Daddy is the Best Medicine
- Jake Chambers
- Jan 10, 2010
- Series: SDSU
Daddy is the Best Medicine
Hebrews 13:8 “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.” Our God is unchanging, perfect, truth, love, sovereign, good, gracious, patient, gentle, kind, just, majestic and wonderful and will be all these things and more for all of 2010 and forever. The God that loved us so much to come and die for us 2000 years ago is the same God who loves us so much to forgive and redeem us now. Jesus Christ does not need to change in 2010, he does not need resolutions, or a new exercise bike, a promotion or vacation fund, because he is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Meditate on how Christ has provided comfort, safety and pleasure to your heart in the past and, rest assured, he is the same God who met your needs then and will meet your needs now.
As we come into the new year we realize that if our hearts our to be properly attached to our God, it is us that needs change in 2010, and not God who needs to be changed.
As most of you know my wife and I are trying to adopt children through San Diego County Adoptions. As part of the process we get to take a couple million hours of parenting classes provided for free by Grossmont College and the child welfare system. Yesterday we started a three-week course on attachment parenting. The funny thing is I did not even really want to take this class but after taking it I feel I learned a lot about attachment and how we as children of God can be securely attached to God. I had already written my entire sermon earlier in the week and felt it was at a good place. I was excited to preach on prayer, and then I realized that God was giving me some new insights into his character and our character regarding the role of prayer in attachment to our Lord.
So first let's look at the Lord’s Prayer and some foundation principles for building attachment.
Matthew 6:9-13
Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
The first principle of attachment parenting is that the child is looking for safety, comfort and pleasure and will attach to the one who brings them these things. It is the role of the parent to lovingly initiate and provide for these three needs. Let's take a look at the Lord’s Prayer and how this prayer addresses these basic needs for attachment. First Jesus teaches us to pray to God the Father as our father. The word used here is “Abba” and can be literally translated to dad or daddy. It is a reminder to his children that we can come pray to God because he is our dad. This is an invitation to pray in safety. God is saying you can come chat with me because I am your dad. In attachment parenting we learned of four types of attachment. The first is secure attachment, and the other three are compromised attachment. There is secure attachment, anxious attachment, avoidance attachment and disorganized attachment. All of us have some attachment to God. We will explore this further but because God has initiated safety, comfort and pleasure we have built some sort of attachment with him. The question is what does our attachment with him consist of or look like?
Secure attachment has no problem picturing God as a loving daddy. Like a child with a good dad they will run up to their dad and talk with him, share their day, ask for things, cry to him or anything else. They feel safety, comfort and pleasure with their daddy. To illustrate this point I wanted to share a letter from one of the women in our community, Hope. Hope spent the past week and a half in the hospital with her sick son, Silas. Nate is Hope's husband and Silas' daddy. During this time she sent messages updating us on how things were going in the hospital. One message was titled “Daddy is the Best Medicine.” The title alone goes a long way in showing how God has reached out to us by calling himself our Father. That he is the best medicine and provider of safety, comfort and pleasure. But I want to read an excerpt from this story so you can see what secure attachment to God, our daddy, looks like.
On Saturday Silas was feeling super crummy, he rolled over in bed and said "I want daddy", I hadn't told him Nate was coming by, but he just happened to say it as Nate got to the door so I said, "what did you say buddy?" He repeated himself, looked up and saw Nate at the end of the bed, and got the biggest smile I had seen on him in days! It was so sweet and transformed my very sick boy into a boy that was able to ignore the sick and enjoy his daddy. Psalm 16:11 says, "In Your (God's) presence there is fullness of joy." I am just reminded than in the midst of the hard I can still find joy in my perfect Father.
Silas not only feels safe around his daddy but also feels comfort and pleasure. He is securely attached to his daddy. He wants to be around his daddy, feels comfortable asking for things from his daddy and talks or spends time with him. This teaches us a ton on prayer. God initiates attachment by inviting us to pray to him like a good dad. He is inviting us into a safe, comfortable and pleasing prayer life.
I want to take a moment and address the reality that a lot of us in this room did not have good dads. We have attachment issues with our own dad and this has drastically affected our view of God and has radically gotten in the way of our prayer life. Some of us had mean or controlling dads. Some had abusive, neglectful or deadbeat dads. Some of us did not have a dad. We have daddy issues. Even those of us with good dads or good parents did not have perfect parents so there are still some things to be worked out. If your view of God the Father is warped, I encourage you to confess that fact, realize that fact, and spend some time around some good dads. Our community is blessed with some good dads. Dads that want to provide safety, comfort and pleasure for their kids. Maybe you have no idea what a good dad looks like. Spend some time in community and know that every loving thing you see in a good dad has been brought to perfect completion by God the Father. Some of us hang around good dads and we feel sorry for our self and wish we had a dad that good. Let me encourage you that you do. You have a perfect loving Father that invites you to have eternal safety, comfort and pleasure in him. This is our Father!
I want to look briefly at the spectrum of attachment so we can analyze where we are at on that spectrum. There is anxious, avoidance or disorganized attachment. Do you have a secure, regular, attached prayer life? Or is it anxious, mantra-ish and repetitive. Is it securely attached or do you avoid prayer and speaking with your Father often? Are you disinterested in his word, his people and speaking to him in general? Are you disorganized with avoidance and anxiety, both of which spill into prayer life? Or you are disorganized in your prayer, thinking sometimes you like it, or want it, other times you hate it, or you think it is stupid, pointless, boring or lame? If so then this illustrates a lot of attachment issues.
We talked at the beginning about how our God is the same, yesterday, today and forever. He does not change and does not need to change for us to have a passionate, regular and secure prayer life. We need to change to have attachment with our God. In the attachment studies, scientists have found that the first building block towards attachment is “basic trust.” The Lord’s Prayer again illustrates this form of attachment in the prayer. You see, if we believe it is our heart that needs to change and not God’s, then we do not pray to change God but we pray to change ourselves. This is an unbelievable, but profoundly Biblical concept. In the Lord's Prayer we see that it is God's name that should be hallowed, it is his kingdom come, and his will be done one earth as it is in heaven. This is a prayer that reminds us of the holiness of God. It reminds us to place our trust not in our own kingdom and in our own will but to place our basic trust in God the Father. Don’t you see that prayer is a vehicle for change and is a vehicle for growing your faith or “basic trust” in Jesus. We need to remind our self and our community repeatedly that our God is trust worthy. Notice how the prayer is communal. We need to pray not only for our own basic trust but for our community. Jesus is calling us to pray for each other. We are taught to pray to “our” dad. It is a family and as a family we need to look out for each other. We need to look out and make sure we are placing our basic trust in God the Father and not in anything or anyone else. We are called to look out for one another and recognize when we are not attached to our heavenly Dad, and call each other to once again put our basic trust in Dad. This is the first building block of attachment.
The next block in attachment that shows secure attachment is the ability to demonstrate causal thinking and show signs of delayed gratification. Let's continue on with the prayer. “Give us this day our daily bread.” Causal thinking is when you start to realize that “A” causes “B”, you and appreciate how things work. We pray for our needs from God because he invites us to. We pray for provision and he lovingly provides. Many of us do not have causal thinking so we are not securely attached. We all have clothes, food and water and none here have died from the elements outdoors, yet our minds do connect that this was because of the gracious giving from God. God has provided for us therefore we should be attached to him. God perfectly provides every need for safety, comfort and pleasure, yet instead of attaching to him we attach to other things. We have screwed up causal thinking and therefore have attachment issues. The next is delayed gratification. God invites us to ask for things and he answers these prayers … though is sometimes the answer is yes, no, or later. This is why we have to pray in his will that his will be done first. These are building blocks. We have basic trust, we see how our provision was from him and so we are fine with delayed gratification. This is like the kid who asks for dessert and his parents say “not until after dinner” and the kid does not throw a fit. He has secure attachment and can wait for delayed gratification. This is difficult. Who here wants to pray for things and wait for them? Not me. I realized my attachment issues with God this week when several things I prayed for got “later” or “no” responses. I admittedly tossed a fit like a two year old and was detached and grumpy with God all day. But again, the answer is not that God needs to change, it is that my heart needs to change. It is amazing how God has built attachment and signs of healthy attachment so deeply into our make up. We show these signs even from infancy. A baby may cry and be calling for a bottle. If this baby has secure attachment they will see a parent making a bottle or preparing to feed them and stop crying. They trust that the bottle is coming and can wait for gratification. But an infant with attachment issues will still cry when they see the bottle. They will cry until the milk is on their tongue. They do not have secure attachment with the parent or baby sitter or nanny or daycare worker and will not trust in delayed gratification. You can see how God has built us to need attachment to function in society. Imagine a world with no attachment. We would trust nobody, have no causal thinking and throw fits when we did not get things right away.
The final building block of a child with secure attachment is conscience development. They will begin to know right from wrong and have a stronger sense of conscience to work out of. This is fascinating and really illustrates Romans 1:24-32, which talks of people lacking a basic trust in God’s truth and instead believing a lie. They exchange God’s trustworthy truth for a lie and God gives them over to a load of sin. They literally will have seared consciences and become unable to recognize the truth from a lie. They never “attach” to God and trust in him, but instead only trust themselves. SD County adoptions tells story after story of children who never learn to trust anyone but themselves so their consciences are broken and all they know is selfishness and survival, not right from wrong. It is devastating and the big idea in “attachment parenting” is that if a child can attach to their parents they can attach to others. If you can attach to others you can function in society. Doesn’t that sound a lot like the Greatest Commandment to love God and love our neighbors? Doesn’t that illustrate how we need to be securely attached to God so we can do his will of loving others? Doesn’t that illustrate how sin disconnects us from God and people and how society malfunctions when sin or “detachment prevails?”
Let's look at the rest of our prayer here in Matthew. “And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” This is a prayer of attachment and conscience development. This is a prayer that is deeply aware that there is right and wrong and good and evil in the world. This is a prayer that recognizes that we are evil and have debt. We need forgiveness. There is confession tied tightly towards this prayer. We need to know right from wrong and we need to be able to confess when we are wrong. All of us are very aware of when we have financial debt. We stress and think about our financial debt and we get credit statements reminding us of our financial debt. This is a prayer that reminds us of our spiritual debt. All of us do wrong, love evil, fall into temptation, and sometimes call others into the same. We commit both sins of omission and sins of commission. We do what we should not do and we don’t do what we should do. We need forgiveness of our debt. Christ is the only one who pays off our spiritual debt. The beauty here is we need not hide our debt and trust in our own righteousness but are free to confess our debt, our sin and the evil we have done or the good we have neglected to do. Our righteousness is completely a gift from Christ which allows us to humbly ask for his righteousness to keep us from evil and to humbly be able to name our sin. This is also why when we sin, we need to name our sin and ask people to forgive our sin. So they have the opportunity to forgive and build back some “basic trust.”
This is a prayer of obedience. In attachment parenting we learned that asking your kids to do things builds attachment. Are you praying for God to lead you and are you praying for obedience and confessing disobedience. If God has given you areas to obey him and you remain in disobedience you are free to confess your sins and know the joy of obedience. Obey where you are being called to and follow Christ's lead and you will have greater joy and pleasure and attachment with our Savior.
There is evil in the world and our loving Father does not want us to be ignorant of that. But we are also free to forgive those who have done evil. Forgiveness and attachment are not the same thing. Forgiveness frees you from bitterness and thinking you have to be the one to get revenge, fix things or change the person. In SD County adoptions we hear of terrible stories of what has happened to some of the kids. But the county is not working to force those kids to build attachment with those parents. They are working to protect those children from those parents and to provide a safe, comfortable and pleasing environment where they can build healthy attachment. Yet they encourage the children to ask questions about their parents and even forgive them for their situation. And some of you may have had evil things done to you or to ones you loved. You are free to forgive but you are not called to attach. Some of you in the name of forgiveness have put your self into one miserable, disappointing and evil situation after another. I encourage you to forgive that person but not to attach to that person or situation until they have begun to build back “basic trust.” Also you must know that it will be up to the one who sinned against you to build back some “basic trust” and they may never build it back. Forgive like Christ forgave you, but run to God the Father for your secure attachment.
Isn’t it crazy that what has taken scientists and psychologists years of research and study to figure out, Jesus Christ sums up in a few sentences? This is our all-knowing God. Finally as we seek change in 2010 I hope your motivation for change is that you would want to be like your dad. To the men out there I pray you will become the type of dads that give their children a loving view of what their dad in heaven is like. Kids want to be like their dads, do what their dads do and act like their dads act. This is why we should long to be like our loving God. This is why we pray his will be done, and we pray to be delivered from evil. Because we want to be like our Dad. I encourage all of you to fight for change in your own life and fight for change in this community in 2010. But I plead with you that this change would be motivated by a love for your heavenly dad. We have a perfect Father who provides us eternal safety, comfort and pleasure. He loves us and invites us to love him, to attach to him and to be like him. Amen.
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