Father's Eyes

otter272

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May 17, 2005
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Faith is a difficult thing to try and express to someone. It is certainly a challenging task to describe those certain ‘mysteries of the faith’ to those unbelievers, those who you are trying to make understand your personal faith. Sometimes, it can be as equally difficult with someone of the same faith as yours because, often at time, they don’t even know why they believe what they claim to believe.

One of the greatest mysteries of faith, I have found, it trying to describe to someone the intensity of God’s love for us. I’ve always found that it is very trying to try and describe to a non-believer how great God’s love for us, humans, his creation is. It is also sometimes just as hard to explain it to a fellow believer. Plausibly, this is because it is just simply too awesome for our feeble little human minds to even start to understand how or even why he loves us.

So I had what I can only describe as an epiphany a few night’s ago. I was sitting in church while watching a video study that we have been doing for the past 12 weeks. The epiphany had, from what I can tell thus far, had nothing to do with what I was watching, however, it was something that the preacher (the one in the video) had said that brought it on.

It was during this epiphany, that it was fairly revealed to me the answer to this mystery of faith.

I have a 10-month-old son named Joey. As I sit back and think about Joey and about how much I love him, no matter what little things he does to irritate me, no matter what things he does to defy (as much as a baby can defy that is) what he and his mother tells him to do (actually what not to do in his case), no matter how many times he wakes us up in the middle of the night crying, no matter how bad he may end up when grows up, I will still always love him.

God’s love is exactly like this. No matter what we do to defy him, he will always love us. A much stronger love than you could ever try to explain to someone that doesn’t know Him, and sometimes just as hard for people who do know Him. A love so strong, so without condition, so uncaring of the bad we have done to Him, you could only compare it to the love a parent has for their child.

After pondering over this for a day or two, I started thinking about some other things pertaining to God’s Love for us. In particular, one of the things I began to think about is His attitude toward our sin. So, I’ve got somewhat of a theory on sin. I think God sees sin as a sickness.

Consider this, when your child is sick, particularly with an illness that you really can’t do anything about except wait it out and let it run it’s course, you feel helpless, and it pains you so much to see your child sick that it almost makes you sick yourself.

Well, I think we can equate this to what God feels when we sin, especially when we are unrepentant sinners. It is one thing to sin, ask forgiveness and be done with it. You get sick, you take a pill, it clears up, and it’s all done. It is a different thing entirely to sin and never ask forgiveness for it or to turn your back on it and pretend it’s not there. This is like an illness that you do nothing about, even a simple little illness, that you just sit there and let fester. Eventually, it gets so bad, that you sicker and sicker, the end sometimes even leading to death, depending on how bad the illness is. Especially if you just ignore it, or pretend it’s not there. Eventually, the sickness is going to take its toll on you.

Now as a parent, I could not ever fathom just letting my child get that sick. I would try to catch it as soon as possible and it taken care of immediately. This must be the way God feels about our sin, he wants us to get rid of it as soon as possible so that we can continue on with our life and so that he can feel more relieved (again, for lack of a better term) about us.

Ok, so back to the idea of God’s Love for us and how much he really does.

Back to the parent analogy, we feel, as parents, like we would do anything for our child. Sometimes, even to the point of risk to ourselves, we would do everything in our power to keep our child out of harm’s way.

This is much the same way God feels about us and how much he does not want us to end up in hell.

The most popular verse in the Bible seems to sum it all up for us. John 3:16, which states "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have ever lasting life," is the most powerful message you can find in the Scriptures. It really says it all.

When you think about this verse, it’s really easy to just look at the surface meaning as, God sent his son and let him die so that we wouldn’t. Much like the way Abraham was about to sacrifice his son to God to prove his faith to Him. Although the biggest difference being that God allowed Abraham to stop him before he went through with the sacrifice, He let the supreme sacrifice of Christ’s death on a cross happen.

So, as I was saying, this is the easiest way to look at the meaning behind the verse, but I actually see it go a little further than that. Keep in mind, that Jesus was not only God’s Son, but he was God Himself made human. Think about that, this man WAS God! God allowed himself to come down from heaven to earth, feel our pain, feel our struggles, feel our sorrows, and than let Himself die so that we could spend eternity with Him in Heaven.

This is so much the ultimate act of love. God let Himself die just to save his children much like I had mentioned a parent doing everything they could to keep their child safe. I think about this on a personal level and it brings me back to thinking about Joey. There are little things we do for our children, such as getting a lack of sleep so that when they wake up in the middle of the night crying, we comfort them and attempt to coax them back to sleep. Than there are the big things like, for instance, jumping in front of a car to keep them from getting hit, or even as far as donating an organ to them if they need a transplant. The point is, as parents, we have this inherent feeling in us that automatically places the needs of our children above our own life. This is how much God loves us.

So, now that we have a better understanding of God’s love for us, what next? So he loves us and is in pain when we are sick, i.e. in sin, what do we do with that information? Let me give you an illustration from the words of Christ Himself. Another popular passage in the Scriptures is the parable of the prodigal son, in Luke 11, and I will paraphrase here, Jesus says there was a man that had 2 sons. The younger of the son asked for the share of his father’s estate that would go to him when he dies. The father did and the boy squandered it all. So he went out into the country and essentially got a job as a farm hand, helping out with the pigs. His life was so bad that he was almost to the point of eating the food he was giving the pigs. Than it dawned on him, if he went back to his father, maybe he could work as one of his father’s servants, because surely they eat and live better than he was right now. So he goes back to his father and tells him how unworthy he is to be called his son and begs to work for him. Now, instead of making his work as a servant, the father put his best clothes on him and held a feast in his honor. His older brother was really upset about this because he had always been with his father, so he felt that he deserved much better than his wandering younger brother received. So the father explained to him that everything he had was his and the reason for the feast was because his younger son had been more or less dead to him and has now returned. It made him happy to see his son again, that we wanted to celebrate.

So, with this information, we can only relate that to the way that God feels when we turn away from him .We are God’s children. He knows every one of us. He feels so strongly for us that when we return to Him, he is the most proud, joyful parent you could ever visualize. So again, armed with the information and understand of God’s love for us, we can only conceive that what God wants from us is his love returned to Him. He only wants us to love Him and not to stray away from Him. For when we sway from Him, he cannot protect us in the way he could if we were always with Him.

So, going back to the question, what is next? What do we do now? We must first return God’s most prized possession back to Him. What is that prized possession? Well, quite simply, that possession is us! So, in order that we may return God’s love for us, to show Him that we love Him too, we must simply form a relationship with Him in the form of faith and love in Jesus Christ.