Dear friends,
We’ve started a new Prayer Meeting. Every second Thursday night you can gather with others in the church office at 7.30pm to pray for our church, our city and our world. The next meeting will be on 20th November.
Prayer does not come easily does it! Even the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to do it!
They have seen Jesus praying, they know that John the Baptist’s disciples pray and they want to pray too. So Jesus instructs them in a pattern of prayer that we now call the Lord’s Prayer. I call it a pattern because there are two versions of this prayer in the Scriptures that are not dramatically different, but diverse enough for us to see that the issue here is not so much the prayer’s exact wording but its content and to whom we address our prayers.
In that vein, Jesus instructs us to pray to “Father”. Now if you have been around a bit in Christian circles, perhaps even been brought up as a Christian, praying to God as Father is normal and perhaps even pedestrian. But it is here we need to stop. For if we overlook the reality that God is our Father, we will over look the grace that enables prayer. So we need to be reminded periodically that the privilege of speaking with God so intimately was not even given to the greatest of the Old Testament saints. The Jewish people would never have called God Father, for being too familiar was serious business as Jesus found out. In John 5:18 we read that the Jewish people try to kill Jesus for calling God his own Father.
But this is the privilege that is ours as Christians. On Jesus lips it seems appropriate, but on ours, we must realise that it is an amazing and unexpected blessing. That the incomparable, sovereign God, creator of the universe, sustainer of life and judge of all, can be approached by feeble creatures like us as Father – it’s an amazing privilege. But ‘Father’ expresses more than our privileged approach.
We can approach God as Father because he approached us first. In Christ he has sought us out and through faith in Jesus, brought us to himself and made us into his children. He is our heavenly Father, and we are his sons through faith in Christ.
I pray you regularly approach your Father in prayer. I pray you might find time to join with others and do that same.
In Christ
Nigel