I Heard My Father Come Out of My Own Mouth

A man told me he had to leave a room because of eight words he said to his own son.

The words were nothing. That is what he wanted me to understand. They were not cruel and they would not have registered on anybody listening. What happened was that he heard the shape of them, and the shape was not his.

It was his father's. Same eight words, same rhythm, same small flat drop at the end of the sentence, delivered by a man who has spent about twenty years deciding not to be that.

He said he went out to the yard and stood there for a while, and that he was not upset exactly. He said the word he kept coming back to was installed. That it had been installed and he had never agreed to it.

I do not have children and I am careful about this room. What I have is my father's voice in my head about several things, and I know what it is to hear him arrive in my own sentences, twenty years after he stopped being able to say anything at all.

There is a verse at the very end of the Old Testament about exactly this, and it is the last thing God says before four hundred years of silence.

The turning goes both ways

Here is the verse.

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the earth with a curse. (Malachi 4:6, King James Version)

Read the two clauses. The heart of the fathers to the children. And then: the heart of the children to their fathers.

Traffic in both directions. It is not a verse about children being fixed, and it is not a verse about fathers being fixed. It describes a turning that happens on both ends of the same relationship.

And notice who does it. He shall turn. Not: they shall turn. The subject of the verb is God, working through the one Malachi is describing, and the turning is His work rather than an achievement of either party.

That matters enormously for a man standing in a yard. He is not being told to try harder at not being his father. He is being told that hearts get turned, and that the turning has an agent, and the agent is not him.

You are not the one who has to accomplish the turning. Malachi 4:6 makes God the subject of the verb rather than either generation. It is His Spirit, Luke 1:17 saying he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias to turn the hearts, who is named in the very passage that quotes it.

What Ezekiel refuses to let travel

There is a chapter in Ezekiel that was written to end a proverb people were repeating, and the proverb was about inheritance.

The saying was that the fathers had eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth were set on edge. Ezekiel spends a whole chapter on it, and lands here:

The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son. (Ezekiel 18:20)

Shall not bear. It is a ruling, and it is aimed at a culture that assumed guilt ran down a family line.

Now, that is about guilt rather than about habits. Nobody in Scripture claims a man does not pick up his father's mannerisms, and plainly we do. But it settles something underneath the habits, which is the question a man in a yard is actually asking at two in the morning.

He is not asking whether he sounds like his father. He knows he does. He is asking whether he is him, and whether the whole thing is fixed, and Ezekiel says the ledger does not travel.

You are not carrying somebody else's ledger, and Ezekiel spent a chapter ending that idea. Ezekiel 18:20 says the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father. It is the Holy Spirit, Romans 8:2 called the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus who made a man free, who does the freeing that a family pattern cannot be argued out of.

What the other Father is described as doing

There is a verse about God as a father that is almost domestic, and the word in it is the one nobody expects.

Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. (Psalm 103:13)

Pitieth in the older English is closer to has compassion on, and it is the word for the tenderness a parent has when a child is small and struggling and not managing something.

And the very next line gives the reason: for he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.

So the picture is a Father who is not startled by a limit, who knows what the material can take, and whose first response to a struggling child is compassion rather than instruction.

For a man who inherited a colder voice than that, this is not a nice thought. It is a different template, and it is the only one that has any authority.

You have a Father whose first move toward a struggling child is compassion. Psalm 103:13 says like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him, and it is the same Spirit, Romans 8:15 called the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry Abba, Father, who puts that word in a man's mouth.

The word that is not inherited

And there is one word in the New Testament that settles the whole subject of which voice a man is speaking in.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. (Romans 8:15)

Abba. It is the ordinary word a child used at home, and Paul leaves it untranslated, in Aramaic, in a letter written in Greek to people in Rome, because there is no equivalent that carries it.

And notice the mechanism: whereby we cry. The word comes out of a person by the Spirit rather than by upbringing. It is not learned from a father and it is not blocked by one.

Which is the answer to a man who heard the wrong voice come out of his mouth. There is a word available to him that he did not inherit from anybody, and it is put in his mouth by Somebody else.

You have a word in your mouth that did not come from your father. Romans 8:15 says ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. It is the Spirit of God named in that exact clause as the one doing the crying.