Many, many children today are growing up in one-parent homes. Maybe when you were a child your father turned his back on your mother for another woman, and your home was torn apart. You may not think you’re worth very much or surely your dad would have stayed with the family.

If you were abandoned by your dad, you may have difficulty thinking of God as your heavenly Father. A friend of mine says that the only thing that helped her with that concept was studying the characteristics of God as our Father that are found in the Bible. In other words, instead of working from her experience with her own father to help her understand God, she had to do the reverse—learn what kind of a Father God is, and then tell herself, “That’s the way a human father should be, even though my Dad certainly was not like that.”

Psalm 27:10 says, “Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me.” The least likely people in the whole world to abandon you are your mom and dad.  A mother, especially, will usually believe in her child when everyone else gives up.  Yet, God says though even your own mother or father would forsake you, God will never, never forsake you.  In Psalm 9 the writer David said, “You, Lord, have never forsaken those who seek you” (verse 10).

The word “forsake” is not one we use frequently nowadays. But listen to its synonyms: abandon, desert, leave, disown, renounce, relinquish, or give up.  Those describe what God will never do to you.  On the contrary, when you ask Him into your life, He promises to be with you always. When you become God’s child, He puts His Spirit within you so that literally He never, never leaves you.

If you have never done so, ask God to take you into His family. He loves you. He is a Father you can count on.