The Importance of Parental Love

I read an article recently on FocusOnTheFamily.com which lists five benefits of parental love.  The link to the article is: (https://www.focusonthefamily.com/parenting/parental-love/). The five benefits and descriptions are listed below. I would like to apply them to our families’ and our spiritual lives as followers of God the Father and Jesus Christ.

Spiritual Growth

Love is a physical need for children. When children receive and learn to give love, they won’t be as thirsty for love from people outside the family. The authentic love of parents helps children develop an identity as a beloved child of God, one who has the capacity and responsibility to share that love with others.

Brain Growth

Research…has demonstrated that a parent’s love helps their children’s brain grow—as much as twice the rate as that of a neglected child.  Preschoolers who received parental love and nurturing…were found to have more growth in the hippocampus, the part of the brain involved in learning, memory, and response to stress.

Confidence

Children…tend to become more confident when they feel a genuine and unconditional love from their parents. These children learn to enjoy the moments and experiences of life instead of being worried about what their future holds.  Being hyper-focused on the future can create paralyzing stress.  But family environments where parental love is frequently demonstrated…prepare children to boldly face all the questions the future may bring.  

Strength To Face Adversity

Children from loving homes tend to be more adaptable. The love of parents gives children the roots needed to develop resilience and perspective for facing life’s difficulties.  Children are better able to learn perseverance, self-control, and patience when they receive authentic, encouraging, and supportive words from their parents.

A Sense of Security and an Ability to Handle Boundaries

True parental love means helping children appreciate limits and boundaries.  Children don’t like boundaries— yet they feel safe, secure and loved when they have them. Even if they won’t admit it, children thrive in a home with loving, clearly defined boundaries.

These five benefits of parental love transform the lives of not only the children, but they have found that it transforms the lives of the parents and by extension everyone who comes into contact with the family.  These benefits are all patient, kind, gentle, sacrificial, and eternal.

These five benefits of God’s parental love also applies to us as children of God. We become children that are more persevering, more kind, much gentle, and having strength of character. It is critical that we understand how deeply our Father and His Son love us and their desire to have us eternally with them as a united family.

As a verb, “desire” means, “to long or hope for, to express a wish for”.  Synonyms include wish, want, and even a strong word like crave.  As a noun, it means: “conscious impulse toward something that promises enjoyment or satisfaction when attained, longing, craving. God has that same type of desire for us. The Father and His Son are not cool about Their desire. They’re not warm about Their desire.  They are hot. It’s the same thing He asks of us:

“And to the angel of the church of the Laodiceans write… ‘I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will vomit you out of My mouth.’ . . . As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten. Therefore be zealous and repent” (Revelation 3:14 -16,19). 

Christ is telling His Church that their spiritual state is poor and commands them to be zealous, to be passionate, to be eager and ardent in their pursuit of Him. God is a passionate God. He desires to have a close personal relationship with us. He also wants that in reciprocation.

If we grasp how passionate God is about having a relationship with us, it changes our view of Him; His Spirit can move us so we can have that same passion for Him. From the day He created man in His own image to the day His Son “marries” His bride His passion about that entire process has never waned. He has never deviated from His plan of salvation. Christ came.  Christ died.  Christ still lives every day with that same passion. It is all about allowing God to transform human nature into His nature and character (Galatians 5.22-23).

Christ’s example demonstrated a strong, passionate desire to spend time with His disciples in order to build the relationship and set the example of how God’s heart and mind functions with love and compassion towards all humanity. God desires to live with man and for man to desire to live in peace with Him.

There are a few examples I want to use that stress how strongly God desires to live with His people and the need for us to give Him our undivided time and attention: “Do not make idols of any kind, whether in the shape of birds or animals or fish. You must never worship or bow down to them, for I, the Lord your God, am a [zealous] God who will not share your affection with any other god! I do not leave unpunished the sins of those who hate me, but I punish the children for the sins of their parents to the third and fourth generations. But I lavish my love on those who love me and obey my commands, even for a thousand generations” (Exodus 20:4 -6 NLT).

God’s passionate either way. If He doesn’t have our time He’s going to be passionate getting us back on the track. If we are following the plan, we are being that child that He gives so much love to He’s going to lavish more on top of us.

According to the Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament the word “jealous” (zealous) comes from the Hebrew word “qanna”. “This noun…is used solely of God and in the context of idolatry. This description strengthens the visualization of Christ’s and the Father’s deep desire for His time with ancient Israel, with His disciples and with us. In fact, God’s desire to spend time with His people was the purpose of Christ’s physical life: “Behold, the virgin shall be with child, and bear a Son, and they shall call His name Immanuel,” which is translated, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23).

 “God with us.”  is more than just a theological statement.  It is also a biological one. It is a declaration of a concrete, flesh-and-blood fact: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1,14). The Word, who was God, became the Word who was Man. Christ was the means the Father used to accomplish His intense desire to develop His family with us. 

Christ came to reveal the Father. He said that if the disciples have seen Him, they have seen the Father.  Their character and nature are identical. The fact that Christ came to live among humanity is a testimony of how much He wanted time among human beings. Christ passionately wanted to be able to walk with the disciples and touch them, laugh with them, communicate, spend time. God’s passionate desire to be with us is the motivating force of all scripture (Leviticus 26:11-12; I Kings 6:11-13).

In Genesis 3, God is in the Garden of Eden calling out, “Where are you?”  The question is not asked because the Creator is uncertain of Adam’s whereabouts. God’s question is, instead, an offer of restoration for the first man and woman, even though they had sinned.  He wanted them to come back.  Though Adam and Eve had demonstrated their preference to rebel and walk away from God, He called to them, inviting them to come back to Him. 

All that God has created physically, He will destroy, and then recreate spiritually for only one purpose.  For Immanuel, for God the Father to be with us. Understanding and believing the depth of God’s love and desire for us is paramount to our salvation.   “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3:14-18).

God is not the God that Satan, the god of this world, has deceived humanity to believe He is.  He is not about judgment; He is not about condemnation but about saving and drawing mankind towards Him. It is our confidence in this understanding – His desire to be with us – that saves us.  It is all about faith. Knowing how much God loves us makes it much easier to say, “I’m sorry” and want to come back to Him. 

Christ came to the point that He said to the disciples, “I now call you friends”.  There’s a lot in that statement about His personal relationship.  Christ pursued their friendship and was willing to die in order to attain it eternally: “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends. You are My friends if you do whatever I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all things that I heard from My Father I have made known to you. You did not choose Me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit, and that your fruit should remain, that whatever you ask the Father in My name He may give you” (John 15:13-16). 

God’s commitment never ends. God is never done with us. Yet, in the future there are definite lines when God says, “I’m done”, only because we refuse to be His children.

God is a loyal friend. Our loyalty is the only question He needs answered.  Through Christ God removed our condemnation, the death penalty incurred through our sin (Romans 8:1-4). He turns our lives around so that it now becomes a fulfillment of the righteousness of Jesus Christ living through us making us heirs with Him (Romans 8:14-17).

And God demonstrates His desire by promising never to forsake us.  He will never allow us to be orphans.  “Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ So we may boldly say: ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not fear. What can man do to me?'” (Hebrews 13:5-6).  

What more proof do we need of God’s desire for us to be with Him? Paul sums it up:

 “What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: ‘For Your sake we are killed all day long; We are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.‘

“Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:31-39).

The awareness of God’s passionate desire for us to be His sons and daughters gives us the assurance that we can grow exponentially in His parental love.

Bill Hutchison