Father's Day

Link as a resource:  http://www.familydads.com/

It is such an amazing reality that earthly fathers have the opportunity to reflect their Heavenly Father to their children.  I believe fathers are under attack not physically but in the unseen, they are pulled by the need to measure up to their own father's expectations, by society who has an increasingly negative picture of dads (as dumb, deadbeats, or just checked out), and even under attack by religion that they aren't doing enough (stepping up to the plate, providing, being the spiritual head, etc...).  I can testify that it is easy to look at myself as a father through the eyes of measurement, performance, and some shadow of the father I should be that I am boxing with.  Yet as the Holy Spirit touched my heart I saw that my own earthly father had judged himself as an inadequate father with inadequate love which was part of what led him to suicide.  Abba spoke into my heart that what He was looking for from my dad was to let Abba love me through him, when love becomes performance and measurement it ceases to be love.  Our Abba did not measure His love for us but was willing to bankrupt heaven, have His own Son die, and risk everything to display His love to a people that may not return it.  This kind of love is not just sacrificially and costly but the ultimate expression of the very heart of God for us.  The Word of God even says that we are "...heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ..." (Romans 8:17), we heirs of God Himself!  What an amazing gift, God gave us Himself not just the benefits and blessings that are ours as an inheritance but God is the ultimate gift.  There have been many amazing self-sacrificing fathers who have been celebrated in history and we need to celebrate them.  But can any of them compare to the Father of Glory who has expressed such a love that comes to fill the deepest voids in the heart of His people.  We all need a father, yet through unforgiveness of the fathers who have hurt us the Enemy seeks to undermine us looking into the very nature of our glorious Abba.  We have a choice we can rejoice in the nature of Abba and His presence receiving healing (ongoing) or we can continue in the pattern of walling off our hurt from the things we hold against our earthly father.  All of our earthly fathers failed, which hurt deeply but their main role was to point us to the perfect Father.

In Abba's Embrace,
Bret