This is the eighty-second lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.
See Mel Lawrenz’s new book, Christmas Joy for Kids: A Devotional.
One day Jesus gave his disciples a model of prayer. This is life-changing prayer. Revolutionary prayer. Bold prayer.
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
Matthew 6:9-13
At the start, the Lord’s Prayer asserts the central truth that God exists, which remains, to this day, an answer to atheism.
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name . . .
The Lord’s Prayer begins simply: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name” (v. 9). Now you could say nothing more than that and have a belief system that fills in the deep cracks and fissures of atheism or materialism. Four truths:
- There is a God
- he is personal and benevolent
- he is above and apart from this finite world
- he is great and worthy of adoration.
By recommending that the disciples and you and I speak to God, Jesus is saying that you can trust that there really is a Creator who can hear the sound of your voice and who (amazingly!) wants to hear your voice.
Because this God is called Father, we know him to be very different from the impersonal cosmic force that some religions think God to be. God is different from the cosmos itself, which God created out of nothing and then shaped as a potter takes his clay and forms it according to the vision in his mind. This is a personal God, which means that God thinks and acts. God creates. God relates. A Father God has an implicit relationship with what he creates, especially the creatures he calls sons and daughters. This is almost too good to be true. We have not only a Master Designer, but the head of a human family. And, analogous to a good earthly father, God provides what he knows we need. God protects us and guides us.
God is in heaven, which is not, as some skeptics want to depict in simplistic terms, outer space. Back in 1962, the second Soviet cosmonaut to go into space thought he was making a strong anti-theistic statement when he said, “Some say God is living there [in space]. I was looking around very attentively. But I did not see anyone there. I did not detect angels or gods. . . . I don’t believe in God. I believe in man—his strength, his possibilities, his reason.” Major Titov thought that he had gone into heaven and found it to be the empty, dark space it appears to be from Earth, which is a little like a kindergartner living in Arizona taking one step outside the house and declaring, “There is no such thing as oceans.”
In 1968, the crew of Apollo 8, whose mission was to have the first human beings in history leave the orbit of planet Earth and travel a quarter million miles across the darkness of space and loop around the moon, radioed back to earth on Christmas Day the following message from the Bible’s opening words: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep” (Gen. 1:1-2, NASB).
Everyone I have ever talked to who remembered that broadcast from the moon’s orbit was deeply moved by it. For me, it was a moment when our highest scientific achievement to date was marked by the anchor point of all spiritual truth.
The God who is dwells in all places at all times. He touches our world and so our lives, but as heaven-dweller. God exists in dimensions beyond our sensible knowledge and beyond our imagining.
If you believe nothing more than that, then you are talking to a God who must be “hallowed,” which means to hold in the highest regard, to treat as holy and worthy of deep reverence. Atheism robs us of reverence. It says that the highest reality you can point to is yourself, which may seem like a compliment and a way of having nobility and dignity in life. But it is a bit like standing in a barrel and trying to lift yourself off the ground. If the self is the highest and holiest reality, then you either worship the self or you hold that there is nothing in the universe actually worth being worshiped.
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Mel Lawrenz (@MelLawrenz) trains an international network of Christian leaders, ministry pioneers, and thought-leaders. He served as senior pastor of Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, for ten years and now serves as Elmbrook’s minister at large. He has a PhD in the history of Christian thought and is on the adjunct faculty of Trinity International University. Mel is the author of 18 books, including How to Understand the Bible—A Simple Guide and Spiritual Influence: the Hidden Power Behind Leadership (Zondervan, 2012). See more of Mel’s writing at WordWay.
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