THE LORD’S PRAYER PART 8: THE FATHER NEVER LOSES A LIGHTNING BOLT!

Pray then like this: "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. 

–Matthew 6:9 (ESV)

    I was watching the movie Percy Jackson and the Olympians recently with my kids. The story goes that Zeus loses his lightning bolt and is threatening a war if it is not found. What strikes me is that, although great and powerful, these gods living in Olympus are also limited and flawed. Zeus, for example is limited by his omniscience, because he cannot find his lightning bolt and he doesn’t know who stole it! These gods are also lonely and want to be with humans. Some of them procreated with humans and sired demi-gods. And they are prohibited by Zeus to be with their children for fear that they will wish to become human in order to experience the love and affection of their human partner and children.

    Compared to the God of the Bible, these gods of Olympus are losers! Unlike Zeus, the Almighty God never loses a lightning bolt!

How great is God—beyond our understanding! The number of his years is past finding out.

He draws up the drops of water, which distill as rain to the streams; the clouds pour down their moisture and abundant showers fall on mankind.

Who can understand how he spreads out the clouds, how he thunders from his pavilion? See how he scatters his lightning about him, bathing the depths of the sea.

This is the way he governs the nations and provides food in abundance. He fills his hands with lightning and commands it to strike its mark.

His thunder announces the coming storm;  even the cattle make known its approach.

-Job 36:26-33 (NIV)

    Unlike Zeus, the Father loves his children and desires to gives them everything they need to live. The Father has given us the gift of prayer so that we can talk to him. Truly the greatness of our God is incomparable!

    The phrase “in heaven” is meant to communicate that the Father is far above us in majesty and greatness. It does not convey this erroneous concept that prayer is us talking to God who is far away. We think that there exists a great gulf of space between us here on earth and the God in the heavens. So our prayers must travel through this great distance. That's not the point at all.

    “Our Father in heaven”, it is a declaration of God’s greatness. Jesus is then teaching us that we approach the Father not just with affection but also with reverence because the Father is great and glorious. Be careful then to address the Father with a sense of familiarity. Also come to the Father in worship. Be in awe of his majesty. God is both personal and majestic! Our personal lives are finite, limited and weak. Our God is infinite, limitless, and powerful! God is personally concerned for us and treats us with love and compassion but we must never lose sight that He is the creator of the universe and that he is sovereign over all!

Great is the LORD, and most worthy of praise,  in the city of our God, his holy mountain.

-Psalm 48:1 (NIV)

For the LORD is the great God, the great King above all gods. Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker;

-Psalm 95:3,6 (NIV)

    I wrote earlier that my God never loses a lightning bolt! It serves as a personal reminder to me that I must avoid making God small when I pray. He is already great and glorious and does not need us to make him look greater. However, we must declare his true greatness as we pray. Far be it, that we limit him with our minds as we lift up our requests.

    How do we make God small in our prayers? In the book Knowing God, author JI Packer points out 3 ways :

1. Wrong thoughts about God.

"To whom will you compare me? Or who is my equal?" says the Holy One.

–Isaiah 40:25 (NIV)

    Sometimes our thoughts of God are too human just like how the gods of Olympus are portrayed in Greek mythology. This is where we go astray. Because we ourselves are limited and weak, we then imagine that God also must have weaknesses at some points. We think that he is much like we are and fail to truly grasp the reality of his infinite power and wisdom.

2. Wrong thoughts about ourselves.

Why do you say, O Jacob, and complain, O Israel, "My way is hidden from the LORD;  my cause is disregarded by my God"?

- Isaiah 40:27 (NIV)

   In suffering, we sometimes think that God has abandoned us and has not heard our prayers. JI Packer says [1],

“God has not abandoned as anymore than he abandoned Job. He never abandons anyone on whom he has set his love; nor does Christ, the good shepherd, ever lose track of his sheep. It is as false as it is irreverent to accuse God of forgetting, or overlooking, or losing interest in the state and needs of his own people. If you have been resigning yourself to the thought the God has left you high and dry, seek grace to be ashamed of yourself. Such unbelieving pessimism deeply dishonors our great God and Savior”

3. Our slowness to believe in God’s majesty.

Do you not know? Have you not heard?
The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.
He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.

–Isaiah 40:28 (NIV)

    This is a rebuke to us from God. He is saying how ignorant we are of him and how we are so slow to understand that that he is sovereign, all knowing, almighty, and limitless. Has he grown old or tired? Of course not! Therefore, let’s know the reality of the Father’s greatness as we pray. Let us remove from our thoughts anything that put limits on him. What a wonderful privilege it is to be children of the great, glorious, almighty, majestic God!

   There is no competition here – Zeus is a loser!

[1] JI Packer, Knowing God, pp. 78-79

Kids, Teens and Media Consumption

     The Kaiser Family Foundation recently released the results from a national survey of children ages 8 to 18 years old about their media use. Here's their findings :

Five years ago, we reported that young people spent an average of nearly 6½ hours (6:21) a day with media—and managed to pack more than 8½ hours (8:33) worth of media content into that time by multitasking. At that point it seemed that young people’s lives were filled to the bursting point with media.

Today, however, those levels of use have been shattered. Over the past five years, young people have increased the amount of time they spend consuming media by an hour and seventeen minutes daily, from 6:21 to 7:38—almost the amount of time most adults spend at work each day, except that young people use media seven days a week instead of five.

Moreover, given the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time, today’s youth pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes worth of media content into those daily 7½ hours—an increase of almost 2¼ hours of media exposure per day over the past five years.

The story of media in young people’s lives today is primarily a story of technology facilitating increased consumption. The mobile and online media revolutions have arrived in the lives—and the pockets—of American youth. Try waking a teenager in the morning, and the odds are good that you’ll find a cell phone tucked under their pillow—the last thing they touch before falling asleep and the first thing they reach for upon waking. Television content they once consumed only by sitting in front of a TV set at an appointed hour is now available whenever and wherever they want, not only on TV sets in their bedrooms, but also on their laptops, cell phones and iPods®.  

That is an astounding finding and yet not surprising. Here's how kids manage to do it today :



(Source : Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18 Year Olds)

   As parents, this is the challenge of our times. The world and its message is now at their fingertips. My response, as a father of two boys, is not to bar them from it but rather harness that technology to teach them about God.  I often ask myself how can these things bring God the glory and use that as the go/nogo test on whether to buy these things for them. Also, we keep a rule in the house that there is to be no Internet or TV during school days except for educational purposes (which is a rare occurence). On the weekends, they are given a block of time but I monitor what they watch or listen to throughout the day. I take advantage webpage histories and automated Windows Vista browsing history reports. Most importantly, I have regularly been teaching them that these must not be their idols. I am thankful to God that they have responded posivitely and understood  that they have freedom to use this technology but Daddy builds fences that protect their minds from  any bad influence.

   How about you? What are some of the protective fences that you have put on your children's use of media?

Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.  -Deuteronomy 6:5-9 (NIV)

  

THE LORD’S PRAYER PART 7: THE PRIVILEGE TO CALL GOD FATHER

    According to Scripture, there are two fathers and two kinds of children. God is the heavenly Father. This father is perfect and seeks the good of his children even when he disciplines them. Those who have the right to call him Father are those who are born again through faith in Jesus Christ. As a new creation, saved by grace through faith, the children of God delight in Him and cry out, “Abba, Father”! They follow God’s will and obey his commands. The other father is the devil. He is the father of those who want to carry out his evil plans. He is called the father of lies. This father is deceitful, enslaves his children, and leads them to destruction. There is no affection in this relationship but only fear.

   “By this it is evident who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not practice righteousness is not of God, nor is the one who does not love his brother.”

      – 1 John 3:10 (ESV)

    The Lord’s Prayer assumes that the petitioner has a relationship with the Father. This prayer is not for the benefit of the entire human race. It is of no benefit to those who do not believe. They are only empty words if uttered by one whose heart is not ruled by Jesus Christ. The Lord’s Prayer is exclusively for the children of God.

    When Jesus taught this prayer, he was making a radical departure from the religious tradition of that time. To refer to God as father was offensive, especially to the Jews. They threatened to take his life. They did not know him despite all the miracles Jesus had done. Jesus healed a paralyzed man beside the pool and yet they were angry at him for healing on a Sabbath.

    “This was why the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God.”

    -John 5:18 (ESV)

    This was all according to the purpose and will of the Father to the praise of his glorious grace. Through Jesus, we enjoy the blessing of adoption as sons and daughters of the Almighty God. It is by the grace of God, that we can address him as Father in prayer.

    So as we pray to the heavenly Father, let us remember that this privilege came at a great cost to himself. It truly is love so amazing.

    “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are….”

     - 1 John 3:1 (ESV)