Tender Loving Father

This week I'm sharing words from George MacDonald's book, "Discovering the Character of God" and the chapter entitled "God our Tender Loving Father." As you read this, ask the Holy Spirit to show you afresh how unbelievably wonderful and good God is!

"Our Lord was, is, and ever shall be divinely childlike. Childhood belongs to the divine nature.

"The Fatherhood and the Sonship are one, except that the Fatherhood looks down lovingly, and the Sonship looks up lovingly. Love is all. And God is all in all. He is ever seeking to get down to us - to be the divine man to us. And yet we are ever saying, 'Be that far from thee, Lord!'

"In our unbelief we are careful over the divine dignity...(but) better pleasing to God is the audacity of Job, who, rushing into God's presence and flinging the door of his presence-chamber to the wall, like a troubled - or it may be even angry yet faithful - child, cries out to him whose perfect Fatherhood Job is in the process of learning.

"The devotion of God to his creatures is perfect. He does not think about himself but about them. He wants nothing for himself but finds his blessedness in the outgoing of blessedness...He gives himself to us - shall we not give ourselves to him?

"For when is the child the ideal child in our eyes and in our hearts? Is it not when with gentle hands he takes his father by the hand or even the beard, and turns that father's face up to his brothers and sisters to kiss? When even the lovely selfishness of love-seeking has vanished and the heart is absorbed in loving?

"In this then is God like the child: that he is simply and altogether our friend, our father - our more than friend, father, and mother - our infinite love-perfect God. Grand and strong beyond all that human imagination can conceive of poet-thinking and kingly action, he is delicate beyond all that a human tenderness can conceive of husband or wife, homey beyond all that human heart can conceive of father and mother.

"He does not think of us in two separate ways. With him all is simplicity of purpose and meaning and effort and end - namely, that we should be as he is, think the same thoughts, mean the same things, possess the same blessedness. It is so plain that anyone may see it, everyone ought to see it, everyone shall see it. It must be so."

Oh dear Father, You are unbelievably good! Thank You that the more like Your Son Jesus we become, the more childlike and simple we are, forgetting ourselves in Your love and loving others in You. All praise and glory be to You forever and ever!