10 Reasons to Honor God the Father this Weekend

This weekend is Father’s Day weekend in the United States. Several weeks ago, I posted some suggestions for celebrating Mother’s Day in our churches, and many of those ideas are relevant for this weekend as well. At the same time, I encourage you to remind folks just how worthy God the Father is:

1. He’s a perfect father. None of us grew up with a perfect father, and none of is a perfect father. God the Father, though, never gets anything wrong. He’s flawless and faultless.
2. He loves us when earthly fathers don’t always. Some of us have hard histories of fathers whose love for us was distorted at best, non-existent at worst. God the Father’s love is more than a hymn topic, however; it’s real.
3. He never leaves us. I’m always shocked when an earthly father walks out on his children. On the other hand, what really amazes me is that God the Father never walks out on us, even when we tend to walk away from Him. He holds our hand more tightly than we hold His.  
4. He forgives us when we let Him down. We don’t always please Him, but He still blots out our wrong (Isa 43:25). Unlike some earthly fathers who bring up our wrong seemingly for the rest of our life, God remembers it no more (Heb 10:17).
5. He disciplines us because He loves us. His discipline is adoring rather than angry, redemptive rather than punitive, and reconciling more than dividing (Heb 12:4-11). His correction is never out of control or abusive.
6. He speaks to us every day. Our heavenly Father daily communicates to us through His inspired Word. He wrote us a love letter that crosses all the cultures, transcends all the years, and meets us exactly where we are in life.
7. He’s always available. No child in the family of God ever wonders who or where his daddy is. We can call out to Him, and He will answer (Jer 33:3). He even comes seeking us when we’re running from Him. 
8. He’s pleased to be our daddy. He loves us more than we can imagine. He will, in fact, rejoice over us with singing (Zeph 3:17).
9. He gives us earthly fathers. For some, that father is the godly man in our family of origin. For others of us, that father is a godly man who has chosen to walk beside us and welcome us as one of his own.
10. He allows us to be somebody’s father. Even for those of us who do not have children (like me), God grants us the blessing of being a “father” in others’ lives. He gives us spiritual children to help raise. That’s truly quite a gift.   

As the chorus says, God really is a “good, good Father” – it’s who He is. And, we’re loved by Him.