January Musings and More
Encountering and Enjoying God as Father
Hey, everyone!
Life, as of late, has been full. Some of you may know that Ken and I sold everything we owned a few years ago and moved on to a sailboat. And for the last eighteen months, we have mostly lived and worked from the boat in Brunswick, Georgia. But all that changed on December 28th when we cast the lines, pulled away from the dock, and set off to explore God’s creation. Since then, we have been meandering our way down the coast, stopping to explore as we go. We’ve visited Amelia Island, Cumberland Island, St. Augustine, New Smyrna Beach, and Ft. Pierce, where we are currently anchored.
Transient life—the kind where you pick up and move your home—every few weeks is challenging. We live and die by the weather. Nothing comes quickly or easily. Things break all the time. You have to hold all plans loosely. And everything requires patience, fortitude, and lots of flexibility. But it has been an epic marriage adventure already, and we are just getting started.
I am thankful for this season to explore God’s creation, be stretched and challenged, face fears, learn new skills, and spend time investing in our marriage. I don’t share much about it publicly, but people have asked and seem genuinely interested, so perhaps I will share about our journey occasionally.
But, as we close out January 2024, here is something I have been pondering.
Encountering and Enjoying God as Father
I’ve written before about my struggles to experience God as Father. However, over the past two years, God has been gently reintroducing himself to me, not only as my Lord, Savior, and King but also as my Father.
In the past year, I sensed a significant shift taking place within me. While I still rightly acknowledge and relate to God as my Lord, Savior, and King, I am also beginning to experience and enjoy him as my Father. Ironically, this transformation has been, in part, facilitated through this transient lifestyle choice we made—one I almost rejected.
Ken and I took many walks around the block, wrestling with the idea of moving onto a boat and traveling the world. My conscience was bound. It felt sinful. Irresponsible. Selfish and self-centered. I wholeheartedly believed that if I woke up in the morning feeling refreshed, I wasn’t doing enough for the kingdom. In order to please the Lord, my whole life had to be poured out. I lived it. I taught it. And I shamed myself and others (directly and indirectly) for not doing enough. And so, for me to pursue a desire to go on this adventure with Ken felt like a rejection of my responsibility to and love for the Lord.
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus frequently, if not predominantly, referred to God as Father—not only as his Father but as ours as well. Maybe my eyes glazed over whenever I encountered those passages. Maybe I acknowledged their theological truth but dismissed them as irrelevant to me experientially. Perhaps I didn’t know how to receive his fatherly affections, so I quickly brushed past any references to that. Or maybe keeping him distant, in the role of Lord and King, felt safer, less intimate and vulnerable. Whatever the cause, my inability to relate to God as Father often resulted in me rejecting the experience of God’s love and missing out on enjoying the good gifts he gives to his children.
Three things about God as Father
The New Testament has over 165 references to God as Father. He sees our private obediences (Matthew 6). He knows what we need before we even ask (Matthew 6:25-34, Luke 12). And we are forever under his watchful eye and in his attentive care (Matthew 10-26:33).
The fact that Jesus not only referred to the Lord as his Father but also taught us to address him as our Father should prompt us to reflect on the significance of and obstacles to experiencing and enjoying our relationship with God as Father.
While we could focus on many aspects of God’s fatherly nature, here are three ways we experience God as our Father.
He disciplines us: Initially, I didn’t want to include this one, which is the very reason I decided to include it. “Discipline” is a loaded term. The mere thought of God’s discipline may stir feelings of fear and conjure up painful memories of our upbringing. Maybe your father’s discipline was harsh, excessive, or even abusive. Perhaps he didn’t engage and left all the discipline to your mother. Or maybe you didn’t have a father, so you have no frame of reference for a father’s discipline.
We may predominantly think of discipline in terms of punishment, but discipline isn’t only corrective; it is also formational. Parents are responsible for teaching their children boundaries, skills, and values and distinguishing right from wrong. Their discipline is intended for our overall growth and well-being.
But in Hebrews 12:3-11, the author reminds us that our own fathers disciplined us as seemed best to them—meaning their discipline was, at best, imperfect and colored by their own sin, desires, fears, anger, or feelings of inadequacy. As our Father, God is committed to disciplining us—training, correcting, and guiding us so that we may flourish. His discipline is not only perfect and for our good but also is meant to assure us that we are, in fact, his children whom he deeply loves.
And where our earthly father’s discipline may have wounded and fractured, our Heavenly Father’s discipline heals us and makes us whole.
He is compassionate: While there are times we will experience our God’s corrective discipline, in Psalm 103, the psalmist assures us that our Father is compassionate and merciful, slow to get angry, and filled with unfailing love (v 8). He does not punish us for all our sins, and he will not deal harshly with us (v. 10). Instead, the psalmist writes, “The Lord is like a father to his children, tender and compassionate to those who fear him. For he knows how weak we are; he remembers we are only dust” (v 13-14).
As our Father, his love for us is not dependent on our perfect obedience. He remembers how vulnerable and frail we are to the disease of sin, the influences of the world, and the pain inflicted on us by others. And so he extends tender compassion to his children.
The dictionary defines compassion as a sympathetic awareness of another’s suffering and a genuine desire to alleviate or mitigate that suffering. Throughout the Scripture, we see God entering into the suffering of his people, rescuing them from slavery, oppression, and their own sin. However, the Father's compassion towards us is most vividly displayed in the person of Jesus.
In Christ, God came near. His compassion was on full display as he entered into our sin, brokenness, and pain. He wept with and for us. He touched the untouchable and loved the unlovable. He healed, comforted, and restored the destitute, despairing, and hopeless. He forgave the incredulous and sought out the cast-offs, lost, and rejected. And ultimately, he offered up his own body to be broken so that we may be made whole.
He gives good gifts: In Matthew 7:7-11, Jesus says that the Lord is not only our Father but that he also gives good gifts to his children:
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”
How much more?! What an overwhelming statement of God’s goodness! There is no scarcity in our relationship with our Father. His gifts are good and plentiful and enriching. And some gifts he gives for the sole purpose of our sheer joy and delight! He gives us sunrises and sunsets. Sunshine and rain. Oceans and mountains. Work and rest. Art and music. Pets and friends. Children—biological and spiritual. Laughter and tears. Fellowship and solitude. And, far better than that, Jesus teaches us that our Father is delighted to give us his kingdom (Luke 12:32-34). As James said, every good and perfect gift comes from the Father (James 1:17).
Indeed, our Father “satisfies the longing soul and the hungry soul he fills with good things” (Psalm 107:9).
Two things about us
The apostle John wrote, “See how very much our Father loves us, for he calls us his children, and that is what we are” (1 John 3:1)! This one verse packs a powerful punch, reminding us of two fundamental truths in our relationship with God.
We are his children: This one may seem obvious, but we don’t always grasp the magnitude of such a statement. The apostle John opened his book by saying that all who receive Jesus, who believe in his name, he gives the right to become children of God (John 1:12). We are children, not by blood or birth, but by his choice. We cannot earn it, and we cannot lose it. He set his affections on us, adopted us into his family, and gave us the full rights of children, including inheriting the kingdom of God (Luke 12:32-34). Believe and receive.
We are deeply loved: You are his beloved child, and he waits for you to come to him with all your joy, pain, confusion, sorrow, fears, shame, doubts, frustrations, hopes, dreams, desires, and needs. As your Father, he invites you into an intimate relationship with him—where he delights in you with gladness, calms your fears with his love, and rejoices over you with joyful songs (Zephaniah 3:17). He encourages you, by His Spirit, when you take that first shaky step of obedience. He beams like a proud Father when you courageously use the gifts he’s entrusted to you. He keeps track of all your sorrows, sees the tears you cry, and stores each one in a bottle (Psalm 56:8). And, as Paul reminds us in Romans 8, God’s love is unshakeable—nothing can separate us from it. Not our sin. Not death. Not even the powers of hell can separate us from our Father’s love. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.
One thing about home
Tim Keller wrote that the “message of the Bible is that the human race is a band of exiles trying to come home.”
What comes to mind for you when you think of home? For some of us, home is a place of comfort, offering peace, rest, security, and renewal. For others, home is a battlefield—littered with conflict, pain, and instability. For me, home is the experience of sitting in front of a fire with a cup of coffee in my hand—it’s warm, cozy, and inviting. Whatever our realities of home, we instinctively long for what we know it is supposed to be. As Amy Baik Lee wrote, we long for the wholeness of a world we “have only ever experienced in shards.” Home, for the children of God, is to be fully and finally be whole, wrapped in peace like a blanket.
Ultimately, to be home is to be with God. And the good news is that it is both a present and a future reality. In John 14:23, Jesus said, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them” (emphasis mine.) As believers, home comes to us! God himself makes his home with us, bringing with him all the comforting assurances of home—belonging, knowing and being known, loving and being loved.
But, there is an aspect of home we still await. Before Christ ascended to the Father, he comforted his disciples with the promise of home:
“Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me. There is more than enough room in my Father’s home. If this were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? When everything is ready, I will come and get you, so that you will always be with me where I am” (John 14:1-3).
What we experience in part now, we will experience in full one day. Christ is, right now, preparing a place for us in our Father’s home—a home no longer scarred by conflict, insecurity, rejection, or betrayal. A home more glorious than we could ever ask for or imagine. A home filled with joy and feasting. A home prepared just for you by your Father, who loves you with an everlasting love.
May we encounter, experience, and enjoy the goodness of our Father.
What about you?
How did you encounter God last year?
Which attribute of God’s fatherhood most encourages you?
Is it hard for you to relate to God as your Father? Why do you think that is?
Love you guys!
CC
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