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Food for Thought : The Paternity of Prayer

"Our Father" Matthew 6...

Dr. Mark Ruppert

Matthew 6:9a

Ever since he hit the literary scene I have been a fan of preacher and writer, Max Lucado. I know that many of you have been taken by his earthy style of writing that makes the pages come alive before your very eyes. He has written some marvelous books such as No Wonder They Call Him Savior, A Gentle Thunder, In the Grip of Grace and children’s books like You're Special and You are Mine. I’d like to share the beginning of chapter one in his book The Great House of God. It begins: “I’d like to talk with you about your house. Let’s step through the front door and walk around a bit. Every so often it’s wise to do a home inspection, you know—check the roof for leaks and examine the walls for bows and the foundation for cracks. We’ll see if your kitchen cupboards are full and glance at the books on the shelves in your study.

What’s that? You think it odd that I want to look at your house? You thought this was a book on spiritual matters? It is. Forgive me, I should have been clearer. I’m not talking about your visible house or stones or sticks, wood or straw, but your invisible one of thoughts and truths and convictions and hopes. I’m talking about your spiritual house.

You have one, you know. And it’s no typical house. Conjure up your fondest notions and this house exceeds them all. A grand castle has been built for your heart. Just as a physical house exists to care for the body, so the spiritual house exists to care for your soul. You’ve never seen a house more solid: the roof never leaks, the walls never crack, and the foundation never trembles. You’ve never seen a castle more splendid: the observatory will stretch you, the chapel will humble you, the study will direct you, and the kitchen will nourish you.

Ever lived in a house like this? Chances are you haven’t. Chances are you’ve given little thought to housing your soul. We create elaborate houses for our bodies, but our souls are relegated to a hillside shanty where the night winds chill us and the rain soaks us. Is it any wonder the world is so full of cold hearts?

Doesn’t have to be this way. We don’t have to live outside. It’s not God’s plan for our heart to roam as a Bedouin. God wants you to move in out of the cold and live… with him. Under his roof there is space available. At his table a plate is set. In his living room a wingback chair is reserved just for you. And he’d like you to take up residence in his house. Why would he want you to share his home? Simple, he’s your Father.” (p. 1-3)

Isn’t that a great image of God’s house where he wants you and me to live? This morning we continue our study of the Disciples’ Prayer, otherwise known as “The Lord’s Prayer” and we focus on the first four words, “Our Father, who art in heaven….” Notice that Jesus first describes God as “Our Father”. Jesus Himself called God “Father” over two hundred times. In the Gospel of John alone, Jesus repeats this name 156 times. (Lacado, p. 13) This was truly a revolutionary move on the part of Jesus to call God “Abba” or “Father.” Now while it is common for many people to call God “Father,” this certainly wasn’t the case back at the time of Christ. New Testament theologian Joachim Jeremias gives us an indication as to how rare it was to use this term back then. He writes, “With the help of my assistants, I have examined the prayer literature of ancient Judaism… The result of this examination was, that in no place in this immense literature is this invocation of God as ‘Abba, Father’ to be found. Abba was an everyday word. It was a homely family-word. No Jew would have dared to address God in this manner, yet Jesus did it always in all his prayers which are handed down to us, with one single exception: the cry from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ In the Lord’s prayer, Jesus authorizes his disciples to repeat the word Abba after him. He gives them a share in his sonship. He empowers his disciples to speak with their heavenly father in such a familiar and trusting way. (Joachim Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus (New York SCM Press, 1967, p. 57) And going back to Max Lucado he tells us in his book that the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer are significant because “Our Father” reminds us that we are welcome in God’s house because we have been adopted by the owner. And that goes back what Joachim Jeremias mentioned regarding the fact that we, like those disciples, have a share in being adopted daughters and sons of God.

This word FATHER has two very distinct meanings. First, it can be used in the sense of paternity. In this sense what it denotes is the person who is responsible for the birth of a child. The only connection between the father and the child is one of a physical nature. Think of it this way, a man could father a child in the paternal sense and yet never cast his eyes on that child. But there is another meaning to this word FATHER. Secondly it can be used in the sense of fatherhood. Now we have moved to a relationship of love and intimacy, a relationship of trust between the father and the child. As Christians we look at God in the paternal sense of the word, because He is the source of all life, He is the one who created us and breathed life into us. But the uniqueness about the Christian idea of God is that God is father in the fatherhood sense of the word. For the Christian believes that there is this intimate, close, loving relationship that can occur between God and human beings all because of Jesus Christ. Christ is the one who provides for us that bridge between God and humankind that sin once separated. And so that I do not neglect to mention this point about the fatherhood of God I realize that there are many people past, present and future who have had and might have a hard time understanding and trusting God as a Heavenly Father. Why? Because their earthly father mistreated them, disappointed them, hurt them and maybe even scared them internally in some way. But I would only ask them to reconsider and plead with them to not confuse their earthly father with the Heavenly Father for our Heavenly Father loves us desperately, unconditionally and is not one who as one person said, “hold you one day and hit you the next.” And how do I know this because the scriptures say in John 15:16 that you and I did not chose God but rather He chose us. He adopted us and His daughters and sons and our adoption is not anything that we can earn.
My brother and sister-in law adopted our nephew, Jeremy from Vietnam. They chose Jeremy from all the other children in that orphanage in Ho Chi Min City. And God does the same with us. He chose us and our adoption as daughters and sons of God is not something we earn but something we receive.

I also realize that there are those who have a difficult time calling God “Father” because they see this as patriarchal language, archaic and out dated. Added to the fact that God is neither male nor female but God. And yet as we try to understand and describe God, speaking of God as “Father” was conceived even before the New Testament or rabbinic period and can be traced back to ancient Babylonia where worshipers addressed the deity as “Father of the Land.” It was after the idea of divine fatherhood was freed from its pagan associations, that the term “Father” was used with increasing frequency in the Jewish and Christian vocabulary of worship. (The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, p. 415).
The Jewish rabbis told a story of an orphan girl who was brought up by a good and faithful guardian. The day came when she was to be married. The Scribe who was making the necessary legal arrangements for the wedding asked her “What is your name?’ And she told him. Then the Scribe asked: ‘What is your father’s name?’ The girl was silent. ‘Why are you silent?’ asked her guardian. The girl answered: ‘Because I know none other than you as a father, for he who brings us is father, not he who begets.’ So, the rabbis said, the real father of Israel is not anyone who’s connected with Israel by any physical connection; it is God who brought the nation up.” And so when we say to God, Our Father, it is not simply paternity we have in mind; it is the close, intimate, loving relationship of fatherhood.
Let me spend a few moments and talk about different understandings of the Fatherhood of God. First, the Old Testament Jewish Understanding. Those who wrote the Old Testament had a much different concept of their relationship with God than we do today. When the scribes would copy the Old Testament scriptures they would write the word for God, Yahweh, and then they would throw away their pen, never to use it again. They said that once it had written the word, Yahweh, the pen was disqualified from writing anything else. (David Jeremiah, Prayer, the Great Adventure, p. 84) The Jews couldn’t think of God as Father because they couldn’t think of him in relational terms but rather they understood God as the one who cared overall for the the nation. And that’s what was so startling about Jesus’ calling God, “Abba.” He came along and began to talk about having an intimate relationship with God.

The Jews in the Old Testament saw 5 Basic Elements in the Fatherhood of God: First, the Begetting of God. Now the word “beget” is not a word that we use frequently today. The word means, “to procreate as the father.” The Old Testament Jew saw God as the Father of the nation Israel. In I Chronicles 29:10 it says, “Then David blessed the Lord in the presence of all the assembly; David said, ‘Blessed are you, O Lord, the God of our ancestor Israel, forever and ever.” Second, the Nearness of God. The Jew saw in the term “Father” something of nearness. When you read Psalm 68 you will hear how God is near. A Father is a close family member not like that of a cousin, uncle, friend or neighbor. And it even says in Psalm 68:5 that He is a “Father of orphans and protector of widows, and in verse 6 that He puts people in His family when it says, “God gives the desolate a home to live in;…” Third, the Compassion of God. Listen to what it says in Psalm 103:13, “As a father has compassion for his children, so the Lord has compassion for those who fear him.” God is loving, forgiving, tenderhearted and merciful to His children. Fourth, the Leading of God.

It says in Jeremiah 31:9, “With weeping they shall come; and with consolations I will lead them back, I will let them walk by brooks of water, in a straight path in which they shall not stumble; for I have become a father to Israel, and Ephraim is my firstborn.” God is seen as father who would guide and lead His children showing them direction and giving them wisdom and instruction. And fifth, Obedience to God. Just because God was seen as a loving father that did not mean that they now had an excuse to disobey Him. It says in Malachi 1:6, “A son honors his father, and servants their master. If then I am a father, where is the honor due me? And if I am a master, where is the respect due me? Says the Lord of hosts…”
Second, The New Testament Jewish Understanding. During Jesus day the Jews had lost their sense of fatherly intimacy and so the term “Father” didn’t mean anything to them. For the Jewish leaders, the Pharisees and the scribes to think of God as father was to think of Him as a lord, ruler or king. They assumed that God was remote and it became blasphemous to even mention the name of God. They had brought about a separation between themselves and God even in the national sense they had known in the past.

Third, the Greek and Roman understanding. At the time of Christ there were two main philosophies in the Greek and Roman world. First, there were the STOICS. They believed a major attribute of God was apatheia or apathy. Their simple and logical argument was that their gods were not like humans and so they were passionless, emotionless and not able to feel because the person who loves can get hurt and if they can feel joy there is also sadness so their gods would be apathetic and indifferent. And second, the EPICUREANS. The EPICUREANS said the supreme quality of the deities was ataraxia, which meant “complete serenity, complete calm, and perfect peace.’ So if their gods got involved in human affairs they would lose their serenity. And so the Epicureans saw the deities as completely and totally detached from the world. This would be what today we would call a deistic view. So for the Greeks and the Romans the gods were apathetic and detached.

Fourth, the Modern understanding questions if there really is a god. In one of his poems Thomas Hardy asks what can possibly be the use of praying when we have no one to whom to pray except, “The dreaming, dark, dumb thing that turns the handle of the idle show.” The French ___________ Voltaire said, “Life is a bad joke. Ring down the curtain, the farce is done.” H. G. Wells painted a picture of a man defeated by the stresses and tensions of modern life. His doctor told him his only hope of finding sanity again was to find fellowship with God. “’What?’ said the man. ‘That—up there—having fellowship with me? I would as soon think of cooling my throat with the Milky Way or shaking hands with the stars.’”
And finally, the Christian understanding. To all this confusion Jesus simply says without explanation two words, “Our Father” and introduces a new kind of intimacy that had never been portrayed before. Jesus used a term that basically means “Daddy” and in that word Jesus was portraying an intimate, loving God. When we take Jesus at His word and call out “My, Our Heavenly Father” our Fears can be laid to rest for our Father in Heaven will minister to us and will love us. We can have Hope in the midst of a hostile world. Our Loneliness can be filled with the knowledge that He is with us and that He will never leave us or forsake us. Selfishness is not part of the vocabulary. The prayer begins “Our” Father, showing that there is a sense of community and if you look there is no singular pronoun in the entire prayer.

Let me just close with this. Every time we pray, ‘Our Father,’ we can rest assured that with our God no one gets left out in the crowd. We can know that if we matter to no one else we matter to God. If no one else cares, He does. And we can come into His presence with a childlike confidence and a boldness, for He desperately loves you and me. Amen.

Key Points

Introduction: The Great House of God by Max Lucado

The word FATHER has two very distinct meanings:
First, it can be used in the sense of _____________

Second, it can be used in the sense of ________________
Adopted daughters and sons of God John 15:16

Different understandings of the Fatherhood of God
First, the Old Testament understanding

Five basic elements in the Fatherhood of God
First, the _________ of God I Chron. 29:10
Second, the _______ of God Psalm 68
Third, the ________ of God Psalm 103:13
Fourth, the _______ of God Jer. 31:9
Fifth, the _________ to God Malachi 1:6

Second, the New Testament Jewish understanding

Third, the Greek and Roman understanding
Two main philosophies:
The STOICS
The EPICUREANS

Fourth, the Modern understanding

Finally, the Christian understanding

Conclusion: Every time we pray “Our Father” we can rest assured that with our God no one gets left out in the crowd, that we matter to God and He cares.

Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)