The Heart of a Father

One of the most important truths the church is still learning to grasp is the revelation of God as our Father. Consider this: in the Gospels, Jesus refers to His relationship with God well over a hundred times. And of all those times, how often does He simply call Him my God, the way we might say O God? Only twice. Once on the cross, bearing the sin of the world, and once when He spoke of carrying His sacrifice to God for us. Every other time, He called Him Father.

No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.

John 1:18

Jesus Came to Reveal the Father

If you really want to know who God is, look to Jesus. Not first to Moses, or Abraham, or Isaiah, or Elijah, for they all saw Him only in part. Jesus is the one who had been with the Father from eternity, and when He came, His central message was not a string of titles. It was this: God is your Father. That is why He taught us that when we pray, we should not begin with distant formality but with intimacy, My Father, who is in heaven.

This changes everything about how we approach Him. Jesus said that if we, being flawed, still know how to give good gifts to our children, how much more will our heavenly Father give good things to those who ask.

Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.

Luke 12:32

It is His good pleasure. Much of our ineffectiveness as believers traces back to the fact that we have not truly grasped this: God is a Father, and He delights to give.

A Father's Heart in the Old Testament

What is striking is that God was revealing His fatherly heart long before the Gospels. You can see it in Ezekiel. God describes a land full of brokenness: violence and bloodshed, idolatry, the powerful using their power to take from the weak, families dishonored, the foreigner and the orphan and the widow oppressed, worship abandoned, sexual corruption, bribery and dishonest gain. And it was not only the pagans who were caught up in it. God's own people were entangled too, and even the leaders, the elders, and the very priests and prophets were compromised. Everyone, He said, had become like impure metal, of no use to Him.

Now imagine you were God, arriving to find that condition among people who had promised themselves to you. What would your first instinct be? To judge? To condemn? To sweep it all away? Here is the astonishing thing the Bible tells us. God's first movement was to look for a way not to destroy them.

And I sought for a man among them, that should make up the hedge, and stand in the gap before me for the land, that I should not destroy it.

Ezekiel 22:30

Why would God search so hard for a reason to spare them? Because He is their Father, and they are His children. So He went looking, from the palaces to the caves, for one person who would carry His own heart, one who would stand in the gap and hold back the judgment His people deserved.

This Is What a Father Really Is

So let me put a question to you. What does it actually mean to be a father? A father is more than a man who produces children. He is more than a provider. He is more than the one who is called the head of the house and gives the orders. A father, in the deepest sense, is a person who carries the same heart God carries, even toward people who deserve judgment, and who is willing to stand between them and the consequences they have earned.

Abraham was that kind of father. When God told him He was going to destroy Sodom, Abraham did not grab a torch to help. He drew near, and at real risk to himself he pleaded, standing between that city and the blow of judgment. That is why he is called Father Abraham.

Moses was that kind of father too. When God's people made an idol and God's anger burned against them, Moses went back up the mountain and offered the most costly prayer imaginable.

Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.

Exodus 32:32

Before you destroy them, destroy me. That is a father. And the Lord answered, I have pardoned according to your word. This is the man God is still looking for, and, I would say, the man our wives and our children are looking for. Not the man who abandons his family to chase a career or his own pleasure. Not the man who withdraws the moment his children fail to impress him or fall short of his expectations. But the one who will stand in the gap, who will give up himself so that mercy and blessing can reach people who may deserve nothing but judgment. Think of the truest picture of this: someone laying down his own life so that others, even strangers, might live, not because they had earned it, but because that is simply the Father's heart. That is the true son of the true Father in heaven.

A father, then, is not mainly the one who buys the big house and the nice car and is pleasant when everyone is pleasant to him. A father is the one who comes between his loved ones and the damage their own choices deserve. God is looking for such men. Homes are longing for such men.

There Is Only One Step

So how does a person become this kind of father? I wish I could hand you a neat five-step plan. But there is no five-step plan, no seven secrets. There is really only one step: encounter the Father.

Look at the pattern in Scripture. Abraham became a father after a searing encounter with God in the covenant. Moses became a father at the burning bush. Joshua met the commander of the Lord's army outside Jericho. Isaiah was changed when the coal from the altar touched his lips. Jacob was transformed after wrestling with God through the night. Paul, on his way to harm believers, met the risen Christ, the true Son of the Father, and was never the same. In every case, a life was set ablaze by an encounter with God Himself.

It is one thing for a man to reach out for God. It is another thing altogether for God to take hold of a man. So this is the one prayer worth praying for the men in your household, and for yourself if you are a man: that they would truly encounter God as Father, and be set on fire from within to become the person God is seeking.

And notice what these encounters were not. They were not seminars on how to be a better man, and they were not lists of resolutions to try harder. They were meetings with a living God who left each person changed at the root. That is good news, because it means fatherhood of this kind is not finally about willpower or technique. It is about proximity to God. You cannot manufacture a father's heart by gritting your teeth; you receive it by drawing near to the Father until His heart begins to beat in you. The same God who set a bush ablaze without consuming it, who met Jacob in the dark and would not let go, is not a figure locked in the past. He still draws near. He still takes hold of ordinary people and makes them into those who will stand in the gap for others.

God said He searched the whole land and, in Ezekiel's day, found no one. But by His grace, He is still searching, and He is still finding. May He find such men here among us, hearts beating in time with His own, ready to stand in the gap for a spouse, for children, for a community, and for a world that needs to see what the Father is truly like. If that stirs something in you, do not reach for a formula. Reach for Him. Ask the Father to take hold of you, and let the encounter make you into the kind of person who carries His heart.