A PASTORAL LETTER
Dearest family,
One of the things I mentioned by way of introduction on Sunday, (for the main message you will have to download it), for pastoral reasons, was that it is important to acknowledge and understand that there are many people, by no means everyone, who find it more challenging to internalize teaching and truth about the fatherhood of God because of difficulties and disappointments, problems and pains, irreconciled or unhealed experiences and memories in relation to their natural father. Within that range, there are some whose experience was chronic neglect, but there are others whose lives were violated and abused. There are some who had no experience of fathering at all, or because of early divorce, little meaningful formation from lovingly present fathering. However, as we shall continue to see, especially when we come to deal with a biblical understanding of what our spiritual sonship and daughterhood means, such experiences, for any who have had them, or are still dealing with the fall-out, can in no way relegate you to a lesser experience of God’s fatherhood; they cannot limit the immediacy with which you relate to God’s fathering; they cannot interfere with your desires and capacities to be a healthy son or daughter of our Father. The enemy of our souls will sponsor any lie about you or any lie about who God is, or possibly can be to you.
Those who had a better experience of fathering than you, are not ahead of you in the line when it comes to the attentiveness of your heavenly father, and they cannot thereby be assumed to be able to know the father better than you. This is an easy lie to believe, especially by those who had to contend with fathers who clearly showed favoritism to one child more than another, or responded emotionally differently to them than to other siblings, or lived under the shadow of not being wanted. Our heavenly Father has no favorites and we are not competing for his attention. Regardless of our human experiences of fathering, we are all equally sons and daughters with no diminishment of our expectations of God’s fathering because of any past deficit.
In his wonderful and seminal text on the character of God, entitled “Knowing God”, Jim Packer nails it on the head. “I have heard it seriously argued that the thought of divine fatherhood can mean nothing to those whose human father was inadequate, lacking wisdom, affection or both, nor to those many more whose misfortune it was to have a fatherless upbringing…But this is silly. For in the first place, it is not true to say that in the realm of personal relations positive concepts cannot be formed by contrast… Many young people get married with a resolve not to make the mess of their marriage that they saw their parents make: can this not be a positive ideal? Of course it can. Similarly, the thought of our maker becoming our perfect parent – faithful in love and care, generous and thoughtful, interested in all we do, respecting our individuality, skillful in training us, wise in guidance, always available, helping to find ourselves in maturity, integrity and uprightness – is a thought which can have meaning for everybody…” By that he means regardless of previous experience of human fathering, whether present and awful, or just absent and therefore awful.
But the most important and powerful thing we can say about this has to do with the fact that God has not left it to us, based on our experience of human fathering, to try and work out what his fathering is like, or how we will be qualified to relate to it. We have not been left to try and work out what his fatherhood is like by deducing it from our human experience. That would favor some and not others and would not be just. The bottom line is that our Father has completely and conclusively and convincingly revealed the total meaning of what his fathering of us is all about, through his relationship with his Son Jesus Christ and through the experience and example of Jesus’ responsive relationship to him. When we come into relationship with the Father through the Son Jesus Christ, we have accessed the true and trustable source of all fathering. Do you remember what Paul said to the Ephesians (3:14)? “I kneel before the Father from whom his whole family in heaven and earth derives its name.” There is nothing about your human experience of fathering that has the final power, though it may try and exercise some temporary power through sadness or bitterness, or unforgiveness, or anger, or despair, or hopelessness – it does not have the ultimate power to hinder your relationship with your heavenly father, because, like Jesus, you are God’s one and only too.
One of the key phrases of the NT is simply the one that says: “The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.” The common beginning of just about every epistle in the NT is a greeting from “God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.” Everyone who was addressed, whether they were being commended as the Thessalonians were, or condemned as some of the Corinthians were, they were all equally being loved and disciplined as sons and daughters of the Father. If I have the time we could do a message just on the fatherhood greetings and openings of every epistle. Paul packs so much teaching about Father into his opening words. Sometimes he just dwells on the fathering of God because that is what the folk he is writing to need to know most, like the Corinthians for example: “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles..” (2Cors.1:3)
The reason the emphasis is always on the fact that God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is because this is always reminding us about the sure and unchangeable benchmark and experience that God as Father had with his Son Jesus, and intends for everyone of his children, no exceptions, no exclusions. Jesus said, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you.” Let the Holy Spirit work that, sink that deep into your spirit. Father’s undiluted love for Jesus is your equal portion as a son and daughter. The enemy will sponsor every possibility of worthlessness, self-condemnation, self-pity, self-condemnation that makes a special case of our pain that somehow we are the exception to God’s fathering. The enemy is merciless in binding people to their emotional convictions that they are the last of the litter, the family runt, the unwanted, the unloved, the unliked, the unparentable, the unlovely. We need to take authority over it and be loosed from its power and freed from the wretched orphanage of the spirit that it forces people to live in, when they should be living as free sons and daughters n the father’s house.
Pastorally yours
Stuart
http://www.christourshepherd.org/pastlet.htm (and follow links to download MP3 audio of sermon)