Church: Reformed Baptist Church of Franconia | Text: Matthew 6:9-13 | Date: October 5, 2025 | Speaker: Fred Zaspel

Matthew chapter 6. Last month, on the first Sunday of the month, we just gave an overview of the Lord’s Prayer. Now we’ll begin to work our way through. And we will… Let’s take the time to read through it again.

Matthew chapter 6. Jesus has been giving instruction on prayer, beginning with verse 5. And then he comes to what we call the Lord’s Prayer, beginning in verse nine. “Pray like this. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

So far as Christian living is concerned, I think the Lord’s Prayer—it’s what we call the Lord’s Prayer here—is some of the most vital practical instruction that we have. If we can learn to pray from this model, we may be sure that we’re praying what God wants to hear from us.

I mentioned last time that there are two major divisions of the prayer. We have the address, addressing God in verse 9: “Our Father in heaven.” And then we have six petitions. Three of them are God-ward: “Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And then three more petitions that are more related to our own concerns, and that is: “Give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

This evening, I just want to look at the opening address in the prayer, make sure we appreciate what the Lord Jesus is giving us in prayer. Our Father in Heaven.

Addressing Father

Addressing Father here is significant. I suppose most fundamentally, it presents God and reminds us that God is a personal God. But more importantly than that, the point is that when we go to God in prayer, we find there one who is loving and affectionate. He’s like a father. In fact, what we find in the Bible is that God is the prototype or the archetype of fatherhood. What fatherhood we have here on earth is a reflection of the fatherhood of God himself that it is modeled after. So whatever a father is supposed to be, ideally, in this world—in love and affection and caring for and protecting and all of that—first of all, is what God is. And our fatherhood, insofar as it’s faithful, is a reflection of that. It is to be a reflection of that. And so our approach then in prayer is to go to God as Father.

Now to appreciate this, I think we need to recognize what a new thing this was. Now we say Father all the time for God, and we take it for granted. But we need to appreciate what a new thing this was for the disciples. In the Old Testament, you don’t find a precedent for this. You find God addressed in terms of his greatness and his transcendence and so on, and all of that is good and right still. You have one passage in Isaiah chapter 64; we read it this morning. “Oh Lord, you are our father. We are the clay, you are the potter. We are all the work of your hand.” So there’s one instance in the Old Testament where God is addressed as father. But you’ll notice there in that, that he is father in terms of his creatorship; he’s the father of us in that sense. But in a familial sense, God as our Father in the family kind of a thing, we don’t find that in the Old Testament anywhere.

It was customary in the time to pray in terms of God’s greatness and his transcendence as a show of reverence, and all of that still is a good thing. But when we come to the New Testament, we open the Gospels, and what we find is Jesus praying and Jesus speaking often of God as his Father. And I have no doubt that this was a striking thing for the disciples to hear Jesus speaking of God as Father and then addressing him as Father. It wasn’t done. It wasn’t the norm in praying. And more than that, I wonder if the disciples might have thought, “Is this overly familiar to speak to God that way?” Or were they thinking in terms of, “Wow, what an inside track he has. Call God Father.”

Now what finally became clear, of course, is that Jesus is revealing God. This is a revelation of the triune God. At God’s name, after the incarnation and the teaching of Jesus and all, now we recognize that God is Father, Son, and Spirit. And that is his name. Father, Son, and Spirit. It is not the name of the Father, the name of the Son, the name of the Spirit. It is the name, singular, of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Spirit. They share that name together. They are themselves God, but this now is how God is known. He’s Father, Son, and Spirit. And the relation between the first two persons is that of Father and Son. The Son proceeds from the Father, the Son reveals the Father, and so on. And we find that kind of language often in the New Testament, particularly later in the epistles.

But it was a stunning thing, I think, for the disciples to hear Jesus speak of God that way. He’s revealing who God is. And he always made that distinction. When you pray for forgiveness of sins, this is your prayer. That’s not Jesus’ prayer. You pray like this: “Forgive us our debts.” That’s not Jesus’ prayer. And Jesus even made the distinction before his ascension. He said, “I go to my Father and to your Father.” There’s a distinction. “And to my God and to your God.” But at the same time, what we find him doing here is that he opens that privilege to his disciples. When you pray, you pray like this: “Our Father.” And so he’s opening up this privilege to address God in this way.

Now, of course, we have to ask, on what ground? How can we pray “Our Father”? How can we address Him that way? For Jesus, He’s God the Son. He’s revealing for us the eternal relations between these first and second person of the triune Godhead. How is it that we can address God as Father? And of course, there’s gospel in the answer to that. We can address God as father because we are united to his son, the Lord Jesus, and united to him, he is our father as well. There’s wonderful gospel in that.

J.I. Packer has a marvelous chapter in his book, Knowing God, a marvelous chapter on adoption. And he defines this doctrine of adoption as the climax of the revelation of the gospel. It’s a marvelous thing what God does for us in saving us. He justifies us. He declares us to be righteous. He goes further than that. He reconciles us. Brings us to himself. The enmity is gone, but even that’s not far enough. He actually makes us his children. He adopts us as his own, and so now we are his children, he is our father, and the relationship is cemented in Jesus. Through faith in Jesus, we become the children of God.

This is a familiar theme in the New Testament, that we now have access to God, whereas in the Old Testament, you had to go through layers of priesthood and what all. Here we can come to God as our Father. Jesus instructs us in the Gospel of John to pray in His name. That’s another important thing, and it’s related to this. When you go to God in prayer, we don’t go in our own name. We have no ground. The only ground we have is Jesus. And so we are instructed to pray in his name.

A number of years ago, a man wrote a book on prayer, and he titled it, Praying Backwards. What he’s trying to capture with it—it’s a good book—what he’s trying to capture with it is instead of saying, at the end of the prayer, “In Jesus’ name, amen,” it might be a good practice to, at the beginning of the prayer, say, “In Jesus’ name we come,” to remind ourselves that the ground of our approach to God is Christ. Well, that’s essentially what we have here when we say God is our Father. And it’s important to say that. Evidently, Jesus instructs us to say that. “Pray like this, our Father in heaven.” This is how we are to address God. Again, by calling attention to the relationship that exists between him and us.

Three Implications

Now, there are some implications to all of that that we should keep in mind as well. First of all, and most obvious, and I’ve already alluded to it, is that there’s a recognition of the privileged status that we have. A recognition of the privileged status that is ours. We can go to God and say, “Father.” That’s not for the rest of the world. You’ll often hear that in pop theology, and you’ll hear it in the world. People who aren’t believers of any sort: “We’re all God’s children.” Well, there’s a sense in which that’s right, in terms of he’s the creator of us all, but in a redemptive sense, that’s us. And John speaks of that. What kind of love has been bestowed upon us that we should be called the children of God? And we are. So there’s this privilege of status. And again, this ties into the theme of access to God.

I’ve wondered sometimes if I needed—let’s back up, let’s go into history. It is said that when Abraham Lincoln was president, he left orders with his staff that his children were to come and see him. They’re to be allowed in and they’re not to be blocked back no matter what’s going on. So he might be in the Oval Office, War Room or whatever. Todd comes in and says, “Hey, Dad.” And that’s pretty cool access. I’ve often wondered if I had a really urgent matter that the president needed to hear, would I get to him? I have a relative who has worked for a number of years with Marco Rubio. I think—I think if the matter were of sufficient urgency and importance, think through that maybe we could, but you see there’s layers. Go to her and she’d have to go to him and he’d have to go, and there are layers maybe. I have a close friend whose son works for one of the United States Senators in Washington and I think I could maybe get some access, but again, there’s layers. Maybe, maybe I could get through. And what we are reminded of when we pray, “Our Father,” is that we have direct access to the God of heaven who rules over all, and he is our Father.

And that brings us to the second implication, not just our privileged status, but God’s welcoming reception of us when we come. When we pray, we are not trying to wrench something from an unwilling deity. He’s our Father. His heart toward us is good. He wants to hear from us. He wants to do good. His heart toward us is to receive us. In fact, in Luke’s account of the Lord’s Prayer, he picks up on this in the following passage. It says, you who are evil, you’re sinful, and you fathers know how to do good for your children. How much more for your Father in heaven?

So number one, our privileged status. Number two, God’s welcoming reception. But number three, and surely this is the bottom line, we are therefore to enjoy a certain boldness in prayer. And I’ll even use the word, even a kind of familiarity with God. Not a glib familiarity, but a family relation. He is God and we are his children. He’s our father. So we go to God and we acknowledge his greatness, we acknowledge his transcendence, but because of our privileged access in Christ and our status in Christ, because he is our father, and therefore his welcoming reception of us, there’s a certain trust, a certain confidence, a certain boldness by which we are allowed then to come to the God of heaven and make our requests known to him. Childlike kind of freedom before God because he is our father.

Our Father In Heaven

All right, and yet, this connotations of familiarity with God. And yet, notice the address again. It’s not just “Our Father.” It is “Our Father in heaven.” So acknowledging God in his greatness, his transcendence, his power, acknowledging that this one who is our Father is still yet the God of glory, the transcendent God who rules over all. And that’s picked up in the first petition. “Hallowed be your name.” Sanctify your name in the earth, acknowledging the greatness of God. We’ll see that next time.

Well, that then indicates the note of praise in prayer. Our Father in heaven—there’s the note of praise in which we come to God to acknowledge his greatness, his transcendence, his majesty. This is probably the most lacking element in Christian prayer today. Prayer of praise, taking time to acknowledge God’s greatness, to ascribe to him the glory that is his. So, our Father in heaven, on the one hand, that reminds us of the awesome privilege that is ours, the awesome resource that we have to be able to go to God. But when we say our Father in heaven, it also guards us against a glib familiarity, recognizing that we are still the creatures and he is God.

Now that opens up some other implications for prayer. If God is our Father, then our prayer should take on a note of thanksgiving. When we acknowledge God as our Father in heaven, we acknowledge him as the giver of every good thing that we have. That’s what James says. Every good gift, every perfect gift comes from above, from the Father of lights. Every blessing we enjoy we should view as a gift from God our Father. So here’s God in heaven who rules over all, whose providence is over all, and yet he is our Father and he provides for us. And so prayer ought to take on the note of thanksgiving as well, in recognition of every blessing that we have has come to us from our Father.

There’s another implication to this. If God is our Father, and if he is our Father in heaven, there ought to be in prayer a notion of submission. What you don’t find here is what you find often in pop theology today, where you name it and claim it, go to God and make your demands and expect that he will give. Every time I hear something like that, I think and I want to scream back at them and think and say, we cannot dare to pray any better than the Lord Jesus himself who prayed, “Not my will, but yours be done.” And so acknowledging God as our Father in heaven, there ought to be a note of submission. So as we begin to pray, at the very outset, we call to mind, one, the greatness of God, and two, our privileged relationship to him. And so there’s that balance of reverence and affectionate familiarity as we go to God, and that sets the tone for prayer. And it’s from there, and we’ll see this next time, that we move on to the petitions in prayer.

Now, let me read you something. It’s a longer quote. I don’t like to read long quotes generally, but this is so good from Martin Lloyd-Jones in his exposition of the Sermon on the Mount.

“That is the way to pray,” says Christ. “Take these two things together. Never separate these two truths. Remember that you are approaching the almighty, eternal, ever-blessed, holy God. Remember also that God in Christ has become your Father, who not only knows all about you in the sense that a father knows all about his child, he knows what is good for the child.

Put these two things together. God in his almightiness is looking at you with a holy love and knows your every need. He hears your every sigh and loves you with an everlasting love. He desires nothing so much as your blessing, your happiness, your joy, your prosperity.

And then remember this, that he is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all we ask or think. As your father in heaven, He is much more anxious to bless you than you are to be blessed. There is also no limit to his almighty power. He can bless you with all the blessings of heaven. He has put them all in Christ and put you into Christ so your life can be enriched with all the glory and riches of the grace of God himself.

This is the way to pray. Before you begin to make any petition, before you begin to ask even for your daily bread, before you ask for anything, just realize that you, such as you are, are in the presence of such a being, your Father, who is in heaven, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, my Father, my God.”