Receiving the Father’s Embrace

Jesus must have been delighted when his disciples asked him how to pray. I mean, his disciples ask Jesus a lot of bad questions.

When the Samaritans don’t welcome Jesus in their town, James and John ask, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven to destroy them?” (Luke 9:54). Not surprisingly, Jesus rebukes them. At the moment of Jesus’s transfiguration, Peter asks, “Should we put up three tents—one for you, Moses, and Elijah?” (Matthew 17:4). Mark and Luke’s gospels makes sure we know, for all time, Peter did not know what he was talking about (Mark 9:6; Luke 9:33).

But occasionally they get it right. “Teach us to pray,” they ask. Our Lord must have been beaming with joy at the opportunity to teach his beloved friends how to enjoy fellowship with his Father. For this question, he doesn’t rebuke them. He doesn’t ignore them. He teaches them.

How Not to Pray: The Pharisee’s Prayer

Interestingly, Jesus doesn’t begin his teaching with how to pray but how not to pray. He points them toward the religious leaders of the day. “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others” (Matthew 6:5). In other words, as the most important theology book of our generation (Sally Lloyd-Jones’s Jesus Storybook Bible) puts it, “They really weren’t praying as much as just showing off. They used lots of special words that were so clever, no one understood what they meant."

Jesus sets before us one way to pray, a posture we might take: It’s the Pharisee’s prayer. The Pharisee (or hypocrite) prays, in the words of Jesus himself, to be seen by others. In a world obsessed with image, appearance, and perfection, even prayer can become a means of gaining others’ attention and approval. We’ll look at this in more detail in the next chapter, but it’s important to see the contrast before Jesus invites us into the correct posture.

But When You Pray: The Child’s Prayer

The first approach to prayer that Jesus describes is the hypocrite’s prayer—the overflow of a performative spirituality, rooted in insecurity. What, then, is the proper approach to prayer? Jesus next describes how to rightly approach God.

Where the hypocrite plans his prayers and takes them out to the synagogues and street corners, Jesus’s disciples are to stay at home, go into their rooms (in the Greek, the word typically referred to a pantry or closet) and close the door. The hypocrite prays to be seen by others; the disciple prays to be seen by God.

But this posture is not merely the disciple’s prayer; Jesus goes one step further. Remember, he says, “pray to your Father, who is unseen” (6:6).

Now, let’s pause and let the full weight of this phrase sink in. The Israelites had thousands of years of history following God. They had the stories of creation and the garden, they knew the lives of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; they had the wisdom of the Proverbs and had memorized many Psalms. They worshipped in the temple, gave tithes to the poor and needy, observed the Sabbath, and celebrated dozens of holy days. Their lives were appropriately religious and (in varying degrees depending on the person) God-centered.

But this was new. Although the Old Testament occasionally refers to God as Father to his people (Deut. 32:6; Ps. 103:13; Isa. 63:16, 64:8), this was not a regular thought for the people of God. For Israel, God is predominantly known as creator, redeemer, shepherd, and almighty God. But father? Let’s not get too carried away.

But suddenly, Jesus is on the scene; he’s the Son of God and the exact imprint of God, he is “one with the Father” (John 10:30). He is, to quote the Jesus Storybook Bible again, “everything God wanted to say to the world, in a person.”

Sure, God loves to be Jesus’s Father, we might think. After all, Jesus is doing a pretty good job of being a Son. He is eternal and perfect and holy. He doesn’t sin. He never disappoints his Father. Why wouldn’t God love his Son, Jesus? We believe all this. But God as our father? Here we may stumble. Yet Jesus was abundantly clear.

“Close the door and pray to your Father” (v. 6)
“Then your Father... will reward you” (v. 6)
“Do not be like [the pagans], for your Father knows what you need” (v. 8)
“This then is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven’” (v. 9)
“If you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you” (v. 14)
“But if you do not forgive others theirs sins, your Father will not forgive your sins” (v. 15)

There we go: Six references to God as Father—and not just Father to Jesus, but Father to you—in Jesus’s very brief instructions on how to pray. Do you see the posture Jesus invites us to take? It is simply and boldly the child’s prayer.

Rediscovering God as Father

What’s the difference between approaching God as merely a strong and powerful and compassionate God and approaching him first and foremost as our Father? This difference will be felt throughout all of life, but nowhere more deeply than in prayer.

Many people struggle to approach God as Father and understandably so. Many folks that I sit with have only known “father” to be a hurtful person or complicated relationship.

Adoption is one of the most important and beautiful elements of the gospel, some would even say the core message of Christianity. It reveals God’s heart and unlocks the Scriptures for us in a way nothing else does. Spiritual adoption is simply the truth that God makes us his own sons and daughters when he saves us through the work of his Son Jesus. He didn’t have to make us sons and daughters. It would have been enough to make us part of his kingdom, as citizens or servants. But we learn of God’s heart when we witness something unexpected: he doesn’t stop there.

Though it’s a wonder that God would make us citizens of his kingdom, the truth is he doesn’t need slaves or
servants or citizens. He doesn’t need anything. But he wants something. He wants children. The theologian J.
I. Packer has said that if you want to know how well a person understands Christianity, “find out how much he
makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts
and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand
Christianity very well at all.”

Some years ago, my sister and her husband went through the long and difficult and expensive process of adoption. Anthony was born into a difficult environment in a different part of town. My sister and her husband had been wanting to adopt for years, they worked with an agency, they did home studies, they saved money, they filled out paperwork, and finally they became Anthony’s foster parents. After years as Anthony’s foster parents, the process was completed, and they went to the courthouse together. Finally, the judge declared Anthony to belong to Drew and Sarah and banged his gavel. At long last, he legally belonged to them. It’s objective, it’s definitive, it’s legally-binding, it’s forever. And yet, it was far more than a legal transaction. It represented something so beautiful. Though there is certainly loss and complication involved, a child in need now has a safe, new home.

That’s the good news of adoption. You were an orphan, homeless and hopeless in a dangerous world. But God put in the work, took the steps to do it legally, and then bent down and picked you up into his arms. As the apostle Paul put it, “those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father’” (Romans 8:14-15).

There’s the exodus language: you are no longer slaves. But it’s not just salvation from, it’s also salvation for. We are saved from our old, broken ways of life, and we are saved for a vibrant life with God, as children in his royal family. Further, we’re given the Holy Spirit, who brings about our adoption and testifies it’s official. We can now cry out this phrase: “Abba Father.”

God loves you, he’s won you back, he’s brought you in, he’s crowned you with every bit of his inheritance, and he’s filled you with his own Holy Spirit (Rom. 8:14-17). Oh, and this Spirit—God himself dwelling in our hearts—is even still just a preview of something even better. The Spirit, Paul says, is an advance payment of the perfect communion we’ll have in the new heavens and earth for all eternity (Eph. 1:13-14).

How on earth do we respond to all this?We should be overwhelmed with gratitude, praise, relief, and joy. We should live a new kind of life, the life not of an orphan or slave, but of a beloved child. We should look in the mirror every morning and recall the unimaginable: God didn’t need me. He wanted me. And he moved heaven and earth for me to be his child.