God has revealed himself to us through Jesus by the Spirit. In this unveiling, we see that God is the one who loves.  Love is his way of being.  We see this in the story of Jesus’ self-giving love.  The Father gives his Son freely to us and for us.  The Son gives himself as the demonstration of God’s love, even while we were opposed to God as sinners.  We can say, with Timothy Keller, “We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”

Truly, we can say the God who loves is for us (Romans 8:31-32). He freely gives himself to change and restore those who are unlovely, making them lovely. He turns enemies into family and gives worth to the unworthy. This God is for us.

Jesus called this loving God his Father, and invites us to do the same. That is our experience of God in the Spirit of God’s Son.  We know God as the Father of Jesus the Son, the Father who sent the Son into the world to accomplish what we humans could not accomplish, so that we could, in turn, know him as our Father. The act that made this possible was the Father sending the Son to die a reconciling and redeeming death on the cross.  The act that enables us to draw near to God as Father is the sending of the Spirit into our hearts, crying Abba Father.  That is now our lived experience as we keep in step with the Spirit in union with Jesus, the Son.