There are holidays and birthdays and different seasons that
affect people in different ways for different reasons. I don’t know why it is,
but the days like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day can really mess some of us up. Even
if we’ve had good fathers and mothers, there might be something that we are
feeling we fall short of in our own lives or our relationships with them –
maybe we feel like we wish we could support them or we wish we could have done
something really great in our lives to make them feel proud of us. If
everything was great, including the way we feel about ourselves, maybe they’re
no longer alive and we miss them on these days. And then there’s the other
side, if we’ve had horrible fathers or mothers, or absent ones, or abusive
ones, or confusing ones, or those with mental or emotional challenges, or those
who have or had illnesses that made them unable to be fully there for us, or even
those who could not show love, the emotions we have on these days can throw us
into an emotional state that is hard to understand and hard to get out of.
It is the tradition of Christianity to call God “The Father,”
or “Our Father,” and to refer to Him as “Him.” Other faith traditions have
different ways of speaking about God – in Jewish tradition, His name is never allowed
to be mentioned, and in some other faith beliefs, including some religions that
have a strong basis in Christian thought, you will hear “God the Mother and
Father,” but in traditional Christianity, it is always “Our Father who is in
heaven.”
When we have known a good father, whether he is still alive
or not, I would think it would be easier to understand a loving God, but that
is not always the case. We might have had a good father, but maybe we lived in
poverty, or maybe he was not able to show affection in a warm and nurturing kind
of way. The idea of God is something that we often try to understand through what
we know of our own fathers, and whatever our father is or was, we often will
think of God that way. Even if we had a good father, but he died, there might
be the fear that God will one day disappear and leave us on our own – that He
will want us to grow up and not need Him anymore, that He will need us to help
take care of Him in His old age, or want us to take care of our family without His help. If we have not known a good father, had a
father who was absent or abusive or angry or depressed or bi-polar, a father
who abandoned us or who told us that we weren’t worth anything and would never
amount to anything, a father who told us to get over it and deal with it when
we needed support, how can we ever understand who God is if we are looking to Him
to be what we know to be a father?
When I was born again, the hardest thing that I experienced
was understanding who God was. I knew at the moment of my salvation that I was
a sinner and that I needed His grace and love and mercy, but it didn’t really
make sense to me why He would bother to save me unless it was to get me to do
something for Him. I also didn’t understand how I could be such a sinner and
have Him forget about my sin just because I believed in Jesus. That did not
make any sense to me at all. I figured that I had to walk around feeling
guilty, and that I had to work very hard to prove to Him that I loved Him and
that I was a good person. I threw myself into my first ministry with everything
I had, and allowed the people in leadership there to take advantage of my time
and money because I wanted to give it all to God. But God is not a slave
driver. He does want us to do things for other people – that is what we are
meant to do in our lives, to be kind to others and to help others – but that help
can come in many forms. Some are called to be missionaries, and some are called
to be leaders and some are called to be financial givers, and some are called
to minister to the people we meet on the bus. God will always give us what we
need to do what He has called us to do. He will not call us to a life of
financial poverty unless He fully intends to make sure that our every need is
met, and He will not call us to give every moment of our time to “doing God’s
work,” either. One of His commandments is that we keep the Sabbath Holy – that we
take a day of rest so that we can continue to do the work He has called us to
do with joy.
When God forgives our sins, He does it fully. He is not like
the parent who reminds us about what we did and how guilty we should feel about
it. It’s important that we understand that as humans we have sin as part of our
nature, so that we can understand our own need for God, but once God forgives
us, He forgives us completely, and He is always ready and willing to forgive us
– all we need to do is ask. I was writing a word to a friend the other day that
I was worried about sending because I thought it was a bit harsh. It was from
Jeremiah 29 and 30, a section that talks about the sinfulness of people and
about God’s decision to forgive and restore them. I wrote to my friend all of the lovely
passages in those chapters because the Lord said it was important for him to
read those first, but I also wrote that God wanted him to read the rest of
those chapters because He needed him to understand his very human condition and
God’s complete willingness to work through that and through him in spite of
what he had done in his life. The Lord had given me that same passage for
myself, at times in the past, and also now as I have been dealing with some
other issues in my own life. It is a passage that can feel like a heavy-handed reprimand,
but God doesn’t mean it that way. He just wants us to understand that we need
His help in order to be all that He has made us to be and to walk in all of the
blessings that He has for us. He wants us to know that though our sin is great,
He will be the cure for that sin because He loves us (Jeremiah 30:12-17).
In the story of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), there is
an image of a father that is very close to who God can be for us. Very often
when people read that story, they gloss over what the son has to go through
before he is forgiven. He has to come to a place where he knows that he has
been living a life of sin. He is literally living in a pig sty and is starving
when he decides to ask his father to let him live in a pig sty at his father’s
house because maybe he’ll be able to have something to eat there. He doesn’t go
back to his father’s house thinking that he will be completely restored to what
he had left behind. It is the miracle of that story, and the miracle of God,
that when the son turns back toward his father’s house, his father runs to meet
him and restores him completely. That moment of realization for the son is an
important part of his restoration. If we don’t have that realization, we can’t
fully understand the miraculous love of God.
God is love (1 John 4:8), fully and completely, and there is
no variableness in Him and no shadow of turning (James 1:17). He is the same
yesterday, today and forever (Hebrews 13:18). Whatever our experience of our
own father, the love of God is a completely different experience. He is better
than the best father, and nothing like the worst. He will never leave us or
forsake us (Joshua 1:5-6, Hebrews 13:5), He does not change His mind or lie
(Numbers 23:19). Whether you have had a father or not, whether your father has
been a good one or not, I encourage you to open your heart to who God is
without holding your own father in
comparison. If you are trying to be a good father, a good husband, a good man
to the people in your life, I encourage you to open your heart to the love of
God, because once you experience that, you will be able to love others as you
are loved, and you will know that whatever He has called you to do, He will help you to do.
Blessings,Jannie Susan
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