Abba: what Jesus taught us to call Him

You may have prayed for years without ever knowing what to call Him. Lord feels right but far away. God feels like a title on a door. And Father catches in your throat for reasons you may not want to explain to anyone.

Here is the answer this article is built on. Jesus, the eternal Son, called God Abba. It is an Aramaic word, the language He spoke at home, and it is the word a son uses for his own father. Then, through His death and resurrection and the gift of His Spirit, He handed that same word to us. When you say Father to God, you are not borrowing a nice idea. You are using the address Jesus used, with His permission, and by His Spirit.

The word Jesus used on His worst night

The one place the Gospels record Jesus saying Abba aloud is not a happy one. It is Gethsemane, late at night, with His friends asleep a stone’s throw away and the arrest hours off. He is face down on the ground.

“Abba, Father,” He said, “all things are possible for You. Take this cup from Me. Yet not what I will, but what You will.”

Mark 14:36

Notice what the word does there. It does not make the cup go away. It does not turn the night into morning. What it does is hold the Son to the Father while He says the hardest thing a person can say: not what I want, but what You want. Abba is the word for a relationship strong enough to carry that sentence.

So if you have thought that calling God Father is for people whose lives are going well, look at where Jesus said it. He said it with His face in the dirt. The word belongs in the dark as much as in the daylight.

What Abba means, and what it does not

You may have heard that Abba means something like a toddler’s word, the sound a small child makes before he can say anything else. That is not quite right, and the mistake matters. In the homes of Jesus’ day, Abba was used by grown sons and daughters as well as by little ones. It is the word of the family table, not the nursery. It is intimate, but it is not baby talk, and it is not casual slang either.

Think of the difference between how you address your father in a formal letter and how you say his name across the kitchen when you need him. Abba is the second one. It carries respect and closeness at the same time. The Son who said it in the garden also said, in the same breath, that all things were possible for the Father. Reverence and nearness are not enemies.

That balance protects you from two errors. One is the distant God, the one you can only approach with your hat in your hands, if at all. The other is the pocket-sized God, a friendly presence who agrees with everything you already think. Abba is neither. He is the Father of Jesus, holy enough that the Son obeyed Him unto death, and close enough that the Son called Him by the family name.

He put the word in our mouths on purpose

It would be one thing for Jesus to call God Abba. He is the Son by nature. It is another thing entirely for that word to be given to people like us. Yet Paul says exactly this, twice, to two different churches.

For you did not receive a spirit of slavery that returns you to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption to sonship, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!” The Spirit Himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.

Romans 8:15–16

Look at the contrast Paul draws. A spirit of slavery returns you to fear. The Spirit of adoption makes you cry out Abba. He does not say we compose the word after careful reflection. He says we cry it. It comes out of us the way a child’s cry comes out, because the Spirit of God is in us and He knows whose we are even on days we do not.

To the Galatians, Paul says the same thing from the other side.

And because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying out, “Abba, Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, you are also an heir through God.

Galatians 4:6–7

Here it is the Spirit of the Son who does the crying, from inside your heart. The cry is not something you have to manufacture. It is already there, put there by God, and your job is mostly to stop drowning it out.

This is why you can call God Father on a morning when you feel nothing. The feeling is not what gives you the right. The Spirit is. And He is not going anywhere. If the word adoption raises questions for you, there is more in Adopted: your standing with God.

The Lord’s Prayer is Jesus handing you His address

When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, He did not give them a technique. He gave them a form of address, and it was His own.

So then, this is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

Matthew 6:9–10

Our Father. Not my Father and your Maker. Not my Father and your Judge. Jesus, who alone had the right to say Father to God, taught ordinary men, a tax collector and some fishermen among them, to say it too, and to say it first, before asking for anything.

Think about what that means practically. Every time you pray the Lord’s Prayer, you begin by standing where Jesus stood. You are using words He chose for you. If you do not know how to start praying tonight, you can start there, with two words, and you will not be wrong. After His resurrection, Jesus sent word to His disciples that He was going to His Father and their Father (John 20:17). He meant it. The address is shared.

How to begin saying it

You do not have to feel close to God to use the word. Use the word, and let closeness come in its own time.

Tonight, find somewhere quiet and say the Lord’s Prayer slowly, out loud if you can. Stop after the first two words for a moment before going on. If Father is hard to say, say it anyway, quietly, the way Jesus said it in the garden.

Then, if you want, add something like this:

This week, read Romans 8 from the beginning through verse 17, more than once. It is the chapter where Paul explains how the Spirit makes the cry possible. And find one Christian, a pastor or an older believer at a church near you, and tell them you are learning to call God Father. Most of them remember when the word was hard for them too.

The address does not expire

The people who first learned this word did not have steady lives. Peter had denied Jesus three times. Paul had hunted Christians. The Galatians were confused, and the Romans were a small church in a hard city. To all of them, the word given was the same: Abba. Not because they had earned it, but because the Son had, and He was not keeping it to Himself.

You have the same word. It was said in a garden by the only one who had the right, and then it was handed to you. Say it.