Foundations of Truth

Guest (Male): You’re listening to Foundations of Truth, the radio and podcast ministry of Firm Foundations. Our mission is to help you build your life on the unshakable foundation of God’s word. Rooted in scripture, anchored in the grace of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Each week, Dr. Timothy Mann opens the Bible to bring clarity, conviction, and encouragement for everyday life. Here now is Dr. Timothy Mann.

Dr. Timothy Mann: This morning we’re beginning a three-part sermon series, Teach Us to Pray. So this morning, we’re going to be reading Luke chapter 11, only verses 1 through 4. So that’s where we’re going to focus as I read it this morning from Luke chapter 11.

The Bible says, now it came to pass as he, meaning Jesus, was praying in a certain place when he ceased that one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples." So he said to them, "When you pray, say: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us day by day our daily bread and forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one." We’ll stop there today. This is God’s infallible and inerrant holy word that we’ve just read this morning.

Guest (Male): Amen.

Dr. Timothy Mann: Let me ask you a question. How important is prayer in the life of a Christian? How much of a priority is it for you? And do you struggle with praying sometimes?

Guest (Male): I sometimes do. The right kind of praying is not always easy.

Dr. Timothy Mann: Do you personally know anyone, I mean someone that you know, I mean you know is a praying person?

Guest (Male): A true person of prayer.

Dr. Timothy Mann: It’s interesting. We usually think of John the Baptist as a prophet and as a martyr. But what we saw as we read this passage at the beginning of this passage, our Lord’s apostles actually remembered John the Baptist as a man of prayer. Now, those of you who know your scriptures, you know that John the Baptist was a miracle baby, is a good way to say it, filled with the Holy Spirit before he was born. And yet he had to pray.

He was privileged, the only one, he was privileged to introduce the Messiah to Israel, and yet he had to pray. And Jesus said, again, this is the only person that Jesus ever said this about, Jesus said that John the Baptist was the greatest of the prophets, and yet John had to depend on prayer. And so, if prayer was vital to a man who had these many advantages, how much more important it ought to be for us who do not have these advantages.

Guest (Male): John’s disciples had to pray, and Jesus’s disciples wanted to learn better how to pray. What’s interesting to me is they did not ask the Master to teach them how to preach or how to do miracles and signs, but yet they asked him to teach them what? To pray. To pray.

Dr. Timothy Mann: I think we sometimes think that we would be better Christians if we had only been with Jesus when he was on earth. But I don’t think that’s very likely because the disciples were with him and yet they failed many times. They could perform miracles and yet they wanted to learn to pray.

Now, I think though maybe the greatest argument for the priority of prayer in a Christian’s life is the fact that our Lord Jesus himself was a man of prayer. In Luke’s gospel, we have seen that he prayed at his baptism. He prayed before he chose all night long, as a matter of fact, before he chose the 12 apostles. He prayed when the crowds were increasing in his ministry that he was beginning to feel the pressure of that ministry. He prayed as the crowds increased.

He prayed before he asked the 12 for their confession of faith and who he was. He prayed at his transfiguration on the mountain. And I’m sure there’s many other times that he prayed that we just don’t have recorded for us. And then here in Luke chapter 11, again, we see that he was praying in a certain place. The disciples knew that he often prayed alone and they wanted to learn from him this secret of spiritual power and wisdom. And so, if Jesus Christ, perfect son of God, had to depend on prayer during the days of his incarnation, during the days of his flesh, then how much more do you and I need to pray?

Guest (Male): Effective prayer is the provision for every need and the solution to every problem. I hope you believe that. Effective prayer is the provision for every need you have and it’s the solution for every problem you have.

Dr. Timothy Mann: Now, this prayer that we’ve just read, this great prayer has been called the Lord’s Prayer for about 2,000 years. And so I don’t think it would be very helpful to attempt to change its name officially. Although, actually, maybe the best title would be the Disciple’s Prayer or maybe the Model Prayer because that’s what it is. It’s a model prayer. We call this the Lord’s Prayer not because Jesus prayed it. He never had to ask for forgiveness, first of all. We call this the Lord’s Prayer not because he prayed it but because Jesus taught it.

And this prayer, the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, I want you to really know this, it was not a formulaic prayer; rather, it was a how-to prayer. These words were never meant to be magical words prayed like an incantation over and over. Instead, he was giving the disciples a pattern to follow, a model. Now, there’s nothing wrong with praying this prayer personally or even as part of a congregation so long as we do it from a believing heart that is sincere and submitted. I mean, how easy it is to recite these words and not really mean them, right?

But also that can happen in a song when we sing or even when we preach. So the fault lies with us, not with the prayer in this kind of situation. Now, again, as I mentioned, strictly speaking, Jesus’s recommended prayer here is one that he, being sinless, could never fully pray because the last part includes a request for forgiveness. Forgive us our sins for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.

The prayer’s five petitions are absolutely perfect for every disciple of Christ, man or woman, who has ever lived. Every Christian who claims to have any seriousness about prayer will gladly receive Jesus’s instructions, when you pray. Oh, and by the way, he says, when you pray. So that says to me there’s an expectation here from Jesus that his followers will what? Pray. When you pray. So there’s an assumption here, right? That you will pray as a Christian, as a believer.

Guest (Male): Have you ever been in a situation where everybody said the Lord’s Prayer together? We don’t want to just say the Lord’s Prayer. We need to understand there’s a lot more to it than just that.

Dr. Timothy Mann: The first thing I want you to notice about this prayer is there is a structure here. First part of this prayer is vertical. Vertical. And it has to do with God. Here in Luke, the first two petitions that we have successively for God’s name and for God’s kingdom, those are vertical and they’re God-centered. The second part is horizontal and has to do with us. In that section of the prayer, we see specifically three requests. We see for our daily bread, for our sins, and for temptation.

We’re not enslaved to the structure or obligated to always follow it in every circumstance because, for as example, when Peter the apostle cried out, "Lord, save me," when he began to sink in the Sea of Galilee, if he had first begun with our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, thy kingdom come, he would have been blowing bubbles before he ever got to the point, right? So it’s not about legalistically following this structure.

But at the same time, the structure and the logic of this prayer is very valuable for all of us as disciples, as followers of Christ. Are we followers of Christ? Are you a follower of Christ? Well, if so, then what follows here really ought to inform and to shape our everyday prayer life.

Guest (Male): If this ministry is making a difference in your life, now is the time to stand with us. Your gift today helps keep the message going strong and keeps us on the air. Visit firm-foundations.org. Here’s Dr. Timothy Mann.

Dr. Timothy Mann: Let’s look at it a little more in detail. The vertical part of this prayer. Verse 2, so he said to them, "When you pray, say: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." And so, Jesus’s opening word of instruction here was to say the least was pretty explosive. It was kind of scandalous a little bit. He said to them, "When you pray, say, Father, our Father."

Now, what’s so interesting about that, the very fact that God should be personally addressed as Father, may not seem out of the ordinary to those of us who frequent church or who have heard or even prayed the Lord’s Prayer, but I want you to know it was revolutionary in Jesus’s day. The writers of the Old Testament certainly understood and believed in the fatherhood of God, but they saw it mainly in terms of a sovereign creator Father to whom they owed their existence.

In fact, God is only referred to as Father 14 times in all of the Old Testament’s 39 books. And then, rather impersonally. In those 14 occurrences, the term was always used with reference to the nation and not to individuals. God was spoken of as Israel’s Father, but Abraham, for example, did not speak of God as my Father. The Jews were so focused on the sovereignty and the transcendence of God that they were careful to never repeat his covenant name and so they invented the word Jehovah, which is actually a combination of two separate names of God, to use instead.

And so the distance from God was well-guarded. But when Jesus came on the scene, he addressed God only as Father. All his prayers address God as Father. The gospels record his using Father more than 60 times in reference to God. So striking is this that some scholars actually maintain that this word Father dramatically captures the difference between the Old and New Testaments even. No one had ever in the entire history of Israel spoken and prayed like Jesus. No one.

But there’s more. The word Jesus used for Father was not a formal word. It was actually the common Aramaic word. It was Aramaic that was translated into Greek that we have translated into English. But it was an Aramaic word which Jesus spoke regularly. It was an Aramaic word with which a child would address his father, Abba. Abba.

The great New Testament scholar Joachim Jeremias, perhaps the most respected New Testament scholar of his generation, he has argued I think rather convincingly that Abba was the original word on Jesus’s lips here in the Lord’s Prayer and indeed in all of his prayers in the New Testament with the exception of Matthew 27:46 when he cried out from the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

But there Jesus was actually quoting Psalm 22 verse 1. And then Jesus reverted back to Abba in the final words before his death when he said, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." And so the word Abba would have also been the word that Jesus regularly used to address his earthly stepfather Joseph from the time that Jesus was a baby and could speak all the way up until Joseph’s death.

And so everyone used the word, but as careful examination of other literature of the time shows, it was never used for God under any circumstances. Abba meant something like papa or daddy but with a more reverent touch than we use it. Probably the best rendering is dearest Father, dear Father. To the traditional Jew, Jesus’s prayer was shocking.

I mean, think of it. God was referred to only 14 times in the Old Testament as Father and then it was as the corporate Father of Israel, never as an individual and never as a personal Father. But when his disciples asked him for instruction on how to pray, Jesus exhorted them to begin by calling God their Father, their Abba, their papa.

And then as Jeremias says, he says in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus authorizes his disciples to repeat the word Abba after him. He gives them a share in his sonship and empowers them as his disciples to speak with their heavenly Father in just such a familiar, trusting way as a child would with his father. And so, when we say Father today in our prayers, we are actually making the same sound that actually fell from Jesus’s lips and from the lips of his disciples.

Jesus transformed the relationship with God from a distant corporate experience into an intimate one-on-one kind of bond and he taught his disciples to pray with the same kind of intimacy. And he wants us to do the same. That’s what he wants for you and me. We are to pray Father, dearest Father, papa, Abba. This really is to be the foundational awareness of all our prayers.

I mean, does that awareness fuel your prayer life that he is your Father, your papa? Is a sense of God’s intimate fatherhood profound in your soul? Is it growing in your soul? See, sincerely addressing God as Father or dearest Father is not only an indication of spiritual health, but it’s actually a mark of the authenticity of your faith.

The Apostle Paul tells us in Galatians 4:6, he says, "Because you are sons, God sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, the spirit who calls out, 'Abba, Father.'" Romans 8:15 and 16 basically says the same thing. He says, "But you received the spirit of sonship, and by him we cry, 'Abba, Father.' The spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children."

And so true believers, if you are a genuine believer, a true follower of Jesus Christ, you are actually propelled then to say this, to say Father. You want to say that. This realization is one of really the primary works of the Holy Spirit in your life. He keeps enhancing this spirit of sonship that you are a child of God in you and increasingly integrates it into your life.

Calling God Father brings a sweetness to your soul. It’s also the language of affection. Father or dad, daddy, dearest Father. Those are also expressions of security as well. That’s the way it is with our Abba, our heavenly Father. He gives us a great sense of security and confidence. He assures us that we belong to him and that he will never forget us or never abandon us.

And so Father, the sweetness of that name, its air of connectedness and intimacy, this sense of affection and security, this upward rush of a sense of paternity, that ought to be present in every single disciple’s prayer. Now, the first disciples may have had some trouble at the beginning at least bringing themselves to say Abba at first. But I have no doubt it quickly became a very joyful word for them. When you pray, say, Father, Abba. How sweet this is.

Now look at this, right in the middle of this aura and this upward rush of our sense of divine fatherhood that God is our Father, we are actually to pray, it says, for God’s name. Did you see what he said? He said, hallowed be your name. Now, actually, I think today names are often not much more than just convenient labels by which we’re able to identify people.

Some people do think about what a name means when they name their children, but usually more are concerned that the name sounds nice or honors some relative. But for the Jews, names were considered to indicate character. And this especially applied to the name of God. For example, Psalm 20 verse 7 says, "Some trust in chariots and some in horses, in other words in man, right?

Some trust in chariots, some trust in horses, but we trust in the name, the character of our Lord, our God." And so for the Jew, God’s name referred to actually the reality of the essence and the nature of God. And so what name is prominent here in the Lord’s Prayer? What name is prominent in the Lord’s Prayer? That’s not rhetorical; you can talk back to me.

Guest (Male): Father.

Dr. Timothy Mann: Yeah. Father, daddy, papa, Abba. Father, hallowed be your name. The name that we ask to be hallowed is Father. That’s really revolutionary. That’s radical. Certainly God’s name as Creator, Elohim, or his covenant name, Yahweh or Jehovah, as well as his many other names, they’re all to be hallowed.

But here, the emphasis here is on his name as Father. This is especially what we pray for. Now, what does it mean to hallow God’s name as Father? The word hallowed means to set apart as holy or to consider it holy or to treat it as holy. If I were going to try to paraphrase it and just put it in my own words, maybe a good way to say it would be to reverence. To reverence.

Hallowed means may you be given that unique reverence that your character and your nature as Father demand. And so we are to pray first for divine action. God, may your essence as Abba be reverenced. I think certainly Jesus the son certainly worked to fulfill this. He said in John 17:25 and 26, he said, "Righteous Father, though the world does not know you, I know you, and they know that you have sent me. I have made you known to them and will continue to make you known."

And so we too should pray for the amazing revelation of God’s divine fatherhood over his children that it be hallowed. Now, this prayer, of course, implicitly is a prayer concerning the quality of our own lives. You do understand that, right? It’s about the quality of our own lives. Martin Luther asked it this way in his catechism. He said, "How is it hallowed amongst us?" meaning God’s name. "How is it hallowed amongst us?"

The answer was, "When our life and our doctrine are truly Christian." Again, Jesus is our great example because as the cross drew near in his life, he prayed John 12:28. He said, "Father, glorify your name." And he knew what this meant in terms of his own commitment. It meant his dying for our sins.

And so here’s the question: how do we hallow his name as Father? How do we do that with our lips? This in turn elevates and actually substantiates our love for him. Verbal reverence to God’s name is of great importance for our lives and for his glory. But of course, we also hallow his name by our actions, as we live lives that show that we really do honor our heavenly Father.

And the sweetness of that relationship, when we have a relationship that we’re living our lives that honors our heavenly Father, that kind of relationship, our connectedness with him, our security and our true affection for God, the aroma, if you will, think about it this way, the aroma of our relationship with our Abba should drift out to those around us.

Guest (Male): Thank you for joining us today for Foundations of Truth, the radio and podcast ministry of Dr. Timothy Mann and Firm Foundations. If today’s message strengthened you in Christ, please consider sharing it with someone you know. You never know who might need to hear these words.

You can also find more teaching and learn how to support this ministry at firm-foundations.org. Your partnership helps us continue sharing God’s word clearly and faithfully. That’s firm-foundations.org. The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of God stands forever. Until next time, keep building your life on the unshakable foundation of truth, the Bible.