The Gospel in Fatherhood

By Matt Watson

Growing up my mother taught me to imagine God sitting in a recliner, inviting me to sit on his lap and talk with him. She intended to teach me the fatherly approachable nature of God, but I could never wrap my head around it. God has never seemed snuggly to me. He is not daddy, he is Father.

There are some unfortunate but predictable daddy issues behind this. Although I had a father and step-father who both loved me, they nonetheless were dealing with their own childhood trauma of abuse and our resulting relationship was imperfect and prickly. No doubt this is an example of generational sin, “...visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation” (Ex 34:7b).

In some ways, my inability to view God as anything but a mighty King is good, because it reinforced that God is not my “homeboy,” or a pal or anything like that. He is higher than those conceptions. To me it was always easier to accept that God is King, God is mighty, and God the Son is worshipped on his throne surrounded by seraphim covering their faces and feet from his holiness (Isa 6). Like Narnia’s Aslan, he is dangerous, and not safe, but good.

But that is an incomplete perspective because he is also our Father. He actively and ardently loves his children (Jn 3:16; 1 Jn 4:19). Through Jesus, we are reconciled to the Father, and thus we can call him “Abba” (Rom 8:15, see also Gal 4:6). This is a Hebrew word for daddy. Those who pray “Daddy God” are rightfully cringe-worthy in their attempt to demonstrate this relationship, but at least they are thinking of him in that way.

This was always something I believed in as an intellectual assent, meaning, I might hear “God is your Father and loves you,” and would nod in agreement. But it was rarely something I believed in how I lived and felt. I’m more of a feeler than a thinker, and thus I routinely have to fight emotion with the truth. A good and noble task, but exhausting.

That is why the family unit is so important. When a man or woman grows up and gets a roommate, though they remain single they become practice spouses. You aren’t married, and thus do not get to enjoy certain benefits of that covenant, but you are quite domestic with each other. You learn to die to yourself, or else constantly argue over whose dishes were left in the sink. This is practice family.

Later, when you marry whoever will become your spouse, God teaches this to you in greater detail. Here you leave your mother and father and become one new family with your spouse (Eph 5:31). I’ve learned, and continue to learn, the love of Christ for his bride as I learn to love my bride in like manner. There are a lot of things Jesus’ bride does that are ugly, petty, and just flat wrong, because it is filled with sinners. Spouses are two sinners living in a covenant together and it can be similarly ugly, petty, and wrong. But what was once abstractly true is now more manifestly evident to me because I’ve experienced that type of relationship and have been disciplined in it by our Father.

I know I am a child of God, that he loves me, and that I’m in his family. But having not always been discipled in the right things by my earthly fathers, it has remained abstract for me to conceive of God this way. And then God gave me a son.

My wife Amanda and I tried for four years to have a baby. For both of us, we had some hormone imbalances that prevented our bodies from doing the things behind the scenes that were necessary to conceive. We tried many things, from diet and exercise to prescriptions and ultimately surgery, to correct these things. And though God was and is always good, he showed his goodness in this particular desire of ours, and we were given a baby boy whom we named Samuel. He is perfectly wonderful and I love him so much. While he was in the womb I began to realize that the amount I love this unborn child is infinitely outmatched by not only how much God loves him, but how much God loves me.

As I hold him and rock him to sleep, and whisper all my prayers over him, I can’t help but routinely quote God the Father in saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (Matt 3:17). And here is the thing: Sam hasn’t done anything yet to deserve that love. He literally just exists right now. But I love him and am well pleased with him nonetheless. How much more is that true about God? We deserve nothing but death and hell, yet God rescued us. The Son who is his beloved, and with whom he is well pleased, is the same Son he gave to the world so “that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). That’s you, and that’s me. God loves me so much he gave Jesus for me, rescuing me from my sin, paying the penalty and price for it by his death on the cross, adopting me into the family, and reconciling me into the right relationship with him. For what seems like the first time I’ve begun to feel what I also believe.

The family unit is where primary discipleship happens. It’s not the sole place, so singles and childless parents are not off the hook, for we are all called to “go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that [Jesus has] commanded you” (Matt 28:19-20a). However, it is the most natural and historical way that discipleship happens. We often say at The Well that wherever your spheres of influence are in where you work, play, and live, that is where God called you to be on mission. That means your family, among other things. As a person gets married, they are discipled by and themselves disciple their spouse. As a married couple has children, whether biologically or through adoption, they disciple the child to know and love Jesus, and are in turn discipled by Jesus in their experience with their children.

I know the gospel of Jesus Christ and how it is truly good news more now than I did. Through Sam, I know God’s love for me now more than I did. Through Amanda, I know God’s love for his bride now more than I did. I wish I had known it earlier. How much happier would my life have been if I had known the Father’s love for me before miraculous demonstrations through marriage and childbearing! Alas, I cannot go back, but I can go forward. This good news of God the Father’s rescuing, covenantal, redeeming love through the life, death, and resurrection of God the Son, and his regeneration and illumination of the truth through God the Holy Spirit must transform me, as it must transform us all. We cannot continue to just ascent to the information being true or not. Demons ascent that Jesus is God, so that isn’t enough. We must be it and live it.

Here is the really cool thing about seeing more clearly the gospel through fatherhood: I’m going to keep learning it. In The Last Battle and the short story The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis imagines that heaven will be the real version of what we currently experience, that everything now is a shadowland, but in glory with the Father, it will be truer and more solid than it is now. There will always be going further up and further in regarding our relationship with him. There will always be more of our infinitely good heavenly Father.