Encore Post: Calling God our father is second nature to Christians. After all, Jesus invites us to do so. We teach the Lord’s Prayer to our youngest children as their first prayer. So it may come as a surprise how unique that is among the world’s religions. Most religions hold their gods at a distance. The high god of native religions makes the world and goes away, leaving it to lesser spirits and humans. For Muslims, Allah is a strict, distant god you must toe the line to please. In Judaism, while God is seen as having a warm relationship with them, even to pronounce his name is considered disrespectful. For Hindus, Buddhists and other Eastern religions, god is not a person at all. The universe is their god and they see humans as god in a real sense.
For Christians, however, God is very much a Father who loves us and is a part of our daily lives. In a previous post, we spoke about how the Father adopted us as his sons and heirs with Christ. He invites us to call him abba — daddy — and approach us the way a little child approaches her father.
When we confess God as Father, we claim that he loves us, cares for us, wants The Three Ways God Cares for Us to be with us now and forever. It is incarnational – a statement that God cares for us so much that in person of his Son, he became a flesh-and-blood man, lived with us as one of us, suffered and died for us and rose again for us. By doing so, he restored the relationship between himself and us. He is indeed our father and a model of what fatherhood is all about.
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This recent “trend” to eliminate gender is nothing more than the world taking another swipe at Christians for the very reason Mr. Smith has presented. On numerous occasions, Jesus assured us that God “is” our Father. We have a familial connection to Him that cannot be disputed. The Scriptures tell us so.
Thanks for the comment! The biggest problem with current trends is rather than accept people for who they really are, they encourage people to think they are what they feel. Doing the same thing with God is making him into our own image and missing out on who he really is.
This topic is the hardest for me to understand. When you haven’t had a loving caring earthly father, instead having a very abusive unloving hateful father, it makes it very hard to view God as a loving heavenly father. It’s very hard to convince myself that my Heavenly Father is good and loving, unlike my earthly father who brought trauma to me.