The Lord's Prayer: In Heaven (Matthew 6.9)
This sermon was preached on June 30th, 2024.
If you and I met today for the first time and I wanted you to know me, I’d probably begin by telling you some things about myself. “My name is Tim, I'm married to Angela and dad to Declan. I love books and loud guitars.” You’d understand me because we speak the same language. You know what a book and a guitar is. You know what ‘married' and ‘dad’ is.
But now imagine I’m meeting a six month old baby for the first time. I could say all those sentences and the baby not understand a thing. So what do I do? I could do what a lot of us do and use baby-talk, which leans in on using tone and affect to communicate moods. It would be a different type of communication—me trying to stoop down so the baby understands me as much as they have the capacity to understand me.
This image is one that John Calvin used to explain how God communicates with us. What we have in Scripture is God’s Word—inspired by him to be the authoritative way he speaks to his people. But the distance between God and us means that he is not communicating to an equal, so God uses human language with all its limitations so that we will know him. Our eternal God stoops to speak to us so that we will know him.
I bring this up because this morning we’re talking about when Jesus teaches us to pray “Our Father in heaven, and I think it can help us, when we’re speaking of things like God and heaven, to start off from a place of confidence and humility. We speak with humility because to speak of “heaven” at all is to speak of something we have not experienced, meaning we do not speak as subject matter experts who know everything, but as exiles longing for something we've never seen. Yet we speak with confidence because we speak of what God has told us, and his word is truth and can be trusted.
“Who art in heaven…”
The past few weeks we’ve been looking at the topic of prayer through the Lord’s Prayer. How prayer is not performance, but family talk: we as God's delighted-in children speaking to our heavenly Father, being guided to value what he values and love what he loves. Today we’re looking at the what comes next—“Our Father…in heaven” What is heaven?
Heaven is a created place. The very first sentence of Scripture tells us that much—“in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Now sometimes Scripture uses the term “the heavens” and it’s talking about what we would call the sky and space—the ‘up there’ visible physical places that we can look up and see. But more often when it uses the term “heaven” it’s speaking about a whole lot more than that. Sometimes Scripture will even clarify and speak of “the invisible heavens.”
Heaven is a fundamentally different kind of place than here. Not just different in the sense that Dunn and Benson are different places. But different in key ways. “Heaven” is a non-physical, non-material reality. A place that doesn’t operate by the same rules as our physical universe. It’s like another dimension that transcends our own—one that we struggle to explain in the limitations of human language because it's unlike any place we’ve ever experienced. Heaven is not a place like any other. To put it simply, heaven is where he has chosen to dwell most powerfully in his creation. Scripture specifically gets at this by saying…
Heaven is God’s throne-room. Like a palace, in a sense—where his will is perfectly done. And the invisible beings that live there, angels, are his royal attendants. As God’s throne-room, heaven is not something that is in-process. It was created fully formed in the sense that there isn’t an increase or decrease in the number of angels there. God never gave the command to angels like he did to humans “to be fruitful and multiply and fill heaven.” He never called angels his image and likeness, as he did humans. These beings are “ministering servants,” but not his children.
It’s a remarkable thing, then, when God creates the earth. It seems like heaven was something he made instantaneously. But he builds the earth like an architect and contractor forming a house. And as the capstone of his creation, he makes humanity—in his image and likeness with the mission to multiply and fill the earth. To build. But by what pattern?Heaven is the blueprint that earth is meant to follow. The throne room of God, where he dwells in his creation most powerfully, is the ideal set forth to copy and emulate. Humanity was placed on earth and tasked with living in such a way that heaven would come to earth. In fact, the picture of Eden we see in Genesis is like a royal garden connected to a palace. This tiny location on this big earth was where God placed his images to live and tend—and expand.
If heaven was created fully formed, in a sense, earth was created to progress. So images of God would cover the earth and the works of these images, copying and emulating God, would fill the earth. And all humanity would live in the glory of God reflected in and through all of us. Human culture would develop—to the greater goal that the knowledge of the glory of God would cover the whole earth as the waters cover the sea.
In this sense, heaven—the throne room of God fully formed—was meant to be the blueprint of earth—all anticipating the fulness of earth becoming a place like heaven—where God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven (to borrow from another line we pray in the Lord’s Prayer).Heaven is coming to earth. It looks like this plan has gone way off track. We live in a world that is full of people—but humanity hasn’t taken this blueprint of heaven and acted as God’s image reflecting his glory. No, more often than not we have filled this world with sin and violence.
Yet God is still intent on his mission to make his world the place where his glory covers all things, which is the ultimate goal for why Jesus came to us. To not only make a way for us individually to be forgiven, but to remove all the obstacles that stood in the way of heaven coming to earth. So God’s original purposes for his creation could be fulfilled.
To do this, it required that he set free God’s image. We’re guilty of sin, so he makes a way for us to be forgiven. We’re cursed with death, so he faced the power of death to defeat its finality. We have hearts that are bent toward sin and selfishness, so he gives us his Holy Spirit to awaken our hearts to new life. He is making all things new, bringing renewal so that his grace will flow as far as the curse of sin is found.
So heaven is a created place, God’s throne room—meant to be a blueprint for what earth will become: the place where God dwells with his people for his glory and for our good.
What Does It Mean To Pray This?
If all of this is what heaven is, then now we have to ask the question: what does it mean for us to pray, in the here and now, to “Our Father in heaven?”
God is not limited to space like we are. He transcends all of that. We aren’t praying to “our Father in Jerusalem" or “Our Father in NY” or any of that. We are praying to a Father who is not far from us at any moment.
Which, in part, means that our prayers are not at all dependent on where they are done. You don't have to find a special place—a cathedral or a temple. In fact, Scripture says that we are temples of the Holy Spirit. Meaning we don’t have to go find God. He has found us and dwells with us and is, at no moment, ever far from us. We don't have to go find him. He has found us.Our Father is King. It's one thing to be able to have someone to talk to. And sometimes we can talk about prayer like that—it’s just us being able to vent to someone who has an open ear. But there’s more to prayer than that. To pray ‘our Father in heaven” is to say “the issues in front of me are not just what I can measure or act on.” If the things that we faced were stuff we could explain and account for, we wouldn’t need to call upon anyone, we could simply step into and handle it. But the reality of the brokenness of this world demands that we reach beyond our brokenness to call upon God’s great willingness to show his grace in this graceless world.
To appeal to “our Father in heaven” is to go above the heads of the verdicts of others or even the verdict of our own hearts. It’s to recognize his ultimate authority and begin to entrust ourselves to him.Our Father gives us instruction. If he is King, he has a kingdom. And if he has a kingdom, he reigns over that kingdom in wisdom. To pray “our Father in heaven” is to see ourselves as his children in this kingdom, as those prepared to not only express ourselves in prayer but to open the ears of our hearts to hear his guidance to us.
To pray “our Father in heaven” is to seek from him that wisdom that is not from us. Which is what ‘the fear of the Lord” is—not terror before him, but a reverence that recognizes his grandeur and authority. We need instruction for our lives that draws on wisdom deeper than what we can account for or come up with.
We spoke earlier of heaven as the blueprint of earth, but that has the danger of making it sound like I’m only talking about architecture. Like earth is made to look like heaven. But what it truly means is that our lives here are meant to be sourced in Him, finding our all outside of ourselves.Our Father will not rest until his work is completed. Remember, heaven is meant to come to earth. God the Father is at work through the work of His Son and in the power of the Holy Spirit to renew this broken creation to be the kingdom of God. To defeat not just the penalty of sin for us and the power of sin for us but even the presence of sin.
And for us to call upon God as “our Father in heaven” is to call this reality into our prayers. It’s to recognize, in the midst of our praying, what God is up to. What we’re in the middle in and maybe find it hard to believe.
So let’s pray “our Father in heaven” and know that we are never alone, that we have been swept into a greater story of God’s redemption. Let’s pray “our Father in heaven” and know that he is at work to make all things new, including us. Let's pray “our Father in heaven” and let that fill our hearts and guide our hands as we live as God's freed children.