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The Sunday of the Good Shepherd Mannum Retreat May 6-7, 2006 Luke 11:1-13; Introduction to the Lord’s Prayer (the prayer that our Good Shepherd taught us) God would by these
words tenderly invite us to believe that He is our true Father and we are His
true children, so that we may with all boldness and confidence ask Him as dear
children ask their dear father. In the name of Jesus, our Good Shepherd. Amen. Have you ever found yourself stewing about some problem, maybe for hours or days on end, just worrying about it, constantly turning it over in your mind – but forgetting to pray?! Forgetting to take it to the Lord in prayer? I tend to be a bit of a ‘worry wart’; I’ve caught myself doing that a number of times recently. Then at last these words of the catechism come back to me and I say to myself ‘you silly ass’ and pray about it. That immediately removes the worry, and often it’s not long before the problem’s solved. Many of you will remember the Peanuts cartoons about Charlie Brown and his friends. In one of these cartoons you see Linus and Lucy at their desks in school. They’ve just got their tests back. Linus says to Lucy: “I worried and worried about this test’. Lucy asks him: ‘What did you get?’ Linus answers: ‘I got an A. I wasted a good worry!’ How often haven’t you and I wasted a good worry! We know the prayer our Good Shepherd taught us as ‘The Lord’s Prayer’. In German it’s called the ‘Our Father’ – a lovely way of looking at it. In Luther’s introduction to the Our Father, we find the most winsome invitation to take all our worries to our heavenly Father in prayer. Here Luther portrays the Father ‘tenderly inviting us’ – coaxing us like children to stop our worrying and trust Him. He is graciously coaxing us to come to him, place our full confidence in Him. By giving us this prayer, Jesus is coaxing us to believe that his God is also our God, his heavenly Father is also our heavenly Father - a Father who’s absolutely well-disposed towards us. We pray the Our Father in Jesus’ name, by virtue of his suffering and death for us (Gal 2:20) and his resurrection to bring us justification and life. So we mustn’t be afraid of our heavenly Father, we mustn’t shrink from him in fear, overcome by a sense of our unworthiness and His holiness. No, we can approach the throne of grace with all the childlike confident faith of a son or a daughter. Let’s hear how the NT encourages us to get over our fears and pray like children: Romans 8: For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back again into fear; but you received the Spirit of sonship, in which we cry ‘Abba, Father. The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are God’s children; and if children, also heirs – heirs of God, fellow-heirs of Christ, since we suffer with him in order to be also glorified with him. Galatians 4: Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts crying: “Abba Father”. So you are no longer a slave but a son; and if a son, then also an heir through God. Ephesians 3: For this reason I bow my knees to the Father, from whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named. These words inspired the writer of hymn 893: “Our Father, by whose name all fatherhood is known; in love divine you claim each family as your own”. 1 John 3: See what amazing love the Father has given us, that we should be called God’s children, and we are! [yes, the unbeliever that still lives in our hearts has a hard time believing this, so St John repeats it, he reinforces it]. Our Father is our Father in heaven. He combines fatherly love with heavenly power. Matthias Claudius wrote: When we pray the Our Father, we are overwhelmed by the reminder that He’s our own good and gracious Father, but at the same time we see the majesty of the One who is the Lord over all. He has his right hand over the sea stretching out to the end of the world, and his left hand full of salvation and goodness, and the mountain tops all around him are full of smoke. I’m reminded of all this, and then I begin to pray: “Our Father, who art in heaven”. Then we go on to pray that our Father’s name will be hallowed, his kingdom come, and his will be done. All these great things happen when our heavenly Father gives us his Holy Spirit. To pray for the gift of the Spirit is the greatest and highest thing we can pray for (Luke 11:13). When our Father pours out his Spirit on us, our families, our churches, our synod, then his name is hallowed, his kingdom comes and it grows, and his good and gracious will is done. So in the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father, we bring all our spiritual worries to our powerful Father in heaven. We pour out our hearts before him on behalf of ourselves, that we’ll be filled with the Spirit, and on behalf of our loved ones that the Spirit will work in their hearts, and on behalf of God’s dear church here and everywhere. As we prepare for the General Pastors’ Conference and the synod: Remember the first three petitions. Rather than worrying, rather than placing confidence in human politicking, above all we pray that God’s name and God’s Word may be hallowed among us in the LCA, that we all may be filled with his Holy Spirit so that we believe His holy Word and lead a godly life, here in time and hereafter in eternity. Pray these petitions of the Lord’s Prayer daily or even more frequently. The other petitions follow, as we cast all our cares on our Father: (Father, give us this day our daily bread,…). I would like to conclude by quoting a letter from Martin Luther to his wife, Katie. This was his second-last letter to Katie. It was written eight days before his death. With her husband in poor health, far from home, and burdened with the task of reconciling the counts of Mansfeld, Katie, from a human point of view, had good reason to worry! Here is the letter: To Mrs Martin Luther, February 10, 1546: To the holy lady, full of worries, Mrs. Catherine Luther, doctor, the lady of Zoelsdorf, at Wittenberg, my gracious, dear mistress of the house: Grace and peace in Christ! Most holy Mrs. Doctor! I thank you very kindly for your great worry which robs me of sleep. Since the date that you started to worry about me, the fire in my quarters, right outside the door of my room, tried to devour me; and yesterday, no doubt because of the strength of your worries, a stone almost fell on my head and nearly squashed me as in a mouse trap. For in our toilet mortar has been falling down for about two days; we called in some people who merely touched the stone with two fingers and it fell down. The stone was as big as a long pillow and as wide as a large hand; it intended to repay you for your holy worries, had the dear angels not protected me. Now I worry that if you do not stop worrying the earth will finally swallow us up and all the elements will chase us. Is this the way you learned the Catechism and the faith? Pray, and let God worry. You have certainly not been commanded to worry about me or about yourself. “Cast your burden on the Lord, and he will sustain you”, as is written in Psalm 55 and many more passages. Our deliverance from evil begins and ends with faith. It begins with faith in our heavenly Father. And it ends with the sure and confident Amen: What does Amen mean? That we may be certain that these petitions are acceptable to our Father in heaven and heard, for he himself has commanded us so to pray and has promised to hear us. Amen, amen, that is Yea, yea, it shall be so. In Jesus’ name. Amen. Dr Greg Lockwood |