Restoration Road Ministry.org

As children we long for the affection, care, encouragement, love and protection that a father provides. We long for connection and quality time spent together that allows for deep bonding and the opportunity to grow into the person that emulates those quality traits we hold so dear in the father we desire to see.

While these values are reasonable for us to desire, we must exercise caution in our expectations towards them. We must recognize that our fleshly fathers are fallible and prone to failure, just as we are in the lives of those around us.

However, those fatherly attributes that we are seeking are nonetheless necessary for us to receive. Unfortunately, we often look for them more intently through our earthly fathers instead of looking to our Heavenly Father to provide them.

Each year, Father’s Day is celebrated with cards and phone calls to express thankfulness or disappointment in these earthly relationships. Yet, God remains unrecognized, even though he represents every quality trait that we desire to experience.

We hope that through this observation each of us will recognize that our earthly fathers will never live up to our expectations. Why? Because they fail in life just as we do. But, our Heavenly Father is perfect in every way, and he is able to provide us with those fatherly attributes we seek to experience.

Fathers around the world are still in the process of spiritually growth and refinement, which will not be complete until the Lord Jesus returns and takes them home. Many of them will have remorse for the things they have said or done or ways they have lacked in their ability to father well.

However, it is our responsibility as children to honor our fathers with love and respect, to reinforce what our Heavenly Father demonstrates to us through his love over all of us. We must not be hypocritical through our own attitudes towards our earthly fathers, while also claiming to love as Jesus Christ loves us.

Today, our earthly fathers need to hear that we love and appreciate them, and that we honor them for the office in which the Heavenly Father has called them to serve. We must accept that only God is able to provide the degree of affection, care, encouragement, love and protection that we hope to experience, while we allow our earthly fathers grace to grow into their fatherly role that we are longing to experience, and which they hope to provide.

We must encourage one another in our respective earthly roles, and as fellow heirs in God’s kingdom remain humble and meek in our attitudes, behaviors, and generosity we exhibit.

Let us glorify God through our spiritual alignment and Christlike walk we have chosen to follow, and demonstrate our love to one another through the spiritual gifts our Heavenly Father calls us to live by.

In Christ.