The Tendencies of the Fatherless: Applications from Acts
/I have a few memories of spending time with my dad when I was little. When he would come home from work, he would always take a nap on the couch, and I would sleep behind him. I remember seeing him and my mom being affectionate with each other. Sometimes they would have a date night and sleep on the trampoline together. At some point, those memories ended. We moved to Lee's Summit and he was gone for a long time. The next time I saw him, I walked into the back yard and he was smoking a cigarette. I had never seen him do anything like that before, and he told me to go back inside. Shortly after, around the dinner table with my three siblings, my mom told me they were getting a divorce. After that, the memories of him are few and far between.
My sisters always had a position of not liking our dad, so I did too. But when I got saved at fifteen years old, I remember connecting the dots between the pattern of the guys I dated and my lack of relationship with my dad. This allowed me to soften my heart towards him. I remember I was sitting in the bathroom of my moms' old house, and I wrote a letter of forgiveness to my dad that I never gave to him. Ever since then, I had a heart of love and forgiveness towards him but have never really felt like he was my “dad.” My relationship with him feels more like a distant uncle now. When I see others interact with their biological fathers, I realize that I don’t feel that way with him. In some ways, it feels like I don’t know what I’m missing.
“ I did whatever I could to prove myself and forgot about everything else”
When I think about how my relationship with my dad affects me, I know that God used my salvation to help me truly forgive him for what he did. I can really say that I love him and want him to be free from shame and sin. I don’t have a lot of expectation for that relationship anymore, but I also know that his relationship to me has taken its toll on how I perceive God’s role as a father in my life. This is something I didn’t fully realize until last summer as we entered the Acts series in C&YA with an emphasis on having a radical and sold-out Christian witness.
At that time, I felt really good about my life. I can’t say that I had a “radical witness,” but I felt in control and I liked that. My husband Alex has always been so sacrificial and our relationship was going really well because he was doing a lot of the emotional “bending” when we would have a potential conflict. My small group was growing and running great despite me being secretly cold emotionally. I was proud. However, I felt like I was missing out in certain relationships that I felt distant in. I saw what was happening in my friend Havilah’s life and wanted to be present in what was going on with her spiritual growth. I felt like I had “done everything I was supposed to do” at that point: married an awesome man, had a thriving small group, worked up to managing a coffee shop and still, I felt dissatisfied. I asked myself, “What is next? What else can I work towards?”
That month a position opened up at the same place Havilah worked, and I took it. Going into it, I thought it was going to be a unified, challenging experience and that I would be on my way to be a healthy leader in the workplace and be closer to some of my good friends. In reality, I felt like an outsider. Being there opened up a whole side of myself that I had never seen before, and it made me want to hide and wish I was a different person. When I walked through those doors every day, I felt like I was the worst version of myself. I quickly went into survival mode and was obsessed with never making mistakes. I did whatever I could to prove myself and forgot about everything else. My ministry at Midtown felt like nothing. All I was looking for in ministry was to be served and comforted. I went to church to lick my wounds from the week and then the process would start over again the following Monday.
I would have moments of hope whenever I would get a comment of approval from my bosses and then my emotions would come crashing down again when I made another mistake. I realize now that I was experiencing a cycle of false repentance. I say false because I genuinely wanted to change at that moment, but I would walk into Monday completely unchanged and using the same devices to cope with my sin. My identity was so wrapped up in what my job expected of me that everything God showed me on Sunday mornings went out the window the moment I walked in the doors of my workplace. There were so many times where I would hear teaching in Acts and go through this same pattern. The weight of proving myself had a strong hold on my heart, and I honestly didn’t know how to get to the root of that problem. When I look back at that season, it is just lost. I ultimately lost that time because I wasn’t obeying what God’s word said.
“God showed me what I had been doing and what needed to be done”
This, of course, had to end. But before I fully communicate how God used the Acts series to end this cycle, I want to first share a verse that comes to mind, which sums up the truth I needed to hear. Philippians 1:6 says, “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform [it] until the day of Jesus Christ:”
All I had been doing for months was trying to perform for everyone and everything. My whole goal was to strive, work hard to ensure that I could play this role, and maintain the mask that I thought would protect me. First off, I failed. Even after I strived so hard and tried in my flesh to be the person that only God could make me be, I failed. After the failure, I realized I would never be able to obtain the status I wanted through my efforts, so I resolved to be apathetic. I decided to stop caring about it: the job, the goals I was working towards, the social status, and everything in-between. If I just stopped caring, I couldn’t be hurt and therefore not experience the pain that comes from having unmet “needs.” God puts needs in our life to teach us to depend on Him, so he can draw us closer to Himself. For me, this was about establishing control. I was and wanted to be in control of myself. If I wanted to submit myself to the Lord and do what he wanted me to do, then I would (to a certain extent), but if I didn’t care to do certain things (invest in people, evangelize, read His Word, etc.) then I wouldn’t. In my heart, my walk was ultimately about me, and I did what I wanted.
Revelation 3:16-17 “So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth. Because thou sayest, I am rich, and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked:” This passage perfectly describes where I was at; this is where the preaching in Acts began to cut me.
Brandon’s recent message in Acts 9 really speaks to the process that happened in my heart. In Acts 9:1-6, God showed me what I had been doing and what needed to be done in order to change. In the beginning, Saul and his men are headed to Damascus to claim the authority from the chief priests to bind all that call Jesus Christ “Lord,” but he encounters something on the way. He and his men are stopped on their path to persecute the people of God. They are stopped by a voice from heaven saying, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?” and a bright light shone around them. Saul immediately responded by saying, “Who art thou Lord?” He first acknowledged Lordship. For Saul, the object of his Lordship at this moment was not yet fully known to him. His heart was postured the right way, but it wasn’t until he asked this question that he knew that Jesus was the one talking to him.
“The moment I heard His word I had to be ready to obey”
Brandon’s first point:
When God speaks, his words demand a posture of humility.
My first point of reflection was:
Why when I hear God’s correction do I look for ways to self-justify and not obey?
What I realized was this: the more times we justify our choice to disobey His word, we eventually get hardened to God’s voice, and it starts to just sound like thunder. I felt at a loss looking at this past season realizing I had been rejecting God’s word over my life for so long. When he would call out to me in my wrong path, I wasn’t willing to hear it because I didn’t have a heart of humility (even though on the outside it looked as if I was doing God’s work). It felt like God was distant and his voice was unrecognizable. I felt that even if I wanted to come back, I would never be able to take back what I had lost along the way.
What Brandon said next countered that hopeless thought:
Whenever you are at a loss, don’t hesitate to ask God to reveal himself.
Jesus’ response in verse Acts 9:4 is faithful, “I am Jesus whom thou persecutest: it is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” What Jesus says here reveals something that spoke so much to me. The phrase “kicking against the pricks” just refers to an animal going against his master. The more he does it, the more pain he endures because he is refusing the guidance of his master. This means Saul at some point had the choice to know that he was going the wrong way, and he was resisting the voice of God. What a heart-wrenching thing this was for me to see. Here I was double-minded, lukewarm, knowing I had a master but continued to buck his authority and guidance in my life. Looking back on this season, I see now that instead of genuinely repenting and turning to the right path, I chose apathy. I chose to be an animal that stopped working and decided to be disengaged from my job.
Brandon’s third point:
When God reveals himself, we must be ready to alter our direction.
In Acts 9:5 Saul responds by saying, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” What makes this response so powerful is that you can see that Saul genuinely wanted to change. I looked at Saul’s response and it was so clear what I had to do. I had to cry out to God if I really wanted to change but crying out to God in honesty and humility wasn’t going to be enough. I had to ask myself, “Would I be willing to do anything the Lord tells me to do?”
Brandon’s fourth point:
When God reveals his will, we must be ready to obey.
Christ responds to him, “Arise, and go into the city, and it shall be told thee what thou must do” (Acts 9:6). This is the heavy thing about his response: God can’t make these decisions for us. The Lord blinds Saul so he can see that he is trusting in his flesh, and he is then forced to make a decision. The reality is in this moment between Saul and Jesus, he had a choice to make. If he chooses to not obey, he will be blind forever.
But the irresistible light of Jesus Christ had taken him. Brandon said it perfectly in this sermon, “God’s light is too glorious for us to look upon, it’s too great. To look at God is to be affected.” I had to not only cry out but to listen to what God would say back to me. The moment I heard His word I had to be ready to obey. The crazy thing about this is Saul was still blind for a while after he obeyed. In fact, he had to be led by the hand of another. In his blindness, Saul was able to see the darkness in his own heart, as well as the true character of his maker.
“This process was something that I resisted for a long time”
The past several years it has been a battle to feel like God is actually close to me the way a father is supposed to be. It has been especially difficult to believe what the word of God says about that relationship. I would “feel” close to Him when I was doing well in proving myself and feel distant when I wasn’t. In a lot of ways that felt normal to me and just like my relationship with my dad, I didn’t know what I was missing out on. Ever since the divorce, I’ve always had to do the work to connect with my dad. If I didn’t pursue him, that connection wouldn’t happen and that love wouldn’t be openly reciprocated. I didn’t feel the safety of God’s closeness like I saw in others around me. I would seek his approval by proving myself to him and felt like everything was fine as long as I maintained an image of thriving. It was much like my relationship with my dad and much like my relationship with my bosses.
Being confronted with who I really was helped me realize who God really was. Up until now, God felt like a ghost, much like my physical father. God had brought me to the end of myself in order to actually change me. I had to repent and turn from this cycle.
This outline from Acts 9 about Saul’s response to God’s voice gave me the perfect outline to genuinely repent: 1) He fell on his knees. 2) He cried out “Lord.” 3) He asked for God to reveal himself. 4) In faith, he asked what he should do next. 5) He then obeyed God’s commands.
This process was something that I resisted for a long time and it requires a lot of continual “undoing” of old patterns. I first was humbled and crushed. I confessed my sins out loud to him and to others. I cried to him in my sinless state and weakness and acknowledged that he was the only help to my problem. I asked in faith what he would have me to do next. This one felt hard at first. I wanted to just stop doing what I had been doing and go back to what I thought God wanted me to do. The answer from the Lord was that he wanted me to be close to him, to continue in my needful state so that I would stay close to him.
Just like Saul did when he decided to do what Jesus told him, he physically changed, he went to different places, he met different people, and he continued to have a close relationship with Christ. In fact, Paul tells us himself that God keeps him in remembrance of his weakness so that he will continue to believe and trust in the sufficiency of Christ.
2 Corinthians 12:7-9 And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.
“I truly am accepted by Him”
If I am being honest I didn’t actually want to write this post. I didn’t want anyone to know that I have been struggling. There has been this deep deception penetrating my heart, telling me that if I don’t protect myself and keep people from seeing my weaknesses, that I won’t be accepted, and I’ll get hurt. God used me having to write this blog post and engage the uncomfortable parts of my story to ensure that I won’t hide. I know now that no matter how big my struggle or hurt is, I truly am accepted by Him.
For the first time in my walk, I feel real stability, and I don’t have the high highs and low lows. God is teaching me again how to trust him and come face to face with the truth that I believed the day I got saved. I need to engage my relationship with the Lord not in pride and secrecy or striving to prove myself in works but in genuine humility. A heart that acknowledges that I have problems and instead of running away from them or pretending they are not there, bring them to the only physician who can heal me.
Amanda Allen is a member at Midtown Baptist Temple and a leader in C&YA. She is a part of the hospitality team and leads a women’s small group Bible study in Grandview.