At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen (Matt. 6:9-13).

So we are invited to pray to God our Father, and we have noted that this is a distinct shift in emphasis. The idea of God as Father comes front and center in the New Testament.

We now come to the next phrase, which is worthy of more meditation than we might want to give it. Of course God is in heaven. Isn’t that where God lives?

Well, yes and no. But the Lord wants us to pray this way for a reason, but before we get to that reason we have to remember two foundational truths about God. The first is that He dwells in eternity (Is. 57:15), and that this is “outside” even the highest heaven. The heavens, along with the rest of the material universe, are created, and God is “higher” than that, or “outside” of that, or “beneath” all of that. The second foundational truth is that God the Father is omnipresent throughout the entire created order. We can see this in the fact that Jesus invites us to pray (here, on earth) to our Father, who is in heaven. As we do this, there is no suggestion that we need to yell. This means that our God in heaven is also here with us, and knows what we need before we ask—as Jesus reminds us just a few verses later (v. 32). In this sense, He is “on earth” every bit as much as He is in heaven.

And yet, the Lord tells us to pray to our Father, who is in the heavens. I say heavens because the phrase is en tois ouranois, in the plural. When we pray to God our Father we are therefore not praying in the direction where He is located (for He is everywhere), but like the ancient Jews we are facing the place where He has determined to establish His throne, where He decided to settle His name.

“The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord’s: But the earth hath he given to the children of men” (Psalm 115:16).

So when we think of God, He wants us to think “up.” When we pray to Him, we are called to think away from the subterranean caverns. This is not rendered ludicrous by the fact that Australians are praying in a different “direction.” That doesn’t matter. What matters is that we (and the Aussies) understand that God our Father must be given glory, as the Christmas angels did, “in the highest” (Luke 2:14).

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen (Matt. 6:9-13).

One of the first things to get straight in learning how to pray is the lesson of learning who you are praying to. Jesus is teaching His disciples to pray, and whenever you send a message of any kind—be it a letter, or email, or text—you need to put an address on it. Who are you talking to? Who should pay attention? Who is being addressed? If we don’t think about this carefully, we might find ourselves in a frightful muddle—beginning our prayer, for example, with “Dear Jesus,” and concluding it with “in Your Son’s name, amen.”

Now what Jesus instructed His disciples to do here—address God as our Father—was a radical innovation. There are a handful of places in the Old Testament where the fatherhood of God is referred to, but the total amounts to about fifteen instances (e.g. Deut. 32:6; Ps. 68:5). And in none of these instances is God directly addressed as “Father.” In the ancient Near East, where male deities and their consorts were common, it is perhaps not surprising that there was an avoidance of this kind of expression, which could have been taken as part of a pagan and sexualized fertility religion.

This is in sharp contrast to the New Testament. Jesus here instructs His disciples to make a point of praying this way. When you pray, make sure you say, “Our Father.” It was the Lord’s favorite expression for God—He uses it around 65 times in the synoptic gospels, and over 100 times in the gospel of John alone. The rest of the New Testament follows this example—in the Pauline letters, God is referred to as Father over 40 times.

At the same time, because God is the source of all that exists, because God is the Creator, it would seem that the Fatherhood of God would be a natural metaphor to draw. If there were no sin, this would be true, and so when liberal theology emphasized the Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man (FOGBOM), they could only do so by minimizing the reality of sin. God is a universal Father, but sin necessarily interferes with our understanding of this, which is why liberals began by emphasizing the Fatherhood of God and ended by not understanding the difference between a father and a mother.

“For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named” (Eph. 3:14–15).

The phrase rendered here as the whole family comes from pas and patria—all the fathered. Every kind of lineage derives its name from the Father of the Lord Jesus. God objectively is the Father of all. But because we rebelled against Him in the Garden, disobeying His prohibition of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we were estranged from our Father. This meant that we either pursued a carnal sort of fatherhood, as in the fertility religions, or we withdrew, not daring to use the term Father.

By His sacrifice on the cross, Christ changed all that. The issue of sin has been addressed through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and this is why we are summoned to approach God as our Father in Heaven. This is only possible because Christ dealt with all of our sins and also with the sins of others. If we believe we cannot come to a Father because of our own sins, Christ teaches us otherwise. If we believe that our experience with an abusive earthly father means that we could never address God as a Father, Christ teaches us otherwise.

So then, Christian prayer is addressed to the Father, in the name of the Son, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Father is the destination, the Son is the road, and the Spirit is the car (Eph. 2:18).

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen (Matt. 6:9-13).

Before considering the Lords Prayer phrase by phrase, we should begin by taking it in as a whole. In English, it takes less than twenty seconds to say, and it seems strange that the Lord said that we were to pray after this manner. Haven’t we all read the impressive stories of prayer warrior missionaries who wrestled in prayer for hours until they were finally able to punch the principalities and powers on the nose?

And yet, when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, the way John the Baptist taught his disciples, He gave them an even shorter version of this particular prayer (Luke 11:2-4). Jesus explicitly teaches us that prayer ought not to be a big production we shouldn’t make a show of praying in church or on street corners (Matt. 6:5). Men like praying for men under the guise of praying to God. Jesus says to hide the fact that we pray (Matt. 6:6). On top of that, He says that we ought not to think that God is in any way interested in the word count and to the extent that He is interested in it, He wants us to make a point of going short (Matt. 6:7)

Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few (Eccl. 5:2).

Of course we would be veering to the opposite extreme if we said that it was a sin for prayer to go long. Before the Lord selected His disciples, He prayed all night (Luke 6:12), and in the Garden of Gethsemane, He prayed long enough to lose the disciples who were with Him (Matt. 26:41). But even with that granted, it seems that Christians who know their prayer life to be inadequate should begin by simply praying the Lords Prayer, as brief as it is.

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