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01 Introduction
Elaine: Hello, everyone. Welcome to GLOBAL REACHOUT. It is my joy and privilege to introduce to you, ‘Bringing Heaven Home’, a new series for the year. My name is Elaine, and I'm the children pastor from Queenstown Baptist Church since 2001. Married for 14 years to my husband, Jason Tan, and we are blessed to have three lovely children, two boys and one girl, aged 12, 11 and 9 years old. My vision is to see children being well developed, raised up and released into the full potential for God. I believe discipleship begins at home, and my focus is to help and equip parents to make home the primary place where faith is matured.
When our family is strong, our community and nation will be strong. Father is the key pillar in the home, and mother needs to come alongside to support our father to bring heaven home. Strong fathers build strong families, strong families build strong communities, and strong communities will make a strong nation.
In this Bringing Heaven Home series, we will be sharing with you from the book, taken from “The World Needs A Father” and “The Mother's Design”. And we have lined up team of trainers to present and share with you in the coming weeks on our learning journey: how we can bring heaven home together.
Now let me introduce to you, Wen Choon, who is one of the key coordinators of “The World Needs A Father”. He will share with us more on what we are going through together in the coming weeks. Wen Choon, over to you. Thank you.
Wen Choon: Thank you Elaine. I think it's a great privilege to be able to share what “The World Needs A Father” movement is all about. At the moment, I am one of the key coordinators in Singapore since 2019. I've accepted that privilege/ position so to speak. And I was very impacted by the teachings of “The World Needs A Father” in 2016 when I attended the training by our founder, Cassie Carstens. Cassie Carstens is the founder of “The World Needs A Father” movement in South Africa. In 2014, he addressed the issue of fatherlessness in Africa. It is a tremendous movement that I've got myself involved in. And to begin with, you may notice in front of you the slide, the mission of “The World Needs A Father” is to eliminate fatherlessness, meaning to prevent Satan ungodly influence upon us as fathers, and the next generation that is our children by bringing heaven home, meaning bringing Christ home into our home.
And I like to touch from the bottom. Two very fundamental verse of “The World Needs A Father” movement. It begins with Malachi 4:5 -6, and it says, “Behold, I will send you Elijah, the prophet, before the coming of a great and dreadful day of the Lord. And he will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.” The calling of this movement is to get a father to turn their hearts to the children and the children back to the fathers, which is very clear. When fathers humbly turn, reaching out to the children with love, children will respond in love. What is before you right now are basically ten chapters, I'm running through within 5 minutes, the connecting dots of what “The World Needs A Father” movement is all about, what the curriculum is all about, and is actually being used in so many ways to impact to disciple “fathers”.
The first chapter, it is a very significant chapter called “Satan came to earth”. It might not mean much hearing this, but in reality, Satan has shown his ugly hits through pornography, through the LGBT movement, through what some of you may want to refer to as COVID, through bringing in casinos into families, through a lot of illegitimate internet gambling, the media. People say, I don't see Satan, but Satan has shown himself in all these. Fathers need to be aware because these are the areas our children are being influenced. They are actually the one fathering our children, not us. Because more and more kids are getting addicted to the media, to gaming addiction, and the fathers are at a lost.
I'm not saying this to glorify Satan, because if you go to the training, you'll be shown what it means, fathers, from the very beginning, to take authority, because Satan is already defeated. Satan came to Earth isn’t. Christ also has came to Earth and gave a crushing blow to Satan’s power. The problem is a lot of fathers are just not taking the authority given to them. This will be gone in detail when you go to the actual training itself.
Then because Satan is actually fathering our children without the father noticing it, our children are crying out for the true father's love. And if the fathers are not meeting the needs of the fathers, the children will continue crying. They need the true father's love from God the Father and from the father himself who is supposed to be ‘God with skin on’. If this continues every season, the children will be in pain.
Fathers need to father from the very beginning, the beginning of birth itself. The first year is so important, that, the child is being well taken care of not just by the mother, but the father coming alongside with the mother to give the child the kind of emotional bonding, through connection of love. When done well, this would prevent lots of emotional wounds upon the child's life. But this wound we are talking about, is the father’s. The fathers themselves are being wounded are being hurt. What are these wounds? The fathers themselves have to go into a serious consideration of learning to forgive their own fathers who have hurt them. Then in chapter ten, we are talking about learning to seek forgiveness from children because many fathers have hurt their children without knowing it. Then when you go through this chapter, it will bring you into a serious, humbling moment of what it means to seek forgiveness from your children.
If the father would have done that well, real manhood issue of the child would not be an issue. Because if they portray what it means to be a real godly man, real godly father, the children will have an image right before them in the family, fathers living godly life at home. How do you go about doing that? That's where the remaining parts from chapter 6 onwards comes into play. That is the pillar of what “The World Needs a Father” is all about, which is in Matthew 17:5.
In the transfiguration, if I can recall, Peter was saying something when he was interrupted by a voice. And that was the voice of God the Father who said, “this is my Son (Jesus Christ), whom I love (the emotional security), whom I'm well pleased.” God the Father is so pleased with his Son, that's where affirmation comes in. And lasts instruction, one of the most significant instructions given to the disciples, is listening to him. Listening to Christ. Christ then would even be the role model of the kind of manhood, the kind of authority that we should be talking about. Listen to Him. And this part about moral authority is a very different teaching in “The World Needs A Father”. It's a moral authority of submission.
Listening to Christ means learning to submit oneself under authority. And that's where you will be going through how Jesus portrayed the moral authority. As a servant, when he addressed 2 groups of people who was very fierce, very forthright. To the devil he was telling “get the behind the Satan!” To the scribe and pharisees, He doesn't mince his words, he says, “you brood of vipers!”
When the fathers get the act of modern moral authority as a servant serving their family, meeting the needs of the family, humbly as what portrayed, washing the feet of the disciples, he indeed will be able to bring heaven home. And as he goes about doing it, he will then know what it means to confer the identity of the child, be it a girl or be a boy. Fathers plays a significant role to confer, to affirm the maleness, the gender identity of the male and female. And then you affirm by telling the child how precious he is to you and to God the Father. So, this is a continual movement that the father must consciously be working on in his relationship with his family in order to bring heaven home.
The vision we have is that we want to train and develop as many fathers to become not just theological trainers, but to be practitioners. Practice what they say. We’re not so interested in imparting knowledge. We want to see them working it out in their family life. Then when time permits to mentor one father at a time, which is one of the motto you see on the slide. How do you impact the world? Changing the world one father at the time. So that’s the introduction to “The World Needs A Father”.
When a father takes it upon himself to exert the right kind of moral authority at home, it makes a lot of difference to the family life. Moral authority need to be exerted with a heart of compassion as a servant, as a servant leader at home in meeting the needs of his family.
And one of the first things that the father needs to do is to confer identity to his children. It is of paramount importance. The male and the femaleness of the child. Fathers are the one that confer and affirm the identity of their children. That will bring them to feel emotionally secure when a father continues affirming them in a home environment, showing them unconditional love, meaning loving them with no expectation, just as they are.
And as they moving along, in chapter nine, is to affirm them, to affirm the child unique identity, to be able to accept their significance, and to continue to provide them security. That makes a lot of difference to how the child feel about themself. And when the father continues to do that, he will raise a generation of healthy children to become men and women of God. And as he moves on to impact the world, he will change the world by impacting one father at a time. Thank you.