Spiritual Slavery to Spiritual Sonship (3 page)

And that’s precisely the point: It
is
much more than we deserve. But it is also true. God Himself said,
“I have loved you with
an everlasting love; I have drawn you with loving-kindness”
(Jer. 31:3b). Take that verse personally because God means it personally. God never created you to be an orphan with no home. He created you to be a beloved son or daughter who has found a home in His embrace.

In fact, all of creation is about God wanting to make His home in you and, indeed, in all of us. And He will not rest until He accomplishes it. Isaiah 66:1 says,
“This is what the Lord says: ‘Heaven is My throne, and the earth is My footstool. Where is the house you will build for Me? Where will My resting place be?”’
Not in a temple or anyplace else that is built by the hand of man. Revelation 21:3 provides the answer: “And
I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and He will live with them. They will be His people, and God Himself will be with them and be their God.’”

God is saying, “I will not leave you like an orphan. You have a home with Me.” Home is a place of safety and security. It is a place of warmth and love. If you’re having a “bad hair day” and everybody is coming against you at school or at work and nobody is speaking anything good about you, home is the place where you can go and hear the voice of your Father say, “No matter what anybody else says, you are the child I love and on whom My favor rests.” Home is where you constantly hear the voice of God speaking His affirmation over you, His love over you, and His forgiveness, compassion, and grace over you.

Without this deep experiential knowledge and understanding of Father’s love and that you have a home in Him, it becomes so easy to live your life as if you don’t have a home, which is a life of fear. And fear produces “numb-numb-ville.” It makes you unable
to healthily connect emotionally with God or anyone else with whom you have a relationship. Living like an orphan means struggling constantly with the fear of trusting. It is a life of independence where you believe you are completely on your own. It means living in a state of agitated resistance against people who do not think like you. When you live your life is if you don’t have a home, you see every person—even loved ones—as a potential threat or enemy to your independence.

Whether you live your life as if you have a home or live your life as if you don’t have a home depends on how you think God feels about you. If you believe that God loves you just as you are, you will live life like a son or daughter of the King. If, however, you believe that God is mad at you and that you always have to try to find out how to appease Him, you will live like an orphan. This is an important distinction because however you think God feels about you is the way you will treat others in your everyday relationships.

All of creation begins and ends with the Father longing for relationship with you as His beloved child. He created you to live your life as if you have a home. Did you get up this morning and hear the loving voice of your Father say, “Don’t worry that you don’t have everything together; that’s OK. I don’t expect you to get it perfect. I love you so much just the way you are. You are the son/daughter I love and in whom I am well pleased”?

Or did you get up thinking,
Nobody loves me. Nobody cares about me. I’ve got to have devotions today, and pray enough, and get my three Bible chapters a day in, and do all the right Christian stuff, just so I can get a crumb from the Master’s table today?
You will treat yourself and others according to the way you think God feels about you. If you know you are loved unconditionally, you will love yourself and others with that same kind of love. But if you feel you have to perform in order to be of value to God, then you will portray the thought to others that they need to perform in order to be of value
to you. Either you live your life as if you have a home, or you live your life as if you don’t have a home. Fear … or Father’s embrace!

I am convinced that in this season of church history more than any other since the days of the apostles, God is calling us to experience a homecoming. He is calling us off the sea of fear into a calm harbor of refuge and safety. It’s hard to beat the feeling of exhilaration you get when you move from a place of not knowing whether you will be alive or dead in the next minute into the warmth of that wheelhouse. During that stormy night on Drake Passage, something came alive inside both David and me. He said, “I don’t even know what it was, but I know I encountered God in a deeper way than ever before.”

That’s what happens when you find yourself frozen on the bow in the sea of fear. You never know what’s going to happen next. But when you choose to confront the sea of fear and cast yourself in faith into the arms of a loving Father, you begin to discover the purpose and meaning of life. As He did with David on the bow of that sailboat, God is saying to you, “Live! Live! Live!”

God is saying to all of us: “Come home.” And where is home? Anywhere He is. We hear a lot about the Kingdom of God in our churches these days; to me, the Kingdom of God means seeing God’s will and purpose come to pass on earth as they are in Heaven. Whenever I think about the Kingdom of God, I always refer back to a few verses in the Gospel of John.
“The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us. We have seen His glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth”
(John 1:14). Jesus came from the bosom of the Father. The original Greek says that He came “from the Father’s heart.” And the
heart of the Father is where He invites us to return. That is our home.

Jesus says in John 8:14, “
I
know where I came from and where I am going.”
He will return to the place from which He came, and He wants us to be with Him: “In
My Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with Me that you also may be where I am”
(John 14:2-3). Jesus is saying to us, “I’m fixing up a special place for you in the family dwelling. My Father’s house will not be an empty house. It is your home in His embrace.”

Christ, who created all things, came from the bosom of the Father, a place of warmth, safety, and security. He came to make it possible for His home to become our home so that we will know that we are not orphans. Subsequently, when crisis comes, we can be confident that we do not have to face it alone because Father is always there.

No one goes through life without experiencing some degree of shame, disappointment, or betrayal. When these and other crises come, where do you hook your lifeline? That is what creation is all about—God making His home among humankind. It is about knowing we have a Father and a home. And isn’t that what we all are looking for? God created every human being to be a son or daughter to someone. All creation began with the Father desiring relationships with sons and daughters.

Until about ten years ago, I was an intense, authoritarian, and performance-oriented husband and father. I was radically born again in 1980 but for the next 15 years still thought and lived like an orphan because I never really understood the depth of the
Father’s love for me. I thought I had to perform and strive to earn it. Consequently, my orphan heart negatively affected every relationship I had, particularly with my family. Finally, God transformed my heart, and I learned to relinquish my orphanhood and embrace sonship. My transformation was both sudden and dramatic. My wife says that God changed me more in 45 minutes than I had changed in my entire previous 15 years of walking with Him. I wrote about this experience in my first book,
Experiencing Father’s Embrace
.

My daughter was 14 at the time. Suddenly, I went from an agitated dad to a compassionate father—a change that literally melted her heart. I had been so hard to live with that she had reached the point of wishing that whenever I left the house to go on a ministry trip, I simply would not return. She said that prior to my receiving a revelation of God’s love, whenever I was home there was no joy in the house; there was only fear—fear of trusting, fear of rejection, and fear of opening her heart to love. Embracing Father’s love made all the difference. In a matter of months, my relationship with Sarah changed from an almost total lack of tenderness, affection, and warmth to the place where she became “Daddy’s girl.”

From the time she was 14 until she was 17, Sarah and I enjoyed the kind of relationship any father and daughter would long for. She would run in the house and yell, “Dad, where are you?” Then she would jump on my lap, give me a kiss, and tell me what an awesome and wonderful dad I was.

One day when she was 17, I was driving her to school and I said, teary-eyed, “Sarah, I just love you so much!”

“Daddy,” she replied, “would you quit before my makeup runs?”

It was a very tender moment between us. Later that day as I was watching the news and my wife, Trisha, was fixing dinner, Sarah
arrived home from school. She came through the back door, slammed it, blew right by her mom without a word, blew right by me without a word, and went straight up to her room. I then heard the bedroom door slam behind her.

Trisha looked at me and said, “What did you do to her this morning?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I replied. “Everything was great!”

“Well, you’d better go find out what’s wrong.”

I knocked on Sarah’s door. “Is everything all right, Sarah?”

“Yes!”

“Did I do something wrong?”

“No!”

“Well then, why don’t you come out and tell us about your day?”

“I don’t want to!”

(Every parent of a teenager recognizes this tone and dialogue!)

A little while later, I called Sarah for supper.

“Do I have to come?”

“Yes, you have to come.”

She came to the table, sat in the chair with her arms crossed, and just glared the whole time. She ate nothing. After supper she went back to her room and locked the door. This isolation went on for weeks.

What hurt so much was that if I had known what I had done wrong, I would have tried to make it right, but I couldn’t think of anything I had done, and neither could Trisha. As the days went by, we began to watch Sarah become more and more consumed by fear. Her hands started shaking. She couldn’t look us in the eye. And whenever it was time to go to church, she pitched a fit: “I
don’t want to go!” For some reason we could not fathom, Sarah had abandoned the warmth and security of the wheelhouse and was now “on the bow,” frozen in “numb-numb-ville.”

Finally, after several weeks, Sarah began opening up to her mother. She had started trying to stand up for righteousness at school regarding some things that were happening with some other Christian girls. Unfortunately, they responded by trashing her. The same thing happened at church. Now all her friends had pushed her to the outside looking in, and she didn’t know how to get back inside. I would drive her to school, and she would be desperately trying to hold back the tears, not wanting to go because of the way other people were treating her on a daily basis.

Trisha tried to encourage her. “Go talk to your dad. People come from all over the world to hear him. You have free access to him any time. Talk to him.”

“I don’t want to talk him! I don’t want to talk to anybody. I want everybody just to leave me alone!”

One night I stayed up all night praying because my heart was so burdened for her. I knew that if she, like anyone else, would continue to close her heart off to love, she would most likely find comfort somewhere else. The enemy is very good at sending the wrong people to us just at our time of greatest crisis. Whenever you cut yourself off from those people who love and care about you, get ready for the enemy to entice you with a counterfeit affection that you think is an answer for the need in your life.

I prayed for Sarah all night: “Please, God, help her find her way home. She’s living her life as if she doesn’t have a home. Help her find her way back to You.”

The next morning as I was driving her to school, she noticed that my eyes were all puffy.

“Dad, you look terrible!”

“Well, I’ve been up all night.”

“Are you and Mom having problems right now?”

“No, I’ve been up all night because my heart is breaking for you. It’s been weeks since you’ve come in the house and sat in my lap and given me a hug.”

Sarah shot me the look that said, “Don’t go there!” But I still had five more minutes of driving time before we arrived at the school. She was a captive audience. “Sarah,” I said, “my heart is breaking because everything in me experiences such great joy when I know that life is going well with you. And I see that your world is collapsing, and I know that what you need more than anything else is to hear me say, ‘No matter what’s going on, Sarah, I love you the way you are. And you are beautiful in my eyes.’ All I want is a hug.”

I believe that in those few hours during the night, I learned what it means to grieve the Holy Spirit. It has to do with a loving Father witnessing the pain that we, His children, are going through—seeing how others have hurt, disappointed, and betrayed us. And instead of crying to Him and casting all our cares upon Him and receiving His loving embrace, we remain “on the bow,” frozen in the sea of fear and in the entanglements of counterfeit affections, comforting ourselves with anger, control, and isolation. And all the time the Father is calling out to us: “Live! Live! Live!”

As I dropped Sarah off at school, I told her how much I just wanted to hold her while everyone else wanted to throw her away. “I’m not ashamed of you, Sarah—no matter whose fault this is. All that matters is that you’re my little girl who I love. And I’m not ashamed to be your daddy. God is not ashamed of you (see Heb.
11:16), and Jesus is not ashamed to be called your brother” (see Heb. 2:11).