Discover Who Your Father IsSample

DAY 3: Our Father Is Sovereign

Because of the redemption we have in Christ, our scars now bear witness to God’s sovereign love. In God’s sovereign compassion, our scars become testimonies. What we thought was meant to break us, Abba uses to make us.

It is an astonishingly beautiful thing that God is working in and using all things—not some things but all things—to form the image of the Messiah in his children. 

You may have a hard time believing that. Really, Derwin? All things? You don’t know about the bad stuff that’s happened to me. Surely there’s some stuff that is outside of God’s control.

But believe it or not, even the worst atrocity in human history—the murder of Jesus—became the means of redeeming humanity and all of creation. Let the sovereign presence and power of Abba comfort you.

Fellow Israelites, listen to these words: This Jesus of Nazareth was a man attested to you by God with miracles, wonders, and signs that God did among you through him, just as you yourselves know. Though he was delivered up according to God’s determined plan and foreknowledge, you used lawless people to nail him to a cross and kill him. God raised him up, ending the pains of death, because it was not possible for him to be held by death. (Acts 2:22-24)

If God can bring the greatest good in the history of creation out of the greatest evil in the history of creation, surely he can work together everything in our lives for our good!

When we pray “Our Father,” we are praying to our loving, sovereign Abba, who invites us into Jesus’ story of redemption. We, as Abba’s Spirit-empowered kids, become his sovereign means by which he heals and restores people and all of creation, from the tiniest atom to the greatest ocean. All things will be made new.

For we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. And we believers also groan, even though we have the Holy Spirit within us as a foretaste of future glory, for we long for our bodies to be released from sin and suffering. We, too, wait with eager hope for the day when God will give us our full rights as his adopted children, including the new bodies he has promised us. (Rom. 8:22-23 NLT)

When we pray “Our Father,” we are communing with our loving, sovereign creator, who holds us near his heart. Our Father’s sovereign love means he is acting in wondrous and mysterious ways in history to "bring everything together in Christ, both things in heaven and things on earth in him” (Eph. 1:10).

Our Abba is great and unmatched in his glory, and he loves to hear his beloved children call his name.