Fatherhood of God

“ But the doctrine of the loving Fatherhood of God, as revealed to us in Christ, is one that is unfolding itself more and more clearly to the Christian world. If it has unfolded itself to us we may aid in its increased discernment. It is one that involves the acceptance of the thought that all human life and every sphere of human endeavour are under Divine patronage. God is in every way our Father. All human excellences whatsoever exist in their fulness and perfection in Him. ”

“ First, the Fatherhood of God, that God is in his very being Father, Love, self-manifesting as light, self-giving as life, self-communicating, pouring himself out into the life of his children, wishing to share his highest life with them, every one. Second, the concrete, unmistakable revelation of the Father in Christ, revealed in full ethical perfection, as an actual fact to be known and experienced; no longer an unknown, hidden, or only partially and imperfectly revealed God, but a real, living God of character, counting as a real, appreciable, but fully spiritual fact in the real world. ”

“ To realise the Divine Fatherhood is to become acquainted with the love of God. When we discover we are dear to Him our hearts melt, our rebellion is conquered, we seek His forgiveness, we revel in His favour, we exult in His service. When we discover He has always loved us we are overwhelmed. ”

“ The fatherhood of God has become so familiar a phrase that we hardly realize what a revolution of thought it represents. In the whole Old Testament, so the scholars say, God is spoken of but seven times as Father; five times as Father of the Hebrew people, once to David as the father of his son Solomon, and once as a prediction that sometime men would thus pray. And so when Jesus at the beginning of his prayer says: "After this manner pray, Our Father," he is opening the door into a new conception of God's relation to man. ”

“ For, having that, we should still be rich in knowledge of the Love and Fatherhood of God. We should still know Christ's dominating conception of God, and have His last and highest word regarding Him. We should still be able to rise, as Jesus not only warrants but invites us to do, from the little broken arc of true fatherhood on earth to the perfect round in Heaven. ”

“ In the teaching of Christ our Master,—the Fatherhood of God is the central truth of all. It gathers into itself all other attributes and gives to all a special quality. It is our special Christian heritage. The heart that believes God to be "Our Father" has room for the conviction that "God is Love". ”

“ We say men are His, as we say the cattle are His. In fact, we attach nearly as little significance to creation as to fatherhood. How can we, when we think of God as a mere ultimate explanation of our existence and the existence of the universe; when the idea of a Father of spirits—of one who has to do first of all with us, because we are spiritual, voluntary beings—is almost banished from our minds? ”

“ The preacher is no longer the representative of a judge; no longer in God's stead the accuser of men. In every age the Church displays favouritism in her doctrinal attachments. In our time it is the doctrine of the divine Fatherhood of which the most is heard. This were well if the whole truth were told; but what manner of fatherhood is that of which we all too often hear? A fatherhood of colossal good nature, of blind, of foolish, indulgence; a conception of paternal wisdom and affection against which the conscience of the thoughtful instinctively revolts. ”

“ The hope of a brotherhood of a humanity reposes on the deeper spiritual truth of the Fatherhood of God. In the recognition of the fact of that Fatherhood and of the divine purpose of the world, which are central to the message of Christianity, we shall discover the ultimate foundation for the reconstruction of an ordered and harmonious life for all men. ”

“ You become conscious of man as your creature brother because you are already conscious of God as your Creator Father. Fatherhood is the relationship out of which we reason ourselves into the recognition of brotherhood. And Fatherhood becomes, or may become, a universe reality to all moral creatures because the Father has himself bestowed personality upon all such beings and has encircuited them within the grasp of the universal personality circuit. ”

“ We are apt to have rather free and easy notions of the Divine fatherhood. To call God our Father, we must ourselves be sons; and it is only those who are led by the Spirit of God who are the sons of God.... Ask for great things, and small things will be given to you. ”

“ The full sense of the Fatherhood of God was not attained under the Law, nor did men under it learn fully to live as children of obedience, children of a Father who loves and will succour every effort which they make to walk according to His law. ”

“ In contrast with these few and doubtful verses, the Scriptures speak many times and clearly of God's Fatherhood in relation to a portion of mankind. Of the Pharisees, Jesus said, "ye are of your father the devil"; but he taught his disciples to pray, "Our Father." The most familiar figure of speech by which entrance into the Christian life is described is that of a new birth. Not all men, but some only are born again, not by their own will, but of God; and thus God gives them authority to become sons of God. ”

“ As verily as God is our Father, so verily God is our Mother, and that shewed He in all, and especially in these sweet words where He saith: I it am [1] That is to say, I it am, the Might and the Goodness of the Fatherhood; I it am, the Wisdom of the Motherhood; I it am, the Light and the Grace that is all blessed Love: I it am, the Trinity, I it am, the Unity: I am the sovereign Goodness of all manner of things. I am that maketh thee to love: I am that maketh thee to long: I it am, the endless fulfilling of all true desires. ”

“ The truth that man is the offspring of God implies the correlative truth of a common divine Fatherhood. God is Father of all men, in that he originates and sustains them as personal beings like in nature to himself. Even toward sinners God holds this natural relation of Father. It is his fatherly love, indeed, which provides the atonement. Thus the demands of holiness are met and the prodigal is restored to the privileges of sonship which have been forfeited by transgression. ”

“ By a different conception of the genesis of the world, and one that is of singular interest in view of the similar conceptions which we shall find in some Gnostic schools, God is the Father of the world: [342] and the metaphor of Fatherhood is expanded into that of a marriage: God is conceived as the Father, His Wisdom as the Mother: “and she, receiving the seed of God, with fruitful birth-pangs brought forth this world, His visible son, only and well-beloved.” ”

“ In the earliest beginnings of life, the parent—to speak with reverence—stands to his child, in a very peculiar sense, for and in the place of God. We gain the conception of the Father in heaven first from our experience of fatherhood on earth; and so it may be said of this commandment, in a sense in which it cannot be said of any other, that it is the foundation of all religion. ”

“ If, then, the doctrine of God’s Fatherhood is to be religiously useful to us, we must make up our minds whether the Father that we seek is to be the omnipotent Ruler of things, or only a limited Power, or again, something else that is not power. ”

“ This natural Fatherhood, therefore, does not exclude, but prepares the way for, God's special Fatherhood toward those who have been regenerated by his Spirit and who have believed on his Son; indeed, since all God's creations take place in and through Christ, there is a natural and physical sonship of all men, by virtue of their relation to Christ, the eternal Son, which antedates and prepares the way for the spiritual sonship of those who join themselves to him by faith. Man's natural sonship underlies the history of the fall, and qualifies the doctrine of Sin. ”

“ He perceived a new conception of God, not as the arbitrary ruler and vindictive judge of his people, but as the universal Father of all men, not anthropomorphic, but Infinite Spirit, whose greatest attributes were love, justice, mercy and truth, expressed in the great term Fatherhood; and that all men are children of the great Father, and therefore brothers. This expresses his fundamental philosophy and working basis of life. Upon it he undertook to build up and establish, not a new system of religion, but a new order of life. ”

“ We believe that we are the offspring of our Father in heaven, and that we possess in our spiritual organizations the same capabilities, powers and faculties that our Father possesses, although in an infantile state, requiring to pass through a certain course or ordeal by which they will be developed and improved according to the heed we give to the principles we have received. ”

“ It is very significant that as the volume of revelation unrolls, the earlier notions of God as Ruler, Governor, King, give way to the notion of Father, until in our Lord's presentation of the character of God it is His Fatherhood which stands in the forefront. What our Lord emphasises in the character of God are precisely the qualities of love and care and sympathy which the word Father connotes. ”

“ The Father is living love, and this life of the Father is in his Sons. And the spirit of the Father is in his Son's sons—mortal men. When all is said and done, the Father idea is still the highest human concept of God. ”

“ Do you earth fathers take pleasure in torturing your children with uncertainty about their place of abiding love in your human hearts? Neither does your Father in heaven leave his faith children of the spirit in doubtful uncertainty as to their position in the kingdom. If you receive God as your Father, then indeed and in truth are you the sons of God. ”

“ Oh, how justly we call him Father, who is so many times ready to receive us, when we sin, into the same favour as before, that he may at length admit us also to the glory, which is the inheritance of the sons of God! ”

“ What is He as cause, and what is this divine life of His being which is the effect of that cause? As cause, He is the Father, the Parent, the Progenitor, the Producer, the Begetter of His own life. And that life, which is begotten in Himself, is the Son. He is the eternally living God, and hence the Son is eternally begotten of the Father. The Person of God who begets His own life is the Father. The Person who is the Life begotten is the Son; and is a Person, because it is God who says by the mouth of the Son—I am the Life begotten. ”

“ Out of this mental incapacity, moral degradation and spiritual paralysis there breaks forth a fountain head of new life—a race of men and women who are certain that God is, and that He is their father. Not now, indeed, for the first time is He called father, but for the first time the name as applied to the Supreme Being implies a tender, personal and intimate relationship with man. The Divine Spirit is breathed into the soul, and awakens a consciousness of the infinite worth and preciousness of life. ”

“ What more beautiful sight is there in the world than a son who really loves his father, really trusts his father, really does his duty to his father, really looks up to and obeys his father’s will in all things? who is ready to sacrifice his own credit, his own pleasure, his own success in life, for the sake of his father’s comfort and honour? How much more fair and noble must be the love and trust which is between God the Father and God the Son! ”

“ And in a little while that soul, unprayed for, passed into eternity. Young man, the day will come, when you perhaps will be a father too. If your boy was dying, and called on you to pray, could you lift your burdened heart to Heaven? Have you learned this sweetest lesson of heaven or earth, to know and hold communion with your God? And before this evil world shall have marked your dearest treasures for its prey, oh learn to lead your little ones to a children's Christ. But what a contrast was the other father! He too had a lovely boy, and one day he came home to find him at the gates of death. ”

“ How then can we call God Father, and yet refuse to believe that He may be as loving as a human father, and that God’s children may be purified by God Himself, giving His own blood in the blood of His Son as a ransom for the sinful souls of men? ”

“ So far we have been praying to our Heavenly Father, first as a Father, then as a King, then as an Inspirer, then as a Giver; and next we pray to Him as a Forgiver—‘Forgive us our trespasses.’ We have been confessing in these four petitions what God’s goodwill to man is; what God wishes man to be, how man ought to live and believe. And then comes the recollection of sin. We must confess what God’s law is before we can confess that we have broken it; and now we do confess that we have broken it. We know that God is our Father. How often have we forgotten that He is a father ”

“ You have read where it is written in the Prophets, 'You shall all be taught by God,' and that 'Those whom the Father teaches will hear also his Son.' Every one who yields to the teaching of the Father's indwelling spirit will eventually come to me. Not that any man has seen the Father, but the Father's spirit does live within man. And the Son who came down from heaven, he has surely seen the Father. And those who truly believe this Son already have eternal life.
"I am this bread of life. Your fathers ate manna in the wilderness and are dead. ”