ask yourself this question:
“Is God Your Creator or Your Father?”
In Matthew 6:9, JESUS TEACHes HIS DISCIPLES WHAT WE CALL the Lord’s Prayer.
Jesus said to His disciples: 9 “Therefore, you should pray like this: Our Father in heaven…”
According to Jesus, prayer begins with Who we get to pray to—Our Father in heaven.
BUT When we talk about God as Father, we MUST ASK, “In what sense is THAT true?”
What does it mean for God to be my Father and me to be His child?
“AM I CHILD OF GOD?”
Today people use the phrase “child of God” in two different senses.
On one hand, it became popular in the late 19th/early 20th century, to talk about the “universal Fatherhood of God.”
It’s essentially the idea that all people are God’s children—by virtue of their existence and dignity as image bearers of God—regardless of whether they have a personal relationship with Christ.
Now, there IS a sense in which all people are God’s children because God IS our Creator.
In a sermon in Athens, the apostle Paul stole a line the Greek poet Aratus had written about Zeus and re-applied rightly to the one, true God. Paul said in Acts 17:28-29:
28 For in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also his offspring.’ 29 Since, then, we are God’s offspring, we shouldn’t think that the divine nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image fashioned by human art and imagination. CSB
From Brittanica.com
At the height of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. fought against racism and affirmed the dignity of every person by saying “we are all children of God.”
His famous, “I Have a Dream” Speech from the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, ended with these words:
“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”
When it comes to fighting the evils of racism, it is right to remind one another of the sanctity of every human life.
All people are uniquely and wonderfully made in God’s image.
Because God is our Creator, every human life is sacred, holy, precious.
But truth be told, that sense of God’s Fatherhood speaks more to His Creatorhood THAN WHAT IT MEANS TO BE SPIRITUALLY ADOPTED INTO HIS FAMILY.
In the Lord’s Prayer, when Jesus teaches us to pray to God as our Father (Abba), He is speaking of something more than us being creations of God.
He is speaking of what it means to be a spiritually alive child of God, a part of the spiritual family of God—through a faith relationship with Jesus Christ.
In a salvation sense, no one becomes a child of God until spiritually born again into the family of God. As John 1:12-13 explains:
12 But to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name, 13 who were born, not of natural descent, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God. CSB
The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 well-summarizes the fatherhood of God in both of those senses—Creator and Savior:
Article II. A. God the Father. “God as Father reigns with providential care over His universe, His creatures, and the flow of the stream of human history according to the purposes of His grace. He is all powerful, all knowing, all loving, and all wise. God is Father in truth to those who become children of God through faith in Jesus Christ. He is fatherly in His attitude toward all men.”
So that’s the question for each of us: Is God Your Creator or is He Your Father?
The apostle Paul illustrated what happens at the moment of salvation with the idea of adoption. In Romans 8, Paul said believers have received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, “Abba, Father” (15b).
