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Intro…

Welcome to the Cornerstone Baptist church podcast. My name is Justin Wheeler, I am the preaching pastor for Cornerstone and today we are in week 46 of our journey through the Heidelberg Catechism. Today, I will be talking to you about question 120-121.

This week we will begin working through the Lord’s Prayer from Matthew 6:9-13.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgives us our debt, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.

This is a prayer that many of us learned as children and have repeated over the years in various settings. I first learned it with my football team in junior high and we would pray it together before games. I wasn’t a believer back then but still this prayer became etched in my memory and it still serves me well today.

I became a Christian while in college and as I began to learn various spiritual disciplines that help believers grow in faith and love, this prayer became much more precious and meaningful to me. It helped me to rehearse certain truths that my heart and mind needed to meditate on. It gave me a guide for how to shape my prayers, and I really needed that because no one took me aside and taught me to pray.

Transition…

But in all honesty, that’s exactly what this prayer is; it is specific instruction from Jesus on how His disciples, how believers in Christs, should pray.

Luke 11:1 Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2 And he said to them, “When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name…

So, this is Jesus teaching all of us how to pray. Jesus is giving us a first-hand lesson on what it looks like for us to pray to God. This is how we should pray and this is how we should understand our relationship to God, whom we are praying to. And the first thing that Jesus tells us should adorn our prayers is an acknowledgment that God is Our Father.

Lord’s Day Focus...

Question 120: Why has Christ commanded us to address God as: Our Father?

Answer: To awaken in us, at the very beginning of our prayer, that childlike awe and trust toward God, which are to be the ground of our prayer; namely, that God has become our Father through Christ, and will much less deny us what we ask of Him in faith, than our parents refuse us earthly things.

For some of us, the command of Christ to call God “Our Father” comes with some difficulty or personal baggage. For some of us, the Fatherhood of God is a bit challenging because you grew up without a father. Or maybe you grew up with an angry and abusive father who never showed grace, or perhaps a weak one who never stood up for you to protect you. Some of us were blessed with wonderful fathers, strong and safe, with big hearts and firm hands; I thank God for my father.

Others may struggle with the Fatherhood of God because they consider it sexist and would prefer to worship a goddess. But God hasn’t revealed Himself to us in that way. He is never called goddess, mother, or queen in the Scriptures but rather God, Father and King. In Matthew’s Gospel we see the Fatherhood of God referenced 44 times, second only to John’s gospel where God is called Father 109 times.

The Fatherhood of God is foundational to Christianity. The whole goal of Christ’s mission is to reunite us with our heavenly Father.

John 14:6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Jesus is the way, the way to what, the way to the Father. When a person comes to faith in Christ they are adopted into God’s family and made a child of God and an heir of the Father’s kingdom right alongside Jesus. Through Jesus we have a relationship with God that is defined as a relationship of a father to his child.

My wife and I have been married for almost 19 years and we have three children; Caroline 15, Luke 14, and Samuel 11. As they have grown and matured they have gotten better about how they ask for things, what they ask for and when they ask; but when they were younger they would ask for whatever they wanted with no regard for decorum.

If they wanted something or needed something they would come with a childlike expectation that no request was too big, no want was off limits; they just came and asked. I have one son who still thinks he should have dessert after every meal and he still asks for it.

Our prayers to the Father should be guided by a more mature request than for ice cream three times a day, but the attitude, the impulse, the recklessness that governs a child’s requests should inform the way we pray to our heavenly Father.

Now, I am an imperfect father, but my desire is to be generous with my kids because I love them, and I want them to be happy. I want to give them good things, cool things, fun things. But my desire to be generous doesn’t even come close to God’s desire to be generous.

Who is God? He is the universes Creator and Sustainer. He is holy, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent; and He is our Father. He knows everything, even our needs before we present them to Him. We don’t have to persuade Him or manipulate Him into caring for us, He loved us before we were born, and He will love us forever and He desires to give us the best gifts in the world.

Why Did Christ command us to call God “Our Father? Because Christ wants to kindle in us what is basic to our prayer – the childlike awe and trust that God through Christ has become our Father.” Childlike awe causes us to respect and revere the name of God. Childlike trust causes us to know that there is nothing greater than our Father’s will being done.

 

Question 121: Why is it added, In Heaven?

Answer: Those words teach us not to think of God’s heavenly majesty as something earthly; and to expect everything necessary for body and soul from His almighty power.

There’s a song that we teach to our children and it goes like this,

My God is so big, so strong and so mighty

There’s nothing my God cannot do

It is a comforting thought to know that there is nothing beyond the scope of God’s power. It is comforting to know that this limitless and powerful God is our Father. It will change our life when we grasp that this almighty God has instructed us to come to Him in prayer asking for every need that we have to be supplied by His power.

God is not a limited Father who can’t tell the difference between a good gift and a dangerous one. He is not an influential man who has limits, but rather is the sovereign ruler of all who has everything at His disposal. When we pray to Our Father in Heaven we are taking our requests, the needs of our body and soul, to the very throne room of the universe.

Our prayers are echoing in the throne room of Heaven. Our prayers are pinned up on Our Father’s refrigerator. God hears you and His heart is inclined to you because you are His child.

I think we could all stand to learn again what it means to pray like a child. When Jesus wanted to teach his disciples about the dynamics of the Kingdom, He invited a child to come and sit next to Him and Jesus told the disciples that they needed to be more like the child. Humble, needy, unashamed, unembarrassed, bold, playful and willing to come and ask God for everything.

And this God who is our Heavenly Father will meet all of our needs, both body and soul, according to His will for us and out of the almighty power that He wields.

Thank you for joining me today to discuss Christian prayer. Next week, we will dig a little deeper into the Lord’s prayer to learn what it means for us to ask for God’s named to be hallowed. I hope you will join me for that discussion as we look at Lord’s Day 47 and question 122.

Conclusion…

If you want to learn more about Cornerstone Baptist church, you can find us online at Cornerstonewylie.org. You can follow us on Twitter or Instagram @cbcwylie. You can find us on Facebook at facebook.com/cornerstonewylie. You can also subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or google play to stay up to date on all the new content.

Thanks for listening.