Our Father - Tim Horman
Have you ever noticed how the first word you use when addressing someone reveals everything about your relationship with them?
The way a child calls out "Dad!" across a crowded room is fundamentally different from how an employee might nervously approach their boss with "Sir" or "Ma'am." One word can carry the weight of intimacy or distance, warmth or formality, safety or fear. And when it comes to prayer, the first word we use to address God might just be the most important word we'll ever speak.
In the second week of our series "As in Heaven: The Lord's Prayer," Tim Horman took us on a deep dive into a single, revolutionary word: Father. Building on last week's introduction to the Lord's Prayer, Tim invited us to slow down and sit with just the opening address of this remarkable prayer. Drawing from Matthew 6 and the broader context of the Sermon on the Mount, Tim explored what it means that Jesus teaches us to call God "Father" — or more precisely, Abba.
You can watch or listen to the full sermon below.
The Lord's Prayer as a Roadmap for Kingdom Living
Before focusing on "Father," Tim reminded us that the Lord's Prayer isn't a formula or technique for correct prayer. Rather, it's a guide that helps us pray with understanding — to know what we're actually asking for when we say, "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven."
What are we asking for? Tim made it concrete:
"When we say your kingdom come, your will be done here on earth as it is in heaven, we are asking specifically these things: Father, let me be poor in spirit. Father, let me be merciful. Father, help me not to murder by my words and my actions. Father, help me not to commit adultery in my thoughts or actions or online when no one is looking. Father, help me to love my enemies, to turn the other cheek, to give my money and my time to the kingdom and not just to myself."
In other words, the Lord's Prayer is the Sermon on the Mount in miniature. When we pray this prayer, we're asking for the vision of life outlined in Matthew 5-7 to become reality in us — for our thoughts, desires, actions, relationships, bodies, and possessions to be shaped by the kingdom of God.
Tim pointed out the sheer genius of the prayer's structure:
Six petitions (like the six days of creation) describing life in the new creation Jesus is making
The first three focused on God: honour his name, long for his kingdom, desire his will
The second three focused on us: depend on his provision, live in his forgiveness, resist evil in his power
All of it takes about 30 seconds to pray
The Lord's Prayer, Tim said, "gathers up the whole of life" — physical (give us daily bread), relational (forgive us as we forgive), and spiritual (hallowed be your name, deliver us from evil). It encompasses every dimension of human existence and provides a roadmap for navigating faithful discipleship in a world that constantly pushes us in the opposite direction.
But here's the crucial point: none of this can happen unless we first enter the kingdom of the Father. Jesus isn't asking us to try harder or pull ourselves up by our spiritual bootstraps. As Paul writes in Romans 8, what the law was powerless to do because we were weakened by our flesh, God did by sending his Son. Christ has done what is required for us to enter this way of life.
Yet the gospel isn't something done to us — it's something done with us and through us. We have agency. We can choose faith or unbelief, obedience or disobedience, participation or passivity. Tim quoted Blaise Pascal's beautiful phrase: we have "the dignity of causality" in God's kingdom. We're not slaves being forced to comply; we're children invited into the family business.
Which is why Jesus sits down with us, pours us a strong cup of coffee, looks us in the eye, and asks: Is this what you want? Do you want the kingdom and will of God to come in your life? Really?
If we can't honestly say yes, there's not much point praying the Lord's Prayer. But the good news is that if we're troubled by our lack of desire, we can ask God to change our hearts. Even those who don't really want him — like both sons in the parable of the prodigal — are never abandoned by the Father, who keeps looking, calling, and longing for them to come home.
The Revolutionary Word: Abba
With that foundation, Tim turned to the first word of the prayer: Father.
In the original Greek it's pater, but scholars agree that Jesus, speaking in Aramaic, would have used the word Abba. And this changes everything.
Tim explained just how shocking this was:
"Jewish tradition held God's name in such reverence that it was actually never even spoken aloud. They used Adonai or Lord instead of Yahweh, or sometimes even Hashem, which just simply means 'the name.' You certainly never, ever spoke to God in such informal, familiar language as Abba. That would have been heard as audacious, presumptuous, bordering on blasphemy. Yet Jesus says when you speak with God, you can call him Dad."
Abba is informal, familiar, tender — the kind of speech a child might use with their father. Some have even suggested it's closer to "Daddy" or "Papa" or "Dada" (though this is debated among scholars). The point isn't to be overly casual but to recognise the stunning intimacy Jesus is inviting us into.
Dallas Willard once wrote that the most important thing about a person is what they think about when they think about God. If you think of God as distant, cold, judgmental, angry, indifferent, or distracted, your prayer life — and indeed your whole life — will reflect that. But if you've learned to understand God as a loving Father who delights in you, who always has time for you, who wants to hear from you, prayer becomes your greatest joy, not an obligation.
Tim pressed the point: Jesus wants us to experience what he experienced. We can come to God and call him Abba. We can call him Dad.
Father: A Revealed Name, Not a Statement of Gender
Some struggle with the language of "Father" because of negative experiences with earthly fathers. Tim acknowledged this with compassion, noting that for some, the image of "Dad" is hard because their dads were broken, absent, or deeply hurtful. Tim has witnessed this in years of pastoral ministry — many of us carry broken images of God inherited from fathers or other authority figures who judged, neglected, ignored, or abused us.
Yet as Pastor John Thompson recently put it, "Father in this prayer is not a statement of patriarchy, and it's not a statement of gender. Father is a revealed name of God."
For some of us, this name needs to be redeemed, not replaced. In the Hebrew Scriptures, God is almost never depicted as the father of an individual — "father" is used only in reference to God as the father of his people, Israel, collectively. Jesus changes that. He invites screwed-up and screwing-up people like us to address God intimately and personally as Abba.
Rather than depicting God as a typical Middle Eastern patriarch wielding near-total power and control, Jesus depicts God as a tender, compassionate Dad who extends grace to both the sinner and the self-righteous — perfectly illustrated in the parable of the prodigal sons.
Tim showed Charlie Mackesy's beautiful sculpture of the father embracing the prodigal and asked: "When was the last time you were embraced by God's presence in this kind of way?"
What "Father" Means Theologically and Experientially
So what does it mean that God is Father?
God is personal. He isn't an abstract force or distant deity. He's a Father who knows you, sees you, delights in you.
God is tender. Not harsh, not demanding, not perpetually disappointed — but compassionate and gentle.
God is love. As John writes, "God is love" (1 John 4:8) — not just that he has love, but that he is love at his very core.
God is gracious. He extends grace freely, not based on our performance or worthiness.
And at the heart of this revelation is the truth that God is relational. God is a Trinity — Father, Son, and Spirit — existing in a perfect, loving relationship from everlasting to everlasting. Christians are the only people on earth who know God relationally as Father, because Jesus is the only door to the Father. As Jesus says in John 14: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you will know my Father as well."
Jesus is like his Father. Jesus shows us the Father. And the Father is "so, so, so, so much better and more gracious and more loving and more available to you than you could ever possibly imagine or that you could ever possibly deserve."
Tim shared his own journey with this. For many years he imagined God as perpetually disappointed with him, never good enough, always needing to prove his worth. His prayer life became a guilt-ridden burden centred on apologising for his existence. He laboured under a deeply transactional view of God: "If I do what is right and do it well enough, then I'll be seen and maybe loved."
But when Tim became a dad, something shifted. Holding his newborn children and feeling the overwhelming love that struck him in that moment, he realised: This is what my Father in Heaven feels for me — but multiplied times infinity. His human experience of love was only a pale reflection of what his Father in Heaven feels about him and about you.
Quoting Brennan Manning:
"If you took all the love of all the best mothers and fathers who have lived in the course of human history, all their goodness, kindness, patience, fidelity, wisdom, tenderness, strength, and love, and united all those qualities in a single person, that person's love would only be a faint shadow of the relentless love and mercy in the heart of God the Father, addressed to you and to me at this very moment."
How "Father" Changes the Way We Pray
When you come to your Father in heaven to pray, you don't have to bow and scrape and grovel. You don't have to try and be better than you are. You don't have to wear a mask or use especially spiritual language or perfectly theological language.
You just come honestly as you are, as who you are, and you sit with your Father like a child. You can even call him Dad if you want to.
Does this make you uncomfortable? Does it feel inappropriate? You're in good company — it made Jesus' first hearers uncomfortable too. They thought it was blasphemous ad dangerous. But Jesus said it because they needed a new image of who God was for them. And maybe we do as well.
Tim offered a simple prayer for those who need a new image of God:
"Abba, Father, I believe that you are not distant. I believe that you're not always angry. I believe that you're not constantly disappointed, but that you are present, that you are loving, and that you are delighted to be here with me in this moment. I believe this. Please help me to believe this."
Who we think we're talking to when we pray shapes how we pray. If we think of God as a strict judge, prayer feels like a courtroom defence. If we think he's distant, prayer feels like shouting into the void. If he's apathetic, why bother at all?
But if he's a Father — and not just any father, but an Abba, a loving, present father ready to welcome you and love you like a little child — that changes everything.
As Paul writes in Romans 8:
"The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, 'Abba, Father.' The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children."
Tim asked: "When was the last time you felt the Holy Spirit testifying to your spirit that you are a child of God, that he delights in you?" Not just forgiven, but co-heirs with Christ — everything that Christ has is yours, every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus.
And here's the astonishing truth: the main spiritual blessing you've received in Christ is not just forgiveness, but that you are now a child of the living God. And that is why he made you. The reason you exist at all is that you might know and experience and discover the love of God as Father and find your deepest delight and fullness of joy in his presence.
Nothing honours that name more than when God's children come to understand what it really means: that we can call him Abba.
One Way to Live It Out This Week
This week, begin your prayers with the word "Father" — and pause there. Don't rush past it. Sit with it. If it helps, use the word "Abba" or even "Dad." Ask the Holy Spirit to testify to your spirit that you are God's child, not an orphan, not a disappointment, but deeply loved and delighted in. If old, broken images of God surface, offer them to him and ask him to heal them. Let this one word reshape how you approach prayer.
A Short Prayer
Abba, Father,
We come to you not as slaves, but as your children.
Thank you that we can call you Dad.
Forgive us for the times we have believed lies about who you are —
that you are distant, disappointed, or disinterested.
Heal our broken images of you.
Help us to know, deep in our hearts,
that you are good, you are present, and you delight in us.
By your Spirit, testify to our spirits that we are your children,
co-heirs with Christ, loved beyond measure.
Amen.
Personal Reflection
What images or feelings come to mind when you think of God? Are they shaped more by theology or by past experiences with authority figures?
How would your prayer life change if you truly believed that God is a loving Father who delights to hear from you and be with you?
What might it look like for you to sit with God as a child sits with a parent — honestly, without pretence, and without having to earn his attention?
Small Group Discussion
Read Matthew 6:9 and Romans 8:14-17 together. What stands out to you about the language of "Father" and "Abba" in these passages?
Tim mentioned that in Jewish tradition, God's name was held in such reverence that it was never spoken aloud. Why do you think Jesus chose to begin the Lord's Prayer with such an intimate, informal term like "Abba"?
Tim said, "The most important thing about a person is what they think about when they think about God." What do you think about when you think about God? How has that shaped your prayer life?
Have you experienced times when your view of God was shaped more by broken earthly relationships than by the revelation of who God is in Jesus? How have you seen God heal or redeem that?
Tim described his own struggle with a transactional view of God — feeling like he had to earn God's attention and approval. Can you relate to that? What helps you move from performance-based relating to resting in God's love?
What does it mean practically to "come honestly as you are" before God in prayer? What barriers make this difficult for you?
How does understanding that you are a child of God — not just forgiven, but adopted and co-heirs with Christ — change the way you approach prayer and life in God's kingdom?
Take some time as a group to pray for one another, asking the Holy Spirit to testify to each person's spirit that they are deeply loved children of God.