God the Father. First person of the Trinity. Name for God. Cited in the Creed every day when we pray.
Our Father who art in heaven. "God tenderly invites us to believe that He is our true Father ... so that we may ask Him as dear children ask their dear father."
Now please be patient with my excitement in stating what may be obvious to everybody else, but wasn't obvious to me. The creed means "I believe in God the Daddy almighty." Or "I believe in God the papa all-powerful." Not some formal or distant or stuffy "father." But "daddy." And not only the daddy who loves us, but the daddy who is almighty, who has all power, and who will not allow anything to harm His dear children.
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I think I started to understand that when I meditated for several weeks on 1 John 4 (the famous "God is love" passage of Scripture).
ReplyDeleteFirst, I realized that John speaks of God sending His Son - thus, God is the Father. I used to just generalize and think of God as "the Trinity" - but in 1 John 4, God very much is the Father.
And when John says "God is love" he is not talking about a feeeeling of love or some abstract concept of love or some other such thing. He's talking about sacrifice. Again, not the idea of sacrifice - but that the Father did something. What is love if it's not active, if it's not sacrificing, if it's not giving of itself for another?
To say that God is love is to confess that the Father is love, and that in love He sent His Son, that we might abide in Him and He in us. The Father stoops down to us, and He protects us. He's not an abstraction, but my real and true Father Who sacrifices Himself (even His only Son) for me.
I don't know... Having the realization that when the apostles speak of "God" they are oftentimes (most of the time even) speaking of the Father (and when "Lord" of Jesus) opened the door to a... better understanding of what it means to confess God as my Father, Who loves me - meaning that He is actively and always giving of Himself for us.
Then again, I've always associated the word "Father" with "fatherly" so I'm not quite sure I ever found it "formal" or "stuffy". :-)