The Father Heart of God is a short book, a mere 160 pages in length, but it is a timely one and it speaks to one of the greatest – if not the most profound – problems that afflicts humankind. It addresses the issue that people find themselves unable to approach God because they suffer from emotional scars and fears. At the beginning of his book, author Floyd McClung, former president of Youth With A Mission, presents the issue succinctly (p. 17):
“Is it any wonder that many people have a distorted view of God? They see Him through the grid of their own experiences, and when these experiences have been hurtful, it contributes to a wrong impression of God … They are spiritual orphans- hurt, lonely, confused, and separated. Projecting onto God our negative experiences deeply affects our ability to relate to Him in the right way. We don’t want to hear [from] God or talk [to] Him. Or, if we do want to know Him, we cannot approach Him with love and trust. The Bible speaks of this as a ‘wounded’ spirit, or a ‘broken’ spirit”.
While not a book primarily about sexuality, ‘The Father Heart of God’ gets to the essence of why people sin: it is not simply a crude matter of being alienated from God, but is anchored in deep emotional roots and unresolved pain. He begs the big question that ultimately Jesus Christ answers (p. 24, 25):
“Is there no one to comfort us? Who will father the [orphaned] children of men? Whose arms are big enough for all the lonely children of the world? Who weeps over our pains? Who will comfort us in our loneliness? Only a brokenhearted father who is rejected by the little ones he yearns to heal … Jesus is not attracted to pleasant places, but to hurting people. He pursues us with His love from our first breath until the day we die”
What McClung sees is the God of the Bible as He is portrayed, emotionally overwrought with benevolent love towards His fallen creation. In reading Scripture, it is not all that hard to see the emotional outpouring of God the Father as well as His Son (e.g. Genesis 6:6; Hosea 11:8; Matthew 27:46; John 11:35; and the Psalms). Grief is at the core of the Trinity in response to man’s sinfulness. Yet, as McClung demonstrates in his short book, the sorrows of the broken heart can be taken to Jesus and healed. To do that, the pain must be felt, and not merely rationalised (p. 52). At the heart of the desire to sin against God “we must remember it is out of hurt, not just rebellion, that [many] people deny God’s existence” (p. 52). In order to discover our healing in God, McClung takes his readers to God Himself:
“It is hypocritical to say we care about suffering in the world if we have not grieved deeply over the suffering our own selfishness has brought to God and others … we can never experience complete healing of our emotional wounds or fully receive the Father’s love unless we share God’s sorrow over sin and selfishness” (p. 53).
At one level that sounds easy: just see things as God sees it, but McClung says, rightly, that it is not that easy. On page 59 he rightly states that in order to be healed and made whole, one must first be broken:
“Let your anger turn to sorrow … experiencing godly sorrow [will change you]. If you have never allowed your heart to be broken, then ask God to reveal you your heart as He sees it”.
This really is where the rubber hits the road, and is consistent with Psalm 139:23-24. Fortunately, McClung’s book is no dry theological treatise about pain, but looks at how it can be practically dealt with in the Lord. Chapter 8 provides a compelling commentary on what destructive patterns of relationship look like, as personified by Saul, (what McClung calls ‘The Saul Syndrome’) and deals in Chapter 7 with how God heals wounded hearts.
So what on earth, one may wonder, what this book has to do specifically with the issue of sexual and relational brokenness? Well, it has everything to do with it. Effectively, as McClung points out, emotionally wounded people find themselves in destructive loops of relationships where, although they are victims of abuse, they too perpetuate the same pattern of abuse that was modelled to them. That usually involves patterns of thought involving self-pity and adopting postures of victim, rescuer, and perpetrator, all of which culminate in using other people and an inability to maintain relationships and internal consistency. This is true of many in sexual sin, but as I see it, prevalent in other elements of life, even when it is unacknowledged by those doing it. Often relationally broken people distract themselves from their pain by pursuing relationships and other types of addictive behavior such as work-a-holism to mask their pain and avoid dealing with it, all of which only serves to make the problem worse.
On top of this, many use spiritual activities, like church, and use behaviour-management techniques to appear outwardly to be dealing with their sin-pain problems. For instance, they may have an accountability partner at church and may have successfully abstained from pornography, masturbation, and fantasy for a time. However, victories over sin in such contexts do not last too long because instead of doing the hard work of facing their brokenness and working through all the horror that is attached to painful memory, people predominantly prefer to shut down their emotions. Many do this when they come to the Bible loaded with cognitive ‘intelligent’ questions: on the outside, they appear erudite and scholarly, but deep inside it is emotional scarring that motivates their ‘rational’ enquiries (New York pastor Tim Keller observed this on pages xx-xxi in his book The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Scepticism when ministering to a Jewish man).
What McClung is offering, and rightly so, is a much superior- albeit much more painful- alternative, which is God’s alternative. It is facing the reality that no matter what the pain and how horrible it is, it must be faced, emoted, and brought to the Lord. Never mind the naysayers who bemoan feelings and tell us to flee them: if anything they are probably still in their brokenness too! Rather, we can feel and bring our feelings to God the Father and be healed because He feels our pain much deeper than we feel for our own selves! Once we face this pain in the Lord and by the power of the Spirit, it will release us from bitter roots and give us lasting victory over sin. As it says in Ephesians 4:26-27 from Psalm 4:4: “Be angry and do not sin: do not let the sun go down on your wrath and give place to the devil” (NKJV). We have permission to be angry, and the good news is that anger can be used to receive healing in Christ.