How Your Relationship With God Helps Your Relationship With Your Parents
Humans are created to live in relationship with each other, and one of the most important human relationships we can have is with our parents. Our fathers and mothers, no matter how imperfect they may be, are valuable in the eyes of God as much as we are, and He wants to bless our relationships with them.
Do you believe that? I don't know where your relationship with your parents is – it could be "great," "amazing," "just ok," "bad," or even "nonexistent." I don't know where you're at right now, but one thing I know is that God wants to bless your relationship with your parents.
Fatherly love
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God Himself understands how relationships work. He is not called "Father" for nothing. In fact, before any human father was, He already was Father. And He wants to bring together the hearts of fathers to their children.
Malachi 4:6 reveals to us that God wants to "turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers." He desires that we would live in love towards our parents.
Earlier, He even commanded us to "Honor your father and your mother" (see Exodus 20:12). When we do that, He promises that "your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God is giving you." Think about that.
God simply wants us to love our parents. And how does He help us do it? By loving us first:
- "Consider how much love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God." (1 John 3:1)
- "We love because he first loved us." (1 John 4:19 NIV)
- "For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people's sins against them." (see 2 Corinthians 5:19 NLT)
Best of all, we must always remember that He gave us the provision so that we could be welcomed as His sons and daughters:
"For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved." (John 3:16-17)
For those who don't have earthly parents
For those who've lost a parent or both parents, or have been abandoned by their parents, let me encourage you: God loves you. God promises to fill the gap they've left and even more.
"I will be a Father to you, and you shall be My sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty." (2 Corinthians 6:18)
Let's live in the love of the Father who gave up all that He had so that we could be His. And let us let His love empower us to love our earthly parents in all their imperfections.
