“I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” (John 14:18)
I was raised in a home with two very devoted parents. As children during the great depression, they were very careful about spending, saving, and family ties. As participants of World War II they were strong, self-sacrificing, and mature. I grew up in a good and loving home.
My father was a very moral man and participated in a very well known religion, however, he did not have a saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ for the entirety of my childhood. When I was in my early twenties he and my mother came to a saving knowledge of Christ, when they were 62.
My wife on the other hand was abandoned by her mom when she was too young to remember, but she was found and brought home by her grandmother. Her mother reclaimed her when she was still very young. She grew up not knowing that she was adopted until she was blind-sided by strangers.
My wife’s step dad was not nice to my wife at all, he was abusive, unkind, a disciplinarian, and brought the military of which he was a career man, into the home, and not love.
What is the good news in my wife’s story and mine own? For me I can understand quite readily the love of a parent. My father endured a world war in which he was wounded and carried the effect of it for the rest of his life. Never did I doubt my father’s love, he was kind, caring, and would have sacrificed his life for mine. Of my father’s love for me, I have never doubted.
My wife has had to learn that God is not like her own earthly parents. Even though her mom was a good woman, although indiscreet in her youth, she became ill as a result of a brain tumor. It altered her personality at times, and because it went undetected, it made life as a child that much more difficult for my wife.
I cannot speak from experience regarding my wife, I only understand her from having lived with her for 42 years. I can say unequivocally that God has used her childhood truals for her good and His glory. Nothing softens the heart of men more than suffering in the light of God suffering to understand and save.
Jesus Christ is God and He cannot lie. In John’s Gospel he is reported to have said, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” There is nothing quite so stabilizing than hearing from the God who died in our place, to secure for us an eternal place in heaven, that He will be an eternal father to us. He will never leave us or forsake us.
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