Our heavenly Father has made sons of us prodigals. We have wasted our inheritance, and yet He takes us back into His household, running out to greet us while we were still a long way off. He has not merely met us "half way," but He has gone to the extraordinary length of offering into death His only begotten Son that He might call us His sons and that we might rightly call him our Father. He has exposed Himself to ridicule by abasing Himself for us, who had done nothing but abuse His hospitality. He has girded up His loins in the incarnation of His Son, that He might fit us in the flowing robe of righteousness given only to a son. Our sin can be no impediment to our changed status. Those whom God forgives have all that is given to those who are sons. Though we ought only be slaves in His household, He has made us heirs of all that is His. He names us sons and what God names a thing; that is what a thing is (1Jn 3:1). Although we have no right to call Him our Father, He invites us to do so. He makes us right through Christ. What we may not claim by right, He gives freely for Christ's sake.

Just as Christ is God's Son, so we too have the right to call ourselves sons of God. How exalted this title, shared as it is with God's Son. Those who pray, then, do not stand on their own right. They haven't got a leg to stand on. Instead our Father makes us to stand on Christ. We are children of our Father through Christ. And there is no middle ground. There isn't a no-man's land between God and the devil. There is no neutral ground. One is either in the trench of Satan or has been rescued from our father by birth and brought into the kingdom of our heavenly Father by rebirth. We have not deserved to be with our heavenly Father, but have deserved to remain under the sway of His enemy, the devil. How unaccountably gracious this is! We deserve damnation. He does not give us what we deserve. He gives us salvation as a free gift paid for by His Son. Our Father puts us on His knee and bends His ear to the whispers of His children, listens to every agonized syllable, and dotes on every request. He is our true Father. We are His true children. We are bold to pray, "Our Father...."

We have those strange definitions of what true spirituality is. It doesn't often include the very earthy experience of praying in the midst of need. As a parish pastor I plan and work and campaign that the mission of the church might go forward in the life of the parish I am privileged to serve, but only when such work seems to be thwarted do I then repair to prayer. This is a shame to me. For here is where we should truly begin. Confident spirituality kneels in humility and begs our Father to grant the very things which He has constantly promised to us, that the gates of hell cannot prevail against His church. We will inherit it all. There is every reason we should claim our inheritance in prayer.