Is God Just Like Your Father?

Blair Linne: Twenty-four million children live in a home absent from their father. That's one out of three.

Dannah Gresh: This is Spoken Word Artist, Blair Linne. She was one of those women who grew up with an absent father.

Blair: When I was three years old, my mom moved from Chicago to Los Angeles. And so, I'm 3,000 miles away from my dad, so our relationship was really just over the phone. 

My dad has a wonderful heart. He's such a kind man. But I felt like, “I want to really get to know you. I want you to really know me and know what's going on.” And so, it was hard for me. Hard for me to understand my identity, who I was.

I wanted to talk to him and say, "This is really hard." But I was too scared. I felt that if I opened up to my dad and shared with him how I felt, that maybe I wouldn't have these conversations every few months. Maybe that would be taken away, too. So fear kept me quiet.

It wasn't until I was around eighteen when I started being approached by guys and thinking, “I have no idea what to even look for in a spouse, in a guy.” I had no model to go by. And as a result, I didn't have my dad's protection. I found myself making compromises with men in hopes that I would find out who I was.

Dannah: Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth says when a woman is in a situation like this, it greatly affects how she views her heavenly Father.

Nancy: As women, our view of God is often shaped and strongly influenced by the men we have known in our lives, and more so by a father or a husband or a brother, men that are closely related to us.

I know if we could go around the room and talk about what we think when we say the word “father,” there would probably be more women who would have painful thoughts than would have easy or blessed thoughts when they think about a father relationship.

And so when I speak of God being our heavenly Father, for many women today, that just makes them cringe.

Dannah: We are about to discover why we can trust our perfect heavenly Father, even when our earthly fathers have let us down.

This is Revive Our Hearts podcast with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, author of Lies Women Believe. It’s Wednesday, August 3, 2022. I’m Dannah Gresh.

By God’s grace, Blair Linne has learned what it means to embrace God as a loving heavenly Father, even though her dad didn’t have a big role in her life. She’ll tell us more about what she’s learned later in the program.

First, Nancy will address something she wrote in the book, Lies Women Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free. She addresses the lie: God is just like my earthly father.

Nancy: Perhaps you relate to one or more of these women who have written to me on this matter.

One woman said, “I had a step-father who was cruel to me, and it’s very hard to accept that God is not like him at all.”

Another woman said, “My dad is a Christian and a good guy, but I never heard much encouragement from him. For instance, when I would help him paint, I would say, ‘Does this look okay?’ I was hoping to hear, ‘Hey, that looks really nice.’ But he would only say, ‘Try not to . . .’ whatever. Maybe that’s why I imagined God finding fault instead of loving me unconditionally and accepting me.”

Another woman said, “My father abandoned me when I was four years old. I have trouble relating to God as a father. One of the lies I have believed and still struggle with is God is not really there.”

Now, if you have been wounded by a father or a husband or another man that you trust, you may find it extremely difficult to trust God. In fact, you may even find yourself being afraid of God or even angry with God.

I want to remind us that our Father in heaven is not like any other man or woman that you have ever known. In fact, the kindest, wisest, most compassionate earthly father is just a pale reflection of our heavenly Father. At their best, every man is a flawed representation of God. That’s why we can’t get our view of God from other people–men or women.

If you want to know what God’s really like, you need to turn to the place where He has revealed Himself, and that’s in His Word.

If you want to know what God’s really like, you need to get to know Jesus because the Scripture says that Jesus is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of His being. So whatever Jesus is like, that’s what God is like. Jesus came to reveal the father-heart of God to us and to make it possible for us to become adopted into the family of God.

There are women in this room–and I can’t tell by looking at you who you are–but there are some of you who are so afraid of God, so afraid of your Father God. You’re afraid that He’s going to abandon you, to disappoint you, to put you down or harm you, as perhaps your earthly father did.

Can I say: That’s not the Spirit of God speaking within you.”

The Spirit of God within us says, “Abba, Father.” Abba is an Aramaic word that is a term of intimacy and endearment. It’s a word of tenderness, closeness, affection, dependency. That’s the Spirit of God within you.

God’s Spirit within you has given you a spirit of intense longing and reaching out, longing to know God as your father.

The God of the Bible is a compassionate, tender, merciful father.

First John chapter 3, tells us, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God.”

• God knows your name. 
• He keeps track of the most minute details of your life. 
• He has lavished His love upon you. 
• He knows the number of cells in your body, the number of hairs on your head–and for some of us, that changes rather frequently.
• He collects, the Scripture says, your tears in a bottle.
• He’s intimately acquainted with you.
• His heart is stirred with compassion towards you.
• He rejoices over you with singing.
• He longs for an intimate relationship with you.

That’s the God of this Book.

Now, that doesn’t mean He gives us everything we want. No wise father would do that for his children. And it doesn’t mean we can always understand His decisions. God is far too great for us to be able to plumb the depth of all His decisions.

And it doesn’t mean that He never allows us to suffer pain. In fact, Hebrews 12 tells us at times God actually inflicts pain upon us. Why? Because He loves us. You say, “That’s a funny way of showing love.”

Well, Hebrews 12:10 says that God disciplines us for our good so that we may share in His holiness. He’s sanctifying us. He’s transforming us. He’s working on those rough edges and making us into the likeness of Jesus.

So regardless of what we feel or what we think, the truth is that God is a good Father who dearly loves His children and can be trusted with our lives.

When you come to know the love of your heavenly Father, it will transform not only your view of God but also your ability to love and respond to others.

Let me read to you a couple of testimonies that illustrate that.

One woman said, 

There were only two men in my life–my father and my husband. I tried every way imaginable to get them to love me. Both of them deserted me when I needed them most. I learned that only God can love me in the way that I need to be loved.

My father never talked to me when I was a teen. I can count on one hand the number of times, and they were all put downs.

I married my high school boyfriend, and he divorced me after 27 years of marriage.

But once I came to understand the enormity of God’s love that surpasses all understanding, I found that I did not need to earn love, and I was able to forgive and to love my father and my ex-husband.

Another woman said,

My father called me terrible names (one I won’t even repeat here). When I had not even kissed a boy, he accused me of being an immoral woman. He treated my mother horribly even until her death when I was 23 years old. I blamed him for a lot of the things I did.

Once I truly realized that Jesus loved me, I was able to let go of my anger toward my dad. I was able to see him in a different light and realized that the hurtful things he said about me were not true and that it matters most what my heavenly Father sees in me.

And, by the way, once I was able to forgive my dad, two hours later my six-year old daughter and I talked, and I was able to lead her to Jesus.

You see how the truth sets you free? To know God as your Father is to find acceptance, security, and peace.

 

I love that verse in Psalm 27 where the Scripture says, “Though my father and my mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me.”

He’s infinitely different from any human father or man that we may know.

Dannah: That’s Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, explaining why we can trust God to be a good Father, even when earthly dads have let us down.

Nancy will be back with a final thought. But earlier in the program we heard the story of Blair Linne. She felt such an absence of a father’s love. Growing up, she only spoke with her dad on the phone every few months. She’s learned the wonder that we can be adopted into God’s family.

Here she is at a True Woman conference, talking about what it means to trust God as her Father.

Blair: Now in the Scripture, God has primarily chosen to identify Himself as Father. There are a few times where He compares Himself to a mother, but over all, it is fatherhood that we see, the fatherhood of God. We cannot let the culture try to tell us that because somehow God is a misogynist or Christianity is demeaning to women. It is not that.

I believe, actually, as we understand God as Father, it actually will help us understand who we are as women.

God does not downplay us. This is just the way God has chosen to reveal Himself. And so, we can praise God for this. This does not take away from our womanhood at all. It adds to it as we understand who we are in Christ.

So we want to look at who Jesus is. We kind of want to go from the beginning, walk through how our adoption actually plays out.

So Jesus is our brother. In Bruce Ware's book In the Trinity, he describes Jesus. What he says is, “Jesus is not one-third God. He is fully God. And He eternally exists with the Father and the Spirit, and each of them possess the full identical nature. So, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—God.

So while on the cross, the Father and Son relationship was marred. Jesus was willing to be separate from His Father.

We see in 2 Corinthians 5:21, it says, "For He made Him [who was Jesus] who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." (NKJV)

So we see while Jesus was on the cross, He eternally existed with the Father. There was never any disunity, never a problem piece of their relationship. They were always in one accord.

And yet we see on the cross, what does He cry out? He says, "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?" Jesus' relationship with the Father was broken because He took on sin—not His own sin, but our sin. We deserved to be on that cross. But Jesus says, "Out of love, I am going to do this. I am going to bear the penalty, the wages of sin, which is death."

So adoption comes through our new birth. So for those who have repented of their sin and have placed their trust in Jesus Christ as Savior, they actually can call God their Father, which is amazing. And that's the result of this new birth. We see that in John 3, with Nicodemus coming at night and Jesus speaking about the new birth.

But also in John 1:12–13, it says, but to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, “he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.” (NKJV)

And this is the beauty of adoption. The adopted child does not bring anything to the situation but their needs. 

God doesn't save us so that He would just tolerate us. "Okay, I saved them. Okay, that's it." No. He says, "I want to fellowship with you. I love you. I delight in you." 

Do you believe that God delights in you? Do you believe that God delights in you—just you, who you are as a daughter of God?

There's a Scripture that Jesus says, it's in John 15:9. He says, "As the Father has loved Me, so have I loved you; abide in My love.” (NKJV)

I think if we meditate on that, just meditate upon that truth . . . He says, "As the Father has loved Me"—this eternal love—He says, "So have I loved you." And then He says, "Abide in My love."

I feel like in my life I have had to fight to hold fast to the fact that the Lord loves me despite me. The way the Father looks at me, He sees Jesus. He sees Christ. Not that I am Christ, but He lives in me. And as a result, He loves me with an everlasting love.

So adoption means we have God as our Father. We have God as our Father. Just think about that! He's promised to care for us, to protect us, to provide for us. He will even discipline us in love, the Scripture says in Hebrews 12. And He does this to show that we belong to Him.

So now we have a new head of the house. We have a new role in the family, a new identity and purpose.

Adoption means that we are loved, and we are cared for. God saw fit to save us, not because we deserve it, but because of His mercy. Yes. We have God as our Abba Father. So now we’re a daughter.

And a few things to note is that a restored daughter is forever secure in her Father’s arms.

Is your relationship with God intimate? Do you realize you never did anything worthy for God to call you His daughter. So, therefore, when we feel like we’re not “earning” or “keeping us with” God’s grace, we never earned it to begin with. We were never good enough. We will never be good enough.

The Bible says your earthly father may have rejected you, Scripture says, “I will never leave you nor forsake you” (Heb. 13:5 NKJV)

Psalm 27:10 says, “For my father and mother have forsaken me, but the LORD will take me in” (ESV).

She’s also able to cling to God, I believe, in a unique way. So I want to speak to the women who have had their father. You may be in this room, and you had a wonderful father who was a believer, who was a model of our Father God. Even you, you have to trust God. We have to love God more than our parents.

But I believe those who did not have their father or did not relate to their father, I believe they can connect to God in a very unique way. It’s similar to–if anyone in this room has ever had a specific need . . . I’ve been encouraged by Joni Eareckson Tada who has great physical suffering. And even as we were praying on the prayer call before the conference, she asked God, “Lord, just give me breath.” Because of her suffering, she’s able to cling to God in a unique way.

How many of us ask God for breath? “Help me to breathe. Help me to speak clearly without coughing.” Her suffering allows her to depend upon God uniquely.

If you’ve ever gone through a financial trial, or, for example, you don’t know where you’re going to get your next meal, how you’re going to feed your family, you’re clinging to God in a unique way. You’re able to understand God as Provider in a way that someone who has always had a meal, has an abundance of food, may not understand.

Here is a unique opportunity to meet with God in a way which never would have existed had everything gone perfectly according to our plan. Although none of us would have ever requested to grow up either without a father or not being able to connect with our father, we can look at this as an opportunity to draw nearer and nearer to God.

So you could go through a trial, and honestly, you may not be able to get your biological father on the phone, but you can pray. You can get your heavenly Father who hears your prayers. God is good, and He gives these good gifts.

Even suffering, even these difficulties, are ultimately for His glory. Suffering produces perseverance, perseverance and hope, the Bible says. Ultimately through our suffering is what solidifies our hope. And that’s why we’re able to say, “Thank You. Thank You, God, for these difficulties. Thank You for these trials because You’re working a hope in me that I may not have had otherwise.”

I just want to share a personal story from a friend of mine. This friend shared this with me years ago where she had been molested by her father for several years from about the age of nine to thirteen. And when she was thirteen, she got pregnant by her father. They forced her to have an abortion, and her family pretended as though it didn’t happen.

I can only imagine what that might be like, to feel alone, and to try and bring up the circumstances and people shut you out as though you’re the problem. “Something’s wrong with you.”

I met her when I was in Los Angeles, and she was from New York. We would fellowship together. We went to church together. She just grew in the Lord, grew in her adoption and understanding her identity in Christ.

We were going to this church, and this guy was interested in pursuing her. She kept turning him down. He literally asked, “Will you marry me?” three times before she said, “Yes.” He was very, very persistent. But she finally said, “Yes.” But she faced a lot of fears. She’d had a lot of brokenness, broken relationships before becoming a believer.

And when her fiance visited with her and went to go see the family, one of the people that they met was her dad. So they went to New York, sat down with the dad, and the fiancé was able to minister Christ to her father. And it was amazing because my friend had forgiveness in her heart.

Now, this whole time, her dad had not acknowledged his sin at all. He refused to acknowledge it, even when she went there with her fiancé. Do you know that she asked him to give her away on her wedding day! I just thought, What an example of honoring your father! Even when it doesn’t seem like he deserves that honor but to still say, “I’m going to honor you.” And the truth is she had already forgiven him in her heart regardless of whether he would acknowledge his sin or not.

It was some years into her marriage, a couple of years ago, and she took another trip to New York to visit her family and to visit her dad, and he finally apologized to her. But the thing is, like I said, she had forgiven him a long time ago, and she was free. She was a free woman because of this change that had happened through her and because she understood who she was in Christ. She was not going to be held down by the sin of her father.

God must give us His perspective. We can only bear this type of fruit by walking in His Spirit. I don’t know your specific situation, but I do want to think through: How can we start this healing process?

As we close and walk through this fairly quickly, as we meditate on this reality of our new birth and our adoption in God, we can pray honestly about our hurts. You can take your fears, you can take your specific circumstances before God. You don’t have to hide. You don’t have to pretend that the sin didn’t happen. You can take it before God honestly. You can tell Him how it made you feel. Tell Him what’s been going on in your heart and your life. You can get honest with God—because He knows anyway.

A Scripture in Matthew 5 says, “Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” (vv. 44–45 ESV)

So, begin to pray for your father. Pray for your dad.

And the second thing here, it says to forgive. Because we have been forgiven, we can choose to forgive others.

A good Scripture to meditate on is the parable of the unmerciful servant in Matthew 18.

So those who are forgiven much, love much. And again, your father may never ask for forgiveness. He may never have an opportunity to ask for your forgiveness, but you can still forgive him because you’ve been forgiven through Christ.

So, the third thing is we can honor our father. This does not mean that you put yourself in a position to be in harm’s way, because I don’t know the specific circumstances. But if there is no danger, pray about how you might be able to encourage your dad.

Think about ways–even with my father, my father was, like I said, he wasn’t there. He wasn’t able to provide, but I have a kind father. He’s a sweet man. And even in the times when I would come to visit him in Chicago, he would give me a little bag of candy.

I mean, is there anything your father has done? Did he take you to church? Did he provide for you? Did he give you a kiss on the cheek? Did he show love towards you? Think about those things. And maybe you can encourage your dad by sharing those things with him.

And also, be a member of a local church. The reason I put this here is I think this connects so much to our adoption. When we come to Christ, not only do we receive God as our Father, but we receive brothers and sisters, spiritual mothers, spiritual fathers. We receive a family. We are the Body of Christ.

It’s beautiful how in James, even the call to true religion, part of that is taking care of orphans. Our call is to care for one another. So you can have an opportunity, even if you didn’t see it modeled in your father, you can look at your pastor maybe or the godly men in your church, the godly women in your church: How do they relate to each other? The godly single women in your church: How do you submit to God? How are you submitting to authority? Talk to the children: What is your dad like? How does he train you up in the fear and admonition of the Lord?

You can ask these questions. Not to idolize but to learn and to grow, to be blessed by the Church.

And now know: You are no longer fatherless. Whatever lie that you attempted to believe because your biological father is not there, you have a father–a heavenly Father–a heavenly Father who will never leave us and never forsake us. We are never alone. God is always with His children.

Isaiah 41:10 says, “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; [personally] I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.” (ESV)

Dannah: That’s Blair Linne, one of the speakers at the upcoming True Woman ’22 conference. 

Blair felt let down by her earthly father. But she has discovered an amazing truth: we can be adopted into God’s family and know Him as a perfect father. 

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth talks about this truth in her book, Lies Women Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free. One of the lies she addresses in that book is this: “God is just like my father.”

Now, we all are tempted to fall for lies. This book is effective at identifying those deep down false beliefs that can trip us up. But more importantly, the book also helps us know how to walk in the truth. So I hope you’ll get a copy of Lies Women Believe and the Truth That Sets Them Free” by visiting ReviveOurHearts.com.

In fact, we’d like to send you the book when you make a donation of any size to help this ministry continue. When you visit ReviveOurHearts.com you can give your gift of any amount, and you’ll see a place to request Lies Women Believe, or call us at 1-800-569-5959 to make your donation and request the book.

Tomorrow we will hear from two sisters who kept getting approached by agents saying, “Have you ever thought about becoming a model?” And Nancy will address the lie: Physical beauty matters more than inward beauty.

Please join us then, but right now, Nancy is back for a final thought.

Nancy: Do you find it hard to accept that your heavenly Father loves you, that He accepts you? You may know it in your head, but have you ever had it connect to your heart?

As I was preparing for this session, I just kept having in my mind’s eye a picture of a father standing with outstretched arms with a little child up on a table or a sofa, some higher place, and the dad saying, “Jump into Daddy’s arms.” And I picture that child feeling so insecure, so fearful. “What happens if I jump, and he’s not there?”

We have those feelings. “What happens if we jump into the arms of God and find out He’s not there?”

That dad knows what that little boy hasn’t experienced yet, those arms are secure. They’re strong.

I just picture us as that little child with our heavenly Father saying, “Jump. Jump. Jump into My arms, and underneath you will find are always the everlasting arms of our heavenly Father.”

Revive Our Hearts with Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth is calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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