OUR FATHER What an intimate, personal, family-like approach to God. What a reassuring, comfortable way in which to address the Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth. Can it be that He, who is from everlasting to everlasting, the infinite One, really regards me as His child? Does He care enough to consider me His own son? This is a startling concept.
I enjoyed reading W. Phillip Keller's A Layman Looks at the Lord's Prayer. This is an author I've been meaning to read for over a decade. I've heard great things about his A Shepherd Looks at Psalm 23 and so I was excited to get the chance to review this title.
Keller goes through the Lord's Prayer line by line, or, phrase by phrase.
I would say this one is definitely leaning more towards being a devotional book than Heavy, Serious Theology. Devotional books may be abundant, but, good ones are not always so.
His insights are good ones:
Unless we do begin to grasp what kind of person God is, we shall never fully develop a simple, strong confidence in Him. Yet, this is what He wants from us more than anything else, our trust and affection as His children.
Too many of us are far too vague in our ideas about spiritual realities. If God is in heaven, then we ought to know something about heaven. If He is our Father and heaven is His natural environment, we should understand what that realm is really like.
It is not possible to divorce or separate the will of God from God Himself. His will is not something detached from and external to the Person and character of our Father in heaven. Yet, it is surprising how many of God’s children speak of their Father’s will as though it was something quite apart from Him. They often act as if the will of God was merely an abstract edict which could be acknowledged or ignored at a whim. The fact of the matter is that to recognize and acknowledge His will is to recognize and acknowledge Him. To ignore and repudiate His will is to ignore and repudiate Him.
It is when we stand alone, quietly, earnestly contemplating the cost to God of our forgiveness made possible by the cross, that there floods over us our deep debt of love to Him. The cross stands central in our Father’s magnanimous scheme for the forgiveness of all men of all time. Someone, somewhere always must pay the penalty for misconduct. He Himself undertook, at Calvary, to bear that cost, to absorb the penalty, to pay the enormous price for our sin.
The degree to which I am able and willing to forgive others is a clear indication of the extent to which I have personally experienced God my Father’s forgiveness for me.
© Becky Laney of Operation Actually Read Bible
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