Friends, a struggle for me to grasp is the idea that God the Father, Abba, loves me. I have been able to wrestle with and come to an understanding that Jesus loves me, but I have always seen the Father differently from Jesus. You too? Anyway, thing is, I’d thought that way all my life and never realized it. I forget now what exactly opened my eyes to my issue, but there you have it. I now understand that I’ve always seen Jesus as the “nice”, neighborly, friendly person who is our link to God, heaven, eternal life etc. I realize too that I thought we likely needed Jesus as an advocate because the Father is pretty tough to please, so Jesus always needs to be the go-between.

What exactly blew this theory out of the water? The simple verse of Scripture where Jesus basically says: “If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father.” In other words, He was saying: “I am LITERALLY Him”. My response: “huh??? How is that possible? Jesus is God, God is Jesus. So, wait, Jesus is the perfect representation of the Father? Does that mean I should feel relaxed about the Father too…? Why don’t I then?”

Following these thoughts down the rabbit hole shows me that I have a fundamental issue that needs resolving. Why do I see the heavenly Father as someone a number of levels below a tyrant? In other words, it appears that I see Him as kind, giving, and so on, but also see Him as authoritative, super strict, and moderately hard to please. Note that these are not necessarily even accurate descriptions of Him. These are reflections of me. My issues.

I’ve decided that I need a hard reset. I got up one morning and decided I needed to study up on the Father’s love. I also started asking Him to show me His love directly. I want to experience it for myself.

I recently watched the movie The Shack, having read the book a few years back. If you haven’t seen the movie or read the book, do. Fantastic stuff. For me, my watching the movie at this time seemed a most timely move. Why? Because of all I’ve been discussing above.

For some reason, it is a lot easier for me to relate to the truth “Jesus loves me” than to “Father loves me”. There were many scenes in the movie that forced me to confront my assumptions – which is awesome –  and even one where the Jesus character answers an important question the main character asks. Truth is, Jesus is seemingly more relatable to us because He made Himself so. By becoming human and walking through this life, He endured much the same stresses, annoyances, pain, frustrations, etc as we do. But where does that leave me with regard to the Father? Jesus still says that His Father is Him in every respect. So…

Looks like I still need yet more revelation of this. I’ve just got to understand His love. Father God’s. We’ll see where the journey takes me. I’m just sharing tidbits of it along the way, like a travel log.

 
What’s your experience like? How do you see Father God?

 
What’s your take on all I’ve shared here?

©2017, WriTEswAY