//Luke 11:1-4 | Andrew Lundy

(Pt. 2 from the series "Teach Us To Pray")

Think about the way you open your prayers. All of us tend to do it a little differently. But Jesus used very specific words in the opening of the Lord’s Prayer that has deep meaning attached to it: “Our Father in Heaven”. This opening is not a strict formality, nor some secret formula, but a spiritual foundation for our prayers. Our prayer life is fundamentally connected to what we believe about the truth that God is our FATHER. This is a fact based on theological truth, not a feeling. We were once children of wrath, but have now been born again as children of God. He became man in the form of Jesus Christ, that we might be enabled to be sons and daughters of God. This important truth is the foundation of our formation. It informs why we pray. Not to get the attention of man or the affection of God, as the hypocrites and heathens do in Matthew 6. We already have God’s attention and affection in abundance as His beloved children, and we pray knowing that truth. It also transforms how we pray. We must become like children to enter the Kingdom, something the world tends to beat out of us. We should pray to our Father thankfully for all He’s done, confidently because of His character, dependently in our need, and honestly as we are. And it also reforms what we pray. We don’t always know what to pray as we should, so the Spirit makes intercession for us. The Lord Jesus balances out our petitions to God with praise for Him and forgiveness from Him. When we pray knowing God as our Father, we are home with Him.