The Intimate Majesty of the Father

“Our Father in heaven …”

When Jesus’ disciples make the simple request, “Teach us to pray,” he answers with what might be the best known text in the New Testament – what we call the Lord’s Prayer. As I think about this response, Jesus seems to be saying, “I am teaching you the embodiment of faith. This is how a disciple expresses confidence and surrender, trust and submission, dependence and hope.”

And he begins this way: “Our Father.” Two words meaning that I expect God’s loving care and protection. And he is the Father in heaven, someone with the greatest authority and power. Jesus reveals to us a relationship with God that marries intimacy to reverence. He loves us enough to care for us, and is great enough to make that care real in every circumstance. He is God to be feared, and one who we abandon ourselves to in unafraid devotion.

Jesus’ teaching avoids the trap of replacing Father with grandpa  or seeing divine fatherhood through our skewed earthly father experience.  God’s fatherhood is entirely different. In him is absolute willingness to sustain and bless us. But that willingness is demonstrated according to his will and his best plan for us. This strikes me as the paradox of faith: “Our Father” declares absolute trust in someone who is at once incomprehensible and equally full of compassion, kindness, mercy, and goodness toward us.

By beginning with the Father – both infinite and intimate – Jesus takes us to the core of our need, and our resistance. To our need because, as human persons, we have all been recipients of failed fatherly care. We need healing, and, for those of us who have children, they will need similar healing. But even more, we need the security of knowing the one who cares for us. We need to know and surrender to his goodness and his power and primacy – to his claim on us as the origin and sovereign over every creature “in heaven, on earth, and in the seas” (Nehemiah 9:6).

Interestingly enough, our need comes into conflict with – and even provokes – the core of our resistance. Human pride and unbelief want to avoid being creatures and children. We neither want the submission of the first, nor the simplicity of the second. I want independence and responsibility for my life in a way that is “too great for me” (Pss. 131:1). I am like the child who puts on his father’s shoes and overcoat, only to stumble and fall over the hem of that too-large garment and the space in that too-large footwear. And, when I take the tumble, I ignore the helping hand that seeks to put me on my feet and into a more fitting wardrobe. I turn away from surrender to both grace and sovereignty.

At this intersection of love and lordship is the place where faith tells me that the Father governs us as a good God who persists in his desire to bless us with “every good and perfect gift” (James 1:17). Unbelief cuts off either one or the other of these fatherly attributes. On some days, I am not sure of the his favor. Is he lurking somewhere, ready to dispense some kind of severe judgment for my real or imagined failings? On other days, I am not convinced of his power. He may be good, but can he accomplish that goodness in my life? And sometimes I don’t believe in goodness OR sovereignty – the worst of all worlds.

I look back over my life and find too many times where I questioned something of God’s fatherly nature. These usually involve – as you might imagine – some kind of challenge or trial. At one point I remember a series of events that made it seem like nothing was going well. I was pastoring a congregation of people who were a bit shaky; I was confronted with a couple of close relationships that weren’t working very well; and my stock portfolio wasn’t so hot either. And what did I do in a situation like that? I prayed that time-honored prayer of faith: “Lord, don’t you care?” And the Lord’s answer was a revelation of his fatherly help – not an instant change of circumstances, but words of loving counsel, a call to worship and surrender, and a promise of his presence that brought just the right transformation to my heart.

The good news is that “Our Father” is a direct attack on our unbelief. The even better news is that it is an entirely effective attack because Jesus perfectly lived this prayer, especially in his death and resurrection – the ultimate act of what Paul calls “the obedience that comes from faith” (Romans 1:5). So when we ask Jesus to bring us to the Father and to give us his gift of faith, he hears OUR prayer so that we can pray and live HIS prayer.