“Now when all the people were baptised, and when Jesus also had been baptised and was praying, the heavens were opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form, like a dove; and a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.'”
Luke 3:21-22
All of us are the son or daughter of some father but few of us have ever heard words from our fathers like Jesus hears here at his baptism.
This is a problem.
Read More
The revelation of God in Jesus is the crowning moment of human history. It is the moment the Earth had been waiting for, the moment that creation up until that point had been holding its breath in anticipation of. At that moment, when the Son of God walked upon the Earth we saw more clearly than any previous generation had ever done that God the creator, ruler, author and sustainer was, originally and eternally Father.
According to Doug Wilson (no relation to Andrew I’m afraid) ‘The Father is the forgotten member of the Trinity.’ We talk about having a ‘personal relationship with Jesus’ and are familiar with being ‘filled with the Holy Spirit’ but whoever heard an altar call to come and ‘know the Father’?
There’s a lot we’re missing out on in our Christian lives if we don’t learn to love and appreciate God as Father. All of us have a father hunger within us, an immaterial invisible ache that longs for and calls out for a father, but not just any father; we long for the true Father.
For the next 5 weeks I want to invite you to join in with a journey of discovery. I want us, together, to explore in detail through the pages of John’s gospel exactly what God the Father is like. I want those of us who are Christians to discover just how good and affirming our Father is so that we might hear, maybe for the first time, those words the Father spoke over Jesus; spoken over us as well.
To draw out the richness of this revelation and to help us become transformed by it, each day we’ll publish a scripture for you to read, a verse to focus on and some observations to go along with it. We’ll use the method of Bible reading I’ve always found helpful, explained by the acronym S.O.A.P.
S – scripture
O – observation
A – application
P – prayer
I’d like to encourage you to read the text for yourself, jot down your own observations and applications, and then read our blogs or watch our videos to hopefully get a little more out of it for yourself.
The daily readings and verses for the first week are:
Day 1: John 1:1-17
Day 2: John 1:17-24
Day 3: John 2:13-25
Day 4: John 3:31-35
Day 5: John 5:1-17
I’m praying that we’ll all discover God the Father as he actually is: generous, loving, life-giving and good. I’m hoping that we’ll find our father hunger satisfied, maybe for the first time, not by a counterfeit god or an imitation father but but by the true and living eternal God.
Here goes.
Jez