The Father

God wants us to relate to him not as mere subjects to a king, nor as mere sheep to a shepherd, but also as children to a loving, generous Father.

If you primarily think of God as your Father, and if you usually address God as Father when you pray, you have Jesus (and the Father) to thank — not only because he taught you to do so, but because he (and the Father) has given you the right to do so. For the fact that God the Father is happy and even delights to share his love for his Son and thus be known as our Father reveals just how gracious and kind he is. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. The Father so loved us that he gave his only begotten Son, that through believing in him we should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). . . In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. For prior to Jesus, no one — not in Judaism or in any other religious tradition — spoke of God or to God as Father in the personal ways Jesus did. never cease to say, ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty, who was and is and is to come!’” (Revelation 4:8). Pause and ponder just how astounding the phrase “our Father in heaven” is, considering the reality it represents: God as our heavenly Pater, Abba, Father. Certainly not in the way Jesus did — which was also the way he taught all his followers to relate to God.