John Murphy:
This is the Rockhouse Center Podcast, and I'm John Murphy.

Beth Murphy:
I'm Beth Murphy, and the title of our podcast today is God is Your Father. We all have limitations to our understanding of God. And today we want to help you know God more fully because the better you know Him, the easier it is to embrace and receive the depth of His fatherly love for you personally.

John Murphy:
I think when people think about Father, think about what the Word means and the Heavenly Father, that there is a tendency, kind of a default towards the theological understanding or the theoretical understanding of who He is. But moving into that relational, that He's a Father, that He fathers me, that He fathered me into this world, that He is the basis of my spiritual existence, the fact that my consciousness, which I will have for eternity, is an eternal thing, that came from Him, that He was the father of that. Those are just concepts which I think are really important, and I talk a lot with my clients about that because when they're trying to relate to Him and to connect and to feel Him as a father in their life, we need to get beyond this sort of theoretical, theological perspective and recognize that He really is our Father. It's just so important.

Beth Murphy:
So when you think about that from a practical standpoint, elaborate on the difference between God as our Father and the role of our earthly parents.

John Murphy:
We understand that our biological parents bring us biological life, that they have born into this world a vessel for the spirit, the life that God has given us to dwell in. And the life that God has given us, this consciousness, this existence that we have, which is eternal, comes from Him, and the physical body that we have comes from our biological parents. And we really do have two fathering relationships. The fathering relationship of our Father who bore us into the world, and then there's the father relationship of our spiritual existence that is eternal, that came from Him and could only come from Him. So it's an important thing to understand.

Beth Murphy:
So talk a little bit more about the significance of our consciousness. the essence of that?

John Murphy:
Well, yes, we have to understand, first off, that we are eternal, and our consciousness, our awareness, our existence, never stops. It is an eternal thing. And that didn't come from our biomass. That didn't come from our body. That came from God. And it is eternal and it will be with Him forever. And so it's important to understand that, and I think that there is some misconception from folks maybe outside the Christian culture, is that they know their body's going to die, but they think their existence is going to die. Their consciousness is going to cease as well with their body, and it isn't. The consciousness goes forever. And that's obviously why this is so important that we have this relationship for not only what it means about our life now, but what it means about the eternity of our existence and our consciousness and the experience of that?

Beth Murphy:
So in our parenting program at Rock House Center, we talk a lot about fathering, whether it's father or mother, but parenting our children in the way that God parents us and thinking then, about a deeper understanding of what that means. What is godly fathering and what is it that we're seeking to emulate? So if you back up from there a step, let's just talk about what is it we're seeking to receive. First off, what is godly fathering? What's his role in our life?

John Murphy:
Well, God's role in our life as a father, just coming back to the original point. And so what we know is that we are brought into existence by him, that our consciousness and the essence of who we are goes forever. The next thing that happens after Him bringing us into this world is that He also releases the Spirit. If you talk about 2 Thessalonians, it says that our salvation is the working, the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. And then once the Holy Spirit has brought us into the kingdom, then the Holy Spirit goes within us and continues to mature us to become more and more like Christ. Well, the Holy Spirit is the very mind of God. So He is pulling us through His Spirit to salvation and to bringing us to a place that He can actually live in us so that He can further, our fathering, the noble urgings of the conscience, our God talking to us through the Spirit. Well, that is those things that He is drawing us and pulling us to the noble character of Christ Himself, and that is fathering. So it's not just that He brought us into existence, but that He is actively fathering us throughout our time here, and I presume on beyond our actual time here on the earth.

Beth Murphy:
So he's all about, when you think of Romans 8, 29 and many other scriptures, but he's all about helping us more and more reflect the character of Christ as the foundational purpose of our being here is to relate to Him as our Father, to love Him, to receive that, and to pull us, woo us toward, as you said, into salvation in the 1st place, and then into being changed, to being transformed, and being transformed into more and more of the heart of Christ. So we're more and more like our big brother.

John Murphy:
Exactly. So if you look at the example of the Israelites as they were at the river looking at trying to go into the kingdom and go into the promised land and they sent over their spies. So the spies come back and determine that there's no way that they could take the promised land, that these people are too big and they're too forceful and that they would be wiped out. And they actually came to the belief that this was God's final effort to basically wipe them out because they never accepted men as a father. They never trusted him. And so when they saw that, what they had to take on to take on to actually conquer and possess the promised land, they declared that they were not going to do that and they rejected the idea of that and they blamed God as having a really bad idea that was ultimately going to wipe them out. Well, the way God responded to that was just to move them off into the desert and allow the next generation of people to come forward. So what we're talking about is the youth. His next 37 years, he was there every day. He was in the cloud by day, in the fire by night. He fed them, he clothed them, he provided for them, he protected them. And so he was fathering them and building in them a trust for him as their father so that at the end of the 40 years, they're back at the river and he says, go into the promised land. And they go, right, I trust this. I trust my father to take me into the promised land. So what did he do? He fathered that entire generation for 37 years to bring them to the level of spiritual maturity they needed to advance into the blessing he had for them. So that's a great example of fathering. Now we know he lives in us and his fathering experiences his spirit in us that is drawing us to becoming more and more like Christ. So it is definitely an active fathering relationship. And that's something that's so important for us to recognize and to be open to and to allow that to happen and to recognize that any fathering He's bringing, it's out of His perfect love for us because He has a perfect plan for us to fulfill us completely. As people understand that, their relationship builds and they have greater peace and assurance about life. It's all very important to understand if we're gonna be dependent on God in this way or relate to God in this way, then we need to understand the reality that He is a Father and that he is in us fathering us all along the way.

Beth Murphy:
That example from scripture that you use is a really important one because the way in which you interpret that whole scene or the whole series of years of not getting into the promised land and being fathered, it's so dependent on your view of God your Father, which commonly comes from our experience with our earthly parents. And of course, we're all affected by many things and the way we were parented. But most especially, it's important to speak to people who might have the most difficulty in the concept of God as a loving, tenderhearted, full of mercy, Heavenly Father, who might interpret that scripture to be very negative about God because of their own experience. And we understand it can be very hard to connect to the truth of who God is if our parents were either unable or unwilling, not present, not there to love us and nurture us, or if in fact they literally abandoned us. And the scripture comes to mind in Psalm 27:10 where David is stating a really important truth that, and this is of course from the Amplified, although my father and my mother have abandoned me, yet the Lord will take me up or adopt me as his child. It's important to get that concept into our minds that our earthly parents were doing whatever was the best that they could do, but in the situations where they were absent or perhaps unkind or cruel or even abandoned us, just to make the distinction, let God help us make the distinction that doesn't define Him. That's not who He is as our loving Heavenly Father.

John Murphy:
There's another really important aspect of understanding the character of God. And one of them is that God is love. And what does that really mean? It's another one of those phrases that people kind of throw around from time to time. But it's a really critical aspect of how life feels to us to understand that God knows us fully and loves us fully. That He sees everything there is about us. He sees everything we've ever had. He sees everything we've ever done, and He absolutely, completely, and totally loves us. He doesn't judge us. There are scriptures that talk about He takes no account of evil done to Him, that He is always looking for the best in His children. That is the character of who He is. And what we understand is the way that God has built us is for us to feel value, we have to be valued by someone outside. And this need we all have to know that there is someone who can understand us at the deepest level and understand everything about who we are and can still love us and there's no fear of ever being rejected. That's the understanding and living in the essence of what this true, perfect, unconditional love is. And that is an expression of that He still values us even though He knows us completely. Our sense of worth and value and assurance about life is resting to a great degree on the degree that we actually believe and live in that. And so again, we need to understand that how much of a Father He really is and to see Him that way and experience Him that way so that we can begin to trust Him, trust Him to love us, trust Him to lead us and rest in that place of trust. And trusting and being able to trust Him is an important part of understanding who He is.

Beth Murphy:
We talk a lot at Rockhouse Center about what we call divine needs, the needs that God has planted within us, from Ecclesiastes 3:11 that He's given us, things that we yearn for that nothing under the sun alone but God can satisfy. So we need Him to do this perfectly. And that, you're talking about there, is really kind of foundational to all of the other divine needs, just the yearning to be fully known and fully loved, which God alone can do. The best of parents, spouses, friends can know us to the best of their ability and love us to the best of our ability, but it's unmatched, unparalleled by the true depth of being fully known and fully loved, which is what that word unconditional means. No human can deliver love without condition because we all at some point have some kind of a condition whether we know what that would be at this moment or not. So it's that yearning that God put in us for Him, which nothing under the sun alone but God can satisfy. So living in that truth of His love, that's where we get the sense of an unshakable foundation because we're receiving His unshakable love that's central to all of our other divine needs, our need for security, protection, peace, assurance, value, worth, all those things. All of that's resting on receiving the true depth of the unconditional love of our Heavenly Father. So the foundation that we are all yearning for begins with the understanding and the believing the truth that God is your Father. So for any of you who are uncertain in any way, if you're struggling with accepting what we're saying, if it seems foreign to you, or more commonly, if you know it in your head to be true and you would check the correct box, but don't feel like you're really living in that relational place with receiving the love of God as your Heavenly Father, as your Father, then please join us in this prayer, because what we want to do is reject any belief that you may have that opposes the truth about God, and that He is your loving Heavenly Father, and ask Him to reveal His love to you in a tangible, relational kind of way that you can embrace and live with the assurance in His love.

John Murphy:
So it's also important to know that in every case, to be who we want to be in our relationship with the Lord, we have to lean on God. This is not about us doing it in our works. And that's why we're praying about this, because we're gonna ask God to help us reveal and to break off and to replace the lies with the truth. This is not something that we buck up and do in our own strength. We need to help God, and God is perfectly okay with and embraces the idea of our asking Him to help us know Him more fully and know how to love Him the way He wants to be loved, which is a blessing for us. So let's just enter into this prayer and start to move that direction. Heavenly Father, thank you for bringing me into existence and blessing me with the reality that you are my Father and you love me perfectly and will love me for eternity. Father, I reject any lie that opposes the truth of who you are how much You love me like Your child. I reject any belief that I have to earn Your love or perform for it in any way. Father, I reject anything in my heart that I may have substituted for Your love, and I ask You to replace it with You and Your divine, unconditional love that only You can have for me. Please heal me of any way I have suffered from depending on anything or anyone other than you to fill my need for divine love and worth. Father, please give me the strength to remain true to your love and to rest in it alone for my peace and assurance about life. I pray this in the name of your Son, Jesus. Amen.

Beth Murphy:
Amen. We're on a mission at Rock House to bring healing and restoration to every challenge of life. And we welcome you to join us by sending this podcast to anyone who might be blessed. We want to reach folks anywhere in the world, including those who may never come for counseling and those who've tried traditional counseling and still feel hopeless. Those of you who have a testimony as a Rock House client or from doing our Be Transformed workbook on your own, join us in this mission. You can lead a friend through the Be Transformed workbook or have them contact Rock House if they're in the middle of a life struggle. And if they connect with Rock House, they'll hear a life-changing truth and get prayed for. Call us at 615-369-0668 or connect online through contact@rockhousecenter.com. Thank you for joining us today, and may God bless every effort to bring healing and restoration to life's challenges.

John Murphy:
Thanks for joining us. Goodbye.