Connect360: Praying Like Jesus

• Lesson 6 in the Connect360 unit “Kingdom Power: The Sermon on the Mount” focuses on Matthew 6:9-15.

The invocation is a summoning of God to receive our prayer as well as an invitation from him for us to join him. We begin with the privilege of calling God our Father. What an incredible privilege.

First, we find the plural pronoun—“our.” Of course, Jesus has a special relationship with the Father since he is the only One called monogena, or only begotten Son in John 3:16. Yet, he invites us to join with the cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 12:1, including those throughout the past generations as well as all who call on him from around the world.

We all are part of the body of Christ. I do not believe in lone ranger Christians. A foot by itself is worthless. Just as a body consists of many members, this is also true of the body of Christ. All Christian believers are one in him. When we pray, we join with others from every nation, tribe and ethnicity as brothers and sisters.

Calling God “our Father” may be a privilege we take for granted since this has been our practice for a lifetime. Yet it sounded like heresy for those who first heard Jesus. “For this reason, therefore, the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he not only was breaking the Sabbath, but also was calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God” (John 5:18).

In the Old Testament God was referred to as “Father” only 13 times, yet Jesus referred to God as “Father” more than 150 times. The only time Jesus prayed to God without calling him “Father” was on the cross, when Jesus cried out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46)

Jesus said to call out, “Our Father.” The Aramaic word for father is abba. Just as a young child first cries out abba—“dada” or “daddy”—Jesus has given us the privilege of calling out to God as one who would call out to his own father.

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