Sermon Tone Analysis

The Lord’s Prayer

Matt 6:13-15 “… but deliver us from evil.

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”

Importance of Prayer

There is nothing more important that we could discuss this morning than prayer.

Prayer is to the Christian and by extension to the church, as necessary as oxygen is to the body.

“Prayer is the way you defeat the devil, reach the lost, restore a backslider, strengthen the saints, send missionaries out, cure the sick, accomplish the impossible, and know the will of God.” ~ David Jeremiah

Prayer is Misunderstood and Neglected

Unfortunately, I think that prayer is also one of the most misunderstood and lease practiced of Christian activities.

Misunderstood, I think because in some ways because prayer comes kind of natural to us as created beings.

This can be a problem in that it can be the cause for our neglecting biblical instruction on prayer.

If the author of prayer is God, then we need to look to his word if we wish to do it well.

In turn, our misunderstanding of prayer, I’m sure is a big reason for our neglect of it.

I believe, that if we, the church would gain a right understanding of what prayer is and who it is we pray to, it would be nothing less than transforming.

If you are unhappy with your praying.

If you want to grow in this divine art, be encouraged.

Know that Jesus can and will teach you to pray.

But, before we get into our text, I want to make some acknowledgements and then a few observations to create a backdrop and establish some context for our message.

Acknowledgements

Having been a board member here at LWF and served with Andy, Pat, Janice and Glenn in that role, I can confidently tell you that each of your board members has God’s interests first and utmost in mind, and your best interests at heart.

They don’t seek any recognition but serve with Pastor Randy and faithfully administer the affairs of this church.

Each of them gives of their time to meet a as board to pray for and steward the ministry of Living Waters.

Let’s acknowledge these men and women for their service.

We also need to acknowledge how abundantly blessed we are to have Randy Beatty as our Pastor.

Week after week, he consistently ad fearlessly declares to us the whole counsel of God.

He is an anointed and humble servant of God, and worthy of our honour.

The greatest famine in our world today, is a famine for the Word of God.

But, we at Living Waters are well fed.

Let’s show him our appreciation this morning.

You and I need to acknowledge the gift that Gos has given us in the scriptures.

Every sermon, if it is a sermon at all, is based on God’s word.

In today’s message we’ll look at an actual event that took place some 2000 years ago, which in itself is amazing!

But more than that, by the mere turning of a page this morning we were permitted to witness a divine interaction between the Son of God and his most intimate friends.

In reading the inspired text we got to hear the very words of God!

This “snapshot” in time, this revelation allows us to sit with those disciples at the feet of Christ and learn from him.

Could anything else be more wonderful than this?

Observations

It was the example of Jesus prayer life that inspired the request for prayer instruction.

We can safely make this assumption because our text tells us that request came immediately after Jesus had finished praying.

We also know from the gospel accounts that Jesus prayed often and prayed much.

It’s also notable that, as revealed in numerous places in the New Testament, these first century Jews would have grown up witnessing the public prayers of their religious leaders.

Yet, after witnessing the prayer life of their rabbi, Christ, they looked to him for instruction - not the Pharisees.

It is possible to learn to pray and Jesus wants us to learn how to pray.

If this were not the case Jesus would have refused their request.

Instead he does exactly what is asked of him, he teaches.

Jesus willingness to teach the disciples gives us the assurance that he is willing to teach us as well.

By praying according to this teaching we will be praying in the same way Jesus himself did.

It stands to reason that since Jesus is God the Son and his life was perfect, that his teaching on prayer was perfect and that he himself would have prayed the same way that he taught his followers.

Jesus is not giving us a prayer to be solely memorized and repeated as a religious observance.

This is not to suggest that we shouldn’t memorize it and repeat it.

Like all scripture is should be studied, meditated on, memorized and taught.

But, like most of Christ’s teachings, there are eternal principles to be learned from it that can then be applied.

As God is a person, and he looks on the heart, our prayers should come from the heart.

In this instructional prayer we are given an example, a pattern for prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer

The Lord’s prayer is found in the both the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6 and here in our text in Luke chapter 11.

In both accounts the prayer begins the same way.

“Father...”.

This relational term, “Father” establish for us the very cornerstone of Christian prayer.

Those early disciples must have been aghast at these words of Christ.

At no other time and in no other place were mere men invited to call the Almighty, “Father”.

In fact, in John 5:18 we’re told that one of the reasons the Pharisees wanted Jesus dead is because he dared to call God his Father.

The Apostle John marvels at this very thing in 1 John 3:1

To these first followers of Christ, this would have been a foreign concept.

These men were born into a religious culture that did everything it could to keep men apart from God, and now Jesus taught them to call Yahweh, Father?

In the Lord’s Prayer, the word Father is translated from he Greek word Pater , the same word Jesus used to address God when he was in Gethsemane, on the cross, and in the parable of the Prodigal Son.

This revelation of God being their Father was revolutionary!

They had been raised in a time when Jewish Religious establishment was at an all-time low.

The Law of Moses which was intended to be a covenant that would bring God and man together, had been perverted to accomplish just the opposite.

The religious leaders added thousands of rules to Judaism that were impossible to keep and they inserted themselves between God and the Hebrew people so they could lord over them and extort them for profit.

That’s what Jesus was referring to Matt 23:1-4

In verse 15, Jesus said Matt 23:15

Under their leadership, God’s love and mercy were hidden behind religious rules, and a relationship with Yahweh was unfathomable.

But, their new Rabbi, Yeshua of Nazareth, had a different message for them.

When you pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph, you may address him as your Father.

And because Jesus was God in the flesh, he had the authority to teach them this.

He, the true Son of God, would fulfill the law of Moses by living a perfect, sinless life, and then die on their behalf so they too could become the children of God the Father, and the brothers and sisters of Christ.

The Apostle Paul confirms this in

How does God being our Father impact my prayer life?

Father’s love their children

Father’s love to provide for their children

Father’s are the protectors of their children

Father’s desire to be close to their children

Fathers know their children

Father’s forgive their children

Father’s listen to their children

Father’s speak to their children

… and we could go on, but you get the point.

When we pray, we are not approaching an angry tyrant who desires to punish us.

When we pray, we connect with a loving Father who desires to reveal himself to us and commune with us.

For the first followers of Christ, and for us, this makes all the difference.

The prayer warrior E.M. Bounds said,

Prayer is the contact of a living soul with God.

In prayer, God stoops to kiss man, to bless man, and to aid in everything that God can devise or man can need.

Prayer fills man’s emptiness with God’s fullness.

It fills man’s poverty with God’s riches.

It puts away man’s weakness with God’s strength.

it banishes man’s littleness with God’s greatness.

Prayer is God’s plan to supply man’s great and continual need with God’s great and continual abundance.

and therefore he said