Have I Understood the Prayer "Our Father"?

For Jesus prayer was a way of life and part of life. We begin a series to understand the pattern of prayer Jesus gave us.  The verse for todays meditation is

Our Father in Heaven
Matthew 6:9a

I read about a soldier who was caught one night returning to his quarters from the nearby woods, and he was charged with holding communications with the enemy. The soldier pleaded that he had gone into the woods to pray. The commanding officer skeptical of his defense shouted at him, "Then down on your knees and pray now. It may be your last” The soldier knelt down and prayed so fervently and sincerely that even the skeptical commanding officer was touched. When the soldier had finished praying the officer said, "You may go, I believe you. If you hadn’t drilled so often, you couldn’t have done so well at review."

If our prayer life was placed under review, how would we do? Perhaps of all areas of our Christian life, the one we struggle in the most is our prayer life. It is the one area that is most neglected and ineffective.

Our Lord knows that prayer is to be a way of life.  Our Lord here stops in the midst of his discourse on the sermon on the mount, which particularly compares the false standard of religion of the Pharisees and the scribes with the true standard of God, and he interjects a word of instruction to all, in order that they might know how they are to pray.

The  Prayer begins with a recognition that God is our Father.  No doubt there is tremendous truth in that thought. The phrase, “Our Father” is an affirmation of an intimacy with God that is wondrous.  Because, you see, for most of the world the gods and/or god they worshipped was a very distant, remote, and fearful being. Sadly, there was an amazing remoteness even in the Jewish thinking of Jesus’ day.

I don’t think it was until Jesus came that men really understood the intimacy of God.  And I think that’s illustrated graphically when Philip says to Jesus in John 14:8-9, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’?  I think it was Jesus that brought us the intimacy of that, but in the Old Testament, the Old Testament Jew really did understand God as a Father, more in a national sense than in a personal sense.

As time went on, and you come to the time of Jesus, they lost the Father concept of God.  God became more and more remote, and I don’t think it was God that moved.  I think they moved.  As they moved away from true religion, as they moved away from true worship, and they redefined their system to tolerate sinfulness, they cut themselves off from God’s fatherly care.  Therefore, they assumed that God was remote, and they even stopped using God’s names.  It became a blasphemous thing to even mention the name of God.  They had developed a wide gulf.  They had lost the sense of God’s fatherhood, even in a national way that they had known it in the past.

And so when our dear Lord utters the term, “Our Father,” it is a shocking thing to them.  It awakens to them something lost long ago in the past.  It introduces a new kind of intimacy that they had never even understood.  “Our Father.”

When Jesus prayed he always used the word “Father;” over 70 times Jesus used this word. Only one prayer did he ever pray and not use the word “Father.”  Do you know what prayer that was?  “My God, my God why has thou  - ” what? “ - forsaken me?”  Only in sin-bearing was he separated from the Father, and only then did he not say, “Father.”  All the other times the intimacy of that relationship was expressed, and only in that one temporary moment, when it was broken by sin-bearing did he ever address God in any other term.

Every time we say “our Father” it is a faith proclamation to the world saying I know I’m not lost in the crowd, I know you’re there.  I know you’re there removing my fear, providing hope, taking away loneliness, doing away with selfishness, providing vast and infinite heavenly resources, calling for my obedience.

This Lenten Season let us turn our faces Father-ward, heavenward, God-ward, Christ-ward, church-ward for that is where we originally belong to.