Against Nothingness

Thielicke, speaking about the petition for daily bread: "A father who would not listen to everything his child says would not be a father. He may smile because the child so often has so little sense of proportion, because the child grieves more over a lost screw in his toy train than the destruction of his parental home, because the child has so little understanding of the difference between great and small things, but he listens nevertheless. God does not want only to be 'praised'; nor does he want us to simply go on saying, 'Thy will be done' and all the while, deep down under our own words, be tormenting ourselves because we have our own will and our own cares and troubles and are only suppressing them out of a kind of religious politeness which we associate with piety. Let us not fool ourselves: the Father knows what we are thinking. And so we can let out even our most secret desires. In other words, we should not only praise God; in this petition and in...

To begin, here is an excerpt from Helmut Thielicke's book The Prayer That Spans The World: Sermons on the Lord's Prayer . It is from the sermon entitled "Hallowed Be Thy Name." "When a man gets away from God he becomes like someone who is deprived of the sun and is therefore artificially isolated from the element of life which is part of his nature. Then symptoms of decline immediately begin to appear because the life-giving element is lacking. This is a fact that can frequently be observed in everyday life; for example, in workers who are cut off for days from the sunlight or dwindle away in unhealthy factories, or even our brethren in the Far North. When this happens, a paralyzing weariness and listlessness settles down upon a man. He is literally cut off from the source of life. So it is not surprising that he seeks artificial stimulants; he swallows caffeine, or he gives himself a lift with nicotine or a coke or vitamin pills. But the bit of specious l...