by Louie Giglio
Although Jesus is not physically with you, He has given you “another Helper” who is with you forever, God the Holy Spirit. God is actually everywhere all the time. And we believe that He is with us in a powerful way as His Spirit takes up residence in our lives. A shift happens, and we understand that life is not so much “Jesus and me” as it is “Jesus in me.” As the Spirit fills us, we grow to know what it means to sense that He is near in sunny days and stormy nights. The perfect Father is closer than a phone call away. He is in you and with you at all times. This is why we keep circling the plane around this central truth:
Though my father and mother forsake me,The Lord will receive me.(Ps. 27:10)
Those words aren’t a prescription for a magical happy pill, if one even existed. Those words are about us developing real faith, raw faith, a faith where we acknowledge the Lord even though the people who are supposed to be the closest to us have actually forsaken us. They’ve turned their backs on us. In the case of this psalm, an earthly father and mother have forsaken their own child.
We don’t know the specific reason for the forsaking described in this psalm, but maybe the father wasn’t there when he was needed, or perhaps the father was abusive, or the father was passive, and perhaps the mother stepped in and tried to help. That’s what often happens today. Mothers can be awesome, and mothers can see when a father isn’t what he needs to be. Plenty of mothers try to stand in that gap, and some succeed in big ways, others in partial ways. But maybe this mother finally gave up and said, Nope, can’t do it anymore . Or maybe she never even tried to step in, and was actually hurtful toward her child from moment one. Maybe the mother was gone, or the mother was off-kilter, or the mother was abusive along with the father. Any way you look at it, there’s a huge amount of pain wrapped up in the words of that psalm. Yet the Lord hasn’t forsaken this person. The Lord “receives” this person. The ESV translates that word this way: “The Lord will take me in.” The NLT reads: “The Lord will hold me close.”
That’s good news, but sadly, the initial pain expressed in that verse reflects the reality of this planet, because bad things sure enough happen on a broken planet. God, in His infinite wisdom, has given people freedom of choice. Some people choose to bless others with their freedom of choice. Others choose to hurt people. There’s a lot of injustice in this world. A lot of poor choices and heartache. Fortunately, the Bible says that one day, all things will be made new (Rev. 21:1–8). One day, everything will be made right (Isa. 61). One day, “justice will roll on like a river, and righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:24).
Even today, despite all the pain in the world, God is greater than all our pain. He’s greater than our greatest wounds and hurts. God is always nearby so we can turn to Him, and when we turn, God receives us. He takes us in and holds us close. God draws us into His arms, a loved child of the Creator of the universe. The perfect Father is loving and good. He is in control and will provide everything we need. The perfect Father is able, and He is always with us.
The Perfect Father Is a Protector
Everyone who has lost a dad, either to divorce, disinterest, death, or distance, has a special place in God’s heart. He is committed to you. The psalmist describes this care powerfully:
Sing to God, sing in praise of his name,extol him who rides on the clouds;rejoice before him—his name is the Lord .A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows,is God in his holy dwelling.God sets the lonely in families,he leads out the prisoners with singing. (Ps. 68:4–6)
For openers, our invitation is to begin with praise because He alone is worthy of our worship. Specifically, we are invited to extol the one who “rides on the clouds.” That’s some incredible songwriting imagery. We are called to sing to this God and sing praises to His name. But it can be hard to join God’s song when we’re hurting inside.
God is singing over us, and sometimes all we can do is receive His words of love, and that is enough. We have turned toward God in our pain, and He’s caught us up and holding us close, and then a long, long time needs to go by before we can do anything other than listen to His voice.
Yet somewhere within our healing, we sense the invitation to sing praise to God, the perfect Father who’s already singing over us. When we begin to praise and worship Him, our healing is somehow accelerated. Our eyes are lifted off ourselves. We’re invited to look at the perfect, flawless Father, who isn’t afraid of a dark night.
I have a good friend who’s a father of little children, and he tells me that sometimes on stormy nights, when his children can’t sleep, he comes into his kids’ bedroom and sings to them, then invites his children to sing along with him. He explains how something reassuring happens in those moments. He sings worship songs to God, songs the kids have heard at church. The children hear the voice of their father, strong and reassuring, and the children hear their own voices too, joining in along with the sound of strength and reassurance. When the children start singing, additional comfort transfers to the children. The children aren’t afraid of the storm as much. The children hear words of praise come from their own mouths. The children are reminded that their father is close to them, and that this storm too will pass.
The next part of Psalm 68 holds forth the truth that God is especially in tune with the fatherless. He’s especially close to those who are widows, to those who don’t have families they can rely on. He’s especially compassionate to those who are held captive—either by their own sins, or perhaps by the sins of others. God the perfect Father is the defender of people who need defending. He’s the one who abolishes loneliness, the one who breaks the chains of bondage. This is the same God who rides on the clouds, the same God who invites us close to Him, the same God who sings over us and calls us His sons and daughters.
In the culture in which Psalm 68 was first written, the worst-case scenario for anybody was to be fatherless or a widow. You were basically left to fend for yourself. You were pushed out of society, and you didn’t have a chance to get ahead. In many situations, the same is true today. And in these especially needy scenarios, God reaches down to people who are feeling low and living low. He sets the lowly within families. He rejoices over us with song. He starts the song because of His love for us, and then He invites us to sing along with Him.
That all sounds good, Louie, but where was God when I needed defending? Where was He when I cried out for help and nothing happened?
If that’s what you’re asking right now, I would agree those are big and painful questions. Again, I won’t try to gloss over what has happened to you. But the fact that you are reading these words means this: you made it through the pain. You’re here now. And though there are painful memories and scars, God has brought you through to a new day.
Remember those times you told yourself, I won’t make it another day ? But you did, and you are still standing. I believe you are still reading, still searching, still hoping (if you’re not hoping for a healing, you wouldn’t have made it this far in this book), and still reaching because God was there even though it didn’t look like He was. He was giving you the strength to endure and probably even protecting you from greater harm in ways you didn’t know.
Then why didn’t He stop what was happening to me? Isn’t that the biggest question of all?
I think the answer is because the moment He steps in and removes all the collateral damage of this broken world from ever happening again, that will mark the instant life on earth is over. And in that moment the lost will be lost forever and many whom God wanted to become sons and daughters will be separated from His arms. So, He waits and extends grace another day. And for twenty-four more hours we are caught in the crossfire of a sin-shattered world.
But today He is reaching with strong arms to pick up any who are fatherless, and He’s standing with resolve to defend every widow. There’s a real sense where every divorce leaves widows and orphans in its wake. It doesn’t have to be death that creates these. And each and every time, God rides in
on the clouds announcing that He wants to be a father to the fatherless.
Is it you He’s coming for right now? Are you feeling lonely and without a family? If so, His eyes are on you and His arms outstretched. He’s the perfect Father, the one who is loving and good and in control. The one who will provide everything you need. He’s the Father who is able and who is with you and who has been fighting for you every moment of your life.
Just think: God has an individual plan for your life. He knew you even before you were born, and all the days you’ll live were chronicled in His book before one of them came to be (Ps. 139:16).
God began a good work in you, and He’ll finish what He started (Phil. 1:6).
God has prepared an incredible future for you. It’s so amazing that no mind has ever conceived it (1 Cor. 2:7–9).
God has chosen you to live a fruitful, effective, God-honoring life (John 15:16).
That’s why He’ll never back down from any threat to you, His child. He’s already overcome the greatest dangers you’ll ever face—sin and death. And He won’t stop now. He is the perfect Father. He will protect you as you go because He has a purpose and plan for your life.
At the center of God’s plan is the hope that you will grow up to look like and act like Him.
Chapter 9
Growing Up Like Dad
Like you, I have a physical birth certificate, an actual paper copy. I haven’t seen it in a while, but in the old days you needed that piece of paper for all kinds of things.
Your birth certificate, like mine, primarily declares that you were in fact born! You didn’t just mysteriously arrive on planet Earth; rather at such and such hospital, and at such and such time, you joined the human race. A quick glance at the birth certificate will tell us your length at birth and how much you weighed. A footprint may be there to forever link you to the information. And then, the two most powerful things about you are listed: the names of your mom and dad. This tells us by whom you came to be, and says a lot about what you’re going to be like. In physical terms you don’t have much of a choice, given that you are the result of the combining of your parents’ DNA, the combination of their genes.
Family Resemblance
When you put it in the most basic biological terms, it goes like this—you received something from your mom and something from your dad, and the result of the two is 100 percent you. That’s why, like it or not, you have a strong tendency to grow up to look like, be like, and act like your mom and dad.
Say this to a teenager and they are likely to fight you over it, defying the power of genetics and swearing they are definitely not ever going to look like their mom or dad. But let a few years go by between visits at Thanksgiving, and Aunt Lucinda will make things clear enough as she comes through the door, gets one look at the fourteen-year-old you, and declares excitedly—I can hardly believe it! You look just like your mother!
This kind of proclamation isn’t necessarily what every teen is hoping to have said about them (they might be thinking they’re a lot more cool and hip than Mom or Dad), and they might defy it. But ask any twenty-something if it’s likely they will grow up to look like Mom and Dad, and you won’t get defiance. You’ll just get a nod.
By the time we become parents ourselves it’s a settled fact—we are our parents . We hear ourselves saying to our kids the same things our parents said to us. We find ourselves drifting toward our parents’ patterns of spending or their view of the world and soon enough we might even start dressing like them. At some point, wearing dress socks with tennis shoes like Dad used to doesn’t seem like such a crazy idea after all.
My wife Shelley tells me all the time that a gesture of mine is just like “Big Lou’s.” She’ll say that the way I smirked or the way I cut my eyes or the way I said what I said was just like him. Or she’ll say, when I respond a certain way, “Martha Jeane (my mom), is that you?!”
But the journey to becoming like our parents doesn’t just result from our genetic makeup. It also comes from watching our parents from our earliest moments of life, from modeling what we saw them do.
There’s a photo of Shelley, taken when she was a little kid, that I absolutely love. She’s standing next to her dad during a family vacation. I think her mom must have taken the photo, because she’s not in it. Shelley’s maybe four years old, and she and her dad are by the side of the road at one of those scenic overlooks where you pull over your car and get out and look around. Snow-capped mountains are behind them, and Shelley and her dad are standing about two feet away from the edge of a cliff. There’s no guardrail on the cliff, just a little berm of stacked rocks, and Shelley’s wearing a white sweater with outrageous black and white checked pants, flared. Her dad has on a late 1960s jacket and slacks, his legs are flexed like he might need to make a move really fast, and he’s got his hand on Shelley’s shoulder like he doesn’t feel completely comfortable with the whole setup because they’re so close to the edge. One of the best parts of the whole image is that both Shelley and her dad are wearing cool-cat sunglasses. Shelley’s sunglasses are just about the same size as her dad’s, and you can almost hear the exuberance in her voice that day: Yessir, I’m wearing shades too. Just like Dad!
Do you have any favorite pictures of you with your dad? If you don’t, that’s okay, we’re walking through this slowly. We’re breathing in the truth that God is our perfect Father, constantly shifting our eyes off of us and onto Jesus, who reveals Abba God to us.
his plan is for you to grow up to become a mighty woman of god, a mighty man of faith.
I’m pointing us to pictures because when I look at that picture of Shelley and her dad, I see a lot of family love, for sure. But what I also see big-time is modeling. You know how when you’re a kid and you look up at your father and you do the things he’s doing? Sometimes, you even wear what he’s wearing, especially sunglasses. That’s happening in this snapshot. All of us are the products of our DNA and of what was modeled for us.
Shelley’s not alone when it comes to wanting to do what her dad was doing when she was a kid; there’s another family picture we bring out every so often for laughs. This one’s of me. I’m slightly younger, maybe two. It’s Atlanta, Georgia, circa 1960, during one of the not-so-frequent winter snows. I’m standing next to a snowman that my dad built, but man, it’s no ordinary snowman. I told you my dad was crazy talented in art and design, and unique when it came to seeing the world. Now, any old snowman is three big snowballs stacked on top of each other with sticks for arms, rocks for a mouth and eyes, and a carrot nose. But no, not this snowman.
This snowman looks like a marble statue. He’s six feet tall and made of perfectly polished snow. His arms flawlessly contour into the body so his hands are clasped in front. His face looks like a carved bust of Tumnus, the impish faun from C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe . I guarantee there’s not another dad in the whole city of Atlanta who ever built his kids a snowman like that .
This is a big reason I’ve spent my whole life doing things differently, a little off the beaten path. When I was little and I first saw that snowman, that freaky thing is what I thought was normal! But mainly, I saw Dad’s work, and I wanted to do things just like Dad.
We all copy the behaviors and heart attitudes of our fathers, right? And later in life, for good or bad, we must all confront what we’ve grown to emulate. If your dad loved to drive 42 miles per hour in the fast lane on the freeway, then chances are there are cars regularly zooming around you when you drive. We can’t make this stuff up. We all saw characteristics, mannerisms, reactions, and patterns in our earthly fathers, and plenty of those behaviors and attitudes found their ways into our lives too. Teenagers, believe what you will, but the power of DNA is strong. And modeling, in fact, does mold us.
New Building Blocks
Here’s a twist—in Christ you have been born twice, so you have a new Father to resemble, and there’s a whole new heritage stream coming down to you. That means, as we’ve talk
ed about already, you have two family trees. It also means you have two birth certificates. One is earthly, one heavenly. On one is the date and place you entered this world. On the other is the date and place you put your faith in Jesus as Savior and Lord of your life. In the case of the latter, that’s the moment God brought you from spiritual death to life through your faith in the finished work of Jesus on the cross. Your spiritual birth certificate announces that you were born again, that you are now and forever a son or a daughter of God.
We see this in John’s Gospel where he describes our new birth this way: “Yet to all who did receive him [Jesus], to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God” (John 1:12–13).
You may feel you aren’t good enough to earn God’s love and to deserve a place in His family. Or you may be striving, hoping your good deeds outweigh the bad and land you in heaven one day. But forget that. It’s hopeless. And God isn’t counting your sins anymore because He already laid them on His innocent Son when He died in your place on the cross.
See, the power of the gospel message is this: sin doesn’t make you a bad person. No, it’s much worse than that. Sin makes you a spiritually dead person. “The wages [result]of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23a). And being dead is a major problem because dead people can’t do a thing to help themselves.
That’s why what God has done for us is called good news! Jesus didn’t leave heaven and die on a cross to make bad people better people. He gave His life as a sacrifice for our sin and rose again so He could bring us from death to life. The verse continues: “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).