When Louie Giglio talks about God as a Father, he knows he’s treading into dangerous territory.
Because for a lot of people, the word father doesn’t evoke warmth or safety. It brings up silence. Absence. Explosions behind closed doors. Or maybe nothing at all — just a hollow where love was supposed to be.
So when Giglio says God wants to be your Father, he knows exactly how loaded that sounds.
“We don’t move toward a theological idea,” he explains. “We move toward our mental image of God. And for a lot of us, that image is cracked.”
In Not Forsaken: Finding Freedom as Sons & Daughters of a Perfect Father, the longtime pastor of Passion City Church isn’t offering another Christian pep talk. He’s making a radical claim: that no matter what kind of earthly dad you had — or didn’t have — there’s a Father who sees you, loves you, and is already running down the road to meet you.
“The main idea behind the book is that we can know God as a perfect father,” Giglio said. “I’ve been sharing that message for 30 years. It really impacted me when I was a college student.”
Giglio points back to the words of theologian A.W. Tozer, who said the most important thing about a person is what they think about when they think about God. That quote stuck with him.
“I knew all these attributes about God — everlasting, sovereign, just — but I didn’t quite know how to put my arms around them,” he said. “Once I realized Jesus was helping me see God as a father who embodies all those things, that’s when it became personal. That’s when I realized: this is a God I can actually know.”
But that shift — from a distant God to a personal Father — is easier said than done. Especially if your experience with your earthly dad was marked by abandonment, criticism or control. According to Giglio, that’s where a lot of people get stuck.
“God is not the reflection of our earthly dad,” he said. “He is the perfection of our earthly dad.”
That idea becomes a turning point in the book — and, for many readers, in their healing. Because for all the talk of God as loving, some still wonder: Can I really trust Him? Or is He just another authority waiting to let me down?
“This is a big issue for all of us: Can I trust anyone after what my dad did to me?” Giglio said. “Time and time again I try to lead people to the cross, because there a few things are certain: God loves us. God doesn’t ask us to sweep anything under the rug. He’s trustworthy. We can depend on Him.”
It’s not just about healing from pain, though. Giglio believes that when people reframe their identity — not as orphans or performers, but as sons and daughters — their lives begin to change.
“They can be revolutionary agents in the affairs of their lives,” he said. “They can be used by God as agents of restoration and forgiveness in their relationships on Earth.”
That kind of freedom, however, doesn’t mean getting everything you want. In fact, part of knowing God as a good Father means accepting His discipline — a concept that can feel confusing in a culture where love often gets equated with constant affirmation.
“Any good father doesn’t give his kid everything he asks for,” Giglio said. “Some of God’s discipline is when He tells us no.”
That kind of no might feel like disappointment, but it’s often protection.
“You have no idea, but that is not what you want,” Giglio said. “You can’t see it, but I can. And I’m going to say no because I love you.”
Other times, God’s discipline shows up as correction — the loving kind that nudges you back toward who you were made to be. Giglio compares it to his own upbringing.
“I grew up in an era when people got spanked,” he said. “Sometimes it was just my dad saying, ‘I’m not going to let you do that,’ or ‘I’m going to penalize you because you did do it.’ But he’d always explain it was for my good.”
Now, years later, he sees those moments not as control, but as care. And he believes God does the same.
“God closes doors. He puts headwind in our lives. He makes us uncomfortable,” he said. “You see this in Scripture — where God intervenes to move people in a different direction. But it takes sensitivity. You have to be willing to ask: ‘God, are you in this? Do I need to be still? Do I need to listen?’”
For Giglio, one of the clearest pictures of who God really is comes from the parable of the prodigal son — a story Jesus told about a son who runs away, hits rock bottom and returns home, expecting rejection.
Instead, his father runs to him.
“I think it tells us everything,” Giglio said. “When Jesus painted a picture of this dignified father running down the road and embracing his son and looking past the muck and the failure and the embarrassment, He clarified how the gospel is not about being good or bad. It’s about being dead or alive.”
But even in that story, the father doesn’t rescue the son from the pigpen. He waits — hoping, watching, ready to embrace.
“There is a repentance moment,” Giglio said. “The father doesn’t go find the kid and bail him out. He waits until the kid returns. But he’s already watching the road.”
That tension — between grace and responsibility, love and discipline — is part of what makes the idea of God as a father so compelling. He’s not passive. He’s not absent. And He’s not here to shame you.
He’s here to call you home.
“You are not forsaken,” Giglio said. “You are not forgotten. You are not unwanted. You are a son. You are a daughter. You are loved by a perfect Father.”
