http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14961447/can-you-forgive-your-father
If you have strained or broken relationships with parents (even deceased ones), how can you forgive them for their sinful failings and defects? How can you learn to view them through gracious lenses?
I’m not a trained counselor, but I had a strained relationship with my dad (who died in 1984), and over the last few years I have walked a slow journey toward understanding, mercy, and forgiveness. So let me try to answer these two questions by sharing some parts of my story. My story is unique, as is everyone’s. But perhaps, as you consider the path God has led me down, your own next steps will become clearer.
How Can I Forgive?
Let’s start with the question of forgiveness. It’s easier to forgive when we can see some of the benefits a bad experience brought. Since my father did not abuse me or harm me in the ways we sometimes read about in newspapers — others have it tougher — I eventually realized that my father’s defects actually made my life easier in three ways: easier to feel successful, easier to do what I wanted, and easier, through God’s grace, to profess Christ.
Good from the Bad
It was easier to feel successful because, as I grew up, my mother constantly disparaged my father, essentially labeling him a lazy loser. That wasn’t fair: he worked consistently for forty years, didn’t get drunk, and didn’t beat her — but he was also an underachieving Harvard graduate. She didn’t respect him because he didn’t get the respect she thought he deserved.
The other day, half a century after seeing it in a theater, I streamed Love Story, set at Harvard. A successful student-athlete there has an ultra-strained relationship with his father, an old-money, elite lawyer who competed in the 1928 Olympics. The son, who calls his dad “Sir,” has a high bar to leap and feels he can never meet Sir’s expectations. I, on the other hand, could feel successful by leaping over a low bar. That’s not bad.
My dad was not absent, but he was distant. I suffered in some ways as a result, but I also gained independence by not caring much what my father thought. I left Judaism at age fourteen without worrying about his disapproval. Later I could tell him about my coming to faith in Christ and my upcoming marriage to a shicksa, a non-Jew, without concern about his disapproval.
I believe I’d have had the guts and good sense to marry Susan regardless, but a few Jews with good paternal relationships become petrified at that point. More are lassoed by Jesus but keep tugging on the rope — or they at least keep their changed thinking secret to avoid upsetting parents. That’s not sensible, since Yeshua proclaimed his Jewishness as he said he’s the Christ. Either way, I never had that problem.
Unseen Sacrifices
Forgiveness in Christianity, of course, means more than relenting in resenting: it involves sacrifice. God forgives us because of Christ’s supreme expression of love. The famous line in Love Story is “love means never having to say you’re sorry,” but I truly love my father only by sacrificing my pride and being sorry for never thanking him for all he did for me.
“Forgiveness in Christianity means more than relenting in resenting: it involves sacrifice.”
His gift started with giving me life, of course, and continued to his material provision for me. I was able to graduate from an expensive college with almost no debt. My father had no car until he was thirty, but I grew up with driving privileges and did not have to pay for them. He grew up poor during the Depression, but he made sure his family had a home. We never went hungry.
The intangibles, though, are now more tangible to me. My research into his experiences leaves me 80 percent sure that he faced abundant anti-Semitism as a teenager. He never told me about that. I’m 90 percent sure that immediately after World War II he saw concentration camps while working as a translator and expediter for survivors and refugees. He never talked about that.
What if, as I was growing up, my father had embedded in me the gruesome detail he almost certainly saw while sweeping up the ruins of the Third Reich? What if he had told me how some of my great-grandparents probably received bullets in the head from Nazi soldiers and collaborators?
As I wrote in Lament for a Father, a book published earlier this year, I grew up without consciousness of anti-Semitism. It was undoubtedly there, but I was unaware. What if my father had rat-a-tat-tatted into my brain a sense that the world was against me? For a decade in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I went seriously astray but retained an overall optimism unmarred by nightmares about Holocaust horrors. I regret as an adult not pressing my father further for information about his past, but I now see method in his reticence.
I suspect my father, like a murder detective who doesn’t tell his wife what he saw that day, also spared my mother the specific detail. But as those law-and-order TV shows have frequently informed us, there’s a cost to the person who psychologically isolates himself to keep the virus of pessimism from spreading. My father was hostile to Christianity and its central theme of supreme sacrifice for others, but he did sacrifice — and I belatedly thank him for that.
How Can I Show Grace?
To address question two: Is that viewing him through gracious lenses? If we say in a secular way, “Give me grace,” we mean, “Understand what I’m going through.” I can imagine what a blow it was when my father changed his theology to one acceptable at Harvard, only to be kicked out of Harvard’s graduate school when he didn’t fit socially. I can imagine what it was like to see Jewish corpses stacked up like logs in Germany. I can imagine what it’s like to be deeply disrespected by a wife — and then disrespected by his sons. Those are three strikes, so no wonder he struck out.
Understanding can also mean seeing parallels. My grandfather probably disappointed his father by heading to America and never again seeing him. My father disappointed my grandfather by leaving Orthodox Judaism and embracing Jewish Reconstructionism, which is like a fundamentalist joining today’s Episcopal Church. I disappointed my father by believing in Christ. My research into the past helped me see that I’m a family traditionalist.
How then should I react? Psychiatrist Abraham Twerski said, “Human beings need four things: air, food, drink, and someone to blame” (quoted in Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis, 53). People angry with absent fathers tend to think of them as stick figures rather than complex humans, so researching a father’s life fleshes him out. It may knock out the blame game and create opportunity for a good relationship if the father is alive, and more understanding if he’s not. Regardless, God commands us to honor our fathers and mothers for their sakes and our own. It’s the only commandment that comes with a gift certificate: obey it so “your days may be long in the land the Lord your God is giving you” (Exodus 20:12; see also Ephesians 6:2).
Again, I’ve had it easy: my father was distant, not devilish. Either way, we need to realize that we all fall short — in different ways and to different degrees, yes, but all without exception. Fathers often aspire to do better for their children than their fathers did for them, often by giving them what they wanted to get and did not — but the children may want something different from what the fathers provide. The road to reconnection starts with the realization that we’re all sinners, and that we should condemn not, lest we be condemned (Luke 6:37).
Breaking the Iron Chain
So I can certainly forgive my father his sins, and hope others will forgive mine. I can view him through gracious lenses only because God gave me glasses, and because God in his infinite mercy views me graciously. Otherwise, we just pass on original sin in our natural wretchedness. At first glance, an iron chain binds generation to generation. Yet sometimes, with God’s grace and mercy, that iron chain becomes a readily breakable daisy chain.
“I can view him through gracious lenses only because God gave me glasses.”
Those who see the miraculous transition cry out joyfully, as the apostle Paul did, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (Romans 7:24–25). When we have faith in God, we can look squarely at our own sin because nothing is a surprise to God. We learn that we’re worse than we have imagined but more loved than we could have hoped for.
I love my father, who was wounded — as was my mother, as was her father, as is everyone. But no wound is too deep for Christ to heal.
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What Is the Futility of the Human Mind? Ephesians 4:17–24, Part 2
http://rss.desiringgod.org/link/10732/14821305/what-is-the-futility-of-the-human-mind
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The Three Most Important Words in Prayer
As a child, I had an unhealthy fear of voicemails.
Since voicemails now are something of an endangered species, this may require some explanation. When I was in school, most phones were still attached to walls and didn’t have caller ID. So, if you called and no one picked up, no one would know that it was you who called — unless you left a voicemail. Seems easy (and safe) enough, right?
One day (I was probably ten), I called to see if a friend across the street wanted to play, but no one picked up. I hung up. A few minutes later, I called again. No answer, I hung up. I did this a few more times over the next hour. My mom noticed my strange behavior and asked what I was doing.
“I was just calling to see if my friend wanted to play, but no one’s home.”
“Well, why don’t you just leave a message?”
I tensed up. “Oh no, no. . . . I’ll just try again in a few minutes.”
“No, Marshall, that’s rude to keep calling like that. You really should leave a voicemail.”
“No, really, Mom, it’s not a big deal. They don’t mind.”
“No,” she said firmly, “you’re going to pick up that phone right now and leave a voicemail.”
I waited to see if she was serious, then slowly lifted the instrument of terror from the wall. There was something about being recorded — with no opportunity to delete, or try again, or call timeout — that made me feel exposed. It certainly didn’t help that my (female) friend could be a bit of a bully and relished just about any opportunity to laugh at my expense.
Again, no one answered. The dreaded beep came. My mom stared at me intently. “Hi, uhhh, Jenna. . . . This is Marshall. Umm . . . just wanted to see if you were home and wanted to play. So . . . give me a call when you get back. . . . Umm . . . in Jesus’s name, Amen.”
My mom’s eyes widened, and she covered her mouth. Her cheeks strained to fight back laughter. My young, insecure blood boiled. She made me do that. How could she!
It’s funny, but my (tiny) humiliation plays out a common paradox in prayer: Those three words — in Jesus’s name — were already so deeply ingrained in my mind through countless prayers in our home that they instinctively poured out. At the same time, they had become so familiar that they had begun to lose their weight and meaning (so that I blurted them to the 10-year-old girl across the street). Many of us have forgotten, through lots of meals and bedtimes, services and Bible studies, what we hold in these three staggering words: in Jesus’s name.
Six Facets in the Name
Where do we learn to pray in Jesus’s name, anyway? The Lord’s Prayer doesn’t end that way. In fact, when you go looking, you realize that we don’t have any actual prayers in Scripture that end with those words.
We hear people baptize in the name of Jesus (Acts 2:38), heal in the name of Jesus (Acts 3:6), teach in the name of Jesus (Acts 4:18), exorcise demons in the name of Jesus (Acts 16:18), and perform wonders in the name of Jesus (Acts 4:30). The apostle Paul goes as far to tell us to do everything we do, in word or deed, “in the name of the Lord Jesus” (Colossians 3:17). The clearest teaching on praying in Jesus’s name, though, comes from Jesus himself, on the night he was betrayed.
In John 14–16, we have Jesus’s last words to his disciples before he goes to the cross, and in all three chapters he mentions the power of praying in his name: “Whatever you ask in my name” (John 14:13) . . . “Whatever you ask the Father in my name” (John 15:16) . . . . “Whatever you ask of the Father in my name” (John 16:23). In the repetition, we see how critical this kind of prayer will be for followers of Jesus, and we learn at least six reasons for Christians to pray in his name.
1. Access: God listens to you.
When we pray in Jesus’s name, we rehearse our only reason for believing God will actually hear our prayers. We dare to bow before the Father only because the Son chose to bow upon the cross. Before he encourages his disciples to pray this way, Jesus says to them, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). No one comes except in me — but everyone who comes in my name will be received, heard, and loved. His life, cross, and resurrection lift our prayers into heaven.
Jesus goes as far as to say (really listen to what he says here), “I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf; for the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have believed that I came from God” (John 16:26–27). In other words, I don’t have to ask him anything for you anymore. No, in me, you can ask the Almighty yourself.
2. Love: God chose you.
God doesn’t only listen to our prayers because Christ died for us, but because, long before his Son was born and took the cross, he had already chosen us as his own. He decided, based on nothing in or about us, to love us and save us in Christ.
“You did not choose me,” Jesus says, “but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name, he may give it to you.” (John 15:16)
I chose you, so that your prayers would have power. That means every prayer we pray in his name is an opportunity to remember the undeserved wonder of our election. The God of heaven and earth, the one who made all that is, the one whom you rejected and assaulted in your sin, chose to love you.
And if he had not chosen you, you would not believe, much less pray. Jesus says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” (John 6:44; also 6:65).
3. Power: God can do anything.
When Jesus ascended into heaven, he left his disciples, but he didn’t really leave them. Before he rose into the clouds, he said, “Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). How could he say that as he was literally leaving them? Because he had told them, “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth” (John 14:16–17, see also 14:25–26).
By the Spirit, Jesus still lives with us, even within us. Therefore, his name is a constant reminder of his abiding, satisfying, empowering presence.
Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him, he it is that bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing. (John 15:4–5)
In his name, anything is possible through prayer. Apart from his name, we can do nothing.
4. Safety: God keeps your faith.
As he comes to the end of his final words, he says to his disciples, “I have said all these things to you to keep you from falling away” (John 16:1). I’ve repeatedly told you (among other things) to pray in my name, so that you will not fall away from me, so that you won’t fall into temptation and make shipwreck of your faith. Fearful days were coming, days that would strain their faith (if possible) to the point of breaking. “In the world you will have tribulation,” he warns them a few verses later. “But take heart; I have overcome the world” (John 16:33). And in my name, you will too.
So, our prayers in Jesus’s name are not only accomplishing great things out in the world and among those we love, but they’re doing something supernatural inside of us. Through them, God is fortifying our faith in God. He’s exerting his infinite power to guard our love for him (1 Peter 1:5). Prayer is perhaps the single greatest way that God works in us the kind of heart and life that please him and persevere to the end (Philippians 2:12–13).
5. Confidence: God won’t dismiss his Son.
Why won’t the Father ignore prayers in the name of his Son? Jesus tells us, “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it” (John 14:13–14). The glory of God himself is at stake in our prayers (even our seemingly small or insignificant prayers), and God will not surrender or violate his glory. That means no prayer is insignificant to God. He will answer your prayers in Jesus’s name because he’s fiercely devoted, with all his sovereign might, to the exalting of that name. For God to disregard requests made in the name of Jesus would be to abandon his reason for creating the universe: his glory.
Our prayers, then, aren’t just in the name of Jesus, but for the name of Jesus. And that means, when we pray in this name, we join Jesus in doing what he most loves to do, what he’s utterly and eternally resolved to do, and that is to glorify God.
6. Reward: Your joy will be full.
Jesus gives us at least one more great incentive to pray in his name always and with boldness:
Truly, truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in my name, he will give it to you. . . . Ask, and you will receive, that your joy may be full. (John 16:23–24)
Just a chapter earlier, he says, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full” (John 15:11). So, God answers our prayers in Jesus’s name for the sake of his glory — “that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” And God answers our prayers in that name because he wants us to be as happy as possible — “that your joy may be full.” Those are the two great ambitions of a healthy prayer life: the glory of God and our fullest possible joy in him.
And because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him, those two ambitions are not really two but one. They’re two sides of the same prayer. John Piper writes,
The unity of these two goals — the glory of God and the joy of his children — is clearly preserved in the act of prayer. Therefore, Christian Hedonists will, above all, be people devoted to earnest prayer. Just as the thirsty deer kneels down to drink at the brook, so the characteristic posture of the Christian Hedonist is on his knees. (Desiring God, 160)
How to End a Prayer
A couple decades after my harrowing voicemail experience, I had another encounter that has shaped how I say these three words. At the time, I was studying in seminary and serving in ministry, regularly leading up front in my local church. During one of the services, I gave the prayer of praise, which strives to give voice to our congregation’s collective gratitude to God for his kindness, his provision, his sovereign and saving love. I had given some serious time preparing to lead our congregation.
After the service, an older man in the faith came up to me and thanked me for the prayer. “I’ve noticed something, though, about your prayers,” he said. I was surprised and a little nervous. Am I doing it wrong? Did I say something heretical? You can still hear the little boy with the corded phone and all those fears. “It’s how you end your prayers,” he said. “You rush through the words — ‘in Jesus’s name.’ They sound like an afterthought. They’re not an afterthought. Slow down on those words. Savor them.”
I’ve never prayed the same since. And so I turn to you, as a good father might with his son. The three most important words in prayer are not words to be rushed or mumbled, but relished and declared. They frame the doorway to fellowship with God — access, love, presence, safety, confidence, joy. Slow down on those words. Savor them.
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Can I Still Have Joy in Seasons of Doubt?
Audio Transcript
Welcome back on this Monday, the final day of July. Last time, on Thursday, we looked at God’s joy, and how his joy becomes our joy by the Holy Spirit. It’s a really key episode: APJ 1962. This week, we continue on the joy theme, but we add another theme to it: the theme of doubt. In fact, can we struggle with doubt and experience joy in God? That’s today. And next time we look at how to fight off the inner skeptic when we have doubts about what we read in the Bible. That’s on Thursday.
So today, can we struggle with doubt and delight in God at the same time? That’s Steve’s question. He lives in Nashville. “Hello, Pastor John. My question for you is about how much joy I can hope to experience in the Christian life as someone who struggles seasonally with doubt. Sometimes I struggle with doubts about whether God exists or whether God is good, based on all the evil that I see on the news. Or I doubt whether God has a plan and purpose for my life. These doubts come and go. They’re seasonal. None of them extinguishes the smoldering flax that is my faith. The doubts do not stay long, and they do not overwhelm me. So, my question for you is this: Can I ever hope to have deepening joy in God in seasons when I also struggle with doubts like these? Or is joy in God simply impossible when doubts are present?”
I think the answer to that last question is no, it is not impossible to experience joy in God when doubts are present. And I think the answer to the question just before it is yes, you can hope to have deepening joy in God in seasons when you are also struggling with doubt. Those are my two answers. Now, let’s try to think biblically about this.
Intruding Doubts, Embattled Faith
First, a definition. Doubt comes in all sizes and shapes and durations and levels of seriousness. So, I’m going to call doubt of a Christian variety (that is, doubts that real born-again Christians have from time to time) thoughts that enter our minds from who knows where — they could be Satan’s fiery darts, desires of the flesh, a skeptical associate at work who mocks your religion, some new scientific argument, lack of sleep, dalliance with sin. There are all kinds of sources for how doubts rise or thoughts rise in our minds.
“Doubting is not a sign of no faith; it’s a sign of embattled faith.”
These doubts are thoughts that enter the mind that make us wonder whether something the Bible teaches is really true or whether we ourselves are as real as we thought we were. Those are the two kinds of doubts that I think a Christian wrestles with: Christian truth claims may not be true, or we may not be true.
Now, for the Christian, these thoughts are not conclusions; these are intrusions. They break in like a thief. They start moving around the house of your mind and knocking things over and making threats. This really does happen to Jesus’s followers. When Peter started to sink after walking a few steps on the water, Jesus said, “Why did you doubt?” (Matthew 14:31). When Jesus appeared after the resurrection, it says, “They worshiped him, but some doubted” (Matthew 28:17). Jude 22 says, “Have mercy” — this is in the church — “on those who doubt.”
In other words, such doubting is not a sign of no faith; it’s a sign of embattled faith. When Paul says we should “fight the good fight of the faith” (1 Timothy 6:12), he included in his meaning, “When doubts intrude, fight them.”
Fight them with prayer. “I believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). That’s a prayer. Or fight them with the word. “Faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word” (Romans 10:17). That doesn’t just apply at the front end of the Christian life — that’s every day. We fight doubt by the word. Fight it by obedience. John 7:17 says, “If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God.” Obedient people have fewer doubts than disobedient people.
Kept in the Storm
My answer to Steve’s question is that during that battle, during that season of doubt, it is possible to experience, alongside the anxiety of doubt, deepening joy in God. Now, why would I say that?
Doubt as Sorrow
First, because the anxieties of doubt are a kind of sorrow. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 6:10 that Christians can have the experience of joy at the same time as experiencing sorrow: “as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, yet possessing everything.” If sorrow and joy can mysteriously coexist in the same heart at the same time — and they can — then doubt and joy in God can coexist at the same time. Picture doubt as the troubled waters on the surface of the sea, and picture the new creation reality of faith as the deep, still waters of the ocean depths beneath.
Doubt as Perplexity
Second, I think in Paul’s mind perplexity is another way of talking about some kinds of doubt. He says in 2 Corinthians 4:8, “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair.” What is perplexity? Perplexity is a state of confusion or uncertainty. And what is uncertainty but a kind of doubt?
And yet, Paul admits to experiencing this kind of perplexity, doubt, but knowing full well he will not be destroyed by it: “perplexed, but not driven to despair.” That confidence beneath the perplexity can be experienced as a kind of deep joy in God’s keeping. Picture a child lost in the forest, but underneath that growing anxiety of the child and his growing doubts is deep confidence: “Daddy will find me. He said he would. He will find me. He promised to keep me.”
Doubt as Suffering
Third, consider Romans 5:3–4: “We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces [approvedness], and [approvedness] produces hope.” Now, what that text teaches is that the reason we can rejoice in times of misery — suffering hurts; it’s misery — is that we have learned that enduring through experiences of misery has the effect of giving us a sense of authenticity. We made it. We’re real. We have been tested by fire and found to be approved. That, he says, produces hope, and hope is why we can rejoice. That’s the argument.
“Every season of doubt with triumph on the other side can bring a deepening sense that God is faithful.”
I think the very same process of testing and enduring and hope and joy can be experienced when the kind of suffering is not physical pain but psychological doubt. “We rejoice in our seasons of doubt, knowing that the suffering of doubt produces endurance, and endurance produces approvedness, and approvedness produces hope.” That’s the ground of our joy.
I would answer Steve’s question, that’s the ground of deepening joy. Can I experience deepening joy in these seasons? My answer is yes.
Paradoxical Calm
In fact, he said, these kinds of doubts are recurrent, seasonal. When that’s true, every season of doubt with triumph on the other side can bring a deepening sense that God is faithful. God will hold me fast. I can, in a sense, laugh at these intrusions on my peace. I can scorn the foam and the waves on the surface because, in the deep waters of my soul, I enjoy paradoxical calm because of Christ’s keeping promises.
So yes, Steve, you can hope to have deepening joy in God in these recurring seasons of doubt.
