Recently one of my dearest friends asked me about repentance. She said, “If you repent, but you keep doing the same sin, will God forgive you? Or do you believe that if you repent and continue doing the same thing He won’t forgive you?” She explained to me that in Islam, there were some who believed that if you asked God for forgiveness and kept doing the same thing, you wouldn’t be forgiven again. But that there were others who believed you could keep doing the same thing over and over and God would always forgive you.
I asked her, “What do you believe?” She thought about it and said, “Okay, I’m NOT saying that God is like a parent or a father. I’m not saying that. No. I’m not saying that. But, God knows me better than I know myself. He created me. He knows my motivations and why I do things. So because of that, I believe that He will continue to forgive me even when I make the same mistake over and over.”
To our friends here, one of the most offensive things that we believe is that God is our Father. Clearly, this friend was scared to seem to communicate that. Generally we avoid that reference when we share with people, knowing that most of the time it is a barrier and not a bridge. I had not talked with this particular friend about that image, yet God has so clearly put it on her heart anyway. She is trying to resist the idea, yet there’s something in her that longs to be able to call Him Father.
Please pray that our people would have their hearts opened to God being their true Father. A perfect Father who can be everything their own fathers were not. Pray they would cry out to Him and not be afraid to seek that relationship with Him. Pray for those of us working with these people, to have opportunities to speak that Truth into their lives in a way that is a blessing and a source of hope.
