There’s something very important that
we need to remember about God, according to the prayer Jesus
taught us to pray. We need to remember where He is—He is
in heaven.
When we pray to God our prayers will fare
better if we orient ourselves to God’s
perspective. His viewpoint is from heaven. Ours is limited to earth. We have
gravity, landfills, wars, rape (dare I go on?) to block our view. He sees all
of that and more, but seeing it does not block His view of what is possible.
He is not limited by gravity, landfills, wars, etc.
When we pray to our God Who is in heaven, we are not praying to a god who is
detached from earthly limitations. He is well aware of the painful realities
that He never wanted for us. They break His heart more than ours because they
never were a part of His loving, good plan from the beginning—yet when
these painful realities became a part of the life He gave us, He gave us the
remedy in His Son, Jesus Christ.
Our God is in heaven. Jesus isn’t asking
us to see God as separate from us as much as He wants us to see
that we do not have the same perspective on our lives as He has.
Try to open your heart to the God to whom
Jesus wants you to learn how to pray. Close your eyes right now.
Take a deep breath, then pray these words: “Our Father, who is
in heaven, hallowed be Your name.” Stop there. Imagine God, your
Father, in heaven; does it prompt you to want to hallow His name?
Rather than feeling pity for yourself and whatever you are going
through, do you find that it helps put your life in perspective?
Now,
begin to imagine the expanse of heaven and earth. We have no
idea where heaven is or what it is like. It is one of those realities
that we believe is real and we know is a part of our future—but
it is too amazing to be spoken about in any great detail. Although
Paul went there, he couldn’t describe it
in human language (2 Corinthians 12:2-4 (ESV):
“I know a man
in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether
in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And
I know that this man was caught up into paradise—whether
in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows— and
he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.”
When John the disciple wrote what he was able
to put into words about heaven and the future events, we got
the book of Revelation, which can never be fully fathomed.
Suffice to say that heaven
is BIG. I think that is the point of praying to God Who is in
heaven. It is about recognizing that there are some parts of
what you are experiencing right now that do not, nor ever will,
make sense if your only perspective is earthbound. You must think
of God in heaven if you are going to learn how to pray the way
Jesus prayed.