When our culture celebrates Father’s Day each year in June, we who know the Lord are happy to join in expressions of gratitude to our earthly fathers for all they have done for us. This is certainly one way in which we keep the fifth commandment: “Thou shalt honor thy father and thy mother.” In addition to giving pleasure to our parents, such honor pleases the Lord when we show our gratitude for the love they have shown to us, the care they have given to us, the guidance they have offered to us, not to mention the material provisions that we have enjoyed from their sacrificial generosity, whether from food and clothing over the years or the financial help for schooling and in the early years of our careers and marriages.
But what a great opportunity to renew our gratitude, and indeed our joyful praise, toward our heavenly Father. In the sixth chapter of Matthew’s gospel (in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount), the word Father is used of God ten times! In the Old Testament, God was known as the father of Israel, of His chosen people. But when we come to the New Testament, there is a change. We find that believers are taught to address God in a more individual and personal way, we could even say in a more intimate way. This has become the normal manner of private prayer, as each of us begins by addressing Him with the affectionate title, “Father …”
The title “Father” is used of God in every New Testament book with the exception of the tiny epistle of Third John. In nearly every one of his letters, Paul’s opening salutation refers to “God our Father.” The name represents both His authority over His children (exercised in disciplining them), and His loving care and guidance of them. There is a limited sense in which God is the Father (i.e. the Progenitor) of all, in that He is the Creator of all. But our particular and personal relationship to Him as our Father comes when we are born again into the family of God, through faith in Christ. It’s then, as His blood-bought children, that the indwelling Spirit of God awakens in us a sense of that new relationship and we cry, “Abba, Father” (an affectionate expression meaning something like “dearest Father”).