Like Our Father by Maxie Dunnam

Let’s keep it clear. As Christians we are to be like our Father. 

Some religions say to their devotees, “Follow me, and the things you fear will not happen to you.” By contrast, Christianity says, “Follow Christ, and some or all of the things that you fear may happen to you; but you do not have to fear them anyway.” Such confidence and courage are born from faith in God the Father Almighty who – even though we face the final enemy, death – will deliver us from the grave. 

Woodie White served United Methodists as a bishop. Some time ago he experienced one of the most difficult things he had ever faced in his life. It is one of my favorite stories and I may have shared it in a prior article. He was sitting at home relaxing, watching his favorite team, the Washington Redskins. The phone rang and a relative exclaimed hysterically, “Woodie! Woodie! You had better come quick. Something terrible has happened to your mother. She has been raped!”

He immediately left Washington, D.C., for New York City. When he walked into his mother’s house and saw her, she was frying chicken. Someone had broken into her home and robbed and raped her. Woodie stood immobile in a state of shock, but then he moved to his mother, took her tenderly in his arms, fighting back tears and anger.

As he was holding his mother, she said, “I’m frying chicken. I thought you might be hungry.” He was so overcome with the beauty of her spirit in the face of tragedy that he broke into tears.

Then his mother looked at him, and in her face was a wonderful light as she told him, “Son, I want to tell you something, and I don’t want you to ever forget it. God is still good! God is good! God is good!”

God’s almighty power is precisely this kind of love, this power of goodness and hope that this mother knew in her own soul and reflected even in the midst of her suffering and pain. This is the power and glory of the Father that Jesus portrayed in his story of the prodigal, and in all of his other stories and prayers. This is the power that Paul described in his praise of God’s love in Christ from which nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate us (Romans 8). It is a power and a relationship that Christians have known throughout the ages. It is not a vengeful power or arbitrary force. It does not leave us alone in our suffering. It travels with us through our pain, and it enables us to stand with courage exposing evil even when our own lives are at stake. It is the power of God’s creative and redemptive love as shown to us in Jesus the Son – the power of the Father Almighty.

We call God Father because we follow Jesus’ example. There is a sense in which we can assess how well one understands Christianity by how much one makes of the thought of being God’s child, having God as Father.

The designation of God as Father has nothing to do with gender: God is not a sexual being. It describes a relationship of shared love and fellowship in which God pours out God’s blessings on all God’s children. God is our Creator and Liberator. Our relationship to God rescues us from sin and alienation and helps us remember who we are created to be. As God liberated the Jews from Egyptian bondage, so God rescues and redeems us from whatever bondage may enslave us.

God is all-powerful, almighty; but God’s power is always defined, perhaps even limited, by God’s love. Though we may not be delivered from pain and suffering, God is with us in our pain and suffering, sustaining us with almighty love. Even though we face the final enemy, death, God will deliver us from the grave, giving us eternal life.

And it is by His strength and through His grace, that we too can be like our Father.