God is not everyone’s Father. He is the Creator of all, but not Father of all. I’m just saying; that’s what the English says.
Christ told the Pharisees, who were very religious, “You seek to kill me, a man that has told you the truth…You are of your father the devil…a murderer from the beginning…a liar, and the father of it” (John 8:40:44).
We see, then, two spiritual fathers at work in the earth: “Our Father” and “your father the devil.” And to help the sons and daughters of God, Christ left us the salutation in His Blueprint Prayer, “Our Father” to distinguish our Father from their father. (To read more on them and their father, see “Children of the Wicked One” under “Recent Posts”).
The words, “Our Father,” also signifies an engendering by God, begetting several spiritual offspring.
The LORD (Yahweh in the Hebrew), told the prophet Jeremiah, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee” (Jer. 1:4-5). God knew Jeremiah before his earthly conception and gestation! And God chose him and ordained him a prophet before he “came forth out of the womb.” Jeremiah was “born from above”–begotten by God long before coming to earth. Jeremiah was in the very heart of God–and so were we, His sons and daughters, before the time of our earthly, fleshly sojourn.
Our Father “has chosen us in him before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4). He knew us before and has pre-destinated us “to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren” (Rom. 8:29). He has given us a destiny to be like Christ before the world was ever founded. This is nothing less that God’s purpose–reproducing Himself.
And so the cycle goes: seedtime and harvest. God the husbandman has great patience waiting for His children to grow up until they are “conformed to the image of His Son.” He will endure the “vessels fitted unto destruction” in order to create His “royal priesthood,” His ruling offspring. This is our destiny, ordered for us by “our Father.”
For make no mistake. Christ told it like it is. He warned that in the last days, many will be deceived by false prophets and false teachers who lead the sheep through the wide and broad gate to destruction. They are wolves in “sheep’s clothing.” They show themselves as God’s spokesmen, but are really modern day Pharisees, whose father is not “our Father.”
And to the many who are deceived by them Christ warns: “Many will say to me, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name done many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, you that work iniquity” (Matthew 7:13-23). They mouthed a bunch of half-truths but didn’t do the will of “our Father which is in heaven” (v. 21).
There is a lot in the phrase “Our Father, which art in heaven.” We must begin to pray with the understanding of His words. It is a great privilege to call Him “our Father.” Not everyone truthfully can. Kenneth Wayne Hancock
Immortality Road 