“Our
Father”
Matthew 6:9
February
17, 2002
Dr.
Jerry Nelson
READ
Matthew 6:9b Standing: “Our
Father”
President Theodore Roosevelt’s childhood was idyllic.
Especially his relationship with his father.
Teedie, as he was known by his family, was always with his father.
His father personally educated him, his father took him all over the world (and this 130 years ago).
His father cared for him when he was sick, as he often was.
Roosevelt’s earliest memory of his father was being carried in his arms hour after hour in the night so Teedie, the weak, asthmatic child could breath.
His father encouraged him and tutored him into manhood.
Years later, when Roosevelt became
President, he told his sister that “he never took any serious step or made any
vital decision for his country without thinking first” what his father would
have done. (In Edmund
Morris The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt 72)
But when Teedie was 20 and in college, his father, whom he called his best friend in life, very suddenly died at 46 years of age.
That day Theodore, who had journaled from childhood, wrote in his diary, “My dear Father. Born Sept 23, 1831…” And there his pen wavered and stopped.
It was three days before he again
picked up his pen and then he wrote, “He has just been buried. I shall never
forget these terrible three days…the dull, inert sorrow, during which I felt as
I had been stunned, or as if part of my life had been taken away…” “He was
everything to me.” “My father was the best man I ever knew.” (The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
70-73)
For twenty years it had been Roosevelt’s experience to know his father’s presence, encouragement, guidance and love.
With a father like that you can take on the world.
If you remember something of his history, you know that Theodore Roosevelt was a man’s man and a Renaissance man all in one – adventurer, cowboy-rancher, “Rough rider”-warrior, New York aristocracy, Harvard-educated, author, naturalist and politician.
But into adulthood, he longed for his father.
For the first time in his life he felt alone and the world around him grew very large.
Practically and realistically, are we, each one, alone in the world?
Oh, we have acquaintances, even some we call friends, we have parents or a spouse but there is a part of us, maybe a large part of us that feels alone.
It’s the part of us that no one else sees or hears.
It’s our private lives of the past with its guilt or the future with its uncertainty, or even the present with its mixture of motives.
Alone in the anxiety we feel about work, or kids, or marriage and alone in determining how to fix the situations we face day after day.
In the movie about WWII submarine “U571”, when the boat was in crisis, the young captain told his crew he didn’t know what to do.
The older master sergeant took the captain aside and asked for permission to speak freely and then said, “You’re the captain. Don’t ever tell the crew you don’t know what to do. The captain always knows what to do whether he does or not.”
That’s something of the “alone” of which I speak.
In many of the roles of life, we feel almost forced into an “alone” position – on our own – and the truth is we don’t know what to do.
With
a good marriage, healthy kids, and a successful career, John Eldredge still
found himself so often angry.
He writes, “I realized I was so furious about
feeling all alone in a world that constantly demanded more of me than I felt
able to give. Something in me felt very young – like a ten-year-old boy in a
man’s world but without a man’s ability to come through. There was much fear beneath the surface,
fear that I would fail, fear that I would be found out, and finally, fear that
I was ultimately on my own… Why does something in my heart feel orphaned?” (Eldredge
Wild at Heart 126)
As
young adults we separate from our parents and unless pride totally clouds our
perspective, when we become aware, we begin to ask, “Am I on my own?”
We try to attach ourselves to another through
marriage and/or other close relationship but even if we succeed, sooner or
later we are still asking from the depths of our souls, “Is anybody with me?”
As we grow older and answers to life’s questions
become less certain, we continue to wonder, “Am I alone?”
There
is in every person an aching, though often-unacknowledged homelessness and fatherlessness.
Novelist Thomas Wolfe wrote, “The deepest search
in life…the thing that in one way or another was central to all living, was
man’s search for a father, not merely the father of his flesh, not merely the
lost father of his youth, but the image of a strength and wisdom external to
his need and superior to his hunger, to which the belief and power of his own
life could be united.” (Wolfe cited by Doberstein in introduction (p9)
to Thielicke’s Our Heavenly Father)
When
we look at history and even our own lives, it can appear that we are alone –
that there is no God out there, no “father” listening, caring, and acting.
Children die, friends are unfaithful, and evil
too often wins.
When things happen, good or bad, chance too often
seems as good an explanation as Providence.
We
don’t want to be alone, we want there to be someone out there – but do we dare
to believe there really is?
Helmut
Thielicke suggested it is as if each person is walking through a dark forest at
night all alone.
Strange sounds make them afraid, shadows flit
across their path.
They would give anything for someone to be with
them who knew the way, knew how to avoid the dangers, and was good enough and
powerful enough to take them through safely.
But in our day we have
become so sophisticated that we “know” no such person exists to help us – we
are on our own.
And so some
attempt to compensate by having times when they can enter into the solitude or
their own souls and find a counterbalance to the frenetic activity of
life.
We must be centered, they say, we must find that place of inner
composure.
Some call it mediation
while others might call it prayer.
They
would say that prayer is really only another way of talking to oneself to
clarify life and bring composure to our minds.
And so we talk to ourselves like a child walking through a graveyard
trying to comfort himself with the sound of his own voice, even while knowing
that he is all alone. (paraphrased
and concept from Thielicke p18)
But Jesus wasn’t whistling
past the cemetery.
He wasn’t just
making noise to drown out his fears and he wasn’t talking to himself.
His speaking was a call – he was addressing someone - “Father!”
He said to his followers
in Matthew 6:9
“This, then, is how you should pray: ‘Our Father
in heaven…”
The very word “Father”
spoken from the heart is a statement of faith.
Jesus knew that
someone was there, listening.
Jan Lochman wrote, “The
classical New Testament confession of faith is prayer…(and) the context of
prayer is our need” of God… In prayer we reach beyond ourselves… Prayer is a
protest against (aloneness). (Lochman p5-7)
When we utter the word “Father” we are saying I believe you are there.
The first thing in
prayer is coming to Someone.
In
prayer we are not talking about God but to him.
This is foundational!
Ultimately God
is not to be talked about but to.
He is, and therefore we
must engage him.
Karl
Barth wrote, “Seriously, properly, and strictly, Christians cannot speak about
the Father but only to him… “Father” as a (called name), whether expressed or
not, is the primal form of the thinking…speaking…and obedience demanded of
Christians…the primal form of the faithfulness with which they may correspond
to his faithfulness.” (Karl Barth The Christian Life Dogmatics IV
p51
In the autobiography of
Friedrich von Bodelschwingh he writes in one chapter of the death of his four
young children within two weeks of each other during the allied bombing of his
German City.
Most moving is
the way he describes how he committed them one after another to the fatherly
hands of God.
Most impressive is that even during this darkness of life, this man never
lost contact with his Father in heaven.
He never
started talking about God as
when we ask, “How could God let this happen” or “Why is God doing this?”
He did not speak about God but always to God. (In
Thielicke Life Can Begin Again)
He trusts his Father enough to call to him.
And
in our speaking to God, the main thing is not that we make correct requests but
that we enter into conversation and relationship with God.
Speech is an integral part of a relationship.
There may be silence but it is eloquent silence,
full of meaning.
Again
from Thielicke, “That is why God did not merely give us pious feelings and
subjective religiosity, of the kind that is inspired by the odor of incense,
the strains of sacred music, or the silence of a sun-drenched clearing in the
woods. These pious feelings pass away…”
but His Word does not. (Thielicke 38)
Isaiah
43:1 "…I have summoned you by name; you are mine.”
Prayer
is not a soliloquy but a dialogue.
But
to engage that great “Someone” in conversation, to call on his Name, is to call
on a very specific “Someone” – “Our Father” – or as Jesus called him, “Abba”!
Joachim
Jeremiah of the last century said that he had studied all the prayer literature
of ancient Judaism and found no place where God was referred to as “Abba”.
Abba was an everyday word, it was a homely
family-word.
No other Jew would have dared to address God in
this way and yet Jesus did it always.
And he authorized us to use that same familiar
and trusting word when we speak to our heavenly father. (Joachim
Jeremiah b.1900 The Prayers of Jesus SCM Press 1967 p57)
No, we are not alone but even better, the One who is there is “our Father”, our “Abba”.
That word “father” had a
place in other religions of Jesus’ day and certainly in Judaisim.
But
Jesus adds an emphasis that was otherwise, largely missing.
There is in his use a closeness, a relationship of love and trust.
What is your
understanding of God?
God
as “Father” can be misunderstood when compared to our selfish, capricious,
authoritarian ways as human fathers.
Sometimes we act out of unrighteous anger and the punishment does
not fit the crime or is altogether unwarranted.
But our heavenly Father is not an
angry father or an absent father or a dependent father.
Without diminishing his
majesty, Jesus demonstrates a very different
Father, a Father of consistent love.
Jesus
is the God who comes near.
The “father” in Jesus’
story of the prodigal son is the clearest illustration of the use of the word
“father”.
There
is, here, no patriarchal or authoritarian picture of a father.
The prodigal’s father doesn’t stop the son from going, though he could
have, he runs to his son upon his son’s return - unheard of by a patriarch and
he demands no restitution but instead celebrates his son’s return.
The prodigal’s
father defies our usual concept of a stern, remote, unyielding, do-or-die God.
In his book, The
Great House of God, Max Lucado writes that the Father’s mission is
adoption, his motive is devotion and his method is redemption. (p13ff)
When Jesus says we can
call God “our Father”, the issue is sonship.
Jesus
speaks of a new relationship with God.
Because of his justice God cannot dismiss our sin and because of his love
he cannot dismiss us.
There may be unplanned
pregnancies, but there are no accidental or unplanned adoptions.
When Jesus says we can call God “OUR Father,” “he is passing on
to us his own priceless relationship” with His Father. (Fredrich Bruner 239)
This word “Father” binds God to us
unconditionally.
You can’t undo fatherhood.
Galatians
4:4-6 ”…God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law, to redeem those
under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons. Because you are sons,
God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, "Abba, Father."
Through
faith in Christ, we are, you are, a son or daughter of God.
He
is “our Father”.
And what is our Father’s motive? It is devotion.
Ephesians
1:3-5
“Long ago, before God
made the world, God chose us to be his very own, through what Christ would do
for us; he decided then to make us holy in his eyes, without a single fault we
who stand before him covered in his love. His unchanging plan has always been
to adopt us into his own family by sending Jesus Christ to die for us. And he did this because he wanted to.” TLB paraphrase
Not
because we were attractive or worthy but solely for “his good pleasure”.
We don’t
readily accept that because we know that among ourselves there is no free
lunch, there is always a price, an expectation, that if we don’t meet, it’s
over.
Many Christians, and I think especially men, live with a quiet fear that
the are alone and even if there is a God out there, they live with the quiet
fear that they don’t measure up or they live with the proud assumption that
they do.
But that is not the way with our Father.
He asks for nothing but our trust.
The
only rational basis for saying “our Father” is if the Father has shown himself
to us first.
It is only in response to his voice that we know
to say anything.
Otherwise prayer is only our wishful
thinking.
That is why it is very important that Jesus
himself is the one who taught us to pray, “our Father”.
In Jesus God has spoken.
Hebrews
1:1-2 “In the past God spoke to our
forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in
these last days he has spoken to us by his Son…”
And
that Son, Jesus, took the penalty for our sin, against God and others, on
himself and died in our place.
Our
Father, in Jesus, removed the legal barriers and brought us into his family by
adoption.
To change metaphors, our Father rescued us from
the kingdom of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.
We, you, have become his child.
Don’t misunderstand,
Jesus did not come to save us from the Father.
It isn’t that the Father
is just and Jesus is merciful.
George
MacDonald wrote, “This is and has been the Father’s work from the
beginning…to bring us into the home of his heart. This is our destiny.” George MacDonald cited in
Michael Phillips A God to Call Father
Take
Bethlehem, Calvary, and the empty tomb out of the equation and we have no
evidence that we are not in fact all alone.
But put Jesus, the Messiah, into the picture and
we can say, “Our Father”.
The point I am making is
that your relationship with God is all grace!
Think about it, adoptive
parents don’t ask the agency if the child can perform certain tasks or has a
certain amount of money to give.
If the Duryeas
or the Luebckes, who have recently adopted children, had asked the caseworker,
“Does the child have clothes and money for school tuition? Does she have a
college fund and a willingness to help make meals and wash clothes?
If they weren’t summarily dismissed, maybe someone would say, “Wait a
minute, you don’t adopt because of what the child has but because of what he needs. A child receives
adoption they don’t earn it.
We have become children
of the Father not because we deserve it but because he has chosen us based only
on his love.
That’s
the kind of Father he is.
1 John 3:1 “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!
We must stop feeling safe with God only when we think we are doing well.
We must come to understand that He is our Father even more when we are doing poorly, mostly when we have failed miserably – for then I am believing that his love is not caused by me, it is his love, freely given.
One author wrote, “When I seek to
fashion a self-image from the adulation of others and the inner voice whispers,
‘You’ve arrived; you’re a player…,’ there is no truth in that
self-concept. (Or) when I sink into
despondency and the inner voice whispers, ‘You are no good, a fraud, a
hypocrite, and dilettante,’ there is no truth in any image shaped from that
message. My dignity (comes from being) Abba’s child….” (Manning in Abba’s Child 63)
I know that every stage of life has its unique challenges but as we grow older we look at childhood as such an idyllic time.
“Look at that kid”, we say of our own child, “not a care in the world”.
He doesn’t have to worry about where food will come from, whether he will have a bed tonight and if anything frightens or hurts him, he comes running to me with no doubt I can save him.
I’d like him to learn to say “please” and “thank you” but they are superfluous formalities to him because he fully expects to be cared for whether he says those things or not because, after all, I’m his father.
He may choose to disobey me and grieve the loss of a privilege or the threat of a spanking but it never even enters his mind that I would cease to love him or care for him – he knows I’m his father.
In fact if put my own life at risk to save his, if he was even aware of it, he would expect it – it would seem perfectly congruent with the relationship – after all, I’m his father.
Do you know that is your relationship with our heavenly Father?
You are not alone, your Father loves you!
Brennan Manning tells the story of Edward Farrell a pastor in Detroit who went to visit his 80 year-old uncle in Ireland.
On his uncle’s birthday, the two of them went for an early morning walk.
After walking in silence for some time and then standing side by side watching the rising sun, the uncle suddenly turned with a great smile and began skipping down the path.
The pastor followed and said, “Uncle Seamus, you look so happy, can you tell me why?”
“Yes”, said the eighty-year-old
man, “You see me Abba is very fond of me.” (Manning Abba’s Child 64)
Everett
Fullam was a missionary to a tribe of people in the interior of Nigeria.
These people had never heard the word Africa much
less the word America.
When the chief heard one day of two Americans
walking on the moon, he said it was impossible because one only as to look to
see that the moon is too small to hold two people.
But in spite of their naïve view of the world
when they became Christians their understanding of things eternal was deep.
Fullam
explains it this way after he baptized three of them:
“There
were two men and one woman.
·
We stood on the
banks of a muddy river, wet and happy.
·
I had never seen
three more joyful people.
·
What is the best
thing about this experience? I asked.
All three continued to smile…but only one spoke,
in clear, deliberate English: ‘Behind this universe stands one God, not a great
number of warring spirits, as we had always believed, but one God. And that God
loves me.’” (Everett
Fullam Living the Lord’s Prayer 1980 p27,28)
Thomas Merton wrote, “Whether you understand it or not, God
loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you
and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have
ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.” (Thomas Merton The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters
146)
I have taken your time
to speak about this opening word in the Lord’s Prayer because I hope it is now
obvious to you how crucial that word is.
If
you misunderstand who the Father is, you miss the whole prayer.
If you know the Father and want to know him more you come to him as a
little child to his father, full of expectation and full of confidence that his
love for you is so great that he will do only the best for you.
Then no matter what the
situation we call out to the God who is there and we say “Our Father”!
That is how we
begin the Lord’s Prayer!
Stand and pray it with
me.
Our Father who art in
heaven
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done on
earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our
daily bread
And forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.
And lead us not into
temptation
But deliver us from evil
For Thine is the kingdom
and the power and the glory forever Amen.