Our Father


Sermon by David Strain on August 29, 2021 Matthew 6:9-13

We continue this morning with our meditations on Jesus’ teaching on the vital subject of prayer. You remember a few weeks ago we looked together at Luke’s gospel chapter 11 at verse 1 and the request of the disciples. That is our basic prayer together as a church in this season – “Lord, teach us to pray. Lord, make us a people of prayer. Enroll us, together as a church, in Your school of prayer.” And last time we looked at Matthew chapter 6 verses 5 through 8 and we noticed some general instructions that Jesus provides at the beginning of His more sustained teaching of prayer found here in the center of the Sermon on the Mount. You remember He warned us not to pray like the hypocrites who used to pray in order to impress others, or to pray like the pagans, like the Gentiles, who saw prayer as a kind of leverage, a way to pry from the reluctant hands of the deity the requisite help that we need. Instead, Jesus called us to pray to our Father and to do so as His beloved children.

And now having cleared the ground, we might say, of the rubble of those common mistakes about prayer, beginning in verse 9 of Matthew chapter 6, He provides for us positive teaching beginning here in the form of prayer commonly called, “The Lord’s Prayer.” So do turn there with me please if you haven’t done so already, Matthew chapter 6; we’ll look at verses 9 through 15. Before we do that, notice in verse 9 Jesus says, “Pray then like this.” So the Lord’s Prayer is given to us as the model, the template, the rule to direct our prayers. “Pray then like this.” Luke 11:1 says, “When you pray, say…” So it is itself also a prayer we are instructed to use, but it is fundamentally a pattern for our prayers. The Westminster Shorter Catechism, in question and answer 99, tells us, “The whole Word of God is of use to direct us in prayer, but the special rule of direction is that form of prayer which Christ taught His disciples, commonly called, the Lord’s Prayer.” So the Lord’s Prayer is meant to be a special rule of direction in prayer. It is the operator’s manual designed to establish the essential order and priorities and provide all the major categories which should mark faithful prayer.

And today we are going to be focused on the preface to the Lord’s Prayer, which you can find in verse 9 of Matthew chapter 6, in the form of address to God that Jesus teaches us to use. He teaches us to pray, notice, “Our Father who is in heaven.” And God helping us, we are going to think about two dimensions of prayer that this opening address to God teaches us. First, we’ll see that prayer belongs to the Church of God. Prayer belongs to the Church of God. And secondly, prayer belongs to the children of God. Prayer belongs to the children of God. In a moment we’ll read the passage together. Before we do, as always, let’s pause once more to pray and ask for the Lord to help us. Let us pray.

O Lord, indeed as we read a moment ago from Psalm 119, we make it our prayer now that You would open our eyes that we may behold marvelous things out of Your Law, out of Your Word. Instruct us and give us illumination by the ministry of the Holy Spirit. Shape us by the truth. Mold and remake us by the truth. Grant that we may not be conformed to this world but renewed and transformed in the renewal of our minds by the truth. For we ask this in Jesus’ sake, amen.


Matthew chapter 6, beginning at the ninth verse. This is the Word of God:

“Pray then like this: 

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

Amen, and we praise God for His holy, inerrant Word.

Prayer Belongs to the Church of God

So Jesus teaches us to pray, “Our Father,” that is to say, the Lord’s Prayer is a prayer for the community of believers. It is, “Our Father.” That’s the first key idea we are being taught here. Prayer belongs to the Church of God. We do not pray, “My Father, give me this day my daily bread. Forgive me my debts as I forgive my debtors. And lead me not into temptation but deliver me from evil.” No, Jesus teaches us to pray in corporate terms. Do you see that? He doesn’t want us privatizing prayer, co-opting prayer in the service of our own petty agendas. We are always to pray in the awareness of and with respect to our place in the community of the people of God. Prayer, like the Christian life as a whole, is churchly. It is corporate. We are never merely individuals in prayer. Even when we are alone on our knees before God, even then we remain in vital, Spirit-wrought union with every other believer in every other place on earth and in heaven.

And so in a real sense we are never truly alone, which is a beautiful thought, actually. If we are believers in Jesus, we participate in the communion of the saints and so we ought to pray, “Our Father, forgive us, lead us.” Jesus is reminding us that authentic Christian spirituality is never individualistic or privatized, even when it is individual and private. He told us just a few verses earlier, remember from last week, “You must go into your closets and close the door and pray to your Father in secret.” Private prayer. But even then, Jesus now explains, you are to pray, “Our Father,” in the consciousness of belonging to the household of God and to the people of God and to the Church of God. Pray, “Our Father,” because your Christian life, my Christian life isn’t just about me or about you, off on our own with Jesus. That is not the essence of the Christian life.

One writer, on the Lord’s Prayer, cites a clever poem that makes Jesus’ point here. “You cannot pray the Lord’s Prayer and even once say, ‘I.’ You cannot say the Lord’s Prayer and even once say, ‘my.’ Nor can you pray the Lord’s Prayer and not pray for another, for when you ask for daily bread, you must include your brother. For others are included in each and every plea, from the beginning to the end of it, it never once says” – what? “It never once says, ‘me.’” The Lord’s Prayer is a churchly prayer, do you see, because the Christian life is a churchly life.

And I think we need to understand that actually with some urgency at the present time. We’ve got to grasp the church is not simply a delivery system for religious goods and services. If it were only that, then those of you who elect to remain at home and watch online or on television for no good reason other than convenience would have every justifiable reason for doing so. After all, you might say, “I can get everything that I need right here on this screen right here in my living room.” If the physical gathering of the church on the Lord’s Day is conceived of only as a convenient mechanism for disseminating religious ideas and facilitating individual acts of piety and nothing more, well then frankly we ought to stop meeting together immediately because there are now much more effective ways of fulfilling that purpose. We should close this grand old building down right away, purchase a small, compact studio space someplace, and go online entirely. It would save a whole lot of money and deliver our spiritual product far more effectively to the comfort of everyone’s home with a great deal less fuss.

But efficiency and convenience are not the primary reasons that we gather. Are they? Church is not utilitarian and pragmatic. We don’t gather for the ease of the consumer. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus calls us to a corporate piety – to pray together, to worship together. For different reasons than merely utilitarian concerns. So maybe you’re sitting at home right now and you’re thinking, “This is great. I really don’t need to go to all the effort of showing up anymore. I get everything I need right here through this screen.” Well if that’s you, let me say to you, in all Christian love, you have misunderstood something basic at the very heart of the Christian Gospel. When Jesus saves sinners, He makes them belong. When Jesus saves sinners, He makes them belong. He puts them into the Church. He grafts them, John 15, as branches into the Vine. They become living stones, 1 Peter chapter 2, connected to every other living stone, resting upon Christ the chief cornerstone until the Church rises as a temple in which God dwells by His Spirit. They become, 1 Corinthians 12, Ephesians 4, members of the body of which Jesus Christ is the Head. They become, Ephesians 5, corporately, not individually but together, the Bride of which the Lord Jesus is the Bridegroom and the Husband.

The point is, God did not make you a Christian to leave you alone or to deal with you in isolation from other believers. He saved you to belong. And so I wonder if you have lost the “we” and the “us” and the “our” from your Christianity lately. Has the “one another” character of the Christian life become a casualty of the pandemic for you? Has the push toward online ministry, which let me be clear, has been so very important, such a spiritual life saver for many vulnerable people, and we praise God for that, but I wonder if it’s actually become for you a convenient way of relieving your conscience, of sort of ticking the religious box, of telling yourself, “I’m still worshipping,” without actually having to make any effort or invest the commitment needed to cultivate community and to build meaningful, accountable relationships with those the Lord saved you to serve and to be served by – your brothers and sisters in Christ. We are to pray, “Our Father.” We are to pray together, with and for one another. The Lord’s Prayer pushes us toward community because we were saved to belong. We are never not part of the Church. Prayer belongs to the Church of God because you and I, if we are Christians, belong in Jesus Christ to one another. So prayer belongs to the Church of God.

Prayer Belongs to the Children of God

Secondly, we are being taught here that prayer belongs to the children of God. Prayer belongs to the children of God. Jesus has us pray, “Our Father.” “Our Father.” “Do you know,” asked Martyn Lloyd-Jones, “that the essence of true prayer is found in the two words in verse 9, ‘Our Father’? I suggest,” says Lloyd-Jones, “that if you can say from your heart, whatever your condition, ‘My Father,’ in a sense your prayer is already answered. It is just this realization of our relationship to God that we so sadly lack.” Jesus wants the disciples to know, He wants you and me to remember, that when we trusted in Christ we became children of God. We were adopted into the family of God. The great doctrine of adoption is the vital, foundational truth that Jesus presupposes for everyone who wishes truly to pray. You must have His Father as your Father. You must be an adopted child of God.

“You sum up the whole of New Testament teaching in a single phrase,” writes J.I. Packer. “If you speak of it as a revelation of the Fatherhood of the holy Creator, in the same way,” he says, “you sum up the whole of New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one’s holy Father.” And then he says this. Listen to this. “If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means he does not understand Christianity very well at all.” That, I think, is exactly right and gets right to the heart of the implications of Jesus’ teaching here on prayer. You see what it means, I hope. It means you cannot come to God with any confidence that He will hear you. Indeed, you must know He will not hear you unless and until you come to Him as His adopted child. You must become a child of God.

Please understand that God stands in only one of two relations to every single human being, to everyone in this room and to everyone watching online or on television. He is either your enemy or He is your Father. He is either your enemy or He is your Father. He will never listen to you while you remain His enemy. He will always listen to you if you become His child. And so it’s an all-important matter to know how to become a child of God. Isn’t it? Nothing can be more important than to know how to become a child of God. How can I approach the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ and call Him, “my God,” and “my Father”? How do I become a child of God? Listen to John 1:12-13. “Jesus,” John tells us, “came to His own and His own did not receive Him. But to all who did receive Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but born of God.” How do you get to call God your Father? You must be born again. You must be born of God. You must believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. You must receive Him. It’s what John says. “To all who have received Him, who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.” Jesus is Himself the only begotten Son of God, full of grace and truth. He died, cut off from Abba Father, all consciousness of the Father’s presence and smile torn from Him, at the cross, that when we turn to Him from our sin and trust in Him, we might live welcomed home as adopted children, like prodigal sons welcomed into the family. Do you have God as your Father? Do you? It is the necessary starting point for all true prayer. You must be an adopted child of God through faith in His only begotten Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, if your prayers are ever to be answered.

Your Adoption and Prayer

Well suppose you have been born again, suppose you are indeed a child of God, what difference does that great fact make to your prayers? What difference does adoption into the Father’s family make to your prayers? Well let me sum it up in three ways. There’s a lot we could say about this, but let me sum it up in three ways and then we’re done. First, your adoption ensures access to God. Your adoption ensures access to God. Secondly, your adoption engenders awe of God. And thirdly, your adoption explains answers from God. Your adoption ensures access to God, it engenders awe of God, and explains answers from God.

Your Adoption Ensures Access to God

First of all, your adoption ensures access to God. Think about it for a minute. How is it that mere creatures, mere creatures of the dust, can ever come into the presence of the Almighty Creator of heaven and earth and ask Him to attend to their concerns? And more than that, how do we dare hope that traitors and sinners and rebels like us who have shaken our fists in His face and pretended that we were gods in our own private world, how do we presume that the thrice holy God would ever listen to our cries? When we sit down to pray, many of us, I think, feel like the prodigal son from Jesus’ parable on his way home to his father, whom we have so terribly wronged – don’t we? Isn’t that how we feel? You remember what the prodigal son was going to say? His plan, when he was headed home to speak to his father – “Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you and I am not worthy to be called your son. Make me like one of your hired men.” That was the plan. He did not expect the father to receive him. Not him; he knew he didn’t deserve to be welcomed as a beloved child, or to be treated as an heir anymore; not after the way he’d been living.

And it may be, you feel just like that every time you sit down to try and pray. You’re so ashamed. You can scarcely bring yourself to address God at all. You don’t feel like you have any right to come to Him. You don’t feel like you have any claim on His affections. You are a beggar at best, hoping against hope for some tiny scrap of kindness. Certainly you do not feel like a son, standing securely in your rights as the Father’s heir. But of course you remember what happened in the parable, don’t you, when the son came home with his speech all ready and prepared. The Father – did he turn up his nose at his wayward son’s request? Did he chase him from the property? “You’re dead to me! No son of mine! We’re through!” Is that what he says? Did he wash his hands of his son? No, he came running and embraced his son and kissed his son and robed and reinstated his son and celebrated over his son, “For this son of mine was dead, and is alive again; was lost and now is found!”

So listen, brothers and sisters, believers in Jesus – your adoption, your sonship, it can never be taken from you. You can’t forfeit it. You cannot lose it. You are always, always welcome home. The Father will never turn you away. He loves to hear His children when they come back to Him, so come on back to Him. In fact, it’s part of our birthright, did you know that, as a child of God, to have access to the Father whenever we need Him. And we always need Him, don’t we? Listen to Romans 8:15. When we became children of God through faith in Jesus Christ, here is what has happened to us. Paul says, Romans 8:15, “You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back again into fear. You have received the spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, ‘Abba Father.’” It is the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit in your heart to communicate to you the sense and assurance of your sonship, your adoption. And as a part of that work and that ministry, He enables you to cry, “Abba Father.” That is to say, He helps you to pray, to come to Him, to have access to Him in all the wonder and intimacy of a child turning to his Father. The blood of Jesus Christ gives you the right, and the Spirit of Jesus Christ gives you the power, all your sin notwithstanding, to call God, “Abba Father,” and to come to Him confident that He will hear you as you look to Him for mercy. Your adoption ensures access to God.

Your Adoption Engenders Awe of God

Secondly, your adoption engenders awe of God. There is intimacy, isn’t there, right here – to call God the infinite, eternal and unchangeable One, “Father.” That’s intimacy; extraordinary intimacy. But there is also reverence and awe and profound respect here. It is still popular in some places to translate “Abba” as “Daddy.” Have you come across that? “Abba,” we are told, is the Aramaic form of address that a child would use in the intimacy of the family home. And so, surely, the argument goes, the equivalent today is, “Daddy.” Well actually, no, to be blunt, it’s not. In an article in the Journal of Theological Studies entitled, “Abba Isn’t Daddy” – I guess he’s not hiding the lead there in any way – “Abba Isn’t Daddy” – the Oxford linguist, James Barr, pointed out the word, “Abba” was typically used in the world of the New Testament not only by children but by mature adults as an affectionate, certainly, but deeply reverent and respectful form of address when they spoke to their own fathers. That’s why, when the New Testament translates, “Abba,” it never ever uses the Greek word for, “Daddy” – “pappas.” It always translates it, “pater,” “father.” The New Testament always translates it, “father.” So yes, there is intimacy, wonderful; free access to God as your Father. But it’s never casual or flippant or careless, and neither ought our prayers to be or our worship to be.

That’s why Jesus insists that He is our Father who is “in heaven.” He is our Father in heaven. He is not like your earthly daddy at all, is He? He isn’t like anyone else in fact. In so far as your earthly father was loving and kind and wise and protecting and nurturing, if he ever provided for your needs or listened to your requests or protected and defended you in danger, he was, at best, only ever a wonderful but necessarily dim reflection of the kind of Father God is toward His children. In fact, that God isn’t like earthly fathers is an incredibly important point for us to grasp today because we are now living in a crisis of fatherlessness in this country. According to the U.S. Census Bureau Reports for 2020 – listen to this statistic – 18.3 million children, that’s 1 in 4, live without a father in the home in this country. There are a lot of children growing up today who have very low opinions and even lower experiences of fathers and fatherhood. How easy it would be for us to recoil then at the idea that God is our Father if we were to read earthly fatherhood back into Him if this is the kind of father we have experienced – abusive, distant, checked out, indifferent, absent.

But Jesus says His Father, our Father in Him, He is our Father in heaven. That is to say, He is a Father of a different character altogether. He is not checked out. He is not indifferent. He is not absent ever! His love doesn’t wax and wane. His care is not a tool by which to manipulate you. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the God of all mercy and the Father of comfort.” Second Corinthians 1:3. “The God of all mercy and the Father of comfort.” That’s the kind of Father He is. So we can run to Him without any thought that He will hang back or withhold affection or keep us at arm’s length or promise much and not deliver. He’s not like that. He is our Father in heaven, transcendent, glorious, almighty, and He always means what He says. He does all His holy will. He that began a good work in you will complete it. Nothing can separate you from His love in Jesus Christ our Lord. And so we can run to Him. We can really trust in Him. We can rest fully upon Him. But we need to do it always with a reverent awe and a wonder that our Father in heaven is unlike any other. And so we worship Him in reverence and awe.

Your Adoption Explains Answers from God

Your adoption ensures access to God. It engenders all of God. And finally, your adoption helps explain answers from God. When you know God is your Father, you have a category that helps you understand why He might sometimes say, “No,” when you pray. It helps you understand why He might delay in answering when you pray. It helps you understand why He might give you something completely different than what you asked for in your prayers – because He is your Father in heaven. Remember the teaching of verse 8. “Your Father who sees in secret knows what you need before you ask Him.” He knows what you need. He knows better than you know. His heart beats with the love of a perfect Father, and before you have asked He already knows what you really need and it may not be what you really asked for or what you really wanted.

You may know the words of John Newton’s justly famous poem, “Prayer Answered by Crosses.” It explores precisely this dynamic. The Father answering in ways Newton neither expected nor particularly wanted, but it is what is best because He is our Father in heaven.

Newton writes:

“I asked the Lord, that I might grow
In faith, and love, and every grace,
Might more of his salvation know,
And seek more earnestly his face.

‘Twas he who taught me thus to pray,
And he, I trust has answered prayer;
But it has been in such a way,
As almost drove me to despair.

I hoped that in some favored hour,
At once he’d answer my request:
And by his love’s constraining power,
Subdue my sins, and give me rest.

Instead of this. He made me feel
The hidden evils of my heart;
And let the angry powers of hell
Assault my soul in every part.

Yea more, with his own hand he seemed
Intent to aggravate my woe;
Crossed all the fair designs I schemed,
Cast out my feelings, and laid me low.

Lord, why is this, I trembling cried,
Wilt thou pursue thy worm to death?
‘Tis in this way,’ the Lord replied,
‘I answer prayer for grace and faith.

These inward trials I employ,
From self and pride to set thee free;
And break thy schemes of earthly joy,
That thou mayest seek thine all in me.’”

The Father knows what you need before you ask Him. What you need. As a perfect Father He is committed to supplying what you need, even when it’s not what you want.

So prayer belongs, do you see, to the Church of God. It’s something we do together. It presses us together. The Gospel binds us together. I wonder if you’ve lost the “we” and the “us” and the “our” from your Christian life lately. And prayer belongs to the children of God. That is to say, it is the work of adoption that we should pray and come boldly and with intimacy and confidence to Abba Father yet tremble before Him in reverence and awe, knowing that He knows what we need and we really can trust Him to do all His holy will. Let’s pray together.

O Lord Jesus, please hear us as we continue to pray. Teach us, teach us to pray. Make us a people of prayer. We do love You and we bow before You repenting and believing once more, crying that by Your grace and by the work of the Spirit of adoption we might learn in Your school what it means to pray, to come before Your Father and our Father with reverence and awe, yet with confidence and boldness, pleading His promises and pouring out our requests, yet always willing to wait upon His perfect will. Help us, O God, we pray. And for those who do not yet know you, yet are called and summoned in Scripture to bow the knee and to seek Your face, bring them please to Jesus. Bring them in repentance and faith into the family of the living God. For we ask this in His holy name, amen.

© 2024 First Presbyterian Church.

This transcribed message has been lightly edited and formatted for the Web site. No attempt has been made, however, to alter the basic extemporaneous delivery style, or to produce a grammatically accurate, publication-ready manuscript conforming to an established style template.

Should there be questions regarding grammar or theological content, the reader should presume any website error to be with the webmaster/transcriber/editor rather than with the original speaker. For full copyright, reproduction and permission information, please visit the First Presbyterian Church Copyright, Reproduction & Permission statement.

To view recordings of our entire services, visit our Facebook page.

caret-downclosedown-arrowenvelopefacebook-squarehamburgerinstagram-squarelinkedin-squarepausephoneplayprocesssearchtwitter-squarevimeo-square