Faithful on Fridays Blog

A Father with Purpose

Recently I’ve been meditating on scriptures that describe God as our Father but from an unusually different perspective. It’s no surprise that God is called our Father; you’ve probably heard that many times growing up. However, have you ever wondered why God, as a Father, created you in the first place? Have you ever looked at your circumstances and thought, “He must have made a big mistake.” You may not see any direction in your life, think your existence doesn’t seem to matter, believe no one really cares about you, and it would have been better if you hadn’t been born? Those thoughts sound like George from the movie, It’s a Wonderful Life. He was also at a low place in his life when he cried out to God, his Father (it’s not just a Christmas movie!). The scripture that I mentioned earlier as my meditation is this:

And yet, O Lord, You are our Father.
We are the clay, and You are the potter.
We all are formed by Your hand. Isaiah 64:8 NLT

The Father formed you by His own hand; read that again. He created you knowing you’d make mistakes, knowing you’d fall short on occasion, and knowing that there’s a destiny for your life that’s good. You’re not just some cosmic mistake; you were created with a plan in mind. But, you might say, just look at my life … and the Father would lovingly correct you:

No, don’t say that. Who are you, a mere human being, to argue with God? Should the thing that was created say to the one who created it, “Why have you made me like this?” When a potter makes jars out of clay, doesn’t he have a right to use the same lump of clay to make one jar for decoration and another to throw garbage into? Romans 9:20, 21 NLT

No matter what your clay jar looks like today, even if you’re physically or mentally impaired, or your outward appearance doesn’t measure up to the world’s standards, be the best jar, of any kind, that you can be. How? What can you do? Scripture tells us that we can go to our Father for direction:

But when you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you, and pray to your Father in private. Then your Father, who sees everything, will reward you. When you pray, don’t babble on and on as people of other religions do. They think their prayers are answered merely by repeating their words again and again. Don’t be like them, for your Father knows exactly what you need even before you ask him! Matthew 6:6-8 NLT

Live with this perspective: your life matters to the Father. He created you with purpose and desires to reveal those purposes to you.

See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.
1 John 3:1a ESV