This week we’ll pray through the Lord’s prayer as an outline, one line at a time. Today, read the first line, verse in Matthew 6:9:

“Our Father, in Heaven,
Hallowed be your name.”

Think about each word and what it teaches you as you pray it.

“Our Father”
Jesus calls God his father, an unusually intimate term for his culture. What does “father” mean to you? What would it mean for you to see God as a good father in your life? How does this affect your concept of God?

“In Heaven”
Jesus didn’t mean Heaven the way we tend to think of it – as a distant cosmic place. Rather, Heaven was the realm of power in which God was fully in charge; Jesus, and all of the Old Testament scriptures, depicted heaven as the place where God’s rule and reign were unspoiled and uninterrupted by sin, disease, violence, and death. God occasionally broke into the present earthly realm, but he lived and worked from heaven. Given this, what does the concept of God being from heaven mean to you?

“Hallowed be your name”
Hallowed means to revere or honor. In the culture of the ancient near east where Jesus and the other Jews lived a person’s name was more powerful and meaningful than it is to modern Western societies. A person’s name was their identity. It reflected their character and purpose. Likewise, the name of God throughout scripture reflects His character and purpose. There are many names for God in the Old Testament, and each depicts, in some way, his divine character as witnessed by the ancient Hebrews. Here are a few:

• YHWH-Yireh — “The LORD will provide” (Genesis 22:13-14)
• YHWH-Rapha — “The LORD that healeth” (Exodus 15:26)
• YHWH-Niss”i — “The LORD our Banner” (Exodus 17:8-15)
• YHWH-Shalom — “The LORD our Peace” (Judges 6:24)
• YHWH-Ro’i — “The LORD my Shepherd” (Psalm 23:1)
• YHWH-Tsidkenu — “The LORD our Righteousness” (Jeremiah 23:6)
• YHWH-Shammah — “The LORD is present” (Ezekiel 48:35)

Prayer Exercise:
Find a quiet place to pray, uninterrupted for 20-30 minutes. Begin by addressing God as your father, then pray through some of these names of God listed above, asking God to be your “provider,” your “healer,” your “peace,” etc. Pause with each one as consider what this might look like in your life and pray for the specific situations that come to mind. Thank God for the ways in which He has already acted in this way for you.

Afterward, share a bit of your experiences in the comments below. Was this a good exercise? Was it easy or difficult? What did you experience?

Sunday night we wrapped up our series of discussions on community formation with an overview of mission. This represents the outer layer in our proposed rhythm of life: Discipleship > Community > Mission. The subject of “mission” and being “missional” is a hot topic in Church circles these days, so it’s important that we capture a way to think about what this means for our lives together.

Mission Belongs to God
Taking John 5:1-30 as our focus, I proposed that mission is the missio dei, or the “mission of God,” which is His act of entering into the world and doing His work of redemption and restoration. Fundamentally, then, mission belongs to God – not the Church. He initiates it and sustains it. We don’t bring God to people, God is already “at work” in the world (John 5:17) bringing about His redemption and restoration, making the world right again.

To put it another way, the church doesn’t have a mission, the mission of God has a church.

Last night we had a great discussion about what it means to be a community of faith and what some of our challenges might be. This week I’d like to use this website as a way to anchor that ongoing discussion.

This will be the only major post this week. I’ll add a few brief quotes and links over the next few days that hopefully with stir the pot a bit, but for the most part this is the critical discussion we need to have in depth.

Last night I suggested that community life together is where discipleship actually occurs most powerfully. I would add that it’s only in our community relationships with one another that we encounter biblical “salvation.” If you want to dig in a little right now, here are some key biblical narratives for gaining a vision of how the people of God are to live out salvation concretely in community: