BIBLICAL BRIEFS 49
God is an ONLY God (Deut. 6: 4). Through Jesus who, as His only begotten Son received his stature from Him (Ps. 2: 7), His everlasting Fatherhood is settled according to his eternal resolution (Eph. 3:11). This furthermore means that only those who are born again from Jesus obtain the Godly seed of sonship. This enables a new lineage after Jesus the Son, a generation that has to come to know God as Father. Rom. 8:15 states that the spirit of fear stands against the “spirit of adoption as sons”. The deepest root cause of the spirit of fear in a believer is that he/she does not know God as Father (Matt. 7:23). The title of the book of the Muslim woman who came to faith in Jesus, Bilquis Sheikh, strikingly summarizes the primary fear towards God: ‘I Dare to Call Him Father’. During the years through which I have been involved in the restoration of people, this specific matter presented itself to be responsible by far for the deepest wounds encountered: fatherhood, or the lack thereof, or the misunderstanding thereof. In the cult movie, ‘Fight Club’. one of the main characters states: “Our fathers were our models for God. If our fathers bailed, what does that say about God?” As a matter of fact, great confusion exists with regard to natural and spiritual fatherhood in the world – it is not a responsibility that one carries as such, as it is a reference to the Father, which Eph. 4: 6 sketches beautifully as “One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all”. E. W. Kenyon, in his classic text, ‘The Father and His Family’, taught us, “All fatherhood love in the human comes out of the bosom of our Father God. He is the fountain of fatherhoods.” Of importance to our current subject, is that spiritual slavery deters us to have an association with God as Father, and this slavery has deeply to do with fear towards the Father. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to know that the spirit of slavery could only be replaced with “the spirit of adoption to sons”. This spirit calls from your deepest being to the Fatherhood of God. The spirit calls him: Abba, Father, Daddy. Jesus’ words in John. 14:10 regarding his relationship with his Father is the closest description of the reality that opposes the spirit of slavery: “It is the Father living in me, who is doing his work.” Dare to call Him Father and break the spirit of slavery in your life. And get to know Him as YOUR Father.
Dr. Tom Gouws
