Tag Archives: failures

THE PERFECT FATHER

Christian Life, , ,

As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him (Psa. 103:13)

I wonder how true this metaphor is in today’s world. Not only do we live in a fatherless world where many men beget children but take no responsibility for them, but where many children suffer at the hands of fatherless fathers who don’t know how to be good fathers to their sons and daughters.

God made fathers to represent Him to their children until they are old enough to understand who God is. The sad thing is that people often reject God because their dads put them off Him. Instead of believing in Him as a compassionate Father, they only see Him through the lens of their own fathers’ failures. They turn away from Him and try to fill the void with people and things that can never take His place.

Louie Giglio said that God is a not a “blown up” version of our earthly fathers. He is not like us as all – at least not like us after Adam sinned and became independent from Him. He created us to be like Him but we chose to go our own way and messed up His plan.

To get past our dads’ failures to know God as a compassionate Father, we must first acknowledge that our fathers are or were as imperfect as we are. How do we deal with their human frailties? We forgive. We don’t have to make excuses for them or for what they did or failed to do. We cancel their debt because God has cancelled ours.

We must let it all go for two reasons. Firstly, we forgive because Jesus paid their debt as well as ours and forgives all sin – theirs and ours. Secondly, God wants us to be merciful to others because He has been merciful to us. How can we hold unforgiveness in our hearts when He has been kind to us? The debt our fathers owe us is small compared with the unpayable debt we owed God.

When we have dealt with the baggage of our father’s debt that we have carried around in our hearts, we will recognise the Father’s love and compassion for us first of all in Jesus, His Son and then in the many “kisses” He gives us every day.

Just imagine how wonderful it will be when you are no longer angry with your father any more. You’ll be able to enjoy your heavenly Father’s love and favour to the full because He is the perfect Abba and He loves you with perfect love.

God Knew

Christian Life, , ,

GOD KNEW

“‘And now friends, I know you had no idea what you were doing when you killed Jesus, and neither did your leaders. But God who, through the preaching of all the prophets had said all along that His Messiah would be killed, knew exactly what you were doing and used it to fulfil His plans.'” Acts 3:17-18 (The Message).

It’s a mystery – this thing called the sovereignty of God! He did not create human beings to be puppets and yet, through our choices and even our failures, He works out His purposes in human lives and human history — and He holds us accountable for what we do.

When we take a step back and consider the life of Jesus as a whole, it becomes clear that He was not a victim of religious hatred or prejudice, nor was He a martyr for some cause He was championing. His life and His death were purposeful.

How many times did He have the opportunity to avoid the cross had He just kept His mouth shut instead of speaking out against the religious leaders to arouse their rage and hatred? It was almost as though He were deliberately out to get Himself killed — and He was. Yet His intention was not primarily to provoke them to murder but to expose their hearts.

He was never afraid or reticent to speak the truth if there was a chance that people would see themselves as God saw them and turn to Him for mercy and forgiveness. The fact that it had the opposite effect on the Pharisees was an exposure of what was really in them.

All of this played into God’s hands and contributed to His grand plan to offer His Son up as an atoning sacrifice for the sin of the whole world. Men had to kill Jesus. We had to kill Him to silence His exposure of our hearts and to confirm our guilt before God. We thought that, by killing Jesus we could get God off our backs once and for all but instead, He came back from the dead and now graciously offer us forgiveness and a place in His family and in His kingdom we don’t deserve.

This sounds great when we are talking about God’s great redemption plan, but what about our puny lives? How do we fit into the bigger picture? How do our ignorant blunders and even our deliberate rebellion serve His purposes? I can’t answer that question. No one this side of eternity can.

But have you noticed how God takes broken, messed-up people who receive His mercy and start all over again and, through them, rescues other broken and messed-up lives and then, through them, He uses other broken and messed-up people and…? How is that for God’s sovereignty!

It’s not a good thing to rebel against God, throw over His laws and spit in His face. It doesn’t faze Him but it certainly ruins us. When we have finished running, hiding and trying to evade Him, He will get us anyway. Why not turn and run to Him? That’s what he wants more than anything else for you.

David tried to run from God but it didn’t work. “Where can I go from your Spirit?” he asked. “Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to heaven you are there, If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me; your right hand will hold me fast.” Psalm 139:7-10 (NIV).

No matter how guilty we are, God invites us to turn to Him. He intentionally had Jesus killed, using man’s hatred for Him to sacrifice His life for us so that we can return to Him, all our rebellious disobedience spent, and find acceptance, forgiveness and a safe place in His home.