The Compassionate Father

Introduction: When You Forget Who God Is

To Bless God is to make space for him to work in us and through us in our truest identities, He as a loving Father, and we as his beloved children.

We are continuing our 365 series through the Bible, and this week we turn to a poem that reorients us to who God truly is.

The Psalms exist not just to reflect human thoughts about God but to guide us in how to relate to Him. They are, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, the "prayer book of the Bible," words given by God so that we might speak rightly to Him. They teach us the language of worship and repentance, reordering our hearts and lives toward God.

I’ll quote Bonhoeffer here: “we confuse wishing, hoping, sighing, lamenting, rejoicing—all of which the heart can do on its own—with praying. But in doing so we confuse earth and heaven, human beings with God. Praying does not mean just pouring out our hearts. Instead, it means finding the way to and speaking with God, whether the heart is full, or empty.”

And this is what the psalms do for us. The Bible is God’s word spoken to us, given to us, providing us with the words to say to him, unlocking communion and community with God. It’s powerful, and freeing. The Psalms invite us to speak God’s words after him, not just about him, but to him. They exist not only to teach and instruct us, they are not merely reflections on the condition of the soul; they are the vehicle through which we make deep connection with the divine Creator. Even when our hearts are empty and impoverished, and there are no words, no emotions, no impulses pulling ourselves toward this connection, we may find in the psalms the expression of truth and reality of God that subverts and overcomes even the poverty of our own hearts.

Psalm 103, in all of its poetic imagery, points the hearer back to to the character and nature of YHWH—what God is like, and what God does. In a world shaped by fractured relationships, performative love, and father-wounds, we often distort the image of God and carry misconceptions that He is cold, distant, or angry. But here, in this short passage, David paints a picture of a Father who is near, patient, merciful, and actively working for the flourishing of His children.

And at the center of Psalm 103 is this truth: God is not who we fear He might be; He is better than we dare to believe.

Maybe you've been wondering if God is distant. Maybe you feel like your prayers hit the ceiling. Or maybe you've been carrying shame you can’t shake. Psalm 103 invites you to stop striving, to remember who God is, and to speak directly to the Father who sees, knows, and loves you.

PRAYER

Father, we come to your Word with open hands and open hearts. We ask that you would give us eyes to see, ears to hear, and hearts soft enough to receive the life-changing truth you’ve spoken to us in love. We don’t just want information—we long for transformation. So would you, through your Spirit, awaken our souls to your compassion this morning? Strip away the noise, the numbness, the resistance. Help us not just to apply your Word to our lives, but to be utterly changed by it—realigned from the inside out. And as we come face to face with your mercy, may it be your kindness that leads us to turn, to trust, to worship. Amen.

Bless the Lord, Oh My Soul (vv. 1-2) 

Psalm 103:1–2 CSB

My soul, bless the Lord, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. My soul, bless the Lord, and do not forget all his benefits.

David starts this psalm by talking to himself: "My soul, bless YHWH.” In English, we usually translate the soul as the immaterial part of the person that exists after death—the ghost in the machine, so to speak, that passes on from us when our bodies fail. But this is an idea we have taken from Greek philosophy, and it is totally foreign to the Hebrew Scriptures. The most basic meaning of “soul”, or nephesh, is throat.

Bless the Lord, oh my throat?

Yes, that’s what it says. But think further on this. Your throat, or neck, accepts food and drink. It takes in air. The throat is an instrument of life for the person, and it came to be understood that the nephesh of a person is his entire being. Everything. Life, breath, energy, joy, physical feelings and urges and emotions. Every part of a person is nephesh. So to say, my soul, bless the Lord, is to say exactly what the psalmist says right after: all that is within me, bless his holy name.

What does it meant to “bless YHWH?” In the Old Testament, the Hebrew term, “to bless,” is about flourishing. It’s about removing obstacles so that creation can be and do exactly as it was always intended—it literally means “to cause to flourish”. So, when the ground is blessed, it multiplies and bears fruit. When a woman is blessed, she is able to bear children. When a society is blessed, it’s people are prosperous and well-regarded among other societies. To curse, on the other hand, is to add obstacles to flourishing, to put barriers in the way that make it difficult for creation to be and do according to its design (see Genesis 3 for more on that). Deuteronomy 30 is a great example of this contrast.

Now, we cannot stop God from being and doing according to his own innate design. How then, can we bless him? By loving him and following him with everything we have. When God’s people say, we trust you, we honor you, we favor you above all other Gods and over all created things, use us as instruments of your glory—we show God favor and through us, God can carry out his will. Yes, God does not need us to bring about his glory, but we are his plan A. He can make rocks cry out when we are silent, but he would rather his beloved humans do the proclaiming. Blessing YHWH, then, is about a mutual dance of blessing the one who blesses. When we give God pride of place in our lives and volunteer ourselves for his mission, God is pleased to work through us and cause our mutual mission to flourish and bear the fruit of the kingdom of God.

So, with everything that I have, with everything my person can offer, I give to God for so that his name and his glory can be made great. And as we talk about God as a father and about what makes him so good and so wonderful, we find that Psalm 103, and so much of this idea of our praise and worship that we do on Sunday mornings and when we pray together or by ourselves, is based upon this right reordering of the human-divine relationship, to reset our idea of trust and dependency and rule when it has drifted so very far.

Because remember, David prays two things here. First: Bless YHWH. Second: Don’t Forget what YHWH is all about. And it’s this forgetting thing that causes a lot of problems. It’s the human tendency—and this is a biblical term here—to drift. To be blown about by the wind (Psalm 1:4) or tossed about by the waves (Eph 4:14). This drift happens in all kinds of ways. Paul speaks of human philosophies, clever ideas and teachings based on the elements of the world. The psalmist just calls it wickedness, or in Psalm 103, iniquity, the slow twisting of the soul until is looks nothing like God’s original design. For you, maybe it’s nothing like that. Maybe it’s just the gradual overtaking of a hurried life. Maybe it’s the slow burning of a desire for more of something—success, money, romance, importance. Maybe it’s the little distractions, the digital algorithms, the 5-second video clips, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling…

Whatever it is, drift doesn’t happen suddenly. It’s not a huge torrent of wind or wave. A few years ago, Beth and I took the kids on a trip down south, and we stopped at the beach to check out the ocean for a couple hours. The kids ran into play while we sat and relaxed for a bit and enjoyed the sun. Then we looked up, and the kids are way out from shore, totally oblivious to the fact that they’ve been floating out to sea. So we yell and scream and eventually have to go out there ourselves to pull them back in.

Spiritual drift is like this. It doesn’t happen in one great moment. It happens over a thousand tiny moments. Inch by inch, we forget who God is and what is all about. We don’t forget God entirely. But our version of God is slowly and gradually replaced by events and experiences and conversations and hurried prayers and bite-sized theology lessons we don’t even realize we are having. And suddenly, who God is to us becomes decidedly different than who he really is. And all of of a sudden, the God we desire to bless isn’t really the God we know. And the soul we have is too fractured and too divided to bless him anyway.

You might feel that today. You might feel like God is either distant, or different, and that dance of mutual flourishing seems impossible right now. This psalm is prayer to return, to remember, why YHWH is such a great and glorious God. It is a prayer to stir up your being to move back toward him with trust and faithfulness.

To Bless God is to make space for him to work in us and through us in our truest identities, He as a loving Father, and we as his beloved children.

God’s Posture: Compassionate and Gracious (v. 8-10)

Psalm 103:8–10 CSB

The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in faithful love. He will not always accuse us or be angry forever. He has not dealt with us as our sins deserve or repaid us according to our iniquities.

This is the most repeated description of God in the Hebrew Scriptures. It originates in Exodus 34, when God reveals His name and character to Moses. It becomes the anchor point of Israel's understanding of who YHWH is. Compassionate (motherly affection). Gracious (fatherly action). Slow to anger (long-nostril patience). Overflowing with hesed, a loyal, unconditional love that refuses to let go.

The human heart is messed up. T.S. Eliot, one of the great modernist poets of the twentieth century, and a self-professed secular humanist, describes “the hollow man;” he is a shape without form, shade without color, gesture without motion. And what Eliot ultimately describes is the man who has rejected God and replaced him with himself. And what this man finds is that when he replaces God with himself, in the end he is left with the realization that he is not God and will never be, and there is no hope for him. The world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper.

But this messed up human heart reveals just how incredible God’s forgiveness and compassion and redemption truly are. What is the first thing in the Bible that God says about himself? Not that he’s all powerful, not that he’s in charge, not that he is holy and pure and untouchable. He is compassionate and gracious. Grace is that holy love that deals with sin through self-sacrifice. Grace is that holy love that collides with human sin and overwhelms it, and absorbs it, and erases it from existence. Not from memory—we do not forget the condition of our brokenness—but from existence.

This verse realigns us. God doesn’t lead with wrath, but with mercy. He doesn’t ignore sin, but He leans in with grace. He is not reluctant to forgive, but abounding in loyal love.

God’s Scale: Love Without Limits (vv. 11-12)

Psalm 103:11–12 CSB

For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his faithful love toward those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

David uses the language of poetry to describe the immeasurable nature of God's love. How high are the heavens? How far is the east from the west? This is the language of infinity.

God's faithful love is cosmic in scope—stretching beyond comprehension. His forgiveness is so complete, it's as though your sin has been launched to the other side of the universe, never to return.

This is the beautiful irony of repentance. In Hebrew, to repent is to "turn the neck" (linked to the word nephesh, meaning neck, life, or soul). This same neck is what we stiffen when we refuse to listen, when we resist God's ways (as Israel is often described as "stiff-necked"). But repentance is the softening of the neck—a turning of the soul. It results in a change of vision, a change of mind, and a change of direction. We don’t run toward guilt. We turn toward grace.

Your sin does not define you in God's eyes. He removes it. Not slightly. Not just far enough. Infinitely. "As far as the east is from the west" means it’s gone in a way that it can never circle back.

Some of you are carrying burdens God already forgave. You’re punishing yourself for what he already released. What would it mean to actually believe your sin has been removed? To live like you’re forgiven—really, truly, completely?

God’s Identity: A Father Who Knows and Cares (v. 13)

Psalm 103:13 CSB

As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.

Here, David introduces something unprecedented in the Old Testament: not only is God a Creator, He is a Father. Not in a distant or general way, but in a relational, emotional, present kind of way. He knows our frailty, our fears, our failures—and yet moves toward us with compassion.

This theme blossoms in the New Testament as Jesus refers to God almost exclusively as Father. In fact, we only understand this verse fully through the lens of the Son. Jesus, the perfect Son of the Father, came to reveal the Father to us—to show us that this compassion is not theory but reality.

Where earthly fathers have failed, the Heavenly Father is faithful. His compassion is not earned but received. And it is available to those who fear Him—those who recognize their smallness and God’s greatness, and trust in His mercy.

Psalm 103 is wrapped around this relatively new idea introduced in the Hebrew Scriptures through the Psalms. It is this idea that God, YHWH, the Creator and Sustainer of all things, is a Father to human beings. But he is not only a father in that he bears new life and replicates himself on the earth—which, as image bearers of God, we do reflect his person and character and rule—he is a father in that he loves us, cares for us, restores us, and redeems us.

This is stunning. In the Old Testament, God is rarely called Father in a relational sense. But here, David personalizes it. He’s saying: God sees me. God knows me. God cares.

God as a father, a good father, a gracious, compassionate, forgiving, father, can sometimes be hard to wrap our heads around. Because our earthly fathers often get it wrong. I get it wrong. I pray so often that my kids will find their way forward despite my failures. I pray that they can see my faults and missteps for what they are, the actions of an imperfect dad. And that when I occasionally get it right, they can see its just a shadow of the perfect dad that they have.

But Psalm 103 redefines fatherhood through the character of God. This is not the kind of father you have to impress or perform for. He knows you. He made you. And he has compassion on you.

He Knows What You’re Made of (vv. 14-16) 

Psalm 103:14–16 CSB

For he knows what we are made of, remembering that we are dust. As for man, his days are like grass— he blooms like a flower of the field; when the wind passes over it, it vanishes, and its place is no longer known.

God is a loving parent. He knows our weakness. He understands our frailties. We are like dust, the psalmist says. Our days are like grass. We bloom for a moment like a flower, and then we vanish with the wind. The impact of a single human life in the scope of all human existence, of space and time and matter, is ultimately insignificant. I don’t care if you were Ghandi or Martin Luther King Jr. or the President of the United States. You are a flower of the field that vanishes with the wind. Your efforts, however herculean, however well-intentioned or well-informed, will end up hollow, with a whimper, and not a bang.

We need a loving parent who knows our weakness and understands our frailties and our fallibility. And in contrast to our days like grass, God the Father offers us a faithful love that stretches from eternity to eternity, to those who fear him.

What would change if you stopped pretending you had it all together? If you came to God not with your resume but with your need?

Eternity to Eternity (v. 17) 

Psalm 103:17 CSB

But from eternity to eternity the Lord’s faithful love is toward those who fear him, and his righteousness toward the grandchildren

The psalm zooms out: “From eternity to eternity, the Lord’s faithful love is toward those who fear him.” Your life is like grass. It fades. But his love doesn’t. Your moments are fleeting. But his mercy is not.

This psalm is not just a call to worship. It’s a call to repentance. And repentance, in Hebrew, is not about guilt—it’s about turning. The word for “repent” is related to the word for “neck” (“nephesh”), because when the neck turns, the direction changes. Your whole life follows your vision. The tragedy of sin is that we become stiff-necked, unable to turn. But the gift of grace is this: you can turn today. And when you do, you don’t just turn from something; you turn toward someone.

Gospel Connection: Jesus Reveals the Father’s Love

The truth of Psalm 103 is this: you are more broken than you care to admit, and yet more loved than you dare to believe.

When Jesus steps into the story, He doesn’t just talk about the Father—He embodies Him. Jesus is the perfect reflection of Psalm 103 in human flesh:

He is compassionate toward the sinner.

He is gracious to the outcast.

He is slow to anger when betrayed.

He is abounding in loyal love to the end.

And then—on the cross—He bears the cost of our sin so that we can receive the full measure of God’s compassion. He is accused so we can be forgiven. He is abandoned so we can be adopted. He is crushed so we can be carried.

Romans 2:4 says it clearly: “It is the kindness of God that leads you to repentance.”

Not shame. Not guilt. Not pressure.

Kindness.

The kind of kindness that softens the neck, turns the head, and shifts the direction of an entire life. The Father’s kindness calls to you. The question is: will you turn?

Gospel Transformation: What Do We Do With This?

V–I–M: Vision, Intention, Means

VISION:

Picture a life where you don’t have to keep pretending. Where your identity isn’t built on performance but on belovedness. Where your sin has been removed—as far as the east is from the west—and your soul is free to bless the Lord again.

INTENTION:

What part of your life has grown stiff-necked? What voice from the Father have you been ignoring? What burden are you still carrying that Jesus already removed?

MEANS:

This week, slow down.

Sit with Psalm 103, and ask: “Where have I forgotten who God really is?”

Practice confession and silence. Name the ways you’ve drifted.

Ask someone close to you to help you stay soft toward God.

And when you're tempted to run, remember: repentance is not about turning away from God in guilt, but turning toward Him in grace.

Conclusion

Every one of us will face moments when we feel like dust—when the joy has faded, when the drift feels too far, when we forget who God is and who we are.

But Psalm 103 reminds us: God never forgets.

He knows you.

He remembers your frame.

He has compassion like a father.

And His love is not limited by your lifespan or your mistakes. It stretches from eternity to eternity.

So if your soul feels scattered today, let this be your prayer:

“Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless His holy name… and forget not all His benefits.”

PRAYER

Father, You know us. You remember that we are dust. And yet you move toward us with compassion. Help us now to remember who You are—and to turn to You with soft hearts, open hands, and surrendered lives. Let your kindness draw us to repentance. Let your grace transform our direction. And may our soul, our breath, our very life, rise to bless you, not just in song, but in every part of our lives. In the name of the Son who reveals the Father, Jesus Christ, we pray— Amen.

DNA QUESTIONS

DISCOVER

What does this passage say about God, especially in contrast to what we often see in earthly fathers?

Consider the traits that define “success” or “strength” in earthly fathers—power, productivity, provision. How does the biblical vision of a compassionate, patient, and forgiving Father challenge or comfort you?

NURTURE

What’s happening inside me that resists this truth?

David speaks to his own soul, urging it to bless the Lord. What holds you back from fully responding to God’s kindness? Where have you drifted or gone numb to His mercy?

ACT

How do I live this out in a way that leads to transformation?

Choose one practical way to intentionally “turn your life” toward God’s presence (eg. Confess an area of drift, Rest in God’s compassion through silence or Scripture, Speak out loud a blessing to God each day).