He has all power. He knows all things. He is full of goodness. All good things come from God. Everything that He does is to help His children become like Him.
The Lord's Prayer
By keeping His commandments we can become like Him. Believe that He exists and that He loves us see Mosiah 4: Pray to Him see James 1: Obey all His commandments as best we can see John As we do these things, we will come to know God and eventually have eternal life.
- Our Heavenly Father?
- Gemas curativas (Spanish Edition).
- Red Planet Blues;
Each chapter in Gospel Principles contains questions. What are some things that testify to you that there is a God? And so as soon as you've said the first words Our Father you've said: I've been given a share in Jesus' relationship with God. I don't have to work out my relationship with God from scratch. I don't have to climb a long long ladder up to heaven, I've been invited into this family relationship and that's the gift that every prayer begins with.
So the very words we start with tell us a huge amount about who we are as Christians, about our Christian doctrine and belief. When we go on to say "who art in heaven", we're saying Heaven, God's place, God's home is also our home.
And the kind of relationship that exists in God's presence in heaven is a relationship of love and trust and intimacy and praise that can be ours here and now. Short, simple words, and yet they tell us that heaven is here on earth because of Jesus, and into that we can enter. But I want to see it against the background of the Old Testament's idea that the name of God is something in itself immensely beautiful and powerful. The name of God is God's word, God's presence.
And to ask that God's name be hallowed, that God's name be looked upon as holy, is to ask that in the world people will understand the presence of God among them with awe and reverence, and will not use the name or the idea of God as a kind of weapon to put other people down, or as a sort of magic to make themselves feel safe. But rather approach the idea of God, the name of God, the word of God, with the veneration and humility that's demanded.
In the Jewish texts of Jesus' own day, the commandment about not taking God's name in the vain, from the Ten Commandments, is often understood as uniting the name of God with a curse - using the name of God as a kind of magic word - and that's to trivialise the name of God, it's to bring it down to our level, to try and make God a tool for our purposes.
So "Hallowed be thy name" means: The Kingdom is not a place or a system; it's just a state of affairs when God is in charge. It's the kingship of God if you like. It's the state in which God really is acknowledged to be directing and giving meaning to everything. So we pray "God's Kingdom come", meaning let the world be transparent to God, let God's will and purpose and God's nature show through in every state of affairs , because that's what it is for God to be King. It's not for God to be ordering around, but for God to be visible everywhere, for God to come through things in his glory.
And Jesus himself tells us that the Kingdom comes in unexpected ways; it doesn't just come with a great clap of thunder at the end of time, it grows in our midst secretly. It comes through in quirky little moments when people do extraordinary things, take extraordinary risks and you think ah yes, that's a life in which God is showing through. And Jesus' parables again tell us about people who give up everything because they catch a glimpse of the Kingdom; they catch a glimpse of God's beauty.
It's a typical bit of Hebrew poetry, the parallel between the first and the second bit of the phrase. We're praying that in the very elaborate version of the old Book of Common Prayer; just as the angels do God's service in heaven so we may reflect that service on earth.
And that's to say that all through the universe, God's glory and God's beauty is being reflected back to God by the stars and the planets, by the angels, by the plants and the animals around us.
'Our Father ': The Nature and Practice of Christian Prayer - ABC Religion & Ethics
Things just being the way they are reflect God's glory, do God's will. We human beings unfortunately have a kind of tone deafness about God's will; we have to learn to sing in tune with all this. Somewhere, some other levels of reality, God's will is done. Here on earth, among us human beings, it isn't very much, and so we pray that we may be brought into tune, that we may not be the only ones singing flat in the great choir of the universe.
Rivers of ink have been spilt over the exact meaning of "give us this day our daily bread", because the word that's used in the Greek is a very, very strange one that you hardly find anywhere else. It probably means daily , it probably means the stuff we need to survive , but at least some people in the early church understood it to mean the bread we want for tomorrow or even the bread of tomorrow ; "give us today tomorrow's bread".
And they thought that might mean "give us now a taste of the bread we shall eat in the Kingdom of God": And so that connects for a lot of Christians with Holy Communion. Of course, because Holy Communion is, at one level, bread for today, it's very much our daily bread - the food we need to keep going - but it's also a foretaste of the bread of heaven, a foretaste of enjoying the presence of Jesus in heaven at his table at his banquet, as the gospels put it.
So lots of meanings there, lots of layers. But I don't think there's one meaning that we just have to settle down with. The simple meaning keep us going, give us what we need is all we really need to go on. And yet as soon as we start unpicking that, we ask: We don't live just by having our material needs fulfilled, we need something more: And so perhaps that ghost of an idea, that shadow of an idea that this is also bread for tomorrow and tomorrow's bread, can come in somewhere.
And it takes a lot of nerve to come before God and say forgive me because I have forgiven someone else. And I don't always feel I'm really up to making that that kind of claim on God. But I think it's saying that it's through God's forgiveness of us that we learn how to forgive. It's in our capacity to forgive that we show we've been forgiven. It reminds us that our own ability to forgive comes from the fact that we're aware of God's forgiveness of us and that unless that really sinks in then we shan't be able to forgive. And it's no good then turning back to God and saying forgive me, I haven't even begun to hear what forgiveness means, I don't know the meaning of the word.
Jesus tells us that very powerful story about the King's servant who's let off his debt and then goes straight off and puts another servant in prison because he owes him a small amount of money. And he underlines the point there that unless you forgive you can't receive forgiveness; you've just made yourself incapable of receiving forgiveness.
The Lord’s Prayer: More than something to be recited out of habit
So it's a bit of a vicious circle of I don't forgive I can't be forgiven. If I can't hear the word of forgiveness and really let it change me, then I shan't be able, I shan't be free to forgive, so this is quite a sobering prayer about forgiveness. But there's a wonderful image in one of the early church fathers about this.
He says that it's a bit like teaching a child to do something. The parent does it carefully a few times, then steps back and says now you show me. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first the kingdom [of God] and his righteousness, and all these things will be given you besides. Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself. Sufficient for a day is its own evil. It may be that you believe the teachings of Christianity, but believe that you cannot be a Christian for a different reason.
The argument is the following:. I've stolen, lied, slept with half the town, murdered, etcetera. Christians are holy, and I can never be holy. I have already been condemned, and nothing can change that. As is often the case, Jesus has the best answer for this, which he tells in the form of parable of the lost sheep.
And when he does find it, he sets it on his shoulders with great joy and, upon his arrival home, he calls together his friends and neighbors and says to them, 'Rejoice with me because I have found my lost sheep.
- Metaphor and Culture!
- The Unknown Heir (Mills & Boon Historical);
- The Shadow of the Pyramid (Shadows from the Past Book 4).
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Then he [Jesus] said, "A man had two sons, and the younger son said to his father, 'Father, give me the share of your estate that should come to me. After a few days, the younger son collected all his belongings and set off to a distant country where he squandered his inheritance on a life of dissipation. When he had freely spent everything, a severe famine struck that country, and he found himself in dire need. So he hired himself out to one of the local citizens who sent him to his farm to tend the swine.
And he longed to eat his fill of the pods on which the swine fed, but nobody gave him any. Coming to his senses he thought, 'How many of my father's hired workers have more than enough food to eat, but here am I, dying from hunger. I shall get up and go to my father and I shall say to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I no longer deserve to be called your son; treat me as you would treat one of your hired workers. While he was still a long way off, his father caught sight of him, and was filled with compassion.
THE OUR FATHER
He ran to his son, embraced him and kissed him. His son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you; I no longer deserve to be called your son. Take the fattened calf and slaughter it. Then let us celebrate with a feast, because this son of mine was dead, and has come to life again; he was lost, and has been found.
No matter who you are, or what you have done, God still loves you and wants you to come home because he is your Father. Unlike human parents, however, God is a perfect parent: Even should she forget, I will never forget you" Is Some Christians find it disturbing that those who have sinned are not sufficiently punished for their sins when they repent. Jesus has an answer for them, in the continuation of the parable of the prodigal son:.
He called one of the servants and asked what this might mean. The servant said to him, 'Your brother has returned and your father has slaughtered the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.