Children and Parenthood III - Children of the Father ...

Friday, Mar 5, 2010. God is called “the father” in the New Testament. Jesus calls him “my father”, but he also uses the term father for God's relation to all other humans who believe in him. The central prayer in the New Testament has the title “Our Father”. Many parables talk about a father and his sons and daughters.

God the Father

God is the father. He is also sometimes called “mother” in the prophets/psalms. Humans in men and women originate from him - he knows both fatherhood and motherhood from its core! God has created all this, how could we think of him as some abstract being who would not know all the details, the feelings, the challenges and the joy of parenthood? He is the prototype and template for all parenthood. He is the origin of our feelings as well as our reason. He is the creator of parents and children, as a model and physical realization of our relation to him, of his relation to Jesus and to the Holy Spirit.

The key goal of the New Testament is to bring us back to a relation to God, to bring us back to the state where we are truly “his children” and he is “our father”. The observation is that when we live without God, we live no longer in a way in which we are his children. We live as if we would not know him - and we do not know him in this state. We are separated from him. But we can discover the eternal living father again. He is there and has always been there in the history of mankind. He has always talked to us, he always acted and showed his fingerprints in our immediate environment. With Jesus, he comes very close to us and formulates an explicit invitation to come back to him in faith.

Children by Faith

Faith is the way how we come back to the Lord. Parent ship is a relation. It is not just a fact which originates from something which happened in the past (a birth or origin). If there is no living relationship, the parents are dead for the children and the children are dead for the parents. But when we live a relationship, then things are different. God wants such a relationship. It is called “faith”.

Faith does not primarily mean that I believe something which I would not know. But it means that I build my life on what I hear from the Lord. I put my trust in him. I believe what he says. I trust on his mercy, his love, his justice and reliability. He wants me to live, not to die. He wants me to flourish, not to wither. ... more texts