The Be Being a father

father is challenging, especially when the culture we live in seems to be

increasingly devaluing the role father fathers play in family life.

The Bible has a completely different take though,

and today on Truth for Life will learn from an imperfect but faith-filled example of fatherhood.

Alistair Begg is teaching from Hebrew chapter 11.

We're looking today at verse 21.

The idea that fathers are actually important, vital, necessary, crucial, whatever you may choose to use as the adjective, is fast losing any kind of credibility at all.

And we have this strange dichotomy that on the one hand, the country, as it it were pauses for a moment and says how wonderful it is to have dads and yet at the same time at a significant element within the culture

there is the erosion of the whole place and

calling of fatherhood. Let us go to the matter viewed biblically.

Back here at our verse, by faith Jacob when he was dying, blessed each of Joseph's sons, and he worshipped as he leaned on the top of his staff.

If the subject of father who had viewed from the perspective of our culture is chaos, then viewed from the

perspective of the Bible, it is clarity, because it provides us with a framework and it is

chock full of examples. And there's perhaps no better example of

fatherhood in the Old Testament than that which is provided for us in the person of Jacob. He wasn't

a perfect father. Indeed he erred in displaying an undue amount of affection for one of his sons over the others.

That's about Genesis 37.

You then need to read all through that story, it is a fantastic story and you should read it if you've never read it.

And if you fast forward to Genesis 46, you pick up the story when Jacob is reunited with a son whom he for all these

years had assumed was dead. Imagine living all of your life 20 and 30 years assuming that one of your boys is dead

and then receiving word that within a matter of hours you're going to meet him.

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