SERMON TITLE: LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON
By Frank Breeden, ©2025 USA All Rights Reserved
SERMON TEXT: JOHN 8:48-59 (CSB)
48 The Jews responded to him, “Aren’t we right in saying that you’re a Samaritana and have a demon?” 49 “I do not have a demon,” Jesus answered. “On the contrary, I honor my Father and you dishonor me. 50 I do not seek my own glory; there is one who seeks it and judges. 51 Truly I tell you, if anyone keeps my word, he will never see death.”
52 Then the Jews said, “Now we know you have a demon. Abraham died and so did the prophets. You say, ‘If anyone keeps my word, he will never taste death.’ 53 Are you greater than our father Abraham who died? And the prophets died. Who do you claim to be?”
54 “If I glorify myself,” Jesus answered, “my glory is nothing. My Father — about whom you say, ‘He is our God’ — he is the one who glorifies me. 55 You do not know him, but I know him. If I were to say I don’t know him, I would be a liar like you. But I do know him, and I keep his word. 56 Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day; he saw it and was glad.”
57 The Jews replied, “You aren’t fifty years old yet, and you’ve seen Abraham?”
58 Jesus said to them, “Truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.”
59 So they picked up stones to throw at him. But Jesus was hidden and went out of the temple.
Ever since Television began broadcasting in the mid-1900s, the Government has required TV networks and stations to set aside some free airtime for PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENTS, known as PSA’s.
In 1967, the American Heart Association ran this PSA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wgkZgWMTYk
This ad likely played some role in a law being passed in 1970 banning all cigarette ads from television. If you’re younger than 55 years old, you’ve never seen a cigarette ad on American TV.
But, as we know too well, TV can talk out of both sides of its mouth. For, while the cigarette ads were banned, Americans have been exposed to an incredible amount of TV programming where smoking has been presented as cool, fashionable, and even as a necessary coping mechanism.
The same hypocrisy can be found in this spot’s “Like Father, Like Son” message. While this commercial praises fathers, TV programs are sending a very different signal about fatherhood.
For example, it’s rare to find a positive male figure in primetime in the role of a father. And if they are cast as such, Dads are more likely to be the comedic foil, the clueless, bumbling, one-dimensional, man child.
To borrow TV’s own warning: VIEWER DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
It should come as no surprise, then, as we gather here today in this church sanctuary on Father’s Day, we won’t be taking our cue about fathers from network television.
We can do much better.
And to all the dad’s with us today and watching online, you DESERVE better.
While preparing for this sermon, I read a sermon Pastor Alistair Begg preached on Father’s Day, 1995 at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio.
In his Father’s Day sermon from 30 years ago, Alistair tells how Father’s Day had its beginning in church.
A pastor of a church in Spokane, Washington preached a Father’s Day sermon in June, 1910 as a complement to his Mother’s Day sermon week earlier. The local newspapers got ahold of it and the news spread across the nation.
Sixty-two years later, Father’s Day was officially recognized here in the US.
As we consider fatherhood today, I submit to you the absolute best model for us to study and emulate is He who is the FATHER of all humanity. The one to whom we pray and often open those prayers with these three words: “Dear | Heavenly | Father”.
He created the very first father and has formed every father since. Everything about Him is worth knowing. Just like our earthly father-child relationships, our heavenly Father knows much more about us than we know about Him. And, the more time we spend with our heavenly Father, the “Dearer” to us He becomes. In fact, the more we learn about Him, the more we learn about ourselves.
~ ~ ~
On the first day of a theology class, the professor welcomed his new cohort of students and explained their first day of class would involve an exercise requiring their participation.
The professor asked for input from the class to help him sketch a drawing of what God looks like. He would listen to their input and sketch their directions on an art pad mounted on an easel facing AWAY from the students.
The students began by describing the face of God.
They estimated Him to be about 75 years of age; because when you’re in college, anyone over 60 is ancient! His face is handsomely weatherbeaten and tanned, His jawline squared, His mouth closed. His face has an expression exuding wisdom.
His eyes are steely, and the consensus of the class is He has shoulder-length white hair and a full white beard. God’s posture is like that of a watchful, ancient mariner staring deeply across the horizon from the wheel of a vessel at sea.
The professor keeps up with the descriptions and in a few minutes has rendered a picture. He turns the easel around for everyone to see how God looks as they have described Him.
God appears just as they have imagined Him and the class is pretty pleased with themselves. Everyone is feeling so very theological and thinking, “This class is gonna be a breeze!—an easy ‘A’ for sure”, they say.
It is at this time the professor bursts their bubble by revealing two things: First, he was only pretending to draw. The picture was already there under the Art Pad cover. It’s the same picture every year and sort of resembles Father Time.
Second, the whole exercise has been a ruse, a misdirection. As it turns out, God the Father does not exist in a bodily form, human or otherwise. He is a Spirit. Invisible.
Any students who stayed enrolled in the class, however, would eventually learn that God DID choose a way to image Himself to humanity.
The way God chose to present His image to the world would be through the very identity we celebrate today: Fatherhood.
Our Heavenly Father chose His Son to be His image for the world to see Him in physical, human form. The voice that had only resonated from the clouds, a burning bush, or in dreams would now emanate from human vocal cords to speak to humanity; not ABOVE them but AMONG them.
When we look at Jesus, we are looking at a picture of God.
Like Father, Like Son.
In Colossians 1:15, Paul writes:
“Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.”
In John 14:9 when Philip, one of the disciples, asked Jesus to show them the Father about whom Jesus had talked so much, Jesus answered,
“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
We’ve all seen children who are little “Mini-Me’s”. They look so much like one or both of their parents we say they are “the spitting image” of their Mom or Dad.
When we see Jesus, we are looking at “the spitting image” of God.
If I may beg your poetic forbearance, allow me to suggest that God drew a picture of Himself, sent it to a young girl named Mary, and asked her to deliver His picture to the world in the person of Jesus.
In ancient times—also known as the mid 1900’s—it was very common for parents to carry wallets in their purses and hip pockets with several picture sleeves attached inside the wallet. They would carry pictures of their children and when someone asked about their kids, they would whip out the wallet and show the pics.
Now that smart phones have come along, the same social exchange occurs except the pictures are much better and there are videos, too. I read a report recently that the average parent takes—and posts—300 pictures of their child every year.
Don’t believe it for a minute. They take that many pictures in ONE WEEKEND at their kid’s soccer game!
Just as parents and family members love looking at, and showing pictures of the children in their family, God also takes great pleasure when people look at the “picture” of His Son, Jesus.
Yes, God so loved the world, but God also loved His Son.
We know this because He said so; both at the baptism of Jesus and the transfiguration of Jesus. He declared, “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well-pleased.”
HINT: When your child hears you talk about them like this, it makes their world and can make their life!
When you own all of creation, as God does, you don’t need a wallet. But, if we can play pretend for a few minutes, let’s imagine that God has a wallet with room for lots of pictures. And then we can pretend we could sit with Him for a while as He flips through the pictures we imagine He would carry around of Jesus—His only Son—in this imaginary wallet.
Certainly, he would have a picture of Jesus as he was preaching the Sermon On The Mount. What Father wouldn’t be bursting with pride over the fact His Son had preached one of the most famous sermons in all of history?
How could He pass up an opportunity to express joy over this sermon introducing the Beatitudes to the world? Such a powerful work of literary and theological beauty as He tells those who mourn they are blessed because they will be comforted; if they are merciful they will be shown mercy?
And if that isn’t enough to make a father proud, in the same sermon Jesus teaches His followers how to pray by giving them a model to follow.
Imagine how pleased God the Father was to hear the model prayer begin with the words, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name!”
What Father doesn’t love it when their child addresses them in such a respectful and beautiful way?
God flips to the next picture in His imaginary wallet and shows us a picture of Jesus still preaching on that Mountain when He tells the audience to look at the birds of the air who do not sow or reap or store away in barns, but are fed by their Heavenly Father. If He cares for these birds, how much more will the Father care for His children?
What father wouldn’t be proud to hear His child acknowledge how he works hard to provide for their every need?
No dad’s wallet would be complete without at least one picture of their young child.
In God’s wallet, we can imagine there would be a picture of 12-year-old Jesus sitting in the temple, listening to the teachers and asking them questions. Boy, were those teachers impressed with Him that day!
If you have a “My Child Is An Honor Student” sticker on the bumper of your car you can certainly identify.
As God the Father flips to the next plastic sleeve in His imaginary wallet, we see a photograph that would strengthen the Father-Son bond.
It shows Jesus on the grounds of the temple in Jerusalem and He is mixing it up with the Pharisees. When Jesus tells them that God is His Father, they ridicule Him and call him a demon-possessed Samaritan!
We can sense God’s emotions stirring as He recalls watching these religious bullies making fun of His Son and making insulting comments about His dad—the very God they claim to worship.
But Jesus goes back at them and tells the Pharisees they are of their father, the Devil. When they try and trap him to see if He thinks He’s greater than Abraham, He tells them, “Your father Abraham rejoiced to see my day, he saw it, and was glad.”
“You’re not even 50 years old and yet you’ve seen Abraham?” the Pharisees retort.
God the Father truly loved Jesus’ response: “Truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am!”
This next wallet picture is kind of blurry because it was snapped as Jesus and His disciples had to make a hasty exit because the Pharisees had just picked up stones to kill him.
How good it must have made the Father’s heart feel that His Son would defend Him like that!
The next photo right after the blurry one is of Jesus and His disciples as they’ve slipped away from the Pharisees at the Temple and into the bustling streets of Jerusalem. Jesus has stopped to speak with a beggar who has been blind from birth.
His disciples look a little nervous in this picture – you can see Peter on the left looking over his shoulder to see if the Pharisees are approaching.
Amid fleeing for survival, Jesus takes the time to heal this beggar’s eyes. And for the first time in his life, HE SEES!
When His disciples inquire about his blindness being caused by his sin or his parents, Jesus told them neither. In fact, Jesus had healed his blindness because He was doing the work of His Father.
How that statement must have touched the heart of God! Any dad would be honored to have a child whose top priority was to help them out and make them proud.
These next few photographs are hard for a Father to see, but they mean the World to the Father of Jesus. So, they’re kept in this imaginary wallet.
This one was taken at night so it’s a little grainy. In the foreground you can see the disciples sleeping. A little further those 3 figures are Peter, James, and John. They’re also sleeping. And at the top of the picture if you really focus, you can see Jesus down on his face. He’s not sleeping. He’s praying to His Father.
He is in deep trouble and, as He confided to Peter, James, and John earlier, “I am really scared to death.”
It’s hard for a father to know his child is beyond his reach and is in real trouble. We can imagine a tremor in God’s voice as he talks about this difficult picture.
God explains this picture was taken in the Garden of Gethsemane just a few minutes before Judas would lead the Roman soldiers to Jesus for Him to be arrested.
God vividly remembers what Jesus was praying to Him that night shown in this picture:
“Daddy, if there’s any way possible for me to avoid drinking this cup of crucifixion, please release me from this fate. But, if it is your will and you want me to, I’ll go through with it.
The Father recalls hearing His Son pray this prayer 3 times that night. So moved was the Father He dispatched a special angel to be with His Son so He wouldn’t be alone during this time of anguish.
It was a tough night that was about to get much worse. It would be followed by flogging, mocking, a rigged political trial, and being forced to carry His own cross to the execution site.
Those Pharisees and their fellow conspirators had finally got their man.
Here’s a picture of Jesus on that cross. Such a terrible thing for a Father to watch His son be executed; especially as man in whom no fault was found.
God would perhaps recall that every angel in Heaven was in full battle gear, leaning over the brink of Heaven just waiting for the signal from the Father to swoop down upon Jerusalem, annihilate the Roman Army, and rescue His only Son from that cross and BRING ... HIM … HOME!
But God never gave that order. And His Son never called for backup or exfil. He was doing the work the Father had sent Him to do.
In His humanity, He was too weak to carry His cross as he fell beneath its weight on the Via Dolorosa.
In His Divinity, He was now carrying the weight of the WHOLE WORLD’S SINS on His shoulders and was not faltering at all. LITERALLY, He was born for this moment.
The next picture of Jesus in this imaginary wallet is completely black; not because the flash failed, but because darkness had descended over Jerusalem while Jesus was hanging between heaven and earth on that cross.
It would have been taken around the time God heard His Son speak to Him one last time from the cross.
Out from the darkness, He cried loudly, “Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit.” And then He died.
After the life went out of Jesus, God knew that the work He had sent His Son to do had been accomplished. He must have reflected on how pleased He was with His Son —a faithful and obedient Son—who endured the pain and shame of the cross because He was focused on the joy set before him.
What joy might that be?
The joy of knowing countless lives of believer-followers who would know full forgiveness of their sins and be reconciled with their Creator.
The joy family members and friends would know at the graveside of their loved one because death had been defeated.
One of the best pictures in God’s wallet has to be the next one. It has a caption printed across it that says, “Not Present On Picture Day.” It was taken early on Sunday morning, about 40 hours after the crucifixion and shows the tomb belonging to Joseph of Arimathea. You can see the stone that had covered the tomb’s entrance has been rolled to the side and the tomb is empty.
THAT IS A GREAT PICTURE!
Well, you’ve been kind to indulge this imaginary exercise. I can assure you there are so many more pictures of Jesus for us to see it would take us a month of Sundays just to scratch the surface.
I do hope you’ve noticed a theme across the pictures of Jesus we reviewed in God’s imaginary wallet this morning: they all depict a faithful and obedient Son fulfilling the task His Father sent Him to do.
~ ~ ~
You may recall #5 of the 10 commandments says:
“Honor your father and your mother so that you may have a long life in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” (Exodus 20:6)
Paul wrote in Ephesians 6:2 this was the first commandment with a promise.
Honoring our parents is a requirement and it is also a condition for living a long, fruitful life.
One of the beautiful aspects of God sending us a picture of Himself in the form of His Son, Jesus is He lifts commandments like this one off of the stone tablet on which it was chiseled and helps us see it lived out in the human form of Jesus.
Before Jesus came, God told his people what to do.
When Jesus came, God showed his people how to do it.
If you want to honor your parents, you can find no better example —as we have seen this morning—than Jesus honoring His Father.
To know your Creator is to look at Jesus.
God made a WAY where there seemed to be no way. Jesus is the WAY.
All TRUTH is God’s truth. Jesus is the TRUTH.
The breath of the Almighty God gives LIFE. Jesus is the LIFE.
Like Father, Like Son.
Alistair Begg is not preaching on Father’s Day today at Parkside Church in Cleveland.
After a retirement announced months in advance, he preached his farewell sermon last Sunday. He has pastored Parkside Church for 42 years. Sunday morning attendance is around 5 thousand in 2 services. Terri and I were in that number a few years ago before we moved here.
A native of Scotland, some of you may know Alistair Begg through his bible-teaching ministry called Truth For Life, a 25-minute daily Bible teaching program airing on 2,000 radio stations across the USA and around the world.
Every sermon Alistair has preached at Parkside is available on the Truth For Life website, recording and transcript, at no charge. TFL.org reports over 1 million sermon downloads every month.
At Alistair’s first service at Parkside 42 years ago, his father, who is now in heaven, read the scripture before his then, 31-year-old son, Alistair, preached.
At last week’s farewell service, Alistair’s son, Cameron, read the scripture before his dad, now 73-year-old Alistair, preached. Cameron inserted some personal remarks about his Dad before he read the scripture.
His remarks, while very brief, were very moving.
First, he said: “Dad, you’re a phenomenal pastor.”
And then he added,
“But, you’re an even better Dad.”
See how that works? Alistair honored his father. Now, his son honors him.
Like Father, Like Son.
To children present or worshiping with us online—children of any age—watch for opportunities to affirm your Dad. Thank him. Love him. Reconcile if necessary. Forgive him. Seek his forgiveness.
Honor your father … while you can.
