Good, Good Father — The Father’s Heart | The Healing Room #1
We want to begin our Healing Room journey with something that might seem very simple:
God is good.
It sounds obvious. Most Christians would probably agree without hesitation. But what if we stopped for a moment and asked ourselves a slightly more searching question:
Do I really believe that God is good to me – and only good – all the time?
Building a Culture of Healing
Our hope isn’t simply to create a series of meetings about healing. We want to see a culture of healing develop among us.
That means changing some of the ways we think about healing.
Healing isn’t the responsibility of a specialist few. It belongs to the whole Church. We are all invited to receive God’s healing, and we are all invited to pray for and minister healing to others.
We also want to keep the teaching simple. There is certainly a place for good theology and thoughtful discussion, but information alone isn’t enough. We want to see our minds renewed and our expectations changed. We want to uncover some of the assumptions and beliefs we carry about God, healing and ourselves, and allow Holy Spirit to lead us into truth.
And we want to develop an expectation that healing isn’t something strange or unusual. When Jesus sent his disciples out, he told them to proclaim the kingdom of God and heal the sick (Luke 9:2). Throughout the Gospels, proclaiming the good news and healing went hand in hand.
“Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness among the people.”
Matthew 4:23
Healing is part of the good news of the Kingdom.
But underneath all of this is something even more fundamental.
Healing begins with the heart of the Father.
Of the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit
Christian faith is centred on a God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
The Father initiates. The Son reveals and accomplishes. The Holy Spirit makes God’s presence and work real among us.
Jesus gives us a beautiful picture of this relationship. He says:
“The Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing.”
John 5:19
And later Jesus says of the Holy Spirit:
“He will speak only what he hears.”
John 16:13
There is a consistent movement here: of the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit.
So when we see Jesus healing people, we aren’t seeing Jesus persuading a reluctant Father to be kind. We are seeing the Father’s heart being revealed through the Son.
Jesus didn’t come to convince the Father to love us. Jesus came to show us what the Father is really like.
How good is the Father?
Psalm 73 begins with a wonderfully simple declaration:
“Surely God is good…”
Psalm 73:1
But during Sunday’s teaching, Richard reflected on a slightly different question:
How good is the Father, really?
He felt, during prayer, God reveal himself to be Father^good^good. The symbol ^ is used in maths to mean “raised to the power of”. It is a shorthand for repeated multiplication. For example, 2^3 means 2 × 2 × 2 = 8.
So, strictly speaking, “Father^good^good” isn’t a mathematical equation, that’s not the point. It’s a picture: taking the goodness of the Father and imagining it raised beyond itself, and then raised again.
Good upon good upon good.
Goodness compounded upon goodness. A way of expressing something that is ultimately too big for our ordinary language to contain.
God isn’t simply good. His goodness isn’t something we can measure or contain. He isn’t only good when things go well. The Father’s goodness isn’t something that occasionally appears in God’s character. It is who he is.
And if that is true, perhaps one of the most important things we can do is allow the Holy Spirit to show us where our picture of the Father is smaller than the reality.
Father^good^good.
Jesus Reveals the Father’s Heart
Sometimes we can unconsciously imagine Jesus as the kind, approachable member of the Trinity who has to persuade a more distant or angry Father to be nice to us. But that isn’t the picture Jesus gives us:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son…”
John 3:16
The Father is the one who loves. The Father is the one who gives. Jesus isn’t changing the Father’s attitude towards us. He is revealing it.
As Chris Gore puts it:
“Jesus didn’t come to the earth to change the Father’s mind about us, but to change our mind about the Father.”
That is important when we think about healing. If we believe that God might be reluctant to heal us, that we have to persuade him, or that perhaps he is looking for a reason not to help us, our expectation will inevitably be affected.
But what if we start somewhere else? What if the Father really is good? What if he is not looking for reasons to withhold good things from us? What if his heart is genuinely for us?
What About the Things that Destroy Us?
Of course, this immediately raises difficult questions. If God is good, what do we make of sickness, disease, suffering, poverty, mental health struggles and all the other things that cause people pain? The answer isn’t to pretend these things don’t exist. Scripture certainly doesn’t do that. But perhaps we need to ask a different question:
What is the Father’s attitude towards the things that destroy his children?
The Father isn’t angry with us because we are suffering. He is against the things that destroy, enslave and diminish his creation.
John 10:10 describes the contrast:
“The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”
And John 3:16 reminds us where the Father’s heart is directed: towards the world he loves.
The cross itself demonstrates just how far that love is willing to go. God doesn’t stand at a distance from our suffering. In Jesus, he enters into our broken world and gives himself for us.
The father wounds we carry
This is where the teaching becomes personal. For many of us, our understanding of father has been shaped by our experience of fathers or father figures. Some of us had wonderful fathers who gave us a glimpse of God’s character. Others experienced absence, rejection, criticism, disappointment, control or simply a father who didn’t know how to express love. And even where our fathers did their best, they were still human.
We can therefore take our experiences of earthly fatherhood and unconsciously project them onto God. We might know intellectually that God is loving, while emotionally expecting him to reject us. We might know that God is generous, while expecting him to withhold from us. We might know that God is close, while instinctively keeping him at arm’s length.
These beliefs can run very deep.
That’s why renewing our minds isn’t simply about learning some new information. Sometimes our hearts need healing as well as our minds. We need to encounter the Father for ourselves.
Go Deeper
Do I really believe He is good to me?
This is worth sitting with for a while. Not “Do I know the right answer?” Not “Would I say the right thing in church?” But:
Do I really believe that he is good to me?
And:
Do I believe that he is good to me all the time?
Perhaps take a few quiet moments today to ask God that question. If you find yourself hesitating, don’t feel that you have failed. Simply bring the hesitation to him.
You might pray something as simple as:
“Father, show me what I really believe about you. Where I have believed something that isn’t true, bring your truth. Where my heart has been wounded, bring healing. Help me to know you as you really are.”
For some people, that may feel like a significant moment. For others, it may be the beginning of a much longer journey. Either is okay. Knowing the Father as good isn’t necessarily something we grasp in a single moment. It can grow slowly through relationship, intimacy and experience – learning to recognise his goodness in our everyday lives.
Do I have to be Good Enough to be Healed?
Is healing something we have to earn? Do we need enough faith? Do we need to have lived well enough? Do we need to have dealt with every area of sin in my life? Do we need to somehow become worthy before God will act?
The only qualification for healing is our need.
We don’t come to a good Father because we’ve earned the right to ask. We come because He is good.
That doesn’t mean we can reduce healing to a formula or demand that God act according to our timetable. Nor does it answer every difficult question about why some people are healed and others aren’t. But it does give us somewhere healthy to start. We don’t have to approach God as though we are trying to convince him to care. He already cares.
Renewing our Minds
Paul writes in Romans 12:
“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is – his good, pleasing and perfect will.”
Perhaps this is one of the most important invitations of the Healing Room. Before we start thinking about how to pray for healing, we need to allow God to reshape what we believe about who he is. Because our understanding of the Father’s goodness will affect our expectation of his goodness. And our expectation will affect the way we pray.
So perhaps the first step isn’t learning a technique. Perhaps it is simply learning to look at the Father again. To look at Jesus. To listen to the Holy Spirit. And to allow God to answer the question:
“What are you really like?”
The answer we find throughout Scripture is remarkably consistent:
He is good.
And perhaps the invitation of this first Healing Room is simply to let that truth go deeper than our heads – until it reaches our hearts.
A Note about Medical Care
As we explore healing together, we want to be clear that prayer and medical care are not opposites.
Nothing in this series should be understood as encouragement to stop medication, tests, treatment or other medical interventions without first discussing it with a doctor, nurse or other appropriate healthcare professional.
Continuing to engage with medical care is not a lack of faith. We can thank God for the people, knowledge, skills and resources he has provided to help care for us.
We can pray and seek medical help. We can expect God to heal and receive the care available to us. There is no need to choose between trusting God and receiving good medical care.
Resources
If you’d like to explore the Father’s heart further, these books may be helpful:
- How Good Is the Father Really? – Chris Gore
- I Am Your Father – Mark Stibbe
- The Search for Significance – Robert McGee
- The Father You Have Been Waiting For – Robert McGee
- Experiencing the Father’s Embrace – Jack Frost
- The Father Heart of God – Floyd McClung
Chris Gore’s talk, “How Good Is the Father Really?”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7llQKvmA-8
You can also explore Jack Frost’s Experiencing the Father’s Embrace talks, session 1 here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFByVMXxWMg