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The sermon presents Christian sonship as a gracious relationship established through adoption and regeneration, not a universal status possessed simply by being created. God’s love is tender and sustaining, providing believers with assurance, provision, inheritance, access in prayer, and loving correction. This identity necessarily produces love for God, obedience, and concern for fellow believers and the lost. Those outside God’s family are urged to confess their sins and seek mercy through the blood of Christ.
Theological center: God is Father to believers not merely by creation but through adoption and new birth in Christ, witnessed by the Spirit of adoption.
Applications: Use Prayer Sincerely · Love and Obey God · Pray for the Lost · Confess Sin and Seek Mercy
Primary texts: Matthew 6:9 · Hebrews 1:5 · Psalms 103:13
“Our Father which art in heaven.” Matthew 6:9 I THINK there is room for very great doubt whether our Savior intended the prayer, of which our text forms a part, to be used in the manner in which it is commonly employed among professing Christians. It is the custom of many persons to repeat it as their morning prayer, and they think that when they have repeated these sacred words they have done enough. I believe that this prayer was never intended for universal use. Jesus Christ taught it not to all men, but to His disciples, and it is a prayer adapted only to those who are the possessors of grace and are truly converted. In the lips of an ungodly man, it is entirely out of place. Does not one say, “Ye are of your father, the devil, for his works ye do?” Why, then, should you mock God by saying, “Our Father which art in heaven”? For how can He be your Father? Have you two Fathers? And if He be a Father, where is His honor? Where is His love? You neither honor nor love Him, and yet you presumptuously and blasphemously approach Him and say, “Our Father,” when your heart is attached still to sin, and your life is opposed to His law, and you therefore prove yourself to be an heir of wrath and not a child of grace! Oh! I beseech you, leave off sacrilegiously employing these sacred words, and until you can in sincerity and truth say, “Our Father which art in heaven,” and in your lives seek to honor His holy name, do not offer to Him the language of the hypocrite, which is an abomination to Him. I very much question also whether this prayer was intended to be used by Christ’s own disciples as a constant form of prayer. It seems to me that Christ gave it as a model, whereby we are to fashion all our prayers, and I think we may use it to edification, and with great sincerity and earnestness, at certain times and seasons. I have seen an architect form the model of a building he intends to erect of plaster or wood, but I never had an idea that it was intended for me to live in it. I have seen an artist trace on a piece of brown paper, perhaps, a design which he intended afterwards to work out on more costly stuff, but I never imagined the design to be the thing itself. This prayer of Christ is a great chart, as it were, but I cannot cross the sea on a chart. It is a map, but a man is not a traveler because he puts his fingers across the map. And so a man may use this form of prayer and yet be a total stranger to the great design of Christ in teaching it to His disciples. I feel that I cannot use this prayer to the omission of others. Great as it is, it does not exp…