Why do so many people have a problem seeing God as their real Father?—Mainly because not many people have ever come into a healthy adult relationship with their earthly fathers. I once asked an audience of about a hundred people: how many of you, in your relationship with your earthly father, feel like he treats you as an adult? Six people raised their hands! Here lies the core problem. Most associate a father as someone who treats them like a child. And so they continue to struggle with a lack of self-confidence; for they have never heard their human father say: what you are doing is good; I'm proud of you as an adult son (or daughter). And in the church, discipleship is more about ‘sin management’ than about walking in a righteous partnership relationship with our heavenly Father.

Jesus, and later Paul too, treated fatherhood as the pre-destined Time that had come in which we entered into an adult son/daughter relationship with God through the Spirit. Neither treated his fatherhood as a return to life in a patriarchal social structure. Following Christ about becoming adult family members in relation to him, not about relating to him as little children or household servants. In the parable of the prodigal son, the father gives the youngest son a ring of authority; and he speaks to the eldest son as an adult (‘all that I have is yours’). The latter still just saw himself as a servant (‘all this time I have served you…’), and the former—because of his failures—could only see himself being restored to his father’s household on a par with the hired laborers.

In Galatians 4, Paul associates this ‘servant’ mentality with an heir who is still an underage child. But through Christ we have received the huiothesia, which means ‘placement as sons’ (4:5). And every adult believer who is baptised into Christ enters with the same position—women as well as men, Greek as well as Jew, slave as well as freeborn (3:26-29). All experience the same freedom from the guardianship and oversight of household managers and tutors. In Romans and Ephesians, where Paul also uses ‘huiothesia,‘ this word is often translated and understood to mean ‘adoption as sons’. But if you look at his use of the word in the context of Galatians 4:1-5, this meaning is ruled out; for he is talking about ‘we’ Jews who are already members of the family, though still minors. Over a hundred years ago, the Scottish theologian George MacDonald showing that being ‘adopted’, in the usual English meaning of the word, could not be Paul's meaning.

And in Galatians 4:6, Paul goes on—using a plural ‘you’ to address the believers from other nations—to say that if you all have received the Spirit of Christ, you too may call your Father God, ‘Abba’; for now you also are heirs. In other words, you too have come of age as adult sons and daughters, by also receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit—as the ‘first fruits’ and the deposit on your inheritance.

When Jesus is baptised with the Holy Spirit, a voice spoke from heaven saying, ‘You are my Son’. At that moment he is declared an adult Son of God on earth. Before this he was still living under the social authority of his parents. But now, when he comes to Cana and is expected to help the family save face when the wedding wine runs out, he says, ‘Dear mother, what does this have to do with me?’ As an adult Son, he is now committed to doing only what he sees his heavenly Father doing.

In an earthly family, every child is pre-destined to become an adult heir. And at a specific moment this becomes a reality. In our heavenly Father's family, this happens when we too receive the Holy Spirit through faith in Christ. Subsequently, walking with Jesus is about three new things: intimacy with the Father in the inheritance and authority we have in Christ as adult sons and daughters.

With the receiving of an inheritance as an adult comes responsibility. You have become a co-heir with Jesus. And in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that being ‘mature—just as your heavenly Father is mature’—means being as merciful with your fellow human beings as he is towards people. If you want to be treated as an adult, a lot is expected of you.

When I was nineteen years old, my earthly father said, ‘You are now an adult son.’ Yet eight years later I was still evaluating everything according to his standards. My father didn’t demand that, I just did it automatically on my own. But then God spoke to me, saying that he wanted to give me the gift of speaking in tongues. And because of the theological upbringing in my family, I responded, ‘I don’t need that’. Then suddenly I realized that I was treating the safe, familiar perspectives of my earthly father as more important than a particular gift my heavenly Father wanted to give me. From then on, I knew I had to learn to trustingly do what I saw him doing in my life.

Yet even if you learn to be independent from the tradition and culture in which you grew up, you are not home free. For then you face new choices: for example, God or money. Accumulating money is the way many people try to gain adult independence and maintain control over their own lives. The rich young ruler who came to Jesus faced this choice. Though he was drawn to Jesus, he could not bring himself to make his earthly inheritance subordinate to a heavenly one.

In Christ, we have also received authority; and this is backed up by the incredible resurrection power that our Father employed in raising Jesus from the dead. But we must learn to exercise it only in that way our Father wants us to do so. In this Jesus is our example; he undertook nothing on his own. And we do well to heed his warning: that at the end of this age he will turn away many people who did all kinds of powerful miracles using his name, but who did not do so according to the will of his Father. Their lives and actions did not reflect his Name—his true character.

Intimacy with Father God is a neglected emphasis in may Protestant circles, where the Word is often taught and understood in a cold rationalistic manner. A true father desires a heart connection in his relationship with his adult children. God seeks this as well; and through the Holy Spirit such a close relationship is possible for us. Now perhaps you want to say, ‘God is my Father’, but you have a difficult time envisioning what that might look like. ‘What if I my own father mistreated, neglected or abandoned me?’ This is why we need to observe Jesus as we listen to the Gospels; for he perfectly shows us what our real Father is like. ‘Whoever has seen me has seen the Father,’ Jesus told his disciples. Choosing to believe these words of Jesus and act on them in our relationship with God as our Father is actually a test of being an adult son or daughter. An important sign of immaturity is the refusal to respond to a trustworthy person, because we are still blaming our powerlessness on the sins of another.

For many, a father is someone responsible for how you came to be. And because he was there before you existed, you need to obey him. I call this a ‘past-oriented’ understanding of fatherhood. Healthy fatherhood is future-focused. A true father is one who expresses faith and encouragement over his children. Sometimes also correction; yet a good father does this as an expression of belief in a good future for his child, not just to exercise power and authority over him or her. Everything such a father does or says has the twin goals: of walking in an adult relationship with his children, and of seeing them become future-focused fathers and mothers as well. I believe that God wants to relate to us in the same way.

And what makes us spiritual fathers and mothers? Our own relationship with our heavenly Father, and that we find our own sense of authority and confidence in Jesus, in the Father and in the Holy Spirit. For the younger generation of leaders in YWAM, I hope that they receive the sense from us older ones that their Father is for them and not against them. Likewise, that they can talk about anything with me, even about their bad choices, because they know that the Holy Spirit who is in me brings them close to the Father. If I clearly allow them to make decisions, with no manipulation or pressure from me, then with them I can say anything. The only pressure they should feel is that which comes from the presence of our Father, by his Spirit. We are all equally accountable to Him, not them to me. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the church as a whole worked this way?

[i] Jim is currently studying towards an MA in Cultural Anthropology at the VU University in Amsterdam, and plans to complete his studies next year.

[ii] Five times the ‘your’ is singular, and ten times the ‘your’ is plural—indicating that God is both a Father to Jesus' listeners as individuals as well as to all of them as a group.