Our Father in Heaven

Matthew 6:9

I was a real Daddy’s girl.  I loved to spend time with my dad.  I remember working in the yard with him when I was maybe six or seven years old.  He bought me a real rake of my own when I was eight, and I was so proud of those piles of leaves in the back yard!  We would go to the hardware store and roam through the tool aisle, and to this day I love to get lost in the tool section at Home Depot.  When he worked in the garage with his table saw, building shelves or adding to the storage space, he would let me use the leftover pieces of lumber.  I learned to love the smell of sawdust, and I also learned how to build things for myself.  And when we would finish our work for the day, I used to crawl up in Daddy’s lap, where I felt safe, and loved, and content.  That is the kind of relationship with God that is promised to us in the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer.  It begins with the words “Our Father.”

It is interesting to me that the only thing the disciples ever asked Jesus to teach them how to do was to pray.  They could have asked him anything, but they just wanted to know how to pray like Jesus did.  They could see the importance of prayer in Jesus’ life, and they could certainly see the results of the prayer time that Jesus spent.  It invigorated him, empowered him, and guided him in his earthly ministry, and gave him the courage to face his death with quiet dignity.  Jesus prayed before every major decision in his life.  He withdrew to lonely places to be with God, the God whom he knew intimately as his Father.  And when he taught the disciples to pray, he began with the words, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”

Let’s look first at that title, “Our Father.”  Prior to the time of Jesus, God had been seen as remote and harsh, and God was only to be approached with a sense of fear and uncertainty.  But Jesus never addressed God in any other way except as Father, and he taught his disciples to begin their prayers with the words, “Our Father.”  This is an intimate, personal approach to God.  And for Jesus, it was rooted somewhat in the Hebrew understanding of the role of the father in a family.

A Hebrew father was the dominant figure in his child’s life and was the one from whom the blessing would be passed to his children.  You might remember the story of Jacob and Esau, and how the blessing from Isaac was considered so important that Jacob and his mother plotted together about how to trick Isaac into giving the blessing to Jacob instead of his older brother Esau.  A father’s blessing is still important in the lives of their children.  Some people spend their lives looking for the blessing that they never received from their fathers.  Others find confidence and courage for life, knowing that they do have their father’s blessing.

Jesus surely recognized that human fathers are imperfect, unreliable, and sometimes even harmful to their children.  Even if they do offer their blessings to their children, sometimes that isn’t enough.  Even the best father cannot love enough or give enough to meet every need of their child at every moment of their lives.  But Jesus also knew that our Father in heaven can do that.  And so he taught us to pray, “Our Father.”

Just think about that for a minute.  The God who made everything, who called the world into being, wants us to call him Father.  The God who worked all those miracles in the Bible is also the one who relates to us as Father.  John Killinger writes, If this doesn’t make shivers run up and down your spine, then you have not properly understood.  To think that the God of all this depth and power and resourcefulness should be our Father, the one with whom we are privileged to live in an attitude of intimacy and relationship, is enough to stagger the mind, to make it recoil through sheer insufficiency … Who could ever have hoped or dreamed that the God of the universe, the God of all universes, should be our Father?

I realize that, for some people, thinking of God as Father is very difficult.  They may be uncomfortable with this male-only image of God.  But I would answer, this is only one metaphor for God, and is not exclusive.  It emphasizes the “fatherly” qualities of God, such as protector and provider.  But it does not mean that God does not also have “motherly” qualities that are just as important.  For other people, thinking of God as father is hard because they had fathers who were not good fathers, who were perhaps mean or abusive or addicts.  But I would encourage those folks to realize that God is the perfect Father who is available to us all.  We can see what kind of Father God is by remembering that Jesus reflects the character of God.  When we see Jesus, we see what God is like.  And Jesus shows us a God who is loving, caring, compassionate, forgiving, patient, understanding, consistent, and reliable.  This is the kind of Father that we can trust and count on in any and every circumstance, a Father who is faithful and whose love is constant and unconditional.

The second part of this opening phrase of the Lord’s Prayer is says that Our Father “is in heaven.”  What does it mean?  What and where is heaven?  The word “heaven” comes from the old Anglo-Saxon word “heave-on,” and means “to be lifted up, or uplifted.”  Heaven is a place that lifts up God, where God is uplifted.  Heaven is above the commonplace life here on earth.  Heaven is the realm of God.

I wish the Bible told us more about heaven.  But what it does tell us helps us to understand that heaven is a good place, a place where we want to be.  Heaven is a place where there is no more crying, no more death, no more sorrow, no more pain.  There is no night in heaven, but it is always light there.  There is peace and justice and fellowship, and those who are in heaven spend their days serving God around the throne.  It is a place of rest for those who are weary, a place of joy for those who have suffered, and a place of singing and worship for everyone.  We know a little of what heaven is like because there is a little of heaven in us.  Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.”  That is possible because the Spirit of God is in us.

The most important thing about heaven is that it is the place where God is.  It is the place where we will meet God face to face.   It is the place where Jesus will lead us home.  There is a great song by the group “Mercy Me,” called “I Can Only Imagine,” and it talks about what heaven might be like:

I can only imagine what my eyes will see when your face is before me, I can only imagine
Surrounded by your glory what will my heart feel
Will I dance for you, Jesus, or in awe of you be still
Will I stand in your presence or to my knees will I fall
Will I sing hallelujah, will I be able to speak at all, I can only imagine, I can only imagine

For Christians, one of our greatest hopes and promises is that the day will come when we will no longer have to just imagine, because we will see for ourselves what heaven is like.  We will see for ourselves the face of God.

The final part of the first phrase of this prayer tells us that God’s name is to be hallowed.  That is, the name of God is to be kept holy.  To be holy means to be set apart or special. And there is no one who is more set apart or more special than God.  God’s name is to be revered and respected, because of who God is.

The ancient Hebrews were very cautious about using the name of God.  They believed that just speaking the name of God was dangerous.  The name of God was Yahweh, and it was to be spoken only once a year, by the high priest, in the Holy of Holies in the Temple.  That was how hallowed the name of God was to them. 

But for 21st century Americans, we have the opposite problem.  We have lost a sense of the holiness of God’s name.  We make jokes and funny movies about God.  We put his name on billboards and bumper stickers.  We use his name when we curse.  God is regularly insulted and shown sarcasm and scorn in the popular media, and by people in general.  And we Christians sometimes attach God’s name to ideas and actions that are as ungodly as I can possibly imagine, using it to defend excluding certain people from our communities of faith or to support our nation’s involvement in war.

The name of God is supposed to be kept holy, sacred, hallowed.  The name of God is the identity and the character of God.  It is not to be taken lightly, and the proper use of God’s name was so important that it was included in the Ten Commandments.  We need to honor the name of God when we worship, when we pray, when we sing hymns, when we talk about our faith.  We need to show proper respect and reverence for God through our use of language.  It matters how we talk to and about God.

“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”  It is a simple beginning, but it is full of complexity.  When you pray, you should think about the God who is your Father.  You should think about the God who is in heaven.  You should think about the God whose name is hallowed.  And you should grapple with having a relationship with one who is so holy and pure, so beyond anything we can imagine on earth, and yet who wants to have an intimate and personal relationship with you as your Father.

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