What if the God you thought you knew wasn’t God at all?

Jesus called him Abba, which means Daddy or Papa in English.

Calling God, “Daddy” or “Papa” seems scandalous.  He’s the Almighty after-all, which I always understood to mean:

Harsh, unpredictable, ready to crush me if I pissed him off.

This last year has been forcing me to take a second look at how I relate to God the Father.

Who is God?

I was pouring my heart out to God a couple of weeks ago, wanting to know who he really was – his character.  Which all stemmed from a dream I had, where the Holy Spirit showed me I had this mouse of a reoccuring thought that kept eating it’s way through the fridge of my life.

I asked God for the revelation of what that mouse was – he showed me that I saw him as harsh and hard.  This led me to wanting God to rain down holy mousetraps so I could snap that bugger’s neck (so sorry for you animal lovers out there).

So, I’m there lost in worship and intermittently praying when God speaks ever so softly to my heart and reminds me of

Matthew 11:29 (HCSB)

All of you, take up My yoke and learn from Me, because I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for yourselves.

Joyce, I am gentle.

Gentle?

I am always gentle with my daughters.

Never in my life had I seen God as gentle – I don’t know if I just fell asleep every time I read that verse or just thought it didn’t apply to me somehow.  I saw God more like Zeus, draped in a white toga and hurling thunder bolts at a moments notice.

And here he’s saying, I’m gentle – you’ve had the wrong image of me.

I’ve been worshiping a really false image of God for the past decade of my life.

Okay, so who are you really God?

I am love (1 John 4:8). 

Okay, yeah but then what is love?

1 Corinthians 13: 4-7 (The Message)

Anything less than that is not God.

So, what if we measured all of our experiences where we thought God let us down or was harsh with us by the definition of love?

We would find that those experiences were not God.

So, that was a couple of weeks ago that God began showing me that I don’t really know him like I thought I did.  And so he’s been taking me on this journey of showing me what love really looks like, what he really looks like.

This theme of God being a Father keeps popping up over and over again for me.

I think he’s trying to make a point.

I was at a conference this weekend – guess what it was about?

All about God the Father, Daddy, our Papa.