Text: Matthew 6:7–9
Preacher: Pastor Brian Sauvé
True Sons in a World of Bastards
In this sermon, I’m going to use a word that is an offensive word, and I want you to know that I am not using it to be inappropriately shocking, or as a kind of cheap rhetorical trick, but rather because it is a word that lives at the heart of what is wrong with us—of our unfulfilled longings and our dysfunction and our sin—and therefore a word that helps us understand the glory of God’s grace.
It’s the word “bastard.” Bastard just means fatherless son. And it’s a word that describes so much of our culture. Our culture is a bastard culture. It is a culture without fathers. It is a fatherless culture. And I mean that on many levels.
Ours is a culture with rampant fatherlessness—something approaching one in four children in the US are growing up right now without a father of any kind in the home. That’s nearly 20 million kids.
And this has massive implications for everything from health to crime to poverty to culture. Did you know that fathers being absent, even during pregnancy, increases the likelihood of miscarriage and negative health outcomes for mother and child? Children are twice as likely to die in infancy when the father is absent.
Children growing up in a female-headed households without father present are four times more likely to live in poverty than children of married couples in the same home. They are 280% more likely to deal drugs, far likelier to engage in criminality, and even twice as likely to become obese. Daughters of female-headed households without a father-presence are far likelier to engage in sexually promiscuous behavior. Is it any wonder that, as Paul writes in Romans, even our women have exchanged what is natural for that which is contrary to nature, consumed with passion for one another?
Now, it would be easy to make a mistake here, and say that this absenteeism is the illness of our culture. If we could get fathers back in the home, we’d fix all these symptoms. It would certainly help, but it would help in the way that Tylenol helps a fever associated with the flu. Tylenol suppresses symptoms, it might lower the fever, but it does nothing to treat the underlying illness.
The underlying illness of our culture—of which our absentee father issue is just a symptom—is the true Father hunger of a world of spiritual bastards. We are cosmically fatherless. Ours is a culture whose father is not the Father of lights, from whom all blessings flow. That that is the illness.
None of this is new, as if something went wrong in the 20th century. No, this cosmic fatherlessness is the arch-problem.
There are lots of ways that you can sum up the story of the Scriptures, but certainly one way is the war of two households and the rival fathers at the head of those households.
The first Adam is born from the dust at the hands of God the Father. Luke even describes Adam as the son of God in his genealogy of Jesus. But Adam rebelled against his Father at the tree, submitting himself rather to a false father, the Serpent, and failing his bride. All of his offspring on down the line—humanity itself—are born bastards, bastards with a serpent for a stand-in father.
That’s what fatherless sons do: They find stand ins. They’re always searching for father figures to be known by, affirmed by, to find their identity in, to belong (COULD RIFF HERE). But the problem is that humanity in that first Adam all end up embracing the Serpent as a stand-in somewhere down the line.
The Pharisees epitomize this bastard humanity, Jesus going so far as to tell them that their father was the devil, that they bore his family likeness.
But that’s where that household comes in—the other household that is at the center of the story of Scripture. The Second Adam, the Lord Jesus, leaves his Father’s house to win his bride back from the Serpent. Where the first Adam fell—at a tree—he stands. Where the first Adam failed his bride and submitted to the Serpent, the Second Adam won his bride at the cost of his blood, crushing the Serpents head and restoring a new humanity to the house of his Father.
Fatherhood is at the center of the cosmos—at the center of creation and eternity. Fatherhood is at the center of what has gone wrong with us, what we lack, and why humanity is wretched and miserable. And fatherhood is at the center of redemption, restoration, and glory.
All of this comes together in Jesus’ instruction to us this morning in Matthew 6, as he teaches us how to pray. Look there with me, if you would. This is the Word of the Living God:
“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this:
“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day 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 evil.”-Matthew 6:7–13
Thus ends the reading of God’s Word; may he write it on our hearts by faith.
We’ll be taking a few weeks to cover this teaching on prayer, because it is a section that is bursting with glory and help for us.
This prayer isn’t to be taken as the only possible prayer to pray—we could even fall into a kind of vain repetition with this very prayer. But rather, this prayer is like a model of what prayer is and is for and is to be. Charles Spurgeon, preaching on this very text, compared this prayer to a master architect’s scale model of a great palace: It teaches you how to build, but you wouldn’t live in it.
So it is with this prayer. This prayer teaches us how to pray all other prayers, even though it is not intended to be a kind of mantra that we superstitiously repeat without thought. So this morning, we will be focusing on the first three verses of what we read, verses seven to nine.
Against Bastard Prayer
Look back there with me, if you would, and Jesus will begin by telling us more about how not to pray.
“And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.” -Matthew 6:7–8
All of the kinds of prayer that Jesus warns us against—both in our text this morning and in last week’s text—has a common root: It is the prayer of spiritual bastards, not true sons.
Last week, he told us that we are not to pray like religious hypocrites—who pray to be seen and rewarded by the approval of men—but rather to pray to be heard and seen by our Father, to live for his reward. The religious hypocrite is praying like a bastard, not a son. Because he doesn’t really believe that he has a Father in heaven who loves him, knows him, and would delight to bless him, he settles for the impotent blessing of people like him. Father-hunger is the seed, bastard prayer is the fruit.
And in what we just read, we find that the pagan suffers the same problem in his prayer. He, too, prays—not as a son to a good Father—but like a bastard child of a piñata god.
A Piñata God
When you heap up empty phrases, repeat mantras, and think that you will be heard for your many words, you end up acting as if God is a piñata, and prayer is a stick. If I can just whack God with enough words, my requests will fall out.
This pagan prayer is not the prayer of a son who knows that his Father loves him, that his Father gives good gifts to those who ask. This repetitive, pagan prayer preaches that their gods are small gods, easily manipulated. Think of Elijah and the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18, for example.
You know, Elijah challenged the prophets of Baal to a contest of gods—whose God would consume a sacrifice on an altar more spectacularly and quickly. They danced around their altar, crying out, cutting themselves, doing anything to try and manipulated their little god into action.
And Elijah, who apparently didn’t take the course on niceness as the only acceptable outreach strategy from Lifeway, mocks them mercilessly. “Maybe your god is on the toilet? Just yell louder!” And then when Elijah’s turn comes, even though he makes his altar much less flammable, God immediately hears his simple prayer and melts even the stones of the altar.
Pagan prayer is full of repetition because it is the prayer, not of sons of a good Father in heaven, but of fatherless pagans, hoping to manipulate a piñata god into action.
Now don’t make an easy mistake, here: None of this is inconsistent with earnest persistence in prayer. In Luke 18, Jesus tells a parable to show us that we ought always to pray and not give up, a parable about an unjust judge and a persistent widow, who urges the judge day after day to grant her justice.
The judge eventually does, and Jesus point is to say, “…will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off?” The answer, of course, is no. It is ok, good, even, to pray earnestly and persistently for the salvation and justice of the Lord.
The problem is when we begin to believe that God is like a piñata, and prayer is like a stick, and that if we just pray the right words and pray them often enough, we can manipulate God into spilling out candy. No, even in our persistent prayer, we pray trusting that the promises of God are true, that he is working all things together for our good—that even his No! is a good and perfect gift to us.
Pray like you have a Father.
A Clueless God
The other problem that Jesus highlights is that pagans pray as if their gods were ignorant. Jesus says that we are not to pray like the pagans, “…for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
The pagans pray as if their gods don’t know what they need. The pagans pray to ignorant gods that need their followers to teach them and fill them in on what they lack. They pray to unsovereign gods. We pray to the God of Psalm 139:
“O Lord, you have searched me and known me!
You know when I sit down and when I rise up;
you discern my thoughts from afar.
You search out my path and my lying down
and are acquainted with all my ways.
Even before a word is on my tongue,
behold, O Lord, you know it altogether.
You hem me in, behind and before,
and lay your hand upon me.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;
it is high; I cannot attain it.
Where shall I go from your Spirit?
Or where shall I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there!
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!”-Psalm 139:1–8
True sons know that their Father knows them better than they even know themselves. The fatherless prayer is the one whose prayer preaches, “This god doesn’t know me or what I need or how to get it. I will instruct him.”
True Sons, Not Cosmic Bastards
Jesus says, rather:
“Pray then like this:
“Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.”-Matthew 6:9
We pray as sons. We pray, “Our Father…”
There is a mistake to be avoided here, a mistake which would rob this prayer of its glory—and that would be to think that all of mankind can pray this prayer. There is an idea that is common to the sort of new-age spiritualism in the air that we are all—that all of mankind in its present state—are sons and daughters of God.
Some even try to justify this from Paul’s words in Acts 17, where he preached to the unbelieving philosophers at the Areopagus that we are all offspring of God. But what Paul is talking about there is not the same thing as being sons of the Father. No, there, he refers to the fact that God is the God who made the world and everything in it.
Yes, we are all creatures created by God. But apart from Christ, mankind are not sons of God, but as Paul says in Ephesians 2:3, children of wrath.
So the question is obvious: How do children of wrath, sons of the Serpent, become sons of the Father? How can we pray “Our Father…”?
The glorious answer of the gospel is adoption. Listen to Paul in Galatians 4:4–7,
“But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.”
-Galatians 4:4–7
Because the Second Adam bore our sins on the tree, we can become adopted sons of God. The Father delights in us, because he looks on us in Christ. Listen: If you are a Christian, you can put your father hunger to rest, because you have a Father who delights to call you his.
Think about how comprehensive the love of the Father is for his Son. Just think back to his baptism in Matthew 4. As Jesus came up from the water, the Father showed that he was present by speaking, by sending the Spirit in the form of a dove on his Son. And not only was he present, but that he loves his Son. He said, “This is my beloved Son.”
And not only that he loved his Son, but that he was pleased with him. Christian, let this change how you pray, that when the Father looks at you, he sees his beloved Son, in whom he is well-pleased, and he hears you.
This little verse in Matthew 6, that we are to pray “Our Father…” points us to a truth so awesome and beyond comprehension that I would feel wrong to say it out loud if not for the clear teaching of the Scriptures: When we pray, we pray as co-heirs of the world with Christ. “So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God.”
Hallowing The Father
So when you pray, pray as a son and an heir, as children of our Father.
We don’t pray as spiritual bastards, but as sons. We don’t pray to a distant, cold, and fickle deity. We don’t pray to a piñata or to a clueless deity who doesn’t know us. No, we pray to a Father, a Father who knows us down to the number of hairs on our head, the span of our life, and the needs of our souls.
But lest we think that this Father is therefore to be trifled with, the very first thing we are to pray is that this Father would be hallowed—meaning that he would be venerated, worshiped, and held up as gloriously holy.
We begin our petition to this Father with the recognition that he is utterly holy, utterly set apart.
At the heart of the Fatherhood of God is a blazing, white-hot fire of holy purity. We are not to forget that we are praying to our Father in heaven, that is, our Father who is utterly and beyond our comprehension transcendent. He is not of earth, of dust, of contingent or created stuff. He is. He alone is in this way.
We are a profoundly flippant and casual people, and we are that way in part because we have defaced our sense of the divine, the transcendently dangerous. There is a famine of the fear of God in the land, we could say.
And so God is portrayed in movies as a casual gentleman, Morgan Freeman. God is portrayed in comedies and cartoons. The Lord Jesus would have us first reckon with this fact: There is nothing more dangerous, nothing more awesomely terrifying, than this holy Father.
Hallowed be your name, we pray.
And we pray this first because it is of first importance: If this Father were to be hallowed everywhere and by everyone, the world would be set right, because the root of all wrong is the unhallowing of this Father—meaning that everything wrong with the Universe is wrong somewhere along the line because something or someone is not properly oriented to the holiness of this Father.
We begin with the petition that the Father would jealously restore the hallowing of his name, that he would cut off all that would profane his name, because if that root were fixed, all else would as well.
This is a prayer that demands us to be a repentant people, and to be a continually repentant people. It is a prayer that demands that we stand before our Father both in awe of his love and in fear of his glory. Our Father has gravity. He is no trifling thing.
And as we stand in that place, as we pray again and again to our God in that spirit, we will find the deep satisfaction of having the love and approval of One whose love and approval is more worthwhile than any other thing.
Let me say it again, because I really don’t think we get this. I know I fail to get this over and over and over. When we go to our Father, we are not going to a dour, angry God. No! He has given his Son to make us sons! He has clothed us in white! He has washed us clean! He delights in his people!
Christian, when you sin, you go to a God who delights to cleanse you of that sin. Don’t hold back. Some of you are doing just that—you are standing far off, hoping to clean yourself up enough from the gossip, the laziness, the lust, whatever it is, in order to be ready to go to him.
That is exactly wrong. We go to him because he already approves of us, in order to help us become what we are. We go to him with our sin, we receive his discipline, not as if he were against us, but because we know that even his chastening is part of his love for us—proof of it, in fact!
Don’t dare not come. Don’t you dare hold back. Go to our Father with all that you have, all the you need, sin included—and wonder and glory in your grace-saturated reception at the Father’s hearth through the blood of the beloved Son.