Children

This week marks the 15th anniversary of my marriage. I still cannot believe how incredibly blessed I am by God with the wife He has given me. So at this milestone, I have been doing so reflecting and thinking, and one of the things I have been thinking about is my children. We have been blessed by three - and they are all very different from one another. Different personalities, different temperaments, different talents, different abilities, different attitudes, different likes and dislikes, and lots more. What this means is that while we love them all the same, we do not treat them all the same. Our love for them means that we know them and treat them according to who they are and their unique needs. So we speak to them differently, discipline them differently, and interact with them differently, which, it seems to me, is how it should be.

Which led me to then think of the fact that we are children of our heavenly Father, and that we are all different too. And so our Father in heaven, in His perfect love for us, does not treat us all the same - but knowing us and loving us, treats us according to who we are and what He knows we need. And so while He loves us all the same, He blesses us differently, disciplines us differently, and leads us differently, which is how it should be.

Therefore, it is exactly because God is perfect love and perfectly loves that we should not expect to all be treated exactly the same. We sometimes fall into that trap of thinking that if God gives to one, He should give to all in the same way. Not at all. That is not love - that is mass production, and God doesn’t mass produce. Instead, He creates each individual life through a father and mother, specially created for them, and whom He will love through them.

Now, sinful parents do sinful things and do not always parent perfectly or with perfect love. Hopefully they try, but that is not always a constant either. One of the things sin has effected, and sometimes devastated, is our family relationships that were created by God for our good, not our harm. But what good news we have, in that our Father in heaven has dealt with our sin and restored His relationship with us through His Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ.

For what is constant from our Father is not what He gives us in this world and life, but what He gives us through His perfect love in His Son - His forgiveness, life, and salvation. This (and it seems to me this is what Galatians 3:28 is about) is the same for us all. And so what is constant in our life is not us or what we have, but our triune God, who is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8).

My mother used to tell me that being a strict parent wasn’t bad. By being strong in things that didn’t really matter so much (like bedtimes, curfews, and TV watching), my children would know that I would also be strong in the things that mattered; that they could count on me to be there for them when it mattered most. And by being loving and strong in the things that matter most, they also knew that I would be loving in the little things - even if they disagreed with me.

How true as well for God. By His love for us in the thing that mattered most - our eternal salvation - by sending his Son to die for us on the cross, we know that He is loving to us in all other things as well; the earthly things that don’t matter as much. We know that we can count on Him in all things, and know that in all things He is loving us with His perfect love - even if we may not understand, or even disagree from time to time.