Our Father in Heaven

So good to be with you again tonight and I want to thank you all for coming. Many churches do not have an evening service and it's always good to see those churches who continue to provide the maximum opportunity for their members to hear the word of God. And I thank God for Jefferson Park Baptist Church and its desire to to fulfill that ministry. The early Christians, because most of them were slaves, did not have the opportunity to meet at nine o'clock or ten o'clock or eleven o'clock in the morning and again at six o'clock at night. It would be four to five o'clock in the morning before they took up their slave duties and then again it would be after nine o'clock in the evening. And that is why Eutychus fell out the window. because he had worked hard all day and then still had to sit and listen to Paul till midnight. And by that time he was a pretty tired man. So it has been the custom of the church since the earliest days of recorded history to meet twice on the Lord's Day. And I commend you and I thank God for your obedience to him. in this way, though there is no direct command in scripture that we should meet together twice on a Sunday, but it's a very good practice. Turn with me then to Galatians 3 and we read from verse 26 to Galatians 4 verse 7 and we shall stand for the reading. Galatians 3 verse 26 to chapter 4 verse 7. For you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus. For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek. There is neither slave nor free. There is neither male nor female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. Now I say that an heir, as long as he is a child, does not differ at all from a slave, though he is master of all, but is under guardians and stewards until the time appointed by the father. Even so we, when we were children, were in bondage under the elements of the world. But when the fullness of the time had come, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying out, Abba, Father. Therefore you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir of God through Christ. Thanks be to God for His word. We look to His Holy Spirit to bless our understanding. Please be seated. Last Sunday evening we did an introduction to what is commonly known as the Lord's Prayer. But it's a title that can be very misleading because it's not a prayer that our Lord Himself could pray. Indeed, it contains one petition that Jesus as the Son of God couldn't pray, namely the petition, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. The New Testament says he was sinless and therefore he had no sin to confess to God and to ask God for forgiveness. It is better then, I think, to call the Lord's Prayer, the pattern prayer, or the model prayer. As dressmakers use patterns to make garments, so the Lord's Prayer is a pattern on which to model our prayers. And by that, I said last Sunday night, we are not bound to its words, but we are bound to its basic content. Because as a pattern, it identifies what are the chief things we should be praying for, and the order of those priorities. Now, tonight we come to that wonderful address or invocation in the Lord's Prayer, or the pattern prayer, Our Father in Heaven. And I would like to expound those four words. For expository preaching is not just verse by verse expounding the meaning of a book or passage of scripture, it can also be expounding one single word, like the word blood, or the word father, or just a phrase, for by grace you have been saved. I am still expounding scripture, but simply the invocation to our Lord's pattern prayer. Prayer is communication between men and God, which is faster, more direct, and more rewarding than the most sophisticated communication the world has yet devised. And like all communication, every prayer has to have a name and an address. And what we want to look at this evening is primarily the name to which we address our prayer, and then the place or address of that prayer in heaven. But our main thought will be on the person to whom we pray. A Christian, I think, can be defined in many ways, but the way that I would define a Christian is a person who has God as their father. Now, there are some who would argue that this can be said of all men, whether they are Christians or not, but that is not true. It's not true at all. All men are not the children of God in a spiritual sense, as Jesus uses the term. But in a material or physical sense, God is the Father of all human beings. Malachi 2 verse 10 says, Have we not all one Father? Has not one God created us? And then you remember in Acts 17, when Paul wishes to address the philosophers in Athens, he reminds them that it is in God that we live and move and have our being, for, he says, we are his offspring. God is not the spiritual father of all men, but he is the physical or material source of all human beings. To say that God is the spiritual father of all human beings is to stand the gospel on its head. Because what we are really saying is that nobody needs to be converted, everybody is going to go to heaven as they are as human beings. That God did not have to give his son to die on the cross of Calvary to remove or to pay the penalty for the sin of the world. that all that creatures need to do is to tell everybody in the world that they are the children of God and that by virtue of their humanity they belong to Him and they need to rejoice in their sonship. But this doctrine of man's natural sonship to God finds no place in the Bible. The Old Testament presents God as a Father not of all men, but of the children, or the offspring, of Abraham. In Exodus 4, verse 22, God says to Pharaoh, Israel is my son, my firstborn, so I say to you, let my son go, that he may serve me. The New Testament also presents God as the Father not of all men, but of those who, knowing themselves to be sinners, receive Christ as their Saviour, and by faith in Christ become the seed, or the children, of Abraham. Thus Paul says to Christians in Galatians 3, you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, and if you are Christ's, then You are Abraham's seed. So, divine sonship is not a natural fact. It is a supernatural gift. John 1.12 says, To as many as received him, who believed on his name, to them 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 of God. By what right then do we become the sons of God? And the answer the New Testament gives us is that it is by the right of adoption, made possible by Christ's work of redemption upon the cross, removing the offense of our sin which has cut us off from God. And because of the shedding of His blood and the removing of our sin, God can draw near to us and He can adopt us as His children. Now that's the whole purpose of Christ's incarnation. And so Paul says in the passage you read, Galatians 4, God sent forth His Son, born of a woman, to redeem those who were under the law that we might receive the adoption of sons. So God's fatherhood is a gift of grace. He makes sinners His sons because He loves them. He has set His love upon them through all eternity. And adoption, therefore, by its very nature, is a free act, a spontaneous act of kindness and of generosity to the person adopted. So, if you become a father by adopting a child, you do so because you choose to, not because you are bound to. Similarly, God adopts His children because He chooses to. He is under no obligation to do so. He need not have done anything about our sins except punish them. But wonder of wonders, God set His love upon you and upon me, and He sent forth His natural Son to redeem us, to give His life as a ransom for our sins. so that we might be adopted as the children of God. Accordingly, by His redeeming work, our Lord Jesus Christ, who is God's Son by nature, His only Son, who has the same nature as God, He has now become our brother, the firstborn among many brethren, says Paul in Romans chapter 8. However, God's grace does not stop at that initial contact, that spiritual process by which we are adopted into His family. No more than the love of a human parent would end with the legal process of adoption. The establishing of a child's status as an adopted member of the family is only the very beginning of the adoption process. The real task, of course, remains, and that is to establish a filial relationship between you and your adopted child. Now, it is this above all else that we want to see, and so we set ourselves to win that child's love by showering him with our affection, or her, with our affection, so that we might excite their affection for us. And in the same way throughout our life in this world and to all eternity beyond, God will constantly be showering His love upon us in order to excite our love for Him. And the prospect therefore before us as God's adopted sons and daughters is an eternity of love, and to know and experience the love of God's fatherhood is the key to prayer. That is why the pattern prayer begins with these two simple but exceedingly precious words, Our Father. It might have begun Our Sovereign Lord, or our Almighty God, or our Righteous Judge. But no, it begins, says Jesus, if you are an adopted child of God with the words, Our Father. That's how you address Him. Christian homage or Christian prayer is not just the routine act of giving some kind of platitudes that would satisfy our heavenly God who is in heaven like the pagans do when they worship some far-off potentate. Rather, it is the opening of our hearts. to a loving father. And I do hope that we know the wondrous reality of the Father's love for us in our prayer life. The measure of God's affection for His adopted children, you know, is the eternal affection He has for His only begotten Son. It is no less. There's no favoritism in God's family. He loves his adopted children as much as he loves his own son by nature. Now that's not often true in human families, where the adopted child is made to feel inferior to the natural children. But as God's adopted children, Jesus says, we are no less loved than Jesus himself is loved by his Father. And you know, that's the best news that anyone can ever hear. Imagine how much God the Father loves God the Son. And then say to yourself, that is as much as he loves me. In John 17 23 Jesus prayed that the world may even know that you have loved them, my followers, as you have loved me. They were tremendous words. Now, because of the downgrading of human fatherhood and the sad experience that so many children have of it, This doesn't come home to many people who have had that experience. It's difficult for some people to appreciate God's unique and perfect fatherhood. An increasing number of children now come from single parent families and as a result they do not know the joy and the care of having a loving earthly father. Others again are the victims of abuse and the responsibility of that abuse often rests, not always but more often, with the father. To call God father then, is not an appealing and as meaningful as it ought to be for some people who have had that experience because they sadly transfer their earthly experience to their experience with God. How we need to recapture today the attractiveness of God as our Heavenly Father and lift it above all the unhappy human experiences of human fatherhood. And friends, the way to do so is twofold. First, we need to understand what the Bible says when it says that all fatherhood on earth gets its inspiration and its direction from the fatherhood of God in heaven. Paul says in Ephesians 3.15, I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ from whom all fatherhood in heaven and on earth derives its name. So we do not call God Father because there are features of God's character that are similar to our earthly father. Rather, the opposite is the case. His fatherhood, God's fatherhood, is the true fatherhood. His is not derived from ours. But our fatherhood is derived from His. All we know of true human fatherhood at its best is but a pale reflection of what God is to Jesus and to us as His adopted children. And you know, it's because we are made in His image that we can reflect His fatherhood in our human families. The name of Father, I want to say again, did not go up from us to God, but it came down from God to us. Now, when we clearly understand that, the second thing we must do to recapture the true spirit of the fatherhood of God, the second thing we must do is to see it perfectly revealed in the life of the Lord Jesus Christ, for He is the only one who has come to this earth to show us what the Father in heaven is like. Remember when Philip said to Jesus, Lord, show us the Father and that will be sufficient for us. And Jesus answered, have I been with you so long and yet have you not known me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father. In John 12 Jesus says, the things that I speak, I speak just as the Father has told me. And in John 14 31 he says again, I do as the Father has commanded me." So, what the picture is, is this, that Jesus spoke only what the Father said to Him, and Jesus did only what the Father told Him to do. And so, to look at Jesus is to see the Father who sent Him, to hear the Father speaking, and to see the Father working. Well, what are some of the things that Jesus told us and showed us about the Father? First of all, I think he taught us that our Father is Spirit. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth, John 4, 24. So God the Father is not to be thought of in physical terms, and so we are not to make images or pictures of our Father. As a spirit, God is not only invisible, but He is not bound to places or to things. So Jerusalem is not the only place to worship Him. Jefferson Park Baptist Sanctuary is not the only place to worship Him. He can be worshipped anywhere, at any time, as long as we worship Him in spirit and in truth. Next, Jesus taught us that our Father is perfect, Matthew 5 and verse 48. Be perfect, He said, just as your Father in heaven is perfect. There can be no development in our Father's character. He is absolutely perfect as He is. He always has been and He always will be. His sublime excellence is revealed in all of His perfect attributes. All of them are in harmony with each other. There is no clashing, there is no excess, there is no defect, no inconsistency, there is no stain. Again, Jesus taught us that our Father is not only spirit, He is not only perfect, but He is good. Luke 18 verse 19, no one is good but one, that is God. And when we say that God is good, we are simply declaring that all He is and all He does is only good. He is good in such a wonderful way that He makes all who trust Him feel good and feel happy in the deepest sense. So happy that they say to all and sundry, Oh, taste the Lord. and see that He is good. Blessed is the man who trusts in Him. And then again, Jesus taught us that our Father is holy. And so in the prayer in John 17, He addresses the Father as Holy Father. His holiness is His unique moral perfection. His sinlessness And because we are unlike Him by reason of our sinfulness, God's holiness is the attribute that we are most aware of when we come to Him in prayer. That is why we are hesitant to come to Him in prayer. His holiness is so great that the angels in heaven speak of it in super-superlative terms. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of hosts. Of course, linked with our Father's holiness is His glory, which is the outshining, the outward manifestation of His inward splendor. And you know, that outward manifestation was veiled by the human flesh of Jesus in the incarnation. But he was nevertheless there. So much so, that at one point, Peter said to Jesus, Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man. And when our Savior returns, He will come in that same glory. And then again, fifthly, Jesus taught us that our Father is righteous and He is just. Our Heavenly Father always acts in accordance with what is right. And that is something that no human father can claim 100% observance. There are times when we may think we are doing what is right, but on further reflection we find out was not quite the right thing to do. But God always acts in a righteous way towards his children, and that means that in an unrighteous and unjust world, we can look forward to our Father upholding what is right. I love the words of F.W. Faber's hymn, God's justice is a bed where we our anxious hearts may lay, and weary with ourselves may sleep our discontent away. That is, although we see everything topsy-turvy and injustice multiplying on the earth, because God is just and right, we may sleep our discontent away, for right is right, since God is God, and right must win the day. To doubt would be disloyalty, to falter would be sin. Sixthly, our Father is loving, merciful, and forgiving. His love is the love he showed when he gave his son so freely to be forsaken on the cross and to endure hell for you and for me. There is no greater proof of love than the exercise of mercy and forgiveness towards someone who does not deserve it. And thus Jesus says in Luke 6.35, Love your enemies, be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. And friends, the more we dwell on God's love, the more we will be assured of His mercy toward us. Seventhly, our Father is caring. We don't have to worry, Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, about what to eat, or about what to wear, or anything else. For your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things, because we are never out of His sight. He knows what we are going through every moment of every day. He knows what we need at each particular moment, even better than we do. Indeed, because he knows the future as perfectly as he knows the past and the present, he can anticipate our future needs. Nothing in our circumstances can ever take God by surprise. We, his adopted children, know that he is ready for every contingency that may crop up. So when we share our concerns with Him in prayer, it is a tremendous comfort to know that He is ready always to care for our needs. Which leads me to say just one more thing about God's fatherhood that Jesus taught us, and that is that He is generous. He delights in giving His children good gifts. Remember what Jesus said in Matthew 7, 9, What man is there among you who, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone? If you, then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father, who is in heaven, give good things to those who ask him? I love the words in the Common Book of Prayer. It's a good book to have, especially the one by Latimer. That's the most ancient of the prayer books. Latimer was a very spiritual man, and the prayers and the thoughts that are in the Common Book of Prayer are often very uplifting and spiritual. And under prayer, he says, God is always more ready to hear than we are to pray and is willing to give more than either we desire or deserve. So this then is the person to whom it is our privilege to address our prayers and all right-minded praying begins with this realization of God's fatherhood and our adopted sonship by His grace. It is so important, says Paul in Romans 8, that when we are born again, when we are converted, we receive the Holy Spirit of adoption. And the first thing the Holy Spirit teaches us is to cry out, Abba, Father. And the word Abba is the Aramaic diminutive for Father. And it has a lot more reverence than our nearest equivalent has, which is Daddy. It wouldn't quite be reverent to speak about Daddy in heaven. But that's the nearest equivalent we have. And so it has been suggested that the best paraphrase or translation of the word Abba would be to just put the word dear before father. Dear father or dear, dear father. To indicate that intimacy, that closeness. It's not just father. He is our dear father. And Paul is telling us in Romans 8 that it is God's spirit of adoption who tells us deep within our hearts that we are really God's children and we can address Him as our dear, dear Father. And nothing, my friends, increases our confidence to pray more than appreciating that God is our Father, especially when we grasp afresh His unspeakable love. for his adopted children. He wants to bless us because he loves us as his sons and daughters, and the love he has for us, as I have said, is the very same love he has for his natural son. There is no favoritism in the family of God. Well, that's the person to whom we are to pray, and I've used most of my time just a few words on the address to which we are to send our prayer. A mark of the prayers of the Bible is an awareness of the greatness of our God. And the invocation of God in the pattern prayer draws just such an awareness upon us. In this manner, therefore, pray, Our Father in heaven, not which art or who art in heaven, that is not in the original text, but just Our Father in heaven. Now, heaven does not signify a place that is extremely remote from our planet. The gods of pagans were generally thought to be far, far away beyond the reach of their earthly worshippers, but not so the God of the Bible. When the Creator is said to be in heaven, the thought in the Bible is that He exists on a different plane. but not in a different place, billions and billions of light years away. No, the God of heaven is always near to His children on the earth. He sees everything we do, He hears everything that we pray. He is unseen, but He sees us, and we live in Him, and we move in Him, and we have our being in Him. So, He is around us and we are in Him. He is on another plane. All I can do is call it a spiritual plane that we cannot see, but He is on that plane. Whereas we are on a physical and a material plane. Added to all this is the fact that God is enthroned in heaven, in that spiritual plane, and is therefore all-powerful and all-sovereign, so that the psalmist can say, our God is in heaven, he does whatever he pleases. Luke 1 verse 37 says, with God nothing shall be impossible. And that is why Christ could be born of a virgin without the assistance of a human father and why God the Father could raise Jesus from the dead three days after his burial. Our God is the great and mighty God who lives and moves and works in that different spiritual plane that you and I cannot see and very often cannot feel. And this knowledge of God's greatness should both humble us, cut us down to size, as it were, and move us to worship such a great being. And these simple words of invocation do just that, don't they? Knowing that the great God in heaven is our Father is meant to increase the wonder of our privilege of being His children and having this hotline of communication to such a great person. And hotline it truly is, friends, because though He is the Lord of heaven and earth and is taking care of billions and billions of things, He always has time for you and me. We can all pray together at the same time and He'll hear every one of us and have time to take care and interest in what each of us are saying. He gives His full attention to each one of us. You know the frustration when you want to get through to AT&T or some other thing and you land up in India And you know, you can't get hold of the human being who is there and can give you the answer. We know that frustration. Well, you'll never have that with God, even if all his children pray to him at the same time. It's absolutely marvelous. But have we really taken it in? It really merits serious thought. And there are two ways we can think of to arouse our worship. First, we can think of God's greatness. We can think of Him as the infinite, eternal God whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain, said Solomon. And then remind ourselves that this God, whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain, is my adopted Father. I'm his adopted child, I should say. He's my father. For this awesome, holy, transcendent God has stooped down in Christ to lift us up from the gutter of sin and bring us into his family to enjoy this unstinting relationship of love with him. And secondly, we can think of God's fatherhood and then remind ourselves that he is in heaven. that He is almighty, He is infinite, He is eternal and free from all the limitations and the flaws that are found in our earthly mothers and fathers. And that as our Divine Father who is eternal and infinite and almighty, His love is unchanging, it is unlimited and more than able to meet all the needs we bring to Him in prayer. So as I close, I want to bring you a simple thought which I hope will be of immense blessing in your prayer life as you come to address God. I want to urge you to let your thoughts in your prayers move like a pendulum from, he's my father, And He's the God that heaven of heavens cannot contain. Two, from that, two, He's the Almighty God that the heaven of heavens cannot contain. And He's my Father. It's beyond belief, but it's true. And I say grasp it, or rather Beloved, let these words grasp you. Let them stir your heart to praise God for this mystery. And that will indeed be the worship that Jesus wanted to evoke in you and me when He gave us this pattern invocation. to the One who is both His Father and ours. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for sending your Son Jesus Christ to die on that cruel cross for our sins to bear the suffering, the affliction, the pain of hell itself so that we might be spared and welcomed home like the prodigals we are and given a ring and sandals and a robe of righteousness. We thank you that there is no better father, more deeply committed to his children's welfare, or more wise or more generous in promoting our welfare than you, our dear, dear Father in Heaven. Lord, let us never cease to be amazed that the Almighty God who is in the heavens is our Father, and that our Father is the almighty God in heaven who rules over all and does whatever he pleases. None can stop him. We ask it, Lord, in the name of Jesus, your natural Son and our brother. Amen.