God is My Father

• Today we take the time to honor our fathers, our our grandfathers, our greatgrandfathers, and I will include also today our great spiritual father, Father God. Fathers deserve honor and we thank them for serving us. We we thank them for caring for us, for providing for us, working hard. Dads work hard. They work hard on our behalf.
• And even if they are already in in heaven, like my dad, we can still honor their memory and we should. And even if at times our relationship was complicated as mine was at times, I still honor dad for his good influence on my life. It was it was him who taught me how to preach. He was an evangelist. He was a a pastor in my early years.
• And even at a very early age, I I felt a call to preach uh uh to declare the word of the Lord, to preach it. I didn’t want to be a pastor, but that’s a different story. And I used to pay close attention to how dad started his sermons. I was intrigued by that because uh how how do you even start a message? For some reason, that always intrigued me.
• You could go a lot of places from there, but how do you even start? So, I would pay attention to his first few few sentences and how how he did that. He was one to always be looking for deeper meanings in scriptures. And if he could find a an a nuance uh in that particular scripture uh he he was delighted to do that. He wanted that.
• But I saw how he studied and in his times he was one of the the best speakers that there was anywhere. To this day this has influenced my life and I honor him for for that heritage. Probably most of us in the room or most of us watching today can find things that we observed from our fathers that influence us to this very day. While dad taught me biblical principles, it was my grandfather that taught me life principles and how to be a father.
• And I honor him for that today. To this day, my grandfather on my mother’s side was the best example of fatherhood that I have ever uh ever personally known. Dad and and mom sometimes were would be gone for weeks at a time doing revivals and uh they’d be week long, two weeks long and maybe they just go to another one if they were uh in the area.
• And we would stay with our grandparents who helped raise us uh especially in our early years when we began going to school. And uh grandpa would walk me and Dutch to to school on his way to work at the hardware store in Waverly, Ohio, making sure that we knew the way.