The Redemptive Father

September 19, 2025. Thirty years. My biological father has now been gone as long as he lived. He was thirty when he carried a bottle of vodka into a small church in Alva, Oklahoma, and never walked out. I was ten. The death certificate said alcohol poisoning; my heart only knew absence.

For a long time, I tried to outrun that ache. I grew up in a place where God was assumed but seldom explained, where church was occasional and the Bible was background noise. In high school, I grabbed onto atheism, not because it healed anything but because it gave me words to sneer at what hurt too much to name. I mocked Christians online. I thought I was brave; I was only loud.

Then life came for me. I became a father at a young age...twice. When my daughter was taken back to Kansas and my son was born there without me, the floor gave way. I wasn’t grieving romance; I was grieving a calling. I had sworn I would never be what my father was to me...gone! Yet, there I was, standing in an empty apartment, learning how vows can be so empty and collapse under the weight of our nature.

Somewhere in that season, God sent me a Christian friend who didn’t try to win arguments. I asked him why a good God would let children suffer. He said, with a strange peace, “I don’t know. There are things about God we can’t fully understand.” That calm answer irritated me and steadied me. It left room for a God who might be bigger than my pain.

One night, the pretending ended. In sorrow and feeling crushed, I hit the carpet and said the only true thing I had: “You win.” No magic words. No formula. Just surrender. I couldn’t even tell you the order in which things changed, but I can say that the stone started to crack.

The Problem We All Face

Looking back, the wound beneath my wounds wasn’t fatherlessness; it was fallenness. Scripture says we are “dead in…trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1), not merely misguided. We inherit guilt and corruption from Adam (Rom. 5:12–19); we drink from broken cisterns that hold no water (Jer. 2:13). Our problem isn’t only what’s been done to us; it’s what lives in us: alienation from the God who made us, loves us, and defines reality.

That alienation is judicial and relational. Judicial, because God is holy and we are not (Rom. 3:10–19). Relational, because sin turns children into runaways who fear the Father’s face. No amount of self-repair can clear our record or soften our hearts. We need pardon and a new nature. We need a Father who does more than feel for us; we need a Father who acts.

How the Redemptive Father Resolved It

Before the first sunrise, the Father set His love on a people (Eph. 1:4–5). In time He sent His Son, born under the law, to redeem those under the law “so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal. 4:4–5). The Son lived the obedience we failed to live and died the death our sins deserved—penal, substitutionary, sufficient (2 Cor. 5:21; Rom. 8:3–4). The cross isn’t God lowering the bar; it’s God satisfying it and then lifting us up into His embrace.

The Father’s justice is not the rival of His love; it is the servant of His love. In Christ, justice is fulfilled and mercy is unleashed. The risen Christ is proof that the bill is paid and death is losing. And because the gospel is not only accomplished but applied, the Father sends the Spirit to do what no argument or willpower can do: open blind eyes, raise dead hearts, and bring prodigals home (John 3:5–8; Titus 3:5–7).

This is the Father I met, not an idea, but the “Father of mercies and God of all comfort” (2 Cor. 1:3). The One who is “Father to the fatherless” (Ps. 68:5) and who says, even to grown men who hide their tears, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you” (John 14:18).

How His Resolution Becomes Ours

In fancy theological terms, the Son accomplishes redemption; the Spirit applies it; the Father adopts. The application is not mechanical but personal:

• Effectual Call & Regeneration: Through His Word, the Father calls. The Spirit gives new birth; new sight, new affections (1 Pet. 1:23; Ezek. 36:26–27). This is why my hard certainties of my heart of stone started to break.
• Repentance & Faith: We really do turn and really do trust, yet both are God’s gifts (Acts 11:18; Phil. 1:29). Not a ritual, but a reorientation; away from self-rule, into the arms of the Son.
• Union with Christ: By faith we are united to Jesus; His record becomes ours (justification), His family becomes ours (adoption), and His life begins to reshape ours (sanctification) (Rom. 5:1; 8:15; 6:4).
• Means of Grace: God nourishes this new life through ordinary means: Scripture read and preached, prayer, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper, and the fellowship of a real church (Acts 2:42). They are not ladders to climb but tables where sons and daughters are fed.

If today you sense the fracture and hear the Father’s voice in His Word, do not harden your heart (Heb. 3:15). Turn from your self-rule and entrust yourself to Christ. Then take the next obedient, ordinary step: find a faithful church, be baptized if you have not already been, sit under the preached Word, come to the Table, pray with the saints, and keep returning to the Father, who keeps drawing you back to Himself.

The Motif That Holds Me

I still don’t know what happened in that Oklahoma church thirty years ago. Perhaps my biological father spoke to God with the honesty that only desperation can sometimes bring. I hope so. I place him in the hands of the Judge who always does right (Gen. 18:25).

What I do know is this: the Father I once resented has become my home. He didn’t make me a perfect man; He made me a son. He gave me a wife who is wiser than my fears and nine children who have taught me more about love and limits than any book ever could. Our house carries laughter and lament in the same walls. We repent a lot. We forgive a lot. We pray before meals and sometimes during arguments. And I have learned that a man can be both broken and fathered at the same time.

If your story holds an empty chair or a slammed door, hear me: your deepest need is not a different past but a present Father. The gospel is the story of that Father, holy and happy, just and merciful, who resolved our problem at His own expense and now brings prodigals to His table. “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3:1).

Thirty years on, I still miss what might have been. But I am kept by what is: a redemptive Father who sought me, bought me, and is, even now, raising me. And if He can turn an angry, argument-picking atheist into a man who calls Him “Abba,” He can rewrite your story, too. Not with spectacle, usually, but with the steady grace of a Father who won’t stop welcoming His children home.