We Call Him Father Too

The apostle John writes with such wonder and awe when he says: "See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are" (1 John 3:1). I understood this wonder better when I read another verse from the gospel of John. "This was why the Jews were seeking to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God" (John 5:18).

It made the Jews furious that Jesus was calling God his father, and yet that is the very name we are to call him. We are his children and the Lord is our Father. This shocked the Old Testament saints, and made some of the Jews want to kill Jesus. Andrew Murray explains the monumental shift that Jesus made in our relation to the Father:

‘Our Father which art in heaven!’ To appreciate this word of adoration aright, I must remember that none of the saints had in Scripture ever ventured to address God as their Father. The invocation places us at once in the center of the wonderful revelation the Son came to make of His Father as our Father too. It comprehends the mystery of redemption—Christ delivering us from the curse that we might become the children of God.... The word Holy is the central word of the Old Testament; the name Father of the New. In this name of Love all the holiness and glory of God are now to be revealed.

And as Children we have the rights and authority of children:

• We come to the living God as a Father: "but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry 'Abba, Father'" (Rom. 8:15).
  
• We are heirs to the inheritance: "and if children, then heirs--heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ" (Rom. 8:17).
  
• We receive good gifts from our Father (Matt. 7:11).
• We receive life, even eternal life like the Father has, from the Son (John 6: especially verse 57)
• We have a helper: "I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever" (John 14:16)
• We have unity with the Father and Son: John 17:21-23.

How wonderful is the work that Jesus has accomplished:

For in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him[our Father].

Colossians 1:19-22