The below is the manuscript to the sermonette I was able to give at church Sunday.
One of the most important things I do as a father is pray with my children. My dad did this and I knew I needed to when I became a father. I want my kids to catch how I pray, what I pray for and most importantly to whom I pray.
In our passage Jesus modeled prayer for His disciples. Jesus no doubt prayed many prayers with or near Matthew, but this is the prayer Matthew recorded for us. This is the prayer Jesus gave His disciples during this speedy, master class in prayer. This prayer is not magic words, though it is always good to pray the words of Scripture, rather, this prayer is a model for us to use.
Jesus begins what we call the Lord’s prayer like this.
“Our Father in Heaven, hallowed by your name.” Matthew 6:9
This is all I’m going to look at today. Our Father in Heaven, hallowed by your name. Just the ‘WHO’ and the first ‘WHAT’ of the prayer.
This morning we will talk about the HOW of prayer but to get the H-O-W we start with the W-H-O of prayer. The WHO of prayer is far more important than the HOW of prayer. The most excellent part of any prayer is the destination of the prayer, the One on the other side of the line, not the words being said or the length of the prayer. Remember last week? The prophets of Baal had some varsity level praying going on from morning to evening and Elijah prayed a short, simple prayer. What was the difference? It was the WHO of prayer. If you’re not praying to the Living God you’re wasting your breath.
“Our Father in Heaven”
Jesus taught us to say Father. In Greek this is ‘Pater’, but Jesus spoke Aramaic and that word is ‘Abba’. Romans 8:15 says Christians receive the Spirit of sonship and by that Spirit we cry out “Abba, Father.”
I have some friends who live in the Middle East. In fact, one of them, Nate Munstermann, will be here next week. They say the little boys and girls run to their fathers and say “Abba, Abba” or “Daddy, Daddy.” Jesus taught us to pray using very intimate language when referring to the Almighty God. This was a new concept when Jesus said it. It was known that Yahweh was the Father of the universe as Alexander Graham Bell is the father of the telephone. But Jesus told his disciples that Yahweh was their father, like their daddy.
But Jesus didn’t just say that God is father. He said “He is Our Father in Heaven.” God is in Heaven. Meaning He is on the throne. He is dwelling in the glory and majesty of Heaven right now. God is the King of Heaven sitting on His very own throne. Don’t miss the majesty and unapproachable holiness that the God of Heaven is described with throughout the Bible.
~To help us understand this truth of Our Father in Heaven we’re going to use our imaginations. Some of you are going to think this is silly, but I want you to do it. You’re going to close your eyes and fill your imagination with what I’m about to describe. I’m going to compile some Scripture to help paint a picture in our minds that I hope will help the truth seep into our hearts using our God given imagination. So, close your eyes and picture this.
Picture the throne room of Heaven. The LORD is seated on a throne, high and exalted. He’s way up above the eye level of every being in the room. The train of His robe is so large that it fills the room. A rainbow resembling emerald encircles the throne. Above the LORD are seraphs, angels that are nearly indescribable in beauty and terror. They have six wings, yet they are protecting their faces from the Almighty LORD because of His inapproachable light. With two wings they cover their faces like Moses in the cleft of the rock, with two they covered their feet and with two they fly in a circle about the throne. They call out to one another, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty who was, and is and is to come; the whole earth is full of His glory.” As they shout that, the doorposts and thresholds of the throne room shake and the room is filled with smoke. Flashes of lightning and rolls of thunder come from the throne. The elders in the room lay their crowns down before the LORD and praise Him loudly.
Are you seeing this?
Now you step into the back of the throne room and survey this awe inspiring scene and shout “Daddy” as you run and boldly approach the throne to talk to Our Father in Heaven.~
Open your eyes.
This is how Jesus taught us to pray. This is to whom we pray!
1 John 3:1 says, “See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are.”
Brothers and sister, this is not a metaphor. This is what we actually are. We ARE children of God!
Understanding this will change our prayer life in a number of ways but I want to talk about two.
1) OUR Father.
Not only does God adopt us into His family but He puts the lonely into a family. You are never alone even though a quarantine or a widowing may make you feel alone. This is why we pray with one another. This is why we pray for one another. This is why we rest knowing somebody’s praying for me. This is why we trust that even if nobody in the church is praying for us that our Big Brother Jesus certainly is and the prayer of a righteous man availeth much!
2) Our Great Father is Good to Us and Desires to Hear from Us.
Some of us pray like we’ve got to get a PowerPoint presentation ready to present to God to convince Him that He should be good to us. We can trust that our Good, Good Father knows best and does best. We can ask in the confidence that He will work all things together for good and that He’s a bread giving Father and not a serpent giving father.
I invite you to think deeply about the wonderful attributes of our Heavenly Father and shout in your heart, “That’s my Dad!” He is holy, self-existent, self-sufficient, eternal, infinite, unchanging, all-knowing, all-powerful, omnipresent, faithful, good, just, merciful, gracious, sovereign and loving. That’s my Dad! Is it yours?
He doesn’t need us to say magic words to get what we need. We don’t have to say fellowship instead of get-together and talk about whatever a hedge of protection is to get Him to notice us.
He doesn’t need us to say millions of words or have millions of people praying for us. See verses 7 and 8, “And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.” So, if He knows what we need before we ask, why do we pray? It’s because our Great Father is good to us and desires to hear from us.
What are we waiting for? Run to the throne, climb on His lap and talk to Him!
That’s the first half of verse 9.
“Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name.”
I read this verse incorrectly for years. I read hallowed as part of the WHO of the Lord’s Prayer and not of the WHAT. Our Father without a doubt is hallowed. He is holy and set apart. But this actually is the first thing Jesus teaches us to ask for in His model prayer.
In fact, I’ll argue that this is the main request of the entire prayer.
So, we ask God to make His name hallowed.
But isn’t it already hallowed? How can I ask an infinitely holy God to MAKE His name hallowed? If you’re thinking that I can’t ask God to be any more holy than He is then you’re right. You can’t increase an infinite.
So, what is Jesus modeling us to ask for?
When we worship we often sing about magnifying God or glorifying God. What do we mean in this? To steal a metaphor from John Piper and to bore all the Pulse kids who have heard this a thousand times… do we magnify God like a telescope or a microscope? Microscopes take small things and magnify them to appear larger than they actually are. Telescopes take enormous things and make them look slightly less small than they appear without the aid of a telescope. Jupiter looks much bigger in a telescope than it does with the naked eye, but we know that Jupiter is not the size of a half dollar. In fact, more than 1,300 planet Earths can fit inside of Jupiter and Earth is so big that many of you haven’t been out of our own country.
We magnify God like a telescope. When we pray that God would be hallowed we are asking Him to appear somewhat more like He actually is. We’re asking Him to look like a half dollar instead of a speck to our mind’s eye and to the minds’ eye of those in this little planet.
Why does Jesus instruct us to make this request first?
I think it is because our Person is child of God and our Purpose is making much of Him.
Our Person: J. I. Packer in Knowing God said, “What is a Christian?... a Christian is one who has God as Father.”
Our Purpose can be defined by the Westminister Shorter Catechism question one.
Q: What is the chief end of man?
A: Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.
1 Corinthians 10:31 says, “So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.”
So, how do we hallow our Father’s name in prayer?
There are many ways but I will look quickly at two ways.
1) We recognize our smallness and our need for our glorious Father.
Jesus teaches this in the Lord’s prayer. We pray for our daily bread. We pray for forgiveness of sins. We pray that we would be forgivers. We pray that we be led away from temptation. We beg our Good Father to help us like my kids beg me for help; not because I have to be begged, but because they have to be helped.
2) We enjoy His presence in prayer.
I love it when I come home and my kids run to me and shout “Daddy’s home!” Tuesday I was meeting with Dan and Jim and when I got home Joshua was thrilled to see me. He asked if he could put on his frog boots and jump in the puddles as it rained. And you know what? I love that. I love when my kids are so utterly satisfied just by holding my hand and jumping in puddles. I secretly love it when they run to me instead of my wife and ask me to kiss the scrape. I love when they’re thrilled with my presence and provision.
I’ll remind you of a Piper quote: “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him.”
So, let me finish by asking two question.
1) Do my prayers magnify the reputation of God? In what I pray for? In how I pray? In how I wait? In how I approach Him?
2) And, do I have God as my Father? If you do, how can you pray like you do so that you experience this truth? If you don’t, do you want God as your Father because His Son died to adopt you.
