Excerpted From
Not Forsaken
By Louie Giglio
God’s promise is this—no matter where things are with your earthly dad, you have a perfect Father in heaven who loves you and wants to pour out his blessing on you.
The Scripture says it this way, “Even if my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will take me up” (Ps. 27:10).
Even if the blessing of our dad escapes us, the love of our heavenly Father can still find us. Even if our dad is dead and gone, our Father God can still hold us close and lift us up. Just because we have experienced a breakdown in our relationship with our dad, it doesn’t mean we can’t experience a miracle recovery in our relationship with God. Even though we may bear wounds inflicted by our dad, God can restore us and raise us up healed and whole.
This may be a far-fetched notion for you, like some pie-in-the-sky promise that’s impractical or impossible. Or you may be thinking, as a lot of people do, If God is anything like my earthly father, then I don’t want anything to do with him anyway.
We all have different father stories to tell. Mine is mostly a good one, and although my dad wasn’t perfect, he loved my sister and me, and did his best. Your experience with your dad may be the worst, a tale marked by tragedy that’s too painful to even talk about. But no matter what has happened on this side of eternity between you and your dad, you are not forsaken by God.
Maybe you can quickly recount the exact places and times and ways you were forsaken by your dad. You were abandoned. The memory is vivid and real. You were knocked down. You were lied to. You were hurt. You were rejected. You were devalued. You were ignored. You were held to a standard that no one could meet.
Yet, even when we are forsaken by the one whose blessing we need the most—one of life’s most debilitating blows—there is still a staggering promise available: “The Lord will take me up.”
God is a father, but he’s not the same as your earthly dad. His heart is good, and his arms are strong.
While your life story to date may be a tangled mess of betrayal, disappointment and defeat, history records that the God of heaven is for you. He made you. He sees you. And he wants you to know the joy of being a child of God, and of having the most excellent father possible. He himself wants to be your father, and he wants to shower you with his blessing. He wants to raise you up, show you the ropes, help you grow strong and cheer you on as you pursue your God-given passion. He wants to put a safety net of his love under you so you can spread your wings and take flight without the crippling fear of failure holding you down.
It’s not the same as having your dad back, or having him become a different kind of father than he was or is. But the blessing God wants to give you is not to be discounted. In fact, the blessing of Father God is actually way beyond any human relationship. The best possible earthly father giving the most excellent blessing can’t compare to the smile of your heavenly Father. His love is supernatural and powerful, unending and unassailable. And his love means this for us:
No one who knows him as father will be forsaken. No one will be left behind. No one will be orphaned.
No one will go unwanted.
No one’s story will end with abuse and betrayal. No one will have to live without a father’s love.
No one, ever.
All God is asking you to do is to give him a chance. He wants to open your eyes to see him as the kind of father he truly is. He wants to tear down any misconceptions that have formed in your mind about him as a result of your experiences or because of what you’ve heard others say about him. And he wants to walk with you through the hard stuff, the pain you have endured as a result of a broken or strained relationship with your dad. He wants to begin to heal the hurt and make your heart live again.
God wants to bring you to the place where you believe and receive that what he says is true when he’s talking about you as a son or daughter of the King of the universe. And he wants you to live fearless and free. He always stands poised and ready to take a step toward you. You just need to give him the nod. Then simply be willing to take a baby step toward him.
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