At the start of our Week of Prayer, we considered that in coming to God in prayer we come to a Father who loves us.
That is how God has chosen to reveal Himself to us, and that is the nature of the relationship that He invites us into. He adopts us into His family through Jesus.
But Jesus reminds us that the Father we pray to is not an earthly father, it is our Father in Heaven.
Firstly our Heavenly Father is not limited like an earthly father is in His emotional capacity to love and care for us; and secondly neither is He limited in His ability to accomplish anything He wants to accomplish.
He is not limited in His love for us.
So often we approach God through the lens of our relationship with our earthly father. If our earthly father was preoccupied and emotionally distant we see God as preoccupied and emotionally distant. If our earthly father was absent we see God as absent. If our earthly father was harsh with us then we view God with fear and keep our distance.
Even if our earthly father was caring, protecting, available to us, we still know his faults and the limits of his relationship with us. And so we tend to filter God through the same lens.
Far better though to view our earthly father through the lens of our perfect Heavenly Father. Far better to come to God’s infinite goodness and care, to a Father who is generous beyond our comprehension, to a Father who lovingly knit us together in our mother’s womb. This should be our reference point, rather our flawed earthly fathers, no matter how good they might have been.
He is not limited in His power
But our Heavenly Father is not only abounding in capacity to love and accept us, despite our issues, He is also omnipotent – all powerful, and therefore fully able to accomplish any goal He set out to accomplish. This is the foundation for our faith. Is anything too impossible for God?
Jeremiah answers us as he prays: “‘Ah, Lord GOD! It is you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you.
(Jeremiah 32:17)
So when we come to pray, we can pray with great confidence when we pray in accordance with God’s will. Our Father in Heaven is fully able to accomplish everything that He has set His heart on. If we will submit our desires and our priorities to His, we will find great confidence in approaching Him with our requests, knowing that He is ultimately able to answer every one of them.
