You Are God’s Child, But Don’t Mistake Intimacy for Frivolity
By Michael Kelley
God desires intimacy with His people. It has always been this way.
When God created the first humans, He looked for them as He walked in that garden in the cool of the day (Gen. 3:8-9).
He ordered the construction of the tabernacle for Him to dwell in the midst of His people (Ex. 29:45).
John tells us that Jesus became flesh and literally “tabernacled” among us (John 1:14).
Jesus taught His disciples to pray not from a distance but with an expression of this intimacy by calling God “Father” (Luke 11:2).
That term, Father, expresses His desire well. God desires to relate to us as a heavenly parent, not in isolation, but in intimacy. God wants to be in a relationship with His people that’s not marked by fear but love. Not apprehension, but an appreciation of His great grace and compassion.
He wants to be our Father through the gospel of Jesus Christ.
That’s where the love of God takes us. John described it like this in 1 John 3:1: “Look at how great a love the Father has given us, that we should be called God’s children.” God’s great love doesn’t make us His servants. It doesn’t make us “the people He puts up with.” God’s great love makes us His sons and daughters.
God is committed to making sure we understand the nature of the relationship we have with Him. In fact, He wants us to know Him as Father so much so that one of the primary functions of the Holy Spirit is to remind us of the reality of His closeness:
“All those led by God’s Spirit are God’s sons. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry out, ‘Abba, Father!’ The Spirit Himself testifies together without spirit that we are God’s children” (Roms 8:14-16).
The Holy Spirit of God that lives inside of us is there for many reasons, but a big part of His role is to rise up in us and remind us of our true identity. He’s there to whisper over and over in our spiritual ears, “You are the child of God. He is your Father.” The word, Abba, points to the familiarity and intimacy God desires.
Now many have said that this term, Abba, puts a kind of exclamation point on that intimacy, claiming that the word doesn’t just mean Father; it means “daddy”. That is true from a modern interpretation - in twenty-first-century Jerusalem, it does indeed mean “daddy,” or “papa.” But in Jesus’ time, it was also used by adult children to their fathers. And it’s at this point we need to be careful, because calling God “Abba” is meant to emphasize intimacy, not frivolity. There is a great difference between those two things.
Think about it like this - you might be walking down the hallway of your office building and see one of your closest friends. As a greeting, you might say something like, “Hey, buddy!” In that sense, the word “buddy” is a term of intimacy. But you might also be walking down that same hallway and see someone you barely know. In fact, you might not even remember his name. So you greet him in the same way: “Hey, buddy!”
The same term is used to emphasize familiarity, comfort, and care that is used in a frivolous, careless kind of greeting.
When the Bible tells us that God is our Abba, it doesn’t mean we should be frivolous in the way we approach Him. We must, therefore, be careful to draw that distinction. The teacher in Ecclesiastes had a helpful word for his audience about how to approach the house of God:
Guard your steps when you go to the house of God. Better to approach in obedience than to offer the sacrifice as fools do, for they ignorantly do wrong (Ecc. 5:1).
But for the Israelites, it was not only a word of caution – it was an architecture of caution. If you go to the temple in Israel today you can still see how the builders constructed that temple in order to emphasize it. The original southern steps – the ones that led up to the temple and the ones the worshippers had to ascend before coming into the temple courts – are all irregular in size.
You might find one step that has a depth of one foot. But the next one might be double that. Not only that, but the depth of the steps also vary as you are going up them. A person coming into the temple to worship had to quite literally guard their steps or they would fall on their face. It was a careful kind of approach.
Oh yes, friends – we have been given access to a greater and better temple than that one. And yes, friends, we are meant to come boldly into it time and time again because our Father invites us to do so. And yes, friends, we would still do well every once in a while to remind ourselves of the reason why we can come there to begin with. The cross of Christ ought to be those same irregular steps that make us pause – not in fear, but in gratitude of what was given for our sake.
So let’s be grateful for a God who invites us into intimacy. But let’s not mistake that intimacy for frivolity.
Michael Kelley is a husband, father of three, author, and speaker from Nashville, TN. His latest book is a year-long family devotional guide called The Whole Story for the Whole Family. Find his personal blog at michaelkelley.co.
