Some of us may have a hard time thinking about God as our Father because of a bad or non existent relationship with our earthly father. Here’s the good news, God wants to be your perfect Father, who loves you and is working towards your good. God is a good Father and our confidence in prayer will only be as strong as our confidence in the One to whom we are praying.
God is a Good Father because His plans for you are always good.
Rom. 8: 18 - 25 tells us that we will suffer and feel the extremely wide gap between God’s good intentions and the brokenness of the world we live in. However, it also tells us of God’s plan to restore His creation. Romans 8:28 - 29 tells us when we love God and are aligned with His purposes, He can take even the worst of our circumstances including our bad decisions and wounds from others, and use them towards our good; to transform us to be like Jesus so we can in turn transform the world around us. Nothing is wasted in God’s good hands.
God is a Good Father because He gives you what you need and not what you deserve.
Rom 8: 29 - 30 tells us how God planned from the beginning for His people to be like Jesus, called us and made us right with Himself, and will complete His work in us. Psalms 103:10 -12 tells us that God has not treated us as we deserve or paid us back for our wrongs, but has taken our sins away & removed them as far as east is from west. Salvation is God’s work from beginning to end. It’s because of His grace, mercy and forgiveness, that we can approach Him with boldness and confidence (Hebrews 4: 15 - 16).
God is a Good Father because He put your good above His own.
Romans 8:32 tells us “God did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all”. In John 10:14 - 15, Jesus says, “I’m the good Shepherd, who lays His life down for His sheep “ Jesus, God wrapped in flesh died in your place to deliver you from the penalty and the power of sin and to exchange your sin for His goodness. 2 Cor. 5:21 says God took sinless Christ & poured into him our sins and in exchange, He poured His goodness into us.
God is a Good Father because He doesn’t say Yes to every request.
A good parent doesn’t say yes to every request. As parents, we have a much a larger perspective than our kids, and what often feels unpleasant in the moment to our children, we know will be for their good in the long run. It can be easy to interpret trials and hardship as a lack of God’s love and care, but Romans 8:35 asks that very question. “Does it mean he no longer loves us if we have trouble or calamity, or are persecuted, or hungry, or destitute, or in danger, or threatened with death?” The author goes on to answer his own questions, saying nothing can separate us from the love of God. God is not a vending machine and prayer is not Tylenol.
God doesn’t promise a pain free life. Don’t let a tumultuous time eclipse your memory of God’s past faithfulness and answers to prayer. And don’t let what you do not understand in this moment undermine the truth that God has revealed to you.
The more we can trust the goodness of God’s heart whether or not we can always see His hand, the more we can lean into Him and pray with passion and confidence.