3 Our Father
Our Father
The Lord’s Prayer is in family terms: Jesus teaches us to invoke God as our Father, just as he himself did—witness his Gethsemane prayer, for instance, or his High Priestly prayer in John 17, where “Father” comes six times. A question, however, arises. Jesus was God’s Son by nature, the second person of the eternal Godhead. We, by contrast, are God’s creatures. By what right, then, may we call God Father? When Jesus taught this manner of address, was he implying that creaturehood, as such, involves sonship—or what?
Adopted
Clarity here is vital. Jesus’ point, as we saw in an earlier study, is not that all men are God’s children by nature, but that his committed disciples have been adopted into God’s family by grace. “To all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God” (John 1:12). Paul states this as the purpose of the incarnation: “God sent forth his Son . . . so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Galatians 4:4, 5). Prayer to God as Father is for Christians only.
This resolves a puzzle. Elsewhere, Jesus stressed that his disciples should pray in his name and through him; that is, looking to him as our way of access to the Father. See John 14:6, 13; 15:16; 16:23-26. Why is there none of this in the model prayer? In fact, the point is present here; it is implicit in “Father.” Only those who look to Jesus as Mediator and sin-bearer, and go to God through him, have any right to call on God as his sons.
Sons and Heirs
If we are to pray and live as we should, we must grasp the implications of God’s gracious fatherhood.
First, as God’s adopted children we are loved no less than is the one whom God called his “beloved Son” (Matthew 3:17; 17:5). In some families containing natural and adopted children the former are favored above the latter, but no such defect mars the fatherhood of God.
This is the best news anyone has ever heard. It means that, as Paul triumphantly declares, nothing “ . . . in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:39). It means that God will never forget us, or cease to care for us, and that he remains our forbearing Father even when we act the prodigal (as, alas, we all sometimes do).
It means too that, as the Prayer Book says, he is “always more ready to hear than we to pray,” and is “wont to give more than either we desire or deserve.” “If you then, who are evil,” said our Lord, “know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11; the parallel saying in Luke 11:13 has “Holy Spirit” for “good things,” and the sustained ministry of the Holy Spirit was surely one of the good things Jesus had in mind.) To know this truth of God’s fatherly love to us gives boundless confidence not merely for praying, but for all our living.
Second, we are God’s heirs. Adoption in the ancient world was for securing an heir, and Christians are joint heirs with Christ of God’s glory (Romans 8:17). “We are God’s children now . . . when he appears we shall be like him” (1 John 3:2). Already “all (things) are yours” in the sense that they further your good here and your glory hereafter, for “you are Christ’s” (1 Corinthians 3:21-23; Romans 8:28-30). To grasp this is to know oneself rich and privileged beyond any monarch or millionaire.
Third, we have God’s Spirit in us. With our changed relationship to God (adoption) goes a change of direction and desire, of outlook and attitude, which Scripture calls regeneration or new birth. Those who “believed in” Jesus’ “name” were “born . . . of God” (John 1:12ff.), or more precisely “born of the Spirit” (3:6; see verses 3-8). “Because you are sons,” says Paul, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying [that is, prompting us to cry, spontaneously, as the expression of a new spiritual instinct], ‘Abba! Father!’” (Galatians 4:6). And when, to our distress (and this comes to us all), we find ourselves so muddle-headed, dead-hearted, and tongue-tied in prayer that “we do not know how to pray as we ought,” then our very desire to pray as we should and our grief that we are not doing so shows that the Spirit is himself making effective intercession for us in our hearts (Romans 8:26ff.); which is as reassuring as it is mysterious, and as thrilling as it is amazing.
Fourth, we must honor our Father by serving his interests. The center of our concern must be “thy name . . . kingdom . . . will,” and we must be like good children in human families, ready to obey instructions.
Fifth, we must love our brothers, by constant care and prayer for them. The Lord’s Prayer schools us in intercession for the family’s needs: “Our Father . . . give us . . . forgive us . . . lead us . . . deliver us . . . ” “Us” means more than just me! For God’s child, prayer is no “flight of the alone to the Alone,” but concern for the family is built into it.
So we should be expressing faith in Christ, confidence in God, joy in the Holy Spirit, a purpose of obedience, and concern for our fellow Christians when we go to God and call him “Father.” Only so shall we answer Jesus’ intention in teaching us this form of address.
Praise and Thanks
As invocation of God as Father opens this pattern prayer, so renewed realization of the family relationship—his parenthood, and our sonship by grace—should always come first in our practice of prayer. All right-minded praying starts with a long look Godward and a deliberate lifting up of one’s heart to give thanks and adore, and it is just this that “Father” calls us to. Thanks for grace, and praise for God’s paternity, and joy in our sonship and heirship should bulk large in Christian prayer, and if we never got beyond it we should still be praying to good purpose. First things first!
So I ask: Do we always pray to God as Father? And do we always praise when we pray?
Further Bible Study
God’s fatherhood:
Romans 8:12-25
Matthew 6:1-16
Questions for Thought and Discussion
What gives us the right to call God our Father? Why may only Christians do this?
What is the importance of realizing our sonship to God when we pray?
Why would one say, “The Lord’s Prayer schools us in intercession for the family’s needs”?