Pour Out Your Heart Through PrayerNäide

Rediscovering God as Father

What’s the difference between approaching God as merely a strong and powerful and compassionate God and approaching him first and foremost as our Father? This difference will be felt throughout all of life, but nowhere more deeply than in prayer.

Many people struggle to approach God as Father and understandably so. Many folks that I sit with have only known “father” to be a hurtful person or complicated relationship.

Adoption is one of the most important and beautiful elements of the gospel, some would even say the core message of Christianity.

It reveals God’s heart and unlocks the Scriptures for us in a way nothing else does. Spiritual adoption is simply the truth that God makes us his own sons and daughters when he saves us through the work of his Son Jesus. He didn’t have to make us sons and daughters. It would have been enough to make us part of his kingdom, as citizens or servants. But we learn of God’s heart when we witness something unexpected: he doesn’t stop there.

Though it’s a wonder that God would make us citizens of his kingdom, the truth is he doesn’t need slaves or servants or citizens. He doesn’t need anything. But he wants something. He wants children.

The good news of adoption is this: You were an orphan, homeless and hopeless in a dangerous world. But God put in the work, took the steps to do it legally, and then bent down and picked you up into his arms.

We are saved from our old, broken ways of life, and we are saved for a vibrant life with God, as children in his royal family. Further, we’re given the Holy Spirit, who brings about our adoption and testifies it’s official. We can now cry out this phrase: “Abba Father.”

God loves you—he’s won you back, he’s brought you in, he’s crowned you with every bit of his inheritance, and he’s filled you with his own Holy Spirit (Romans 8:14–17). Oh, and this Spirit— God himself dwelling in our hearts—is even still just a preview of something even better. The Spirit, Paul says, is an advance payment of the perfect communion we’ll have in the new heavens and earth for all eternity (Ephesians 1:13–14).

How on earth do we respond to all this? We should be overwhelmed with gratitude, praise, relief, and joy. We should live a new kind of life—the life not of an orphan or slave, but of a beloved child.

We should look in the mirror every morning and recall the unimaginable: God didn’t need me. He wanted me. And he moved heaven and earth for me to be his child.