Corporate Prayer Is an Affirmation of the Church

Confess your trespasses to one another, and pray for one another…

James 5:16a

This morning we look again at Westminster Larger Catechism Question 189, which asks, “What doth the preface of the Lord's prayer teach us?” It gives the answer, “The preface of the Lord's prayer (contained in these words, Our Father, which art in heaven,) teacheth us, when we pray, to draw near to God with confidence of his fatherly goodness, and our interest therein; with reverence, and all other child-like dispositions, heavenly affections, and due apprehensions of his sovereign power, majesty, and gracious condescension: as also, to pray with and for others.”

Last time we looked at how we should comprehend and be conscious of God’s majesty and God’s gracious condescension as we approach Him in prayer.  We ought to be thinking of both if our hearts are to rightly come into His presence as we lay before Him our petitions.  That our God is majestic in His being, and so in all of His attributes.  He is high and lofty in the royalty of His holiness, infinitely above the greatest person who has ever lived.  His glory shines so bright that it would blind us instantly if He were to manifest a small portion of it to us even for a moment.  Our God transcends all categories and all degrees of greatness and magnificence.  Yet at the same time, this infinitely glorious and awesome God graciously condescends to receive the prayers of the lowliest sinner, if only he would humble himself and come to Him by the blood of Christ, trusting in Jesus alone for his audience before God.  This is what the preface to the Lord’s Prayer teaches us about the God to whom we pray.

But there is one final thing the divines note about this preface that would be easy to miss, for it is found in the use of one word: our.  When the disciples asked, and when Jesus taught them to pray by giving them The Lord’s Prayer, He did not begin the prayer by saying, “Now when you pray, say ‘My Father who art in Heaven,’” which He would have done if prayer was to mostly be an individual exercise.  But instead He began the model prayer with the word “our.”  Jesus taught them, and therefore us to pray by saying, “When you pray, say: ‘Our Father who art in heaven…’” (Luke 11:2).  In any language we can only rightly say “Our Father” when we are speaking as group of at least two people before God. 

This instruction through the use of the single word “our” was intentional by Jesus for two reasons.  First, because when Jesus prayed, He used the phrase “My Father.”  In fact, in the New Testament, Jesus uses the phrase “My Father” to speak of or to pray to God over fifty times!  But Jesus never taught once the individual Christian to say to God “my Father.”  This is because Jesus has a unique relationship to God the Father that we do not.  Jesus is God’s Son by nature.  He is the monogenes – the only-begotten Son of the Father.  As embodied in the Nicene Creed, Jesus is of “one substance with the Father.”  The Father did not make the Son.  The Son always was, even as the Father always was. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father, as His “exact representation” (Hebrews 1:3 NAS) of Himself.  His glory IS the Father’s glory.  His wisdom IS the Father’s wisdom.  His might IS the Father’s might.  He is “very God of very God.”  In this sense Jesus can say “My Father” and we cannot.

Yet the second reason Christ instructs us to pray “our Father” is because God desires us to pray with and for other Christians.  Christ died so that God could become “our Father.”  God adopts the Christian in Christ, making him who was a child of the devil a child of God.  This act of adoption occurs the moment a person truly believes in Christ for salvation. God really is the Father of the Christian now and forevermore.  But Christ did not die to save individuals in their solitariness, He died to make many people the one family of God. We are family—we, the many are His one Church. We are one nation, one people, one house, one vineyard, one flock, one tree, one bride.  And we live in a place where sin, Satan, the world, and our own flesh oppose us.  We have God’s Word and God’s Spirit to aid us, but this aid is given in the form of differing fruits and gifts given to each to benefit the whole.  Therefore, we should always seek to pray with and for other believers, for we are in this together, and God would help us and see us helped together.