Where I belong
As our plane approached Birmingham Airport last Monday, the flight steward asked me if I needed an immigration form. “No thank you,” I proudly replied, “I’m British.” I was coming home, after all; this is where I belong. Later, I half-expected the immigration officer inspecting my passport to greet me with a cheerful, “Welcome home, sir.” Sadly, I was disappointed.
One of the consequences of knowing that God is our Father is that it means we belong. We have someone to take care of us, to provide for us and protect us; we belong. Towards the end of the Second World War, the German pastor and theologian Helmut Thielicke said, “The history of the world is a story of war, deeply marked with the hoofprints of the apocalyptic horsemen. It is the story of humanity without a Father – so it seems.” Those final italics (which are his) point to the tragedy that, while humanity has a heavenly Father, so many human beings do not know it – they don’t know him. They are “cosmic orphans”, adrift in the universe with nowhere to call ‘home’.
Knowing God as Father lies at the heart of what it means to be a Christian. JI Packer writes, “If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, of having God as his Father.”