How one father’s love helped me understand the way God loves me
By Mark A. Taylor
Soon after I arrived for dinner, the host pulled out his cell phone to show me a video of his eighteen-month-old daughter. It was taken earlier that year, not long before she died.
This gentle professional and his accomplished wife had invited me for the evening after hearing my sermon at their church that morning. I had spoken of James 1, which tells us to rejoice in our trials, but they were struggling simply to cope. Their loss was still searing their hearts, and they wanted to talk.
I focused on his phone and saw the image of the weakened child, head grotesquely misshapen because she was suffering with encephalitis, swelling of the brain. Her face was unsmiling even though they were feeding her ice cream. From her contorted mouth every bite of the treat melted and trickled down her cheek, dripping from her chin. Even though brief, the video was difficult to watch.
I didn’t know what to say. But the father spoke. “Isn’t she beautiful,” he said.
It wasn’t the word I would have chosen. But after thinking in silence for a full three seconds, I replied, “Oh, yes. She is beautiful.”
Undeserving favor
Since then, I haven’t been able to forget the incident. I’ve come to realize that even a diseased and dying child is beautiful in the eyes of her father. So I think of myself and my father, my Heavenly Father, that is. How often have I come short of the love or duty or discipline that should be as natural for a child of God as eating should be for a growing infant? And even in my failures, how regularly has God looked past my sickness to say, “This is my child. Isn’t he beautiful?”
We know the right answers. God has made his love for us clear. “See what great love the Father has lavished on us,” the apostle wrote in amazement, “that we should be called children of God!” (1 John 3:1). Paul explained the gospel by enunciating the remarkable way God proves he loves us: “While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). In his letter to the Thessalonians, he affirmed that God “loved us and gave us eternal comfort and good hope through grace” (2 Thessalonians 2:16).
Ah, grace. Could it be we’ve so seldom experienced grace that we don’t understand it exists? Is this why Christians sometimes wonder and worry about their relationship with God? Does this explain why they fear their misshapen motives and faulty decisions will keep them from him? What can we say to those conditioned to believe their salvation depends on racking up credit with God, earning his favor through merit?
What can we say to those convinced that salvation comes from earning God’s favor?
I’ll always remember my poor mother, looking at the floor and shaking her head and saying, “I just hope the good Lord will find it in his heart to let me into Heaven.” She had worshipped him for decades when she spoke the words. I was too immature to know how to point her to peace, probably because growing up in her home, I couldn’t remember anyone ever speaking about grace.
Just this week a Facebook friend wrote, asking her audience how she could know she was forgiven for something very wrong she had done. She has grown up in the church; her parents served in Christian ministries. Surely she’s read all the verses I quoted above. Why does she—why do many—wonder how God can still love them?
Uneasy believers
I wish these uneasy believers could have been with me to see that video and hear that father’s testimony. Maybe then they could turn their back on the lie that tells them, “You’re beyond hope.” Maybe they could believe their condemnation comes from the great accuser, Satan himself, instead of from our God who loved us enough to handle our imperfection with the gift of his own unblemished Son.
“We love because he first loved us,” the apostle John tells us. And the eyes of a godlike father mourning the loss of his broken baby have helped me believe that God looks at me with that love too.