Always when we relate to God as our father, we should mingle both reverence, esteem, all trembling with affection, tenderness, trust, confidence, and warmth and friendship.

Knowing that God is our Father is one thing. Understanding how we should relate to him as our father is

another. In this episode of Light and Truth, John Piper opens Malachai One

6 to 14 to demonstrate how knowing God as Father should lead us to honor him.

This sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on October 25th, 1987.

If God welcomes you into his family, if he sends his son into the world to die for your

sins, to open the highway to the heart of God as Father. If he then adopts you through faith in Christ,

put into your heart the spirit of Sonship so that you can cry, Abba, Father, what are the emotions that God is after in you?

Now the biblical answer to that is not simple, it is complex. It has two parts at least, not one part.

Here are the two parts that I'll mention. First, he is after reverence and honor as our father.

He wants us to honor him for his age and strength and wisdom and authority.

He's the source of our life.

And on him we depend minute by minute. We should revere him and honor him as our father.

The second part of our emotional response should be one of security, peace, warmth, friendship, based on his pity and his

provision and his provision and care. I think the emphasis today, however, is very different than

it was 200 years ago. If you ask a typical evangelical today, what do you think of when you hear the fatherhood of God? I think right across the board almost all of us would say he loves me,

he cares for me, he guides me. He treats me with tenderness. He forgives me and when I die he'll take me to his home and let me be his eternal child. And that's true.

Gloriously, wonderfully, indispensable,

preciously true. And absolutely nothing that I say this morning, nor that Malachai says

is intended to diminish the preciousness of that truth. In fact, I hope you can see this, it may not be very plain at first, but it is very true. In fact, what I'm going to say is intended to secure that experience, to send the roots of that experience

down so that it becomes an unshakable experience. But isn't it striking that the most famous commandment in the Bible regarding a child's relationship to his father is the fifth commandment. Children, honor your father and mother.

Now, very few people today when you tell them that God is their father think in those terms that it implies a sacred duty to honor God with reverence and all because he is their father.

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