Technology is amazing. You can take the same camera and get two totally different views just by using two different lenses. For example, when you put on the wide-angle lens, you can get a picture of an entire football field with that camera. When you change over to what is called a macro lens, which really magnifies things, you can fill that camera's view with one face in the stands. It's amazing to see how that camera can go from the big picture to the smallest details.
Jesus says in Matthew 6:9-11, "This, then, is how you should pray: 'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread.'" This is an excerpt from the Lord's Prayer and it is really like a camera with two lenses looking at our heavenly Father. Think about the word father and what that means to you. You might have had a bad father experience growing up. When we think about God being our Father, we are thinking about the perfect father.
Look at God with the wide-angle lens focused on Him. He is in heaven and His name is to be revered, hallowed, and reverenced. We should be driven to our knees by who He is. He is the God who rules a hundred billion galaxies, and when we pray, we are in the throne room from which it is all governed. Prayer should never be boring, wimpy, or trivial again when we know Whom we are with.
The Lord's Prayer says, "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." Here is God's agenda on earth, His whole cosmic agenda, and the prayer is, "Lord, help me plug into Your cosmic agenda with my life. Your will that is done so awesomely in heaven, I want to do it on earth." We should pray with a sense of the bigness and the awesomeness of God.
Then all of a sudden the Lord's Prayer switches lenses. "Give us today our daily bread." Jesus is telling us that we can come to this awesome Father with His incredible eternal plan and even ask Him about today's lunch. Talk about going from the wide-angle to the macro lens! We can aim all the power of heaven on a very real need on earth. Here is this hallowed Father in heaven, who is bringing in a great kingdom and has this tremendous eternal will, and we can talk to Him about our daily bread.
Hebrews 4:16 encourages us to "approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need." This is God through the macro lens. He is the God who cares about the details of your life. He cares about your bank account, about today's little need, about that hard phone call, and about the rent. He cares about the car, the trip, the repairs, the discomfort, and a million other details that make up our days.
What a Father we have, and we can come right to Him with any prayer. What a miracle prayer is; it brings us into the presence and love of a God who is big enough to rule the universe and small enough to care about our groceries.