12.4 Father as Personality
© 2016 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
The personality of Father is quite a different topic than the qualities inherent inside of God or the characteristics of God flowing out into creation as laws or principles. The personality of Father is where we find a whole lot of fun and unfolding adventure.
Now, the first thing we must know about Father’s personality is that He is excessive. Father is always exceeding all, doing simply too much in every direction. We are talking about a God who carpets the tundra with flowers, an overflowing riot of color, that no one ever sees. We are talking about a God who creates moose and camels. Who in their right mind would ever create moose and camels?
God’s Loves
God loves beauty beyond our comprehension, that’s why He made Eve, the epitome of all creative art. And God loves to laugh and laugh and laugh. That’s probably why He made moose and camels. And God especially loves adventure. But none of these things come close to the most important aspect of Father’s personality, the most important to His heart.
To understand Father’s personality, and in particular, this most important aspect of personality to Father, we must first catch a view of the complexity of an infinite God. Complex means made up of a multitude of very different, but interlocking parts. Infinite means without end.
Something New
If you were to begin counting the individual components that make up this infinitely complex Person we call Father, you could count one new reality of Father every second for a trillion years and hardly have scratched the surface. How can we know a God who never ends? How can we say, “I know You, Father,” when we know there is an infinite extent of what is God far beyond any present knowledge?
Through the Lord’s mercies we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness (Lamentations 3:22-23). Let’s give a legitimate paraphrase from the Hebrew. Through covenant grace we never cease, for His depths never fail. There is something new every morning; God, You are filled with faith.
My Portion
Then Jeremiah continues in verse 24: “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “Therefore I hope in Him!” The word “portion” is one’s inheritance, one’s plot of land, one’s own possession. All of God belongs to us; a specific element, place, room, that is part of God’s Person and Being belongs to each one of us individually. Our hope (expectation) meets God’s overflowing faith (expectation).
In My Father’s house are many dwelling places… I go to prepare a place for you… I will come (be present) again and receive you to Myself; that where I am, there you may be also (John 14:2-3).
Many Dwelling Places
This reality of Father’s house, many dwelling places, goes in both directions at the same time. There is a piece of God that belongs to each one of us individually, our own “room,” so to speak. At the same time, as God gives each one of us a portion of Himself, unique to us, in which to live forever, so God wins for Himself a multitude of rooms, you and me, in which to dwell.
To him who overcomes I will give some of the hidden manna to eat. And I will give him a white stone, and on the stone a new name written which no one knows except him who receives it. – I will write on him the name of My God and the name of the city of My God, the New Jerusalem, which comes down out of heaven from My God. And I will write on him My new name (Revelation 2:17 & 3:12).
A Portion Belonging to Me
All three of these passages, the depths of God bringing forth something new every morning, a portion of God belonging to each one, a house of many dwelling places for us and for God, and a new name for each one that includes a shared name, “God,” are speaking of this same mind-blowing reality. Let’s attempt to reduce this incredible God down to each one of us. I will use the pronoun, “I”; read that as yourself.
All of God is inside of me, but there is, inside of this All-God, a portion of Himself that belongs only to me. I live inside this private portion of God, this personal inheritance that is mine, and God lives in me as this personal portion of God, this aspect of His personality.
Father AS HE IS
Written upon me is my new name, this part of God’s personality given to me, yet it is also God’s name there, fused into and part of mine. Even more, it is also the name of God’s city, His entire dwelling place written upon my forehead, sealed upon my whole being, and the new name of the Lord Jesus, Father revealed.
Here is what we must know. Father’s personality is so vast and so complex that it takes millions of overcoming believers in Jesus to give some sort of scope to the revealing of Father’s personality, each one revealing a unique and different portion, altogether as one body revealing Father AS HE IS.
Back into Community
All that I am as God created me, as I find myself to be, I am my own special portion of Father, His Person, His personality, in which I dwell and which is my portion to reveal. This is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Now, I want to take this reality back into the community of Christ. Of around 100 elders under whom I walked as my covering over 21 years in move fellowship, only three of those walked with me without any hint of being “above” me. In contrast, more than half of that number made sure I knew at every opportunity that they were “above” me.
Rick Annett was one of those three.
Unique Expressions
For that reason, when Rick turned towards me while we were sawing firewood, and said, “This is me; this is how I do it,” he had three powerful things inside of me in his favor. First, I was at an end of treating people poorly and being treated poorly in return. But far more than that, Rick was my friend, and I regarded him above most of those I knew in that fellowship.
God used Rick’s words to change something huge inside of me, to turn me entirely around. But it is this word of Christ as me that has caused me to know what that turn-around really means. Every one of us is a unique expression of this same Christ.
Unique Personality Traits
And for the first time in our lives we can see how “do it my way” and “I am right and you are wrong” are so hostile to the Lord Jesus Christ. Those expressions are anti-Christ.
God created a moose because there is a moose-sort-of quality inside of Father, a quality that needed expression. But you and I are far more to God than all moose put together.
Every one of us IS a unique personality trait of Father that He NEEDS to express. Every one of us IS an essential and critical part of Father just being Himself. Father cannot express Himself as He is except through many, many very, very different human beings.
Jesus for ME
What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he loses one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness, and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing (Luke 15:4-5). What God means is that each one of us, as we are created, as we find ourselves to be, are of such value to Father as a critical and unique expression of Himself that each one of us can look Jesus in the Eye and know that He gave Himself in full as if we, individually, were the only one lost.
I am as critical to Father as an expression of His personality as the life of His own Son. You are as critical to Father as an expression of His personality as the life of His own Son.
Value
This means two incredible things. The most obvious thing is that you and I value one another in our differences, in how we do things differently, in how we say things differently, in how we see the world differently. We value one another even in our “opposition,” as we value the Lord Jesus inside of us, the One upon whose breast we always lean our heads.
But this second incredible thing coming out of the mind-blowing fact that each one of us is our own personal expression of Father’s personality goes out in all directions forever. Each one of us, in the new creation, becomes the shape and design of all things new.
Design and Fabric
What that means is this. Look inside your heart. Look at your loves and joys, the things that delight you, that make your heart sing. Look at the things that cause you sorrow; look at your expression, your ways of thinking and doing. Look at your own personality, your friendships, your giving. Look at the things you like to buy for yourself, for your own simple and quiet pleasure – or, for your loud and boisterous pleasure, if that’s your way.
Out from all of that comes the shaping and design, the fabric and construction of the Kingdom of God arising in this heaven/earth and increasing forever throughout all the ages to come and across the entire universe. All of it is Father just being Himself through you.
Foundations of Father
(I need not mention, except for those who oppose, that we are not speaking of any perversion of a false self abusing others and lying about everything. We are speaking of ourselves for real.)
Now the wall of the city had twelve foundations, and on them were the names of the twelve apostles of the Lamb (Revelation 21:14). This is not speaking of some Catholic exaltation of a superiority of twelve individual men; it is speaking of Father. “The wall of the city” is the Kingdom of God. The “twelve foundations” are the foundations of Father under all things. And the “names of the twelve apostles” are the individual expressions of each one through whom Father Reveals Himself.
Placing Abundance
Now we know where to place this one attribute of Father, abundance, inside the foundations of the Kingdom. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly (John 10:10). Abundance is a “Paul word,” though John embraced it before he wrote. Abundance is a word Paul loved to throw in any time he wrote about anything having to do with Father.
And thus we see that abundance is not an attribute of Father distinct from other attributes. Abundance applies to every aspect of Father, a God who just gets carried away with Himself, a God who always overflows.
Our Father.