We all have times where we live our lives outside of the personal presence of God. When we do, we become like orphans. God’s heart is not to leave people as orphans but to come to them, to be with them. This is our great hope.

God never intended for us to do life with him. On the night before his crucifixion Jesus told the disciples he would ask the Father to give them the Holy Spirit to be with them forever. We have all the help we need.

Love and obedience always go together. Always. Obedience problems are at their core love problems. We need heart surgery if we are to love well.

Jesus regularly works to reshape our expectations. In this section of John he shapes the way we think about he and the Father, the works we will do after he goes back to the Father, and the nature and power of prayer.

Jesus isn’t mainly interested in rescuing people from their sins, he is mainly interested in ushering people into the presence of the Father. His death on the cross for us wasn’t about avoiding something negative but was about giving something to us which is unspeakably precious – access to the Father.

While behaviour can be loud and obvious, good parents look through what they can see to the unseen motivations driving it. The word the bible uses to describe these unseen motivations as the heart. Biblical parenting is about shaping the heart of a child not merely behaviour modification.