I believe God's wanting to bring the spirit of fatherhood into the house and into the church. I believe He's wanting to raise up men and women in the church, who will be fathers to the next generation. He wants to put fathering in your heart and spirit, the heart to reach out and embrace, and be a father to someone who needs you. So in John 14:18, this is what Jesus spoke. He talked about leaving; He said: shortly I'm going to leave, and then He talked about the Holy Spirit. He said: I will send to you - Verse 16 - I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever - the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, nor that sees Him nor knows Him, but you know Him, for He dwells in you, and will be in you. I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you. Notice this statement: I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you. He's promising the Holy Spirit would come.
So I want to just open this scripture up, and begin to just have a look at it. Some of the seed thoughts I got came from a guy, James Jordan, a New Zealander who's got a tremendous revelation of the love of the Father, and I want to just share some things related to this. The first thing is to understand the purpose that Jesus came, so many people think He just came to die on the cross for our sins. It's much more than that. The purpose of dying on the cross for our sins was to remove the block to relationship. He wanted to soundly deal with the issue, that we live in this life separated from God. Sin separates us from God, spiritually orphans us, leaves us without a loving Father; and so Jesus came, and through the Bible God sent prophets, sent various men, and they all revealed some aspect of God. But when Jesus came, Jesus came to reveal this: He came to reveal that God is a Father. Now this was the major revelation that He brought to His day - that God is a Father. Now religions don't know God as a Father. They know Him as a God, they know Him as severe, they know Him in all kinds of ways. The do not know Him as a Father.
When Jesus taught the disciples to pray, He said this is how you pray: Father. If we have issues in our heart with a father, if there are issues of unresolved conflict, we will find this extremely difficult to connect with God as a Father. Yet Jesus said that's how He wants us to relate to Him, as a Father. For many, the experiences of a father have caused images in the mind to be formed, that are not what Father in heaven is like at all. They are idols, they are wrong images. Jesus came to show us exactly what God is, as a Father; so when you study the life Jesus, He said: the words I speak are the Father's words, I say the things He gives Me to say, I do the things He tells Me to do. So when you look at Jesus' life, He reveals exactly what Father God is like, in the way He handles people and deals with people. So have another go through the gospels, reading about Jesus, and begin to think: this is what God is like as a Father. Is this what I would have expected Him to do?
And so God is a Father - so Jesus made it very clear: the words I speak are the words the Father gives Me. So when He says: I will not leave you orphans; He's saying something like this: currently when I leave you, you are orphans, spiritual orphans. The plight of humanity is, we are spiritually orphaned. We have not God as our Father, we have someone else. It's called the devil, and he runs a world system, with a belief structure and ways of doing life, values and attitudes, and we live in that, we're conditioned by that, we think like that, and God wants to remove us out of that, to give us a revelation of His Fatherhood, His love for us, and to bring us into our identity as sons. So remember we shared the story of the Prodigal Son, and the older brother, although he was a son, lived as a slave. Here's a picture for people who are Christians, who have come into the house of God, who are a son of God; but still in the mentality, live like an orphan, like a slave. Jesus came to remove that. He came to take away all the need to perform, and came to bring us into a revelation of grace, and the sheer goodness of God.