My children have been put through college by their mother and I. This is as it should be. What does it mean, after all, that they are my children, unless I am responsible for them and their education? I would never have allowed them to ask the father of other children to fund their college careers. Someone else's father would never have received such an entreaty. My children would never have dared to make such a request of someone who is not their father. Their ability to approach me with their petitions, needs, and requests is a sign that I am their true father and that they are my true children. As Luther says, a dear father always listens to his dear children. Dear children will always ask their dear father.

We would never have thought to pray, except that our heavenly Father has invited us to do so, and He has promised to hear us. Who would have thought to invoke Him or to dream that He would hear and answer our slightest anxious murmur? By our fallen nature, we flee from God as children of wrath. By nature, we have no expectation that He would hear us. After all, we are not His children, but children of Adam and sold under sin to the deceiver.

Yet our God does not leave us mired in the muck of Adam's sin to inherit the patrimony of depravity and death. He sees to making us His children, adopting us into His family in the rebirth of baptism. He specifically sends His Son, that we might become sons at His table to eat with all the children from their Father's table: "When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba! Father!'" (Gal 4:4-6). The historical flow of the entire universe was focused on Bethlehem where God's Son became incarnate, who would turn the tables on our enemy by grabbing us from his greedy clutches and embracing us into the family of our Father in heaven.

Since we are His adopted children, we have access to His heart, just as dear children can ask their dear father for anything. We would ask no one else than this our Father. We would never dare, because we have no other Father. So we have gone from being those who would never dare to speak to God and had no right, to being those who will constantly approach Him with our needs and indeed would never ask anyone else. He is our Father in heaven. He invites us to ask. In fact, like an earthly parent, who suspects that his children are up to "no good" when they are quiet, our Father is agonized when we do not pray. He still invites us to petition Him. Deficiency in prayer is often a sign of deficiency in faith.

"Prayer begins with a testimony to God, and with the benefit of faith, when we say, "Our Father who art in heaven;" for in so saying, we at the same time pray to God and commend faith, which gives this title: "To all who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God' (Jn 1:12). However, our Lord Jesus very frequently proclaimed God as a Father to us. He even gave a precept 'call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven' (Mt 23:9). So, in thus praying, we are likewise obeying His precept. Happy are those who recognize their Father!