Uncover the intriguing story of unexpected family discoveries and the deeper meaning of spiritual bonds in ‘I Took a DNA Test and God is My Father.’ Sharon Otts shares a deeply personal narrative highlighting the strength of faith and spiritual rebirth. This captivating journey through scripture and life echoes the universal yearning for identity and connection.
Greetings, friends and new listeners, and welcome to The Sound of Faith. I’m Sharon Otts, thanking you for tuning in today because we know faith comes by hearing and hearing by the Word of God. I’m excited to bring you today’s message, I Took a DNA Test and God is My Father. You may be aware of all the attention Ancestor DNA is getting these days. Well, imagine the shock when my own husband, Benny, and I took a DNA test and he found out that his dad is not his bio father. Benny Knotts is not a Knotts, but there is a greater DNA test in I took a DNA test and God is my father. Happy Father’s Day. Happy Grandfather’s Day. Amen. And today we just want to honor our father, God. Amen. Because not everyone can really call him father. So we’re going to begin this morning in the Gospel of John, the third chapter. John in 3. How did we get to be able to call God our Father? That we can say Father and say it even more intimately than that. Amen? Well, we know the story well, but we’ll read the verses in John 3, beginning with 1. There was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus. a ruler of the Jews. He was an important person. The same came to Jesus by night and said unto him, We know that thou art a teacher come from God. For no man can do these miracles that thou doest except God be with him. And Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God. And Nicodemus said unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb and be born? And Jesus said, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, capital S, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. Now here is the key. This is the divine principle. That which is born of the flesh… is flesh. And that which is born of the Spirit, capital S, is Spirit, lowercase s. Marvel not that I say unto you, you must be born again. Nicodemus came to him and he was a ruler. He was a great man. He was part of the Sanhedrin council. And he said, Rabbi, we know you are a teacher come from God. Notice he spoke in the plural. He didn’t say, I know. He said, we know. But there was nobody with him. He came all alone and he came at nighttime. He wanted to come under cover of night. He didn’t really want anybody to know that he was coming to Jesus. But he had been apparently in some conversations and discussions. where they talked about jesus he said we know they kept saying how is it that this man does these extraordinary miracles and these signs and wonders surely it must be god who’s working with him and through him and in him amen he said we know that you’re a miracle worker they had to accept the facts as they were jesus was a mighty miracle worker and no one else had ever done the miracles that jesus did the way he did them in the quantity he did them amen and some of them very unique so we know that god must be with you god himself has to be given you the ability to perform these things And apparently they had discussed this amongst themselves in the council. And so Jesus said to him, well, I’m going to tell you, you must be born again. Because if you want me to explain spiritual principles to you, you have to be a spiritual person. If I try to explain it to you intellectually with your brain, you’re going to miss it. And you know what? Nicodemus illustrated it. This wise man said, well, how can I get back in my mother’s womb? I don’t understand how I’m going to do that now that I’m old. Well, I’ll tell you what, you can’t do it if you’re young. You can’t do it if you’ve just been born. You can’t get back in there. Amen? Once you’re out, you’re out. And there’s no way to get back inside. And so he just illustrated what Jesus was saying. Okay, you are speaking to me in a natural way. You’re talking about natural birth, but what you’re missing is I’m talking about spiritual birth. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit, capital, the Spirit of God, is spirit. So in other words, the spirit part of us that we were born, as Paul said, dead in trespasses and sin, now comes alive. through the new birth. Amen. And this is unimpeachable, unalterable. This is a divine principle. That which is born of the flesh is flesh and that which is born of the spirit is spirit. And the difference between the two births determines a person’s eternal destiny. You know, you may not have gotten a good deal in your natural birth. Some of you may not know who your father is. Or you may know who he is, but you never really had a relationship with him. Amen. And maybe you didn’t get a good deal with your natural birth. Some of you may have been adopted or put in foster homes. And maybe, you know, you’ve always had that sort of missing part in your heart because you didn’t understand why you weren’t kept with your family. Amen. but the thing is is even if you didn’t get this great wonderful natural birth or family if you know god as your father if you have a relationship with god himself as your father you’re going to be blessed in this life that relationship will bless your entire life no matter what happened in your past no matter how you got here what family you came to and through. If you have God as your father, you’re going to be blessed in this life and your eternal destiny is heaven. Before I go any further, I’d like Benny to come up here for a minute. Come on up. Amen. He’s going to be my illustrated sermon. Now, can you see what this shirt says? I took a DNA test and I am a child of God. I saw one online, but I wasn’t able to find that. It said, I took a DNA test and my father is God. Same thing, but I didn’t want to emphasize the word father. Amen. So now I’m going to tell you, there’s a story behind this, a story that is 59 years old. Some of you may have heard about it, but a lot of you haven’t. So I’m going to tell it this morning with Benny’s permission. It’s too late. I already wrote it. He always says, why do you tell my stories? Because when you tell somebody a real story, it makes the whole point stick. Amen. So as I said, there’s a story behind that and it’s 59 years old in the making. How many of you would like to hear it? Well, it all began really with Sarah. Sarah wanted to learn more about her ethnic heritage. You know there’s a lot of buzz right now about Ancestry.com. In fact, right now there’s a big sale on for Father’s Day. You can get it for $69. Amen. And there are also some new TV shows on cable network, the Learning Channel, where they have shows about people that are searching for their parents. Who are you or who do you think you are? Something like that anyway. And people now want to get into their heritage, even if they know who their parents are. You know, they want to see, well, where did I come from in Europe or where did I come from in Africa? And they want to search and find their real ethnic roots. So it’s a big thing right now going on. so sarah was interested in this and also her cousin lisa uh cheryl’s daughter benny sister cheryl and her daughter lisa she was also into searching out her heritage and had done so for several years you know you can go on and do a tree but once you take a dna test then you ramp up your searching because now you get all of this information about the percentage of your heritage based on your blood, and also you’ll start getting information about other people who also took a DNA test. that you’re close to. And so that gives you all of these hints that you can start searching. So Lisa had already done one a while back, and so then Sarah decided to do one. So when the results for Sarah’s came back in, she and Lisa, they’re online and they’re going back and forth discussing, you know, who their DNA matches are. But it wasn’t long before Lisa started getting suspicious because she detected things weren’t adding up the way they should be because Sarah had DNA matches Lisa didn’t have. And Lisa had some that Sarah didn’t have. And so that got Lisa suspicious and she told Sarah, I don’t think we’re full cousins. So Sarah comes to Benny and I and tells us, yeah, Lisa says she doesn’t think that we’re full cousins. Something’s wrong. And we said, oh, really? But we just laughed it off like it was nothing to it. However, Lisa and Sarah kept, you know, going back and forth. And then they came up with a super, super sale. But you had to buy several kits to get the good price, like four kits. So they decided. lisa bought one for her mother cheryl sarah bought one for me and benny and so i said oh wow this is fun i wanted to do it because really i’ve been hoping to try to trace mother hardy granny’s uh lineage back and i keep getting stuck because you know she came over here in 1905 and i’m trying to find more information about if i possibly could about lithuania and what happened there So I was all for it. Yeah, this is going to be great. I’ll be able to find more out maybe about Granny. So we took the DNA test. And when the results came in a few weeks later, Benny was faced with a jolting reality. He and Cheryl were only half siblings. And all of their DNA matches were only on their mother’s side. They had no DNA matches on their father’s side. In other words, Mr. Elton Knotts, his matches, only Cheryl had, Benny had none of them. So all indications were that Mr. Elton Knotts, who raised Benny, was not his biological father. The man that he knew for 59 years to be his father was not his father. Both of his parents are deceased. And so most of their generation is also deceased. So there was really no one to give us any information. No one could solve the mystery and answer the big question. Who is Benny’s biological father? Now, Cheryl is 10 years older than Benny, and she was racking her brain for memories and ideas to try to figure out, well, if my dad’s not your dad, then who is your dad? But she really couldn’t come up with anything, and she and her mother were very close, especially towards the end of her mother’s life. Her mother came to live with her while Cheryl was still working for Joyce Meyers in St. Louis. Her mother came from Louisiana to live with Cheryl. So they were very close towards the end of her mom’s life. But as close as they were, her mom never divulged any information about Benny’s dad. She took that secret to her grave. Now, Benny, you all know he’s pretty easygoing. He just kind of laughs at everything. So he was taking it in stride. But this growing curiosity in him was making him want to find out because, folks, it’s innate in every one of us. We want to know where we came from. We want to know who our parents are. We want to know who we came from. And so this curiosity and another one of his attributes is nosy about everything. And so he just had to start digging. And so he began spending hours on the computer he’d get up in the morning before he went to work he’d be on the computer he’d come home on the computer after dinner on the computer till late at night sometimes hours searching all these branches of the family tree trying to figure out who could be his father so what he did is he looked at all the close dna matches that he did have that Cheryl didn’t have, that he had, starting with the closest ones and looking at their trees, twice he thought he found who his father is. But when he really examined the men’s ages and the timeline of their lives, they did not match Benny’s timeline of his birth. So two times he got excited and, nah, that’s not the right one. but he went ahead and emailed one of the men actually the man’s son because the man is elderly but his son he emailed him and said i think that someone in your line is my father and explain the situation to him and the man answered him back and said instead of you looking at my father’s father’s line look at my father’s mother’s line and benny did and when he did It led him to another branch that he wasn’t looking at. And he began to think, oh, now I know who my dad is. And he pretty certain he had found the right man. However, over here, there was a line that hooked up to this man going down here with somebody with the last name of Knott’s. So he says, if I’m not a knots, why is this DNA match in my line? It was confusing him and sending him a curve ball because if he’s not a knots, there shouldn’t be a knots. the line amen so this was bugging him a lot and so one morning while he was praying before he got to the computer he was praying by himself and he was praying and all this is still in his mind it’s going round and round it’s always thinking about and so it’s like the Lord dropped in his spirit the name of a family on his tree that he had not really paid a lot of attention to. And when that name came up in his spirit, he went and got on the computer and he began to trace that particular tree and he was able to see that not only did it match the tree the man told him to look at, But it led him back that he could find a match with the Knotts. And he realized that Knotts has nothing to do with the Knotts family that I was raised in, who’s Cheryl’s dad. This is another Knotts family. that happened to marry into this family. So that cleared up that mystery. He is now 99% sure, now I have found my biological father. And he thought to himself, you know, I’m going to find out what I can about him. Of course, what’s the first thing you’re thinking? Where is he and is he still alive? So he found out the man had died in 2009. So that means there’s no chance of meeting the man. And the man’s wife had also passed away. Of course, you wouldn’t want to, you know, do anything to hurt her feelings, so you wouldn’t say anything, but she’s going to. All the principals are dead. But now he’s going a little bit further, looking, because, you know, when you start tracing these things, it’ll give you hints that you can pull up. You can pull up any public paperwork that’s online, like insurance policies and such. And he came across an insurance policy in his father’s name. His father was on there. I’m talking about now the biological father. And in there, of course, the man’s address was listed where the man lived. Boy, you might say a red flag was popped up. Why? Because that address where the man was living is the same address that’s on Benny’s birth certificate five doors down. In other words, when Benny was born, this man was Benny’s neighbor. When Benny was born, the neighbors of the Nazis was this family. And you know, it could be a coincidence, but, uh, really? So Benny found out that the man had married, of course, and he had three daughters, which means that Benny would have three more half-sisters. And so he debated for a while, should I contact these women and disrupt their lives with this astonishing information? What should I do? And for a while, how many thinks he should tell them? Let me see your hands. Okay, put your hands down. How many thinks no, don’t contact them, don’t tell them? Okay, only a couple that time. Well, after a while, he just decided he couldn’t take it anymore. So he made contact with them. and told them, you know, what he believed. And of course, they were full of unbelief a lot in the beginning. But the one thing that even got them to even think about considering what he was telling them, to even say, I’ll even listen to your story, is because of that address. on that birth certificate of Benny’s than their father’s insurance policy. And not only that, their father’s oldest child, daughter, who’s one year older than Benny, that address is on her birth certificate. Because they were neighbors. That got her thinking, okay, I’ll listen to your story. The other two, they were like… We didn’t really hear anything from them. So Benny said, I am 99% sure that your dad is my dad, but if we want to be 100% sure, then you need to take a DNA test. Would you be willing to do that? So she said she would be willing, and Sarah sent her one. So she took the DNA test, and it came back, and it confirmed what Benny already knew, that Benny Knotts is not a Knotts. and that that woman’s father is Benny’s biological father. So now he knew for certain who his father was. And It’s a process. It’s a big process now to maybe develop a relationship with these three women. Amen. And they were reticent at first, which you can understand. They were shocked. Apparently their parents had a good marriage. They were married for 53 years. So, you know, things happen. People make mistakes, don’t they? Boy, I know you’re all sitting out there quiet. You’re thinking about it. But you know, the older sister, she began to talk a little bit about Benny and then the younger daughter started talking a little bit and sending pictures. And when we began to see the pictures and they begin to tell things about their father, it turns out that Benny and their father have so many similarities. in their ways. They share similar hobbies. They share similar abilities. You all know that Benny is an expert builder. He can build anything. He is great to fix almost anything with his hands. Their father was the same way. The man who raised Benny was not like that. Benny would be all by himself down in the basement building stuff. And his father wasn’t into that. And of course, Benny is a big fisherman and all of that. And so was this man. And so they began to see so many similarities. And then we began to look at pictures. And, you know, I had always thought to myself, who does Benny look like? I could see a little bit of his mom in him, I could, but when I would see pictures of Mr. Knotts, because I never got to meet him, he had already passed when we were married, I really couldn’t figure it out. I could see Cheryl look like her dad, really, but I couldn’t see where Benny did, and I always wondered who he really looked like, and now I know why. But when I saw pictures of his father, then I realized the great similarities, the resemblance. Amen. Even before the DNA was confirmed, I already just by looking at the pictures, I said, look, look at the ears. Look at the eyes. Look, look this. I mean, I could just see it in the profile. I could see it. Amen. Amen. And what a strong resemblance there was. Now, folks, you may think that this story is wildly unusual, but I’m telling you it’s not. I guarantee you this same story is over and over across this whole nation. I bet you today on Father’s Day there’s a whole lot of stuff going on because with these sales and they had them on sale for Mother’s Day and a lot of people are probably just now getting their DNA results back that bought it for Mother’s Day and now they’re getting their results back and their daddy’s not who they thought their daddy was. Amen? It’s not unusual. This thing is being repeated across the country. I’m sure the same scenario is playing out thousands of times. Because with the advancement of DNA, who would have ever thought that the day would come that you would be able to find out who your biological father was through DNA? Now we know that for this, that if a woman said, that man is the father of my child, and he said, no, I’m not, they could take what they call a paternity test. Because they knew who the man was that they were checking that she’s claiming. But if you don’t know who your father is, he’s out there somewhere in millions of people. There’s no way to say you’ve got to find them first to say take a DNA test. But now with many people and more and more people taking DNA tests, that means that the DNA database is getting lots and lots and lots of more people on it. So more and more people will be coming up as your match. Once you’re on there, you’re on there. And that means in the years to come, other people decide to do it. If they match you, then all of a sudden you will get a notice. You got a new match. And so you will be finding out this story is replayed over and over. Amen. Amen. I hope you’re enjoying this unique message. I took a DNA test and God is my father. The current rage is DNA testing through services like Ancestry DNA. It’s actually rewarding to trace your ethnic roots back to Europe or Africa or Asia. But many have been unexpectedly shocked to learn their father is not their bio father. This happened to my husband, Benny. He found out that Benny Knotts is not a Knotts. Since all the players involved are deceased, there are many questions that cannot be answered. But the good news is he has been united with his three new sisters he never knew existed. But there is even better news. Benny took a spiritual DNA test and God is his father. Many today do not know who their bio fathers are. Others who do know have no relationship or a strained relationship with their fathers. The feeling of rejection is a heavy load on the heart. Jesus was rejected by his own people and most did not accept that he is the son of God. But as early as age 12, Jesus knew who his father is, and he was eager to be about his business. He said, if you don’t believe me when I say God is my father, believe the works I do. If you were born again of the incorruptible seed of God’s word, the attributes of your heavenly father are evident in you, and God calls you his beloved son or daughter. I took a DNA test, and God is my Father is available on CD for a love gift for the radio ministry of $10 or more. Request SK205. Mail to Sound of Faith, P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland, 21203. Or go online to our e-store at soundoffaith.org, where you can also purchase on MP3s. Recently, we have had to cut several radio stations because of finance. Don’t let this station be cut. Help us today with a generous love gift for radio. To receive the CD, request SK-205 with your minimum love gift of $10. Mail to P.O. Box 1744, Baltimore, Maryland, 21203. Till next time, this is Sharon Knott saying, Maranatha.
