Jesus taught us to begin our prayers with these words as our pattern: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” (Matt 6:9)<\/p>\n\n\n
Recently as I was praying this, I was struck by the juxtaposition of “Father” and “name”.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
I thought of my own earthly father.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
It was my custom to address him as “Dad”. In all the years I knew him, I never called him by his first name, Major.<\/p>\n\n\n
That would have been weird.<\/p>\n\n\n
On the other hand, I was aware that even though I had this special relationship with him, and though I am sure he valued that relationship very much himself, there was so much more to “Major Gross” than being “Steve’s Dad”.<\/p>\n\n\n
He was Dad to 3 other sons, a husband to Carla, a member at First United Methodist Church, a business owner, plus all the personal attributes which made up his reputation with every person he ever met – integrity, common sense, patience, and wisdom.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
It seems like Jesus is inviting us to remember something similar about God when we begin a conversation with Him: our personal relationship with Him and Who He Is.<\/p>\n\n\n
God invites us to call Him “Father” – and that is a close and loving relationship – but we are reminded of His name, and thus His reputation – “Yahweh” – the Creator, the One Who spoke to Abraham and Moses, Who sent His Only Son to take away our sins – a God slow to anger and abounding in love, righteous and holy.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
And THAT is a good place to start the conversation.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jesus taught us to begin our prayers with these words as our pattern: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” (Matt 6:9) Recently as I was praying this, I was struck by the juxtaposition of “Father” and “name”.\u00a0 I thought of my own earthly father.\u00a0 It was my custom to address him as “Dad”. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7941"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7942,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7941\/revisions\/7942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}