GOD-FATHERHOOD
America has
now embarked on a foolhardy experiment to discover what happens to a culture in
which nearly half the children do not live with their fathers. One result is
that many people do not know how to call God "Father," nor do they
want to.
When You Pray, Crossway Books, 2000,
p. 141.
Many who say
"Our Father" on Sunday spend the rest of the week acting like
orphans.
Author Unknown
When certain
concepts are ascribed to God, they are thus not used figuratively but in their
first and most original sense. God is not “as it were” a father; He is the
Father from whom all fatherhood on earth is derived.
Hendrikus
Berkhof
Quoted in Donald G. Bloesch, The Battle for the Trinity: The Debate over
Inclusive God-Language, Servant, 1985, p. 25.
The first and
most obvious reason we call (God) “Father” is because that is what He wants to
be called. The first person of the Trinity has many names – Almighty One,
Creator, Most High, Holy Holy Holy,
the Rock, the Great I Am. But when Jesus came to tear away the veil so we could
look directly into the heart of God, He revealed God as “Father.” Jesus used
the word “Father” more than any other description or name for God. And He
taught us to address God in the same way: “Our Father who art in heaven…” “Father” is God’s self-revealed designation.
Mary A. Kassian
Taken from: Biblical Womanhood in the
Home by Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Crossway, 2002, p. 49.
It is
astounding that God wants us to call Him “Father.” The implications are
staggering. Having God as our Father means that He is a
living, personal being, and not an impersonal force. It means we can get
to know Him. It means we can talk to Him and interact with Him. It means we can
relate to Him on a personal and even an intimate basis. I might not know how to
relate to an Almighty One, a Most High, or the Great I Am, because I have not
met anybody like that. I have no earthly frame of reference to do so. But
relating to a father? That’s different.
Mary A. Kassian
Taken from: Biblical Womanhood in the
Home by Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Crossway, 2002, p. 50.
“Father” is
the most significant name of the God of the Bible. It is the name that sets
Christianity apart from all the other religions of the world. Other religions
invite us to worship their gods, allahs,
creators, or metaphysical forces, but Christianity invites us to believe in a
Son and to enter into an intimate family relationship with a loving Father.
Jesus, the Son of God, came so that we could meet His Father, be adopted into
the family of God, and relate to the almighty God of the universe in an
intimate, personal, concrete way as sons and daughters (2 Cor. 6:16, 18).
Mary A. Kassian
Taken from: Biblical Womanhood in the
Home by Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Crossway, 2002, p. 51.
God is
Father, and He alone defines what true fatherhood means. How tragic and foolish
and how very arrogant of us to shy away from this name because some human males
are poor examples of fatherhood or because our culture regards a God named
“Father” as oppressive and patriarchal.
Mary A. Kassian
Taken from: Biblical Womanhood in the Home by Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Crossway, 2002, p. 52.
We may feel
God’s hand as a Father upon us when He strikes us as well as when He strokes
us.
Abraham Wright
A Puritan Golden Treasury, compiled by I.D.E. Thomas, by permission of Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA. 2000, p. 41.
We want, in
fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven: a senile
benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves”
and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the
end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”
C.S. Lewis
In almost
every prayer that Jesus utters in the New Testament, He addresses God as
Father... This represents a radical departure from Jewish custom and tradition.
Though Jewish people were given a lengthy number of appropriate titles for God
in personal prayer, significantly absent from the approved list was the title
“Father”… The serious reaction against Jesus by His contemporaries indicated
that they heard in His addressing God as Father a blasphemous utterance by
which Jesus was presuming, by this term of address, a certain equality that He
enjoyed with the Father.
R.C. Sproul
Our Father, Tabletalk magazine, June 2007,
Used by Permission.
God is the
archetypal Father; all other fatherhood is a more or less imperfect copy of his
perfect fatherhood.
F.F. Bruce
The New International Dictionary of New
Testament Theology, Zondervan, 1976, 2:655.
If you ask a
typical evangelical Christian today what the fatherhood of God means to them,
they would probably almost all say, “It means that He loves me, that He will
take care of me and guide me and forgive me and take me home to live with Him
forever some day.” And this would be true – wonderfully true! ... But is it not
striking that the most famous of all biblical commands relating to child and
father is surely the fifth commandment, Exodus 20:12, "Honor your father
and your mother;" and yet very few people today would say that the
fatherhood of God implies to them that God is to be honored and revered and
venerated and held in sacred respect.
John Piper
Sermon: Malachi 1:6-14, October 25, 1987, www.DesiringGod.org. Used by
permission.
The happiest
and holiest children in the world are the children whose fathers succeed in
winning both their tender affection and their reverential and loving fear. And
they are the children who will come to understand most easily the mystery of
the fatherhood of God.
John Piper
Sermon: Malachi 1:6-14, October 25, 1987, www.DesiringGod.org. Used by
permission.
“Abba” is
only a little word, and yet contains everything. It is not the mouth but the
heart’s affection which speaks like this. Even if I am oppressed with anguish
and terror on every side, and seem to be forsaken and utterly cast away from
your presence, yet am I Your child, and You are my
Father. For Christ’s sake: I am loved because of the Beloved. So this little
word, “Abba,” Father, deeply felt in the heart, surpasses all the eloquence of
Demosthenes, Cicero, and the most eloquent speakers that ever lived. This
matter is not expressed with words, but with groanings,
and these groanings cannot be uttered with any words
of eloquence, for no tongue can express them.
Martin Luther
If you want
to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes
of the thought of being God's child, and having God as his Father. If this is
not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole
outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at
all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament
new and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood
of God the Father.
J.I. Packer
Knowing God, 1973 J. I. Packer.
Used with permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL
60515. www.ivpress.com.
As Christian
people we must learn to appropriate by faith the fact that God is our Father.
Christ taught us to pray “Our Father.” This eternal everlasting God has become
our Father and the moment we realize that, everything tends to change. He is
our Father and He is always caring for us, He loves us with an everlasting
love, He so loved us that He sent His only begotten Son into the world and to
the Cross to die for our sins. That is our relationship to God and the moment
we realize it, it transforms everything.
Martyn Lloyd-Jones
Spiritual
Depression – Its Causes and its Cures, 1965, p. 172,
Used by Permission from Elizabeth Catherwood (daughter).
I am taking
my children with me, and I notice that it is not difficult for me to remember
that the little ones need breakfast in the morning, dinner at midday, and
something before they go to bed at night. Indeed I could not forget it.
And I find it impossible to suppose that our heavenly Father is less
tender or mindful than I… I do not believe that our heavenly Father will ever
forget His children. I am as very poor father, but it is not my habit to forget
my children. God is a very, very good Father. It is not His habit to forget His
children.
Hudson Taylor
Taken
From: Marshall Broomhall, The Man Who
Believed God: The Story of Hudson Taylor, Moody, 1929, p. 150.
Unless God is
our Father, we are orphans. But God’s own Son has become our Older Brother. He
comes through His Spirit, with His Father, to live with us. The Holy Spirit
dwells in our lives, making us a suitable dwelling place to receive the Father
and the Son! As a consequence, by the Spirit we learn that we are not abandoned
and unloved, but rather that we are loved by the Father, by the Son, and lovingly
cared for by the Holy Spirit (John 14:21).
Sinclair Ferguson
A Heart for God, 1987, p. 21-22, by
permission Banner of Truth, Carlisle, PA.
Did not [Jesus] say, "You are of your
father the devil, for his works you do?" Why, then,
should you mock God by saying, "Our Father which art in heaven." For
how can He be your Father? Have you two Fathers? And if He be a Father, where
is His honor? Where is His love? You neither honor nor love Him, and yet you
presumptuously and blasphemously approach Him, and say, "Our Father,"
when your heart is attached still to sin, and your life is opposed to His law,
and you therefore prove yourself to be an heir of wrath, and not a child of
grace!
C.H. Spurgeon
The Fatherhood of God, Sermon #213.
I have never been able to see that creation necessarily implies fatherhood. I
believe God has made many things that are not His children. Did He not make the
heavens and the earth, the sea and the fullness thereof and are they His
children? You say these are not rational and intelligent beings; but He made
the angels, who stand in an eminently high and holy position, are they His
children? "Unto which of the angels said He at any time, you are My son?" I do not find, as a rule, that angels are
called the children of God; and I must demur to the idea that mere creation
brings God necessarily into the relationship of a Father.
C.H. Spurgeon
The Fatherhood of God, Sermon #213.
No
man hath a right to claim God as his Father, unless he feeleth
in his soul, and believeth, solemnly, through the faith of God's election, that
he has been adopted into the one family of which is in heaven and earth, and
that he has been regenerated or born again.
C.H. Spurgeon
The Fatherhood of God, Sermon #213.
It
is not for me to rise up and go in rebellion against His wishes. If He be a
father, let me note His commands, and let me reverentially obey. If He has said
"Do this," let me do it, not because I dread Him, but because I love
Him. And if He forbids me to do anything, let me avoid it.
C.H. Spurgeon
The Fatherhood of God, Sermon #213.
Sonship is a thing which all the infirmities
of our flesh, and all the sins into which we are hurried by temptation, can
never violate or weaken.
C.H. Spurgeon
The Fatherhood of God, Sermon #213.
It
is a sweet compound of faith that knows God to be my Father, love that loves
Him as my Father, joy that rejoices in Him as my Father, fear that trembles to
disobey Him because he is my Father and a confident affection and trustfulness
that relies upon Him, and casts itself wholly upon Him, because it knows by the
infallible witness of the Holy Spirit, that Jehovah, the God of earth and
heaven, is the Father of my heart.
C.H. Spurgeon
The Fatherhood of God, Sermon #213.
When I
regarded God as a tyrant, I thought my sin a trifle, but when O knew Him to be
my Father, then I mourned that I could ever have kicked against Him.
C.H.
Spurgeon
Repentance and
Conversion, Sermon 2419.
The intellectual source for the notion that your
experience of your father determines your view of the heavenly Father is
psychodynamic psychology, not the Bible... In an earlier generation, one of the
stock human excuses for unbelief was, “The church is full of hypocrites, so I
don’t want anything to do with God.” That was more willful and bitter: “Get
lost, God.” The new variant is more self-pitying: “I just can’t seem to trust
God.” But the net effect is the same. No cry of “Abba, Father” springs from the
heart. “My father didn’t love me, so my self-centeredness, self-pity, and
unbelief have an underlying reason. Somebody else caused my problems; somebody
else must fix them.”… People change when the Holy Spirit brings the love of God
to their hearts through the Gospel. Whoever receives the Spirit of adoption as
God’s child learns to cry out, “Abba, Father.” People change when they see that
they are responsible for what they believe about God. Life experience is no
excuse for believing lies; the world and devil don’t excuse the flesh. People
change when biblical truth becomes more loud and vivid than previous life
experience. People change when they have ears to hear and eyes to see what God
tells us about Himself.
David Powlison
Seeing With New Eyes, P&R Publishers, 2003,
p. 175-177.
Way[s] to grow in the knowledge of God your Father even
if your father sinned against you:
1. Identify
and take responsibility for the specific lies, false beliefs, desires,
expectations, and fears that poison your relationship with God.
2. Find and
apply specific truths in the Bible that contend with those lies and cravings.
3. Turn to
God for mercy and help, so that the Spirit of truth would renew you, pouring
out His love freely.
4. Take
responsibility for the specific sins you express toward your father (i.e.
bitterness, willfulness, avoidance, blame-shifting, brooding, fears,
people-pleasing, slander, lying, self-pity, etc.).
5. Turn to
God for mercy and help, that the Spirit of love would enable you to bear his
fruit thankfully.
6. Identify
the specific sins committed against you… Identifying the wrongs helps you know
what to forgive. It also makes it clear what God calls you to tackle
constructively.
7. Ponder
the good things your father did for you.
8. The
Father gives the power to return good for evil rather than evil for evil… Come
up with a plan for specific changes (i.e. forgiving, giving love, seeking
forgiveness, forbearing, confronting constructively, refocusing your attention,
pouring your energies into God’s calling, etc.).
9. Find wise
believers to pray for you, hold you accountable.
David Powlison
Excerpted
from: Seeing With New Eyes, P&R Publishers, 2003, p. 180-181.
Five fatherly responsibilities that
God has assumed toward His children:
1.
God provides for us (Phil. 4:19).
2.
God protects (Mt. 10:29-31).
3.
God encourages us (Psm. 10:17).
4.
God comforts us (2 Cor. 1:3-4).
5.
God disciplines us (Heb. 12:10).
Jerry Bridges
Copied
from The Gospel for Real Life by Jerry Bridges, © 2002, p. 146. Used by
permission of NavPress – www.navpress.com.
All rights reserved.
The
mere inclination to call God “Father”, apart from a sense of my own deep
sinfulness, is not the work of the Spirit of God. Note this carefully. It is
extremely important. Nothing is easier than to teach men to address God as
“Father”. But the Spirit’s work is different in this way: the Spirit teaches
men to call God “Father”, who would otherwise fear to do so because of what
they know of their own sin.
Tom Wells
Christian: Take Heart! By Permission of the
Banner of Truth Trust, Carlisle, PA. 1987, p. 27.