Monday, March 5, 2012

Who's Your Daddy?

I have finally reached what is probably the most well known and often quoted section of The Sermon On The Mount, The Lord's Prayer. Here Jesus sums up everything that He has taught us so far on the importance of relationship with our Creator with a precise example of how to communicate with Him while also teaching even more about the spiritual principles covered in the Sermon.

He begins with the two most important words ever used to describe our relationship with our Creator. The start of everything worth while is our Father. God is our father, but that produces different mental images in different people due to our experiences, or lack of experiences, with out earthly fathers. Some of us had great fathers, and some of us had men that shouldn't be allowed to raise animals, much less children. Most have men somewhere in between who love their children and do the best they can, but they still make many mistakes. This is why there are sayings like "any man can be a father, but it takes a special man to be a father. This is true in the human sense, but when God tells us He is our Father it is like He is saying I'm you Daddy, only perfect. I'm the Daddy you had without the mistakes or the Daddy you dreamed of having only better.

When He Himself prayed Jesus began with "Abba, Father." Abba is a word that was the Greek word that meant papa or daddy. Jesus is making it clear the relationship He had with the Father is one of daddy and beloved son. Through Christ we can become the adopted children of God and have Him as a Daddy as well. A Daddy who cares completely about us while at the same time knowing us and understanding us even better than we know and understand ourselves. This is difficult for me to grasp at times because in the past, the better I knew and understood myself the less I licked myself. If God really knew and understood me, how could He love me? I couldn't. But God does love me, and He loves me enough to change me into a man I can respect, like and even love.

This is a vital truth for recovery. God loves me, and God loves everyone else just as much as He loves me, no more and no less. I have to understand this. I can not in any sense of truth turn over my will and my life over to the care of a God that I am not sure loves me. If I try I will fail, because if I don't trust God to love me than I have to protect myself from whatever God might do that falls short of love. I act as though He might do something that is not in my best interest. But the truth is that the worst wreckage in my past was caused in some way or another by an attempt to protect myself from God. The sad thing is that I never needed to protect myself from God. That is the one relationship where I was never vulnerable to being hurt by the other party.

God is my Father, my Daddy, and when I turn my life over to Him, He makes it better. He doesn't prevent me from doing the things I want to do. He changes the darkness within me into light, causing a change in what I want. It is brainwashing and spiritwashing and emotionwashing, and I was miserable and in desperate need of a bath. He will never leave me or fall short of perfect love. This is the truth that my entire recovery is built on, and it is good to remind myself of it whenever I begin a conversation with my Creator. Father, thank you for our relationship. Can we talk? All the while knowing that the answer is always yes.

One last comment on the words our Father. Jesus said "our," not "my." This is important because it shows that this relationship is not exclusive to the perfect and only begotten Son of God. It is available to all of us. It is also crucial that I remember that every person I encounter can say the same thing. When I understand that God wants to be Daddy to the person I find myself dealing with it's a whole lot easier to treat them as though the have value, to love them.

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