A Church Without Walls

In this episode I share a prayer practice that has been part of going deeper in the Father's love - the Welcoming Prayer. I hope this will help frame our time as we seek to be still and make space to receive what God already wants to give us.

Today I talk with Bob Ekblad, founder and director of Tierra Nueva in NW Washington State, a ministry that seeks to share the good news of God's total liberation, healing, and transformation in Jesus Christ with people on the margins, especially those affected by immigration, incarceration, and addiction. Bob shares his approach to the Father of Jesus as it impacts our orphan hearts and the drive to perform.

I share a picture of my inward journey that has resulted from praying, "Father, take me deeper in Your love." David Banner, in his book, The Gift of Being Yourself,  frames what deeper looks like. “The self that God persistently loves is not my prettied up pretend self but my actual self – the real me. But, master of delusion that I am, I have trouble penetrating my web of deceptions and knowing this real me. I continually confuse it with some ideal self I wish I were.” 

Our identity, as ones who have been born from above, is to come from what the Father says and must trump any other identity, every other value. An idol is anything that we have put in place of the Father. And whatever is in the place of the Father is calling the shots.

We are so wired for performance in every relationship. We get the job because of how we’ve performed in other places. We keep the job or get a promotion because of how we’ve performed in the job. Even our closest relationships have an element of performance. But our relationship with the Father is one of being loved by Him first, before we’ve done anything – no performance! We want to move from our performance-based identity to a baptismal identity where we can receive what the Father has to say about us.

One of the greatest obstacles in our journey toward God as Father is our complicated relationships with our earthly fathers, especially when we've been hurt by them. If we’ve had no father or bad fathers, or even average or good but not perfect fathers, how do we get to the Father revealed by Jesus, who looks, acts, tastes, smells and feels like Jesus?

How can we know for sure what the Father is like and how He feels about us? It's not enough to say that the Bible tells us what God is like. 

God is like Jesus.

God has always been like Jesus.

There has never been a time when God was not like Jesus.

We have not always known what God is like—

But now we do.

"Mother is the name of god on the hearts and lips of all children." 
In our journey to go deeper in the Father's love, one of the primary obstacles has to do with the fact that, no matter what we say we believe about God and His love, in our hearts we often  relate to God through the filter of our relationships with our parents.

In Galatians 4, Paul tells us that one of the reasons the Father sent the Son was to rescue us from the Law, that we might receive adoption. Is it possible the have been rescued but not truly entered into the experience of our adoption as beloved daughters and sons?

Right now, 100% of the Father's love is for you. But we aren't experiencing it. Church Without Walls is launching with an eight part series on the Father love of God and exploring some of the obstacles that keep us from entering in and receiving more fully the love of the Father. Whoever you are, wherever you are, there is more.