A father's love is powerful. Children who grow up affirmed and loved by their father grow confident and secure in themselves. While mothers provide children with warmth and tender care, fathers provide children with security, a firm confidence, and a strong outlook in life that will help them stand in the face of life's trials.
Yes, a father's love is powerful.
Many of us, however, have problems in our relationships with our fathers. In my region, many children have absentee fathers who went away in search of money to provide for them. Other children have fathers who are dysfunctional, unable to serve as the role model for them and provide them security and the love their children need from a father figure. Others even grow up not knowing who their father was – because they are in a broken family.
These and many other problems cause many children, with a father or without, to become some sort of "orphans," or at least people with an orphan spirit. These children grow up longing to be affirmed and called out to adulthood: manhood for boys, and womanhood for girls. Yes, a father does that.
However, there is hope. No matter how nonexistent or broken our relationship with our earthly fathers may be, if we are in Christ we are no orphans. Simply because we have a loving Father in heaven, a Father like no other.
A Father Who Desires to Be Father
God, the very One who created all the heavens and the earth and everything in them, wants to be our Father. He loved us all so much that He sent His one and only begotten Son Jesus Christ to die for our sakes and make us God's children (see John 3:16-17; Galatians 3:26). Yes, God didn't simply send Christ to give us life eternal; He sent Christ so that we could be reconciled with Him while we're on earth.
In 2 Corinthians 6:16-18, we read that God wants to be with us, and so we should respond accordingly:
"What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For you are the temple of the living God. As God has said: 'I will live in them and walk in them. I will be their God, and they shall be My people.' Therefore, 'Come out from among them and be separate, says the Lord. Do not touch what is unclean, and I will receive you.' 'I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.'" (MEV)
God's love for us enables us to receive the love that our earthly fathers were unable to give. Yet, instead of making us hate our human fathers for what they lacked, God's love causes us to want to love our imperfect, flawed human fathers, and be reconciled with them.
In Malachi 4:5-6, we read of God's desire for this reconciliation to happen:
"Look, I am sending you the prophet Elijah before the great and dreadful day of the Lord arrives. His preaching will turn the hearts of fathers to their children, and the hearts of children to their fathers. Otherwise I will come and strike the land with a curse." (NLT)
Friends, God wants us to be reconciled with our fathers. He loved us even while we were imperfect, flawed, and sinful. Let His love teach us how to love our human fathers, no matter how imperfect they are.
