Teach Me to Prayer - Week #10: The Infinite Fatherliness of God (Part 2)

This week we continue on the chapter about God's infinite fatherliness. Murray says in this chapter that the Lord's primary lesson for us in His school of prayer is rooted in the name Father and is the source of answered prayer. "Christ tells us that the highest lesson is to learn to say 'Abba, Father!' (Romans 8:15) and 'Our Father in heaven' (Matthew 6:9). The one who can address God with true sincerity and intimacy has the key to all prayer."

A few years ago I heard someone say, "The Father is Christlike." What a wonderful truth! We need continual renewing of our mind related to what His fatherliness looks like because even the best of human fathers are weak and fail often; only the Son could fully reveal what the Father is like. Through His condescension and meekness and lowliness as a Man and His descent into death for love of broken and sinful humans, we see what the Father is like.

The end of this chapter quotes an excerpt from Thoughts on Holiness by Mark Guy Pearse, and I'm going to close this posting with most of this quote and pray that the eyes of our hearts will be increasingly open to these almost unbelievable truths:

"'Our Father in heaven...' We generally speak it only as the utterance of a reverential homage. We think of it as an image borrowed from our earthly life, and only in some faint and shallow meaning to be used of God. We are afraid to take God as our own tender and companionable Father. We think of Him as our schoolmaster or even further off than that - a superintendent who knows nothing of us except through our (school) lessons. His eyes are not on the scholar but on the book, and all must meet the standard equally.

But open the eyes of your heart, timid child of God; let the words sink down into the innermost depths of your soul. Here is the starting point of holiness, in the love and patience and compassion of our heavenly Father. We are not to learn to be holy like a hard lesson in school, (so)that we may make God think well of us; we are to learn it at home with the Father who longs to help us. God loves you not because you are clever, not because you are good, but because He is your Father. The cross of Christ does not make God love us; the cross is the outcome and measure of His love for us. He loves all His children - the clumsiest, the dullest, the poorest, even the outcast of society. His love lies at the back of everything, and we must rest upon that as the solid foundation of our Christian life, not growing up into that, but growing up out of it. We must begin there or our beginning will come to nothing. Seek to grasp this truth.

'Our Father in heaven...' Speak them over to yourself until something of the wonderful truth is felt. It means that you are bound to God by the closest and gentlest relationship, that you have a right to His love and His power and His blessing - to His answers to your prayers. O the boldness with which we can draw near to Him! O the great things we have a right to ask of Him! He is our Father. It means that His infinite love and patience and wisdom cover us and enfold us. In this relationship lies not only the possibility of holiness but infinitely more.

Here we begin, in the patient love of the Father. He knows each of us in all our peculiarities, in all our weaknesses and difficulties. A master judges by the result, but our Father judges by the effort...He know the cost of your efforts and weighs them where others only measure...Do not fear to take it all as your own."

I realize how I need ever-increasing understanding of the nature of a father in order to walk more and more confidently in believing prayer and in the daily affairs of life.

Spirit of the Father, once again I ask for Your ministry to us. I ask you to open the eyes of our heart to understand Jesus more fully, knowing that He will show us what the Father's nature is like; I ask for courage and faith to believe what You say about Jesus and the Father and to accept gladly what the Father says about His tender affection about us even in our clumsiness and weaknesses. Thank You that You really do hear our prayer!