The Father Heart of God

What was your dad like?  Do you think of your childhood with fond memories?  Or do you avoid thinking about it at all costs?

Every person out there has shortcomings.  Every human is flawed.  But there’s something so special about the role of a father that when their flaws surface, it impacts us much more than just about any other relationship we have.

If someone asks us what’s your dad like? most of us would instantly think of our earthly dad and then begin to choose what bits of him to reveal to answer the question.

These images and pictures in our heads of what our dads are or were like?  These are the images we bring into our relationship with God.

If you had an angry father, then you will see God through that filter. You see, no matter what your earthly father is or was like, this is the most impactful example of a father that you will have. Whether your earthly father was loving or not.  Whether you experienced fear and terror and abuse, or gentleness and tenderness and love.  It’s a starting point for getting to know God the Father in an intimate way.

Believe it or not this is by design. God created the family to be a reflection of our relationship with him. You see it all throughout scripture, God the father, we are the bride of Christ, we are co-heirs with Christ, we are adopted children of God. The scripture is littered with imagery is of family being a reflection of our relationship with God.

Here’s the thing though…no matter how close that reflection is to the image that it’s be holding, it’s still a reflection. It’s not the real thing! No matter how flawed, or how perfect your earthly father is or was, he is not the same as your perfect Father, your Heavenly Father.  Some of us have such a bad example of fatherly love, that it takes a lot of healing to begin to understand the freeing love of the Father above.

It has taken years for my Papa God to shatter the wrong image of a father that I have held onto my entire life. It has taken opening up to people, being vulnerable, and letting God unearth the pain and wounds of my past so I could find healing.  So I could understand what I already knew in my head.

Here’s a excerpt from my journal from when God was really trying to reveal His Father love for me, and I was struggling so much to get it…

God is asking me to build relationships, to be open to people.  I don’t know how much to trust people, and that is just something God will have to teach me because I don’t want to go too far and get hurt.  I am much more vulnerable than I let on, and I don’t want to be overly sensitive and stupid.  I can’t tell, I just can’t.  I have been thinking so much about God and what He is teaching me, and I keep sorting it out more and more and wanting more and more…..because the more I let Him show me what love is, the more I can love Him.  The more I understand in my heart how much He loves me…the more I get that….then the more I can respond to it by pouring it back out to Him.  By worshipping Him with a purity and a wholeness.  That’s what I want.  I want to know His Father Love because I want to love Him back.  I want to be that loved, I want to feel it and know it and see it and trust it, and I know that it will allow me to love Him better and to love everyone around me better.  It’s already changing things in my life.

But is God’s Abba love enough?  Shouldn’t it be?  It’s more than enough. It has to be.

Why does it feel like such a struggle to understand how to know God like a Father?  

I am so overwhelmed.

The grace, the gifts to see breakthroughs, it’s free.  But to see breakthroughs like Jesus did, it means going deeper into those giftings and into God’s presence and that means there is a cost.  Jesus said, when the disciples were asking why they couldn’t deliver a demon-possessed child, that that kind only came out with prayer and fasting.  That he spent the night praying alone on a mountaintop for the breakthrough.  This really speaks to me.  Not one of them then went to pray and fast for it.  Jesus went alone.  He spent a lot of time doing this…going off alone to be in God’s presence and to pray.  There’s got to be something hugely valuable in that.

I realized that there was nothing that I could do to understand the questions I had.  I already knew what the word of God said.  I had the right answers.  But I also knew that my heart was cold to it…I didn’t have the heart knowledge of it.  I had to go after it.  I had to show Him that it mattered to me, that I was seeking Him.  I had to be unrelenting.  I chose to cut out time in my day to seek Him more.  I stole precious moments to run to my church and sit in the sanctuary by myself, even for just 15 minutes.  And slowly, much more slowly than I wanted, He began to reveal what it means to have a Father in Heaven that loves me perfectly.  He’s still revealing it.

The biggest realization I had to have was that I am no longer a slave to fear, but a child of God (Romans 8:15).  A child who cries out, “Abba!  Father!”  Cries out!  From the heart!  Abba is translated as Papa, or Daddy.  This is the same word Jesus used when he was crying out for God to spare his life the night before he was tried, tortured, and crucified.

I had to start referring to God in my own personal prayer life as my Papa God so that I could start to feel it.  To give my brain some truth to hang onto.  It worked backwards.  It often does….truth and faith come before experience most of the time.

I had to understand that the spirit of adoption means being chosen, and I had to break with the orphan spirit that I carried around all of the time.  God showed me that He was my Father first and foremost.  He is the example, not the other way around.

God created me, I am fearfully and wonderfully made because He chose for me to exist.  He knew all my days before I took a breath.  He chose me before the foundations of the world.  That is pretty special right there.

God is the perfect Father, longing for a relationship with His children. HE IS LOVE, and He is a jealous God longing for His children, all of them, to return to Him. Longing for men to be reflections of Him, not tarnished by sin, but pure reflections of Him. He is longing for us girls to find that longing for a daddy to protect us and hold us and be tenderhearted with us in Him.  His presence is available.  Conversation is available.  Intimacy and love are available in fullness.  There’s more in His presence readily available to us than we can ever experience in all our time on earth.  Always more for us.

No matter what your earthly father was like it’s time to discover your Heavenly Father.

prayer

 Father,

I choose to trust You and Your unfailing love more than the desire to hold onto something.  More than the desire to not lose something precious or to protect myself.  What you have for me is more precious than anything I could find on this earth.  I believe that You chose me before the foundations of the world, and I declare that I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  I am Yours, and You are my Father.  You will do so much more than I can even ask or think in this situation, so I trust You.  I let it go.  I am choosing to let it all go.  Reveal your love for me, I want to know your Father heart.  

In Your Name I pray, AMEN.