Our Father

And since we are focusing on prayer, where better to go than to the Lord’s Prayer. So if you have your Bibles, look with me at Matthew 6 beginning in verse 5.

“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

The Lord’s Prayer begins with the words, “our Father.” Now, we can easily skip over this as a mere preface to the meat of the prayer, but these two words are actually a powerful proclamation of the gospel. When Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, he doesn’t say, “My Father in heaven,” but he had every right to do so, didn’t he? He is by nature the Son of God. He is by nature the only-begotten of God. He is by nature the Beloved Son of the Father. That relationship is his by nature. And yet we see the beautiful truth of the gospel in these opening words, because what is Christ’s by nature becomes our’s by grace. Jesus does not say “My Father,” bu the invites us all to say “Our Father.”

The Lord’s Prayer, and every prayer, begins with the profound reality that because of Jesus, we have been adopted into the family of God. This image of being adopted is straight from the Scriptures. In Ephesians 1, Paul writes this:

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.

Good friends of ours when we lived in Athens went through the process to adopt a child from the State of Georgia. And they rightfully said that it was the clearest representation of the gospel that they had ever been witness to. This child they were adopting had no right to their family. By nature, this child had no claim on being included in the life that they shared as a family, and yet in adopting that child they were emphatically declaring that he would forever be a beloved member of their family with all the rights and privileges that belonged to any child born to them by nature.

When we pray “Our Father” we are preaching the gospel, because we recognize that in our own state we cannot pray that prayer. We forfeited our right to God’s family when we rebelled against him in our sin and sought to live according to our own desires rather than his. By nature we have no right to cry out in prayer, “Our Father,” and yet in his love for us, he sent his one and only Son, his Son by nature, to bring us once and for all back into his family, to share the blessings of life in his family.

Something you’ll come to find as we go through this series is that prayer is less about what you say to God and more about what God says to you, and the very first thing that God says to you in the Lord’s Prayer is what: You are my child, because what was my Son’s by nature, we have given to you by grace. The first words of this prayer are a proclamation of the gospel of our adoption through Jesus.

Now, for many us though, we struggle with this opening line because the idea of praying to our Father is difficult, because our earthly fathers are people we want nothing to do with - or even if we do desire a relationship with them, we love them, and we know they tried their best, we also know that they’re deeply flawed. A lot of fathers are distant, emotionally removed, and not particularly relatable. So we wonder, why would we want to have a relationship with a God who is revealed as Father?

But we have to rediscover the beauty of this phrase, “Our Father in Heaven.” The fatherhood that we are speaking about is not an earthly fatherhood. There are a hundred examples of the differences, but I’ll highlight just one. Many of us had fathers who were distant and distracted. They weren’t attentive, whether due to physical absence or maybe emotional absence. Either way, when you looked to see if they were present for you when you needed or wanted them, you couldn’t always count on them.

You know, I’ve seen this in myself already only ten months into fatherhood. There will be times when Melanie and I are playing with Peter, down on the floor with him, and I’ve got my phone out, hidden behind some toy of his so he can’t see it. And on more than one occasion, Peter will try to get my attention. He’ll make a sound or even pat my leg, but I’m too distracted with my phone to notice. And it isn’t until Melanie says something that I snap back into reality and notice my son’s desire for my attention.

A lot of us have experienced something similar with our fathers. They don’t hear us. They don’t see us. They are distant and uninterested, and as a result, that’s how we view God. He’s not listening. He’s too busy with running the universe to care about me. But that could not be further from the truth. The Scriptures are clear in affirming that the Father loves the Son with limitless affection. When Jesus is baptized, the Father tears open the heavens to tell the Son of his love saying, “You are my beloved Son, and I am so pleased with you.” The Father is always lovingly present and attentive to the Son. His gaze is always on the Son.

You know I love the song, How Deep the Father’s Love for Us, but they get one thing wrong in it. One of the verses goes like this, “How great the pain of searing loss, the Father turns His face away, as wounds which mar the Chosen One, bring many sons to glory.” I have a problem with that verse, as beautiful as it is, because the Father never turned his face away from the Son. In fact, the Psalm that Jesus cried out while on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s not a psalm about God’s absence, but of his abiding presence. It’s a Psalm about God’s faithfulness! At the end of the Psalm, he writes, “For he has not despised or abhorred the affliction of the afflicted, and he has not hidden his face from him, but has heard, when he cried to him.” How Deep Is the Father’s Love for the Son? It’s limitless, and if you have placed for trust in Jesus, you have been clothed in his Sonship, so that you can be assured that the Father will never turn his face from you. His gaze will always be on you, you do not need to get his attention, because you are in Christ his Son.

And this means that you can cry out to the Father at any time of the day and he is perfectly attentive to you. In a world where we often feel forgotten or ignored, the one place where we can go and be heard is to our Father in Heaven. He is always ready and willing to listen to those who are wrapped in His Son.

Now, the Lord’s Prayer continues, and we come to its first petition: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Again we want to skip over this part, but mainly because most of us don’t know what the word hallowed means. You have never used that word outside of the Lord’s Prayer and that’s okay. What does it mean? It simply means, “make your name holy.” Now, this might be confusing to us, because God’s name is already holy. In fact, it’s as holy as it can possibly ever get. There is no such thing as adding to God’s holiness, because he is the definition and source of all holiness. So, what then does it mean, and why are we asking God to make his name holy if it already is?

Well, underlying this petition is the recognition that we need the power of the Holy Spirit to reveal to the world, in our words and deeds, the holiness of God. This isn’t about adding to God’s holiness - which is impossible - this is about asking God to empower us to live lives that point to the holiness of God. All of our lives point to something. Our lives all orient around something in which we’ve placed our ultimate value. The world orients its life around career, financial security, technology, family, education. But the very first ask in the Lord’s Prayer, is for the Spirit to move us away from those things as the center of our lives, and to enable us to live a life that points to the Father - so the world can see Him in and through us. Jesus is teaching us to ask the Father to make our lives a testament to the one place where we can find true and perfect love, peace, joy, and life.

This is a way of thinking about holiness that may be new for you. Pursuing holiness is typically seen as something we do for our benefit. And that’s certainly true. Living our lives according to God’s will, according to his vision of life, according to how he has made us, that is absolutely for our good - it actually makes us more human. But according to Jesus, pursuing holiness is also an act of loving your neighbor. It’s also a way of pointing your neighbor to the place where true love, peace, and joy can be found. Not in you, but in your Father.

And this reveals something profound about prayer. Prayer always culminates in a sending out into the world. Prayer always turns us outward. In prayer we go to the Father, we go to him with our burdens, our concerns, our highs and our lows, and in prayer we commune with him, but in that we are always being equipped and sent out into the lost and hurting world to show them, to point them in the direction of our Lord, where they can find the same love and hope and peace and joy that we’ve found in Our Father in heaven.

As we set out on a new year, now is the time to enter into prayer. We are tired and weary from the last year, and we are excited and eager to turn the page and pursue the Lord’s work in this new year. Now is the time to pray. This is our first and primary ministry. Now is the time to claim our inheritance as sons and daughters of God, made that way by grace through Jesus Christ. Now is the time to cry out to the Father who is ever present with us, always listening, always attentive. Now is the time to ask the Lord to so empower our lives by his Spirit, that we might highlight for a lost and broken world, the place where all love and hope and joy can be eternally found. Let’s pray.