Matt 6:7–15 — The Lord’s Prayer, Part 1: Our Father in Heaven

Prayer is vital to the Christian life, yet we often struggle to pray and need the Lord’s instruction. The first disciples knew the same weakness. After watching Jesus pray, one of them asked, “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). Jesus graciously answered by giving them the Lord’s Prayer.

The prayer contains an address and six petitions. Following the Heidelberg Catechism, we may summarize them as adoption, adoration, anticipation, submission, provision, confession, and protection. These themes encompass our relationship with God: we adore him, submit to his will, depend on his provision, confess our sins, and seek his protection.

Prayer is therefore not an optional addition to Christian life. Robert Dabney called it “the vital breath of religion in the soul.” Through prayer our dependence on God deepens, gratitude is enlivened, sin is confessed, and we are changed as we adore God’s perfections.

We begin with the address, “Our Father in heaven.” Because God has adopted us as his children, we may pray with confidence that he hears us. We will consider the fact that God hears us, the reason he hears us, and the greatness of the God who hears us.

The Fact That God Hears Us

Verse seven, when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Unbelievers do not have a relationship with God. They do not have the confidence that God hears them when they pray. And so when they pray, they have to resort to empty phrases.

This phrase here that’s translated in the ESV, do not heap up empty phrases. Is actually one word in Greek. And I’m going to say the word because, not to talk about Greek, but so you can hear how it sounds. Battalogeō. This is a case of onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia is when you have a word that sounds like the thing that it’s describing, like the word buzz. Buzz sounds like a bee buzzing. So Battalogeō sounds somewhat like the way we think of the pagans as they’re worshiping their gods. Bata, bata, bata.

It’s like this just repetitious, empty phrases, meaningless talk. When the Gentiles pray, when the pagans pray, they don’t have this confidence that they are speaking to a personal God who knows them and that they’re in a relationship with. They’re just using meaningless repetition. They’re just speaking without thinking. They’re just repeating certain words and phrases. They’re just heaping up all these words in order to somehow hope that maybe something will get through and that the gods will hear what they have to say. They do not have the confidence of a relationship with God as their father.

By contrast, we have the confidence that we are heard, that we are heard by the creator of the universe. Isn’t that amazing? The creator of the universe hears us. Psalm 34 verse 15, the eyes of the Lord are toward the righteous and his ears are toward their cry. It’s like he’s bending down from heaven listening to us. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Psalm 145 verse 18 says the Lord is near to all who call on him, to all who call on him in truth.

In the Old Testament, in the book of Deuteronomy, there’s an interesting statement that Moses makes about the greatness of the nation of Israel. In Deuteronomy 7, verse 4, he says that the nations around will see the people of God, their relationship with God, and they’ll be amazed at that they have such a God who is near to them.

All the other nations, they had gods too. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, they had gods. But their gods were distant. Their gods were gods of the state. The gods that only cared about the big issues of who’s the king, and going out into battle, and making sure that the state, the nation is secure. But they didn’t have a god that was personal, that knew them, that was in a personal relationship with them. A god who was near to them, that they could call upon. A god who cared about the details of the individual person’s life.

What great nation is there that has a God so near to it as the Lord our God is to us whenever we call upon Him? In Hebrew that phrase whenever is at any time when we call upon Him. It just has this idea of we can call upon the Lord at any time. And go to Him and know that His ear is, that He’s bending His ear from heaven to hear us, that He cares about our needs, that He is near to the brokenhearted, that He cares about the details of our lives. What an incredible thought that is, that we have this relationship with God, that God hears the prayers of His people. But that then raises the question of why.

The Reason God Hears Us

Why is it that God is so near to us? And so point two is the reason why God hears us. Well, the reason why God hears us is because of that we have been adopted as his children. We know God and we are able to relate to him and call him our father because we’ve been adopted as his children through Christ. The Heidelberg Catechism makes that very point.

Question 120, why has Christ commanded us to address God as our Father? Answer, to awaken in us at the very beginning of our prayer, what should be basic to our prayer? A childlike reverence and trust that through Christ, that’s the key, God has become our Father.

You might be wondering, where does that statement through Christ, that God is our Father through Christ, where does that come from here in our text? We know it from other passages, but where in our text here? And the answer is that Jesus teaches this in an indirect way. How does Jesus teach this? How does Jesus teach that we can call God our Father through Christ because Christ is the mediator who enables us to go to God as a Father? Well, it’s in this way.

It’s in that Jesus never calls himself or classes himself, let’s put it that way, Jesus never classes himself with the disciples as being in the same level with them. Of calling God Father in the way that the disciples are being encouraged to call God Father. Jesus has a unique relationship with the Father.

Remember a couple sermons ago, I brought up this fact that in English, we don’t really have a very good word to take the word son and turn it into an adjective. And so if you were to do that in English, you would say suddenly, but it doesn’t really work.

But actually there is a word from Latin that we have called filial. So we have a filial relationship with God because the Latin word for son is filius. So we can call God our father and have a filial relationship with the father because we are his sons. We are his children.

But Jesus does not put himself at the same level as the disciples in their relationship with the father. Jesus has a filial relationship to his father that’s unique. And you see this right here in the Sermon on the Mount. For example, in Matthew chapter 7 and verse 21, Jesus says, So notice how Jesus here refers to his filial relationship with God as my Father. Which is something that is very unique and distinct. Later on in Matthew, in Matthew chapter 11, he says, All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

Jesus has this unique relationship with God because he is the eternal son of God. He is God. He is God’s only begotten son. And so he can call God my father in this special way. Remember in the Gospel of John where he would do that and the Jews would just be offended. They’re like, this man is making God to be his own father. That makes himself divine.

And they picked up stones to stone him because they were so shocked by what seemed to them to be blasphemy. In his book, Things Unseen, by J. Gresham Machen, which is actually a collection of radio addresses that he gave on public radio in Philadelphia in the mid-1930s, he talks about this issue.

He says that Jesus, according to all four of the Gospels, never speaks of God as our Father. You never hear that statement, our father, on the lips of Jesus, as if he’s putting himself alongside the disciples and saying, we’re all here, Jesus bless the disciples, looking to God and calling God our father. He says my father, and then he says to the disciples, your father, but he never says our father, classing himself with the disciples in that filial relationship to God. The Lord’s prayer begins with those words, our father, And so you might think, oh, here’s the exception.

We have it right here in Matthew 6, verse 9. But Jesus certainly did not pray that prayer with his disciples. How do we know? Because this prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, contains a confession of sin. Verse 12, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And Jesus never had any sins to confess. It was a prayer he taught his disciples to pray, not a prayer that he himself prayed. The significant fact remains therefore Jesus never appears in the Gospels as saying our father to God together with the disciples.

God was his father and God was their father but he was Jesus’s father in an entirely different sense from the sense in which he was their father. Jesus was the son of God in an entirely unique way. And so then this becomes the answer to our question. The question was, where in the text do we see what the Heidelberg Catechism says, that it is through Christ that God has become our Father? Well, we see it here because when Jesus then, having talked about his unique filial relationship with the Father as my Father, and then when he reveals to the disciples this prayer and instructs them to call upon God as our Father, he is indirectly teaching that it is through himself that they are able to call God Father. It is through Christ that God has become their Father. Remember I made a similar argument back in Matthew chapter 5 when I was preaching through the Beatitudes. Remember the Beatitude in verse 8? Matthew 5 verse 8. It says, blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

And remember I argued that what that means is that we will see God through Christ. God himself is an invisible spirit. No one can see God. But we will see God when we see Christ, because Christ is the image of God. He is the revelation of God, the Son of God incarnate.

And I argue that it’s the very fact that Jesus is the one teaching this, it’s the very fact that this statement, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God, is on the lips of Jesus himself, the Son of God. That’s what, by implication, indirectly teaches us that This is true, that we will see God through Christ.

The same thing is here. This prayer that the Lord is teaching is the prayer that Jesus himself is instructing and giving his disciples. And so the very fact that he’s the one instructing them means that he is mediating this prayer to them and therefore he’s mediating this filial relationship with God to them through his own filial relationship with God which is unique because he’s the eternal divine son of God whereas our filial relationship is based upon the fact we’ve been adopted as sons through Christ. And so we have this very important principle. It’s like a hermeneutical principle of how to interpret the teaching of Jesus. A lot of people don’t like that some Bibles are red letter editions. And they think, well, that’s not a good idea to pick out the words of Jesus and put them in red because that implies that somehow they’re more holy or more inspired or more inerrant than the rest of the words that are in black. And we don’t want to say that. Of course, we want to say that all the scripture is inspired. We don’t want to make differences in levels between the more inspired parts and the less inspired parts.

But even though that’s a legitimate concern, there’s a hermeneutical truth behind that idea of putting the words of Jesus in red because they are the words of Jesus himself. And therefore, there’s not a greater authority or a greater truth, but there is this mediatorial aspect that is communicated through them. It is Christ himself, the eternal Son of God become man, who is mediating our knowledge of God.

There’s something precious about that, isn’t there? Just think about like the precious promises of Christ. It’s one thing to hear in the letters of Paul that, or let’s say in the book of Hebrews, that we have rest in Christ. And that in union with Christ we have eternal rest and we’re resting from our labors and hymn and so on. But it’s another thing entirely to hear Jesus himself say in his own words, here’s the eternal Son of God become man saying to you directly, come unto me all you who labor and I will give you rest. Isn’t that just something spiritually ministering to your heart to hear Jesus himself say that? Because it directs your faith to him. And then through him, you can now call God your father.

This is what it means to pray. Prayer is simply the experience of our adoption. Adoption isn’t simply a doctrine. It’s not just as you go through the order of salvation, there’s conversion, regeneration, justification, adoption, and so on. It’s not just one of these doctrines that we have that, oh, we’re justified and we’re also adopted. It’s something that is a reality that we experience. In our relationship with God and how do we experience it?

We experience it through prayer. Paul says that in Romans chapter 8 verses 15 and 16, he says, So receiving the spirit of adoption as sons in Paul’s theology means that we cry to God. It’s expressed through this prayer. We cry, Abba, Father. And it’s the spirit himself who bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. Jonathan Edwards has a great comment on this verse in his book, The Religious Affections. He says, quote, we have received a spirit of love which naturally disposes us to go to God as children to a father, and to behave towards God as children. The spirit of bondage works by fear, for slaves fear the rod. But love cries, Abba, Father. It disposes us to go to God and to behave ourselves towards God as children, and it gives us clear evidence of our union to God as his children, and so casts out fear. So that it appears that the witness of the spirit that the apostle speaks of is far from being any whisper or immediate suggestion or revelation, but that gracious, holy effect of the spirit of God in the hearts of the saints, the disposition and temper of children appearing in sweet childlike love to God, which casts out fear and the spirit of a slave.

The very fact that you are able to think of God as your father and to feel that you are his child and to know that he cares about your needs. The very fact that you’re able even to cry Abba Father is an indicator that the spirit of adoption is within you and that it is through Christ that you have been brought into this relationship with God. What does it mean then to call God our Father? Well, the Heidelberg Catechism explains. Why has Christ commanded us to address God as our Father?

It’s to awaken in us at the very beginning of our prayer what should be basic to our prayer, a childlike reverence and trust that through Christ God has become our Father and will much less refuse to give us what we ask in faith than will our parents refuse us the things of this life. The Lord knows our needs and he will provide for it. And that is what prayer is doing. Prayer is resting in this childlike trust in the Lord that he will provide for us. In our text we see the same thing. Matthew 6 verse 8.

He knows exactly what you need. Of course, what you need is not always obvious. It’s not always what you think you need. But he knows exactly what you need. And so you can trust in him that as you put your burdens and your requests and your petitions and your needs before him, that he will answer your prayer and he will provide what is best for you. Of course, your Heavenly Father has your best spiritual interests at heart. And he will therefore provide for you everything that you need for body and soul.

The Greatness of the God Who Hears Us

What then about the second part of this first clause in the Lord’s Prayer, our Father in Heaven, that part in Heaven? This is the greatness of the God who hears us. The Heidelberg Catechism interprets that, why the words, who is in Heaven? These words teach us not to think of God’s heavenly majesty in an earthly way, and to expect from his almighty power everything needed for body and soul. God’s heavenly majesty is indicated by that added clause, our Father in heaven. He is our Father who is in heaven.

He is exalted in the heavenly places. And so we’re not to think of God in an earthly way. We’re not to bring him down to our level. This is the danger of contemporary, easygoing, informal worship, which teaches us to view God merely as our buddy sitting on the beach. We’re not to view God that way.

God is the great king of heaven. He’s the God of heaven. God is the king enthroned in his cosmic temple. Thus says the Lord, heaven is my throne and the earth is my footstool. The Lord is the most high God. He sits above the circle of the earth and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers. He sits in the heaven and he laughs. He is the great king over all the earth. But through Christ, we have access to the throne of God in heaven.

Hebrews chapter four, since then we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a high priest who’s unable to sympathize with us in our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace. That we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.” Isn’t that interesting how we have this interesting combination of the majesty and the exaltedness and the greatness of God with this sense of being able to go to Him as our Father, this sense of childlike trust in Him, this intimacy.

even though we shouldn’t view God as just being our buddy on the beach, we shouldn’t view Him as this creature who’s in the same boat as we are, He’s the almighty creator of the universe. He’s exalted in heaven. And yet, because of Christ, we can go to the throne of grace. We can go to this throne of God as a throne of grace and mercy and not a throne of judgment.

And we can look to him as one from whom we don’t expect wrath, but we rather expect from his almighty power everything needed for body and soul. We see this interesting combination of thoughts in Matthew 6 verse 26, so it’s our same chapter but later on, where Jesus says, Are you not of more value than they?

Here’s the Heavenly Father, the exalted King of the universe who’s in heaven above in his awesome majesty and sovereignty and power and glory, who as that Heavenly Father is caring even for the birds of the air. And how much more are we of value to him in his eyes because of our adoption as his sons. And so that’s an amazing thing. It’s just this wonderful reality that how encouraging it is that we do not have an earthly buddy who’s on the same level as us and just as needy as us, but we have the fatherly care of the great king of heaven, the sovereign creator of heaven and earth, who has the whole world in his hand, who is the awesome king of glory. He is the one who cares for us. He is the one whom we call our father.

Practical Counsel for Prayer

I’d like to just conclude with some practical suggestions for you as you think about your prayer life. And take these with a grain of salt. They’re not inspired. They’re just my own practical thoughts and suggestions for you. If they don’t work for you, cast them aside. But here are some things to think about.

Number one, if circumstances permit, pray out loud. Why do I say that? It’s not that it’s wrong to pray in your own thoughts, in your own mind. Of course you can. But somehow, for some reason, I have found that when you pray out loud, it suddenly becomes more real.. Just saying the words, Father, I’m coming to you. You’re the great king of the universe. I’m looking to you. I have these needs and these burdens and concerns. Talking to the Lord out loud makes it seem more real that God is really there, that he’s really listening to what you’re saying, that you’re really talking to a real person.

You’re not just thinking thoughts in your own brain. The difficulty with praying in your own mind silently is that you begin good usually at the very start of your prayer, but then pretty soon you start to wander off into your own thoughts instead of actually talking to God. And so it’s very helpful if you can, if circumstances permit. Of course, if circumstances don’t permit, then it’s okay to pray in your own thoughts.

But if circumstances permit, try praying out loud. Secondly, when you do that, when you begin your prayer, the very first thing you need to do is to use this example here of our Lord where he says, when you pray, pray like this, our Father in heaven. In other words, addressing God. And lifting your thoughts to God himself and addressing him in his greatness as the Father who is in heaven and talking to him as to a real person. You can get to the requests, the burdens, the struggles, whatever it is you want to bring to the Lord in a minute, but right at the beginning, the very first thing you need to do is to compose your thoughts and to realize that you are in the presence of God. And to talk to Him and say, our Father who is in heaven. And so that helps you to focus. It helps you to direct yourself away from your own thoughts and your own whatever it is you’re going through and to place your thoughts directly on Him and to be addressing Him.

Third, be sincere and honest with God about what it is that is on your mind, with your worries, your burdens, your difficulties, the deepest desires of your heart. The most important thing in prayer is sincerity. It doesn’t have to be eloquent, it doesn’t have to be long, it doesn’t have to be detailed, it just has to be sincere. That is the most important thing, is to be sincere and honest with God about what it is that is on your mind and what it is that you need His help with. And then finally, pray without ceasing.

Pray Without Ceasing

This final counsel is inspired, because it comes from 1 Thessalonians 5:17.

But what I mean by that and what I think Paul meant by that was don’t worry so much about how much time you spend in prayer. I think a lot of us have grown up with these stories about these great prayer warriors, right, who would spend hours and hours on their knees praying to the Lord, and so we sometimes feel like, well, I just, I don’t have the strength to do that. It’s just not, I don’t have the time to do that. I don’t have the spirituality to do that, and so we feel that we’re not really praying as we ought, but Interestingly, Paul says, pray without ceasing, which obviously didn’t mean that 24 hours a day you’re literally praying to the Lord, but what it means is throughout the day.

It means all the time. It means that you’re not focusing on the length of time in your prayer, but you’re focusing on that you’re going to the Lord in prayer often, daily, and even throughout the day. And so what I like to do, I think a helpful thing is this, is whenever the thought enters your mind, hey, maybe I should pray, maybe you should pray right then and there.

Do not put prayer off until later. When a need or a person comes to mind, pray then and there. The prayer need not be long, and circumstances may require you to pray silently. Offer that brief prayer to heaven while the concern is before you.

This is part of what it means to “pray without ceasing.” Do not let stories of extraordinary prayer warriors discourage you. Go to your Father daily and throughout the day. Through Christ you are speaking to the almighty King of heaven who knows your needs, cares for you as his child, and invites you to draw near to his throne of grace.