The Father's Heart by Vicki Brawner

I believe the Lord would like to break down any barriers of anything that is standing between you and the Father so you can receive a greater measure of His love. 

Every problem we face has its deepest root in the lack of good fathering in a person. This may come as a bit of a shock, but the truth is that we are rooted and grounded by our Heavenly Father, and there are many things that stand in the way of understanding and feeling His incredible love for us. He wants to heal this in you and open the passages that are blocked by experiences and damage that have happened in our lives, so you can experience true love. 

You may have heard this phrase: there is a God-sized hole in each one of us, and only the Father can fit in and fill this hole. We try to fill this need with food, exercise, entertainment, ministry, addiction to work, addiction to ministry and anointing, with relationships, etc.

It is the role of the Father to fill this need. This is why people go from relationship to relationship, church to church, job to job, etc. 

All human beings hunger to feel fulfilled, unconditionally loved, safe, purposeful, and accepted.

When we get down to the root cause of our dissatisfaction, we will find that emptiness can only be filled by the fatherhood of God, not only from a psycho-emotional perspective but primarily from a spiritual perspective.

Many things are highlighted in our media today:

• Confusion of identity and orientation.

• Many suffer from eating disorders - anorexia, bulimia, overeating, and gluttony.

• Getting needs met by sleeping around. 

• Self-medicating with drugs, removing our ability to feel and be fully present in the moment.

• High anxiety and mental illness.

1 Cor. 5:17 says in Christ, we are a new creation. If we are a new creation, we have a new DNA. Since He exchanged His life for ours, we have His DNA. None of the things I just mentioned are in His DNA…therefore not in ours either! So we need a new perspective on the Father-heart of God to understand that He is the One who fills all the holes in our hearts. 

People try to fill this hunger with many things that don't work:

● With physical or emotional food - but the problem is that this is a spiritual hunger. For example, many eating disorders like bulimia, anorexia, or overeating are an attempt to fill a spiritual void with food, or the control of food - but that is impossible. Emotional food would be things like social media, all forms of entertainment, etc. 

•  With an addiction to work -  the insatiable search for more money, power, influence, or other useless attempts to satisfy a spiritual hunger. This hunger can only be satisfied with the love of our Heavenly Father. His love gives us fulfillment, a sense of purpose in life, security, affirmation, and full acceptance

• With our relationships - expecting this type of life fulfillment from your spouse, pastor, boss, or any other person is completely unjust because you’re expecting them to fulfill a role in your life that only God can do. However, we live in relationships expecting another person to make us happy, but they fail us, so the voracious hunger to be fulfilled continues.

Ecclesiastes 6:7 (AMP) “All the labor of man is for his mouth [for self-preservation and enjoyment], and yet his desire is not satisfied.”

According to studies, there is no greater influence than the influence of a father on the lives of young people who are under twenty-five years of age. It is the greatest influence in the life of a child; more than the mother, and it is greater than drugs, alcohol, addiction, or promiscuity.

It is interesting to note:

God is referred to as Father only fifteen times in the Old Testament. But in the New Testament, He is called Father, as well as Abba (meaning Papa or Daddy): In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, sixty-five times. In Paul’s letters, forty-five times. In John, more than 100 times!

As you can see, in the New Covenant through Jesus, we now have access to the Father and His desire is to show you that He is a GOOD Father. 

We can have a lot of false paradigms because of our experiences with our earthly fathers.

Here are five types of fathers that bring false paradigms. You may find your own dad in this list:

1. Absent - an absent dad brings feelings of abandonment, rejection, a lack of love, loneliness, and a loss of identity.

2. Passive - a passive father makes a person feel insecure, lost, having no direction.

3. Perfectionist - if you had a perfectionist father, you were made to feel inadequate, afraid that you couldn’t live up to his expectations, always thinking,“I have to do more”. Sadly, this leads to rebellion.

4. Authoritarian - this type of father puts distance between him and the child, instills fear, and makes the child feel like they don’t want to disappoint.

5. Abusive - this father brings fear, hate, powerlessness, and repulsion, making one feel like trash. 

All these things break your connection with the Heavenly Father and give you the wrong perception of what a father really is. 

Maybe you had a great dad, a godly man, one who made you feel loved and accepted. This is wonderful, and you are blessed! But we need to remember that he was/is human, and did not love you completely perfectly, even if you were protected from all the damage that I just mentioned. We are still affected by the way we were raised, and we received a picture of our Father God in our formative years. God wants to redeem anything that is not a clear picture of the reality of who He is. 

The key to receiving inner heart healing in this area is forgiveness. Forgiving our fathers opens the door to the Father’s love. 

For example, when my friend Tom was a boy, he loved to play baseball. One of his greatest desires was to play catch with his dad. He was always waiting for the day when his dad would be off work, the weather was right, and he could throw the ball a few times with his dad out in the yard. Finally, the day came when he thought it would be a perfect afternoon to play catch. So he got his ball and glove, grabbed another glove for his dad, bounced into the living room, and asked, “Hey Dad, wanna play catch?” His dad said, “No, not right now.”  “Aw, c’mon, Dad, please? Just for a little while?” His dad said, “I said no, Tom. Not right now.” His mom overheard this conversation from the kitchen, came into the living room, and said sternly, “Go play catch with your son!” His dad responded by yelling, “NO! I said I don’t want to play catch!” And then a yelling match ensued. Soon, Tom was cowering in the corner, watching all hell break loose. Back and forth they yelled, mom telling dad to play with his son, dad yelling back he didn’t want to play with his son. Tom tried to get their attention and say it was fine, he didn’t really want to play anyway, and tried to get them to stop fighting. That day a wall went up and he didn’t ask his dad to play catch ever again. 

Tom grew up, went to college, and like a lot of college kids, he learned to drink. He had a great time partying with his friends and messing around, but he had one secret desire. He thought, “If I could just go have a beer with my dad, he would see that I can drink just as well as he can and that I’m all grown up - he’d be proud of me!” Once again, the perfect day came, and he asked his dad out for a drink. They got to the bar, ordered their drinks, and Tom felt like this was going to be the moment when his dad would finally approve of him. The whole time they were there, his dad talked to every other person in the bar, cutting up, making jokes, telling stories, and being the “fun guy”, but never once spoke or even acknowledged Tom. I’m sure you can see the damage that was being done to Tom’s view of a father. Sadly, they parted ways that evening, and Tom had nothing to do with him after that. 

Years later, after Tom met Jesus, He ministered truth to Him and walked him through forgiving his father, which gave him incredible victory and broke down all the walls and barriers to receiving the Father’s love. 

Again, forgiving our fathers opens the door to the Father’s love. 

Let’s forgive our fathers for failing us and letting us down. 

Your heart, using your mouth, has to connect the pain with what he did so Jesus can touch it. 

So let’s do that now. 

Maybe as you have been reading, you have been reminded of something that happened in your life as you were growing up or a facet of the relationship between you and your father. Maybe your father was/is one of the types mentioned earlier. Remember, he’s human. He’s not perfect. Let’s ask the Holy Spirit to give you the supernatural ability to forgive your father now.

Put your hand on your heart and say (out loud) something like this;

“Holy Spirit, in Jesus’ name I forgive my dad for that day when…

…or for not being there when…

…for causing so much pain. I forgive him for that.”

Take a moment to let the Lord minister to your heart as His power to forgive washes over you.

The Good Father

Let’s look in the scriptures to see what a good father is.

John 14:6:

“I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Did you know Jesus is not the final destination? It's THE FATHER!

Jesus is the way to the Father. That is always where HE is going. We are IN HIM, so we are going there too. Because of our misconstrued images of what a good father is, we like to stop at what Jesus did for us, and stay there. But we must remember that His whole purpose of coming to earth to sacrifice His life in exchange for ours was to bring us back into relationship with the Father. The Father has always been His final destination - and He is the way there. 

Galatians 4:6:

“Because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”

Romans 8:15:

“For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!”

Religion is another useless attempt to satisfy this hunger.

Religion is the attempt to get God to act in my favor by acting correctly, by doing the right things, by rituals,

and by performance. This doesn't work, because the spiritual void does not get filled with a belief in God, but can only be filled with an experience with the Love of our Heavenly Father. We learned that all that is required of us is to believe, but the hole in our hearts is only satisfied by experiencing His love. 

Many believers continue with this void and hunger in the deepest part of their being. They have not experienced the Fatherhood of God; the love of the Father that fills everything and they tend to feel empty most of the time.

They feel unstable and insecure, and when problems come they feel unprotected. If the love of the Father isn't cemented in the deepest part of your being, what will govern your life will not be God, but the emptiness in your heart and these useless attempts to fill it.

In Mark 1:9-11, one day Jesus came from Nazareth in Galilee, and John baptized him in the Jordan River.  As Jesus came up out of the water, He saw the heavens splitting apart and the Holy Spirit descending on Him like a dove.  And a voice from heaven said, “You are my dearly loved Son, and you bring me great joy.”

John 17:23: “I am in them and you are in Me. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that You sent Me and that You love them as much as You love Me.”

John 17:26: “I have revealed you to them, and I will continue to do so. Then your love for Me will be in them, and I will be in them.”

John 16:25-27: “I have spoken of these matters in figures of speech, but soon I will stop speaking figuratively and will tell you plainly all about the Father. Then you will ask in My name. I’m not saying I will ask the Father on your behalf, for the Father Himself loves you dearly because you love Me and believe that I came from God.”

Romans 8:15-16: “You have not received a spirit that makes you fearful slaves. Instead, you received God’s Spirit when He adopted you as His own children. Now

we call him, ‘Abba, Father.’”

John 14:23: “Jesus replied, ‘All who love me will do what I say. My Father will love them, and We will come and make Our home with each of them.”

Revelation 3:20: “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with Me.”

Pray with me:

“Father, in the name of Jesus, I ask you to baptize me with a fresh infilling of your love. Would You give me a tangible revelation of your pure love for me, filling the hole in my heart, that place that desperately is hungering for what only Your love can satisfy? Would You pour out Your intense love on me now. As I forgive my dad (or father figure in my life) who failed me, I now turn to You for the true love of a Father. Wrap me in Your arms. Amen.”

Let His unfailing love wash over you, Dear one.