Please turn to Lord's Day 46 in your Psalter hymnals. This can be found on page 894. Today we examine Lord's Day 46 of the Heidelberg Catechism, which focuses on the opening words of the Lord's Prayer, our Father who art in heaven. These simple yet profound words establish the foundation for all Christian prayer. The Catechism, of course, is going to explore these two questions, I'm sorry, this opening clause to two questions that help us understand both the intimacy and the majesty of approaching the Lord in prayer. Lord's Day 46 found on page 894 Hopefully I can find it too. We will recite the catechism responsibly. Why has Christ commanded us to address God as our Father? To whom await the anointing of the cross at the very beginning of our prayer, for thy good Why the words, who is in heaven? These words suggest not to think of God's heavenly majesty in an earthly way, and to expect from his almighty power everything needed for a body and soul. Thank you. So as I trust you all know, prayer begins with an orientation of the heart, an orientation toward reverence, and an orientation towards trust. Reverence in the sense of recognizing God's majesty, his holiness, and his authority, and trust in the sense that we know that God is not distance, but near to us as a father is to his children. The main question that we're looking at is found in question 120. Why did Christ command us to address God as our father? Question 121 fills out this question a bit by asking why the prayer added, who art in heaven? These questions help us understand both the relational aspect of prayer and the transcendent nature of the God to whom we pray. Let's start with the fatherhood of God. Here's a simple but very important question. Who is God the father of? Who is God the father of? And I want to start with a wrong answer. I'm not trying to lead you to contemplate this answer too much. I'm starting with this wrong answer because it has been very influential in the West over the last 120, 130 years, and it continues to be in the background of much of Western thought today. So please mark this. Don't go home and say, that's a great thing. This is the wrong answer. The wrong answer is God is the father of all of us. That is, as Adolf von Harnack, a very renowned scholar, put it, the essence of Christianity is the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. How many of you have heard that? Most of you have. Even if you've never heard of Harnack before, you know that that's part of the way our culture works. Because when we shifted in the late 19th century into the 20th century, from theology to talking about religion in universities, they wanted to step back and be objective. That is, you didn't say one was true and one was false. You considered all the various religions. And the only way to bring them together is to imagine they're all worshiping the same God. And therefore, you can't say, well, of course, when you say that, you're saying Christianity is false. But you're not allowed to say that Christianity is true and other religions are not. And if everyone's worshiping the same God, then in fact, we do all have the same father and we are all brothers and sisters. How do you know that's not true? Elaine? I'm sorry, how do you know? Yeah, how do you know that that's not true from the Bible? Oh, we're very much on the scriptures here. How else would you know that not everybody is your brother and sister? Ah, that's a good question. From the Bible, how do we know that not everybody is your brother or sister? Let me give you a verse that should help you. Jesus one time in talking with his critics says, you are of your father the devil. That's pretty clear. Okay, they have a different father than Jesus does, a different father than those who believe in Jesus. In fact, the Bible speaks a great deal in the New Testament about how we become children of God. And so if you look, for example, in the Gospel according to John, I think it's verse 12, you'll see that it will talk about those who are rejecting Jesus. And then it says, yet to those who did believe in him, who received him, He gave the right to be called children of God to those who believed in his name, who were born not of the flesh, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. So the way that people become children of God is in Jesus Christ through faith. The idea that everybody has God as their father is, A, wrong, but also, if you think that way, you'll miss the fact of what an extraordinary privilege it is that you get to call the creator of the universe, our incomparably great God, your own father, who loves you with an everlasting love, who delights to meet with you in prayer, and who delights to bless you in the midst of this broken world. You might wonder how someone as smart as Von Harnack, who was, after all, a renowned scholar, a church historian, how he could get it so wrong, that he could say the essence of Christianity is the universal fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man. One person today, he's a modern scholar, who very much likes Harnack, puts it like this. Painstaking scholarship enabled Harnack boldly to read between the lines of the New Testament text and discover afresh Jesus's persistent tendency to speak of religion in terms of family life. Did you get that? I mean, it's true that Jesus does speak a lot in terms of the church being the family of God. That's an important truth. But Harnack came to his conclusion, not by reading the words of scripture, but by reading the white spaces. That is, he took a pencil and crossed out some of those things God said, like, you know, your father's a devil, because, you know, Jesus would never say that. And then he read his own imagined ideas back into the space between the words. I draw your attention to that because it's a reminder that once people reject the Bible being the very word of God, They can end up believing anything they want and then claim that it's Christian. They don't just claim it's a different religion, that would be much easier. He actually said this is the essence of Christianity while denying what Jesus himself has said. Okay, so it's important for us to identify Harnack's view as entirely wrong, simply because it's still in the background of modern Western thought, but what we really want to do is come up with the right answer. So let me ask you this question a little differently. Yes, Scott. What's helpful is when you just clarify the way you did, and you can go back to what we said in the question and answer this morning, or question 32 was, which was shorter. What are the benefits that are effectually called? What benefits do they, that are effectually called, partake of in this life? So what benefits do we have in this life? Three things. We have justification, adoption, and sanctification. We can't be adopted for every part of the family. That's exactly right. So Scott points out this wonderful confluence between the shorter catechism we confessed this morning, where those who are affectionately called are adopted, and the fact that not everybody is a child of God, but those who are affectionately called, therefore born again, therefore believing in Jesus Christ. That's how we become children of God. I've asked this question before, but I'm going to ask it again just to see who was paying attention. If you were to ask someone, a faithful Jewish person, in the 7th century BC, so way before the Messiah has come, who is the Son of God? What would that faithful Jewish person likely have said? Jack! I'm saying call on you because you haven't been here for my previous Sunday school classes, you don't know what I'm going to say. Well, I guess I'd say Adam. Adam is the son of God. That is a valid answer. Although I think they might have said Adam was a son of God. My question for you is, how would they answer the question, who is the son of God? Bill. Abraham. Abraham, still in the past. We're in the seventh century. Although Abraham's a good answer for another reason, so is Adam. You know, Adam and Abraham are both covenant heads who represent all the people. You'll see that's important in a second. Ethan. We are. We are. It's always good to know someone's listening. Thank you, Ethan. Why would they say we are? And notice the collective plural. They would have said we are because that's the way God talked to his Old Testament people and about them. So for example, during the Exodus, The Lord says to Pharaoh, Israel is my son, my firstborn son, let my people go. But that leads to a second thing that actually ties into Adam and Abraham, although we don't really get that language so much around Abraham. We get the language, although it applies, we get the language in the Psalms about the kings, the anointed kings of Israel. So, David, in that sense, is the son of God, and so are all the anointed kings after him. You read the Psalms, that's one of the places you see that expression, my son, comes up quite frequently. You may be tempted to jump to the conclusion that language of son means God the son. It can sometimes, you can't just split these apart, but most of the time it's a messianic title that is not saying God the son, it's saying the son of God. Just as Israel is my son, the king who represents the entire nation sums up the people. So the people collectively are the son of God, and the king who represents the people, is the covenant head, is also called the son of God. That representative thing actually happens in one place where it's applied beyond the kings to judges. And it's actually used by God to just show how evil they are. But in one of the Psalms, I think it's Psalm 82, anyone know Psalm 82 by heart? I think it's Psalm 82 where he says, I have called you gods. And there he actually refers to them as sons of God. Plural, that's a very unusual usage. But I think the reason why he's doing it there is he's saying, you have this status of representing me to all the people, and it shows how wicked you are. Because I called you my sons, I've given you this place of representative leadership, and you, have acted wickedly, both as judges and also in your own lives. There's actually another answer in scripture, but it's quite rare. I only throw it out, so none of you will email me this week. But in the book of Job, it is actually only in Job that there are unambiguous examples of this. But in the book of Job, the holy angels are called the sons of God. So for example, in Job 1.6 we read, now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan also came among them. So it's right for us to see the holy angels, in some sense, having a fatherly relationship, father and child relationship with God. God loves them. He cares for them. There's a face-to-face intimacy that they can enjoy. But I don't really think that has any impact for us in how we think about the opening words of the Lord's Prayer. If one of you does, you can offer that. And then, of course, there is one more answer that we come to when we get to the New Testament. You would not have expected a seventh century Jew to say this, but the other person who's the son of God is God the Son, right? The second person of the Trinity, who is eternally the Son of God. Before time began, he was son. Before time began, his father was father. And he will always be the beloved, eternally begotten son of his father. That's actually really important for us because it helps us understand how we have become, in a very intimate way, the daughters and sons of God. So here are the two key things to grasp about the fatherhood of God. First, God's word tells us that we become children of God by being born again, and by believing in Jesus Christ. I've already mentioned this passage to you from the opening verses of the Gospel of John, but I wanna read it in your hearing now, so you get this fixed in your thinking. The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. So I'm gonna be really redundant here, but according to this passage that I just read for you, how does someone become a child of God? Faith. Faith. So they make a good decision. Yeah, so they do make a good decision, by the way. That's not a wrong answer. You just want to think about how that faith comes about Right, it's God's grace, but everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. Not simply rescued from judgment, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord is adopted into his family. If you come back to evening worship tonight, which I'll encourage you to do, I will point out some interesting ramifications from that as we look at the end of the letter of Jude. Second, we should think a bit about the relationship between the sonship of Jesus and how we become children of God. Jesus, the eternal son of God, took to himself a true human nature and became the messianic son of God. He actually has the same title in two different ways. Intrinsically, he's the son of God, but he also has the title because he's the messianic king. And what he does is he unites with you. It's helpful sometimes to think of it that way. We sometimes think of us uniting with him, but he's the one that took the initiative. He's the one that comes to the Jordan River and tells John, it's fitting to fulfill all righteousness that you baptize me. I'm coming to identify with my people. And through union with Christ, you share in his messianic sonship. you do not share in his eternal sonship, but you share in his messianic sonship so that you too are adopted into God's family. Indeed, when God looks at you in his courtroom, he sees you exactly as righteous as Jesus was in his own life because Christ has reckoned his perfect righteousness to your account. As Paul writes in Galatians 4, when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you were sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father. So you were no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God. Let me encourage you to spend some time thinking about that this week, how you became a son or a daughter of God. By Jesus choosing, right, the Son of God, God the Son, choosing to identify with you, and therefore dying for your sins, reckoning His righteousness to you, pouring out with the Father, the Holy Spirit on you, so that even now the Holy Spirit cries out, Abba Father. It's an extraordinary privilege. The Catechism teaches that addressing God as our Father, therefore, awakens 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. Okay, pop quiz on Scripture again. Where does the Bible teach this? Give me a verse, you don't have to have the citation, but give me a verse from Scripture that teaches how God, as your Father loves you, and therefore will give you good things, even better than your parents, your earthly parents. Bill? Who among you if your son asks you for a serpent? Yeah, that's exactly the one that we'd all think of. Bill said, you know, who among you if your precious child comes to you and says, you know, can I have a loaf of bread? You don't give him a serpent. Jesus actually emphasizes the point because he also adds in one of the passages, Matthew or Luke, if you being evil know how to do good, how much more your father in heaven, right? God delights to bless his children as a father to a very young and precious child. It is not only a great privilege to call God Father, and it is, this should also be an amazing encouragement to us in our prayers We are not going to a stern judge with a really thick ruler so that when we open our mouths, he's gonna wrap us across our knuckles and remind us of all the things we got wrong this week. He's your father who loves you. That ought to encourage us to run into his presence. You know when there's parents that are really loving parents and they have little children? Just over and over again, many of you have had this experience. But children just run into your presence because they got an idea. Or, as I said last week, they picked a dandelion out of the garden, they want to show it to you, they want to ask you a question, they want to ask for a cup of milk, whatever it happens to be. Now, what do the parents do in those circumstances? It might be they're asking for something you shouldn't give them. We do that with God, too, and gently explain, that's not the right thing. but you're also gonna welcome them with love and seek to bless them and enjoy them being in your company. Remember what we said about John F. Kennedy, forget your political things about him, but you know, the President of the United States is a really busy job. You don't just, hey, I'm visiting in Washington, D.C., I'd like to go talk to the President for 15, 20 minutes. You don't get in that way. There's a whole network of people designed to keep you out. You know who didn't get kept out of the Oval Office? His kids. God, of course, doesn't have the problem of needing to have people screened out because he's infinite, right? But God always welcomes his little children to him. The reason why, no, that's not right. The reasons, there's two. There's two reasons why we don't rush into God's presence, longingly trusting that he's going to bless us and love us, and we're gonna enjoy our communion with him, is one of two things. First, we forget that God's really our father, right? You start thinking of God as this stern, distant judge, perhaps more distant than stern in our own day. And the second is we forget we're little children. Perhaps it's both, right? But if you remember you're a little child before God and you remember how good God is and how much he loves his children, that would encourage us to have more regular prayer and to do so with confidence that our Father in heaven is going to hear us. Beginning our prayer by calling upon God as Father reminds us that we have confidence, we have access, we have assurance, Because our identity is wrapped up in Jesus Christ, the eternally beloved Son of God the Father. Questions about question 120, question answer 120, about praying to God as our Father. Yes, Glenn. which goes in both directions. Not only are we laughing at children, but if we remember when we were children as parents, the way that we approached them. No, I think that's good. The intimacy thing is important. If an unbeliever comes before the throne of God, The picture you should have in your mind is a guilty person standing and looking up at the judge on the bench. And of course, Jesus is the judge of all the earth, right? He's judged for us too. But Jesus doesn't stay up there looking down at us, like a parent does with young children. He comes down, he squats down, he gets his arms around us because he loves us. and there's a deeply relational aspect to this. I do want to say something from Tim Keller. that I thought was really helpful. I didn't realize how many people struggled with this actually until I read his book about eight or nine years ago on prayer. But in the modern world, there's often a divide in prayer where if you read books on it, some people want to talk about kingdom prayer, very sort of objective. I'm asking for the advance of the kingdom. We do pray in the Lord's Prayer. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. It's good. And there's also an emphasis on prayer as communion with God. And oddly, apparently, those two things have been separated in two different camps. When you read the Bible, of course, you read the Psalms, it's both, right? You come to your father, who you have this personal relationship with, and you pray that his kingdom would come. It's not an either or. So if you find yourself, Tim is a very, well, he's passed away now, but was a very wise pastor in many ways. If you find yourself drifting only into one category, remember that one of the most common mistakes people make in theology, including theology professors, is to think that questions are either or when in fact they're both and. And that's definitely true about prayer. Okay. Some of you are panicking because you think I don't have time for the next question, but the next question is very short for us to look at. The Lord's Prayer doesn't just teach us to pray to our Father, it teaches us to pray to our Father who art in heaven. What does that additional expression teach us, who art in heaven? Why is it important that Jesus didn't just say, say our Father, and then move on to petitions, but our Father who art in heaven? What qualification does that give us? Jack. One of the things you said at the beginning was that it does help us to realize that that's the incentive. Yes, that's exactly right. I was reading about my toser, and he basically said, God is not like us. He is transcendent. Different beings. We can never be. Either way, he summed it up, there's God and then there's everything else which is not God. Yeah, the creator-creature distinction is very important to maintain. And so there is a way of talking about God being our father that leads to an improper type of familiarity. I don't want to say an over-familiarity, because we should be very familiar with God, but an improper attitude which treats God like he's my buddy, rather than he's my father, who's in charge of everything, right? And so I do think that's one of the helpful aspects to it. And of course, praying our father, the other side of it, helps keep us from having a distant view of God, like he's the deist God who's kind of too busy for me, but he's wound up the universe and is way off at a distance. I want to offer three practical consequences, therefore, of the opening words of the Lord's Prayer. First, they give us confidence in approaching God. We come to the Lord as children, not as strangers. You are members of God's family. You belong. Second, well, I shouldn't do second, because this is my second point. This is another point under this point. We'll have that again tonight in the sermon, Peter. We have a right to ask for our needs. Now, that's a way of putting it that might jar you a little bit, but we have a right to ask for God to bless us. It is not a right we merited. That's the thing you got to add. But by grace, we do have a right. Go back to that passage from the Gospel of John again. He gave them the right to be called children of God. And Jesus has made many promises to us in the Gospels where he says, ask. Ask your right. You have not. That's from James. You have not because you ask not. He says, God himself is calling you and by his grace has given you the right to come into his throne room and say, father I have needs, would you meet my needs? I think that's very important for us to remember. Second, these words lead to a reverence in prayer. That is by combining our father with who are in heaven. We maintain proper respect for the Lord who is our creator and our king. And through these words, we openly acknowledge his majesty. Third, we trust in God's power. I kept this one for last because I think this is really a tremendous encouragement for us. Our father shows intimacy, but if our human father is an inept, wimpy guy, he's not gonna have the resources that I need to answer my questions, to answer my needs, but our Spiritual father is our father who is in heaven. He's enthroned, right? Don't think of heaven as being some distant location at a spot somewhere in the universe. It reflects the place where God is reigning from, his sovereignty. Because our father is enthroned over the entire universe, he's able to answer all of our prayers. And because our father is enthroned over the entire universe, His heavenly position means unlimited resources. Remember, he's also the creator, right? He can make the resources absolutely out of nothing, as he did on days one through six. As one writer puts it, to say our father in heaven is to acknowledge that while God is near to us, he is also infinitely greater than us, ruling over all things from his throne in heaven, it reminds us not to limit God's power, his presence, and his wisdom by our earthly experience. I want to just throw in a little plug here for you. Something to think about this week. Are your prayers small? You heard in the sermon this morning, Excellent sermon. I could say that because Ryan wasn't here, but I also told him I thought it was an excellent sermon. But you heard in the sermon this morning the problem with the Pharisees, and commonly our own, expectations for the Messiah was not that they were too high and Jesus wasn't meeting them by overthrowing the Roman Empire. You can't set the bar too high for Jesus. I want to encourage you to pray some really big prayers this week. At least one. At least one. And it's right we should pray for broken legs and illnesses and all those sorts of things. But would you pray for a massive revival in New England? Or do you imagine that somehow the rocky soil of New England is too tough for God to break it up? So think in your own heart and dare to pray big prayers. Here's the thing, we know God answers those prayers. He may say not yet, but he's not unhearing for you. He loves you in Christ. You're his daughter or his son. Lourdes Day 46 teaches us that prayer is not merely a religious exercise, but a child's conversation with his or her father. Yet this Father is the majestic God of heaven, combining tender care with infinite power. This understanding should transform how we pray, but also how we live. When we say our Father who art in heaven, we're making a profound theological statement about who God is. He's not the force. He's not a higher power, if you limit it to that. He's a personal God who loves you, who created the universe so that he would have that relationship with his people, and in that way manifest his glory. We're making a profound theological statement about the fact that we're in relation with him, how we should approach him, and what we can expect from him. Any last questions or thoughts? Yes, Martha. 11th passage that the Catechism refers to says, If you then, who are able, know how to give good gifts to your children, which more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him? Yeah, the Luke passage, as Martha points out, doesn't just say that God will give things. He will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him. Giving Himself, giving God Himself to you. It's an extraordinary blessing. Any last questions or thoughts? Judy. Yeah, so Judy's drawing our attention to the relationship between our prayers and the high priestly prayer of Christ in John 17. If I just build off that just a little bit, it's a really big encouragement to remember that both the Messiah, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit are interceding on your behalf. You can't figure out how to pray? The Holy Spirit intercedes with groanings that are too hard for us to give voice to. And Jesus is always interceding as your High Priest before the throne of heaven. I want to add one more thing to this. Does the Father listen to Jesus' prayers? Yeah. I've often think of, at the Last Supper, when Peter was boldly pounding his chest and saying, I'll never deny you. I'll lay down my life for you, Jesus. And Jesus said, will you lay down your life for me? This very night you'll deny me three times before the cock crows twice. But Jesus does not stop there. He says, Peter, actually he says Simon Simon, personal name, he's born with. Simon, Simon, Satan has desired to have you, to sift you like wheat. And we could add, and you're no match for him at all, but I have prayed the Father, and when you are restored, strengthen the brethren. Jesus does not say to Simon, if you are restored, he says when. Jesus' prayers are efficacious, and because you are in Christ, So are yours. John, would you close in prayer?