Saturday
Saturday
Our Image of God
If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
Matthew 7:11
Jesus seems to have given us in the Lord’s Prayer a model of real prayer, Christian prayer, in distinction to the prayers of the Pharisees and the pagans. To be sure, one could recite the Lord’s Prayer either hypocritically or mechanically or both. But if we mean what we say, then the Lord’s Prayer becomes the divine alternative to both forms of false prayer.
The error of the hypocrite is selfishness. Even in his prayers he is obsessed with his own self-image and how he looks in the eyes of the beholder. But in the Lord’s Prayer Christians are obsessed with God—with his name, his kingdom, and his will, not with theirs.
The error of the heathen is mindlessness. He just goes babbling on, giving voice to his meaningless liturgy. Over against this folly Jesus invites us to make all our needs known to our heavenly Father with humble thoughtfulness and so express our daily dependence on him.
So the fundamental difference between various kinds of prayer is the fundamentally different images of God that lie behind them. What kind of God is it who might be interested in such selfish and mindless prayers? Is God a commodity that we can use him to boost our own status, or a computer that we can feed words into him mechanically? From these unworthy notions we turn back with relief to the teaching of Jesus that God is our Father in heaven. We need to remember that he loves his children with the most tender affection, that he sees his children even in the secret place, that he knows his children’s needs before they ask him, and that he acts on their behalf with his heavenly and kingly power. If we thus allow Scripture to fashion our image of God, we will never pray with hypocrisy but always with integrity, never mechanically but always thoughtfully, like the children of God we are.
For further reading: Matthew 7:7–11