Point People to God through Actions

I started helping an organization by volunteering to help with there quarterly camp out as this is my second quarter to assist. It is a group that focuses on veterans and suicide prevention and I believe I have grown to enjoy laboring with my co volunteers we are a small group but are striving to leave a large impact

For some of us, it can be easy to look at the relationships that others have with their fathers and just feel a little jealous. No dad is perfect, but some are certainly more ideal than others from an outside perspective. Maybe you grew up with a great dad, or maybe you didn’t. If you didn’t have an earthly father who was approachable, loving, and had your very best in mind, God – as your Heavenly Father – is waiting to more than make up for what you never had. Psalm 103:17 says, “from everlasting to everlasting the Lord’s love is with those who fear him, and his righteousness with their children’s children.” And Psalm 106:1 says, “for he is good; his love endures forever.” That means not only that God’s patience and kindness never wear out, but it also means that you never run out of chances to be forgiven by him. Psalm 103:12 tells us, “As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.”  We all long to be intimately known, yet sometimes we hide who we really are out of fear of rejection. Scripture says your Heavenly Father knows you intimately already and still loves your unconditionally. In Psalm 139, David said, “You have searched me, Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways”. God knows your thoughts before you think them, your words before you say them, and your actions before you act on them. And still, with all that intimate knowledge of you, he continues to love you endlessly.  DISCUSSION/REFLECTION QUESTIONS: What Scripture do you most resonate with when looking at God’s role as your Heavenly Father? Pick some of your favorite verses, write them down, and put them in a place where you can regularly see them. 

When you are in the middle of difficult or trying circumstances, it can be easy to feel like God has forgotten you or that he isn’t interested in what you are going through. However, Scripture tells us a very different story about God’s proximity to us, especially during the overwhelming and challenging times in our life. Psalm 145:18 states, “The Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.” Then in Psalm 34:18, we read, “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” Again, we see in Philippians 4:5-6 that “Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” While you may have had an earthly father that distanced himself from you, you have a Heavenly Father who never will. God, not for one moment, ever thinks about distancing himself from you or removing himself from your life, even in the darkest of situations. He is close and longs for you, as his beloved child, to lean into him and let him provide you with what you need to get through life’s trials.  DISCUSSION/REFLECTION QUESTIONS: Do you often sense God’s presence or closeness in your life? Describe a time when you felt God’s closeness in a situation. 

As you read through Scripture, you see that, while God goes by many names, God wants to be known as Father most of all by his children. Romans 8:14-17 tells us that when you received the gift of the Holy Spirit, this brought about your adoption to sonship. Sonship is a word we don’t hear a lot nowadays, but it is a term referring to the full legal standing of an adopted male heir in Roman culture. When someone is legally adopted into a family, they are given the same treatment and permissions as a biological child in that family. Ideally, parents treat their adopted child the same as their biological child, giving them the same unconditional love, forgiveness, and support. Sin separates us from a deep, intimate relationship that God longs to have with us as his children, but Jesus’s death and resurrection changes all that and closes this separation. By having a relationship with Jesus and receiving the Holy Spirit into your heart, we read that the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. And if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ. Being an heir means that, just as Christ, we are entitled to all the good gifts and riches that belong to God, our heavenly Father. In other words, all that the Jesus shares with God, such as peace, life, righteousness, has now been imparted to us as well. DISCUSSION/REFLECTION QUESTIONS: Do you often think of yourself as being an heir of God, along with Jesus? How does that impact how you think about your relationship with God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit?

How do you view God as a Father? Do you place characteristics on him that are similar to your earthly father, or do you use Scripture as the basis for what you know him to be? We see throughout Scripture that God's not a controlling or condemning father. In fact, we read in Romans chapter eight that we are set free from this mindset of fear and slavery, and instead we're called children of God.  So, if you think of God as a father that's overly controlling, overbearing, and condemning, chances are that it will lead to one of two outcomes in your life. It will lead to rebellion because you believe that nothing you do is good enough, so you figure it’s not worth it to even try to do the right thing. Or this mindset will lead to exhaustion, where you spend your life constantly trying to earn God's affection and trying to be good enough for his approval. But the Bible makes it clear in Psalm 145 that God is a good Father. Verses 8 and 9 state that, “The Lord is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and rich in love. The Lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made.” God's compassion and love are intertwined in everything he does for his children. That's the kind of father we have in Heaven.  DISCUSSION/REFLECTION QUESTIONS: What adjectives first come to your mind when you think of God as your Father? Do you find yourself either rebelling or at the point of exhaustion because you have an incorrect view of God?