Chapter 1.
God The Father

We begin with the first six English words, "Our Father who art in heaven"—for they state the primary awareness with which we must pray—that God is our Father.

Our Father

That God should be personally addressed as "Father" may not seem out of the ordinary to those of us who frequent the church and pray the Lord's Prayer, but it was absolutely revolutionary in Jesus' day. The writers of the Old Testament certainly believed in the Fatherhood of God, but they saw it mainly in terms of a sovereign Creator-Father to whom they owed their paternity.

In fact, God is only referred to as Father fourteen times in the huge corpus of the Old Testament's thirty-nine books—and then rather impersonally. In those fourteen occurrences of "Father," the term was always used with reference to the nation, and not individuals. God was spoken of as Israel's Father, but Abraham did not speak of God as "my Father." You can search from Genesis to Malachi, and you will not find such an occurrence.

Moreover, in Jesus' day, His contemporaries had so focused on the sovereignty and transcendence of God that they were careful never to repeat His covenant name, "Jahweh," and so invented the word "Jehovah," which was made of a combination of two separate names of God. Thus, the distance from God was well guarded.

But when Jesus came on the scene, He addressed God only as Father. He never used anything else. All His prayers address God as Father. The Gospels (just four books) record His using Father more than sixty times in reference to God. So striking is this that some scholars maintain that this word "Father" dramatically capsulizes the difference between the Old Testament and New Testament. No one had ever in the entire history of Israel spoken and prayed like Jesus. No one!

But this amazing fact is only part of the story, because the word Jesus used for Father was not a formal word. It was the common Aramaic word with which a child would address its father—the word "Abba." The great German New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias, perhaps the most respected New Testament scholar of his generation, has argued convincingly that "Abba" was the original word on Jesus' lips here in the Lord's Prayer and, indeed, in all of His prayers in the New Testament—with the exception of Matthew 27:46 when He cried out from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast Thou Forsaken Me?" But there, Jeremias explains, Jesus was quoting Psalm 22:1. Jesus reverted to "Father" with the final words before His death: "Father, into Thy hands I commit My spirit" (Luke 23:46, quoting Psalm 31:5).

The word "Abba" was also the word Jesus regularly used to address His earthly father, Joseph, from the time Jesus was a baby until Joseph's death. Everyone used the word; but as the careful examination of other literature of the time shows, it was never used of God—under any circumstances. "Abba" meant something like "Daddy"—but with a more reverent touch than we use it. The best rendering is "Dearest Father."

To the traditional Jew, Jesus' prayer was revolutionary. Think of it. God was referred to only fourteen times in the Old Testament as "Father," and then it was as the corporate Father of Israel—never the individual or personal Father. Now, as His disciples ask Him for instruction on how to pray, Jesus enjoins them to begin by calling God their Father, their "Abba"! As Jeremias says,

... in the Lord's Prayer Jesus authorizes His disciples to repeat the word abba after Him. He gives them a share in His sonship and empowers them, as His disciples, to speak with their heavenly Father in just such a familiar, trusting way as a child would with his father.

When we say "Abba" today in our prayers, as we sometimes do, we are making the same sound that actually fell from Jesus' lips—and the lips of His incredulous disciples. Jesus transformed the relationship with God from a distant, corporate experience into an intimate, one-to-one bond, and He taught His disciples to pray with the same intimacy. And that is what He does for us.

The way we are to pray is "Our Father"—"Our Abba"—"Our Dearest Father." This is to be the foundational awareness of all of our prayer. We must honestly ask ourselves if this awareness pervades our prayer life. And then we must go further and ask ourselves if the sense of God's intimate Fatherhood is profound and growing.

The impulse to address God as "Abba" (Dearest Father) is not only an indication of our spiritual health, but is a mark of the authenticity of our faith. Paul tells us in Galatians 4:6: "And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba! Father!'" The impulse is the sign of being God's child. Romans 8:15, 16 says the same: "...but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, 'Abba! Father!' The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God."

True believers are impelled to say this.

This is precisely what happened to me when I came to faith during the summer before my freshman year in high school. Before that I had a cool theological idea of the universal paternity of God as the Creator of all humanity. His Fatherhood was there, but it was not personal. Then, with my conversion, God became warm and personal, and "Dear Father" the constant refrain of my subconscious. I knew God, and I knew He was my Father!

This realization is one of the great and primary works of the Holy Spirit. His work is to make Christians realize with increasing clarity the meaning of their filial relationship with God in Christ. He keeps enhancing this "spirit of adoption" in us and is ever integrating it into our lives.

Let me ask a personal question of each one of us. Do we have a "spirit of adoption"? Do we sense that God is our Father? Do we think of Him, and address Him, as our "Dear Father"? If we cannot answer in the affirmative, it may be because He is not our spiritual Father; and, therefore, we need to heed the words of Scripture and receive Him. "But as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become children of God, even to those who believe in His name" (John 1:12).

Dr. J. I. Packer considers one's grasp of God's Fatherhood and one's adoption as a son or daughter as of essential importance to spiritual life. He says:

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 that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new, and better than the Old, everything that is distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish, is summed up in the knowledge of the Fatherhood of God. "Father" is the Christian name for God.

That God is our Abba-Father is a truth that we must cultivate for the sake of our soul's health.

The Father-child understanding brings wholeness to spiritual life. First, it brings a sense of being loved. Reverend Everett Fullam tells how this came home to him when he was ministering to a remote tribe of people in Nigeria. The tribe was so isolated that it had never heard the word Africa, much less America. They had a prescientific view of creation, so simplistic that when Fullam mentioned to the chief the then-recent phenomenon of two Americans walking on the moon, the old chief looked hard into Fullam's face, and then up at the moon, and exclaimed in an angry tone, "There's nobody up there! Besides, it is not big enough for two people to stand on."

The old chief meant it. He had absolutely no idea of the size of the moon or its distance from the earth. But it was there in the wilds of west Africa that Fullam had the memorable experience which drove home to him what it means to know God as Father. The moment came when he was invited to baptize three converts, people who had come to know the love of God through faith in Jesus Christ, although they, like the old chief, knew little about science and the universe. Fullam describes his experience this way:

There were two men and one woman. We stood on the banks of a muddy river, wet and happy. I had never seen three more joyful people. "What is the best thing about this experience?" I asked. All three continued to smile, the glistening water emphasizing the brightness of their dark-skinned faces; but only one spoke, in clear, deliberate English: "Behind this universe stands one God, not a great number of warring spirits, as we had always believed, but one God. And that God loves me."

How beautiful! Separated by millennia of culture, men and women through faith in Christ found the same spirit of adoption and the same sense of God's intimate love that we also find through Christ. Those three tribespeople now prayed, "Our Father," and experienced the same sense of love that we know.

Next, the sense of God's Fatherhood helps drive home the reality of our forgiveness. The word "Father" implies forgiveness. I think it is most significant that the first word to fall from the Prodigal Son's lips when he returned was "Father." "Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight..." (Luke 15:21). And, of course, those words were followed by forgiveness. The more deep-seated our sense of God's tender, loving care, the deeper will be our sense of forgiveness and the wholeness that comes from being loved and forgiven.

Then there is also the confidence and security it gives us. When I was a young father and my children were very small, my younger son once hid on top of the refrigerator. As I walked by, with no warning he suddenly dove off the refrigerator onto my back. I didn't see him, I didn't feel him coming—he just tackled me and held on. And I held him up.

As I thought about it later, I realized that Carey felt that if he jumped in the direction of his father, he was going to be safe. He might have knocked me silly, but it never occurred to him that I would not catch him. That is the way it is with our Abba, our Heavenly Father. He gives us a great sense of security and confidence—and it is a valid sense of security and confidence.

My point is this: the concept that God is our Father, our Abba, is not only a sign of our spiritual health and the authenticity of our faith, but it is one of the most healing doctrines of all of Scripture. Some have never had a positive relationship with an earthly father. There are entire neighborhoods in our large cities where there are almost no fathers—just mothers and children. In such situations, the experience of knowing a caring father is rare. There are also thousands who have grown up in conventional homes with fathers where the relationship with father or mother was negative at best.

The fact is, whatever our background, we need the touch of a loving parent. Our Lord wants to provide that. That is another reason why He commands all of us to pray "Our Father"—"Our Dearest Abba Father." If we need to, we can simply say, "Dearest Father," "Abba," and find the wholeness and healing that God wants to give us.

Our Father, Who Art in Heaven

As we have seen, Jesus' use of "Father" and "Abba" to address God was amazingly revolutionary because the Jewish theology of the time stressed the transcendence and sovereignty of God—that He was so far above and so "other" that He could not be addressed with familiarity.

On the other hand, the problem today among some evangelical Christians is reversed, because they have sentimentalized God so that He has been robbed of His holiness. Many Christians are flippantly sentimental about God and sing tunes about the "great big God in the sky" as if He were some big celestial teddy bear.

Such songs may not actually be blasphemous—but they come very close. Moreover, such flip familiarity—which outwardly suggests exceptional intimacy with God—really points to shallowness and a defective knowledge of God.

Jesus provides the remedy to both errors with His opening words, "Our Father, who art in heaven." "Father" stresses God's immanence: He is involved in life and is to be intimately approached as Abba. "Who art in heaven" stresses God's transcendence: He surpasses all that is human; He is sovereign and reigning. In a word, He is our Father and our King. We are to affectionately call Him "Abba," "Dear Father," perhaps even "Daddy," but we do it with a deep sense of wonder and reverence.

He is our Father, but He is not restricted to the analogy of our earthly parents. He exceeds them in all their nurturing and protecting qualities because He is "Our Father... in heaven." He always understands. He always is caring and loving. He never forgets. And He always delivers.

This is the way little children regard their fathers. I well remember the day that one of my boys came in with his little buddy, Greggie Salazar, saying, "You can beat up Mr. Salazar, can't you, Dad? Greggie says you can't." And he kept repeating this while I kept saying, "Don't talk so loud—shh!" Each boy knew his father was the stronger and could deliver.

There is no doubt about our Heavenly Father, because He is "our Father in heaven." He is superior. He exceeds all of our earthly fathers' virtues one billion-fold. Oh, the tenderness and power that the opening lines of the Lord's Prayer evoke!

Our Father

The Prayer begins with the word "Our"—"Our Father." "Our" is the pronoun of partnership. While it is beneficial sometimes to say, "My Father," Jesus purposely says, "Our," because he wants to stress the identity that God's Fatherhood brings.

When we pray the Lord's Prayer, we are affirming that we are brothers and sisters, and that if we love God, we must love one another. There is no place in God's family for the much-glorified American individualism which says, "I don't need anyone else—and they don't need me." "Our Father" calls us not only upward, but outward to minister to our brothers and sisters as members of our own family. The Fatherhood of God enriches life vertically and horizontally. How beautiful His ways and His words are!

What is the foundational awareness with which we are to pray? It is that God is our tender, loving Father, our Abba; He loves us like a parent; He forgives us like a parent; He takes care of us like a parent. The other part of the awareness is that He can deliver, for He is "Our Father ... in heaven." He exceeds every virtue of our earthly parents.

And, finally, all this suggests how we ought to pray. There are three ways: first, with confidence. When my children come to me saying, as my girls sometimes do, "Daddy, dear," they make my day. And it is my delight to do anything for them which is in reason. In the same way, God delights in answering our prayers. We may, we must, be confident.

Secondly, we must pray with simplicity. Fathers do not look for eloquent rhetoric from their children—just simple, direct, heartfelt conversation. Let us honor God with our simplicity.

Lastly, we ought to pray with love. The words "Abba, Father" are the words of love, and our prayer ought to be overflowing with love. "Our Father, who art in heaven, we love You. Amen."