He wants us to ask Him what He thinks of our father. Not our Father in heaven right now, but our earthly fathers. So let’s say that together. “Jesus, what do You think of my father?”

And listen to the thoughts that come and raise your hands. Now your father may be dead, but Jesus can show you how he looks in His kingdom. Yes. “I love him too.” Jesus loves your father too. Is that what you are saying? Are you saying more than that?

That He loves both of you? Yes. Okay. Why don’t you say, “Why, Jesus? Why do You love my father?” Someone else? Gordon? He says, “Your father is with Me, and I trained him to be a father for you, though you knew Me not.” Amen. That’s a miracle. I am the same.

Praise the Lord. The same message. And it was, “My father trained you. Your father trained you.” Jesus trained my father to be a father for me. All right. Jesus trained my father to be a father for me. Though at the time he didn’t know Jesus. Though at the time he didn’t know Jesus. And Gordon’s father is with Jesus now. And that happened to another lady back there. Yes.

Did he mean your earthly father? Fine. And he was speaking of your father on earth, that you were one. His earthly father and his heavenly Father are one. I’m a little slow, but I will get it. I’m glad He’s talking to you.

Someone else over here. “I love him and he is with Me now.” Isn’t that a comfort? “I gave you your father that he might share My joy with the world.” Praise the Lord. This is a comforting time for those whose fathers are with Jesus.

Someone whose father is still alive. Some of you feel funny because your fathers are in this room, but you go ahead. “You don’t have to worry anymore because he’s made his peace with Me. Happiness and laughter are yours.”

How about this middle section? Yes. “Your father lived many years and worked very hard and is now at rest and peace. Your father is a righteous man. His father is leaping and shouting and praising God.” Someone else. Yes.

“I love your father.” And say the last part. My ears have closed up. I’m sorry. I receive that he is lost. He is lost. Okay. Ask Jesus to talk to you some more about that, too. Someone in back.

The second one from the end there. He loves all of us. Is that your earthly father? Your heavenly Father. Good. I believe that. One more and then I’ll go on. Mm-hmm. Jesus, I ask You to open my ears right now so I could hear these beautiful things that You’re saying through Your people. Thank You, Lord.

Yes. Amen. That’s beautiful. To those who honor the father. And the father and the son with the father. And just going on down. Praise the Lord. This is a hard one. Most of you who shared, your fathers have gone to be with the Lord. And the Lord gave you comfort. And I’ll bet that one case, if I understood my sister rightly, she said her father was lost. I’d like to share with you, he may be lost. Some people choose not to know Jesus. But let’s see what more the Lord has to share about that. But for most of you, it was words of comfort. Now, I didn’t hear as much from those whose father was alive. And you’re all sitting down here grinning. I want you to feel free to ask Jesus and say, “Well, Jesus, if he’s so good, how come he does this? Or how come that upsets me?” And you just keep questioning Him until you get the right answer. Now, how many of you didn’t hear anything? Would you raise your hand? Some of you didn’t. And you should say, “Jesus, why can’t I hear You?” And you just keep after Him. Say, “Jesus, why can’t I hear You?” And tell someone what He’s saying.

He tells some people, “You’re not listening to Me.” Tell someone else, “You don’t think I can speak.” To someone else, He says, “You’re afraid I might speak.” So you ask Jesus because all of His children can hear Him. Let’s close with this passage from John 10. I want you to underline a little bit of it. Later on in the week, I’ll have you ask Jesus some more questions. One good question to ask is, “Jesus, how can I love my family better this week?” And He’ll give you exciting ways to do it.

John 10. Amen. Why don’t you underline, “And the sheep follow Him because they know His voice.” This is a word we have to believe, that we will not follow a stranger, but we will flee from him, because we do not know the voice of a stranger. We only know the voice of our true shepherd.

“This figure of speech Jesus spoke to them, but they did not understand what those things were which He had been saying to them. Jesus therefore said to them again, ‘Truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them.’” Just underline, “the sheep did not hear them.” “I am the door. If anyone enters through Me, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they might have life, and might have it abundantly. I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down His life for His sheep. He who is a hireling and not a shepherd, who is not the owner of the sheep, beholds the wolf coming, and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them. He flees because he is a hireling and is not concerned about the sheep. I am the good shepherd, and I know My own, and My own know Me.” Underline that part, “I know My own, and My own know Me.” “Even as the Father knows Me, and I know the Father, and I lay down My life for My sheep.”

If we go down to verse 27, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. And I give eternal life to them, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of My hand. My Father who has given them to Me is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father’s hand, those that the Father has given to Me.” That’s such a reassuring word.

Father, I pray for all Your lambs and sheep this morning, and I ask that You will have spoken to our innermost spirit during this time. I ask You, Jesus, to forgive me for not knowing how to take care of this problem with my ears, for not knowing how to send the enemy to flight. Lord, I ask that You would use this time anyway, that You would bless me and bless Your people and teach us.

And Jesus, even parts of this sharing that were not filled with life, I ask that You would breathe Your Holy Spirit into those words now, that they would be planted and bear fruit. And the parts, Lord, that were filled with Your life, I bless You for. And I thank You for Your faithful in both things, and both things You redeem to Your people’s good. And how I thank You, Lord, that You are going to work in us a love for our earthly father, particularly those who are still with us on earth, that we would be able to relate to them and communicate with them and hold them in communion with You, our true and everlasting Father. Heal broken relationships, Jesus. Heal relationships with stepfathers and with guardians.

Heal them with fathers who have left home long ago. And heal them with fathers who wanted sons instead of daughters or daughters instead of sons. Bless Your people, Jesus, and send forth Your Spirit of life. Thank You.