Abba: God the Father: Faith for the weary. Hope for the honest. Room for the mind. (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798243197779)

The God who made two trillion galaxies knows your name. Both halves of that sentence are true, and almost nobody can hold them at once.

Lose the majesty, and God becomes small - a life coach, a warm feeling, a projection of your own preferences with a halo on. He is comfortable, and He cannot save you, because He is not larger than you.

Lose the love, and God becomes a threat - the watcher, the scorekeeper, the vast power that is monitoring you and is not pleased. You cannot rest under Him. You can only manage Him.

ABBA refuses both.

Because when Jesus taught His followers to pray, He opened with Father - and then, in the very next breath, hallowed be Thy name. Intimacy and majesty, at full strength, in a single sentence, without apology.

This book walks you into both.

You will stand in front of the God who is not your size - the I AM, the God whose holiness undid Isaiah on the temple floor, the God who is not tame and never was.

And then you will watch Him stoop. Psalm 113 says He is so exalted that He must bend down even to see the heavens - and He doesn't stop at the stars. He keeps going, all the way down, to lift a specific person out of an ash heap.

You will find the God who walked the covenant corridor alone, in the dark, taking both halves of an oath so that a frightened old man could sleep. The God who says I taught Ephraim to walk, taking them by the arms - and I bent down to feed them. The God whose self-definition, delivered days after the golden calf, begins with the word merciful.

And if the word Father is a hard word for you - if it arrives carrying a face you would rather not see - this book will not rush you, will not shame you, and will not pretend your difficulty is a failure of faith.

It may not be a spiritual failure. It may be a memory.

The Father Jesus described is not the one most of us were introduced to. And the fastest way to be free of the god you were afraid of is to discover that it was never Him.

Inside: 21 chapters in four parts - the majesty, the heart, the love that came looking, and the life that follows. Reflection questions and a practice in every chapter. Fourteen practices collected at the back, for when you need them.

Faith for the weary. Hope for the honest. Room for the mind.