If you haven't come across Team Hoyt before, do yourself a favour and check our the story of Rick Hoyt and his father Dick. The story has become a little over-egged in the telling, but check it out on their own website. It is a tale of real love and determination.
There is, as the Team Hoyt website says, some grounds for making Dick Hoyt the dictionary definition of what a father should be and voting him the father of the century. Certainly he is setting the bar pretty high for the rest of us.
But as I said to my own congregation this morning, even Dick Hoyt's love for his son is only a pale shadow of the love that our heavenly Father has for each of us. That is the reason for Paul's prayer in the letter to the Ephesians:
I kneel before the Father, from whom his whole family in heaven and on earth derives its name. I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fulness of God. Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
Ephesians 3:14-21 (ANIV)
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