Your Father Knows Your Need
“The Father knows your need.”
Matthew 6:32 (NIV)
The fall days are getting shorter as we move through October and head toward Christmas. It’s staying darker longer, but I’m still waking up at my usual time. Half-awake I lie in bed wondering whether to get up or go back to sleep when I suddenly hear the first sounds of dawn. A bird chirps happily outside my bedroom window.
Returning to sleep is now not an option as five words quickly come to my mind and heart: “Your Father knows your need.” (Matthew 6:32) Those five words remind me to pray for my friend who lies hospitalized on a ventilator as he wrestles with life and death. They also form my prayer for his family, “Father, you know their need. Please meet them there.”
The little bird continues singing outside my window and reminds me of my sweet Mama. She’s been gone for two years now, but oh, how Mama loved her birds! “They are all God’s creatures,” Mama would say happily as she fed them with recycled bread rolls from her assisted living cafeteria. Ever a survivor of the Great Depression, Mama hated waste as much as she loved her birds and she never minded giving God a little help!
Throughout the morning I remember Jesus’ five words as He taught His most famous sermon. Using birds and lilies, Jesus repeatedly admonished his listeners, “Do not worry about your life!” (Matthew 6:25) Later in his sermon Jesus reminded his disciples that God is a “much more” God and a good, good heavenly Father (Matthew 7:9-11). Those words are good reminders for me as I pray for my husband, children, and grandchildren.
“Your Father knows your need.” I whisper the words for James Bruce and the Rainbow Omega staff.
Theologian J. I. Packer writing in his classic Knowing God asks, “What is a Christian? The question can be answered in many ways, but the richest answer I know is that a Christian is one who has God as Father…Everything that makes the New Testament new and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. “Father” is the Christian name for God”… Our understanding of Christianity cannot be better than our grasp of adoption. God has One Son by nature, but many sons by adoption.”
Author Russell Moore agrees with Packer. In a 2010 article for Christianity Today entitled Abba Changes Everything, Moore records his own family’s adoption experience. Entering the Russian orphanage each day, Moore and his wife Maria encountered an unsettling silence. Moore writes, “These children did not cry, because infants eventually learn to stop crying if no one ever responds to their calls for food, for comfort, for love. No one ever responded to these children. So they stopped.”
For days the Moores visited their two prospective sons; reading books and giving hugs and kisses. Finally, the Moores were required to leave the country while the legal paperwork made its way through the Russian courts. On the last day of their visit, Moore records the following:
And that’s when we heard the scream. Little Maxim fell back in his crib and let out a guttural yell. It seemed he knew, maybe for the first time, that he would be heard. On some primal level, he knew he had a father and mother now…Little Maxim’s scream changed everything—more, I think, than did the judge’s verdict and the notarized paperwork. It was the moment, in his recognizing that he would be heard, that he went from being an orphan to being a son. It was also the moment I became a father, in fact if not in law.
All those who are in union with Christ have a good, good heavenly Father who knows our need and guarantees that we will be heard. The question for each of us is simply: do I know my need and do I trust His provision?
Wherever you are today, take courage. Your Father know your need.