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“Our Father in Heaven”
Praying The Lord’s Prayer, Part 2
Matthew 6:9
Lord, Teach Us to Pray
February 16, 2003
On Valentine’s Day, I gave my little girl Kaira a daisy. I told her that I love her very much—and that as her daddy, she and I will always have a special relationship unlike any other in our family. She is my little girl, my little sweetheart. She looked up at me through her bangs and smiled a smile that spoke volumes: it was a smile that said, “I am loved. My Daddy loves me.”
And as I soaked in this special moment with my little girl, it occurred to me that this is what God the Father wants from all his children. He wants us to know that he loves us with a tender, fatherly love that gives us a daisy on Valentine’s Day—a gesture to let us know that he loves us. This is what I want us to concentrate on today.
One day, Jesus’ followers watched as he was praying. Jesus got up from his knees, and one of his disciples boldly asked the Master an important request. It has been our quest here in the New Year. He boldly said to Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray” (see Luke 11). Jesus’ response was to teach them what has come to be known as The Lord’s Prayer.
As we said last week, The Lord’s Prayer is actually Jesus’ teaching his disciples how to pray, not what to pray. This is not necessarily the prayer that we must recite verbatim in order to be pray the way God wants us to, it is a model of the kind of prayer that God wants us to pray. We certainly should commit this prayer to memory, often praying the very words—for if you pray this prayer, allowing yourself to slowly meditate on each word, you will have an outline of all that you would ever want to pray to God about! In this prayer, Jesus teaches us what our priorities should be, and the kind of things we should be praying for.
And with the first line of the prayer, Jesus teaches us some of the most profound things about prayer. If you think about and let your heart warm to this first line of prayer, your prayer life will never be the same.
“Our Father in Heaven.”
1. First, we pray to our Father.
The Lord’s Prayer is so familiar to many of us, we don’t get how earth-shatteringly different this prayer was to the ears of those first disciples of Jesus. In their Jewish world, you addressed God only with exalted titles, like “Sovereign Lord,” or “King of the Universe.”
But Jesus tells his disciples that they can call the Sovereign Lord by the name “Father.”
Jesus called God “Father” all the time—he was, after all, the Son of God. He prayed to his
“Abba,” the Aramaic word that children called their daddy. Of course, Jesus was the Son of God in a unique sense. He was not just the first “son” (as some heretical teachings assert), but the
“one and only son” (John 1:14, 18; 3:16). Being the unique son of God meant that he alone could say,
“I and the Father are one” (John 10:30).
But here in this prayer, remarkably, he tells his disciples that they too can address God in this intimate manner! HOW?
Because whereas Jesus is the One and Only Son, of God, we who repent of our sins and trust Jesus as the one who paid for our sins by dying on our behalf on the cross and vow to follow Jesus as his disciples are adopted as children of God! As Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans,
"So you should not be like cowering, fearful slaves. You should behave instead like God’s very own children, adopted into his family—calling him “Abba, Father.” For his Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we are God’s children." (Romans 8:15-16)
In other words, before submitting our hearts to becoming disciples of Christ, when we thought of God we should cower in fear—for God is the Sovereign Lord, The King of the Universe who is holy and powerful and righteous and is justly wrathful toward on all sin—and since our sin would not have yet been forgiven since we were not yet Christians, we should cower!
But! As disciples of Jesus Christ, you should no longer be fearful! “You should behave instead like God’s very own children, adopted into his family—calling him
'Abba, Father.'” Children do not cower in fear—they call their Father, “Abba” (“Daddy!”).
“For his Holy Spirit speaks to us deep in our hearts and tells us that we are God’s children.”
Ahh! What a delight to know that God does not see us as slaves to sin, people who should cower in fear at the wrath of God! What a delight to know that we have been adopted into the family of God!
“God sent him (Jesus) to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that he could adopt us as his very own children.” (Galatians 4:5)
Nothing brings more pleasure to me as a parent than to do that which is the very best for my children. It is my joy to love and care for my children! I like to give them gifts that will make them dance around in delight. I love to plan out mini-“adventures” to take Trey on—watching as his eyes are wide open with anticipation!
I know of parents who have adopted children—and the plans and the work that this took, and the joy of having these kids in their family!
“God’s unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. And this gave him great pleasure” (Ephesians 1:5).
God is our Father! What a loving relationship we have been brought into!
Many of us have wonderful thoughts and feelings toward our earthly fathers. Others, sadly, are not blessed with such memories. Earthly fathers are never perfect, they are all fallen, sinful human beings—some show their sinfulness in ugly and even harmful and hurtful ways. But I want you to know this: That no matter if you have great feelings toward your earthly father, or the opposite, our Father in heaven is perfectly loving, perfectly caring.
He is like that perfect daddy—playing and hugging and spending wonderful quality time with his child, helping her experience the wonder of life.
We have been adopted into God’s family! What an awesome place to be!
This brings us to the second profound point I see in this opening line:
2. We do not merely pray to “My” Father, but to
“Our Father.”
We cannot quickly skip over this! It is at the heart of who we are as a church!
Many of us who have been brought up in the Christianity of the latter half of the 20th Century have been raised with a highly individualistic view of Christianity. We were taught that “it is just Jesus and me.” But when we look at the community of believers in the Bible—both in Old Testament Israel and the New Testament church, we are struch by the corporate concept that is at the center of faith. We in the West, with our rugged individualism, find this hard to swallow, but there it is! Israel was God’s corporate community, called to be God’s witness to the world of his love, mercy, and salvation. The church is the new Israel—called to be the same witness of the New Covenant of Jesus Christ! In the recent past, Christianity (in our Western evangelical form of it) has lost that salvation is not just an individual thing, that calls each person out of death and into light, but a corporate thing, calling each individual into a new community of people who are now the
family of God!
We pray, “Our Father,” in a community of believers, in a family of believers, all of whom are God’s children, all of whom we call “brothers and sisters.”
Mark Driscoll, pastor of Mars Hill Fellowship, a church much like ours in Seattle, writes, “Church isn’t just the Sunday morning experience. It is a family with members of all ages…a family with members who are students and software designers and retail clerks and parents and construction workers…a family with members who have intimate relationship with God, others who desire to know him better and still others who don’t know him at all…a family who gather to worship God, to pray, to learn, and for some to just hang out.”
(quoted in The Younger Evangelicals by Robert Webber).
In the postmodern world of the 21st Century, we need to move away from the concept of church where it’s “everyone for themselves” toward a more biblical model of “everyone for each other.” As Robert Webber writes, “In a postmodern church…the world’s agenda if individualism or of CEO hierarchy is exchanged for relationship with various functions of service to each other. An excellent example of the tension between individualism and community is expressed in the television hit Survivor, for it ‘represented the perfect postmodern paradox.’ The participants were to ‘work together to build shelter, find food, and survive the island, but ultimately it is everyone for themselves.’ People long for community. They what to use their talents to help each other, but in the end, says our culture, it is individual survival that counts. In the church, of course, things should be different. In the true church everyone is a provider and everyone is a
recipient” (in The Younger Evangelicals).
Well said.
In the true church, we pray to
“our Father.” We recognize that we are in this together, that we share the same love for the same Father, we are to love one another as brothers and sisters in the family of God, and we are encourage each other by reminding each other of the love that our Father has for us.
This is my idea to symbolize that we can encourage one another to experience the Father’s love. I have several daisies. We should know that these beautiful flowers were created by our loving Father to show us his love. He gives them to us as a valentine from God the Father to his little children. Take the bunch of flowers, and pass it on to the person next to you and as you do so, say, “The Father loves us, his children.”
3. And, lastly, we pray to our Father in heaven.
Our Father is not just any father—he is our Father in heaven.
As I said earlier, the Jews of Jesus’ day were inclined to see God as thoroughly transcendent, so completely other, so exalted that a personal relationship with him could hardly be imagined. By contrast, 20th Century evangelicalism almost swung the pendulum too far the other way—we understanding of God was reduced to perhaps too warm and fuzzy Daddy-ness. We lost the magnificence and the majesty and the mystery of God. It’s like we could not keep these two seemingly contrasting parts of God in view at the same time. But, wonderfully, in the 21st Century, evangelicals are rediscovering the wonder of a God who is “in heaven” that we can also call “our Father.
We need to get back to the awe of those first century disciples, who quaked at the thought of God, and yet were introduced to the concept of being able to address the Almighty as “Our Father!”
Mystery, magnificence, majesty, coupled with intimacy, relationship, love.
We sing mighty hymns like “Immortal, Invisible,” in which we sing to our Father in Heaven these words that reflect also his majesty:
Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes.
Most blessed most glorious, the ancient of days—
Almighty, victorious, Thy great name we praise.
Great Father of glory, pure Father of light,
Thine angels adore Thee, all veiling their sight.
All praise we would render, Oh help us to see,
‘Tis only the splendor of light hideth Thee.
And we sing a new song to the Lord, like “Who is Like Our God?” in which we remind ourselves that our God is unlike anybody we can ever conceive:
Who is like our God?
Holy and intimate,
Tender and strong,
Patient and powerful;
Who is like our God?
Mighty and innocent,
Jealous and kind,
Sovereign and merciful;
Who is like our God?
These are the two sides of who our God is. He is holy (he is “in heaven”) and at the same time intimate (he is “our Father). He is strong (he is “in heaven”), and at the same time he is tender (he is “our Father).
This is not just any Father, this is God! And we have the tremendous opportunity to pray to the one who is both holy and intimate.
This is the wonder and blessing of The Lord’s Prayer. Jesus teaches us that since we have entered into the family of God through our faith in Jesus Christ, we have tremendous privileges! We can pray to God--the holy, the strong, the powerful, the mighty, the jealous, the sovereign—as our Father!
As we are told in John’s first letter,
“How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” (1 John 3:1)
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