What would you say is the biggest problem that men in the church face today?  Some might answer careers, money, or perhaps even relationships.  As men, we want to have purpose in our work, we want it to mean something.  Not just that but we want to be able to provide well for our families, and perhaps have a few extra bucks to spend on our favorite hobbies.  Relationally men have a desire for respect.  It’s one of the things that drives us and motivates us.  Yet I’ll pose to you, that though these are real, legitimate concerns facing men today, these are merely side effects of a much larger, deeper issue at work within us.

I happened to pose this question to a fellow pastor and you may not be so surprised to hear what they had to say.  Pastors as you know meet often with men in the church and have the opportunity to hear firsthand what guys struggle with.  They hear all of the struggles, the pressures, and the weight that many men are under, but yet have the opportunity to be the observer, sort of looking from the outside in.  And with some reflection, the response to the number one problem that men in the church struggle with at its very core is their view of God, which ultimately impacts their view of themselves in relation to their God.  Men truly struggle to find and understand their identity, not just as a husband or father, but their identity in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Getting to the Root of the Problem

Many men struggle to relate to their Earthly father’s. It’s so common that it has a name called “The Father Wound”.  Some of us grew up with great Dads who were there for us, played ball with us, and truly loved us the best that they could.  Yet many men also grew up with fathers who, perhaps, did the best they could, but maybe fell short of Dad of the Year.  This isn’t to bash on Dad’s here, because we all know that every man has their own stories, and their own father wounds that they had to live with.  The point is that the way that we perceived our Earthly dads is often how we perceive our Heavenly Dad as well.  If our dad was strict, you may perceive God as being a strict task master, cracking the whip to make sure you stay in line.  Or perhaps your dad was distant and working all the time, never seeming to find time for you in his busy schedule.  You may end up viewing God as the one who holds the whole universe together, and perhaps between that and answering billions of prayers a day, what possible time could he have for your seemingly insignificant issues, right?

Here’s where many of us tend to go wrong.  We base our view of God on our experiences, and on human fathers who we always wanted to believe were the best, but often fell short.  Let’s take a moment and cut our dads some slack, because you know what… we need a little slack ourselves, don’t we?  With that out of the way, our problem isn’t our fathers good or bad example, but the fact that we’re unfairly comparing our Heavenly father to our Earthly dads, and that’s going to lead us astray every time.  Rather than looking through our Dads to get an idea of who God is, we instead need to look to God Himself to understand who HE says HE is.

A right view of God leads to a right understanding of who we are through Him.

Understanding Who God Is

Early on in Scripture God reveals himself for the first time, and to a man named Moses. (Exodus 3) God commands Moses to go to Egypt, to Pharaoh, and to set His people, the Israelites, free. Moses answers and says who should I say sent me?  God responds, “tell them I AM has sent you”.  This is the first time that God provides a name for himself to mankind, but what an interesting name.  In the Hebrew “I AM” would translate to the more familiar name, Yahweh.  For God to say that he is the “I AM” He is stating a number of things about Himself.

First of all, “I AM” gives the idea of always having existed.  God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, always having existed in three distinct persons, yet one complete Godhead. He came before all things, and he will outlast all things.  He is the Alpha and the Omega (the beginning and the end).  And he is the only being in the universe who can claim to be the self-existent one.

Second, “I AM” also describes his presence always everywhere (known as omnipresence).  God is not limited by space or time and therefore has the ability to be everywhere at once.  And because He is outside of time, God can also be past, present, and future.  For God, something that he has mandated to be true is often spoken of in the past tense even though it hasn’t even happened yet.  Take for example Romans 8:30 “And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.”  Can you say at this moment that you are glorified?  Have you received your glorified body yet? Of course not, yet for God because he has already called you, and justified you, he already sees you as glorified from His perspective.

Third, “I AM” describes just how indescribable He really is, to speak of Himself in such generalities, yet with so much meaning behind it.  If you were to ask someone on the street what their name was and they responded “I AM”, it would lead to more questions about their identity than it solved.  Yet for God, no one else gets to define Him.  He and He alone describes Himself however He chooses, and for Him to say “I AM” is all that you really need to know.  That answer was sufficient for Moses, and it was sufficient for the people of Israel to understand who it was that sent Moses.

If you were hoping for an exhaustive deep dive into all of the characteristics of God in this one blog, you’re going to soon be disappointed.  On the other hand, you may also be relieved as the length of this blog would be far longer than you would care to read in one sitting.  The hope however is this; to give you just a taste of the goodness that is our God found in the pages of the Scriptures.  We will dive deeper and further into this topic over time through this blog.

As I close, let me leave you with these thoughts.  God is the great “I AM” and because He’s always everywhere present, he sees you, he knows your struggles, and he hears your prayers.  Our God is not like our Earthly dads who had limited time and attention to give. No, his attention to you is limitless and he desires for you to talk with him often. Use this privilege.  In addition, “I AM” is the name of power, and so know that not only is He aware of you, but He has great power to respond to your prayers.  Perhaps not in the exact form that you phrased them, but always for your ultimate good.

Finally, to borrow from the New Testament, God deeply cares for you and loves you unconditionally.  Romans 5:8 tells us “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”  Notice that it doesn’t say that once we got our act together, or once we cleaned ourselves up enough.  Nope, while we were still sinners, God demonstrated his love for us by sacrificing his Son Jesus Christ to die on a cross, in our place, to pay our sin debt, and to restore a right relationship with Him for those who would believe.  Your identity has changed.  You are no longer who you were, no longer who you grew up as, no longer the inheritor of your father’s shortcomings. You are a new, and beautiful creation in Jesus Christ.  Our identity is now in him.  This is what I hope to explore more with you in the blogs to come.  For now, bask in the son-ship that is yours in Jesus Christ, and seek God in the Scriptures to better know him, and to better know your new self.

Be blessed in Christ today!