Praying to Daddy God

Prayer is one of those disciplines that we realize needs to be a part of our walk by but many of us find it difficult to do on a regular basis. Over my next few blogs I hope to take a look at prayer and explore our journey in prayer and hopefully have it make sense in a practical way.

For me it all starts with the Disciples’ Prayer. I know, most of you know it as the Lord’s Prayer but in reality it was how He chose to teach His disciples how to pray.

Matt 6:9-13 "'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one, for yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen”

It all starts with knowing whom we are praying to. We pray to God the Father. The Bible tell us to pray in the Spirit (Eph 6:18; Jude 20) and it tells us to pray in Jesus name (John 15:16) but it is clear that we are to pray to the Father.

For many, this is where the first disconnect happens. It is only human to superimpose our relationship with our earthly fathers into this prayer equation. Many had absent, distant or disciplinarian fathers. Others had abusive, manipulative and controlling fathers. Sadly, very few fathers have modeled the Father Heart of God. There are two things the Bible tells us about the character of God. First, He is good. He wants the best for His children. Second, He is Love. He is the embodiment of what most of us spend a lifetime searching for. We need to dig into His Word so that we can see who He really is. He is not this greybeard off in this cosmos somewhere waiting for us to mess up so that he can hit us over the head with his wrath. He is an immanent, present, loving God that sent His Son to die on a cross so that our sins would be forgiven and we could have the kind of relationship with Him where we can call Him “Daddy”.

Think of what “Daddy” evokes. For me it is a child with a smile on their face and their arms stretched upward waiting for their “Daddy” to pick them up. It is an expectation of love and security.

When I was a child my mother taught me to pray to “Papa Dios” or translated to “Daddy God”. In one of our Life Groups I started my prayer by praying to “Daddy God” and after the prayer, one of the ladies in our group commented on how it touched her to hear me pray that way. It opened up a new realm to her that she had not considered.

Do you know whom you are praying to or do you merely know about Him? Recently, a member of our community who was a former Buc and who was responsible for starting the football program at the University of South Florida passed away. He was a man of faith and he had touched countless lives in the Tampa Bay area. I knew a lot about this man and with so much in the press about him I felt like I knew him. The truth was though, that I had never met him and while I knew and admired much about him, I didn’t “know” him.

I “know” whom it is I serve. I have a personal relationship with Him. I have experienced Him and felt His touch. He is not some distant entity. He is the lover of my soul. He is my “Daddy God”.

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