A BIGGER VIEW OF FATHER GOD

A Bigger View of Father God
By Eddie Smith
In 1957, when I was in high school, my father was pastor of First Baptist Church in McAllen , Texas , a beautiful border city. I recently found an old 1957 Texas Baptist Annual that listed church statistics of that year. Curious, I looked up First Baptist, McAllen.
To my amazement, I discovered that Dad's church averaged over seven hundred people in Sunday school attendance that year, in a town where non-Catholics comprised only 3 percent of the population. That's considered a large church by today's standards. But for that time and place, his was a mega church!
Interestingly, when I was a child, although I knew he was a wonderful dad, it never dawned on me that he was a particularly successful pastor.
Then I thought about our four children. It wasn't until they were adults that they began to grasp that Mom and Dad are more than Mom and Dad. They began to understand that we are people with dreams, responsibilities, demanding roles, and levels of influence outside of the family. As children they assumed, as we all did, that Mom and Dad's world revolved primarily around them.

During our first few years of life, we related to our parents according to who they were to us. We had tunnel vision. As preschool children, we knew our fathers only in their role as "Daddy." Caring for our needs was their only role in life--wasn't it? We were blissfully unaware that our daddy was an attorney, a doctor, a factory worker, a farmer, a manager or that he held any other position or had any responsibility other than to meet our needs.
In time, our view began to broaden. If you had siblings, you began to realize that your parents were their parents too. Gradually your parents' other roles began to register with you.
You discovered that they shared a relationship with each other that hardly included you--they were husband and wife. Who knew?! And, although differently for each of us, we eventually discovered that our parents had relationships, roles, and responsibilities outside the home that were not newly acquired; they'd had these all along. We were simply becoming aware of them.
The same is true with our heavenly Father and our relationship to Him through prayer. Most of us realized the importance of prayer in a time of need. If you've been praying since childhood, you came to God as you were instructed by your parents, teachers, and pastors. You likely learned to pray when you were fearful, or when you wanted something. Prayer was little more than that.
If you came to God for the first time as an adult, perhaps you learned to pray as a result of the death of a loved one, a divorce, or a job loss. Adults typically come to God in prayer because they have a need. It isn't wrong to pray in these circumstances; God is here to meet our needs. But that isn't where our prayers should stop. There's much more!
It's time for us to climb to the summit, look over the crest of this mountain, and view the vast horizon. From here, we can see things beyond--the expanse of eternity lies before us. We can get a great view of God's kingdom, our place, and the place of prayer in it!
Daddy has called us into partnership--to joint-venture with Him in the family business--extending His kingdom on the earth! And prayer is one of our primary tools! Let's not just sit here. Let's get to work!