This week, the Leckie family have been sharing their daily thoughts, and today, Mal Calladine chats with them about their experience. What does it mean to think of God as Father? What does his Kingdom look like? And how do we talk with young children about evil and the devil?
Bern Leckie writes:
Talk of the devil! We don’t do this very often, in our family at least. Is Jesus prompting us to start?
This was a tricky realisation, to be honest. We’ve spent a lot of time discussing God as our loving Father, the source of our love and so many good things he has given us in his world.
When I think about how “the evil one” is represented, from high art to cartoons, I’m somehow stuck with this ridiculous image of a grinning, fiery-red villain with pointy horns and a pitchfork that any child would know to stay away from if they didn’t want to get stabbed, toasted and laughed at.
Of course, there are more grown-up stories of devilry, but I don’t think Noah is ready for too much darkness, horror or the subtle deceptions of The Usual Suspects’ Keyser Soze, but this character may have been truthful when he said that “the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
Nevertheless, here he is in the prayer Jesus taught us. We can’t pray this meaningfully unless we can describe evil and “the evil one”. How do we do this truthfully, acknowledging the closeness of evil to us without unnecessary frights and unhelpful cartoonification?
After some thought, prayer and discussion, we landed close to where we began Jesus’ prayer, with a reminder of God as our loving Father and what he wants for us.
We reminded Noah of what we have always chosen to want for him. It’s our parenting syllabus, the only things we need Noah to know as he grows up, the things we believe God wants him to know too:
How much he is loved (some of which he should see in us, some he will need to see in God)
How good he is at loving others when he practises this (and without practice he will never know)
As simple as this sounds, of course, life gets in the way. Lots of things make us feel unloved or unable to love. We can call these out as opposed to what God wants, the opposite of his goodness: evil. Is anything getting in the way of you or your friends knowing they are loved and able to love? God wants to deliver us from that.
Are there people opposed to God and love that we can recognise in the world? It might look like there are many. Jesus only tells us to pray against one, a source of evil, someone we can’t see in just the same way that we can’t see God. That is not any of the people who hurt us, and that’s very important. Our battle is not with people. It is with an enemy only God can defeat. (And the good news is… he has!)
We live in a culture which encourages us to protect ourselves from harm and accept that we might need to do this by firming up our judgements about people, who is right or wrong, good or evil, safe or dangerous, welcomed or cancelled.
But we want to get better at following Jesus, trusting God for protection, believing that his way of life works, and that Jesus’ prayer is effective. We want to keep praying it and growing our faith that we won’t run out of love, food, forgiveness, protection or purpose. I want us to trust God for these increasingly so that his Kingdom will come, and his will be done in Bristol as it is in heaven.
Bern Leckie writes:
Would God lead us into temptation? If not, why pray like this?
When I prayed about this, I remembered a few bits from the Bible. In Old Testament times, people didn’t separate “God” things from “natural” things the way we often do and tended to accept God’s involvement with everything. But this didn’t mean that God caused everything to happen in our lives. Job suffered and his friends assumed that God must have been addressing some unconfessed sin in his life, but the story shows us that it’s wise not to make assumptions about what God is or isn’t doing like this.
In New Testament times, people still linked their troubles and temptations with a belief that God must be doing something. But James wrote that, “when tempted, no-one should say, ‘God is tempting me.’” In his view, temptation is never from God. It’s purely a product of our own desire. Having a desire isn’t sinful but, given enough nurturing, an evil or harmful desire “gives birth to sin” which, in turn, “gives birth to death.”
We are all sure that our loving Father God doesn’t muck around with tempting us towards harm and death! Why would he? So we talked about times when we might really want to do the wrong thing, and how we could ask God to protect us from those times.
Is that it, then? Should Jesus simply have been better translated as “protect us” or “lead us away from temptation?” Maybe!
Or maybe it’s good to feel that tension, knowing that I find it harder that I would like to admit to separate good from bad, such as an appreciation for tasty food, and an unhealthy appetite for too much.
I want to get better at being led by God. I also want to see more of God’s involvement with my whole life, not just the bits that fit into the categories of faith and church stuff. So when I do feel tempted, I don’t want to blame God, but I do want to remember that God is close and with me for the whole of my life's journey. He knows how temptation to me is not always stuff to avoid but how I learn to regard it, such as whether I believe it will satisfy me when it won't. God never misdirects, but he is always involved and able to lead me.
Bern Leckie writes:
Have you ever tried explaining “sin” to someone who isn’t churchy? It’s not too hard to explain in terms of breaking God’s rules, but it’s very hard to convince someone who isn’t sure they believe in God that this matters.
Thankfully, when we picked up two Bible versions of the prayer Helen and I had learned as “forgive us our sins”, the word sin had already been replaced with “debts” or “wrongs”. Now these words feel much more meaningful for conversations with our friends and colleagues. I have been in debt to some of them, and some are to me. We feel the importance of this, how easy it is to hold on to the sense of what we are owed, and how hard it is to forgive.
6-year-old Noah hasn’t suffered with debt but does recognise what it is to do wrong, or to be wronged by someone else. This was an easy conversation to get a quick nod of agreement that this is a thing, but I know from all of our past tears and deep feelings how hard it is to try mining the sources of hurt where there is unforgiveness. It’s a weight which is harder to carry than any other debt.
So, when we approach God to be honest about where we need forgiveness, I think it’s amazing that Jesus ties this to an expectation that we can and will be forgivers too.
I think it’s easy to read “forgive us… as we forgive” as a limit on God’s willingness to forgive, like a trickle of blessing he will hold back until we mend our own ways. But when I prayed about this, I had more of a picture of blessing and forgiveness rushing like unstoppable water from God, the source of more love and blessing than we can handle or contain within ourselves. When we are truly open to it, open with God and willing to be open to others, that forgiveness blows our valves open. It changes us into people who can’t hold onto resentment.
Are we there yet? I’m really encouraged that it felt hard to identify unforgiveness, because I think God has been flooding us with forgiveness and helping us walk through forgiving each other on a regular basis.
I’m praying for this to continue, and especially that Noah’s young and optimistic views on love and forgiveness will mature and grow to be a recognisable force among his friends: truly strong, Christ-like and reliant on God’s power. It’s one of the ways we can hope to see God’s kingdom come where we are.
Bern Leckie writes:
This one sounded straightforward but was complicated by Ocado.
I know this isn’t everyone these days but, I confess, we are a “big shop” family. Sorry about that. As you look for somewhere quick to pay for your handful of necessities, we are the people you might get stuck behind with our two trolleys, piled with family meal ingredients, random treats and bulk buy bargains to keep for ages, just in case, and a small boy joyously hopping among the lot.
Or rather, that was the pre-pandemic routine. Now it’s fewer people picking up the same stuff (or more, because “just in case” covers more dreadful possibilities now) or, if we feel it’s justified once in a while, booking a precious delivery slot and stocking up on luxuries we can only get from the posh van service, like we did on Valentines Day.
To be clear, we are amazingly grateful for the ability to do this. But when there is more than a week’s worth of everything at home, it can feel guilt-inducingly weird to me to pray for daily bread.
So, this is where the prayer took me. What are the down sides of stocking up and feeling comfortable? I was briefly reminded of the foolish man who piled up his stuff to retire but died in a poverty of love towards anyone else. I don’t think that’s us. I really don’t want it to be!
But even if that’s not who we are, I think there is a danger that without a daily reliance on God, knowing that we really need continual supplies from him to survive, our comfortable insulation can remove our sensitivity to what he keeps giving us, how he keeps loving us, and how he might be guiding us. We might even fool ourselves that we are doing fine providing for ourselves.
Jesus talked about bread, and provided it, but also showed that we need more to survive. We discussed this and realised that Jesus wasn’t guiding his followers into holy poverty but into an everyday reliance on God for all we need, including his life-bringing word. Jesus lived on that in the desert, and we can too.
The practical conclusion? We need to keep praying this every day. Jesus gives us this pray to keep us coming back, not to stock up on holiness for a week or more. And we want to grow in love and generosity, because “our stuff” isn’t really our stuff, it’s what God has trusted us to look after for our neighbours as well as ourselves. (Ask if you need anything!)
Bern Leckie writes:
So, how to explain the kingdom of God to a 6-year-old? (Or a grown-up Christian who, like me, associated “kingdom come” with the end of the world and thought maybe we were praying for this to come quickly?)
We started off talking about kingdoms, rulers and rules, but Noah hasn’t been thinking about Brexit as much as Helen and I have. So we discussed where these things play a big part in a child’s life – at school. Noah could quickly name the Queen and King of his school as the head teacher and her deputy. They have important jobs and make rules! But why? Is it to please themselves or feel important? No, they are trying to make a good school, where people can enjoy learning and get on well with each other. In a good kingdom with good rules, people know how to respect each other’s value and live their very best.
This is sounding very grown up and getting somewhere, we thought. So, if you ruled the school, what would you make happen? After some thought, Noah gave us the smile of a boy who knows he has the perfect answer. “People could get second helpings of pudding!”
And that made us think about how wide ranging the whole business of kingdoms and rules really is. If I could, I’d make a rule that chocolate was good for you. But even if I got to be king of the world one day, I still wouldn’t be the ruler of physics.
As we thought and prayed about God’s kingdom, we considered his power and how he chooses to focus it. We can see in Jesus the promise of an end to suffering, hunger, sickness and death. We want to live in a world like that. Some of this looks like justice we can hope, pray and work for in our lifetime.
So we want to be part of God’s kingdom coming on Earth and get better at knowing and doing God’s will, in faith that we will see this increasingly present around us.
This means we want God to grow our sensitivity and obedience where he can use us, perhaps to right a wrong, make someone safe, comfort or feed them. And not in a patronising, religiously dutiful or holier-than-thou kind of way, but with the generosity, love and joy we expect to receive from God as his kingdom comes, the sort where it’s obvious to everyone that there will be second helpings of pudding.
Bern Leckie writes:
What does it mean for God to be our Father? I grew up without a father, so people sometimes reassured me that it was nice to have a heavenly Father. I didn’t always know what to make of this, but I’ve been glad to look to and rely on God as a role model when learning how to be a father myself.
Our son Noah likes the idea of an extra father, but he worked out something even more exciting for him. Jesus must be his brother and, as an only child, this is something he has often wanted!
My wife Helen loves that this family relationship we have with God is not because of what we do, like servants or dutiful religious people, but because of who we are. And I love that it is God’s choice to include us like this. Prayer, as Jesus leads us, starts with a reminder of family relationship, as well as pointing us upwards, to heaven, holiness and honour.
I spent a day with this on my mind last week while some practical work, home schooling and technical bits were doing their best to annoy me and keep my mind grounded in rubbishness.
I kept coming back to “may your holy name be honoured” and taking it as reassurance. God wants us in his family. So if his name is glorious and hallowed, shouldn’t ours be too? Is that a choice we can make by honouring God and putting him first, that everything that matters today can be defined by him?
I’m not sure that anything does matter more than recognising God as Father and enjoying his presence. That is something I want to do more often at stressful moments during Lent.
