John Killinger's Book.....

The God Named Hallowed: The Lord's Prayer for Today, impressed and humbled me when I discovered it almost twenty years ago in a friend's personal library. The book has since become mine, and I have used quotes from it over the years in several different contexts. One passage that was especially well received when I shared it in a presentation on worship is the following, concerning the first two words in the model prayer:

For Jesus to call God our heavenly Father was to make the most audacious theological statement that could ever be made. Think about it---the God who created the world and cast the nebulae in space; the God who heard the prayers of the first man and woman on earth and who sees the intricacies of the future; the God whose majesty is seen from the highest mountain and who inhabits the jeweled depths of the darkest ocean........ our Father. (emphasis mine)

The God who fashioned the giant sequoia tree and plants the tiny seed of pearls in all the oysters;....the God who imprisoned energy in coal and whispered the secret of relativity into the ear of Einstein ---our Father.

The God who set the oceans rocking and shaped the crescent beaches of distant islands; the God who blessed the world with language and then confounded it with many tongues; the God who ordained the very existence of mortality and then raised up Christ from the coldness of death---our Father.

If it doesn't make shivers run up and down your spine, then you have not properly understood. To think that the God of all this depth and power and resourcefulness should be our Father, the one with whom we are privileged to live in an attitude of intimacy and relationship, is enough to stagger the mind, to make it recoil though sheer insufficiency. "Our Father." It is confession, praise, triumph, unbelievable fortune, overwhelming good news! Who could ever have hoped or dreamed that the God of the universe, the God of ALL universes, should be our Father?

To worship in that spirit of awe and gratitude is a worthy goal, in my opinion. What do you think?