Like Father, Like Son

On the Leogane Plain in Haiti, Pastor Richard Gay has served God for 25 years as pastor and school director at the New Missions Academy in Masson.

When we were at his school a few weeks ago, he said to me, “This is my son”—with a smile reminding me of God the Father to His son, Jesus (“I am well-pleased”). Pastor Gay’s son works as a school teacher alongside his father—directing this campus with over 450 students. Other mission campuses hold the same victorious news of the second generation rising up. Like father, like son.

What more could the carpenter Joseph of Nazareth have asked of his son Jesus than for Him to learn the trade of His earthly father and be a carpenter? Like father, like Son. How many fathers do you know who long for their sons to take over their business, their farms, and their ministries…and to hear, “Like father, like son?”

There is also a negative intention when this phrase is used. An alcoholic father may have a son who has followed in his footsteps. A father may have a violent temper. A son may also feel doomed by his father’s lack of character and integrity. But each one of us is a new creation through Christ. We may look like our fathers and act like our fathers, but we have a higher more influencing DNA, and that is the DNA we take from the Blood of Jesus—the One sacrificed for us to be called a son of God. And now we can say, “like God, like me.” The inheritance from Adam has been replaced with our inheritance to become heirs with Christ.

This position with Jesus Christ takes away the pain of the influence of an ungodly biological father. One of our students in the Dominican Republic confided in his pastor that his father encourages him to steal shoes. The five-year-old boy I sponsor in Haiti never knew his father, and that leaves an emotional pain to not have an identity. We have the amazing, awesome gift of salvation so we can say, “I have a Father, and I am like my Father.”

What’s your father like? My father was a farm boy from an immigrant family of eight children. He was up before daylight to milk cows and to deliver milk to the next town on his horse Sam. My father often went to school exhausted and would fall asleep at his desk. He gave me the gift of his integrity and good name. My husband Ted’s father always had a garden, and Ted has a garden in Michigan. His garden is so big that when we are traveling, we have to call on neighbors and friends to come take the produce. This week I missed taking a photo of Ted walking in a village canal with water up to his knees—reaching into the garden of one of our mission students. Ted also planted a garden in Florida, and within two months we were eating spinach, peas, lettuce, and radishes.  

The news we hear speaks to us around the world that the days we live in are very dark. We are honored and privileged to live at this very critical time in history. What the world needs is JESUS!  People must see Jesus, feel Jesus, learn about Jesus, and be saved through our witness. We must rise up so that many will come to be the sons and daughters of the Father. Like Father, like son…to be like Jesus! ~Jeanne DeTellis Loudon