(From the series, What Is God Like?)

(Watch the sermon by clicking the “Read on blog” link in this email. Prefer to read? The text is below.)

Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.

The other night, I woke up from a dream in which I was home, but my home wasn’t at 29851 County Road 12, Elkhart, IN. It wasn’t at 220 E. Lockwood Road, Coldwater, MI—where we lived before we came here. It was 910 Lake Avenue, Elyria, OH.

That was the house where I grew up. When I dream, if I’m home or headed home, it is almost always that home. I haven’t lived there since the 1970s and haven’t been in the house since 2002, when my mother died. I’ve lived here for over a year, and spent more than 35 years on Lockwood Road, but in the recesses of my mind, it’s the house on Lake Avenue that is home.

Most of our views – well, not so much our views as the mental lens through which we view everything else – is shaped by the time we are twelve years old. That lens gets scratched and cracked, but most people are still looking through it when they’re seventy years old. How we look at the world around us, the friends near us, the enemies against us, and the God above us is shaped by those early years. They have a lot to do with whether we see life as an opportunity or a trial; earth as a safe place or a war zone; God as a Father to be trusted or a bully to be avoided.

That last one is what we’re thinking about today. If you were not able to trust your dad when you were ten, trusting God now will be a challenge. A dad will make it easier or harder to trust the heavenly Father. Harder – and this is important – but not impossible, for God himself will help you.

If you are a dad, you are making it easier or harder for your kids to trust their heavenly Father. This is true even if your kids are grown, but if they are still at home, the importance of your role is almost impossible to overstate.

My own dad, like most peoples’ dads, made it both easier and harder. He made it easier because I learned from him that a Father takes care of his family. I could have walked through a dark alley on the wrong side of town without fear, as long as he was with me. That will make it easier for me to walk through the dark valley when I enter the shadow of death. During my time on Lake Avenue, my dad stopped two robberies, ended a murderous fight between strangers, and gave me every reason to believe – and no reason to doubt – that he could handle any threat that came our way. When the 1965 tornados tore through the area, a small town just thirteen miles south of us was all but wiped out. But I wasn’t afraid because my dad wasn’t afraid. I never doubted he could keep us safe.

Nothing from the outside world could threaten me while my dad was there, which makes it easier now for me to believe that God can shield me from danger. But with my dad, the danger didn’t come from the outside world; it came from within. He could be angry, demeaning, critical.

Most of us have things to unlearn regarding the Fatherhood of God, as well as things to learn – to learn deep, in our souls and bodies. The person to teach us is Jesus, and one of the things we will learn from him is that God is Father. Jesus was always saying, “Father.” He said, “my Father,” “our Father,” “your Father,” and even called God “Abba,” which is what a little child calls his daddy. The four Gospels have the word “Father” on the lips of Jesus more than a hundred and fifty times. Compare that with the entire Old Testament, which is ten times as long. No one in the Old Testament ever addressed God as Father and the references to God’s fatherhood, while they are there, are few. (Fourteen, if I remember correctly).

Do you remember the first words of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels? While you’re trying to think of that, I’ll give you the backstory. The Passover Festival had just ended and tens of thousands of people were returning home. When Jesus’s parents suddenly realized he wasn’t with them, or their friends, or their family, they panicked. They started searching for him and found him in the temple, talking with a group of religious scholars. His mother said (in effect), “Son! We were worried sick! How could you do this to us?” The 12-year-old Jesus answered, “Didn’t you know I’d be in my Father’s house?” (Luke 2:49). Jesus knew God as his own Father and he wants us to know him as our Father too.

In all extant Jewish literature, from the beginning of Judaism until ten centuries after Jesus, no one else addressed God as “Father.” Jesus did, and he taught his followers to address God that way. He wanted us to have a rich, loving child-to-father relationship with God.

In certain segments of the church over the last fifty years, people have urged us to stop calling God “Father” because they think it is sexist and misleading. They want us to use gender-neutral or gender-inclusive language when we speak of (or to) God. In some circles, the Lord’s Prayer begins like this: “Our Father/Mother…” They claim that the use of father-language for God evolved in a patriarchal society and takes part in its sexist prejudices.

And there is truth in that, but it is not the whole truth. If using father-language for God was merely the result of living in a patriarchal society, why in two thousand years did no Jew besides Jesus address God as Father? Jesus’s understanding of God was revolutionary. It completely undermined the paradigms and prejudices of culture.

Jesus revealed God to people as no one else ever has, but in no way more important than this: God is a Father. He is our Father. Jesus taught us – something no other Jewish teacher taught – to begin our prayers by calling God, “Father.” He knew God as Father and wanted us to know him in that way.

That may be difficult for you, especially if your relationship to your human father was strained (or even non-existent). You may need to unlearn a few things and learn some new ones. You may need to unlearn a few things in order to learn some new ones. So, let’s look at what Jesus taught us about our heavenly Father.

First, he gets you. Your heavenly Father understands you. Our biological parents often don’t really know us. They make the mistake of treating us as if we were younger replicas of themselves. “But you like to fish. I’ve been taking you fishing since you were in diapers!” “Of course, you’re going to play the piano.” “You can’t be serious about joining the Marine Corp! That’s the stupidest idea I ever heard.”

But our heavenly Father knows who we are. He knows us better than we know ourselves. He knows our likes and our dislikes, and he knows when we think we are something we’re not. He “perceives,” as the Psalmist wrote, “my thoughts from afar.” He is “familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue,” he knows “it completely” (Ps. 139:2-4). Or, as Jesus put it just before he taught the disciples the prayer we’re looking at: “Your Father knows what you need before you ask” (Matthew 6:8). He knows what you need because he knows you.

The Father knows us. Jesus said he even knows the number of hairs on our heads (Matthew 10:30). He knows everything we’ve ever done, ever said, and ever thought. He knows everything we will do, and say, and think. When I say he gets us, he gets us!

The idea that he knows us – knows everything about us – might be a little unsettling. I thought that the less my dad knew about me, the better. Christopher Hitchens put it this way: “I think it would be rather awful if it was true [that the biblical God exists]. If there was a permanent, total, round-the-clock divine supervision and invigilation of everything you did, you would never have a waking or sleeping moment when you weren’t being watched and controlled and supervised by some celestial entity from the moment of your conception to the moment of your death … It would be like living in North Korea.”[1]

That would only be true if God were Our Dictator in heaven. But God not only knows us – knows everything, the good, the bad, and the shameful – he loves us. He is not our dictator in heaven but our Father.

In the upper room, a few hours before his arrest, Jesus assured his disciples that “the Father himself loves you” (John 16:27). It was almost unthinkable: The God who made the universe knew all about these ordinary guys. He not only knew about them; he loved them.

Here is something else Jesus knew about his Father: his children can always go to him … even after they’ve messed up. The story Jesus told in Luke 15 – we’ll go into it next week – is a great example. The Father, Jesus taught, is like a dad whose son walked away from his relationship with him. Then, when the son got himself into trouble, he came back to his dad because he didn’t know what else to do. The father didn’t lecture him or say, “I told you so.” He was overjoyed to have him back! He hugged him and threw him a party. Even when we’ve messed up, our heavenly Father loves us.

God always has time for us. I’ve had days when the interruptions have been non-stop. Just as I’d finish one call, another would come in, and I found myself wishing that Alexander Graham Bell had pursued a career in baseball instead of engineering. Yet if one of my sons calls, I am eager to pick up. God is like that. He loves it when his kids call. He doesn’t let their calls go to voicemail.

Jesus tells us something else about our Father: he is someone we can respect. There is nothing more disheartening – or damaging – than for a child to learn that his dad is not respectable. To discover that one’s dad is not truthful or is lazy or is unfaithful or is a coward will deeply wound a child’s heart. But Jesus revealed to us a heavenly Father who merits our deepest respect.

He tells his disciples, and that includes all of us who have come to Jesus to learn from him, to pray, “Father, hallowed be your name” (Luke 11:2). The heavenly Father Jesus knew is not one of those divorced dads, trying to buy their kids’ affection. He is not a disconnected dad, off doing his own thing. He is a father who loves his children and wants – insists on – what is best for them. He will never let his children disrespect him or each other in order to have a little peace and quiet. He will not turn a blind eye to their wrongdoing. Because he really loves them, he will discipline them: as the Proverb has it: “The Lord disciplines those he loves, and he punishes everyone he accepts as a son” (Proverbs 3:12). He is a father we can be proud of.

He is also a strong father. Absolutely fearless. There is nothing he cannot handle. Jesus’s way of putting it was: “What is impossible with men is possible with God” (Luke 18:27). During his own dark night, Jesus began his prayer, “Father, everything is possible for you” (Mark 14:36). That was his starting point. He knew his Father could do anything – he is that strong. On another occasion he said, “My Father is … greater than all.” He sounded like a boy on the playground, bragging that his dad is stronger than anybody else’s dad – or everybody else’s dads … combined.

God is a Father whose ability we need never doubt. If we don’t know that our Father can do whatever is needed, we will worry ourselves sick or wander off into error. Jesus once said to the Sadducees: “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God” (Matthew 22:29). We fall into error for the same reason.

But knowing that God can help us is not the same as knowing that God will help us. And the plain fact is, he may not help us in the way we desire – not when a better way is available. On the eve of his crucifixion, Jesus asked for his Father’s help to escape the cross; but such help was not forthcoming. The Father did help him endure the cross, despise its shame, and attain the joy set before him, but he did not help him escape the cross. Let that sink in for a moment. The Father said “No” to the eternal Son.

When he says no to us, we must be able to do what the eternal Son did: entrust ourselves to the Father, knowing that he is good and his way will work out for the best. It was because Jesus knew his Father that he could say, “Not my will but your will be done” (Luke 22:42).

Do you know why Jesus could trust his Father even when his Father did not do what Jesus wanted? Because he knew him. After all that happened to him, how could Jesus, hanging on a cross, commit his spirit to his Father? Because he knew him. He knew from experience that his Father always heard him (John 11:41-42). He put himself – the incarnation is Jesus putting himself – in a place of reliance on his Father. That’s what we try our best to avoid, but it is the only way we’ll ever learn to do what Jesus did. You can’t do what Jesus did unless you know the Father Jesus knew.

Do you know God as your loving, strong, and good Father? Before John W. Fountain was a journalist and university professor, he was a kid growing up on the west side of Chicago. When he was four the police led his dad away in handcuffs in the middle of the night, and he disappeared from John’s life.

But after John lost his biological dad, he found his heavenly Father. He says God warmed him on those days when he could see his breath inside their freezing apartment; when the gas was disconnected in the dead of winter, and there was no food, or hot water … or hope.

God was the Father who spared him when other boys in the neighborhood were being swallowed up by violence and death. God was the Father who claimed him when he felt like “no-man’s son.”

Fountain says, “I believe in God, God the Father, embodied in his Son Jesus Christ. The God who allowed me to feel his presence … whenever I found myself in the tempest of life’s storms, telling me (even when I was told I was “nothing”) that I was something, that I was his, and that even amid the desertion of the man who gave me his name and DNA and little else, I might find in Him sustenance.

“I believe in God, the God who I have come to know as father, as Abba—Daddy.”

He said, “It wasn’t until many years later, standing over my father’s grave for a conversation long overdue, that my tears flowed. I told him about the man I had become. I told him about how much I wished he had been in my life. And I realized fully that in his absence, I had found another. Or that he—God the Father, God my Father—had found me.”[2]

Do you know God as your Father – the good Father who will never leave you nor forsake you? The way to know God as your Father is to trust Jesus as your Lord. He said, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Not because God doesn’t want everyone, but because Jesus is the only one capable of bringing us to him; the only one who can help us experience his Father as our Father.

If you have not already done so, I urge you to become a student of Jesus. He can teach you to relate to the God of the universe personally as your Father. He can do more than teach you; he can help you. But becoming Jesus’s student is not automatic. You must decide.

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[1] Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great, © 2007 by Christopher Hitchens

[2] Excerpted from “The God Who Embraced Me,” All Things Considered, http://www.npr.org (posted 11-28-2005)