In this Q&A, Pastor Bill Johnson shares how we can accomplish a lot more by living out of our identity as a child of God than we can when we try to earn it and how the Lord often uses our earthly fathers and mother to teach us to hear His voice.
could you tell us a little bit about
your own journey in becoming a son of
the father um
you know i think probably everybody goes
through
seasons or times where um where
where we were ambitious or were anxious
to become
something to accomplish something i
think those are fairly natural desires
but they can be really disruptive to to
discovering who god made us to be
and we accomplish a lot more when we
live out of our identity as a child of
god
than when we try to earn it and for me
that’s that’s it right there i mean i
i learned it as a young man but i’m
still learning it now quite a bit older
i think probably the biggest life change
for me was when i had my own kids
i started to see it different i started
to see him different
when i saw me moved by
my own kids you know you see you see
you feel the heart of a father and then
you see what jesus says he says if you
being evil
know how to give good gifts to your
children how much more your heavenly
father
so there’s that contrast that i am so
restricted and so limited and yet i am
moved to tears in love for my own kids
and and if i feel that way
and i am finite what does the infinite
one look like that changed everything
for me
yeah everything that’s beautiful some of
my favorite stories that you share
are those of your own father your
earthly father
and um i think it is significant to
address the fact that we do have real
needs
from earthly spiritual parents or
physical parents
how would you say we balance that with
um the need to get
actually our identity and and really
important needs met by
the heavenly father well
um let me use the example of a of a baby
sheep a lamb
a lamb doesn’t know the voice of the
shepherd a lamb knows
the voice of the you sheep the la the
the mother sheep
and it’s in following the mother it
learns
to recognize the voice of the shepherd
and so it’s that way with earthly
fathers and the spiritual fathers you
connect with the ones god’s put over you
you
you learn to relate to them you draw
from them you you come alive from what
they say about your life
and in that journey with them you learn
to recognize more and more
the voice of the father of course it’s
not either or
we are uh humanly connected in community
as we’re supposed to be
but we also have to have our own
relationship with god
and and so it’s it’s it comes down to
this there are times where
the lord will not satisfy you with what
you can get from the people around you
and you
you have to go to god to get it and
there are other times
he will seal up the answer in the mouth
of a friend or in this case
a spiritual father and you can pray
night and day fast do everything you
want but until you seek the counsel from
that father
and it’s uh you learn in the doing it’s
not a
it’s not a formula you know we can write
out you know two days of this three days
of that
it’s uh it’s a journey where we’re on
this quest to know god
and we will respond to whatever tool he
uses if it’s a
another man or a mother a woman in our
life speaking to us
great if it’s our prayer life great it’s
just that we are responding
to the cry to grow and to know him more
so it’s
it’s both it’s both yeah