Our Father, Who is in Heaven

       I’ve never been invited to the White House.  But Forest Gump kept getting invited.  He was invited as a football All-American when Kennedy was president.  He was invited as a recipient of the Medal of Honor when Johnson was President.  Now he’s a member of the ping pong team that opened relations between the U.S. and China when Nixon was president.  Here’s his reaction.

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       “I had to go to the White House – again!”   Have you ever noticed how familiarity can breed boredom  — how it is possible to yawn at a wonder of the world simply because it's close by?  If you went to visit my cousin Ahmad in Cairo, he would say: "Well, company’s coming. I guess we'll have to show 'em the pyramids." In Lucerne Em’s Aunt Heidi would drag herself out one more time to look at the Alps. In Buffalo, Kristin’s nephew Horace would probably loan you his car to go see Niagara Falls. But he wouldn't be bothered to go himself.

        This can become our attitude with the Lord's Prayer. We said it a few minutes ago as we do every Sunday. For some of us, it's maybe too familiar -- like Niagara Falls to Kristin’s couch potato nephew Horace.

       But come. Take a fresh look. Pretend you've never read, heard, or recited the prayer before. And as you look, recognize first that this prayer is prayed to someone.  That’s the place to start.

       Every so often I meet people who speak very kindly about religion.  They allow that it has a positive effect on some people. They say that religion can increase your contentment level. They'll even say that prayer can be a positive force that helps you coordinate your thoughts and give you a good chance to talk through a problem or find that penetrating insight into an issue that concerns you. Prayer can give you personal insight. The fact that they feel that there is no one who listens to those prayers is irrelevant.

       Jesus says that when we pray, we are engaged in much more than helpful self-talk. We are connecting ourselves to the God of the Universe in a very special way.  He says, "Pray like this: 'Our Father who is in heaven.'"

       At Mt. Sinai, God revealed himself to Moses by the name Yahweh -- "I Am that I Am." But soon the sacred name was no longer spoken for fear of offense. After a while, no one even knew for sure how it was pronounced since the vowels were not written down. To the Jews of the First Century, God was God at a distance. 

       You may remember the words of the Bette Midler song:

“And God is watching us, God is watching us,
  God is watching us from a distance.”

       But God will not remain at a distance – even though He is in heaven. The one we address in our prayer is not only the "Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise" of the medieval hymn. He is also the one who shows Himself to us and calls us into fellowship.  This is why Jesus, God made flesh, tells us that we are to address God by a very special title -- the title "Abba".

       Have you ever listened to children who are learning to talk? One of the first sounds they can make is "a-ba-ba-ba ba."   Hebrew men were very clever back when their language was being formed.  They heard that early “a-ba-ba sound and declared, “the baby’s saying daddy.”  Jesus says that we should use this childish sound in our prayers. So we pray to our "Abba" -- our daddy. Not our "pater" or our "father sir." That's "abinu" in Hebrew. Uh huh. "Abba." "Daddy".

       God has lots of names.  Most of them are very impressive.  But of all of His names, Abba is God’s favorite. We know He loves this name more than any other because it’s the one He used most. While on earth, Jesus called God "Father" over two hundred recorded times. God loves to be called Father. This is why Jesus teaches us to begin our prayer with the phrase, "Our Abba."

       In using this name, Jesus tells us that when we pray we are not praying to God at a distance. We are not praying to one from whom unwilling gifts must be extracted. We are praying to a father who delights to supply our needs who calls us into intimate fellowship with himself. Abba, became the characteristic Christian address to God. As Paul writes in Romans 8:15, "when we cry 'Abba', father, the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirits that we are children of God."

       Now I recognize that this whole concept of God as father has an explosive potential depending on how you feel about fathers.  Some people, including some here, had harsh, hard fathers. Some had human fathers who were selfish and self-centered.  Some had fathers who made an earthly hell out of their homes. Others had a father who were weak-willed -- who could command no respect from their children. Or he may have fluctuated in his moods and temper -- lenient one day and tough and terrifying the next.

       Not everyone had a father like mine. 

      He wasn’t perfect.  Like many of his generation, my father was not especially emotionally open. He found it hard to express love even as he broke his back to show his love.  Personal conversations were hard for him. 

       I still remember the way he taught me about the birds and the bees – probably on orders from my mom – when I was about twelve. We were walking along and came upon a certain word written in chalk on the sidewalk.  (No, I don’t have a picture to show you.) He asked me, “Do you know what that means?’  I gulped and admitted that I did.  Then he asked, “Do you have any questions?”  When I said, “No” he said “good” and went and told my mom that he’d had the conversation. 

        Looking back that was pretty funny.  But later I learned that when I was ready to get real with him on adult issues, he was more than willing to get real with me.  Later in life He became much more open about his love. 

         That was good.  But don’t confuse your Heavenly Father with some of the fathers you’ve seen on earth – even good ones like my dad. Your Father in Heaven isn’t prone to headaches and temper tantrums. He doesn’t hold you one day and hit you the next.  He doesn’t have a hard time expressing his love or talking with you about important stuff. So when we pray the Lord's Prayer we should picture God as our father with all the love and care that name expresses at its very best.  If we had a bad father we should thank God that  He’s a great one. 

     The Lord's Prayer begins with a personal pronoun.   Our.  Prayer is above all meant to be personal. 

       Prayer is not a formal ritual.  Now you can make it that. You can recite your prayers with a cold formality. But then, you can also read Dr. Suess or The Lord of the Rings in a monotone. You can do it. But it doesn't fit. It's not the way we should pray. Because God yearns to have a personal relationship with us. He expresses Himself in the scriptures with a high degree of intimacy. He wants conversation.

       But this open and unclouded approach to the Father is not always easy for us. We are haunted by our own failures.  So we come into His presence rather carefully because of our guilt. We wonder if we really will be understood because we are not sure we even understand ourselves.

       But God knows our makeup. He understands why we are the way we are. And He tells us that He appreciates our particular problems.

       Psalm 103 says of God:

       "The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in loving-kindness. He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is His loving-kindness toward those who fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgression from us. Just as a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion toward those who fear Him."

       Why?

       "For He himself knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust."

       The Psalmist says that the Lord knows what we are made of. And because He knows, He has a much more forgiving attitude than we have to ourselves or each other.

       God is our Father. And because God is our Father through Jesus Christ, that makes us blood relation with one another through the cross. You are a child of God but you are not an only child. The prayer Jesus teaches is filled with plural pronouns -- "our, us, we." Just as we are joined to God, we are also joined to our brothers and sisters in faith.

       For the God we pray to is the Father who is "ours." Jesus taught this prayer to His disciples. It's not a prayer for the world. It's for those to whom God is a Father through their faith is Jesus Christ. All people are God’s creation but only believers are His children.

       The Bible tells us in John 1 in reference to Jesus Christ: "As many as received him, to them he gave power to become the children of God, even to them that believe on His name; who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God."

       That is who we are.  That is the relationship we enjoy.

       This is why the early church allowed only baptized persons to repeat the Lord's Prayer.  This is how seriously they took their understanding of what it means to know God as father. They knew that only those who have been saved -- who have been born again through faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, who have had their sins forgiven -- are truly children of God. Only they can rightly call God their Abba in the actual sense of the word.

       We are God's own children.  We are redeemed by the blood of his Son who came to share our death and overcame it.  So we are bound for life.  We are joined in a forever family with our brothers and sisters in faith -- and with our Abba who is in Heaven.

        And that is why we now come to the table.  It’s time for the family meal.