Matthew 6:9 This, then, is how you should pray: “Our Father in heaven…”

I know the picture of a “father,” or even “parent,” isn’t always a pretty one for us. Some of us may have had loving parents who sacrificed the world to raise us. They applied a good balance of discipline and boundaries, encouragement and freedom. Yet even then we can recognize some flaws.

Some of us had parents who drank way too much beer. They loved their careers and hobbies more than their children. They weren’t able to see the line between spanking their children and beating them. They used their children to try to feel better about themselves and soaked up all the love and affection in the relationship for themselves without sharing any of it with their kids.

When Jesus says, “This, then, is how you should pray: Our Father in heaven,” he isn’t saying, “Think of God as a really, really big version of your dad or mom, warts and all.” This is your Father in heaven. He is the perfect parent. That is what gives us the confidence to pray.

Your Father in heaven loves you perfectly, even when it comes time to discipline you. We often think of fathers as the disciplinarian in the family. It is a special kind of love, a perfect love, that loves us enough to set aside our comfort when a little pain or discomfort will do us some good. The writer of Hebrews reminds us, “Endure hardship as discipline; God is treating you as sons… No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it” (Heb. 12:7,10-11).

Because your Father in heaven loves you perfectly, he gives you just what you need for your soul. That starts with the forgiveness of sins. David writes in Psalm 103, “As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him.”

But when we look at what our Father did to forgive us, does it seem that the idea of “perfect Parent” and “perfect love” begins to break down? Ordinarily any hint of favoritism in a family is death to the relationships there. If a parent had some children who were “natural” children, and some children who were “adopted”, and the one set received preferential treatment, we would expect all kinds of problems. If anyone was going to receive special treatment and privileges, we would expect it to be the natural children, those who belonged to the family by birth, not the adopted children who were accepted into the family later.

Our Father in heaven sacrificed the only “natural” Son he had to spare the children he wanted to adopt. Our Father had the natural Son, the only innocent member of the family, suffer the punishment for the crimes the adopted children committed. We are the adopted children, Jesus the natural Son, and it doesn’t seem fair. But in our perfect Parent’s family, this wasn’t favoritism gone mad or injustice. It was perfect love, from Jesus who calls himself our brother, and his Father who has also become our Father.

These are the things Jesus wants us to remember as we begin our prayers: Our Brother suffers and dies for our forgiveness and adoption. That makes our God our Father in heaven. That makes us confident to pray as his dear children.