Not Forsaken

by Louie Giglio

  How lovely is your dwelling place, L ord Almighty!

  My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the L ord ;

  my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.

  Even the sparrow has found a home, and the swallow a nest for herself,

  where she may have her young—a place near your altar,

  L ord Almighty, my King and my God. (Ps. 84:1–3)

  God’s altar is holy, surrounded by awe and wonder. Yet, even in that holy place you will find a welcome mat for all looking for a home—for all seeking to be close to their Maker. Even the swallow can build her nest there, near Your altar, Lord Almighty . If a tiny bird can come near to Him, you know that’s where God wants His sons and daughters to be. He wants them right by His side.

  God invites us to taste and see . God wants His love to be experienced. He wants you to bite off a chunk of His character through the pages of His Word and the person of Christ. He wants you to chew on His attributes—to dwell on who He is. He doesn’t want to be reduced to information you read on a page. God wants you to look up from the pages of Scripture with the eyes of your heart and realize He is right there with you.

  To say that God is good speaks to His motives, to His intent. Although everything in life is not good . In fact, the world is badly broken. But in a world filled with wrong, your Father is still good. As we come closer to Him and realize that what is on the inside matches the promise we heard from a distance, we come to the same conclusion as the psalmist:

  Better is one day in your courts than a thousand elsewhere;

  I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of the wicked. For the L ord God is a sun and shield;

  the L ord bestows favor and honor; no good thing does he withhold

  from those whose walk is blameless.

  L ord Almighty, blessed is the one who trusts in you. (Ps. 84:10–12)

  Another way we know God is good is by taking a quick survey of His résumé. It’s not like He’s only been around a decade or two. Our sample of His life and motives is not small. God’s been around since before time.

  Maybe, in the short term, like this week or this year, we’re not positive that everything happening around us anthems the fact that God is good. Sometimes we just can’t see it. We don’t understand. Yet, we have a rich history of God’s activity preserved in the pages of Scripture, and we can look back over the ages and see the goodness of His love.

  Staying Power

  Think for a moment how everything beautiful in life has an expiration date—a moment when even fine things wilt and decay and die. It’s true of the flowers blooming in your garden, the meal you’re cooking for dinner, your loved ones, and even you. Scripture even tells us that one day the whole earth is going to fade away.

  But we don’t have to worry or fear, because every step of the way our perfect Father will be good. And when the end comes, He will take us to a new forever with Him (a brand-new heaven and Earth) where every bad thing that sin has brought into our lives will be vanquished. Until then, you can be sure that everything that happens to you will pass through His goodness and His love. Nothing will stop your Father from bringing about good in your life, no matter what.

  He says, “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord , “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future” (Jer. 29:11).

  And He promises, “that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Rom. 8:28).

  Again, we anchor our hope in the cross, the place where our perfect Father places every anti-good thing on His innocent Son so that you can know His love, experience His forgiveness, and know that He is good.

  So maybe your dad was/is a good guy! If that’s the case I’m so happy for you. But maybe your earthly dad was a bad man. Not good, through and through. If so, I don’t want to just blow by this moment and offer a bunch of nice sounding words that you think are a million miles away from your reality . It may sound a little crazy, but I want you to try something.

  Just pause for a moment and let your mind drift back over two thousand years to a hill outside Jerusalem. I want you to dwell on the very moment God revealed His master plan to the world. It wasn’t a power play like we might expect, where God would swoop in and wipe everyone out. He was coming to serve us, not to squash us. So, our perfect Father offered the only good person alive to die in our place. He didn’t do it against the will of His Son. Jesus signed off on the mission, a mission of love and justice, stamping out the lingering effects of sin that had cursed us to die.

  As you think about what happened there, listen to the pounding of the nails as they smash through Jesus’ hands and feet and into the beams of wood. Clink. Clink. Clink. Clink. Every blow is telling you right now that God is someone you can trust, someone who is never going to let you down. And when He reaches out His hand to you and says, “Come on, walk with Me,” you can know that hand is one you can hold onto forever.

  The perfect Father’s arms are strong, and His heart is good.

  Everything in His Hands

  The perfect Father is sovereign. That means simply that God is great—really great. In fact, His sovereignty means He is the greatest force in the universe. He sees everything. He understands it all. He stitches together generations and millennia and galaxies and time into a story of His love and grace.

  How great is He? God invented the inventors. He created the laboratory of the cosmos and the science used by the scientists. He scans human history as easily as we would a ten-second commercial ad before a news clip. He holds the universe between His fingers. He calls the shots, and at this very moment He is standing at the end of human history, waiting for us to arrive at His predetermined conclusion. To say it another way—if you know Him, it’s your Father who runs the world. And He is the loving, good one.

  As we’ve just highlighted, the fact that a great and good God is holding the world in His hands does not mean that everything in the universe is good. No, sin hit the world like a wrecking ball, in an attempt to shatter God’s best-laid intentions for you and me. Yet even this was no surprise to God, and no evil can force His hand or stymie His plans. God had rescue in mind before the Fall, and the Scripture says that Christ was “slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8). God is good, and He trumps the power of the darkness. He is good, and He brings beauty from the ashes. God is in control and, as Job discovered, “No plan of yours can be thwarted” (Job 42:2).

  So how does your Father’s sovereignty impact you as a son or daughter? How does it change the way you live to know you are a child of the sovereign King? For one thing, you can have confidence that God always has a plan, and His plan will always come to pass. That doesn’t mean God is going to explain everything to us on this side of heaven. It just assures us in every situation that this loving, good, great, perfect Father is painting something beautiful on a canvas bigger than we can see or understand.

  One night my mom and I sat in a tiny consultation room at the hospital at about 9:00 p.m. My dad had been suffering the effects of a previously undetected brain infection for days, maybe longer. As he lay in a coma down the hall in an ICU room, we were face-to-face with a neurosurgeon we’d never met before who was asking us to sign a piece of paper giving him permission to remove a portion of my dad’s brain. If the he didn’t perform this operation, he announced, my dad most likely wouldn’t make it through the night.

  I signed the paper.

  It’s a miracle my dad survived the surgery and the viral attack that normally would take the life of someone his age. Yet, the effects of the procedure, and the damage already done by the virus-induced swelling (not to mention the stroke my dad suffered the day following the surgery) left him physically and mentally disabled. My genius, designer, golfing dad never returned to work, drove a car, or dressed unassisted again.

  Our family was in shock for a long time, wondering wh
en we’d wake up to our old lives again. But each new day brought trials, frustration, more hospital stays, another brain operation, rehab centers, questions.

  When Dad first became disabled, Shelley and I were living in Texas, leading a ministry to college students on the campus where I hung that “I heart you” poster on the oak tree. Now, as the years of hardship rolled by, Shelley and I continually asked God to release us from our ministry at Baylor so we could move to Atlanta and help Mom take care of Dad. But every time we asked, the answer was a clear not now .

  Finally, in November of the seventh year of my dad’s disability, we got what we thought was the “go ahead” to move to Atlanta. We were thrilled. We’d be sad to leave behind the work we’d built for ten years, but the calling to help with my dad was strong. We planned to finish out the spring semester and then head to Atlanta to give Mom a much-needed hand.

  Our last meeting of the spring was on Monday, May 1, and it was going to be a huge “thank you” celebration for all God had done in the decade we’d been serving there. Lots of friends planned to be there, and our ministry board would attend. We planned a really special night.

  We’ve heard that last gathering was incredible. But oddly, Shelley and I were not there.

  You missed your own goodbye party , you’re thinking.

  Yep.

  That Monday was the day we buried my father. He had a heart attack and died the previous Friday, before we could make it home to help with his care. Talk about being frustrated and confused. My dad was gone, and that was more pain than I knew existed. Added to that, we had already said goodbye to a ministry we really loved, and there was no turning back now.

  So we moved to Atlanta even though Dad was gone. Turned out, Mom needed a lot of help re-entering a world she’d basically pulled out of altogether to give Dad the twenty-four/seven care he required. But I was frustrated. Did I miss out on God’s timing completely? Were we supposed to go to Atlanta straightaway in November? If we had done that, we’d have been there the last few months with Dad. How could I have messed this up?

  I wasn’t so much mad at God as I was disappointed in myself. But we trudged on to our new city, wondering what we were supposed to do next. It’s a long (and incredible) story that I can’t spell out completely here without writing another book, but a few months after my father died, God dropped a vision onto our radar that in time became Passion Conferences, and everything else associated with Passion. Since that time God has gathered millions of university-aged young people at Passion events around the world, calling them to live for what matters most.

  Yet in the summer after my father left us, the idea of Passion was only that, an idea, and we had no way of knowing what to do next. But chasing and building the Passion vision turned out to be a new venture, a new beginning.

  Fast-forward to the year 2013, eighteen years later. We were walking into what would be our largest gathering of college students to date as upward of sixty thousand university students were set to unite in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta.

  The night before, a college football bowl game took place on the very field where we would gather the next day. The game ended late, and we didn’t get the venue to begin our set-up until around midnight. Interestingly, I’d been asked to give the invocation before that game (one of the few sporting events of this magnitude that still opens with a prayer), and I had stood out near midfield, close to the fifty-yard line.

  The next time I walked onto that field it had been transformed. Overnight a thick plastic cover had been placed on the turf in pieces that resembled a jigsaw puzzle. Then a huge circular stage was set up in the middle of the field, with accompanying lights and sound and everything needed to translate the music and message of the conference to the tens of thousands of people that were coming.

  That night as I walked to the steps leading up to the stage in the opening session, my heart almost stopped beating. It was the biggest event we had ever hosted. The moment was filled with possibility and expectation. I was about to deliver a message that I was praying would forever change the direction of the people in the stadium seats. But I had to stop and catch my breath for another reason.

  In the frenzy following the end of the game the night before there had been no time to erase the logo of the bowl game’s sponsor from the center of the field. It was still there, underneath the plastic covering and directly underneath the stage where I was about to stand.

  WHAT!?!?!

  In that instant I realized the Chick-fil-A logo (they were the sponsors of the game), which my dad had created in 1968, was now painted under the stage at the largest Passion Conference to date. For four days I would stand and preach and lead on top of my dad’s design, his creation.

  I could hardly believe what was happening. And then I remembered that my perfect Father is a sovereign King. This crazy collision of my dad’s logo design and the fulfillment of the vision that sprang from the bitter soil that accompanied his death didn’t resolve the suffering that our family, and especially my dad, had endured. It wasn’t like I got an explanation from heaven for why everything happened the way it did. But it was a reminder to me of God being loving and good. It was my perfect Father reminding me that all the frayed endings called “life on earth” are not so disconnected in His sovereign plans.

  God knows the “end from the beginning” (Isa. 46:10). With Him “one day is like a thousand years and a thousand years like one day” (2 Pet. 3:8 nasb ). “He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name” (Ps. 147:4), so there’s no way He will ever forget your name. And He’s always working for your good and His glory. Your perfect Father is actually working all around you right now. And nothing is going to stop Him from making you the son or daughter He’s dreamed you can be.

  You may not get a blueprint for your life today. Instead, you may just get curve balls and left turns you didn’t see coming. But can you see that your Father is above it all, in it all, working through it all? To know Him more and more as the sovereign King will bring peace and confidence in every storm and every season. To believe that He is loving, good, and in control will allow you to do well with what He has placed in your hands today, leaving all the outcomes to Him.

  But there’s even more to discover about the perfect Father.

  Chapter 8

  Appreciating the Flawless Father

  In his book, The God You Can Know , my mentor, Dan DeHaan (the one I mentioned earlier), shares an illustration that seems appropriate here. He talks about a boy who is fishing in a small pond, moving around the shore from spot to spot until he’s exhausted every inch only to discover a small stream flowing from the pond. As he follows the stream, it widens into a creek and then a river, eventually leading him to the sea. The body of water he thought he knew in full was only the beginning of a much greater world to be discovered.

  The same could be said of my efforts to describe the perfect Father. Trying to exhaust God’s character in a few chapters of this book is like me trying to fit the ocean into a fishbowl on your coffee table. But let’s dive a little deeper into God’s heart and character. Let’s discover more of who God is so you can know who is inviting you into this new relationship as a son or daughter of a perfect Father.

  The Perfect Father Is a Provider

  One of Jesus’ most well-known teachings—the Sermon on the Mount—gives an amazing look at how God the perfect Father operates. Jesus is describing God to His disciples, encouraging them to trust God in prayer, to go to God and find out that God does not disappoint.

  Jesus says,

  “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.” (Matt. 7:7–8)

  Immediately after Jesus lays this foundation, He turns the subject specifically toward fatherhood. Jesus asks the crowd, “Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish,
will give him a snake?” (Matt. 7:9–10).

  Those are rhetorical questions, with obvious answers. It’s almost as if Jesus is telling a joke. He’s saying, Look, if your child comes to you at mealtime and says, Daddy, I’m hungry. Can I have some bread, please? No parent is going to hand the child a rock and say, I hope you like your dinner supper crunchy. Eat up, son. Or if your child’s stomach is rumbling and she asks for a piece of broiled fish, you’re not going to hand her a rattlesnake and say, Watch out—live snake! And he bites!

  I imagine the crowd chuckled at Jesus’ comparisons. They understood the lesson. Jesus spelled it out further, saying, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give what is good to those who ask Him!” (Matt. 7:11 nasb ).

  The lesson is clear. If human parents, with a propensity toward sin, know what good things to give a child when the child asks, how much more will God the perfect Father “provide us with everything for our enjoyment” (1 Tim. 6:17)? God is the giver of good gifts.

  That’s not to say that God will hand us a Ferrari if we pray for one. But it does mean that God always provides what is best for us—and more than a bare subsistence, He provides us things for our enjoyment. He even provides us with “the desires of our heart” (Ps. 37:4).

  Some of you are saying, I hate to break it to you, Louie. But my dad actually did give me a rock when I needed bread. My dad handed out snakes right and left. If I asked for simple things I needed, he gave me things so twisted they were unthinkable.

  Others of you who’ve experienced the benefit of a generous earthly father face a different challenge. You found your security in what your earthly dad could give you and never learned to be dependent on God. Yet, many of you are coming from a place where your dad never provided even the essentials.