Question 120 - Why has Christ commanded us to address God as Our Father?
Answer - To awaken in us at the very beginning of our prayer that childlike reverence and trust toward God which should be basic to our prayer: God has become our Father through Christ and will much less deny us what we ask of Him in faith than our fathers would refuse us earthly things.1
In this video from the Gospel Coalition, watch as John Piper gives insight into sin, the kingdom and what the good news of the Gospel means for life on earth and live on the new earth.
In this audio from the Gospel Coalition, listen as John Piper gives insight into sin, the kingdom and what the good news of the Gospel means for life on earth and live on the new earth.
Since coming to Bethlehem in July, 1980, I have averaged about one funeral per month. One of the things I regret about this experience is that all of you can't share it with me. I know that some of you would not live the way you do if once a month you had to spend three or four hours writing a funeral meditation about the meaning of death, and if you had to think and pray about what you would say to the family, and if you had to stand beside the open hole and the mound of dirt and try to make the decisive farewell significant for the bereaved. I regret that I am the one who does all this once a month, not because it is a hard job and I want someone else to do it, but because it is a gift to me and I would that all of you could share it.
There are two reasons why the ministry of funerals is a gift. One reason is that it keeps my mind and heart awake to the reality and certainty of my death and my wife's death and my sons' death and the death of all of you. It is easy to forget about our dying. Except for those in terrible suffering, death is not usually what we want to happen. It terminates some things we enjoy very much; it severs us from people we love. And for many it is an awful door leading they know not where. Perhaps to judgment and eternal hell, perhaps to utter nothingness. For many it is a great and terrifying unknown. And since our minds cannot endure such constant threat, we very naturally forget. Or, more fundamentally, we really avoid the thought of death by filling our minds with other things. When the Bible says in Hebrews 2:15 that "through fear of death men are subject to slavery all their life," it doesn't mean, of course, that human psychological experience is one of constant fear. It means, rather, that, since death is fearful, and since we impulsively flee fear, man is enslaved to perpetual flight apart from Christ. He may know periods of peace and happiness when for a season he has put the haunting thought of death off his trail. But he will awake and remember that he is a fugitive and must keep running. There is no true freedom where happiness depends on denying the inevitable; there is only slavery disguised in a thousand forms of fun and busyness. And therefore I count the ministry of funerals a gift because it keeps my heart and mind awake to the reality of death and protects me from the enslavements of being a fugitive.
