The Holy Apostles Stachys, Amplias and others with them; the Holy Martyr Epimachus (250).
1 Thessalonians 1:6-10; Luke 11:1-10.
Read Luke 11:1-10
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
When we call God our Father in our prayers, it is not hard to start thinking in terms of metaphors. We know that the scriptures use lots of different language for God – for example, when the Psalms call God “our shield,” we don’t imagine that God is a big piece of wood covered with metal, used by medieval soldiers, but that God protects us. And when the Bible speaks of God as a “rock,” we don’t ask what type of rock – igneous, metamorphic, or sedimentary – we understand that “rock” means that He is stable, reliable, and unchanging.
Maybe, the first words of the Lord’s Prayer have been explained to us in this way: perhaps we have been told that Christians call God Father because this reminds us of our own fathers, of how they care for and protect us. But beware of this idea! Some language from the scriptures is metaphorical – BUT, when Jesus calls God Father, and tells us to call Him Father too, we should have no doubt that this is not a metaphor. When we call God Father, we are calling him by His name: we are speaking about God in His essence.
Why does this matter? First of all, because we want to get these things right: we want to know God as He has revealed Himself. Second, it frees us from the baggage that our own fathers, with all their failures, may have left us with. Human fathers are really a metaphor for the Fatherhood of God (sometimes awesome, sometimes not). And thirdly, calling God Father, and believing it, reminds us of how He has changed our relationship with Him. It’s because His Fatherhood is a reality, not a metaphor, that our adoption is a reality, not a metaphor. Calling God Father means we know we really belong to Him.
Bible References