We are made sons through Jesus.  We are made sons by faith.

And now, how should this Fatherhood affect our prayers?  We shall come with hope and familiar confidence, for ’your heavenly Father knoweth what things ye have need of.’  Does a father love to have his children about him?  Does a child shrink from telling its wishes to a father?  Also we must bend our wills to His—­to a Father.

Contrast that conception with the ideas of God which we are all tempted to cherish, the slavish one which dwells upon the gulf between God and man, with the cold deity of ‘natural religion,’ with the Epicurean notion of Him which divorces Him from all living interest in His creation.

Contrast it with the ghastly image which our consciences and our fears frame, the heathen notion of an avenger and cruel.  We do not need to seek to avert His anger.  This mighty word shatters all cowering terror and abject prostration.

And it is a vow as well as an Invocation, binding us to supreme love to Him, to obedience to Him, to moral conformity with Him.  Be ye perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.  The noblest prayer is ’Abba, Father.’

II.  The loftiness and perfectness of that divine Name.

‘In heaven.’  Not fact, but symbol, to express His exaltation above the earth, and so suggesting all ideas of remoteness from creatures, from earth’s limitations and conditions, changes and imperfection, and showing the gulf between man and God.

1.  The thought that He is in heaven deepens our reverence, love casting out fear, but making us more lowly.  It leads to familiar yet awe-stricken approach.

2.  It exalts the preciousness of the Fatherhood, as being free from all weakness and all change.  It reveals a better Father than we can know here; one not narrow of view, infirm of purpose, weak in tenderness, bounded in power.  As the heavens stretch calm and serene above us, far from all our trouble and noise, unvexed, pitying, and dropping rain and dew on earth, so is He.

3.  It draws our hearts and hopes to our Father’s home.

4.  It delivers us from worship of the visible and from worship by means of the visible.  So the Name guards against placing stress on externals and secondary forms, places, times of worship.

III.  The Community of Brotherhood of the Worshippers.

Our Father.

1.  All true enjoyment of blessings depends on our being willing to share them.  To keep for ourselves is to lose.  We enter by faith into a great community.

2.  The effect of this on our prayers:  to destroy their selfishness.  We bow to Him of whom the whole family is named.

3.  Effect on our lives.

Dare we rise from our knees to plan and plot for ourselves?  How we are tempted to forget our brotherhood in personal animosities, vanity, and self-interest, competing with others!  Our differences of ideas arising from differences of race, training, occupation, country, fling us apart.  Our differences of wealth and position alienate us.  Our differences of conception of Christianity often separate and embitter us.  But do these not crumble when we say ‘Our Father’?