Our Father

Jesus, when He gave the Lord's Prayer to the church, did not say, when you pray, pray this prayer. What He did say to His disciples was, when you pray, pray like this. And He gave them an example of godly prayer. Although the Lord's Prayer was not given to us to be mindlessly recited, as you'll hear this week from R.C. Sproul, and each petition in it contains practical lessons to aid us in prayer. Welcome to the Tuesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham.

Today, R.C. Sproul will consider an astonishing line in the Lord's Prayer where we are told to address God as our Father. To help us understand the significance and privilege of this, here's Dr. Sproul. We are talking about prayer, and we raised this subject initially by looking at the disciples who came to Jesus with this request, Lord, teach us how to pray. And we've seen that Jesus began His teaching on prayer by telling us how not to pray, how we ought not to emulate the hypocrites of His day, whose sole purpose of praying was to be seen of men, to give a public display of piety that was in fact fraudulent, and how that Jesus told us that we ought to go into our houses, into our closets, close the door, and pray to God in secret who would reward us openly. And we also saw that Jesus warned against not only praying like hypocrites, but also praying like pagans, who, thinking that they could manipulate God by certain formulae, by the recitation or incantation of certain words and phrases that would be repeated endlessly, wrote formal prayers that were designed, as I said, to manipulate God. We think that we can manipulate God through magic, and there was a lot of magic in the ancient realm of paganism, where people thought in the magic realm that they could not only manipulate the gods, but they could manipulate their environment. They could change their environment by magic incantations or particular formulae. Now that may seem utterly foreign to us in the sophisticated culture in which we live today, but I ask you to think about it.

This whole system of manipulating our environment is at the core of New Age religion and has infiltrated profoundly into the life of the church and particularly into the evangelical church, where I see a lot of magic. You see the signs on bumper stickers or on billboards, Visualize World Peace. I saw one on a bumper sticker not too long ago that said Visualize, and then it wrote W-H-I-R-L-E-D-P-E-A-S, World Peace. It was obviously a joke taking off on this common statement that we see, Visualize World Peace. What's behind that?

What's the point of visualizing world peace? The idea is that if we concentrate our thinking, we will somehow emanate certain power from the core of our being, and if we get enough people to focus their energy fields on what we want to have happen, that that will actually involve a kind of psychokinetic activity whereby mind over matter takes place, like Uri Geller can concentrate on the handle of a spoon and make it bend. That's a trick, folks. It's not real, but we believe we can now call upon the resources of the inner person and invoke power that it manipulates our environment. That is not religious faith in the biblical sense.

It's magic. And no matter how you cloak it with sanctified phrases, it's still magic. And we need to be very careful of this intrusion of New Age thinking into the Christian faith because Jesus, again, before He teaches people the proper way to pray, He warns them against these two kinds of improper praying, the kind of the hypocrite and the kind of the pagan. God is not honored by pagan prayer that seeks to manipulate Him or to use the power of magic to change our environment. Well, having given these prefatory warnings, then Jesus turns His attention to a positive exposition of what godly prayer should contain and what it should look like. And in that instance, He delivered to the church what has since become known as the Lord's Prayer. And the Lord's Prayer is an integral part of the worship of multitudes of Christians. Most Christian worship services on Sunday morning include within it somewhere the praying of the Lord's Prayer. Now, don't get me wrong here, and please don't call me up or write me about this, I'm not opposed to that.

But even in that, there is a danger. There's a danger that by reciting the Lord's Prayer, we are doing just that, involved in a recitation, that the Lord's Prayer itself can become an occasion for a violation of what Jesus just warned that prayer should avoid. It could become an exercise in paganism of the heaping up of meaningless, empty, endless repetitions. That is, if we just say the prayer. It bothers me sometimes when I'll see Christians gather together for a meal, and somebody will say to the crowd, so-and-so, John E. Smith, will you please say the grace for us?

Not lead us in prayer, but say the grace. I mean, that suggests we're just going to say it. We're just going to recite it. And then we hear the recitation. And so what I'm saying is any prayer can become an occasion for empty repetition, for an outward rote recitation that does not come from the heart.

Now, I might add to that this caveat. Jesus, when He gave the Lord's Prayer to the church, did not say, when you pray, pray this prayer. Let me say it again. Jesus did not say, when you pray, pray this prayer. What He did say to His disciples was, when you pray, pray like this. And He gave them an example of godly prayer. He gave them a model for prayer that can teach us what we call transferable principles. I started this study on prayer by telling the story of a meeting I had with a nationally prominent piano teacher, George M'Ladden, who has this system where you can write in and get this method of learning the piano. And what George's technique is, is the instructing of his students in what he calls transferable principles of music, so that if you learn a particular principle, the use of the pentatonic scale, for example, you then have a technique or a principle that is not applied simply to one song or even to one kind of music, but is transferable.

You can use it in a multitude of different musical compositions and musical settings. What he does is give you an example of something that can be used to a wider degree. That's what Jesus is doing here when He gives us the Lord's Prayer.

He gives us transferable principles. He shows us how we are to pray, what the content of prayer should involve and include. He did not give us this prayer with the specific mandate to repeat the exact words of this prayer over and over and over again. Now again, I'm emphasizing the danger of reducing the Lord's Prayer to mindless, empty repetition.

Now there's the other side of the coin. I've often said that one of my favorite liturgies in the life of the church is the traditional marriage ceremony. You've all heard it many, many times in your life every time you go to a wedding. Dearly beloved, we are gathered or assembled together here today in the presence of God and in of these witnesses to unite this man and this woman in the holy bonds of marriage, which was instituted by God, you know, and sanctified by our Lord at the wedding feast of Canaan, and it goes on and on and on from there.

It's a very brief service. It contains pledges. It contains vows.

It contains charges. It contains prayers. And it's one of those things that the more marriages I've performed or the more marriage services I've heard, the more blessed I am by the content of the phrases used in that order of worship. That is, the more familiar I become with the language, the more I begin to think about it and meditate upon it and think, look at all of the ingredients that are contained in this brief service of marriage, how rich it is in explaining to us the sanctity of this institution.

It's marvelous. And so it is with the Lord's Prayer. Hearing it over and over and over again may lead us to blind, empty, mindless repetition, or it may be taking these words, these principles, and burning them into our minds, burning them into our consciences by repetition. Repetition in and of itself is not a bad thing. It's one of the most important ingredients of learning, of going over the information over and over and over again.

Why? Because it's the rare person who masters a concept or a principle by hearing it once. Great virtuosos on the piano or on the violin master the scales by playing them over and over and over again. There was a great piano teacher who was teaching one of his students scales. And he said to the student, as the student was getting bored to tears playing these scales, the student said, I don't want to play scales. I want to play like Von Clyburn. I want to play like a great piano virtuoso. And the teacher said to the student, you know, you may never be able to play music like Van Clyburn.

In fact, in all probability, you won't be able to master this medium to the degree that Van Clyburn has. But one thing you can do like Van Clyburn, he said, what's that? He said, you can play your scales.

You can play them as well as he plays them. And don't ever think for a moment that Van Clyburn became Van Clyburn without doing the scales over and over and over again, so that those tones became second nature to him. That's the other side of this question. That's the benefit of praying a prayer like the Lord's Prayer over and over and over again. It becomes part of the fabric of our thinking.

It begins to become a part of our soul. And it's something we fall back on when we're at a loss on how to pray. We can always pray the Lord's Prayer. Okay, with those little caveats, let's take a look now at this prayer that Jesus gives to the church as the supreme model of prayer. Again, answering the question, Lord, teach us how to pray. Jesus said, when you pray, here's how.

When you pray, pray like this. And He begins this model prayer with these words, our Father who art in heaven. Now, those of you who have been in Christian groups that pray frequently or in church groups where people will move around the room and give individual prayers, perhaps you've noticed already how common it is for Christians to begin their prayers with the word Father, or our Father, or our dear heavenly Father. Again and again, the overwhelming majority of personal prayers begin with some form of the address of God as Father. And we have a tendency to take this title for God for granted. It is so familiar to us, so common to our life and to our liturgy that if there's anything that we can say without thinking in the Lord's Prayer, it's the opening form of address, our Father, missing how radical this statement is. The German theologian Jehoiakim Jeremyus, the New Testament scholar, did a study.

It's been questioned by some, but the fruit of Jeremyus' research was this. He searched through the Old Testament writings and the existent rabbinic writings from ancient Jewish sources and could not find a single example ever of a Jewish writer or author addressing God directly as Father in prayer until the 10th century A.D. He couldn't find a Jewish prayer that has survived in printed form to this day until a thousand years after Christ that included a direct address of God as Father. He found occasions where God was referred to as the Father, but never used in a direct form of personal address until the 10th century. The other extraordinary part of Jeremyus' research was this, that he examined the recorded prayers of Jesus in the New Testament and discovered that every prayer of Jesus recorded in the New Testament except one starts with Jesus addressing God as Father. Now, what's the significance of that? Well, Jeremyus says that the significance of it was that Jesus, as a Jew and as a rabbi himself, was making a departure from tradition here.

And it wasn't just a little departure from tradition, it was a radical departure from tradition, and it was a departure that was met with profound hostility from His contemporaries. When Jesus would refer to God as His Father, His contemporaries, the Pharisees for example, would become enraged and they'd say, who do you think you are calling God Father? You're a man, and they derived a lot more than we would from just looking at these words, you who are a man are making yourself equal with God.

Because they understood the significance of Jesus by addressing God in this familiar form of personal address that Jesus was indicating a profound sense of intimacy between Himself and God, and that He was being, as it were, the Son of God in a unique way. Now, notice when Jesus says, you want to learn how to pray? When you pray, say, our Father. He's saying, not only am I allowed to address God as Father, but I am now transferring that privilege to you. He realized, don't you dear friends, that one of the most important doctrines of the New Testament that gives expression to our redemption is the doctrine of adoption.

By nature, the Bible says we are children of wrath. God is not our Father naturally in terms of an intimate, personal, filial relationship. But we are adopted into the family of God in Christ. Christ is the monogenes, the only begotten of the Father, the only Son of the Father, the only one who has the right on earth to address God as Abba Father. And now He invites His disciples to participate in that personal form of address, that intensely familiar filial relationship. And of course, not only does the Son give us the right and the authority to address God as Father, but the Holy Spirit in His assistance in our prayer life, in His aid to us, intercedes for us and gives to us the right to cry, Abba Father.

So the point is, this is not something to be taken for granted or taken lightly. Every time we say the Lord's Prayer, every time we open our mouths and say, Our Father, we should be reminded of our adoption, of our being engrafted into Christ and being placed into this personal, intimate, filial relationship with God that is not ours by nature. It has been won for us by the perfect obedience of the Son, who receives an inheritance that has been given and promised to Him from the foundation of the world, which inheritance He shares with His brothers and sisters who are in Him. And we remember this every time we pray the Lord's Prayer. I know people who struggle with the term of address for God as Father. I've had people say to me, I can hardly bear to say it because in my experience, my family experience, my father, my earthly father, was a cruel and vicious, insensitive person.

He violated me. I've had people tell me of incestuous rape and that sort of thing where the fathers had abused their children sexually, and they'd say, after that experience, how can I possibly address God as Father for the whole word is repugnant to me? And I can understand that, and I can feel what they're saying when they make that complaint. And I say, well, you know, even in the pain and torment that you bear in your psyche from these miserable experiences from your earthly father, you still understand that part of the reason that pain is so severe is because it didn't come from your next-door neighbor. It didn't come even from your uncle.

It came from your father. And even nature itself teaches you that there should be much more that you have a reason to expect from your earthly father than what you have received. Now, as hard as it may be, if you're having difficulty using the word father and want to choke on it when you refer to God, then focus your attention on the word that comes before it, our, because our father is not your father. Our father is not the father that violated you and abused you. He is our heavenly father, our father who has no abuse in him, who will never violate you. And you need to learn to practice this phrase and transfer to him the positive attributes that you so earnestly desire and so seriously miss in the experience of your earthly father.

What an important truth and a sensitive topic. And we also need to remember that even for those who have had wonderful godly fathers, our heavenly father is yet greatest still, and he calls us his own. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind as we spend a week considering prayer, and in particular, the Lord's Prayer. I've said before that I don't struggle with prayer.

I struggle with my priorities. It's one of the reasons why I so appreciate this series and the encouragement it is for me to adjust my priorities. You can work through all 10 messages in this series when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org, or when you call us at 800 435 4343. The entire series will be unlocked for you in the free Ligonier app, and we'll send you Dr. Sproul's companion book, The Prayer of the Lord. That's a book and a 10-message series on a vital area of the Christian life when you give a donation in support of Renewing Your Mind and Ligonier Ministries at renewingyourmind.org, or by using the link in the podcast show notes. Thank you for your support, whether financially or by praying for our staff, our teachers, and the millions of people who are reached by our Bible teaching every month. You've probably heard someone say, well, we're all God's children. Is that true? And is that what the Lord's Prayer is teaching us when it calls us to address God as Father? Join us tomorrow to find out here on Renewing Your Mind. .