Our Father in heaven - Midweek Message 20th May

This then is how you should pray, ‘Our Father in heaven…’ (Matthew  6.9)

Dear Friends,

Following on from last Sunday, I wanted to think a little further about some of the implications of what Jesus teaches all his disciples to pray  and particularly what he says here about how we are to address God in prayer, namely Our Father in heaven. I don’t think Jim Packer was exaggerating when he wrote, as I quoted last Sunday:

“You sum up the whole of New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one’s holy Father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all.” (Knowing God  J I Packer p224)

So, what specifically does knowing and speaking to God as our Father in heaven tell us about Christianity and being and living as a Christian? As always there is so much that could be said but I want to mention 3 things.

Firstly, Christianity is relational.  Father is essentially a relational word. It speaks of personal relationship, of intimate relationship, of familial relationship. Jesus came to bring us back into relationship with God, back into the family of God – the God who made us and sustains us but from whom we had turned. John sums up Jesus’ mission in the opening chapter of his gospel to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God (John 1:12) – and then he spends the rest of is gospel telling us what the repairing of that relationship, that bringing us home to God the Father involved for him – in particular it involved his suffering death on the cross in our place and then rising again from death. After his resurrection Jesus says to Mary Magdalene “Go… to my brothers and tell them,`I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'” (20:17)  He calls his disciples ‘brothers’ and refers to his Father as one who has now become ‘your (his disciples) Father’.  To be a Christian is to know Jesus as your Elder Brother and his Father as your Father.

So many people struggle today with issues of identity and look for their identity -  their sense of being, of significance, of security, of worth -  in a whole variety of places like gender, sexuality, race, wealth, career, etc -  but Jesus restores and bestows  on all who trust themselves to him the truest, most human, most secure and enduring identity  a person can ever have: a child of the living God. Why is that so? Because as Genesis 1.1 puts it In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth but long before God was a Creator – he was a father he was THE Father, living and loving eternally with Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit as one God in three persons. To know God as Father, to know God the Father through his Son Jesus by His Spirit is to know the one who is the eternal source and origin of everything that ever came into being. It is to come face to face with eternal reality who is personal who is God, the triune God. As Jesus prayed in John 17 Father…this is eternal life that they know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. (17.1,3) It doesn’t get any better than this – this is life, eternal life, life as it was meant to be, life as it will always be in the new heavens and new earth  – knowing God the Father through the Son by the Spirit.

Secondly, Christianity is outward looking.  In this, of course, it finds itself totally at odds with popular secular thought. Carl Sagan the US astronomer and  communicator once said  ‘The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be’ and on another occasion, looking on a photograph  from space of earth – the Pale Blue Dot as he called it -  he further wrote: Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. Therefore, if we have problems on earth, problems in humanity, we have got to sort them out ourselves. There is no outside help. There is nothing outside the material universe. We are on our own. But Jesus said differently. He tells us the cosmos is not all there is. It is not self -generating it is not self-existent. This is not a closed universe. There is an unseen realm beyond the material which is even more real than the material. There is God – God the Father in heaven – who made everything and continues to rule over everything in this world, even though this world may have ignored and rejected him. The best evidence (though by no means the only evidence) for that is Jesus’ own presence on earth. He is the one sent by the Father (John 17.3)  So when he teaches his disciples to pray Our Father in heaven  he is reminding  us our help, our hope, our joy, our peace lie beyond ourselves, beyond this world in our Creator who through Jesus is our heavenly Father, our merciful and powerful Father, living and active in the world. We are not called to try and fix our own problems. We are not called to try and be our own Saviour. That is always doomed to fail because our problems ultimately are beyond human capacity to deal with. Look out. Look up. Call out to your Father in heaven. He can, he will help – again Jesus presence and work in the world confirms that.

Thirdly and lastly, Christianity is corporate as opposed to individualistic. Jesus taught his disciples to pray Our Father in heaven, as opposed simply to My Father in heaven. It is true of course that once I have come to know him through Jesus he is My Father, but he is not only My Father.  He is the Father of all who trust Jesus and having him as my Father means I am now part of a family, his family – the church local and global. I am not an only child. I have brothers and sisters, whom I need, if I am to live and grow as a child of God. This is why lockdown and the inability to meet in person in fellowship on a Sunday or any other day of the week with fellow Christians is so hard, so ‘unnatural’ for a Christian. We were meant to meet – we were made and re-made in Christ to meet together as Christians. It is in our meeting together with our heavenly Father and our Elder Brother and sharing together their  Word and the various gifts they have given us by the Spirit that we  grow up together in faith, have our characters shaped and fashioned more in the family likeness and are able to reflect back to our triune God, the wonder of his saving grace manifested in the diversity and unity of the church family.

In that regard, I hope that one of the things that may come out of this unique period of lockdown is that whenever we are able to meet again, we will value and make the very most of every opportunity to gather with our church family and know, serve and enjoy God our Father together. Any desire within a professing Christian to self-isolate, to social distance from fellow Christians is, spiritually speaking, dangerously unhealthy and is totally out of step with our Lord Jesus and our heavenly Father. Remember how the writer to the Hebrews exhorts us: Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another--and all the more as you see the Day approaching. (Hebrews 10.25)  

So, Christianity - being and living as a Christian -  as Jesus revealed it, is relational, outward looking and corporate. It is impossible to underestimate the privilege or the intended significance and implications of being able to pray, Our Father in heaven,

Yours in the outworking of that privilege and significance,

David

PS This coming Sunday Farquhar is going to look at a bit more of the Lord’s prayer (particularly the first 3 petitions in Matthew 6.9-10) so keep thinking about these things, keep enjoying the privilege – keep praying!