My Father Never Said It

His father was not a bad man. That is the first thing he says, and he means it.

He worked, and he provided, and he turned up at things, and he was there for fifty three years and he never once said the sentence. Not at a graduation, not at a wedding, not in a hospital room where the moment was practically holding the door open. He said other things instead. He said, that is a long drive, you must be tired. He said, is the car all right.

Everybody in that family knows what those sentences meant. They are fluent in them.

But here is what he only worked out in his forties. He has never expected God to say it either. Not once. He never decided that. He simply arrived in adulthood with a settled sense that affection is real and unspoken, that it is expressed through provision and presence, and that asking for the words themselves is a small greed.

So he has a God he trusts completely and does not expect warmth from.

If your picture of God was built in a house like that, come and sit down in the courtyard. Nobody's father is going to be criticized here.

Two men, and only one of them is God

Let us do the separation gently, because a page like this can very quickly turn into a prosecution of somebody's father and that would be a betrayal of both of you.

Your father's silence was his. It came from his own father, most likely, and from a place and a time and a set of things a man was permitted to say. It expressed love in the currency he had. None of that is being taken from him tonight.

But he is not God, and God has never been silent about this, and the two of them got fused so early that the fusion has never been inspected.

You are not dealing with a God who withholds the words. Nothing in your father's manner has ever been the Father's manner toward you. I am not saying it to be warm. The written word says the LORD is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy (Psalm 103:8), which is God describing His own temperament rather than us guessing at it, and the Holy Spirit presses that home in a man who has never expected to hear anything.

The word Scripture puts in your mouth

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not an instruction to want more from anybody.

Paul is writing about what a person receives, and he goes straight to the family language, and then he does something extraordinary with it.

For ye have not received the spirit of bondage again to fear; but ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.Romans 8:15

Abba is not a formal word. It is what a small child says, and it survives untranslated in the Greek text because the writer could not bear to lose the sound of it.

And notice who supplies it. The Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry. The intimate word is not something a person has to work up. It is put in the mouth of somebody who did not have it before.

You have been given the vocabulary of a family you were not born into, and the Word says the Spirit is the one who puts the word in your mouth. That is written down exactly that way, and it is the Holy Spirit who puts that in the hands of a man who was raised fluent in a different language entirely.

The pleasure is not earned and it is not implied

Something has to be said plainly, because a man from that kind of house will now try to accept this quietly and without any words at all, which is the same arrangement in different clothes.

The Father's pleasure is not something to be inferred from His provision. It is spoken. It was spoken out loud, from an opened sky, in front of witnesses, and it was recorded so that people would have the actual sentence.

You have that spoken over you, in words, and it does not have to be deduced from anything. Scripture says behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God (1 John 3:1), where behold is an instruction to look directly at something rather than to assume it, and the Holy Spirit is the one that makes that a spoken thing in a house where nothing was ever said.

And if this has cost more than anybody at this table knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.