The following quote may be helpful in understanding the steadfast love of the Father and applying it in our families. This comes from The Father You’ve Always Wanted, by Ed Tandy McGlasson (pp. 26-29):
Many of us have grown up as spiritual orphans, never knowing the delight that our loving heavenly Father feels toward us. How many of you have grown up with a broken dad or no dad at all and it has affected how you see God in your life? Maybe God has become someone you can’t totally trust because your dad was untrustworthy? Or you see God as One who loves you conditionally and is only interested in making sure you never break the rules?
All of us are wounded, in one way or another. None of us has the perfect father, and none of us can be the perfect father, no matter how good we are or how hard we try. Jesus wouldn’t have promised us a new Father if we could be perfect as moms and dads!
But there is another reality, a truth deeper than any pain: the Father loves us and He sent His Son to let us know. Through Jesus we can be part of a perfect family, with a Father who is always home, and always watching over us with a smile…
There is never a time when we cannot call on the name of our heavenly Father, never a time when His delight in us fades. God our Father longs to call us into a place of perfect safety and love–a place where we are seen and loved for who we are no matter what we do.
It is from this place of blessing that we are equipped to call out our own children into God’s good future–a future where it is never too late for us or for our children…
Trust me. Your heavenly Father sacrificed His only Son on the cross so He could heal, restore, and release you into a life that’s centered on His love and smile for you. That same smile will equip you to transcend the brokenness of your family so that you can become the fathers and mothers God has made you to be. Fathers and mothers who call their own children into a life that unlocks them from their own brokenness and into the life God the Father has meant them to have.
As we catch the smile of the Father for us, His love will bring us home to the place of love and belonging and delight where we were meant to live. And this in turn equips us to be the son or daughter of God that we want our kids to be.
May the Father’s love enable us to apply steadfast love as Paul describes in Colossians 3:12-14 (ESV): “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”
