It all begins with love being restored, especially in the Father’s deep love for you
When people share about their faith-walk in an honest way, too often, they reveal a lack of love connection to God. There isn’t a firm blueprint of His love as a Father written in their hearts. This is often because our father lens needs healing and reconstruction. The earthly examples we received have not aligned our hearts to understand who God is as a loving Father.
God is love, and He is also a Father. But how will we understand who He is as a Father when our father lens is damaged or distorted?
This is why the healing of father wounds can be incredibly helpful if we want to experience a greater sense of His love in our lives. Without a healthy father lens, there are a series of lies we can easily believe, that keep us from experiencing God’s love in a powerful way.
Here are those lies:
1. “God is far away.”
It’s amazing how long I spent my early Christian life feeling as though God was far away.
If you are a believer, God is near. In fact, His Spirit lives within you. But rejection will convince you that God is far away, using certain thoughts and feelings to convince you of this belief.
When you say, “I feel far from God,” the father of lies is behind that kind of thinking. But it often gets formed from our earthly father experience. We can believe that God and people will not remain near.
2. “God is upset with me.”
The way I perceived God growing up was that He was pretty moody and often upset with me. I didn’t get this from reading the Scriptures. I gleaned it from the preaching I heard. Well-meaning teachers and pastors often emphasized this edge that God had towards me. It didn’t develop a respect of God. it caused me to be deathly afraid of Him. I wondered at what moment He would strike me because of my sin. So I often avoided His presence, because I was afraid of how he saw me.
Without the foundation of Father God’s love for us being properly set, the other subjects of our spiritual life will be really challenging to put into perspective.
3. “I’m not good enough . . . “
Without the Father’s love, we lack confidence in who we are. Our potential can get stifled. Our voice loses power and we don’t take risks, because there is an underlying lie that resists any value in who they are.
The biggest thing that can take place from this lie is that we will sabotage great relationship opportunities. People will come to you who genuinely love you, but you can’t receive it, because there is a lie that says, “You are not worth being loved.”
4. “I am not of value, unless I perform.”
Without Father God’s love imprinted on our hearts, we can all feel the need to perform for love, acceptance and approval. The culture of our world puts so much emphasis on achievement, status and success, people only feel they matter if they have accomplished something that is noteworthy to the world.
Because of this, masses of people have this burden to prove themselves or to become successful according to the world’s definition. We don’t think we have an identity unless we have an impressive resume to go along with it.
5. “I don’t have what it takes.”
You were made to overcome, but if without the Father’s love filling your heart, you won’t know what you are capable of. With the Father’s great love, His belief in His children’s potential to overcome is greater than we can ever imagine. That love builds great faith to step forward confidently. Without it, we won’t walk with the confident power that is possible.
6. “The pressure is all on me.”
A father empowers his sons and daughters to overcome, but without the torment of pressure. Without love, we can feel enormous pressure in life, thinking, “everything is on my shoulders. The pressure is all on me.”
7. “I have to do life all on my own.”
This can lead us to think that no one will ever help us, including God. We don’t believe that anyone has our back, so we trudge out into life without resources or equipping. Many were set up for this, because they were not fathered in the way they were meant to be. An unhealthy independence develops, to keep us from receiving the blessing of healthy relationship and the help we need.
8. “I will never break through this.”
Without the Father’s love written in our hearts, we will lack the confidence and faith to step out boldly. Our hope and faith will easily wane.
In the end, we can live more from a hopeless posture. The pain and disappointment in life begins to wear us out. We become cynical and jaded about life, losing a sense of optimism about what our future holds.
The good news is that these lies can be dismantled. It often takes some humility, honesty and self-awareness to realize how our past brokenness infects our current outlook on life.
It all begins with love being restored, especially in the Father’s deep love for you.
This article was written by Mark DeJesus and originally appeared on charismanews
