Is God really our Father?

‘For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom all fatherhood derives its name.’ Ephesians 3:15

I find there is a danger when thinking about God as our Father that we view this as simply the Bible’s way of telling us something about his qualities; i.e. that we are supposed to extrapolate back from our experience of our ‘real’ fathers and thereby understand something about God. But as the text above says, all fatherhood derives from God and not the other way around. Lets be clear about this: God is not some kind of metaphorical father. God is more truly our Father than our human fathers will ever be. As Christians, we are first of all children of God and then children of our human fathers. Our human fathers are just the reflection of the reality which is the fatherhood of God. Their God-given role is to reflect or re-enact God’s fatherhood to us in the way that they treat us. In loving, giving, protecting, feeding, disciplining and so many other things, they reflect what God does for us. They do so imperfectly - some are very precious pointers to God; others barely seem to reflect God’s character at all. The Bible is under no illusions about the imperfections of our human fathers, but it wants those imperfections to make us desire the reality of God’s fatherhood all the more, rather than use them as an excuse to reject God’s fatherhood.

Think about it: God brought us into existence more truly than ever our human parents did. He designed our bodies and created the awesome processes by which we came into existence through our human parents. He knows every aspect of our physical and spiritual being and understands our deepest needs in a way that even the best human parents can never do. He knows our most intimate thoughts and feelings. He disciplines us with absolute fairness and wisdom. He is always willing to give us good things and able to do  for us ‘more than all we can ask or imagine', if we will but ask. He has demonstrated the unquenchable nature of his love in the cross of Christ – a love that is unconditional, for he sent Jesus when we were still God’s sworn enemies. As Paul recounts in Romans 8, God has a profound jealousy for our preservation that will not allow anything to threaten our welfare or separate us from his love.

 

Will you be my Facebook friend?

If you use Facebook or other social networks even a little bit, then I strongly recommend you read this this terrific little book  by Tim Chester.  We're discussing it this week in our women's book group. At 48 pages, it won't take you long! Despite the size of the book I could quote many helpful passages but I’ll confine myself to these 12 guidelines for social networking with which the author closes the book:

1.       Don’t say anything on line that you wouldn’t say were the people concerned in the room

2.       Don’t say anything on line that you wouldn’t share publicly with your Christian community

3.       Ensure your online world is visible to your offline Christian community

4.       Challenge one another if you think someone’s online self reflects a self-created identity rather than identity in Christ

5.       Challenge one another if you think someone’s online self doesn’t match their offline self

6.       Use social networking to enhance offline relationships, not replace them

7.       Don’t let children have unsupervised internet access or accept as online friends people you don’t know offline

8.       Set limits for the time you spend online and ask someone to hold you accountable to these

9.       Set aside a day a week as a technology ‘Sabbath’ or fast.

10.   Avoid alerts (emails, tweets, texts and so on) that interrupt other activities, especially reading, praying, worshipping and relating

11.   Ban mobiles from the meal table and the bedroom

12.   Look for opportunities to replace disembodied (online or phone) communication with embodied (face-to-face) communication