This article was written by Rose Lynas our resident theologian:) Hope it helps you think of healing not simply as a dimension of ‘the now and not yet’ or a guarantee of the atonement but as the overflow and expression of the nature of God.
Have you ever prayed “The Lord’s prayer,” the prayer Jesus taught His disciples? Most of us could recite it with little effort at speed, almost as one long word, the religious version of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. But do we consider, do we really believe, the words that so easily trip out of our mouths. This prayer condenses the entirety of the “good news” into about sixty words! Beginning with the very first words it speaks out another reality - explosive, scandalous, impertinent, wonderful, animated, awe-full, abundant, life. “Our Father…” Children understand who they are, their identity is shaped, in relation to, and in relationship with, their parents. So getting to know “Our Father” is a big deal! As we soak in Our Father’s character, so ours will be shaped and renewed. It may sound rather self-serving, but this is one of the incredible Gospel truths that confounds our sensibilities by its selfish generosity – God desires us to know Him so that we can become all that we can be. This prayer is an invitation to a lifetime of discovery, of God, of ourselves, of our world. It encourages us to keep moving; it orientates and inspires us for our ever onwards and upwards journey into God, and towards our neighbours. We desire to know Our Father, to be like Our Father, and for a fatherless world to see Our Father. Our Father is not concealed behind or restricted to the words that we pray. But the Word became our flesh and blood and moved into our street; with our own eyes we saw the very same awesomeness of Our Father in His Son, Our Saviour, Priest and King. So whatever ministry we are involved in, our longing is the same: that all will encounter the Kingdom and the King, and be so bowled over by the experience that they will choose to continue further into Our Father and wholeness. Let me introduce you once again to Our Father, describe something of the indescribable, of His earthed transcendence, so that you too might see and be transformed by and for His glory. You will understand the absurdity of this task, but we are forever fresh-born children, are we not, eager to engage in this wonderful dance with Our Father? 1.Our Father of Abundance Our Father is a God of the most reckless, superfluous abundance. He is a God of more than we need. Indeed, many of us are offended by God’s generosity, offended by His seeming carelessness with resources. We don’t get that our God is a God of limitless resources; there is always more. We need to allow His character to invade our meanness. God is not scared of running out so He continues to bless a world that is turned away from Him. The abundance of His divine nature overflows so that all may experience something of the goodness of the Kingdom of God. This is what we want people to experience as they engage with us in whatever capacity (in our services or on the streets), this abundant goodness that spills out and blesses even those who as yet reject Our Father and the King. All can experience this “common” grace, can experience the life of the Kingdom, the benefits of the atonement, the love of God without any Kingdom commitment. This is the ultimate “try before you buy”! Of course we do not want people to stay on the edge, living on the scraps. We desire them to enter in and feast, but they are still invited to sample, and a Heavenly sample is no mean dish. There is a traditional Jewish Passover song called Dayenu, “it would have been sufficient. ” A sample verse goes like this, “Dayenu, it would have been sufficient. If He had brought us out of Egypt, and had not carried out judgements against them.” YHWH is not a God of sufficiency, but of more than sufficient. He always desires to give, and for us to receive, more. One of Israel’s poets pictured it forth this way, “The time is surely coming, says YHWH, when the one whoplows shall overtake the one who reaps. And the treaderof grapes the one who sows the seed; the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills will flow with it. I will restore the fortunes of my people Israel, and they shall rebuild the ruined cities and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and drink their wine, and they shall make gardens and eat their fruit. I will plant them upon their land, and they shall never again be plucked up out of the land that I have given them says YHWH your God.” (Amos 9:13-15) God wants us to get to the point where there is so much that creation cannot contain it. Harvest on top of harvest, more on top of more. Unmanageable abundance. We don’t have to worry about spending God – no one who asks will need to be turned away because God has reached His limit. His abundant love knows no bounds. 2. The Presence of Our Father Our Father’s abundance is, in fact, too much for creation to bear, and so in His abundant mercy He hides something of Himself allowing us to catch up slowly. In Exodus 33 Moses asks to see God, to see God’s glory, the abundance of His character. But God’s glory, His face, His presence is an awe-full reality, one that Moses cannot see and live. God’s presence is potent. While Moses cannot look at it directly, he knows that it is futile, foolish and deadly, to attempt to live anywhere but in God’s presence, because only here is there life, abundant life. God says to Moses, “’My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.’ And he [Moses] said to him, ‘If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here.’” (Exodus 33:14-16) We should not try to operate outwith God’s presence, or perhaps more accurately, buy into the lie that that is possible. A wonder-full event takes place as we move into the New Testament. God in the person of Jesus allows His glory, His presence to be enfleshed. Although our eyes have yet to become accustomed to the light, we can now look at, and begin to make out Our Father’s face. And to crown it all He has named us as His temples, from which His glory, His presence will shine. When we look into Our Father’s face we will see His delight in us, His children. Do you know His delight? God’s presence, His Spirit that empowered Jesus to do Kingdom business, that raised Him from the dead, is that which is in us, royal priests and priestesses of the Kingdom, sons and daughters of the King. Where-ever we go, so goes God’s presence, the life-source that animates the cosmos! Who-ever we speak with, touch, pass-by, experiences something of its potency. The presence of God is so powerful in His human temples that people could touch the hem of Jesus’ garment (Mark 5:28ff), stand in Peter’s shadow (Acts5:15), touch Paul’s hankerchief (Acts 19:11-12) and be healed! Our only concern is to remain in Him so that He can remain in us, and flow out of us for a broken world. Rest in the presence of Our Father, gaze at His gloryuntil you see reality as it really is; then go into a world that desperately needs to see Our Father. 3. Our Good Father “Good” sounds a bit anaemic these days. Good is just “good enough”. For something that is truly good we use words like excellent, amazing, superb. It is time to reclaim the supreme goodness of good. One of the characteristics of Our Father is His goodness. “O give thanks to YHWH, for he is good; for his steadfast love endures forever.” (Psalm 107:1) God’s goodness is demonstrated through abundant, persisting love, mercy, patience, justice, and so much more. We never have to doubt nor should we limit God’s goodness. Good is as good as it gets! In the face of the immense pain in our world it is, at times, easy for satan to persuade us to doubt God’s goodness, to question His love, to deny that He is just. Contrary to what we see we declare that God is good all the time, that the current condition of the world is no measure of God’s goodness. Because God is good we can state emphatically that anything that is not good - sickness, loneliness, debt, relationship breakdown - does not come from him. That God can bring anything positive, even beautiful, out such darkness is a clear sign of His goodness, but it does not follow that he likes or even causes it. We know what God’s desire is “now” by looking at the goodness of the “not yet” – no tears, no death, no mourning, no crying, no pain (Rev. 21:4). God’s goodness is best seen in the good news of Jesus’ Kingdom manifesto. The Kingdom of God is near – heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. In other words, include the excluded, promote the least, love the despised, free the oppressed. Our Father’s goodness seeks to turn our upside-down world right-side-up. And He is Good now; this is the Good News that we proclaim. God’s good future has come to meet us in the present transforming a tired creation before our very eyes…because Our Father is good. 4. Our Faithful Father Our Father is faithful to His word, to His promises because He cannot but be faithful to His character. When we pray in faith we are praying not out of our lack of faith but into His perfect faithfulness. His abundant, perfect faithfulness stretches across time and space and “more than enough” meets our deficiency. We know that God will be faithful to all that He has said, and is saying. Each of us has a Kingdom commission upon our lives, to faithfully, in faith, live out the reality of the Kingdom today, expecting to see more daily. 5. Our Just Father C. S. Lewis in his last novel, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold captures the essence of the human dispute against (G)od, and the only true, if difficult, response: “Are the gods not just?” “Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?” If the gods, if God was only just, what indeed would become of us? All of us are happy for God to be just when we have been wronged, but what about when we wrong others either by our action or inaction? Many find Our Father’s Old Testament image, as it has been too frequently caricatured, difficult to deal with. They prefer His New Testament depiction, again misrepresented. This distorted understanding of Our Father rejects the so-called God of justice (aka nasty God), preferring the God of love (aka nice God). This is not only a false reading of God, but a false rendering of justice. In the words of G. M. Hopkins’ poem, As Kingfishers Catch Fire, “the just man justices.” In light of our wicked world we must be thankful that a just God cannot but “justice”…but He is, thank God, not confined to “just” justice. Our Father loves justice (Psalm 33:5); Jesus’ manifesto is all about and for the least, those who have been excluded from society, treated unjustly. Our Father’s goodness, abundance, faithfulness, renewing presence, is contingent on His justness, and visa versa. We cannot select only the bits that suit us, either to praise or emulate. In Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe Lucy frolics with Aslan after he has arisen from the dead, but she can’t decide, “whether it was more like playing with a thunderstorm or a kitten.” So too with God; in fact both are true. God is both intimate and friendly, transcendent and awful. This is what makes God God. The Kingdom of God, and its effects, is predicated on the character of God. God cannot but be God; be and do as God is. The Kingdom reflects the very nature of the King, and while He is not safe, He is good. We must trust His abundant, good, glorious, good justice; trust Our just Father whether His justice appears to us fair or unfair, gentle or ruthless. Remember that while we pray “Thy will be done,” He in turn permits, for a time, “Thy will be done.” 6. Our Father of Wholeness The trajectory of God’s Kingdom is Shalom, wholeness. We don’t know what this wholeness will look like but we do know that it will exceed all our expectations. As the Kingdom breaks into our world we get to experience something of this wholeness now. We live increasingly into the “now” expecting to see the greater things that Jesus promised we would. Clearly something of the “not-yet” remains and will remain until God’s Kingdom fully invades, but remember God’s Kingdom is not static. It is ever-advancing. If you like, the “not-yet” component is being squeezed into a corner. It is not that God is holding back, but that the reality that He is bringing about is something other from that which we know, if the “now” blows our minds, the “not-yet” will finish them off! While we don’t know what that wholeness looks like we do know that it will be abundantly good. There is both continuity and discontinuity with the measure of wholeness that we experience now and the wholeness which we will be then. Even those that are healed now, released from addiction now, freed from debt now, have only experienced a measure of the Kingdom and are still on a journey into the fullness of the “not yet.” We are all on this journey into wholeness together, pushing into the whole character of Our Father for more, for more, for more. This desire to see more of Our Father is unlike the demand of our times to have it all now whatever the cost to future generations. Our desire to realise more of Our Father’s wholeness now is for our sake but also for the sake of our children, so that their experience of and expectation for God’s abundance, goodness, love, faithfulness and wholeness will be even greater than our own. Remember we have a very rich Father whose resources cannot be depleted, but we can and do limit him by our poverty mindset. Our Father yearns for His children; for us to be whole, to be all that He created us to be. And His heart breaks for those that choose not to be His children. His vision is for world peace, for all of creation to be whole. Our Father… Our Father invites us to envisage something that might strike us as scandalous, even blasphemous. Jesus revealed the heart of Our Father. He came to establish the baseline of expectation, below which we must not fall. But our aim is not to meet the standard He set but to exceed it. We are to do and see greater works than Jesus! This is in all areas of Kingdom ministry. Think about it - what is greater than a blind person seeing, than a dead person being raised, even resurrected. What is greater than a person released from debt, prison, raised to equal value in a society that has long excluded and forgotten them. We need Spirit-fired imaginations. We need to be as “in” God as we can possibly be, so that we can be necessarily creative to see the more that He desires us to see and do. We need to seek renewal for ourselves so that we can effect renewal around us. Don’t settle for less that seeing beyond sight; seeing that moves us from efficiency to abundance, indifference to action, illusion to reality, fear to faith, brokenness to wholeness, death to life, possible to impossible, earth to heaven, heaven to earth. What can we conclude. It is important that you know what you are praying when you pray Our Father. Words are not empty; they have meaning, are effective. Know what you pray; receive and pass on the blessing of your prayers. Know also that when you pray “Our Father” He will respond and show you His will for you and for our world, for the brokenness in your own life and for thebroken places and people of the world. We are to receive, embody and share the character of Our Fatherfor a sick world; to seek first the ever-coming Kingdom so that increasingly the will of Our Father will be done in our lives, in our neighbours lives, in our world.
