Jerry Bridges

We tend to subjectively feel God’s displeasure more than we do his loving Father we care. This means that in order to experience the reality and full meaning of our adoption, we must also keep in mind our identity in Christ. This is how we counteract our own tendency to focus on our performance as a measure of God’s acceptance… I am an adopted son of God. I’m a child of the King. I have the privilege in this life of an intimate father-child relationship with Him. And I look forward with expect and hope to an eternal inheritance that is far more glorious than anything I could imagine.

Graham Kendrick

If…we know Him by the revelation of the Holy Spirit and in our daily experience of Him as a personal loving heavenly Father, and are acquainted with both His gentleness and His awesome holiness, we will run to Him as children with open arms and yet deepest respect. The most important Person who ever existed loves you and me! The Creator of the universe has revealed Himself as having the tender heart of loving Father, and has by his Spirit made us His true-born children. He knows your name, He knows my name, He laughs and weeps with us! In Him we have discovered that we are valued infinitely far above our worth. How can we keep quiet about such a God?

Pete Greig

Before Jesus, the Bible has just 40 references to God as Father, but the New Testament has more than 260! And Jesus wasn’t just pointing people to a distant, Freudian father figure in the sky. He dared to call God Abba (Mark 14:36), a word used by any normal kid at the time to express love for their dad. The single key that explains everything Jesus did was this intimate relationship he shared with his Father. In prayer each day he learned to listen to God, and then he lived his whole life simply speaking his Father’s words and doing his works (John 5:19).

Frederick Buechner

We are children, perhaps, at the very moment when we know that it is as children that God loves us – not because we have deserved his love and not in spite of our undeserving; not because we try and not because we recognize the futility of our trying; but simply because he has chosen to love us. We are children because he is our father; and all of our efforts, fruitful and fruitless, to do good, to speak truth, to understand, are the efforts of children who, for all their precocity, are children still in that before we loved him, he loved us, as children, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

John Flavel

What is a child, but a piece of the parent enrapt up in another skin? And yet our dearest children are but as strangers to us, in comparison of the unspeakable dearness that was between the Father and Christ. Now, that he should ever be content to part with a Son, and such an only One, is such a manifestation of love, as will be admired to all eternity.