In and Within 4 The Father---Near, Here and Dear

[HKHaugan]

“But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you (Mt.6.6)”

 

Well we have gone into our room, our closet.  We have closed the door and now we pray to our Father, who is unseen.  Getting with the Father is a matter of understanding the Scripture and how it describes Him.  There are three views of the Father, Jesus’, the Old Testament’s and ours.  What we have to be careful of is standing on the last two without the first, which is a common secular failure among those who want to dismiss belief in God.  They use biblical history to show Him as an impersonal cold warrior, a savage manipulator and as distant and uncaring when it comes to suffering, war and disease.  Who wants to believe in anything like that?

 

As far as our own view of God is concerned, how many of us have not come up with ideas that we use to satisfy our own internal doubts and fears?  Think of the answers we have given when put on the spot by hostile questioners. Thank God that He sent His Son and gave us His Word to clearly reveal who He really is.  When you look at it that way you finally come to the conclusion that only the first, Jesus’ view, can adequately define Him.  When Jesus is asked to show the Father His reply was simple,  “When you have seen me you have seen the Father (Jn.14:9).”  So everything we want to know about the Father is seen in Jesus’ manner, words and actions.  And that is the Father’s will which He made clear at Jesus’ Baptism and Transfiguration (Mt.3:17 and 17:5).

 

It is Jesus who exhibits the presence of the Father and therefore through Him that we pray.  One absolutely critical part of that awareness is the One who carries who we are to the Father and that is the person of the Holy Spirit whom Jesus has sent to bring His presence into our mind and heart (Jn.16).  Our prayers to the Father are in the name of and through Jesus conveyed by the Holy Spirit (Rom.8).  While this is our mindset, that is, how we think about God, we can relax in our heart and spirit because He has made access to Himself simple and personal.  We go to Him with our heart and spirit open since our mind has given us the entrance defined by His Word. 

 

We go to the Father in faith the same way Jesus did in His earthly life.  We go to the Father with our whole being in the assurance that He knows everything about our mind, heart and spirit.  Nothing is left out.  He has already penetrated our history, our dreams, our failures and the full reality of who we are.  Yet here we are, alive, breathing and going to Him who is unseen.  There is not a fragment of our being that remains unknown to Him. 

 

To shut the door to the world and retreat into the presence of the Father is to place ourselves totally in communion with Him.  It is to do what Jesus did and that is to empty ourselves of all thought and consciousness except for Him.  He is the One we talk to, we feel for, we allow our spirit to embrace.  In actuality it is that faith we carry into His presence that shows us the embrace is really His.  We have allowed Him to embrace us.  And in that embrace is the face of Jesus saying to us that the Father loves us, that He is taking every detail of who we are and using it to bring us closer to Him.  It is the Spirit of God lovingly reshaping us, molding us through our repentance and healing us with His forgiveness. 

 

Do we have weaknesses, broken hearts, yearnings, dreams, dashed hopes, lingering hidden fears and attitudes we can’t seem to shake?  The Father is there in His fullness clearing the paths of our lives from birth to death through His Son in the power of the Spirit. 

 

We can see the Father’s hand in the life of Jesus especially in the way He continued to go to the Father in prayer.   His every thought, word and action portrayed His Father’s presence.  How many times haven’t we seen in the Gospel of John Jesus repeatedly saying He only does what His Father wants, thinks what His Father thinks and acts out the mind and will of the Father?

 

Now as we have been reading and thinking about the Father haven’t you too been immersed in letting the Father be your Father?  That’s how He wants it.  When Jesus told Mary not to hang on to Him because He was going to His Father and her Father it declared how personal the Father is to each and every person.  See how He puts it, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God (Jn.20:17).’”

 

Paul caught the depth of Jesus’ teaching when he wrote, “The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father (Rom.8:15).”  Abba is the Aramaic word for ‘Daddy.’  He is both the ‘Daddy’ that sits us on His lap and the Father whose will is our authority.  He is that all-encompassing, all-loving and all-embracing.   Now, go to the Father and talk to Him, think of yourself sitting on His lap, His arm about your shoulders, share with Him and receive His counsel.  In Jesus’ Name.  Amen.