If God doesn’t feel like your father

When Jesus teaches His people to pray (Matthew 6, Luke 11) He starts out with the words, “Our Father.” He means something beautiful, but for most of us the beauty is hard to access. That can be for a few reasons.

First, for most people, the image of “father” isn’t a positive one—it certainly isn’t one we’re excited to apply to a God we’re going to pray to. Most people today had predominantly negative experiences with their fathers. That makes it hard to start a prayer this way.

Second, even if we can mentally or emotionally get behind the idea of God being a good Father, life is hard. We don’t have to look far in our lives for examples of ways that suffering is close to us or close to the people we love. How can a Father, Who we are trying to believe is good, allow these things to happen?

Jesus doesn’t directly answer these questions in His model prayer for His people. But He does say that this is the place to start with prayer. “Our Father.” So what are we supposed to do with this? What do we do if God doesn’t seem like our Father, or if having God as our Father isn’t something we’re interested in because of what “father” has meant to us in the past?

The first place to start is with another teaching that Jesus gives on prayer in Matthew 7. Here, Jesus is teaching on prayer and He talks about earthly fathers, and he asks, “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?” (verses 9-10, NIV). His point is that any decent father understands how to meet the basic needs of his children. But Jesus goes on. In verse 11 He says, “If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!”

There are two important lessons for us here. First, Jesus is saying that even the best earthly father is evil compared to how good God is. I work at being a good dad. I give myself to it. I’m evil compared to how good of a Father God is. That’s truth I can hold onto. What that means for you is that no matter what your dad was like, God is better. If your dad was untrustworthy, God is faithful. if your dad left, God will not. If your dad made you feel unsafe, God says you can rest in the shelter of His presence. It’s better than we could ever imagine. We’re absolutely loved. We’re absolutely safe. That matters for how we approach God, especially in prayer.

So what about when life brings us suffering? How are we supposed to call God Father when we are left looking at the ashes of our pain or the devastation of those we love? The easy answer is to go back to the same words of Jesus in Matthew 7—God is a better Father than we could ever imagine. That’s good, and it’s true, but what do we do when it doesn’t feel like it? What do we do when we don’t feel the loving fatherhood of God.

The truth is there isn’t an easy answer here. We aren’t going to “feel it” all the time. Suffering is suffering. Pain is pain. There are times when we will wonder where He is. It’s important to remind ourselves that He’s here with us as He’s always been, but that’s not all we do. It’s important to lead our hearts and remind ourselves of the ways that God has been our good Father and has been there for us in our pain before. That can be helpful too, but there’s something even better.

God tells us two things about suffering that help us remember how loving He really is. First, suffering is something God is going to use to destroy the works of the devil. the Bible says (Isaiah 61) God brings beauty from ashes and the oil of joy for mourning. What that means is that God is so creative and so powerful that He takes the most devastating attacks of the enemy and He uses them as soil to grow things in our lives that are going to last forever. We’ll have to have the conversation about how that works another time, but the Bible has a lot to say about it. For now, it’s enough to say that for the believer in Jesus, the enemy can’t win. Whatever suffering or chaos the enemy attacks us with, God will use it and make something beautiful grow out of the ashes it produces.

Here’s the second thing. It’s not a cliche, and we don’t want to dismiss it as one. Jesus knows what we’re going through. He suffered for us, and He did it on purpose. No matter how much we’re suffering, we can remember that Jesus chose to suffer more than that. He did that for a lot of reasons—mostly in the pursuit of bringing about the forgiveness of our sins—but also so that we would know that He understands what it’s like to be us. It’s the ultimate example of love—that Jesus would suffer and die for us. He didn’t have to do it either—He could have stayed in Heaven and left us to our own fate, but he didn’t. Why? Because God is our loving Father.

When Jesus teaches His people to pray, He starts out by teaching us to pray to God as our Father. It’s hard sometimes—either because of baggage or because of suffering—but it’s beautiful. It’s worth working through it with God, because when we understand what He means when He says He is our Father, we start to realize just how beautiful His love is for us, and how much we can trust and rest in Him. We can approach Him freely and confidently—the way Jesus talks about in the rest of the prayer—because He is our Father.