6. Calling God Father

6.         Calling God Father

            When you pray, what do you call God?   How do you address Him?  Jesus says that, when we pray, we should call Him Father.  Out of all the possible names for God, the Creator of the universe, God Almighty, we should know Him as our Father.

            How does that make you feel?  I was never particularly close to my father.  He is dead now, so there is nothing I can do to change that.  Though I do believe that, when he died, he went to heaven, and that he now understands all the reasons why we were not close.  And I believe that things are alright between us now.  It would have been nice if we had been closer when he was here.  Life isn’t easy, and sometimes these things happen.  I believe he knows now that I love him. 

            But how do you feel about calling God Father?  I am a father now.  I have two sons.  I believe one of the reasons why God created life the way He did is to help us understand His love for us.  We get two chances to get this right. 

            First, we have parents.  Hopefully we will come to understand how much they love us.  When we are young, usually they will dote over us and go to great lengths to express their love for us.  As we get older and try to become our own persons, the signals can get mixed. 

            The physical indications of love and affection may stop; and, as they try to mold our personalities and character to what they think they ought to be, conflicts can arise; and we can doubt or question their love.  Or at least, it won’t mean so much to us.  It won’t fill us with joy and gratitude so much as being just another fact of life.

            But then most of us will have the opportunity to become parents ourselves.  Now we will see the relationship from the other perspective.  Hopefully between the two we will come to understand how great this love is, how great our parents loved us, and we will know how great is the love that we have for our children.  Even when they act like they can’t stand us, and we can almost wish they would move out of the house, deep down inside, there is this abiding love that binds us to them.  We would do anything for them.  And God is our Father.

            I was never really close with my dad, so for me to see God as my Father, I didn’t have much to work with.  That expression did not mean that much to me.

            But then I became a father.  I could wish for a better relationship with my kids, but I know now the love of a father.  I know how my heart aches for my kids.  I know the joy they bring to me, how proud I am of them, especially when I see them do the right things.

            God wants us to have these kinds of experiences, because He wants us to understand better what His relationship to us is like.  When Jesus taught His disciples, and us, to pray, He told them and us to call God our Father. 

Can we think of God in the same way?   We speak often of God sending His Son to die for us, that He loved us so much that He would do such a thing.  Yet we see this too often only in terms of our eternal salvation.  It was the necessary price to be paid.  But then it was for such a great good:  the salvation of all humankind. 

            But we need to put a human face on this.  Usually when we want to do this, we think of Jesus.  But I want us to put on a different human face: our own.  We read about Jesus and the things that He did.  And they may even move us.  He healed people, so we may figure that He will heal us too.   But then maybe not.   He touched the leper out of His compassion for him, but I think much of the time we have a hard time trying to figure out just what it means for us now everyday because of Jesus’ compassion for us.

            When Jesus tries to show what God the Father is like and how He responds to us in prayer, the example Jesus uses is us, as parents.  “Or who among you, whose son shall ask him for bread, he won’t give him a stone, will he?  Or again he will ask for a fish, he won’t give him a serpent, will he?  If you, being evil, know to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him.”[1]  What I think so many of us will find surprising is how much Jesus tries to make the point that God actually wants to give us what we want.  And I know by saying that, I will be accused of promoting all kinds of selfish behavior and suggesting that God wants all of us to drive BMWs and own a home with a pool. 

            Too often, though, I think we go to the other extreme, where God either permits or otherwise wants us to go through junk we wouldn’t want anyone to go through, except maybe an  unrepentant serial killer or a child molester.  I think what has influenced us in this regard, too much in fact, is that we have come to know or hear of some person who endured great suffering and died at a young age, leaving even younger children. 

            We have lost any real sense of just what it is that God wants to do in our lives.  We have these vague notions of trials and tribulations that somehow refine us and make us more Christlike.   Too often I think they can have the opposite effect.  They can breed anger, bitterness, and feelings of mistrust for God.  We lose our real joy in life and with that our joy in God. 

            We can begin to expect bad things to happen to us.  It becomes easy to see the good times as only temporary respites from the bad.  When times are good, we find it hard to believe they can last.  We can almost start looking for that next crisis to come.

            But this is not the picture that Jesus paints for us.   We keep looking for reasons why God won’t or can’t give us the things we ask for, and Jesus keeps insisting that we should expect that He will.  If a son asks his father for a fish, he won’t give him a snake, would he?   And if he asks for an egg, would the father give him a scorpion?  God loves us at least as much as we love our own children.   And if we give good things to our children, so will our Father in heaven give good things to His children.             

            Jesus, the Son of God, the Revelation of God in the flesh, immediately after He gives us this model prayer, offers a picture of what prayer to God is like.  It is like a man who goes to a friend at midnight.  How many people do you know that you would feel free to even just call them in the middle of the night?

            So Jesus shifts the imagery from a father to a friend, but the common thread is that of the sense of acceptance, love, and freedom to ask for what you want.  We are always quick to suggest that we don’t know what to ask for and that God has higher purposes that we don’t know about or understand, and so God can’t just come right out and give us these things.

            This does not seem to be Jesus’ concern.    He says that this man in the parable gives to his friend as much as he needs.  Jesus then very emphatically goes on to add: “Keep asking, and it shall be given to you.  Keep seeking, and you shall find.  Keep knocking, and it shall be opened to you.  For everyone who keeps asking receives and who keeps seeking finds and to the one who keeps knocking it shall be opened”[2]

Knowing God as Father is to embolden us in our prayers.  We are to stop wondering whether or not God might answer our prayers, and I don’t mean with the yes, no, or maybe. 

            But why do we have this reluctance, this hesitancy to believe that God would give us those things we ask for?

            Might we not ask for wrong things, things that we wouldn’t really want, if we knew all that God did?  Certainly.   Would we still want or expect God to give us the things we asked for originally?  Of course not.  The problem is that we have gotten to the place where we question everything we might ask from God and we never know if what we are praying for is what is best. 

            What happens then is that we don’t really know how God answered our prayers.  We look at our circumstances and how they either changed or didn’t change, and we try to conclude what God’s will may have been.

            Jesus seems quite clear that our prayers most likely would be ones that God would favorably answer, but He wants to make it clear that we may need to be very insistent and persistent on our part. 

            He does not say just why this is so, what reason there should be that we should need to persevere in our prayers.  It could be that this apparent longer-than-we-might-like time between the time we first pray for something and its answer is needed to help us pray for the right things.

            But what is important here is to maintain the image of God in our minds as our Father.  As I said, hopefully between knowing our own parents and having children of our own, we can sense something of the depth of God’s love for us and how He delights in His children.   Others of us may need to use their own experiences of loving or being loved to try to picture how it is that God loves us.

            We asked the question at the beginning of this chapter of how it is that you address God when you pray.   Do you call Him God or Lord?  Jesus says to call Him Father.  He is God and He is Lord.  But our prayers will never be all they are meant to be until we know Him as our Father.