I know, I know, Father’s Day has come and gone. In Sunday’s sermon, I talked about the significance of dads that have been touched by God.

Here’s where my thought came from:

I was reading last week in 1 Kings. You remember how you keep seeing this pattern of how the next king in the line did what his father did, whether good or evil?  For instance, “He did what was evil in the sight of the LORD and walked in the way of his father, and in his sin which he made Israel to sin.”  That is 15:26, but really there’s a whole slew of verses just like that. Point is, the sin of the father was easy to pass on to the next king, and guess what the consequence was?

Perhaps you’ve read or heard me say before how blessed I am by who my father was.  You see both my dad and my wife’s father were not raised in homes where they were taught the things of the Lord.  And actually it was a pretty dismal outlook when you consider the other details that I wont go into here. Looking on from the outside, you might assume that neither of them had a chance or would ever amount to much.

Then God touched them.  Without a dad, or anyone in the home to point the way, my dad was 12 when he trusted in Jesus for his salvation. Laurie’s dad was 15.  And guess what? Everything changed. Each would go on to marry amazing Christian women who were raised in wonderful, God honoring homes. Each would raise a large family of Christ followers. And each became missionaries.  I’ve never tried to do the math of the influence, I’ll let God keep that record, but I must believe it’s amazing.

You see dads, it matters. Yesterday at Grace as we were honoring our dads, we were also getting a quick report from our youth who just returned, (like seriously 6 hours earlier) from a week at Hume Lake, where 11 students trusted Jesus for their salvation.  Imagine the young person whose life changed this very week, and imagine the next generation who just may be impacted by each of those individuals.  Is there a Jim Smith in that group, a Larry Cardoza?  Maybe. Probably. How about most definitely?