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& #894; 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!