Becoming a King: The Path to Restoring the Heart of a ManSample

Becoming a Son

How have we learned the Father? It would be better for us to know nothing about him than to have learned him wrong. – George MacDonald

The first doorway we must travel through on our path toward becoming a king is to choose sonship. It is a choice. Are we willing to become our Father’s sons again? 

Will you open your heart to unlearn the Father as you have learned him and instead learn him as he truly is? The Father is pursuing you. He is opening up his heart and his kingdom and his treasures to you. He is asking, Son, are you ready to become who you were born to be? We can finish this together.

If we are ever to become the kind of men to whom God can entrust his kingdom, the journey must begin in the most unlikely of places. We must choose a spirit of sonship, taking the place set before us as the greatest gift of God’s heart, receiving the identity against which every war has been waged by our enemy, who knows who we are and fears who we could become.

In many ways, to consent to being a son is the hardest and the easiest of the narrow gates through which we must enter. It is easy because all it requires is a genuine turning of our souls to receive the lavish love of the Father. Yet it is the hardest because it will require us to begin forsaking the many other places in which our wounded hearts have sought the independent and self-sufficient life for so many years.

It will require relearning everything, throwing out our former map and receiving a new one that outlines a reality more dangerous and more joy-filled than we have ever dared to dream.

As George MacDonald said, “Since we are the sons of God, we must become the sons of God.” Whatever else we encounter when we engage the life of Jesus, we encounter a person living fully as a son. Sonship is the truest state of being. It is the epicenter of Jesus’ life and it is the epicenter of ours. And only from an ongoing experience of sonship can we bring our strength—rather than our question—to the world. 

If we live from an ever-expanding reservoir of sonship as our primary identity, we will become the kind of person who can prevail in any circumstances, no matter what the cost. Even more, we will recover the lost treasure of deep and lasting joy.

Reflection Questions

1. How have you learned “father”? Take an honest inventory. Think of the male figures in your life growing up—the good and the bad, including your father and/or stepfather, your coaches, teachers, pastors, men held out as role models in media, perhaps fathers of your friends. Call to mind and make a list of the men who surrounded you. Without editing or filtering, what words would you use to describe the traits you found in those men?
2. How has God raised the condition of fatherlessness in your heart? Notice “what is not working” in your life as a signpost to the feeling of fatherlessness. What have you done with this part of your story?
3. Pause for a few moments and think back over the last decade or so of your story. What are several examples of ways that God was working to father you, even if at the time you may not have had the capacity to receive or respond as a son?

Closing Prayer

Jesus, by your power and authority I break the agreements I have made with the lies in my story that are set against the truth of who you are. I break agreement with the lie that I am an orphan, that I deserve to be alone, that I am too weak of a man to be desired as a son, that I am a disappointment of a son to my Father in heaven. 

[Pause and observe what other lies come to your mind that you want to renounce.]

In the place of these lies, I agree with the truth of who you truly are and who you long to be in my life. I receive afresh a spirit of sonship. I crucify the self-sufficient life, and I crucify independence. I choose instead to receive the resurrection life of Jesus Christ and union with you. I choose to become what I already am: your beloved son. I choose to receive you as my True Father. I unite my heart with your heart and receive the full portion of my inheritance as your son. In the place of fear, I receive an increase of faith. In the place of scarcity, I receive your abundance. In the place of self-sufficiency, I receive the strength of total dependency upon your Life rising up within me. I choose to be infused with the same love you offer your son, Jesus Christ. I am your son. You are my Father. I receive you as my Father and ask that you would father me today and every day going forward. Amen.