God’s Coronary heart for You
“What comes into our minds after we take into consideration God is crucial factor about us.” So begins A. W. Tozer’s guide The Data of the Holy.1 Christ’s coronary heart is to make clear what God is definitely like, as a substitute of what we count on him to be like. I’m making an attempt to assist us depart behind our pure, fallen intuitions that God is distant and chilly and to step into the releasing information that he’s mild and lowly in coronary heart.
However our research focuses on the Son of God. What about God the Father?
Ought to the Son as mild and lowly be “what comes into our minds” however ought to we consider the Father as one thing else? Is the Father rather less mild, perhaps?
There appears to be a typical thought amongst Christians that the Son is the nicest member of the Trinity. The Father loves us too, in fact. However he’s slightly colder. Extra stern. The Son is the actually loving one.
However this isn’t what the Bible teaches. It’s true that the Father’s wrath was glad by the Son’s work on the cross. However the Father’s coronary heart is simply as crammed up with love for you because the Son’s. The Son’s work on the cross opened the best way for the Father’s like to stream right down to us, however it didn’t enhance the Father’s love for us.
That includes quick, easy-to-read chapters and useful explanations, this simplified version of Light and Lowly takes readers into the depths of Christ’s tender coronary heart for sinners and victims.
The Bible is evident that the Father’s coronary heart is simply as full of affection for his folks because the Son’s coronary heart. In 2 Corinthians 1:3, for instance, we learn:
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all consolation.
“The Father of mercies.” As Paul opens 2 Corinthians he offers us a window into what got here into his thoughts when he considered God.
Sure, the Father is simply and righteous. Completely so. With out such a fact, we might haven’t any hope that every one wrongs would sooner or later be put proper.
However what’s his coronary heart?
What flows out from his deepest being? Mercies.
He’s “the Father of mercies.” Simply as a father has youngsters who mirror who he’s, the divine Father has mercies that mirror him. There’s a household resemblance between the Father and mercy.
To talk of God the Father because the Father of mercies is to say that he multiplies compassionate mercies to his needful, wayward, messy, fallen, wandering folks. That is the Bible’s method of taking us into who God the Father is. An accurate understanding of the triune God isn’t that of a Father whose central disposition is judgment and a Son whose central disposition is love. The guts of each is one and the identical; that is, in any case, one God, not two. Theirs is a coronary heart of redeeming love. This isn’t a love that softens his justice and wrath however a love that fantastically satisfies his justice and wrath.
The Bible is evident that the Father’s coronary heart is simply as full of affection for his folks because the Son’s coronary heart.
What ought to come into our minds after we take into consideration God? The triune God is three in a single, a fountain of infinite mercies. These mercies stream right down to us and abundantly present for us in all of our many wants and failures and wanderings. That is who he’s. Father a minimum of Son, and Son a minimum of Father.
Past what we’re conscious of at any given second, the Father’s tender care envelopes us with pursuing gentleness, sweetly governing each final element of our lives. He orders the flutter of the leaf that falls from the tree and the breeze that knocked it free (Matt. 10:29–31), and he controls the bomb that evil minds detonate (Amos 3:6; Luke 13:1–5). However via and beneath and fueling all that washes into our lives, nice and small, is the guts of a Father. The Father of mercies.
A few of us had nice dads rising up. Others of us had been horribly mistreated by them. Regardless of the case, the nice in our earthly dads is a faint pointer to the true goodness of our heavenly Father, and the unhealthy in our earthly dads is the alternative of who our heavenly Father is. He’s the Father of whom each human father is a shadow.
In John 14, Philip asks Jesus to indicate the disciples the Father (John 14:8). Jesus responds: “Have I been with you so lengthy, and you continue to have no idea me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9).
“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
Jesus Christ is the seen manifestation of the invisible God (2 Cor. 4:4, 6; Heb. 1:3). In him we see heaven’s coronary heart strolling round on two legs in time and house. Once we see the guts of Christ all through the 4 Gospels, we’re seeing the very compassion and tenderness of who God himself most deeply is.
As you contemplate the Father’s coronary heart in your personal life, let him be the Father of mercies to you. He’s not cautious in his tenderness towards you. He multiplies mercies in your each want, and there’s nothing he would somewhat do. “Keep in mind,” stated the Puritan John Flavel, “that this God is your Father, and is extra tender towards you than you might be, or could be, towards your self.”2 In different phrases, your gentlest remedy of your self isn’t as mild as the best way your heavenly Father handles you.
The guts of Christ is mild and lowly. And that’s the excellent image of who the Father is. “The Father himself loves you” (John 16:27).
Notes:
- A. W. Tozer, The Data of the Holy (New York: HarperCollins, 1961), 1.
- John Flavel, Holding the Coronary heart: How one can Preserve Your Love for God (Fearn, UK: Christian Heritage, 2012), 57. I’ve barely up to date the language.
This text is tailored from The Heart of Jesus: How He Really Feels about You by Dane C. Ortlund.
