Jesus is Our Father

Recently my three-year-old daughter has been talking often about Jesus, and I’ve heard her say more than once, “Jesus is our Father! He loves us!”  I’m not sure where she learned that, but the scriptures certainly confirm that to call Jesus our Father is correct.  Of course our Father in Heaven, He whom Jesus calls Father, is the Creator of our spirits and it is to Him that we pray.  He is the author of the great plan of happiness who chose His Firstborn to be our Savior.  All who live on the earth are His literal spirit children and it is about this relationship that we rightly sing, “I Am a Child of God.”  But the Savior also is our Father as recorded in the scriptures.  For example, He declared to the brother of Jared, “Behold, I am Jesus Christ. I am the Father and the Son. In me shall all mankind have life, and that eternally, even they who shall believe on my name; and they shall become my sons and my daughters” (Ether 3:14).  We become the daughters and sons of the Savior as we come to believe on Him; He is the Father of our salvation and we take upon us His name, just as children take upon themselves the name of their father, when we are born again.  The Prophet Joseph Smith declared that through Jesus Christ, the inhabitants of the earth “are begotten sons and daughters unto God” (Doctrine and Covenants 76:24).  He is the Father of our rebirth, the spiritual rebirth that He taught Nicodemus about.  In Abinadi’s final testimony to the priests of King Noah, he declared, “Teach them that redemption cometh through Christ the Lord, who is the very Eternal Father” (Mosiah 16:15).  He is the Father of that which is eternal; the Father of our eternal life; the One through whom we can find salvation.

               I believe that King Benjamin’s words about the Savior best teach us what this relationship of Jesus as our Father should mean.  He wrote that we must put off the natural man and become “a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father” (Mosiah 3:19).  We must learn to become a child in our relationship to the Savior; we must be submissive and obedient and willing to submit to the will of the Savior just as a humble child would submit to their father.  Certainly it is true that Jesus is our Brother in that His Father is also the Father of our spirits, but I don’t believe that is the relationship that is most important to focus us.  The scriptures, rather, speak of Him as a Father because, as the angel taught King Benjamin, we must learn to obey Him like we would to our earthly father.  Just as His will was swallowed up in the will of His Father, so too to become saints we must learn to let our wills be swallowed up in His, to be born again with Him as our spiritual Father.  He declared, “For behold, I am the Father, I am the light, and the life, and the truth of the world” (Ether 4:12).  As His begotten children we must learn to follow His light and seek His truth.