by Louie Giglio
if you know him, it’s your father who runs the world.
Why tell you this? Because it’s possible that you might think the blessing we have been talking about in these pages is a thing , like a credential you put around your neck or a VIP card you stick in your wallet. Look everyone, I’ve got God’s blessing. I can go anywhere in His kingdom.
While it is true God confers benefits on us when we come to know Him (such as grace and peace and forgiveness and power), it’s important to see that everything we’ve received is wrapped up in a Someone . The blessing is not a thing. The blessing is a Person . God is the blessing—our perfect Father.
The blessing God wants you to discover is not simply a thing He gives you—it is Himself. Yes, He will supply everything you’ll ever need, yet He wants you to discover that everything you need is found in Him . For you to truly live out this reality you need to know who the perfect Father is. Do you know Him?
The Heart of Love
At His core, the Bible indicates that God is love. The perfect Father is loving, and when the Father acts, He always acts out of this heart of love.
That’s good news for us, because at the heart of all humanity is our need for love. Maybe that’s tough for you to wrap your mind around because your earthly dad couldn’t get the words I love you out of his mouth. You wanted to hear those words so badly, and as a way of coping, you settled with the thought, My dad wasn’t the kind who told you he loved you; he just showed you.
But we don’t just want to settle for a dad who says, You know I love you; I don’t need to say it . We really need to hear it. We want to hear these words not only on monumental occasions, but regularly, consistently, in both good and bad times. We want to hear those words by text and email and phone call and letter and birthday card and face-to-face around the dinner table. We don’t just want empty words without actions; we want to hear him say I love you and show it. And wrapped throughout this desire, we want to know that something about us touches our father’s heart—that there is a positive emotion inside of him when he thinks about us.
All of us processing the big ideas of this book together undoubtedly experience a whole gamut of thoughts and emotions about being loved. Some of us have been swimming in the ocean of a father’s love for as long as we can remember. Others have literally never heard the words I love you, son, or I love you, baby girl come out of our father’s mouth. Some have only heard the opposite—I hate you, I wish you’d never been born . Most of us have a mixture of good and not so good. And we all have this in common: none of our earthly father’s love has been perfect. Yet our need to be loved—prized and valued and wanted—is at the epicenter of our hearts.
Our new story with our heavenly Father is a love-fueled story from beginning to end. It started with your conception, the moment God designed you, and the pinnacle of the story is the place where Jesus died. That moment is summed up powerfully and beautifully like this: “For God so loved the world, He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16 nasb ).
Packed inside this amazing love declaration is one little word, an incredibly potent little descriptor. Do you know the word?
God sooooooooo loved . . .
The text could just as aptly read God loved the world . Yet this tiny little word “so” is added, a word so small it’s almost completely overlooked in the text. But we can’t miss it—because it’s ramifications for us are so huge. We need to camp out in “so land” and soak in the implications of why a great God would want to add such a tiny word to one of the most definitive proclamations of His love in the whole Bible. It’s because He’s trying to get through to us. He didn’t merely love us. He so loved us. And that one little descriptor packs a terrific punch.
This love of His that compelled Him to write history around the cross of His Son was not a perfunctory love, an obligatory love that He was contractually required to offer. No, it’s an emphatic love. God sooooooooo loved you that He gave His one and only Son. He really, really valued and prized you to the point that He gave the ultimate gift, so that you could be held in His holy arms.
God’s love is not vague or general. His love for you is an intense, specifically applied love.
You might be thinking, Louie, if you knew my life, what I’ve been through, the things that have been done to me, you’d understand why I can’t quite see how God loves me. If God loves me, then why have so many terrible things happened to me?
One thing I hope you know by now is that this book is not my attempt to give a simplistic, surface, “churchy,” or cliché answer to things you’ve struggled with your whole life. But I do want to offer you the reality of the cross. Man , you might be saying, you’ve talked a lot about the cross! Yep, I have to. Because the cross is real. The six hours in the span of history when Jesus hung on the cross say more about you than all the rest of the hours in history put together. And without a doubt, the cross says God so loves you.
When Shelley and I were first dating we lived a little over an hour apart. She was a student at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and I was in grad school up the road in Ft. Worth. One night while sitting in the library studying, I got the crazy idea to make a quick trip to Waco and surprise her.
I really didn’t have a road trip budgeted into my schedule for the night, and I had class early the next morning. But emotion trumped sound judgment, and within no time I was pulling up in front of her dorm. I’d stopped at the gas station nearby and picked up two cans of a soft drink we loved, and I had a plan. The mobile phone hadn’t been invented so I asked the kind woman behind the window at the desk to call Shelley’s room and tell her she had a visitor and to come down. I left the cans in plain sight (if you’re wondering, it was Hawaiian Punch), and slipped out of sight around the corner. Shelley came down and saw the cans, which tipped her off that I was close by. I appeared, and we laughed and hugged (and undoubtedly kissed) as we sat side by side on the steps outside. But after about twenty minutes, our moment of togetherness was over. I had to jet because there was more studying to be done this night, and she had a test the next morning.
As I drove away, I had a final thought. The impromptu visit was a success, but how could I leave another I love you behind? With less than twenty bucks in my pocket my options were limited, plus it was past eleven at night. My limited funds got me a piece of poster board from the grocery store, two markers, some nails, and a box of that stretchy plastic wrap you use when storing food in the fridge. I returned to a covered breezeway between two campus buildings and went to work.
An hour later my “I heart you” poster was finished and wrapped to protect it from the oncoming drizzle. I knew Shelley’s second-floor window faced the courtyard in the middle of her quadrangle-shaped dorm. Slipping into the courtyard I nailed my poster on the big oak tree in the center, making sure it faced her room. Please God, don’t let it get blown down during the night , I prayed.
First thing the next morning I called her room. After a groggy hello, she finally understood that I was saying to her—look out your window!!
Click. I hung up and waited. I knew she only had to turn and peek through the blind.
Was the poster still there? I wondered.
In a few seconds my phone rang.
“Awwwwww,” she said. “I love you, too.”
I got my point across! Let it be known to all the other boys who wanted to date her—I love this girl, and she’s taken! I’ll hang a giant sign out in public to prove it.
I don’t tell you this story to make myself look great. Shelley would add that this was well over thirty years ago, and she might ask, What have you done lately?
I’m telling you this story to help paint a picture of something stunning that God did for you. In fact, if you look right now, you can see the cross from wherever you are! You don’t have to climb up to a holy vista or get your stuff together or be in just the perfect spot. No matter where you are—no matter how dark or l
onely or awful or sinful or broken or low—if you look, you can see the cross from wherever you are. You can see God’s I love you so much hanging on public display. His love was calculated, well thought out, extravagant, and costly.
You couldn’t earn it. You didn’t deserve it. But that didn’t stop the God who sooooooooo loved you from giving His best so you could be born again as a daughter or son of the King!
Everybody has a Billy Graham story, and none is perhaps so poignant as the story told by his daughter, Ruth, at his memorial in 2018, a story that shows the essence of fatherhood.
She said:
After twenty-one years my marriage ended in divorce. I was devastated. I floundered. I did a lot wrong. The rug was pulled out from under me.
My family thought it would be a good idea for me to move away, to get a fresh start somewhere else. And so, I decided to live near my older sister and her family and near a good church.
The pastor of that church introduced me to a handsome widower, and we began to date fast and furiously. My children didn’t like him, but I thought, you know, they were almost grown. They didn’t know—they couldn’t tell me what to do. I knew what was best for my life.
My mother called me from Seattle. My father called me from Tokyo. They said, Honey, why don’t you slow down. Let us wait to get to know this man. They had never been a single parent. They had never been divorced. What did they know?
So, being stubborn, willful, and sinful I married a man— this man—on New Year’s Eve, and within twenty-four hours I knew I’d made a terrible mistake.
After five weeks I fled. I was afraid of him. What was I going to do?
I wanted to go talk to my mother and father. It was a two-day drive. Questions swirled in my mind. What was I going to say to Daddy? What was I going to say to Mother? What was I going to say to my children?
I’d been such a failure. What were they going to say to me? We’re tired of fooling with you. We told you not to do it. You’ve embarrassed us.
Let me tell you. You women will understand. You don’t want to embarrass your father. You really don’t want to embarrass Billy Graham. And many of you know that we live on the side of a mountain, and as I wound myself up the mountain, I rounded the last bend in my father’s driveway, and my father was standing there waiting for me.
As I got out of the car, he wrapped his arms around me, and he said, “Welcome home.”
There was no shame. There was no blame. There was no condemnation, just unconditional love, and you know, my father was not God, but he showed me what God was like that day.
When we come to God with our sin, our brokenness, our failure, our pain and our hurt, God says, “Welcome home,” and that invitation is open to you. 7
Reason to Celebrate
The experience of Ruth Graham echoes a story Jesus told about a father with two sons. The younger son, feeling full of himself and ready to break free and see the world, asked for his share of his inheritance early. Amazingly, his dad obliged. Overnight, the boy counted the cash, quit his post on his father’s estate, and headed into the distance with dreams of wild parties and total control.
As the story goes, the money eventually ran out; the friends disappeared; and an unforeseen famine struck the land. A dejected and demoralized son hit rock bottom and turned for home.
The shocking twist in the story happens when the father doesn’t condemn the son, but runs down the road to meet him with open arms and the promise of a welcome-home party. The father’s embrace and lavish welcome-home party stunned the community and really hacked off the older brother.
You’ve never thrown me a party with my friends , he retorted when invited into the party by the father. But this insulting, womanizing, embarrassing kid drags our family name through the mud and he gets a dance-all-night celebration.
On the surface his reaction makes total sense. But through the lens of the good news message of Jesus we see things differently. The party was a picture of the celebration of spiritual birth we have already unpacked in previous chapters. The father didn’t say that the celebration was because the son “got better.” He said that his son “was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found” (Luke 15:32, emphasis mine).
Heaven celebrates when one sinner turns for home, not when religious people try harder to clean up their lives for God.
But what was up with the older brother? What was his problem? Well, it wasn’t that he was slouching on the job. He worked hard every day. It wasn’t that he didn’t try his best. He was as straight-laced as they come. His problem, as the father tried to help him see, was that his thinking about his identity was all mixed up.
He thought he was loved because he showed up to work every day and was a trusted worker. He totally missed that he was loved simply because he was a son of the father.
“My son,” the father said, “you are always with me, and everything I have is yours” (Luke 15:31). The older brother was working to get something he already had. He was toiling with the identity of a slave while the father saw him as a son.
So many people see God this way. They think if they try really hard, they can work their way into His good graces. But, consider this: dead people can never do anything to improve their position. And without Christ, people are spiritually dead.
The beauty of this story Jesus tells us is not only that the younger son came back (though turning around and leaving behind a life of reckless choices is a necessary step in coming to God), but that the father was watching and waiting for him the whole time. The father welcomed him home because he loved him, not because he needed another hired hand on the estate.
And that’s why God is pursuing you today. He doesn’t want to lecture you. He wants to tell you that He loves you.
Strong Stuff
How does the perfect Father love you? Check out these Scriptures:
God shows His love for you in that while you are still a sinner, Christ died for you (Rom. 5:8).
Nothing can separate you from God’s love. Absolutely nothing (Rom. 8:37–39)!
God’s love for you is so great, it surpasses human knowledge. The love of Christ is amazingly wide and long and high and deep (Eph. 3:17–19).
God loves you so much He’s engraved your name on the palms of His hands. He never forgets about you (Isa. 49:15–16).
He is good and kind, “The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing” (Zeph. 3:17).
Can you see it? The heavenly Father is crazy about you and willing to go public with His love.
Yet all that love is for naught if we don’t receive it and live in it. The echo to His great love is that we could say, “So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us” (1 John 4:16 esv ).
There’s one more thing about our heavenly Father’s love that is essential to understand and appreciate. God’s love is tough love . He is exceedingly tender, but He’s not a pushover. He’s not going to just step aside and let His kids get away with whatever they decide. He loves you enough to speak sternly when appropriate, to always tell you the truth and to discipline you when your decisions are heading you for a shipwreck. His motive will always be pure love, but God will go to great lengths to ensure your best, including saying no to something He knows is less than the best. God gave His all to love you, and more than just being loving toward you, your perfect Father is love. (Check the entire book of 1 John.)
But how do I know He won’t hurt me , you ask? Because He’s reaching for you with hands that have been pierced through for you. He’s the one who was demolished, shattered on the cross so He could offer you a love that’s indestructible, a love that will be yours from here to eternity.
God is showing you what a great place you have in His heart. Every earthly love is going to fall short at some point in time. But there’s a love that is bulletproof and sure, outrageous and inviting, personal and pow
erful. He’s the one who will never tire of saying I love you!
The Peak of Goodness
The perfect Father is good. This is a bottom line truth.
One night Shelley and I were making taco salad for dinner, but there was a problem. Soon I was at our nearby grocery trying to figure out how to pick the right avocados for the job of completing our meal. I’ll admit it takes a better man than me to pick an avocado that’s ready to eat, not too hard, not too soft. But I was fairly confident with the four I placed in my shopping bag as I checked out and headed home.
When we cut into the first avocado, halving it to expose its big round pit, the whole thing was grayish-green and mushy inside. The pit just plopped right out on the kitchen counter. Yuck! No sweat, we have three more that look good. We sliced into the second one, and it was worse—rotten and putrid. Somehow, in spite of all my investigative efforts I had managed to come home with four worthless avocados. Although they looked fantastic on the outside, these avocados were no good.
A false front is definitely a bummer when the subject is fruits and vegetables, but it can be devastating when it comes to someone you trust and love.
Rest assured, God, your perfect Father doesn’t just love you with a love that looks good from a distance. Through and through, your perfect Father is good. You can slice and slice and slice and slice, and you’re always going to find His love to be the same. Your heavenly Father is a good Father, perfect in every season.
How can we know that He is good? For one, we can come close and examine His character and actually experience His goodness. The psalmist encourages us: “Taste and see that the Lord is good, blessed is the one who takes refuge in him” (Ps. 34:8). What an invitation! God is not afraid to invite you for a close inspection. In fact, He wants you to be close to Him. In another place the psalm-writer talks about how much better it is to be in God’s House than anywhere else in the world. He proclaims: