Monday, December 30, 2024  

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Today's Scripture
Galatians 4:4–7

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children. And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God. (NRSV)

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Reflection

The term “Abba” as an address to God appears three times in the New Testament. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus prays on the night of his arrest to “Abba, Father” to be delivered from the ordeal he knew awaited him. In his letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul wrote that our use of it in prayer proves that we are children of God. And here, in Galatians 4:6, he writes essentially the same thing, that calling God “Abba” demonstrates our relationship toward God as children toward a parent.

And in both places Paul argues that it is the very Spirit of God that enables us to address God this way, the very same way Jesus did.

This is not just an especially intimate expression of our piety but rather a rebuttal of a different kind of relationship between us and God, that of slaves to a master. Though it is often lamented — rightly — that the New Testament lacks an explicit condemnation of the institution of human slavery, yet passages like this make plain that, for Christians, the arrangement whereby some people must regard others as their owners is loathsome, especially when compared to the regard we believe God has for us. If God regards us as beloved children, then how could any Christians have ever abided an arrangement whereby some took it upon themselves to regard others as property? And to claim that arrangement as divinely sanctioned?

As the Spirit of Christ speaks through us to pray to God as Parent, we must also pray that the Spirit would so speak through all of God’s children everywhere, including those who do not yet know — or who have been prevented by oppression or injustice from knowing — God as one who regards them with a Father’s mercy and a Mother’s tenderness.

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Prayer
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit go with us today and every day — in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit: one God, Mother of us all. Amen.

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Written by Rocky Supinger, Senior Associate Pastor

Reflection and Prayer © Fourth Presbyterian Church

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