When I was a young teenager, someone at church looked at the casual way I dressed and asked, “Is that how you would dress if you were going to meet the Queen?” In that moment, I had an epiphany. I realized that if God is my King, I ought to have respect, and it should show in the way I dress. I immediately went and purchased a suit and a tie.
Months after my initial epiphany, I hoped to share my valuable wisdom and experience with a casual-dressing, close Christian friend. With a wise tone in my voice I asked him the same question that was asked of me: “Is that how you would dress if you were going to meet the Queen?” As he scanned my best Sunday suit, he replied, “Is that how you would dress to meet your father?”
One of many Scriptures that show us that God wants to relate to us as our spiritual Father is the The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9). Jesus teaches us to relate to God as “Our Father in heaven.” In other words, God is our good and flawless spiritual Father, and we are to relate to Him as such.
Slowly I began to understand that God wants us to relate to Him as both our Father and our King at the same time. With the previous scriptures in mind, consider how a person can simultaneously relate to God with the familiar and trusting intimacy of a good Father, and the respect and majestic reverence of a powerful King. That’s challenging. Most of us tend to lean heavily towards one way or another rather than both together.
How can I relate to God as fully both? This has recently become an important pursuit for me, because I realized how I relate to God not only greatly affects how I worship Him, but how I pray, how I listen, and how I obey Him.
So many of us have lived our lives with an absent or inadequate father, and it is easy to project that concept of flawed and undesirable fatherhood on God. On the other side of the equation, for those of us who were born and raised in North America, we have never fully had a King or Queen that has served as anything more than a celebrity or figurehead. That also is also by default an unfamiliar concept to us.
How do we relate to God as both Father and King simultaneously, as they seem to conflict with each other?
I recently realized this could be best done relating to God as my spiritual Father, but knowing and respecting the fact that my spiritual Father is famous and revered as the eternal King of all creation. There are certain times I need to show the same reverence. My Father is the King! I can relate to Him in my pajamas and my suit, with casual language and formal, lying down or bowing.
Knowing this, I speak with God differently. I listen, worship, and respond to sermons differently. The way I read the Scriptures has shifted, and I value God, others, and myself differently. How we relate to God as either Father or King — or both — affects how we see, how we speak and ultimately how we live. If you lean more heavily towards one way than the other, then this season in your life, lean more the other way to live out both realities more fully in your relationship with Him.
