Jesus in the Margins by Rick Mckinley

Jesus in the Margins by Rick Mckinley

Author:Rick Mckinley [McKinley, Rick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56359-0
Publisher: The Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-24T00:00:00+00:00


7 FATHER OF MINE

Something about the word father brings to mind a picture—a picture that differs for each of us, according to our experience. Some people see a grinning face cheering on the sidelines during a youth soccer game. Some people see a birthday card showing up a month late with a five-dollar bill inside. Some people see a guy who slept with their mom, and moved on. For too many of us our experience of father is limited to images of Cliff Huxtable and Tony Soprano.

In the margins you find a lot of people who have little or no relationship with their dads. In the margins, father is often a four-letter word. I could never understand why God chose to call himself Father. He knew that many people would misunderstand what he meant by it, so why did he choose it?

The reality is that in the early dawn of this new millenium, ours is a fatherless generation. The evidence is found in the scarred hearts of people in the margins. These are the scars of abandonment left by the wounds of divorce, abuse, and dads who disengaged emotionally from their families.

Fathers have tremendous power to shape our lives, a power inherent in the family structure as ordained by God. God designed the father to be the head of the home, and so each of us is wired to long for the love of our fathers. When fathers abuse their God-given place in our lives, they leave a legacy of confusion and heartache for their children.

Countless young men and women are growing up right now without a real understanding of what the word father means. So many of us take father to mean the Homer Simpsons we see in the media—goofy and aloof guys who aren’t really tuned in to their kids’ lives and are not worthy of much respect.

Jesus tells us father means something else.

He invites us to reimagine life in relationship with the perfect Father. Jesus redeems us from our sin and the brokenness of our father-wounds, and he returns us to the Father and his love for us.

In order to reimagine life in the Father’s love, we need to understand who this Father is and what he is like. If we don’t, we will simply take our broken understanding of what a father is and attach it to God, and that will only leave us confused and angry with God. But Jesus wants to paint us a new picture of father so that we will know and believe that his Father is our Father. Then we can begin to live life in his perfect love.

So what is the Father like?

In Matthew 6, Jesus introduces us to his Father, describes what he is like, and lets us know how he feels about us. For one thing, Jesus tells us, the Father knows what we need even before we ask him. For many of us, prayer can be an awkward experience. Somebody once said it’s hard to have a conversation with someone who already knows what you’re going to say.



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