Your Parents Were Never the Point

There’s a moment most of us have had — standing in the kitchen, or sitting in a car, or lying awake in the dark — thinking about something your parents said or did or didn’t do. Maybe it was small. Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe your parents have been mostly great and you’re still collecting a mental list of their greatest misses. Maybe things at home have been genuinely hard, and this article is already making you a little uncomfortable.

That’s okay. Stay with it.

Because in Matthew 7:9–11, Jesus brings up flawed parents on purpose — and somehow, incredibly, he wants it to encourage you.

The Analogy You Didn’t Expect

Jesus is wrapping up a section of his sermon where he’s been talking about prayer — about how God invites us to ask, seek, and knock with confidence because of his generous heart toward us. And then, to illustrate just how generous God is, he pulls out this comparison:

“Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?”

Matthew 7:9–11

He’s basically saying: even imperfect parents — even evil parents, in his actual words — still tend to feed their hungry kids and not hand their children dangerous things. A decent parent doesn’t warm up a boulder for dinner when their kid asks for food. A decent parent doesn’t dump a live snake on the table when their kid asks for fish sticks.

And yet — and here’s the turn — even those parents are flawed. Sometimes selfish. Sometimes short-tempered. Sometimes inconsistent. Jesus doesn’t sugarcoat it; he calls the crowd he’s talking to “evil.” He means it theologically: all of us are corrupted by sin, and that includes moms and dads.

And still — even they give good gifts sometimes.

The Picture Your Parents Were Never Meant to Be

Here’s where it gets personal.

A lot of us have formed our mental picture of God based on our earthly fathers. If your dad was harsh and critical, if nothing you did was ever quite good enough, if warmth and acceptance always came with conditions — there’s a good chance some part of your brain has pasted that image onto God and called it theology.

Jesus wants to pull that image down.

Your heavenly Father is not your earthly dad, scaled up. He is something else entirely. Take the best things about your parents — their provision, their protection, the moments they actually came through for you — and multiply them by a billion. You still haven’t gotten close.

Were your parents kind most of the time? God is kind even in the moments no one’s watching. Were your parents reliable when life slowed down? God is reliable at 2 a.m. on the worst night of your life. Were your parents accepting when you performed well? God is accepting even when you’ve just failed spectacularly.

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.“

James 1:17

That last part means God doesn’t have good days and off days. He doesn’t get tired and snap at you. He isn’t distracted when you come to him. He is always, only, constantly good — and every single thing he sends your way, even the things that look like disappointments, comes from that goodness.

What If Your Parents Weren’t Even Decent?

Maybe you read that whole “decent parents provide and protect” section and you thought: mine didn’t even do that.

Maybe there wasn’t food because the money went somewhere else. Maybe home wasn’t safe. Maybe you never had a father in the picture at all.

The Psalms have you. 

“When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up.”

Psalm 27:10

Scripture calls God a Father to the fatherless. Not a substitute Father, not a backup plan — the Father. If you got a broken, absent, or dangerous version of parenthood, you weren’t cheated out of a good Father. You have one. He’s been there the whole time.

The Blessing You Might Have Missed

So what is the blessing of flawed parents?

It’s this: even their imperfect, inconsistent, sometimes frustrating goodness is a faint shadow — a glimpse — of the perfect goodness of your heavenly Father. The times your mom came through for you, the moments your dad actually showed up, even the smallest kindnesses from imperfect people — those are tiny, low-resolution previews of something infinitely better.

Don’t let your parents’ failures make you afraid to approach God. Don’t project their limitations onto him. Let even their small attempts at love point you toward the One whose love has no ceiling and no conditions.

He invites you to ask. He promises to give good things. And unlike every human parent who’s ever lived, he will never, ever let you down.