Grace Church
257 Kendall Street
Burlington, WI 53105

(262) 763-3021

What is the God I believe in like? Romans 8:15 We Believe Sermon Series #4 [Open with clip from The Wizard of Oz - when the foursome first meet the Wizard] What’s God like? Is He scary? Is He someone that we are to dread and fear?  Run fleeing from in fear? Many years ago when trains were popular transportation, a little girl was taking her first train ride with her parents. As night descended, the mother took the girl, who was clearly quite anxious, and placed her on the upper bunk of the sleeper. She told her little one that up there she would be nearer to God and that God would watch over her. As silence enveloped the young lady she became afraid and called softly, "Mommy, are you there?" “Yes dear," came the response. A little later, in a louder voice, the child called, "Daddy, are you there, too?" "Yes dear," was the reply. After this had been repeated several times one of the passengers sharing their sleeper car finally lost his patience and shouted loudly, "Yes, we're all here, your father, your mother, your brother, and all your aunts and cousins; now settle down and go to sleep!" There was a moment of silence and then, in a very hushed tone the little voice asked, "Mommy, was that God?” A lot of times we’re wondering, “was that God?” Are my perceptions of God correct? The Apostles’ Creed begins, “I believe in God the Father Almighty.” Last week we considered the faith fact that we believe in God. Today we want to consider What is the God I believe in like? Those words “Father Almighty” gives us finite human beings a glimpse on this side of eternity of what our God is like. But what do we mean then when we say that God is the “Father Almighty?” What are we saying? 1. We are saying that God has a familiar face. The Apostles’ Creed does not allow belief in God as an impersonal being or an abstract force. That is immediately discounted when we speak of God as our “Father.” What’s so amazing and wonderful about this is that God’s identity as a father, as our father, is how He has chosen to characterize his relationship to us. It’s not just a description that was dreamed up by preachers or theologians. I could stand up here this morning, and say, for example, "God is like a favorite uncle” and perhaps I could use that "uncle‑nephew" analogy to highlight some important truths about God. It might even turn into a pretty good sermon. But likening God to an uncle would still be just a human comparison because Scripture never refers to Him that way. The Lord’s Prayer, for example, doesn’t begin with the words, "Our uncle in heaven, hallowed be your name," but rather "Our Father in heaven." Among all the human relationships He could have chosen as a metaphor for His relationship with us, He chose this one, "Father.” There was something significant that God wanted to communicate by His choice of this title. If belief in God gives us the sense of authority because of who He is, belief in God the Father is intended to give us a sense of affiliation, of intimacy, of relationship. Two aspects of God are revealed in Scripture. One is that He is transcendent. He is high and holy and reigns and rules separate from us. And the other aspect, the balancing aspect, is that He is immanent. He is close and intimate, and we can know Him personally. When we say, "I believe in God," we can be talking about His transcendence. When we talk about belief in God the Father, we’re introduced to the concept of His immanence. We have an intimate relationship with Him. In the Old Testament, there are not many references to God as Father. When you find them, they usually refer to Him as creator, pointing out the fact that we’re all created by Him. In that very limited sense, we’re all the children of God. Malachi, for instance, says, "Have we not all one father?" Paul, debating with the philosophers in Athens, quoted one of the Athenian poets. And he said, "We are all His offspring” speaking of the fact that God has created all human beings. In the Old Testament "God the Father" is related to His identity as creator, but when we move into the New Testament, the idea of God being Father is related to the Lord Jesus. The Lord Jesus, about a hundred times in John’s gospel alone, talks about the Father. And He used a very interesting word for Father. It was the Aramaic word Abba. When a little baby starts to stammer something in the English language, one of the first words he will probably say is Dada. The Aramaic equivalent of Dada is Abba. As Romans 8:15 says, “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by Him we cry, ‘Abba, Father’.” When Jesus began to use this deeply intimate, wonderfully personal word to describe God, He scandalized the people. They were offended that He could talk about God in such an intimate, familiar way. And yet, repeatedly, He did it. He then added to the controversy by saying, "I and the Father are one. The Father is in me and I in the Father." Jesus was speaking of the intimacy, the affinity, that He, as the Son, had with the Father.   In John 20:17, Jesus talked about "my Father" and "your Father." When the disciples asked how they should pray, he said, "When you pray, ‘Our Father...’” Clearly Jesus was linking His well‑defined sense of intimacy and affinity with the Father with the affinity His disciples would enjoy with God. He was introducing them to a sense of the Father’s loving care, intimate interest, and concern. You’ll recall that on one occasion He asked these questions: “Now if an earthly father would not give his son a snake when asked for a fish, and if an earthly father would not give his son a stone when he asked for bread, is it not reasonable to assume that your heavenly Father will behave in at least the way an earthly father will, and if you ask Him, He will give you what you need?” No serpents for fish from God your father. No stones for bread from God your father. Your heavenly Father knows what you need and will provide for you. He was introducing them to this tremendous sense of immanence, intimacy and affinity with the Father. Someone has said something very wonderful of this fatherly relationship with God that God loves us as if He had only one of us to love. He is giving; other religions speak about giving gifts to the gods, but God so loved that He gave. He is forgiving; yet the sin and separation within the human community is breaking God’s heart. He is seeking; His outgoing love is forever searching for us in our hiding places. But there are some contaminations with this concept of God as our Father, let me touch on three of the most common.   A) Religious Contamination. There is a church in northern California that has portraits of famous people hanging in its vestibule. There is a portrait of Socrates and another of Eleanor Roosevelt. There is a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and Gandhi and Jesus. These words are written in beautiful gold letters over the assembled portraits, “And we are all children of God.” I’m sure that people pass by those portraits and marvel at the universal brotherhood of man. There is only one problem: the universal brotherhood of man (and the universal fatherhood of God) is an inclusive, benevolent, politically correct, loving lie. The quote in gold letters is even a quote from the Bible, but it’s incomplete. “We are all children of God,” the Bible says in Galatians 3:26, “through faith in our Lord Jesus Christ.” Many then have this idea that because the Bible speaks of God as the Father of us all, everybody is going to finish up in heaven. They begin with "God the Father" and finish with universalism. They have confused “common grace” with “saving grace.” As the Father of all mankind, God gives to all His created children out of the bounty of His common grace. As Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:45), sunshine and rainfall are granted alike to Sunday churchgoers and Sunday gardeners; to the man who pays his taxes and to the cheater. Common grace is the beauty of nature, the loving affection of a pet, the provision of water when we’re thirsty, heat when we’re cold. Common grace is available to us through the love of other human beings, through the talents they use to promote our good. God the Father also blesses us with common grace in another dimension. There’s a lot of evil in this world. But if you think about it, you may agree that the world isn’t as cruel as it might be. For all their sinfulness, people aren’t quite as ornery as they’re capable of being. We sometimes call it civilized behavior or the milk of human kindness. But it isn’t civilization that deserves the credit, it’s common grace. The smile from a stranger, or his stopping to help you change a flat tire: that’s not merely courtesy, it’s common grace. So too with God’s power to restrain evil, to keep it under some control. As the Father of His creation, He restrains His fallen creatures from being as wicked as they might be. But in addition to common grace, theologians tell us about God’s special or saving grace. This attribute reveals another characteristic of God as our Father. God’s special grace is His gift of salvation to all who have especially asked for it. The Bible does not define sonship in biological terms. There is a clearly implied spiritual distinction between the "children of light" and the "children of darkness." We are not born the children of God. It was the nation of Israel’s gravest error to assume an automatic filial relationship with God on the basis of biology. Sonship comes through faith, not genetics. "We were," says Paul, "by nature children of wrath" (Eph. 2:3). We are all God’s children in that He has created each of us but we are not part of His forever family unless we have personally accepted His saving grace that comes through the Cross. The Fatherhood of God via creation does not allow for universalism.   B) Cultural Contamination. If we are going to communicate the Gospel in today’s world, we need to recognize that not everyone is excited about the doctrine of God as father. Is it still appropriate to call God Father or are they correct who say that to call God "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" is hopelessly outdated? Surprising as it may seem, many argue that, in place of traditional Trinitarian terms, we must now use gender‑inclusive words like "Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier," or "Shepherd, Helper, Refuge," or even neutral terms like "The Ultimate, the Intimate, and Warmth." Radical feminist theologians insist we go even further: "The Mother, the Child, and the Spirit." In one new translation of the Bible, published by the National Council of Churches, John 1:14 describes Jesus not as "the only begotten Son of the Father" but as "the only Child of the Father and Mother.” The pressure to move in this direction is found within most mainline churches. At an Anglican conference a woman priest led in an "updated" version of the Lord’s Prayer which began: “Our God, Father and Mother of us all, holy be Your name...” Now please do not spurn this as looney tunes. You and I are called to reach this world. The early Christians reached out to a polytheistic world; you and I are called to reach out to a politically correct one. And there are many sharp, intelligent, upwardly mobile women in our society today who are totally turned off to the church of Jesus Christ. They are totally opposed to the doctrine of God the Father. We are commanded to meet them where they are at, to minister to them, to build bridges to them, and to get across to them the great good news of God the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Let me say this as well. The term feminist is a very broad, generic term that can mean a lot of things. Though he is not my favorite actor, M.A.S.H. star, Alan Alda, said a feminist is somebody who believes that women are human. One of the most conservative of the contemporary English theologians, J. I. Packer, went to a conference on one occasion, wrote about it, and said, “On my way home I discovered to my amazement that I, of all people, am a feminist. For I discovered that a feminist, in the truer sense of the word, is a person that believes that women should be free to enjoy all that God intended them to enjoy." Packer then said, ‘‘I’m a feminist.” From that perspective, so am I and so should you be. I do not believe that we can accurately interpret and apply Scripture without being that kind of feminist. Women are not second class citizens. They are not less than men or in any way inferior to men. Jesus was deeply critical of the social injustices of His day and broke taboos related to women, foreigners and social outcasts. And we must do the same.    For example, it’s wrong for a woman to be paid less than a man if she does the same job. There should be no glass ceiling in the corporate world. Divine patriarchy does not sanction mistreatment, injustice or oppression. When we come to God’s Word though, we cannot escape the overwhelming witness of Scripture that God has chosen to reveal Himself primarily through masculine imagery. While this imagery never means that God is male...God does not have a beard or male sex organs. The consistent witness of Scripture does point out that God thought that male imagery more appropriate to His self-revelation than female imagery.  As Peter Kreeft writes, “We call God Father rather than Mother or neuter Parent because we believe that God Himself has told us how to speak of Him!” This revelation does not negate the feminine but forbids locating a female within the trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And please do not foolishly think that that is the case because the Bible was written in ancient times. Goddess religion and feminism is not new. Goddess spirituality was dominant in Canaanite religion during the times of the Old Testament. Dr. Carl Henry, probably the greatest theological mind of the last century, points out that when the Bible talks about God as "He" It’s not saying that God is masculine as opposed to feminine. It’s saying that God is personal as opposed to impersonal. He is a He as opposed to an it, not a he as opposed to a she. When the Bible talks about God as father, It is talking about God’s loving care and graceful provision for us. The point is His immanence and intimacy, not His gender. And you and I need to keep these things in mind if we’re going to communicate the Gospel in this very gender sensitized world.   C) Personal History Contamination. There’s another group of people who have problems with God as Father. I minister to them all the time. They’re people who in their childhood have had very difficult experiences with their own earthly fathers. They say things like, “If God the father is anything like my old man, I don’t want anything to do with Him.” This is a major problem for many people. From his research, New York University psychology professor, Paul Vitz, believes that there is a direct connection between atheism and a defective father relationship. By defective he means the father died, abused his child, or abandoned him. For example, Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher famous for saying "God is dead," lost his father when he was just four years old. Vitz writes that Nietzsche had "a strong, intellectually macho reaction against a dead, very Christian father" whom he perceived as weak and sickly. Joseph Stalin hated his father, who beat him unmercifully. It’s not difficult to understand why communism, with its explicit rejection of God and all other higher authorities had such appeal to Stalin. Adolf Hitler received terrible beatings from his father, who died when Adolf was fourteen. The father of China's Chairman Mao was a tyrant. America's most famous atheist, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, despised her father and once tried to kill him with a butcher knife. If we’re going to communicate the Gospel in this culture, we must recognize that there are hundreds of thousands of people in it who have been abused by their fathers and, as a result, have a warped view of fatherhood. When we talk to them about the fatherhood of God, they take their warped view of their earthly father and blow it up to divine proportions, finishing with a grotesque ogre whom they deeply fear. The effect is the exact opposite of what is intended. If we are to minister to those people, we must recognize that not infrequently their antagonism to Christianity and their rejection of the Christian church is not for intellectual reasons: it is for psychological reasons. Those who have struggled with father issues usually have one of four types of struggles with God. They think that He is unreasonable, unreliable, unconcerned or unpleasable. But they are not dealing with the God of Scripture or God the Father but the God that they have made in the image of their earthly father. And He does not exist except in their mind. Os Guiness, in his book In Two Minds, writes, “True intellectual doubts need answers. But emotionally rooted doubts answer needs." That means simply that there are some people who will doubt God and doubt the Christian gospel, not for intellectual reasons, but because the thought of them is too painful for them emotionally and psychologically. But the more that we get to know the One True God and Heavenly Father, the greater our chances of overcoming the prison of our own narrow personal experience. We must allow Him to redeem our experience of fatherhood. 2. We are saying that God has unfamiliar ability. Those early Christians who formulated the Apostles’ Creed added the word almighty to their statement of belief in God in order to distinguish between earthly fatherhood and God’s fatherhood. God was something out of their finite frame of reference. The Apostles’ Creed makes sure too that our picture of God is not some doting grandfather. He is Almighty–deus omnipotens in the Latin original. In Genesis God revealed Himself to Abraham as El Shaddai, or The Almighty God. When God’s attributes are discussed, He is usually described as omni-this and omni-that; omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, etc. And then someone will ask, “If God is Almighty, is there anything that God cannot do?” The Church has argued over this enigma for centuries. Augustine declared, "He is, in a word, omnipotent to perform everything He wills." But then Augustine went on to say, "I can tell the sort of things He could not do. He cannot die, He cannot sin, He cannot lie, He cannot be deceived. Such things He cannot; if He could, He would not be Almighty." The fullest and briefest summary of these restrictions on our understanding of God as the Almighty had already been given by Paul to Timothy, possibly quoting an early creed: "If we are faithless, He will remain faithful, for He cannot disown Himself” (2 Tim. 2:13). The word Almighty should keep us from sentimentalizing God. He’s not our buddy or someone we can cozy up to. He is infinite in majesty and power. But this almightiness of God is something that should give us a great sense of divine encouragement and ability. Psalm 91 says, "He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say of the LORD, 'He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust " The fact that God is Almighty reminds us that all power and authority in this world comes from Him. God is not sweating the November election. Rulers, governments and Christian leaders all derive authority from God (Romans 13:1‑2) and are responsible to Him for the way they exercise it. Then, what seems impossible to us is perfectly possible for God. Remember Gabriel’s gentle chiding of Mary; as she expressed astonishment that she was to bear the Savior of the world, “Nothing is impossible with God” (Luke 1:37). It is very easy for us to underestimate God; the Creed reminds us that He is able to do far more than we imagine. Almightiness and fatherly love are difficult to hold together. But the Creed does this for us. It reminds us that power used in love is the greatest force in the world. This is a cruciform kind of power, the power of suffering love. This power in love is constantly affirming that good shall prevail: love over hate, truth over falsehood, good over evil. Almighty love will not be frustrated. Like the hound of heaven, it will not let us go. This infinite might is coupled with undefeatable love; or, undefeatable love is coupled with infinite might. This is the Father Almighty. God is love, powerful love. Conclusion: As we conclude this morning, when we quote, “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” we are also affirming that God is, for the sake of His only Son, our Father. This fatherhood of God in relation to us is not at all natural or necessary. It is a matter of sheer grace, the stupendous grace of the eternal God, who adopts human beings as His sons and daughters because of the Cross, for the sake of his own dear Son and gives them the right to call Him “Father.” So how, you ask, do we become children of the heavenly Father Almighty?  The New Testament has two answers to that question for us: Number one, through adoption. Number two, through regeneration. Adoption means that our Sovereign God reaches out and chooses us to be His children. Stuart Briscoe shares this wonderful story. He writes, “I remember on one occasion staying with a delightful family in New England. They had two daughters who didn’t look at all alike. One of them looked very much like her father, and the other girl looked totally different. As we were talking, it suddenly dawned on me why the other girl looked so different. And she told me quite openly, ‘I was adopted. My sister is the natural child of my parents, but I was adopted.’ Because we were getting along very well I said, ‘I’ve always wanted to ask somebody who’s adopted this question: “Do you feel different from your sister? " And she said, ‘Yes, of course I feel different.’ I said, ‘In what way?’ She said, ‘Oh, they just had her, but they chose me.’ ‘They just had her, but they chose me.’  Now there’s the emphasis of adoption. When we become children of the Father through adoption, it is because God the Father Almighty chose us to be His children. The other aspect of becoming the children of God, so that we call Him Father, is that we have been born again by the Spirit of God. In the same way that the human father transmits life to the children, so our heavenly Father imparts His life to us. Through Christ’s ministry to us in the person of the Holy Spirit, we become partakers of the divine nature. We’re born again of the Spirit of God. We’ve been regenerated! The Apostle Paul tells us the Spirit bears witness with our spirit, and we cry "Abba, Father." We are able to relate intimately to this transcendent God.       When I affirm that I believe in God the Father, I’m affirming that I’ve been adopted into His family, that I’m regenerated by the Holy Spirit, that I have an affinity with Him, and that He, the great transcendent One, is near and dear, I have access to Him, and He Hears my every prayer. But He is only the Father of those who have come to Him, who have committed their lives to Him and trusted that the shed blood of Christ was sufficient to pay for all of their sins. If you have come to the Cross my friend, then He is God the Father Almighty...your Father!. Have you come to the Cross? Have you committed your life to Christ? If you haven’t, please come to Him today!