When you hear the word "father," what image comes into your mind? How do you think the kind of father you grew up with has shaped the way you see God?
Jesus' entire ministry flowed out of His relationship with the Father. He knew where He came from, why He came and whose will He was doing. That same Father-relationship is the foundation of our ministry too.
The word "father" carries an image into our hearts before we even think about it. That image, shaped by our experience of earthly fathers, will quietly colour how we see God unless we let the truth renew it. Some of us had absent fathers, some had harsh ones, some had great ones. None of them was a complete picture of the true Father. Jesus is that picture. "He who has seen Me has seen the Father" (- John 14:9).
The better we understand the Father's heart, the better we will understand how Jesus ministered and what He is calling us to do.
Consider for a moment what the Father chose to do when He sent His Son into the world. He sent a baby, born in a stable, to parents who were travelling, in a land under enemy occupation. Think through what followed: Herod's plot to kill all the male children (- Matt 2); thirty years of obscurity and anonymity as a carpenter; forty days of serious temptation at His weakest point; rejection by His own people; plots against His life; betrayal; arrest; a mock trial; beatings; the cross; being forsaken; being made sin and then three days in the lowest parts of the earth (- 2 Cor 5:21).
The Father saw all of this before it happened. And He said yes, because "God so loved the world" (- John 3:16). That is a Father's love. It gives at its own cost, with faith that the Son will stay in fellowship and finish the course.
Jesus did not minister at random. Four things anchored everything He did.
He knew where He came from. He prayed, "Father, glorify Me together with Yourself, with the glory which I had with You before the world was" (- John 17:5). He was secure in His origin. You cannot be shaken easily when you know who you are and where you come from.
He knew why He came. He came to preach good news to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted, to set captives free and to destroy the works of the devil (- Luke 4:18; John 10:10; 1 John 3:8). He was never distracted from that mission.
He ministered from relationship, not religion. He said, "The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do" (- John 5:19-20). His ministry was not a performance; it was an overflow of a living connection with the Father.
He came to do the Father's will, not His own. Even when His human will recoiled in the garden, He submitted: "Not My will, but Yours be done" (- John 5:30). That submission was not weakness; it was the source of His authority.
What is remarkable is that the New Testament maps Jesus' relationship with the Father almost point for point onto our relationship with the Father. He came in the Father's name (- John 5:43); we are sealed by the Father (- Eph 1:13). He was taught by the Father (- John 8:28); we are taught by the Spirit (- John 14:26). He received all things from the Father (- John 3:35); the Father freely gives us all things (- Rom 8:32). He was sent by the Father (- John 5:36); we are sent in the same way (- John 20:21). He is one with the Father (- John 10:30); we are one with the Father through Him (- John 17:21).
This is not a small overlap. Jesus is the express image of the Father (- Heb 1:3). His mission is our mission. His life is our life. The Father who shaped and sustained His ministry is the same Father who is shaping and sustaining ours.
The same Father who sent Jesus, sustained Jesus and worked through Jesus is my Father too. My ministry flows from that relationship, not from my own effort.
This week, I will write down any wrong or incomplete picture I have of God as Father, and replace each one with a truth about how Jesus revealed the Father to be.