Our Father in Heaven

I find great encouragement from the Lord's Prayer to give shape to my own prayers. Rather than just a rote prayer, Jesus gave us the Lord's Prayer as an outline to teach us how we should pray. When we pray through the Lord's Prayer, phrase by phrase, we understand how God is leading us to pray.

The opening phrase, "Our Father in heaven" is a powerful reminder and truth of the personal access we have to God through our prayers.

During the Apollo space missions to the moon, there were long, uncomfortable periods of silence while the astronauts vanished on the far side of the moon during each orbit. Every period of silence was tense with concern something had happened.

There was a BBC article a few years ago that described a NASA plan to cut off all communication with the astronauts in the event of a failure to return from the moon.

NASA confirmed that extensive plans were laid in case Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, the first two men to walk on the moon, were unable to return home.

With no rescue mission planned, their radio contact with Earth would have been switched off and they would have been left to die.

President Richard Nixon even had a speech prepared for the watching world if the Apollo 11 lunar landing module could not take off from the moon's surface. Thankfully they safely returned to Earth.

Apart from Christ, that is the situation a person is in. Because of sin, there is a separation that is impossible to cross and communication that has been damaged by sin.

The start of the Lord's Prayer, "Our Father", is the wonderful news that 1. Peace and rescue has been made possible by Jesus, and 2. We have immediate and ongoing contact with God through prayer.

Every time we pray, every moment we come to the Lord in prayer we should be reminded of the permanent access we have with our Father because of Jesus' death and resurrection.

The access we have to the Father is not a waiting list, or an unreliable connection. Because of Jesus we have access to the Father, immediate access. To understand the devastation of sin is to recognize the insurmountable separation that is caused.

Through Jesus we are no longer isolated from God but the blood of Jesus has brought us near to God. It is Jesus that made it possible to pray and to pray "Our Father."