I am a son and I am a father. Both at the same time, every day of my life.
And for a while now I've been on a quest that sits at the intersection of those two things. I want to be a true son of God. And I want to be a father here on earth who looks like the Father I serve. Those aren't two goals. They're one goal, because I've become convinced the only way to do the second one right is to get the first one right.
Here's my honest starting point, and it isn't a comfortable one. I didn't learn much about fathering from my own father. That's all I'll say about that, except this: I know I'm not alone. Unless you were raised by a godly man, you were probably raised by a man who was simply doing what he was taught, by a man who was doing what he was taught, all the way back up the chain. And somewhere in that chain, nobody stopped to ask the Father how it was supposed to be done.
So I made a decision. I don't want to be taught how to father by a human (some are helpful though!). I want to be taught by the Lord.
And I mean that almost literally. If there's a man out there who fathers better than the heavenly Father, have him stand up. He can plead his case directly to God. I won't be pleading it for him. My Father is the FATHER. And His curriculum is open enrollment. It's called the Bible, and once you start reading it this way, you realize it's a fathering manual from cover to cover.
Can I learn from believing men? Absolutely. Men who have translated the Father's love into a real human household are worth watching, and I watch them closely (although they are rare). But that's exactly what they are. Translations. I want to keep going back to the original language.
Which brings me to the question this whole post is really about. What does the Father's love actually look like? Because I'll warn you now. It's not all hugs.
What the Father Actually Looks Like
Let's be honest about what's in the Book, because a lot of people aren't.
Read the Old Testament straight through and the Father will scare you. Mount Sinai wasn't a worship service. It was fire, smoke, thunder, and a mountain trembling so violently that God told the people not even to touch its base or they'd die. The same Father who counts the hairs on your head also flooded the earth, leveled cities, and sent His own chosen people into exile when they wouldn't turn around. Fire and brimstone are not a caricature invented by angry preachers. They're in there.
And here's what is worth acknowledging (and accepting). That's the Father too. Not a different God from the one in the New Testament, not an earlier draft that Jesus came to apologize for. The same Father.
So how does that square with love? I've wrestled with it, and here's where I've landed. Everything the Father does flows out of three things, in this order.
Immovable love. Discipline. And pruning.
Let me take them one at a time.
Immovable (Eternal & Unwavering) Love
Start with what He is, because Scripture doesn't say God has love. It says God is love (1 John 4:8). Love isn't one of His tools. It's His essence. And His love has a quality that no human love fully achieves.
It does not move.
"I the LORD do not change" (Malachi 3:6). The Father of lights "does not change like shifting shadows" (James 1:17). And Paul takes it all the way: neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither height nor depth, "nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39). His gifts and His call are "irrevocable" (Romans 11:29).
Immovable love. Undeniable love. Irrevocable love. Always-there love.
Now think about what that means for every terrifying scene in Scripture. If He doesn't move, then every bit of distance between us and Him was created by us. We drift. He doesn't. We wander into the far country. He stands at the end of the driveway. All that fire isn't a Father who left. It's a Father who won't, confronting children who did.
And think about what it means for a child. You can slam the door, scream that you hate him, run as far as your legs can carry you, and when you finally turn around, he is exactly where you left him. Somebody in the relationship has to be the fixed point, or nobody ever finds their way home. The Father is home, permanently.
The clearest picture He ever painted of Himself is the father in the prodigal son story (Note: I tear up every time I read it), and the detail everyone misses is that the father runs. A patriarch in that culture did not run. It was beneath his dignity. This one sees his son from a long way off, which means he was watching the road the whole time, hikes up his robes, and sprints. The immovable Father turns out to also be the running Father.
He won't chase you into the far country. But the second you turn around, He closes the distance faster than you can.
One more scene, because it shows how this love speaks. At the Jordan river, before Jesus had preached a single sermon or performed a single miracle, the Father's voice came from heaven: "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased" (Matthew 3:17). Before the resume. Before the performance. The blessing came first. Most of us learned it backwards growing up: perform, and then I'll be pleased. The Father speaks identity first, and the life flows out of it.
That's the center. Everything else the Father does is this love in motion.
Discipline
Here's the hand nobody wants to talk about, and here's where FATHERLY love (the all-caps kind) starts looking very unlike love.
The Book of Hebrews says it as bluntly as it can be said.
"The Lord disciplines the one he loves, and he chastens everyone he accepts as his son... God is treating you as sons. For what son is there whom his father does not discipline?" (Hebrews 12:6-7).
Read that again. Discipline isn't the interruption of the Father's love. It's the evidence of it. Hebrews goes so far as to say that if you're never disciplined, you should question whether you're a son at all (that should sound terrifying to some). Moses said the same thing a thousand years earlier: "As a man disciplines his son, so the LORD your God disciplines you" (Deuteronomy 8:5). Human fatherhood isn't a metaphor we project onto God. It's the comparison God Himself chose.
But we have to get one distinction right, because everything depends on it. Discipline is not punishment. Punishment looks backward and makes you pay. Discipline looks forward and makes you grow. The Greek word in Hebrews 12 is ‘paideia’, the word for training up a child, not sentencing a criminal. For the believer, the punishment question was settled at the cross. It fell on Christ, all of it. What's left for us isn't payback. It's training.
And the training comes for two different reasons. This took me a while to see, and it changed how I read the whole Bible.
The first kind is corrective. This is the discipline that comes when we wander from that immovable love. The prodigal's pigsty. Jonah's storm, which looked like wrath and was actually pursuit. Israel's wilderness: "He humbled you, causing you to hunger... to teach you that man does not live on bread alone" (Deuteronomy 8:3). Exile itself. When we move away from the love that doesn't move, love comes after us, and it does not always come gently. The storm is love saying come home.
But there's a second kind, and if you miss it, you'll misread half the pain in your life. Because sometimes the hard thing comes when you haven't wandered at all (this one is tough for me, but I definitely understand it). Jesus "learned obedience from what he suffered" (Hebrews 5:8), and He never strayed an inch. This is formative discipline. Training, not correction. The Father putting a son through something hard, not because the son did wrong, but because the son is capable of more. When the disciples saw a blind man and asked who sinned to cause it, Jesus said neither him nor his parents (John 9:3). Not all suffering is a summons home. Sometimes it's the Father training a son who's already home.
Hebrews doesn't pretend any of it feels good: "No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it" (Hebrews 12:11). Trained by it.
Okay, A Bit of My Personal Bias
And here's the plainest way I know to say what that verse means. You can't judge love by how it feels in the moment. You judge it in arrears. You judge it thirty, forty, fifty years later, by how it helped that child grow into the person they became (OHHH, do I know this all too well). The hug feels like love instantly. The hard ‘no’ doesn't. Give it a few decades. Both were love.
Now let me be a little judgmental for a second, because I think our generation needs it. Both of these together is the goal, the hug and the no. But if those two ever get separated, they are not equally dangerous. The hug without the no is where we get in trouble, because it tells a kid you're fine exactly as you are, and no kid is, and neither are we. And I'll go one further. If you forced me to pick just one (please don’t!) I'd take the ‘no’. Here's why. The hug is free. Anybody can give it, it costs nothing, and it feels wonderful in both directions. The no is expensive. It costs you the evening, the mood, sometimes a week of being the ‘bad guy’ in your own house. Nobody pays that price for a kid they don't love. The no is the one with the receipt.
But the no draws every ounce of its power from the hug being certain. That's the whole architecture of this post in one sentence: discipline only works as love when it comes from love that doesn't move. The same no from a cold father lands as rejection, and Scripture already told us what that produces: embittered, discouraged kids. So the no I'm defending isn't the no of a hard man. It's the no of a father whose hug was never in question.
And here's the plainest way I know to say what that verse means. You can't judge love by how it feels in the moment. You judge it in arrears. You judge it thirty, forty, fifty years later, by how it helped that child grow into the person they became. The hug feels like love instantly. The hard “no” doesn't. Give it a few decades. Both were love.
Pruning
And then there's the deepest cut of all, and Jesus is the one who told us about it.
"Every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful" (John 15:2). Sit with that sentence. The fruitful branch gets the knife. Not the dead one, not the wandering one. The healthy, growing, producing branch. The Father is a vinedresser, and a vinedresser's hardest cuts are living wood, good green shoots that are quietly drawing sap away from the branches that matter most.
This is where I finally understood what sanctification actually is. It's pruning. The Father, over the course of a whole life, cutting away the parts of me that are not of HIM, and here's the part that stings: not just the sinful parts. Sometimes good things. Good opportunities, good ambitions, (seemingly) good busyness, things that aren't wrong, they're just stealing life from the vital thing. We assume growth means adding. The Father grows fruit by subtracting. As a founder I'd call it ruthless prioritization. He invented it, and He applies it to souls.
But the cutting is not the point. The space is the point.
Because the cleared space doesn't stay empty. It gets filled, with Him. That's the whole mechanism of the vine: "Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself... apart from me you can do nothing" (John 15:4-5). Less branch clutter, more vine life. Every cut makes room for more of Him to flow through. John the Baptist compressed the entire process into eight words: "He must become greater; I must become less" (John 3:30).
And the end state of a fully pruned branch? I've already written it on this blog, because it's the verse that took my hands out of my pockets: "I no longer live, but Christ lives in me" (Galatians 2:20).
So look at the whole portrait now. Immovable love at the center, love that cannot be shaken, separated, or revoked. That love in motion is discipline: a storm for the wanderer, come home, and training for the faithful, become more. And its deepest work is pruning: cut, so the space can be filled with Him, so more fruit comes out the other side.
The Father's harshness and the Father's tenderness turn out to be the same hand doing the same thing. Making room for Himself in His kids.
Now the hard question. How does a flawed, human father translate any of that into a real house with real kids?
The Grand Struggle
Here's where I get down of my VERY tall soap box and start confessing. Because knowing the portrait is not the same as knowing how to paint it, and I am a terrible painter.
I can tell you what the Father looks like. Immovable love, discipline, pruning. But I'm writing this section as a man in the middle of the struggle, not on the other side of it. I'm a son who is still being disciplined and pruned, trying to discipline and prune sons of my own. It's like being a patient who's also doing surgery. And if I'm honest, of the three things the Father does, I'm confident in my ability to do exactly one of them.
Let me take them in order.
Being Immovable
This one I can do. My father gave it to me.
Earlier I said I didn't learn much about fathering from my dad, and that's true. But it's not the whole truth, and this is the place to say the rest. There is one thing my father was, without fail, for my entire childhood: he was there. I never wondered where he was. Not once. Whatever else was missing, the fixed point was not. And now, standing on the other side as a father myself, I understand what a gift that was.
So that pillar came to me as an inheritance, and I will pass it down whole. My kids will never wonder where I am. I will be the north star in their sky, the door that is never locked, the same man on Tuesday that I was on Sunday. When they blow it, and they will, because I did and I do, they will find out that the relationship was never the thing on the table. Consequences, maybe. Distance, never. I want them to be able to run to the far country in their hearts and know, with the certainty of gravity, that the driveway still has a father standing at the end of it.
Discipline in a Divided House
Now the hard one. Homes are rarely fully united on this subject.
Two loving parents can look at the same kid, the same moment, the same offense, and see two different right answers. And when you think about it, of course they can. Look at everything each parent carries into that moment. How you were raised. How you were disciplined. Whether you grew up in a believing home. Whether your own father was seeking the Father's way or just passing along whatever was handed to him, link by link up the chain. Every marriage is the meeting point of two entire histories of discipline, and those histories don't automatically agree.
And the ways to get it wrong run in both directions. Drift one way and discipline quietly disappears altogether. Everything gets a pass, everything gets ignored, and the kid ends up raising himself/herself. Drift the other way and it curdles into over-discipline, all consequences and no warmth, a house with rules but no robe. So what's the right level? How exactly do you marry discipline and love in the same moment, with the same kid? With two parents who have different backgrounds and beliefs?
I'll be straight with you: I'm still working through those questions. This section isn't an answer key. It's my homework, shown for all to see.
But here's one thing that has genuinely changed how I hold the tension: God claims both instincts as His own. "As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you" (Isaiah 66:13). "Can a mother forget the baby at her breast? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!" (Isaiah 49:15). The same God of Sinai speaks in mother-tongue when He wants to describe His tenderness. The Father contains the full spectrum. Human parents split it. Roughly, motherly love is the love of being: you are mine, no matter what, come here. Fatherly love is the love of becoming: I know who you're capable of being, now stand up. A kid raised on only the first grows soft. A kid raised on only the second grows brittle. They need the collision. Which means the tension in a divided house isn't a bug in the marriage. It's the design, badly translated, the two halves of God's love negotiating in the kitchen after the kids are in bed.
But fathers, we have to hold our half with (some, appropriate amounts of) fear and trembling, and here's why. Scripture never once warns God about being too harsh. It warns us. Twice. "Fathers, do not exasperate your children" (Ephesians 6:4). "Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged" (Colossians 3:21). His severity is safe because His love and knowledge are perfect. Ours are not. So we get guardrails He doesn't need. When I feel most certain that a hard line is righteous, that's exactly when I check whether it's the Father's discipline flowing through me or just my frustration wearing his uniform.
And the distinction from earlier does real work in a real house: discipline is not punishment. Punishment makes them pay. Discipline makes them grow. Which means the question before a consequence is never "what do they deserve?" It's "what does this produce?" And it means discipline gets attached to identity, not shame. Not "you're a bad kid," but its exact opposite: "that's not who you are, and we both know it." The Father blessed His Son before the performance. I'm trying to discipline mine the same way, from identity, never toward it.
Pruning a Child
And then there's the one I'm still learning, the one this whole post has been walking toward.
How do you prune a kid?
Remember what makes pruning different from discipline. Discipline responds, either to wandering or to readiness. Pruning is quieter and more surgical: it removes things that aren't wrong, they're just stealing sap. And when I look at my kids' lives through a vinedresser's eyes, I don't mainly see sin that needs correcting. I see comfort that needs cutting.
Take screens (think iPhone, iPad, TV, etc). A screen isn't evil. It's comforting. It's even joyful, in its way. That's precisely what makes it dangerous, because nobody builds a defense against the pleasant. It produces nothing, costs nothing, demands nothing, and it will happily drink every hour of sap a childhood has. It's the greenest, healthiest-looking branch on the vine, and it bears no fruit at all. The Father prunes fruitful branches to get more fruit. The least I can do is prune the fruitless ones.
But here's the part that separates pruning from just being the fun police: the cut is not the point. The space is the point. If I cut the screen time and leave a vacuum, I've just swept the house and left it empty, and something will move in. The cleared space has to be filled, and this is where my whole obsession with discomfort comes home to roost (read some of my other posts in this section). The space is for the hard, real things: the trail, the BJJ mat, the ocean, the chore done to completion, the boredom that turns into imagination, the dinner table with nowhere else to be. Voluntary discomfort is formative discipline, sized for a child. I choose suffering in my own life because it strips me down to where God is. My job as a father is to build small, safe versions of that same stripping into theirs, before life builds unsafe ones without asking.
Okay, my warning. There is a counterfeit version of everything I just described. A father who prunes his kid's life to make room for the father, his dreams, his do-overs, his ego, isn't a vinedresser. He's just a bratty kid carving his initials into a tree for all to see. The test of every cut is the same: whose image is this making room for? The space I clear in my kids is not for me. It's for Him. My highest calling as a dad is to become less so that the Father can become greater in them.
The Job I Accept
Which leads me to the strangest job description I've ever accepted. I said at the top of this post that believing men are translations, and I go back to the original language. Well, to my kids, for now, I am the translation. I'm the only version of the Father's love they can read (so far). That's the weight of it. And the goal, the finish line I actually pray for, is the day they don't need the translation anymore. The day they read Him for themselves, hands in the air, hearts all in, needing their earthly father for nothing but the joy of him.
That's when I'll know the pruning worked. On them, and on me.