{"id":5247,"date":"2026-02-24T08:45:40","date_gmt":"2026-02-24T13:45:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/?p=5247"},"modified":"2026-02-24T08:45:40","modified_gmt":"2026-02-24T13:45:40","slug":"i-believe-in-god-the-father-almighty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/2026\/02\/24\/i-believe-in-god-the-father-almighty\/","title":{"rendered":"(I Believe in) God the Father Almighty"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here<\/a>
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Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.<\/em>
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A humble building known as the Abbot Pass Hut was long regarded as one of the Western Hemisphere\u2019s most intriguing structures.
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It was constructed in 1922 as a shelter for mountaineers attempting to scale either Mount Victoria or Mount Lefroy, two of the higher peaks in Banff Provincial Park in Alberta, Canada.\u00a0
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Until its rickety timbers were deemed unsafe a few years ago, it served as an overnight waystation for hikers and climbers.\u00a0
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What made it famous was its location \u2013 Abbot Pass (9,598 feet above sea level), which sits directly astride North America\u2019s hydrological watershed. That\u2019s the imaginary line popularly known as the Continental Divide.\u00a0
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If a raindrop or snowflake fell on the eastern half of the hut\u2019s roof, it eventually made its way to Hudson Bay and the Atlantic Ocean.\u00a0Precipitation that fell on the western half of the roof wound up in the Pacific Ocean.\u00a0
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To spend a night in the Abbot Pass Hut was to teeter on the mountainous \u201crooftop\u201d of the Western world.\u00a0Depending on which direction you turned when you stepped outside in the morning, you were heading downhill \u2013 toward either one or the other of the world\u2019s two greatest bodies of water.\u00a0
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Most people who cross the Continental Divide on paved highways hardly notice it \u2013 unless they see an information sign informing them they have just surmounted the watershed.\u00a0
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Things are a bit different on the pages of Scripture.
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Just a half dozen chapters into the New Testament, there\u2019s a sudden and dramatic change in how people pray \u2013 specifically, in how they picture the God to whom they are directing their heartfelt requests.\u00a0We might call it the Bible\u2019s Continental Divide.\u00a0
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Before Matthew 6, God is addressed formally, even fearfully.\u00a0On the pages of the Old Testament, God is only rarely identified as father (check out Isaiah 63:16, Jeremiah 31:9, and Malachi 2:10). More often he is our Maker, Sustainer, Consuming Fire, Shield, Rock, and Strong Tower.\u00a0 He is the Lord Almighty, high and lifted up.\u00a0
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After Matthew 6, however, people begin to address God as \u201cDaddy.\u201d\u00a0How in the world does this happen?
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It happens because of the opening words of the Lord\u2019s Prayer.\u00a0
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It\u2019s worth noting that prayer is the only activity in the four Gospels for which Jesus\u2019 disciples specifically request training.\u00a0
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We never hear them asking, \u201cLord, teach us how to share our faith, or cast out demons, or run a capital campaign that will really impress the Baptists.\u201d\u00a0The disciples would have been fully trained in the first century Judaic disciplines of prayer.\u00a0But in Jesus they observe something different going on. So they ask an expert to mentor them \u2013 \u201cLord, teach us how to pray\u201d \u2013 just as we might say, \u201cAlysa Liu, teach us how to do a triple lutz and not fall on the ice,\u201d or, \u201cWarren Buffett, teach us how to turn a few dollars into millions.\u201d
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In response, Jesus doesn\u2019t give a lecture.\u00a0He prays an actual prayer.\u00a0
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Most Bible scholars agree that when Jesus says in Matthew 6:9-13, \u201cThis, then, is how you should pray,\u201d he\u2019s not locking us into these specific words.\u00a0It takes approximately 18 seconds to speak the words of the Lord\u2019s Prayer, and I know of at least one Bible teacher who believes Jesus was telling us we should never pray longer than 18 seconds.\u00a0
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Assuming instead that Matthew 6 provides a general model for sustaining a conversation with God, let\u2019s take a look at those two stunning opening words: Our Father.<\/strong>\u00a0
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It would have been entirely appropriate for Jesus to have said, \u201cMy<\/u><\/em> Father.\u201d He is, after all, the only true Son of God.\u00a0We are God\u2019s children by spiritual adoption<\/em>.\u00a0But by using the word \u201cour,\u201d Jesus is inviting us into the family conversation.\u00a0
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Using the word \u201cFather\u201d is like crossing the boundary into an entirely new way of relating to God.\u00a0There\u2019s no evidence that anyone in Israel\u2019s history had ever had the audacity, in private prayer, to address the Lord in such a familiar way.\u00a0
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Nobody, that is, until Jesus.
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But there\u2019s more.\u00a0Jesus uses the word abba<\/em>, which is the Aramaic word for \u201cDaddy\u201d or \u201cPoppy.\u201d This is the language of the street, the rhetoric of the nursery \u2013 the word a toddler would use when asking for a drink of milk, or when seeking comfort in the middle of a midnight thunderstorm.\u00a0Children don\u2019t know any better than to say, \u201cDaddy, I need you right now!\u201d\u00a0That\u2019s how Jesus instructs his disciples to pray.
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Which is why the Lord\u2019s Prayer is the Bible\u2019s spiritual watershed.\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0
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Before Jesus, God is someone who just might scare us to death.\u00a0We cannot fathom his holiness and perfection.\u00a0Isn’t our own unholiness and imperfection an automatic disqualifier for a conversation with the Divine?\u00a0
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After Jesus, however, the door to God\u2019s back porch is open.\u00a0Against all expectation, we\u2019re being beckoned to cross the threshold and kick off our shoes.\u00a0
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This is where we notice that the Apostles\u2019 Creed preserves the special emphases of both Old and New Testaments. \u201cI believe in God the Father Almighty<\/em>\u2026\u201d
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Australian Bible scholar Michael Bird writes, \u201cTo say that God is \u2018almighty\u2019 is to say that he possesses all might. His power is not limited by anything beyond his own character and being. God always works to bring about what he intends to do, and not a single molecule in the universe can thwart him or frustrate his purposes.\u201d
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He is the one true God, El Shaddai, high and lifted up. But as the Almighty Father<\/em> he uses his unlimited power to hang onto every word we speak.
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It\u2019s a dreadful thing to spend a night wavering between two very different visions of God \u2013 to be stuck in a \u201chut\u201d wondering if God is my enemy or if God is my ally.\u00a0
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The next morning when I wake up, which way should I turn?
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Jesus invites us to step onto the path that he himself followed \u2013 to believe that, by his grace, we are the treasured children of a Papa who will never let us go.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To listen to today’s reflection as a podcast,\u00a0click here\u00a0Throughout the season of Lent, we’re taking a close look at the Apostles’ Creed – one of the earliest and most concise summaries of what followers of Jesus believe.\u00a0A humble building known as the Abbot Pass Hut was long regarded as one of the Western Hemisphere\u2019s most intriguing structures.\u00a0It was constructed in… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5248,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1080],"class_list":["post-5247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-apostles-creed"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5247"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5249,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5247\/revisions\/5249"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glennsreflections.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}