Tim Chester, in his 2018 book Enjoying God, uses the term “fathered world” frequently. It’s a helpful term. He uses it to explain how the world we live in—and each of our personal lives within it—is upheld and guided not just by God, but as Christians by our heavenly Father. And this is true with blessings as well as hardships.
A Fathered World of Blessings
On the chapter about enjoying God’s gifts, entitled “In Every Pleasure We Can Enjoy the Father’s Generosity,” Chester explains how “it all begins with the Father’s love.” He writes,
“Maybe you think God is gracious because that’s what God is supposed to be, but you assume there’s no delight in it for him, no pleasure, no affection. At best he tolerates you. More often he’s frustrated with you. John Owen says some believers are ‘afraid to have good thoughts of God’. But the Father chose us ‘before the creation of the world’. ‘In love [God the Father] predestined us for adoption’ (Ephesians 1 v 4-5). It all begins with the Father’s love. The Father is not reluctant. Quite the opposite: it all starts with his love.” (38, emphasis original)
Later, he explains this using the term “fathered”:
“The world is full of signs of our Father’s intimate involvement. We live in a fathered world.” (42, emphasis original).
Why then do we struggle believing this? It originates all the way back in the Garden of Eden and the lie of the serpent:
“The lie of the serpent in the Garden of Eden was that God is an uncaring Father and so we should go it alone. Satan didn’t dispute the existence of God nor his power. The lie was that God doesn’t care. All the evidence was to the contrary…Yet humanity believed the lie that God is distant and uncaring. We still do. Still today, says Jesus, our problem is that we lack faith…We don’t believe God cares. We think of him as distant. We see this world as unfathered.” (44)
“We see this world as unfathered.” We forget not only that it’s controlled by God, but by our Father.
A Fathered World of Formation
So we live in a world where all the blessings points us to our loving Father. But what about hardship? Still, we live in a fathered world. In the chapter entitled “In Every Hardship We Can Enjoy the Father’s Formation,” using Hebrews 12:5-8 as his backdrop, Chester explains,
“Seeing this world as a fathered world enables us to welcome every hardship as a sign of the Father’s love. And that has the power to turn a bad day into a good day. A bad day becomes a day full of God’s fatherly discipline, and God’s fatherly disciple is a sign of fatherly love.” (53)
In other words, the same Father who blesses us with gifts also orchestrates our lives in such a way that we may become more holy—which is both for our good and happiness and for his glory.
This is a heartening thought: everything in my life is placed there for my holiness, for my good. Chester writes,
“For Jesus, discipline didn’t mean correcting what was wrong [although it can mean that for us sinners, Chester explains elsewhere], but equipping him for his role. In the same way, God the Father carefully organizes all the circumstances of our lives to equip us to trust him and serve him.” (58)
He then applies this to daily life:
“Think about that for a moment. Look back over your day. Everything that has happened was put in place by God the Father for your good and to develop your holiness. Think about the activities you planned and events that took you by surprise. Think about what you’ve enjoyed and what went wrong…All were part of his tailor-made training regimen. This perspective radically alters how we view each moment of our day. Sometimes we’re forced to think though the big challenges that life throws our way: things like long-term illness, unemployment or the less of a child. But we’re less used to seeing day-to-day events as part of God’s design.” (58-59).
Hardship is “put in place by God the Father for your good and to develop your holiness.”
Everything is Fathered
The point Chester makes is that everything—the big and the small, the happy and the hard—is part of God’s design for our good, happiness, and holiness. This includes the blessings, which clearly show us the Father’s goodness and love; and it includes the hardships, which we can also know come from the Father’s goodness and love.
May we take heart: We live in a fathered world.
