Ephesians Devotionals
Bob Morris
The Father God (Ephesians 3:14-15)
For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family [or, the whole family] in heaven and on earth derives its name. 
“What is a Christian?” asked J.I. Packer in Knowing God. “The question can be answered in many ways, but the richest answer I know is that a Christian is one who has God for his Father.”
Jesus told the disciples, “This, then, is how you should pray, ‘Our Father…’” (Matt. 6: 9). When the disciples came to Jesus and said, “Teach us to pray” they were asking him for his signature prayer. In Jesus’ day, rabbis taught their disciples a way of praying that marked them uniquely as followers of theirs. Jesus said, in effect, “Followers of mine should pray, ‘Our Father…’”, marking them as uniquely his disciples. The Holy Spirit has been sent by Jesus into our hearts to cry out “Abba, Father” (Gal.4: 6). We are no longer slaves, but God’s children.
Bilquis Sheikh, a Pakistani Muslim woman, encountered God as her Father, and it transformed her. She wrote her autobiography, titling it I Dared to Call Him Father. For Jewish Paul it was no less radical a step to address YHWH as Father. Now he goes even further and suggests that the very concept of family derives its definition from YHWH, God the Father. There is a sense in which God’s activity in human history is to grow a family for himself, in which his Son is the firstborn among many brothers and sisters (Rom. 8: 29).
Not everyone likes to think of God as Father. We are all aware of the devastation that absent or ineffective fathers can cause in families. A.J. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, locates the origin of evil in the role of fathers in family life:
“As I look back over the five published books,” she says, “I realize that it’s kind of a litany of bad fathers. That’s where evil seems to flourish, in places where people didn’t get good fathering.” (quoted in TIME July 25, 2005)
Some people have difficulty in approaching God as Father, because their own fathers were so disappointing and, in some cases, even perverse. Somehow we have to encourage each other not to judge God the Father from our own experience, but rather start with God our Father and discover what fatherhood and family were always intended to be.
In a study by Elizabeth Marquardt published in Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (Crown, 2005), 38% of the children of divorce agreed with the statement, “God became the father or parent I never had in real life” (compared to 22% of those from intact families who agreed with the statement). Marquardt says that a typical statement is, “My earthly father failed me, but in God I found that loving father figure I never had”. [To hear in narration form the many verses that speak to us of God as loving Father, go to this site, fathersloveletter.com.]
Not every human can say they belong to the family of God in the Biblical sense. Jesus said, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14: 6). “To all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God”
(John 1: 12).
Let Packer have the last word:
If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father…. ‘Father’ is the Christian name for God.
(Knowing God page 224)
Holy God and Loving Father, we gladly kneel before you and worship you, confident of your acceptance of us, and reveling in the great love which you have lavished on us as your children.
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