February is Father heart month

Obstacles to experiencing the Father’s Love

CTF pastors are here in Mexico on retreat and we are sharing our stories of encountering the Father’s love, and it is doing my heart so good!

We often miss experiencing the Father’s love because we don’t have an interpretive grid for the experiences we’ve already had with him. One of God’s significant self-revelations is that of Father. So, he didn’t become Father when we began to hear Father heart messages.  He has always been Father. Therefore, many of our experiences with the Lord ought to be interpreted in the light of God’s Fatherhood. Let me illustrate.

When I first became a follower of Jesus at the age of 14, I was in high school.  For the first week or two, I would have a warm satisfying sensation in my heart. It was such a beautiful feeling that instead of getting a ride home after school with my dad or with a school friend’s family, as was often the case, I would choose to walk home for an hour or so in the hot tropical sun. I did that because I wanted to enjoy this lovely emotion in the privacy of my own heart.

In retrospect, I now understand, by the Holy Spirit, that this was the Father revealing his affection for me!  If I had understood this at the time I would have valued this experience that lasted a week or two even more.  And perhaps it would have continued even longer.

I would suggest, that if you find it difficult to connect to, and receive the Father’s love for you, that you ask him to show you when and how he has already been releasing his love to you. The Holy Spirit will be faithful to show you these moments as he was for me.

Honour your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. – Exodus 20:12 NIV

Another significant obstacle to receiving the Father’s love has to do with dishonouring and judging our earthly fathers. None of us have had perfect fathers. Even the very good and loving ones have fallen short in some way. Some of us have had absentee fathers who have not been present either physically or emotionally.  Others of us have had fathers who are authoritarian as if they were army sergeants. Some fathers have been performance oriented dads – like mine was. Still others have been passive dads. Whatever the sort of father we’ve had it’s vital that we take time to examine our hearts to see if we’ve judged and dishonoured him. We need to confess to the Lord and repent for any ways that we have.

I encourage you to listen to Amanda’s messagefrom this past Sunday to hear in more detail about Father types and how to process your own personal  experiences in order to receive more of the Father’s love.