When Louie Giglio was a college student, a mentor quoted A.W. Tozer to him — and it stopped him cold. “What comes into our minds when we think about God,” Tozer wrote, “is the most important thing about us.” The idea was simple, but the implication cut deep: we don’t just believe things about God in the abstract. We move toward our mental image of Him.
For Giglio, pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta, that insight has driven his ministry for 30 years. His goal is to do two things at once: reframe who God actually is, and repair whatever damage our earthly fathers may have done to our ability to see Him clearly.
The premise is uncomfortable. Most of us carry a picture of God built from experience, and our fathers are the primary architects of that picture. The dad who was absent, harsh, distracted or just imperfect leaves marks we often don’t notice until we try to trust a God who calls Himself Father and find we can’t quite do it.
“God is not the reflection of our earthly dad,” Giglio says, “but He is the perfection of our earthly dad.”
It’s a careful distinction. The invitation is to consider that everything good about fatherhood — the protection, the guidance, the unconditional love — exists most fully somewhere else, in a Father who never falls short of it.
Getting there requires honesty about where we’re starting from. Giglio says the first move is simply helping people see God as He actually is, which tends to expose how distorted our existing image has become. Once that gap is visible, the harder work begins: rebuilding trust.
“Can I trust anyone after what my dad did to me?” It’s the question Giglio says underlies almost everything, and he keeps returning to the cross as the only ground firm enough to stand on.
“Time and time again I tried to lead us to the cross,” he says, “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.”
From there, he says, something shifts. Once people reframe their identity as a loved son or daughter, the change moves outward. “They can be revolutionary agents in the affairs of their lives — and be used by God as an agent of restoration and forgiveness in their relationships on Earth.”
Discipline is where that trust gets tested most. Giglio is careful not to soften it. A good father doesn’t give his kids everything they ask for, and neither does God. Some of His discipline is simply a no — a door closed, a headwind introduced, a comfort removed.
“He’s just being a father,” Giglio says, “saying: ‘You have no idea, but that is not what you want, and you can’t see it but I can see it. And I’m just going to say no to that because I love you.'”
The flip side, he says, is correction — and it’s something he understands personally. “I grew up in an era when people got spanked, and 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 would always explain to me it was for my good. Then 10 years later, 15 years later, 20 years later, we realize it did hurt, but it was just them helping us get on another path. I think God does that through closing doors, putting headwind in our lives, making us uncomfortable.”
The Prodigal Son is unavoidable in any conversation about God and fatherhood, and Giglio doesn’t try to dodge it. What Jesus paints in that story, he argues, is the clearest picture of the Gospel we have.
“When Jesus painted a picture of this dignified father running down the road and embracing his son and kissing him 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 there’s a part of the story Giglio says gets skipped over. The father doesn’t go find the son in the pig pen. He waits.
“He waits until the kid hits rock bottom and returns,” Giglio says, “but is already waiting for him. He was hoping his son would return.”
The welcome is extravagant. The return has to be real. It’s what Giglio is ultimately after — the claim that there is a perfect Father, that He can be trusted completely, and that seeing Him clearly changes everything else: your identity, your relationships, your capacity to extend to others the forgiveness you’ve struggled to receive yourself.
Thirty years in, Giglio is still making that case. The question he leaves is the same one Tozer’s words pressed on him as a college student: when you close your eyes and think about God, what do you actually see?
