It’s hard not to be cynical in an election year. My wife just brought in the mail, which includes two political messages, one produced by conservatives the other by progressives. Both are irritating.
The piece produced by conservatives is a so-called “Voter Guide.” It pictures the Republican and Democratic candidates for governor along with their “Yes” or “No” stands on eight issues. The issues are intentionally titled to put the Democratic candidate in a bad light. One title, for example, was “Abortion on Demand.” Had progressives printed a voter guide they would have titled this issue, “Reproductive Freedom.”
Progressives produced the other piece of political mail. It pictures soldiers in fatigues and on patrol and in bold print urges voters to “Make sure their vote is counted.” But the soldiers are window dressing. This proposal itself is a wide-ranging progressive wish list for voter reform. It is not all bad but, for heaven’s sake, tells us its real purpose.
Five states are taking up the abortion issue in November. In our state, there is a constitutional amendment on the ballot known as the “Right to Reproductive Freedom Initiative.” Because Americans value freedom, its sponsors made sure to get that word into the proposal’s title.
The proposed amendment is deceptive on many levels. For example, it promises protections for women having a miscarriage or an abortion. Protections from whom? There is no history of women in our state being punished under the law for a miscarriage or an abortion. In fact, the State Supreme Court ruled almost 60 years ago that a woman performing an abortion on herself or receiving an abortion was not guilty of a crime.
Proponents of this proposal make a big deal of saying that the decision on abortion should be left to a woman and her doctor. Yet the proposal does not mention a doctor but rather an “attending health care professional.” That is a big umbrella. In our state it includes dentists, chiropractors, massage therapists, acupuncturists, counselors, psychologists, and many others.
The proposal would ban the state from prohibiting an abortion when a “health care professional” considers it “medically indicated to protect the life, or physical or mental health of the pregnant individual.” One could argue that morning sickness, stretch marks, and a declining bank account all qualify as threats to “the pregnant individual” by this definition.
Further, the proposal would enshrine in the state constitution protections for “someone aiding or assisting a pregnant individual in exercising their right to reproductive freedom with their voluntary consent.” What if this “someone” is the person who got the “individual” (who could be a minor) pregnant? One can certainly imagine a teenager giving her “voluntary consent” to a manipulative older lover who protects himself from criminal action by “aiding” her to “exercise her right to reproductive freedom.”
Speaking of minors, some critics of this proposal suggest that it leaves the door open to children undergoing sterilizing gender transitioning procedures without their parents’ consent. My reading of the proposal does not make that clear, but with so many intentionally unclear statements, it raises concerns.
The most egregiously deceptive thing in this proposal is its summary statement suggesting it will: “Allow state to regulate abortion after fetal viability.” This is the opposite of what it would allow. If passed, the proposal will effectively redefine viability and create a loophole in state regulations big enough to drive a truck through. What the proposal speciously grants with the right hand it snatches away with the left.
Subtle misrepresentation of other people’s views and intentionally misleading statements about one’s own are symptomatic of a politics gone wrong. Such duplicity is the result of the commitment to beat one’s adversaries by any means. Deception is a strategically necessary tactic in that cause.
I, for one, am fed up with it. If, for example, a group is committed to making abortion available to any female, even a child, for any reason, tell voters that and let them decide. Don’t disrespect and manipulate them. This is common decency and should be the standard to which all players in the political arena – conservative or progressive – are held.
This class follows Jesus’s warning against using religion to build a reputation. The instruction he gives is straightforward: Be careful not to do your righteousness before people to be seen by them. The temptation to build a reputation – to seek the “praise that comes from people” – is a dangerous detour that does not lead to the Kingdom of God.
(Co-teacher Kevin Looper was leading a Spiritual Disciplines Retreat this weekend but will be back next week’s class.)
Does God really provide our daily bread – what we need for life today? Can we trust him to take care of us? Jesus knew we could. This encouraging message helps us to trust God as we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread…
Immediately after World War II the allied armies gathered hungry, homeless children from across the countryside and placed them in large camps. The children were given all the food they wanted, shown acceptance, and given care. But at night they did not sleep well. They were restless and afraid.
A psychologist had an idea. He suggested that the children’s caregivers give each of them a slice of bread to hold when they put them to bed. If they wanted more to eat, they were given it, but this particular slice was not to be eaten—they were just to hold it.
The results were remarkable. The children began sleeping better immediately, subconsciously assured that they would have something to eat tomorrow. Just knowing that was enough to give them a good night’s sleep.
King David would have understood. He wrote, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” The shepherd makes plans today so that the sheep will have grass to graze on tomorrow. David understood that God planned to provide for him. Figuratively speaking, he went to bed with a piece of bread in his hand. He knew God would take care of him.[1]
But we’re not David. Will God take care of us? Will we have what we need tomorrow? Today, we arrive at the fourth petition in the Lord’s prayer, the first which makes a personal request: “Give us this day our daily bread.”
There are six (or seven, depending on whether you link the final two) requests in the Lord’s prayer. The first three concern God, the final three concern us. The first three mention God’s name, his kingdom, and his will. The final three mention our bread, our debts, and our deliverance.
Many of the church fathers couldn’t believe that Jesus would follow the first three high and holy requests by telling his followers to pray for something as mundane as bread. They thought that Jesus must be talking about the bread of Holy Communion, which seemed more noble.
But there is not a hint in this text or anywhere else in the Bible that the church fathers were right about this. They were, it seems, trying to be more spiritual than Jesus. He knows his people need food to survive – God made them that way – and he wants them to survive. More than that, he wants them to thrive.
A man once described to me how he prayed – I think he thought I would be impressed. He talked about how he would pray for others – friends, family, missionaries – but made a point of saying that he never prayed for his own needs.
He seemed to think that praying for one’s own needs was selfish and spiritually immature. He was wrong. It is not selfish to want daily bread, only to want someone else’s daily bread. Nor is it spiritually immature. The spiritually mature need daily bread too, and the more mature they are, the more they appreciate the privilege of asking their Father in heaven for it, and the more joy and gratitude they experience when they receive it.
Martin Luther said that “daily bread” was a metaphor that stood for “everything necessary for the preservation of this life, like food, a healthy body, good weather, house, home, wife, children, good government and peace.”[2]
Do I need a car in order to live and do good and serve God? Then a car is my daily bread, and I can ask our Father in heaven for it and expect to receive it. Do I need health to live and do good and serve God? Then I can ask Father for it and he’ll give it. Do I need a job, an education, a friend, a spouse, a child, a computer, or a vacation in order to live and do good and serve God? If so, I can ask Father and expect him to answer.
Now I may think I need things I don’t really need. For example, I may be wrong about needing a computer to live and do good and serve God. I may not need a spouse to do those things. I may not even need a body – at least temporarily. God’s plan may be for me to live better, do better, and serve joyfully in heaven. But if I need a body and health, I can ask and be confident that he will provide.
The prayer for daily bread is a recognition of dependence on God. Many people find that hard to do. They would rather pray, “Give us this day the winning lottery ticket, and we’ll never bother you again about our daily bread.” They hate being dependent. They never want to be in a position where they must depend on anyone else – even God.
To pray for daily bread is to depend on God daily, not once in a while. Jesus’s choice of phrasing was no accident. He intended “daily bread” to carry his hearers back to the Old Testament story of manna in the wilderness. Do you know the story?
Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt and through some of the most rugged, barren, country on earth. It was one of the largest refugee flights in history: hundreds of thousands of people crossing the desert, in need of water and food to survive.
They quickly despaired. They could see no way to feed that many people in the desert and wanted to turn back. They feared they would all starve to death. But God told Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day” (Exodus 16:4).
Each morning, the people were to gather enough bread (called manna) for that day. On the weekend, they were to gather enough for two days because no manna fell on the Sabbath. God said, “In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow my instructions” (Exodus 16:4). If they tried to save up the manna – to get ahead, have a stockpile – the stored manna would spoil. The point is they could not manufacture a situation for themselves in which they would be independent of God. They didn’t get a three-month supply of manna. They had to trust God to provide for them today, and then again tomorrow, and then the day after that.
We are a lot like the Israelites who tried to stockpile their manna, to set themselves up for the future, and take control of their destiny. Why are we like that? I think it is because we have trouble trusting – we do not want to trust.
Jesus knew that. We have been brainwashed into thinking that it is all up to us, that we have to look out for ourselves, for no one else will do it for us. That kind of thinking needs to change before we can thrive. We need to learn for ourselves that Father will provide for us.
Jesus not only wants us to ask for our daily bread; he wants us to have the joyful, faith-building experience of receiving it. When we know God as Father and long for his name to be hallowed, when we yearn for his kingdom and genuinely desire his will, we will see our prayers for daily bread answered.
I am not saying that God will not answer our prayers for daily bread until all those conditions are met. I suspect that he will. But I don’t think we will recognize the answers, for we will remain spiritually nearsighted and our ability to trust our Father will be strictly limited.
We cannot thoughtlessly recite, “Our Father,” rush past, “hallowed be thy name,” and pay lip service to “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done,” and still pray effectively for daily bread. It doesn’t work that way. Think of the Lord’s Prayer as a seven-story building. You don’t start with the roof. You start with the foundation, and the foundation of the Lord’s Prayer is its very first word: “Father.”
When that foundation has been laid, the frame erected, and the doors and windows opened to receive our daily bread from heaven, our needs are not only supplied; our faith is inspired. Think of what receiving daily bread did for the Israelites in the wilderness. It daily reinforced the fact that God cared and was able to help. His provision for them today helped them to trust him for tomorrow. God’s answer to our prayers for daily bread will have the same effect.
Unfortunately, the ancient Israelites began taking God’s provision for granted. They stopped appreciating his gifts and, when that happened, their faith started to diminish. They began to doubt God – not because he gave them the bread they needed, but because he had not given them other things they wanted. Instead of their hearts overflowing with gratitude, they were hardened with greed. If we cease being grateful to God for his gifts, the same thing will happen to us. Gratitude and faith are closely linked.
When we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” there are various dynamics in play. There is a family dynamic. We do not pray, “Give me my daily bread,” but “Give us our daily bread.” Our request does not exclude others and their needs but takes them in.
There is a recurring dynamic in the words, “day” and “daily.” We never ask for provisions in a way that will remove us from the Provider. We don’t ask for our “monthly” bread, so that we can remain independent of God until the month is almost up. Our need unites us to God. If his provision then divides us, the problem lies with us.
Sometimes, the daily bread for which we ask is literally bread. We have no money in our pocket and no food in our pantry, and our need sends us to our heavenly Father.
Sometimes the daily bread for which we ask is healing. Our bodies are under threat. Disease is advancing. Our need brings us to God, brings us daily, and many times each day. But when we receive our daily bread – healing of the body – we mustn’t stop coming to God. I have sometimes marveled at how quickly people have turned from God when they’ve got what they wanted.
When I was pastoring in another place, a neighbor was diagnosed with cancer. He was a lapsed Catholic who showed no interest in church or in God – until he received the diagnosis. Then he was interested. When I learned of his situation, I visited him and he asked me to pray for him, which I gladly did. I was even gladder when I learned that God had provided his daily bread: the cancer had gone into remission, he was ecstatic, and gave God the glory. A couple of months later –just before we moved here – I stopped to say hi and was disturbed by what I saw. He had taken his daily bread and walked away from God with little more than a nod in his direction.
What people need more than daily bread is a daily God. Bread may keep our bodies alive, but God causes our souls to live and thrive. Bread gives us energy; God gives us meaning. Bread gives us enjoyment; God gives us joy.
My friend Dave Brown says that he doesn’t buy lottery tickets because he is afraid that he might win. I understand where he is coming from. There is in most of us a stubborn independence even from God – perhaps especially from God. If we won millions of dollars, we might fall into thinking that we are enough without God. Our bodies would get fat, but our souls would be lean. Our bank account would be robust, but our spirit would be feeble.
When you have a need for bread of whatever kind – food, health, relationships, possessions – instead of bemoaning it, thank God for it. That need is a door, and faith is the key that opens that door. If you’ll go through it, you will find yourself in the company of our good Father. You will experience him for yourself, and your confidence in him will grow.
Don’t take your daily bread and walk away, like our old neighbor did. Take it and stay. Enjoy it with God. An old gospel song I know captures this idea in its first verse: Once it was the blessing, now it is the Lord; once it was the feeling, now it is His Word; once His gift I wanted, now, the Giver own; once I sought for healing, now Himself alone. The man who wrote those words knew how to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
In our younger days, Karen and I had hoped to serve the Lord overseas in the denomination that ordained me. We were required, as part of our preparations, to serve in a stateside ministry for at least two years. The denomination placed us in a mission-style church and gave me – who had never had a pastoral ministry class of any kind – the responsibility of pastoring the church.
It had endured a very ugly split seven years earlier. When we arrived, it was on its last leg. During our first year there, our average worship attendance was 19 – and only about a dozen of those were adults. Two months after we arrived, the church’s largest giver died. Within a year, the church was having trouble paying us. Sometimes we would get our full pay, but more often we would get half, and sometimes even less. We began dipping into our personal savings.
That was gone before long, and there were times when we had no money. How we were going to put gas in the car and food on the table was sometimes in question – not always, by any means, but there were times. I remember some of those times vividly. I also remember how we talked to our Father in heaven about our daily bread and how he provided. He did not give us so much that we could forget about him, but he gave us more than enough for us to trust him. The faith that came out of those experiences has been worth more to us than gold.
We had many remarkable manna from heaven moments. There were times when we prayed, and God answered within hours, like the time I prayed for a car, and one was in our driveway three hours later—without any effort or knowledge on my part. Or the time I prayed in the morning for a very specific amount of money I needed that day – the next day would be too late – and had it (stuffed in an envelope and wedged in our door) before mid-afternoon. Or the night when, on the verge of giving up, I poured out my heart to God. The next day a woman I had not met before asked to speak with me. She handed me an envelope with cash and said that God told her to give it to me. There were many other examples, equally remarkable, and the thing is, Karen and I never told another soul about our need – except our Father in heaven.
What do you think that did for our faith? It was better than winning the lottery. Those days were sometimes hard and scary, but they gave us great confidence in our Father in heaven. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.
Let’s apply what we’ve seen. First, your Father in heaven loves you too much to answer your prayer for daily bread in a way that makes dependence on him unnecessary. He knows that you need him more than you need bread. Any provision that enables you to get along without God is not daily bread but deadly poison. Reflect on your prayers: are you asking for daily bread or deadly poison? If you got what our praying for, would it bring you closer to God or cause you to drift away?
Secondly, you will not be able to pray for daily bread with faith (and faith is necessary) if you cannot pray sincerely for God’s will to be done. If we don’t trust God’s will to be good, you need to take care of that issue first. Share your struggle with God and with a wise Christian friend.
Finally, remember that this prayer, including the request for daily bread, rests on the foundation of the fatherhood of God. If you cannot call God, “Father,” your experience of the Christian life, including the reception of daily bread, will be far below what it could be. The way to call God “Father” is through confessing Jesus “Lord.” He is the cornerstone – “the precious cornerstone for a sure foundation; the one who trusts in him will never be dismayed” (Isaiah 28:16). If you have questions about what that entails, talk to one of our prayer helpers today or talk to me at any time – just don’t wait. It is too good to miss.
[1] Charles L. Allen, God’s Psychiatry (Revell, 1988)
[2] From Stott, J. R. W., The message of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7): Christian Counter-Culture (p. 149). InterVarsity Press.
If I understand him correctly, the theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind, who teaches at Stanford, contends that matter entering a black hole is preserved in the form of data. Should a black hole consume our world, all it’s information – which is in a sense what matter is – will be compressed and preserved on the surface of the black hole’s horizon.
If this is true, it leaves open the door for some advanced alien race to reconstruct everything that has ever existed, including you and me. It is a kind of eternal life that Susskind foresees, and with it, an eternal meaning for the human race.
Susskind is not the only scientist looking for an escape hatch from the heat death of the universe. Freeman Dyson suggested that humans may in the eons to come shed their physical bodies and become, for lack of a better description, thinking, communicating clouds of gas, preserving the universe from collapse.
It is possible that Dyson changed his mind about the survival of human consciousness, for he told science writer John Horgan in 2018 that his 1979 paper had become obsolete. Whether he gave up on his theory or not, one cannot help but wonder if existence as a thinking cloud of gas is all that desirable. We all know people for whom that is a fairly apt description, and no one wants to be them.
Roger Penrose has proposed a new model of the cosmos he calls “conformal cyclic cosmology.” In this model, the dying universe produces a singularity which gives birth to new universes, one after another. This is not unlike Einstein’s and Friedmann’s “oscillating universe,” only Penrose has found a way to preserve the accumulated data of previous universes in leftover cosmic microwave radiation.
David Deutsch of Oxford, a strong advocate of the “Many Universes Theory,” has written: “…unimaginably numerous environments in the universe are waiting out there … Almost any of them would, if the right knowledge ever reached it, instantly and irrevocably burst into … activity…”
Deutsch allows for no final “end of all things,” whether in the hellish heat death of the universe nor in a perfect heaven, for he rejects the idea of completion. Deutsch sees humanity forever at “the beginning of infinity,” which is the title he chose for his 2011 book.
Alan Lightman of MIT owns up to his longing for “eternal youth and constancy,” but calls himself “sentimental.” He writes, “Perhaps I could accept the fact that in a few short years, my atoms will be scattered in wind and soil, my mind and thoughts gone, my “I-ness” dissolved in an infinite cavern of nothingness. But I cannot accept that fate even though I believe it to be true.”
He accepts the fact but not the fate. Something in him, as in Penrose, Dyson, Susskind, and Deutsch – all eminently brilliant people – longs for meaning, “constancy,” eternity. “Accepting the fact” of universal futility does not exempt even a scientist from desiring something else. How odd that this desire, thought by Lightman to have no basis in reality, should be so universal. It has been experienced by people of every religion and by people of no religion throughout history.
One very old explanation for this universal longing, predating even the early theoretical “scientist” Democritus, is that the creator of the universe instilled a longing for eternity into the very fabric of humanity. Thus Solomon, nearly a millennium before Christ, wrote that God has “set eternity in the hearts of people.”
Eternity lies within us, which means that humans are bigger on the inside than on the outside. And because eternity is in our hearts, it doesn’t just call to us from “out there” but from “in here,” from the depths of our souls. We cannot escape it, not even if we are brilliant mathematicians or theoretical physicists, for we cannot escape ourselves.
The call of eternity rings within us, but it originates outside of us. It is our creator who places the call. If we will answer it and be connected to him, we will be connected to eternity, to meaning, and to the source of life itself.
This is the part of the Sermon on the Mount that people find most difficult, yet it yields great insights and real help for living the Jesus way in the world.
In ancient times, people had to decide which deity they would serve. There were many from which to choose. There was Yahweh the God of Israel, and the pantheon ruler Zeus, Egypt’s Amon-Ra, the fertility god Baal, the “detestable” Molech, to whom child sacrifices were made, and many more. The list of possible candidates was long.
The idea that one must choose between the gods is presented numerous times in the Bible. For example, Israel’s aged leader Joshua issued an ultimatum to his contemporaries: “…choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”
Other examples include the famous prophet Elijah’s challenge: “How long will you waver between two opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal is God, follow him.” To this challenge, we are told, “the people said nothing.”
In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul praises the Christians in Thessalonica who “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God.” In each of these situations, ordinary people came to a decision about which God they would trust and serve.
But the choice between competing Gods is only one aspect of the decision that needs to be made. It is not enough to say that this or that God will be my God; I must go on to relate to this God as Lord – the one whose authority I acknowledge. The decision now is not about which God I will serve, but whether I will serve him, or he will serve me.
This decision predates the other, for it predates the gods. The Bible tells how Adam, the most ancient of humans, chose. His was not a choice between the Gods, for there was then only one. The choice was between the one God and himself or, put differently, between going God’s way and going his own. He chose badly.
This archetypal decision is made by each succeeding generation, and by each person in every generation. Though universal, the actual moment of decision can pass unnoticed. Rarely does someone think, “I will choose myself over God.” Instead, they think, “I must do this; I have no other choice.” The mind has camouflaged the true nature of the decision.
There is a fascinating biblical account that sheds light on this. The nomadic Hebrew people had gone to Egypt for refuge during a time of famine and had remained there for hundreds of years. When societal sentiment and public policy turned against them, they left Egypt in one of history’s largest refugee flights. Poised on the border of “the Promised Land,” their newly installed leader Joshua had a God encounter.
On the eve of the Battle of Jericho, Joshua was alone when he met a soldier with a drawn sword. Being a man of extraordinary courage, he immediately approached the stranger with the challenge: “Are you for us or for our enemies?”
The stranger, it turned out, was no mere soldier but the “commander of the army of the Lord” and, quite possibly, the Lord himself. He answered Joshua, “Neither.” It seems that God was not on Israel’s side nor their enemy’s. The question, as Joshua learned, is not whether God is on our side but whether we are on his.
Joshua learned the lesson that everyone must learn. The true God will not serve us or our cause, no matter how just or noble. But we can serve him—or not.
Yet throughout history, people have tried to indenture God and claim him for their side. They have expected him to render service, as if they were the God and he were the servant. When he does not comply, they are reduced to using him as propaganda in their crusade.
This makes it difficult for people to believe. They suspect that the God about whom they have been told is a fiction, a propaganda tool, for the people from whom they have heard treat him that way. How will they believe otherwise until we who claim to believe start acting like we do?
I (Shayne) remember preaching through Matthew and coming to chapter 19 and the section on divorce. When I announced my text, and told people it was about divorce, you could hear a pin drop. I looked out to see friends who have been divorced dreading the condemnation they were certain was coming. But Jesus teaching on divorce is meant to spare us pain, not cause it. It fits directly into his brilliant instruction on the righteousness that surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees – the righteousness of the heart.
Only when we can pray, “Our Father,” from a full heart can we say truly, “Hallowed by thy name.” This message looks at hallowing the name of “our Father, the One in the heavens.”
Approximately 31 minutes. Text below.
You live in two worlds – maybe more – simultaneously. One is the real world, which God made, and sin marred. The real world is comprised of the sum total of all that is, from quantum physical processes to spiritual powers to hidden motives. The real world is where real things really happen.
But you also live in what the psychiatrist Jerome Frank in 1961 labeled an “assumptive world.” The assumptive world is the world that you assume exists. It overlaps with the real world on a great many points but diverges from it on others. God created the real world, but you created the assumptive world, as do each of us.
I’ll give you an example from real life. About 30 years ago, there was a pastor in Toledo who was loved and admired by his congregation. They considered him caring, hard-working (he was always on the go), and holy. Then, in a move that surprised everyone, even the pastor’s wife, he was arrested for bank robbery. It turned out that he had been robbing banks for a long while. In further revelations, people learned that he had a second life, including a second home and a second wife (or lover; I don’t remember which).
That congregation’s assumptive world included a pastor who was kind, caring, and hard-working, but the real world included an immoral, thieving, hypocrite and grifter.
When a person’s assumptive world – we all have one – collides with the real world, a person experiences all kinds of emotions: fear, despair, uncertainty, hatred, and more. Sometimes these emotions are so powerful that a person is incapable of carrying on their life and routine.
This is the case with many people who suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. When some trauma forces them to acknowledge that the world in which they thought they lived does not exist, they don’t know how to live. When they discover that they are not the people they assumed they were, they lose their identity.
The real world and the assumptive world are always scraping up against each other, though the result in not always so catastrophic. People who used to attend church stop doing so because their assumptive world has collided with the real world and has suffered damage. Some people stop believing in God because such a collision. Others change jobs, divorce, separate from parents, experience midlife crises, and so on.
In a head-on collision between the assumptive world and the real world, it is always the assumptive world that changes, not the real world. But that doesn’t mean that a collision between the two is always negative, or that the emotions it evokes are always painful.
The assumptive world of the disciple of Jesus is continually changing to become more like the real world. But remember that “real world” does not mean the world of the physicist or the politician or the philosopher – they all have their assumptive worlds too; it means the world as it really is—God’s world.
Psychologists think that a person’s assumptive world is designed to make them feel safe and worthwhile. They take for granted that collisions with the real world will cause pain and insecurity, and this is often the case. But the merging of the Christian’s assumptive world with the real world can be a source of joy, growing confidence, and insurmountable hope. Jesus’s teaching is intended to help his disciples enter the real real world – God’s world under God’s loving rule – with the result that their lives will be much better, full of peace and joy and love.
Jesus lived in the real world in a way that no one before or since has done. He invited people to enter that world with him by trusting him. But when we begin following Jesus, we bring our assumptive world – with all its false ideas and mistaken images – along with us.
That world needs to – and can – be carefully disassembled, false ideas and mistaken images removed, and rebuilt. By paying careful attention to Jesus, listening to what he says, watching, what he does, and obeying what he commands, we can do that. Our assumptive world will not perfectly reflect God’s real world in this lifetime, but we can make real progress in that direction, the direction of love, joy, and peace.
When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, many of us may experience a divergence of sorts between our assumptive world and the real world. Jesus tells us to pray, “Our Father in heaven” or, in a literal, word-for-word translation, “Father of us, the One in the heavens.” When we speak those words, there may be hidden deep in our assumptive world an image of God that can derail us right from the outset of our prayer.
Here is what I mean. When many of us read “in heaven” our minds assume – I don’t say we think it, but that we take it for granted, which is more problematic – that heaven is a long way off. So, if our Father is in heaven, he is an absent Father. Phrases like, “the highest heaven,” accentuate that image in our mind. Heaven is out there somewhere – maybe in the Pleiades, 135 parsecs, 444 light years away. If I did the math right, that is about 260 trillion miles. And the Pleiades are, cosmically speaking, on our side of town, even in our neighborhood. So, if God is in heaven, he must be a long way off.
That kind of mental image, present in so many of us, makes praying in faith almost impossible. A distant heavenly Father, like a distant earthly father, cannot be counted on. If God is way up there somewhere, I’m going to have to make it on my own. If that’s been part of my assumptive world all along, what’s the sense of praying? And doesn’t the prayer Jesus taught us reinforce that assumption?
It does not. In fact, it collides head on with that assumption. The problem for us is one of language and culture. For us, heaven is up there somewhere. It is a long way off. But the Jews did not think merely of heaven but of “the heavens.” When Jesus was on earth, they routinely spoke of three heavens, the first was the air around them, the second the sky above them, and the third God’s throne room that is over all.
“The heavens” start right here – in the air around me. To pray to our Father in the heavens is to pray to the God who is all around me. Yes, he is in the Pleiades and a thousand parsecs beyond, but he is also in the atmosphere that enfolds me. When I pray to “Our Father in heaven,” I am not sending up a flare hoping that the distant God who resides in the Pleiades might notice. I am speaking to the God who (in David’s words) is at my right hand and who hears my whispers. More than that, he hears my thoughts, for David said, “Before a word is on my tongue, you know it completely, O Lord” (Ps. 139:4).
To pray to the Father in heaven is to pray to the God in whom “we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28). To pray to the Father in heaven is to pray to the God who sees. The wise prophet Asa said, “For the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth, to show Himself strong on behalf of those whose heart is loyal to Him” (2 Chronicles 16:9). It is not that he might notice. He is watching.
When Hagar (the story is told in Genesis 16) was in trouble and utterly demoralized, God rescued her and her son. This is what she then understood about the Lord: “You are the God who sees me,” and that he saw her was a very good thing. People who are not burdened with sin and shame want to be seen.
The former Surgeon General of the United States, Vice Admiral Murthy, has said: “During my tenure as … surgeon general … the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.” The research firm YouGov has documented a surge in loneliness among people 23 to 38 years old, who are now 10 percent more likely to experience loneliness than their parents.
But if they could pray, “Our Father in heaven,” and understand it and mean it, their assumptive world would change. They would know that they are never alone. They would know that Isaiah was right when he said: “… you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I” (Isaiah 58:9). They will know that they are seen.
If we get right who we are praying to – “Father,” the one who loves us and is ready to help us – and get right where he is when we pray – not far away but with us, watching us, and listening for our call, like a dad with a beloved child – then we will get right the next line of the prayer: “hallowed be your name.”
The request, “Hallowed be your name,” expresses a desire to see God’s name honored, loved, and held in highest regard. We can pray this and mean it when we think so highly of God that we want everyone else to think of him like we do.
It’s like that with all the things we delight in: we want other people to delight in them too. If I love a book, I want you to love it too. If I eat at a restaurant that is off the charts good, I tell you all about it. If I think our Father in heaven is “greater than all” (as Jesus put it), I will want everyone else to think the same.
When a boy thinks his dad is the best and tells his friends about him, he is hallowing his dad’s name. If some kid then put his dad down, that boy will be deeply bothered and will object. He wants everyone to honor his dad.
So do we. We pray, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”
Christian Smith has done extensive research into the religious views of American teens. He has learned is that teens pray more frequently than we knew: 40 percent say they pray daily or more than once a day, and only 15 percent say they never pray. The numbers are encouraging, but there is a problem: the faith of many of these praying teens is sub-Christian.
Here is what some of them said about their prayers: “If I ever have a problem, I go pray.” “[Praying] helps me deal with problems. … it calms me down for the most part.” “Praying just makes me feel more secure, like there’s something there helping me out.” “I would say prayer is an essential part of my success.”
According to Smith, many young Americans pray to a “distant God” who asks nothing of them “because” – I quote – “his job is to solve problems and make people feel good.” No reverence. No repentance. “There is nothing here to evoke wonder and admiration.”[1] A faith that lacks wonder and admiration is not a Christian faith.
When C. S. Lewis learned that his mother was dying, he prayed for her healing, but she died. Years later, he wrote: “I had approached God, or my idea of God, without love, without awe, even without fear. He was, in my mental picture … neither … Savior nor … Judge, but merely … magician; and when he had done what was required of him, I supposed he would simply—well, go away. It never crossed my mind that the tremendous contract which I solicited should have any consequence beyond restoring the status quo.”[2]
The young Lewis prayed in a way that was similar to that of millions of American teens today. He became an atheist for the next two decades. I’m afraid that some of them will become atheists for the rest of their lives. But people who hallow God’s name – who think the world of God, want everyone to know him, and are grieved when he is dishonored – those people don’t become atheists. They become joyful, hopeful, and confident.
It has been said that until we truly long for God’s name to be hallowed – to be loved and treasured above every other name – “the human compass will always be pointing in the wrong direction, and individual lives as well as history as a whole, will suffer from constant …disorientation.”[3] Ours is a disoriented and disorienting world.
But we cannot hallow God’s name with words alone. St. Paul rebuked people who used words – they taught, preached, and told other people how to live – but whose lives contradicted their words. “God’s name,” he told them, “is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you” (Romans 2:24). Blasphemed, not hallowed, because their lives cancelled their fine words. That is the worst kind of “cancel culture.” We who were baptized in the Name, must not engage in it.
The opposite of hallowing God’s name is taking his name in vain. When I was a new Christian, I was under the impression that taking God’s name is vain was all about saying, “God” or “Jesus Christ” as a kind of a swear word, which happened often enough in my experience. But there are other, even more damaging, ways to take God’s name vain.
Using God-talk – whether with children, grandchildren, or other adults – as a tool to get people to do what you want is one. It is manipulative and, in the long term, always harmful.
So is using God’s name to try to convince people we are telling the truth. This happens when we say things like, “I swear to God.” I wonder if God sometimes says, “Hey! Don’t bring me into this!” Jesus warns us explicitly against doing this. He told us to let our yes be yes and our no be no. Anything beyond that comes from (and leads to) evil (Matthew 5:37).
I could list other ways to hallow or profane God’s name, but we don’t need a list. We need to become a certain kind of person—one who longs for our Father’s name to be hallowed.
For that to happen, we must encounter him for ourselves. People assume (part of their assumptive world) that such encounters almost never take place, and they shouldn’t expect one. But in the real world – God’s world – such encounters happen regularly.
And many people are committed to avoiding them. They know that such encounters would change their lives and so they fear them. They try to stay busy and always have a distraction at hand in case God should come too close. They don’t have time, they say, to read the Bible, though they spend hours watching TV and fiddling with their phones. Their prayers are like emails: they push “send” whenever they’re in trouble, but never check the inbox to see if God may be reaching out to them.
The truth is that a person can avoid God if they so choose … for a while. They can maintain the illusion that they are in control … for a while. They can so distract themselves that they hardly think of God and can quickly redirect their thoughts when they do. If I were to suggest to these people that they were avoiding God, they would deny it, but God knows and, deep down, I suspect, they know too.
The other side of all this is that people can find God if they so choose. God has set up the world in such a way that anyone who truly wants to find him will find him and those who want to avoid him can do so. (Hell, the outer darkness, is the final refuge for those who choose to avoid God.)
Encountering God doesn’t happen by accident, though. Listen to God’s word through Jeremiah: “You will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart. I will be found by you, says the LORD…” God will let you avoid him, but he will also let you find him.
J.P Moreland said, “God maintains a delicate balance between keeping His existence sufficiently evident so that people will know He’s there and yet hiding His presence enough so that people who want to choose to ignore Him can. This way, their choice of destiny is really free.”[4]
Seek him and you will find him. And when you do, you will discover that the awesome, powerful, all-knowing, joyful, kind God is your Father and that you are never alone. Then you will pray for his name to be hallowed.
One hint for you who seek (and seeking is a life-long occupation). You will need help. And you’ll have it. “Christ … suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God…” (1 Peter 3:18). He is the key. He not only knows the way to God; he is the way.
[1] Adapted from Tim Keller, Prayer (Dutton, 2014), page 294
The people of this generation are living through a sea change but as is often the case, those on the sea are liable not to notice it until it is too late. The term “sea change” has had two primary meanings. Shakespeare coined it in The Tempest to refer to a change wrought by the sea itself on the body of a shipwreck victim. Think of T. S. Eliot’s bone-picking undersea current in The Waste Land, and you will have the idea.
Today, the term has lost Shakespeare’s literalness. Instead of a change effected by the sea, it is used as a metaphor for a large scale transformation in culture or industry. The sea change occurring in the Western World – now spreading through the Majority World as well – is both. It is a large scale cultural transformation that is being propagated by culture itself – a culture that has been alienated from God.
Jesus predicted such a sea change in the week leading up to his execution. His words are both prophetic and ominous. He warned that a day was coming when “the love of most will grow cold.” Is this not occurring in our generation?
We are currently living in a culture of rejection. The traditional circles of belonging – family, religion, social clubs, friend groups – are breaking down. There are complex reasons behind this reality, rooted in a materialistic worldview that has emerged with the West’s rejection of religion generally and Jesus in particular. The trend has been further exacerbated by the digital revolution and by the pandemic.
The result is a spreading coldness that is hard to ignore. Respect for others, once considered a mainstay of civilized culture, has come to be seen as a weakness. Leaders are now expected, even required, to show contempt toward their enemies—and are celebrated when they do.
Family, which is the fundamental circle of belonging, has lost its cohesion. In 1950, 11 out of every 100 children born would become part of a broken family. By 2004, that number had risen to 60. In a study published by the National Library of Medicine, 89 percent of preadolescent children admitted to a hospital mental health unit “had some kind of disruption in their family structure.”
Vice-Admiral Murthy, who served as surgeon general of the United States under presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden, reported: “During my tenure as … surgeon general … the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.” That loneliness is a result of the social fracturing that continues to occur in our nation.
Dallas Willard rightly asked, “Could the epidemic of addictions and dysfunctions from which the masses suffer possibly be related to the fact that we are constantly in the presence of people who are withdrawn from us, who don’t want to acknowledge we are there and frankly would feel more at ease if we weren’t—people who in many cases explicitly reject us and feel it only right to do so?”
The loss of social cohesion seems to be accelerating. The idea that a person might enter a public building, even a school, and begin killing as many people as possible, including children, would have been unthinkable in 1950. Even America’s most infamous mobsters would have been morally outraged at the idea. But now it happens with mind-numbing regularity.
Is there any hope? Yes, but it will not be found in the bankrupt coffers of modern and postmodern philosophies. It will not be found in philosophies at all, whether irreligious or religious, for philosophies can at best explain the coldness of love; they cannot “warm it up.”
That happens in relationships, beginning in a relationship with the Creator, which alone can set us right. It then extends to relationships with family, friends, and society at large. A good place for this to happen is in the church where, allegedly at least, people have been connected to the life and love-giving God.
But churches must be more than entertainment venues or centers of religious instruction. Being the home of theological distinctives is not enough. Churches must become communities of love and belonging, centered around Jesus and apprenticeship to him.
How can the addiction to anger or to lust be broken? How can Christians experience the righteousness of the heart in these areas? We think through these questions based on Jesus’s extraordinary Sermon on the Mount.
The Way Home 