Our Father
   Jesus would not have prayed The Lord’s Prayer Himself.  The petition for forgiveness would not been appropriate for Him to pray since He was without sin. The church has called this prayer The Lord’s Prayer because this is the prayer He taught His disciples to pray.  It is the prayer of those who are living the life of the kingdom of God and in the presence of their heavenly Father.  In it, Jesus gives the fundamental structure and order of things for which we are to pray, but it also teaches us how He expects us to live the Christian life in fellowship with God.   He tells us what life in fellowship with God is like in the New Covenant.  If we were to ask for those principles by which every Christian ought to live their lives from the point of view of teaching of the New Testament, we could very simply point to the Lord’s Prayer for a summary of them.  Even though this is a prayer, couched as it is in terms of adoration, confession and petition, it is also a compendium of theology; it is a teaching tool, a catechism summarizing those things we are bound to know if we are to make progress in the kingdom of God.  We can usefully gauge our theology as well as our praying by the standards of this prayer.

The preface (as it is called) to the Lord’s Prayer, "Our Father in heaven" (Matt 6:9), is perhaps the most spiritually determinative of our spiritual condition.  If we are not able to say these words with understanding and faith, they signal that we are not in a relationship with God that assures salvation.  In a most profound sense, theologians have noted that to be able to call God, "Father," is what the message of the New Testament is principally about.

J. I. Packer wrote some time ago that, "you sum up the whole of the New Testament teaching in a single phrase, if you speak of it as a revelation of the Fatherhood of the holy Creator."  Similarly, Sinclair Ferguson has written: "You cannot open the pages of the New Testament without realizing that one of the things that makes it so ‘new’, in every way, is that here men and women call God ‘Father’.   These two theologians have identified the Fatherhood of God, or its corollary, our sonship or adoption, as the very heartbeat of the New Covenant relationship.  A failure to appreciate this can be fatal. If we never know what it is to commune with God as our Father, we fail to grasp the meaning of what Jesus Christ accomplished for us.

The Fatherhood of God
   Reading through the Bible in a cursory fashion will reveal that the designation, "Father," is used of God in both the Old Testament and the New Testament.  But, He is not called "Father" in precisely the same sense everywhere in the Bible.  Sometimes the term reflects the fact that He is the Creator of the universe in which we live.  Malachi, for example, asks the question: "Have we not all one Father?  Did not one God create us?" (Mal. 2:10).   And even in the New Testament there is a sense in which Paul can agree that we are all "His offspring" in the sense that we are all created by God (Acts 17:28).   God is "the Father of the heavenly lights" (Jam 1:17).

Of greater significance, however, is the fact that this is the way Jesus thought about His own relationship to God.  It is with the expression, "Father," that Jesus addresses God.  Six times, for example, He calls upon His Father in heaven in the so-called High Priestly Prayer of John 17 (John 17:1, 5, 11, 21, 24, 25).  In a sense, it might be better if we had called John 17 The Lord’s Prayer, and The Lord’s Prayer, The Disciples Prayer! Something of the inner soul of Jesus is revealed in this prayer in John 17.  Perhaps this is why John Knox, as he was dying, asked his wife to read the chapter to him. The fact that this prayer was overheard (it was, after all, recorded by John) is indicative that Jesus intended us to draw from this prayer the lesson that Jesus and His disciples share a common relation with God, one in which we both refer to Him as "Father."

This is brought out in the words Jesus spoke to Mary Magdalene on the morning of the resurrection.  As she clung to Him, He said, "Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father.  Go instead to My brothers and tell them, 'I am returning to My Father and your Father, to My God and your God'" (John 20:17).   It is often thought that these words illustrate the fact that Jesus’ relationship to His Father is different from ours. He is, after all, the eternal Son of God, and we become sons by adoption.  But whilst there is an aspect of this which is true, the point of this incident is the very opposite: it is to signal that His ascension will inaugurate a similar relationship with God that He has enjoyed, and hence He tells Mary, "Go…to My brothers and tell them…".   Jesus is our Elder Brother in a relationship in which God is our Father.   Jesus’ personal gift to those who trust in him is this: "You can call Him "Father" too!"  It is as though Jesus is saying, "You will be able to call on God in the same way that you have heard Me do for these past few years"

Nothing encourages prayer more than the realization that we have this relationship with God by which we call Him, "Father."  In comparison with Old Testament believers, burdened by ceremonial restrictions of access, the fact that we can come to God in this way is breathtaking.  A new order of reality has dawned with the coming of New Testament in which "because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’  So you are no longer a slave, but a son" (Gal 4:6-7).  Christians belong to that Jerusalem which is above which free (Gal 4:26).

We dare to call him "Father."

Knowing Him
   It is one thing to know this truth in an intellectual sense; but it is another to know experientially.  And it is one of those self-revealing things about a person that in a moment of crisis and difficulty, they have recourse to a Father who loves them and cares for them.  What so many folk do in a crisis, and you hear it all the time, is to mouth the name "Jesus" only because they have used as a swear word so many times.  But now, in a crisis, when they feel they need help, they can only say "Jesus" without comprehension of what a believer in Jesus can know.   It is interesting to note that many do not instinctively cry out, "O Father!"  And that, because they do not know Him as a Father.  If you don’t have the heart of a child, the instinct to call Him "Father isn’t there.

John’s Gospel begins, not only with a magnificent word about Jesus as The Word of God (John 1:1); but, it also has something to say about how we may come to know Him as Saviour and Lord.  "Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God" (John 1:12).  Born by the power of God, they are given the right to call God their heavenly Father.  Through regeneration we are adopted into God’s family.  By means of transformation of our nature, we are introduced into a new relationship.

Those who have legally adopted children can relate to that moment whenever a child first begins instinctively to say "Daddy" or "Mommy."  No explanation of the legal process can do justice to the sound of those words.  And what God desires most of all is not only the legal right to the privileges of adoption, but that they have a nature that can respond to them in words that betray the intimacy and closeness of their new relationship.  Instinctively, they say, "Abba, Father" (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6).  The new nature gives rise to new instincts: so that in trouble we instinctively say, "My Father in heaven."

It was singular emphasis in John Calvin, for example, that the very essence of piety lies in the recognition that that our lives are nourished by God’s Fatherly care.   That is why, Calvin adds, the "first title" given to the Holy Spirit in the New Testament is "Spirit of adoption."  As one eminent scholar has summed it up: "It is the knowledge of His Fatherly love that is the true knowledge of God."  What the truth of Fatherhood through regeneration and adoption means experientially is this: we are loved by God no less than Jesus was loved by God.   As startling as that sounds, it is true!  We, like Jesus, come before our God and call Him, "Abba, Father."

The distinguished New Testament scholar, Joachim Jeremias, noted that in Judaism, calling upon God as "Father" was very rare indeed.  What this emphasis in the New Testament points to is that the early Christians were imitating something they had heard Jesus do again and again. They were praying like Him!  That is why the writer to the Hebrews can say, "Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers" (Heb 2:11).

This, by the way, is the short-sightedness of those who claim that there is nothing of Christ in this prayer.  Whilst it is true that generally we should address the Father, through the Son’s mediation, and by the help of the Spirit, this does not mean that is never right to address Jesus or the Holy Spirit directly in prayer.  But the norm is as here: we talk to our Father in heaven.  But in doing so, we are reminded of our relationship to Jesus Christ.  We pray like he prayed!  As Calvin points out in his eloquent exposition of the Lord’s Prayer in the Institutes:

He, while He is the true Son, has of Himself been given us as a brother that what He has of His own nature may become ours by benefit of adoption if we embrace this great blessing with sure faith.

It is the unexpectedness of this Fatherly love to which John gives testimony in his first epistle: "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!" (1 John 3:1).  The translation here obscures something that John says.  Literally, he says, "What manner of love…" using a word that asks as to quality.  It is though he were saying, "God’s love is out of this world…"

What is to the fore here is our access to the Father. Jesus refers to two different and paralyzing conditions of human heart: hypocrisy and anxiety. These are very different problems, but Jesus tells us in the section which precedes the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew’s Gospel that in essence they have the same having the same solution. To both hypocrites (Matt 5:7), and the anxious (Matt 5:9), Jesus says that trouble is that they do not know God as your heavenly Father. They would not need to try and impress others with outward show if they knew God as their Father in heaven. Similarly the anxious are betraying a lack of trust in the Father’s provision. The problems are very different, but the solution is the same.

That is the problem that bedevils us: that we do not live as those who have a heavenly Father who takes care of their every need.  It is to this that Paul speaks in Romans 8 at great length.  Speaking of the "weaknesses" which every Christian knows, Paul goes on to admit to the problem this creates in praying: " We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express" (Rom 8:26).  We pray in our weakness with the Spirit’s help.  Earlier in the chapter, Paul refers to the Spirit again in the context of prayer and access to God, saying that it is by his help that we can call God, "Abba, Father" (Rom 8:15).  What is not often appreciated is that far from this being a cry of confident affirmation and assurance, the context of the believer is often the very opposite! It is because we are weak and suffering, troubled by a thousand cares, that the Spirit helps us cry.  The word "cry" which Paul uses is used elsewhere of the agonized cries of those in distress (e.g. Matt 15:22; Mk 3:11).  In our most troubled times, we have access to God as our Father by the Spirit’s help. That is the encouragement held out before us.  At our very lowest, when there is nothing else left, my deepest instinct is to say, "O Father!"  And the assurance I, " He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all -- how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things?" (Rom 8:32).

In heaven
   There have been attempts to place in the foreground this New Testament emphasis upon sonship and thereby redress what has appeared to some as an imbalance in the presentation of the Christian life as the New Testament perceives it to be. The Sonship program, for example, attempts to do that and for those recovering from fundamentalist legalism, its attraction is understandable.

There are, however, some presentations of what is perceived to be the New Testament emphasis on sonship that carries with it an agenda that is decidedly unbiblical.  In attempting to emphasize our access to God and the intimacy of our relationship denials can very easily creep in as to issues of reverence and submission. Liberty can easily give way to license.  Access can succumb to presumption and familiarity. The term "Abba" for example can give way to expressions like "Daddy" or "Pops."

That is why the Lord’s Prayer provides for us a corrective by saying, "Our Father in heaven."  "By this," Calvin writes, "he is lifted up above all chance of either corruption or change…it is as if he had been said to be of infinite greatness or loftiness, of incomprehensible essence, of boundless might, and of everlasting immortality."  This, together with the first petition to "hallow" God’s name, reminds us that we are always to be reverent in God’s presence.  We come as children, but with courtesy and humility.   Meekness must always mark the children of God (Matt 5:5).

The balancing of these twin truths keeps our feet on the ground and our heads from swelling. We think of our Father and remind ourselves that he dwells "in unapproachable light" (1 Tim 6:16).  We think of God’s greatness and majesty and remind ourselves that He has asked that we call Him, "Father."

But it is not only reverence that is in view.  Perhaps, it is not even what is primarily in view.  By adding "in heaven" did Jesus not want to say to his anxious and troubled brethren that the one who most desires to help them is able to help them?  Because he resides in heaven he is in a position to do for us what we cannot do. "His almighty arm," writes Witsius, "which is ever ready to be stretched forth in behalf of His own people, no created power is able to resist."   It is this reassurance of Divine aid that draws us into this prayer and desires to make it our own.  We, too, are helpless creatures in need of divine protection, of the kind that our Father is more than bale to provide.

This is the encouragement we have to pray with confidence.