Here's my May magazine article:
Ascension Day, forty days after Easter, is on 13th May this year and it again marks the start of the 11-day global prayer movement called 'Thy Kingdom Come'. The title is taken from the Lord's Prayer, the prayer that Jesus taught his followers as a pattern for our praying as well as a prayer that we can make our own. The familiarity of that prayer means that we can lose sight of the radical nature of what we are praying for, and perhaps the most radical part of the prayer is the most over-looked: the opening two words - “Our Father.”
Our Western civilisation is so saturated in Christian thought that it is quite natural to think of God as 'Father'. However, this is unknown in Greco-Roman culture and unthinkable in Islam (hence the famous account of Bilquis Sheikh's conversion from Islam to Christianity entitled “I dared to call him Father”). Even in the Old Testament, God is the Father of the nation of Israel, and only of certain special individuals such as David. Conversely, the Christian-soaked Western world takes the idea of the Fatherhood of God too far the other way: as God is the Creator and originator of everything, the thinking goes, every human is therefore a child of God.Jesus' radical message saves us both from a distant deity and from a conception of our position as God's children that is so wide that it becomes meaningless. John's gospel opens by telling us that Jesus would be rejected by many “Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12). Paul tells the Christians in Galatia: “you are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26 New King James Version) and “God sent forth His Son...to redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the adoption as sons...Therefore you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son, then an heir of God through Christ” (Galatians 4:4-7 NKJV).
These verses tell us important things. Firstly, only those who believe in (in the sense of putting their faith and trust in) Jesus are truly children of God. Secondly, adoption as a child of God is a result of redemption, i.e. by repenting of our sins in the faith that Jesus' death has paid the penalty for those sins. Thirdly, we are adopted as sons. This last point seems to be sexist, and indeed most modern translations of the Bible in these verses will render the Greek word 'son' as 'child'. However, Paul deliberately uses the word 'son' for a particular reason: in the society of his day only males could inherit, so Paul wants us to understand that those who are adopted as God's sons will share in everything the Father has. This distinction might also help us today for though it could be said that by virtue of being created by God we are all children of God, only those who are redeemed are sons of God and thus inherit the kingdom / salvation / eternal life.
The Lord's Prayer is therefore a family prayer – the prayer of those who have been adopted as God's sons through faith in Jesus. Can you truly say that prayer as part of that family?
