If you had a father who not only loved you, but valued you enough to nurture and spend time and energy with you, you are lucky indeed. It is a really solid start to life. But no earthly father is perfect. I certainly am not (just ask my children). And this is a problem, since we seem to project onto our heavenly Father, the characteristics of our earthly fathers. I knew that my father loved me, but he did not have time for me. So my view of God was that yes He is loving, but He is also distant. I just confessed to Him (as I write) that I seem at some level, to still be believing this lie. I will come back to this later.
If your experience of your earthly father or mother is negative, you will likely have a lot more to overcome in order for you to allow Father God to come close. Forgiving your earthly father is likely to be difficult, but essential (see "Don't get mad …"). We are also likely to have set up vows that need to be forsaken such as “I will never be like my dad” or “I don't need him”. But our heavenly Father is a different kind of Father, He is the perfect Father.
Just before His crucifixion one of the disciples Philip, asked Jesus to show him the Father. Jesus' reply was “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). So we see the incredible love and compassion and mercy and forgiveness of the Father because we see them in Jesus. Perhaps one the best pictures of the Fatherhood of God is to be found in the parable Jesus told of the prodigal's father. This father after his son had blown his inheritance on prostitutes and the like, ran to him when he saw his son coming home in repentance. And he honours him by giving him the best robe, putting a ring on his finger and shoes on his feet, and throwing a lavish party for him (Luke 15:11ff). We were born for love, born to be the object of Father God's extravagant healing love. But far too often we allow the brokenness of our earthly parents to form a barrier against Him, and we allow the lies of the father of lies to poison us against the one who loved us so much, He sent His one and only Son to die in order that we might be reconciled to Him.
In Romans 5, Paul comments that it is rare for someone to die for a good man, but that Father God “demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us”. Just think of the incredible value He puts on you responding to Him. He gave what was most precious to Himself, His only Son. They say that market value determines worth. Look at what you are worth to Him. Please do not pass lightly over this. Jesus suffered incredibly and died the most painful of deaths for you and for me. We are meant to respond to this, it is meant to break our hearts. Part of this response is that you and I need to start the process of basing our self worth more on what God thinks of us, than on what others think of us, be it our parents or friends or our culture.
This last thing is important in our healing. More than likely up to this point, you will have allowed the “tapes”, the ongoing thoughts you have about yourself, to have been shaped by the outside. The process of healing involves and includes choosing which thoughts to allow, which thoughts to change and which to throw out. In Bill Johnson's words “I cannot afford to have a thought in my head about me that is not in His”. The reason is that His thoughts about me are positive and empowering, but many of the thoughts we allow are of the very opposite genre.
The communion service, or the Lord's supper as some call it (i.e. Matthew 26:26ff), plays an interesting role here. The feasts of Israel were intended to put His people in remembrance in all that God has done. The communion service is intended to do the same thing, to remind us of the extravagant love that God lavished upon us in His rescue mission. We need to be reminded over and over that God loved you and me so much, that He gave everything for us. We need to meditate upon this love, we need to sing about this love and we need to bask in it. It has the power to change our lives for the good. As one Bible teacher put it, “We need to learn to live loved”.
When we were children we lived from the outside in. We understood who we were by the way the world treated us. We were not equipped to respond any other way. Many times this left us wounded. Now we are adults, we have a choice, we can continue to live from the outside in, continuing to respond to the hurts we have sustained in life, or we can start the process of living from the inside out (Psalm 1:1,2), from the ongoing (John 8:31) affirmation of the Spirit of God who dwells inside of us, the Spirit of Jesus and of the Father whose very essence is love and mercy and truth and joy and peace.
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