Pray Like Jesus

Life of the Church

Good morning, everyone. Happy Sunday to you. It’s good to see you all here, and welcome to those watching our service online.

Let’s go over just a few of the announcements listed in your bulletin.

Our men’s group will be meeting at 6:00 tonight, focusing on John 11:35. Also, the men’s prayer breakfast will also be held next Sunday at 8:00. All men are invited to attend both of those.

We will also be having our monthly deacon meeting this Tuesday at 7:00. If you’re a deacon, please try to attend that.

If you’d like to place a lily in the church for Easter, you’ll find a form to do so in your bulletin. This is your last day to do that, so keep that in mind, and just make your checks payable to the church.

Also, next Saturday we’ll be helping out at the Gathering Place, which is beside the post office here in town. If you’re available from 10-noon then on that day, please see either Della or Sandy.

Jesyka, would you give us an update on our youth activities coming up?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

As we come before You in Jesus’ name, Father, we praise You with our innermost being and praise Your Holy name.

We praise You because You have redeemed our life from the pit and crowned us with compassion.

We praise You because You satisfy our desires with good things and You renew our Youth like the eagles.

Father, we praise You and honor You, for You alone work righteousness for the oppressed, You are compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love. In Jesus’s name, Amen.

Sermon

I heard more than my fair share of prayers as a boy, and a lot of those prayers were given by people who probably would be familiar to you if you’re of a certain age.

But I want to mention one person in particular as we begin this morning, a kindly Mennonite man named Paul Barnhart.

He was old for as long as I could remember. Tall, thin. A farmer, I think — most of the Mennonite men around here back then were farmers.

He was a part-time preacher and you could always count on Mr. Barnhart to deliver a good sermon, but those sermons aren’t why I remember him. It was his praying. It was the way that man prayed.

As a boy, listening to Mr. Barnhart pray was maybe the most frightening thing in the world, because he talked to God like God was standing right there. He talked to God the way I’m talking to you. That man talked to God like God was his friend. Scared me to death when I was a kid, but way I would love to talk to God that way now.

We’ve spoken quite a bit about prayer these last weeks. You have to pray like Hannah, pour out your heart to God and then leave it all with him, trusting that he’ll do what’s right and best.

You have to pray like Heman. You have to keep on praying even when you feel deep down in your bones that your words aren’t going anywhere and aren’t doing a bit of good at all.

You have to pray like Paul, asking God to change you instead of changing your circumstances, asking for nothing more than to experience his love and joy.

But really, can we talk about prayer and not talk about Jesus? Can we talk about prayer and not talk about the most famous prayer in the world? No, of course not. So that’s what we’re going to do today.

Why spend so many Sundays talking about prayer? Because prayer is the work of the soul. Because prayer is the most practical thing we can do.

Studies have shown that even people who aren’t religious pray. No matter how little faith means to someone, we’re all still desperate to experience the divine. We still crave it, because it’s built into us.

And the best way, the most direct and reliable way to experience the divine, is through prayer.

Jesus, in our scripture today, teaches us how to pray. The Lord’s Prayer is the most famous prayer in the world. That can actually be a problem to Christians. I probably don’t even have to tell you to open your Bibles to read it, because chances are you can recite it word for word from memory.

We’ve all heard it a million times. Which is great. But we’ve heard it so often that it can be too familiar. The words are so recognizable that they can lose their meaning and power.

I grew up down on Wayne Avenue, right near the railroad tracks. And if you live on Wayne Avenue, you have to put up with the trains.

As a boy, I’d hear that train coming every single time. It would even wake me up at night.

But by the time I was a teenager, a train could sound its horn and blow right through town without me realizing it. Why? Because I’d heard too many of them. I’d gotten used to them.

It can be the same with this prayer. So we’re going to try and fix that today by taking a look at how Jesus says we should pray with fresh eyes. Turn with me to Matthew chapter 6, verses 9-13:

Pray then like this:

“Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come,

your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

and forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

And this is God’s word.

We make a mistake with the Lord’s Prayer when we think that it’s some sort of magic formula, or that the words themselves have a power that they really don’t.

It isn’t the words themselves that really matter here. It’s the way that Jesus uses them. It’s the pattern he gives us to follow.

Repeating the words of the Lord’s Prayer over and over the same way that we repeat the national anthem or the pledge of allegiance won’t get us very far. Because that’s just memorization. We’re saying the words instead of thinking about what the words mean.

We have to get away from that here. This is a prayer, yes. But it’s also a model that we’re supposed to follow in our own prayers about our own situations. We have to think about more than the words Jesus says here. We have to think about what Jesus means by them.

According to Christ, we can and are supposed to go to God with all of our needs. Those needs are called petitions.

There are six petitions in this prayer, meaning there are six things that Jesus says we should ask God for each day, multiple times a day.

But he doesn’t start out with those petitions, does he? Jesus doesn’t get right into asking for things at all.

Instead he begins with what’s called the address, and that’s the first phrase of verse 9 — “Our father in heaven.”

There are two things we need to talk about here. One is what this phrase means. The other is why Jesus says we should begin all of our prayers this way.

First, what this phrase means. Do you understand what this phrase means? If we’ve heard the Lord’s Prayer so often that we take it for granted, we take even more for granted these words at the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer.

All three of the major world religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — say there is one God. All three are very different, of course, but they all agree on that. There is only God.

For Muslims, it is unthinkable to believe that anyone can approach God on any level of familiarity. God is unknowable. He is so different, so holy, so very much other, that it’s a sin to think that anyone can truly know Him. Worshipping a God like that would be frightening in a way, wouldn’t it?

Sort of along those same lines, if we look at the Old Testament God of the Jewish faith, we find a God of sharp edges — a God that allows Job to suffer but never tells Job why, a God that wrestles with Jacob, a God that tells His people to slaughter an entire race of Canaanites, children included.

Hard to fathom a God like that, isn’t it? But in the Old Testament we also find a God who is called a shepherd, a God who is said to love us more than a mother loves her child. We see people like Enoch, who walked with God, and David, who is called a man after God’s own heart.

God is a little more accessible in the Jewish faith. But he’s still largely unknowable, isn’t he? Still, “My ways are not your ways, and my thoughts not your thoughts.”

But Christianity? Christianity says that God is beyond us. Beyond our wisdom. Beyond our knowledge. God is the ultimate in holiness. He still has sharp edges.

But not only can we know him in spite of these things, we can know Him so intimately and have such a close relationship with him that we can call him “Father.”

Father.

Jesus was the first figure in history to call God “Father.” And we say well of course he would, because he’s Jesus, and God really is, in some sense, Jesus’s father.

But notice what he says. Jesus doesn’t say, “My father in heaven.” He says, “OUR father in heaven.” Meaning that God is our father as well.

That’s how we can approach him in prayer, and the only way we can ever do that is because we prayer in Jesus’s name. We can’t call God “Father” unless we’ve been adopted as children of grace in Christ.

Because of Christ, we can stand before God pure and without sin, because Christ died for our impurity. Because of Christ, we can approach God with confidence, knowing that he loves us just as he loves Jesus.

Do you ever stop to understand what that means? What the value of it is? Approaching God in this way is the same as saying, “Even though you could rightly judge me, God, I come to you in Jesus’s name because of what he did for me, and so I come to you as a child comes to his or her parent, knowing I will be loved and accepted.”

That’s what this small phrase means. But now why does Jesus begin the Lord’s Prayer this way? This is a hugely important point.

What Jesus is telling us here is that when we pray, we shouldn’t just plunge right into asking God for things. We have to get into a proper mindset first, and that mindset begins with realizing who we are in Christ.

Jesus is saying that we should start every prayer by asking God to place in our hearts a trust and a comfort that our words are going to be heard by the Lord of the Universe, the Holy God of Creation, but also someone who loves us as a father loves his children.

Now, what words does Jesus use next? “Hallowed be your name.”

That’s an old English word, “hallowed.” We don’t use that word much anymore in a society that’s been secularized like ours. The basic idea of hallowed is holiness. What Jesus is praying here is, “May your name, father, be Holy.”

But now wait a minute. Why should we pray for God’s name to be holy? Isn’t God’s name holy already?

Yes, absolutely. But that’s not Jesus’s point. His point is that God is holy, but our use of God’s name often isn’t holy at all.

As a Christian saved by faith, you have the ultimate blessing of being able to call God “Father.” But with that blessing comes a huge responsibility of having God’s name put upon you. Meaning that you are a representative of Him. You are an ambassador of God in a broken world.

Remember, there aren’t four gospels — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There are actually five — Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and you. You are the only Bible that some people will ever read.

What Jesus is praying for here is for God to keep us from dishonoring the name by which we’re called — Christian — and that he will strengthen us to become good and holy in our thoughts and our actions.

It’s saying to God, “Father, thank you that I am a Christian, now help me live like one.”

This is also a prayer that God will be glorified in all the nations in the same way that he’s glorified among believers.

It’s a request that God’s truth will spread throughout the world, and that as a Christian, you will honor God by living a holy life so that more and more people around you will call on his name.

To hallow God is to have a heart of grateful joy toward Him and a sense of His beauty and love all around you. That is how to revere his name. That’s exactly what Jesus says we should do. That’s how we should live out our daily lives.

Those are the first two points. When we pray, we’re to begin by understanding our place with God because of Christ’s sacrifice for us, and then ask that we show our thanks for that sacrifice by doing all we can to honor the God who made it.

What’s the next thing we should pray for? Verse 10: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

God is reigning right now. He is, he always was, and he always will be Lord of all.

But even the brightest light can still go unseen if you refuse to open your eyes and see it. Even though God is the ultimate ruler, it is still possible to refuse God’s rule. He gives you that choice.

But choosing that — choosing not to let Him rule over our lives — is the cause of every human problem, because we were created to serve him.

So every spiritual problem in the world, every psychological and cultural problem, even every material problem, is caused by that choice to serve something else in God’s place.

When Jesus says this, he’s telling us to pray that God will rule over every part of our lives — our emotions, our desires, our thoughts, our commitments — so that we’ll want to obey him with all of our hearts. With that inner being that Paul talked about last week.

But this petition isn’t just inward. It’s outward too. When we pray this, we’re acknowledging that God’s reign on earth right now is only partial, but that one day he will reign in fullness in the new heaven and new earth, and that kingdom will be perfect. All suffering, all injustice, all poverty, all death will be ended.

To pray “Your kingdom come” is to look forward to that future life of peace and joy. It’s to gain an eternal perspective instead of one that’s just concerned with what’s going on with us in the moment.

Next, Jesus prays “your will be done.” Tough one here, isn’t it? That’s maybe the toughest petition to pray for. It’s also the daily goal of the Christian life — allowing Christ to become more in our hearts, while allowing ourselves to become less.

This is asking God to give us the grace to bear whatever he allows life to bring our way, all those sufferings that we have to endure, because enduring them crucifies our will so that it’s easier for us to accept his.

This drives home the importance of that first part of the Lord’s Prayer — our father in heaven.

You will never be able to say to God, “Your will be done” unless you are absolutely certain of two things: that God is all-powerful, and that God is your heavenly father.

What do we know an earthly father should do? Teach you. Protect you. Provide for you. We know this and we expect it even though we also know that every earthly father is just as much a sinner, just as much broken, as anyone else.

But if our earthly fathers try to do all of those things for us, how much more can a heavenly father who is all-knowing and all-powerful and all-loving do? “Our father in heaven.”

Only if you trust that God is your father can you ask for the grace to bear your troubles with patience.

But how can we be know beyond all doubt that God is trustworthy? I’ll tell you.

This is the one part of the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus actually prayed himself. Matthew 26:39. Jesus and the disciples are in the Garden of Gethsemane, and here’s what Matthew writes:

And going a little farther he fell on his face and prayed, saying, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”

In the Garden, Jesus trusted the will of his father instead of following his own desires not to go to the cross. And because he trusted his father, Christ saved us all.

That’s why we can trust God. Jesus isn’t asking us to do anything for him that he hasn’t already done for us, and in circumstances that were harder than anything we can imagine.

If we don’t trust in God, if we follow our own will instead of his, then we try to take God’s place in our lives.

If you can’t say “Your will be done” from the bottom of your heart, you’ll never know any peace. You’ll try to control people, you’ll try to control your circumstances, you’ll try to force life to be what you think it should be. But the problem is you can’t do that.

You can’t control life because life is beyond your ability to control, and so you’ll just meet failure after failure and you risk turning away from God.

Jesus says we should pray to submit to God’s will instead of our own because God knows far more than we do, far better that we do. Submitting to God’s will is the only way to not become bitter and hardened by the things that happen to us.

Notice what Jesus has asked for so far: that we keep the name of God holy in all we do; that God will rule over every part of our lives so that we will want to obey him with all of our hearts; and that God will give us the grace to bear our sufferings and learn to trust his will.

Now, notice one thing here so far. Jesus hasn’t prayed anything for himself yet. He hasn’t addressed any of his specific needs. The whole beginning of this prayer isn’t about himself at all, it’s all about God.

Jesus is saying that we can’t let our own needs and circumstances dominate our prayers. We have to focus on praising and honoring God instead. We have to long for his greatness. We have to love him and thank him and acknowledge who he is first. Then and only then should we turn to our own needs and the needs of others.

And Jesus does this starting in verse 11: “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Now, what’s this metaphor about? Bread at that time was a staple of life. It was the basic food for everyone from the richest king to the poorest peasant.

It could taste wonderful, or it could taste plain. Didn’t matter, because the point of bread is that it kept you alive. Bread was fuel for the body.

Jesus uses this phrase “Give us our daily bread” to say this: “Father, I pray that you provide for me the necessities of life, and not the luxuries.”

Now that kind of flies in the face of what a lot of Christians pray for these days, doesn’t it? Because they say God wants to make us rich. God wants to make us successful.

They say God wants to bless us (which is true), but he wants to bless us with earthly delights (which some will get, but most won’t, and so that means none of us really need them).

Why doesn’t Jesus ask for the luxuries instead of the basics, though? When we pray, we’re speaking directly to the Heavenly Father who gives everything, so why not treat him like Santa and give him our whole list of needs and wants, no matter how expensive they are?

Here’s why. Listen to Proverbs 30:

Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, “Who is the LORD?” or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God.

See? By asking God to provide for only those things we need, we’re asking him to not give us poverty, because then the risk is to resent him, which will lead to our ruin.

And we’re not asking him to give us riches either, because then the risk is to forget him, which will also lead to our ruin.

And besides, if we’ve done the work we should have already in our prayer by acknowledging God’s holiness and our responsibility and asking that our will is to do his will, then we won’t ask for much, will we?

Because we’ll understand that God is all we need. And what smaller needs we do have will be prayed expecting for God to respond, because our mindset will be one of trust in him.

Next, in verse 12, our prayer should turn to our relationships, both with God and with others. “And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

This is a call to seek God’s forgiveness, and it’s both a challenge to our pride and a test of the spiritual reality we live with. It’s to see that the things we cannot stand in others are usually the things we struggle with in ourselves.

Martin Luther put it this way: “If anyone insists on his own goodness and despises others, let him look into himself when this petition confronts him. He will find he is no better than others, and that in the presence of God everyone must duck his head and come into the joy of forgiveness only through the low door of humility.”

We don’t like confessing our sins, especially to God. But if telling God about the sins in your life doesn’t end up producing more confidence in him and more joy in you, then you don’t understand the most essential part of the Christian faith: we’re forgiven. we are saved by God’s grace, not by anything we do ourselves.

Jesus is linking our relationship with God to our relationship with others. If we don’t recognize our sin and go to God for forgiveness, we won’t be able to see the good in others and forgive the wrong way they’ve treated us.

This verse is a reminder that none of us are perfect. It’s also a warning that we can’t keep bitterness trapped inside our hearts, because that’s a sign that we’re not right with God. We cannot hold a grudge and seek forgiveness from God for our own sins if we don’t forgive others.

So that’s the first of the second thing we should ask God for personally in our prayers. First, “Father, today give me everything I need and nothing that I don’t.”

And second, “Father, forgive me for my sins and help me to forgive others.”

Now, the next, the first part of verse 13: “And lead us not into temptation...”

This prayer isn’t that we shouldn’t be tempted, but that we shouldn’t be led into temptation. Temptation itself is not a sin. Temptation is going to happen to you. It’s not only inevitable, it’s actually valuable, because it puts us in the furnace where all of our impurities are burned off.

But to enter into temptation means to entertain and consider the prospect of giving in to sin, and we’ve already touched on the two kinds of temptation: there’s the temptation of power and riches, which tempt us to think that we don’t need God. And there’s poverty, sickness and disgrace, which tempt us to despair and lose hope and lose faith from God.

Entertaining either one of those, prosperity and suffering, — thinking “What if?” Thinking, “Why not?” — can set us on the road to turning away from trusting God and instead centering your life around yourself, and your own desires.

Jesus says we have to always be on our guard against that, so we have to pray that God will protect us from our own evil desires.

And speaking of evil, that’s what Jesus addresses next in the second part of verse 13: “ ... deliver us from evil.”

For most Bible scholars, this is a separate petition from the one that says “lead us not into temptation.”

“Lead us not into temptation” is a prayer for God to help with the evils inside us.

But this part — “deliver us from evil” — is a prayer for God to protect us from the evils in the world. From Satan himself, and the evils that come from the Devil’s kingdom. It’s everything that threatens us physically from the outside.

We have to remember that the darkness of this world doesn’t just come from inside of us, from our own sinful natures.

There are also dark forces and powers that actively battle against God’s armies of angels, and the battlefield they fight upon isn’t just our own hearts, but the world itself. And we are on the front lines.

That’s where Jesus leaves things. That’s the end of his model of prayer. But that’s not how we all learned the Lord’s Prayer, is it? There’s a little bit missing. What have we all memorized that isn’t here?

“For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever, amen.”

Right? That last little bit isn’t included in the earliest manuscripts. There’s some question of whether that’s really what Jesus said, or whether that last part was added by someone else as the years went on.

But even though there’s some question as to the accuracy and authorship of the line “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever,” it’s still appropriate for how we should pray.

Because what are we saying when we pray like this? Jesus says when you pray, start out by thinking of God. Start out by thinking about how God is all-powerful, and all-knowing, and all-loving. Think about how God is all-holy.

And then think about how you can still approach this God, whose power and wisdom and judgment stand above all, as the most perfect Daddy of all because of the price Jesus paid for us on the cross.

Then, he says, once your mindset is right, then you can bring your concerns and needs to God.

But when you do that, make sure you’re asking for the right things. Make sure you ask to be given the strength to follow God’s will rather than your own, because his will is a lot better than yours.

And make sure that you ask forgiveness for the wrong things you’ve done, knowing that the forgiveness you ask for is completely and totally given — so much so that when God forgives your sin, he treats it as though it never happened.

But while you’re asking for God to forgive your sins, you should also ask him for the strength and the love to forgive the people who’ve hurt you through their own sins.

Because the bad things that people do to you, and the terrible things you feel as a result, pale in comparison to how God feels every time you sin against him.

And then Jesus says you should pray not that you won’t go looking for temptation. That you’ll be entirely happy with whatever he gives you, because that keeps you right in the center of his will, and that is the safest, happiest, and most peaceful place you could ever be in this world.

But remember, Jesus says, that even though there’s evil inside you, there’s also evil out there in the world. Terrible evil.

There are evil things you can see — war, violence, hate — and there are also evil things you can’t see, things behind the scenes that are helping to grow the war and violence and hate — meaning the devil and his demons.

They’re always out there, the devil’s out there prowling like a lion, looking for you, hunting you, so you also have to pray that God will protect you from that kind of evil as well.

And then we have the words that maybe aren’t printed in your Bible, or they’re down there in a little footnote with a comment that says “this verse is omitted from the earliest manuscripts”:

For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, Amen.

I don’t know if Jesus really said that part or not. I don’t know if it was added to by some monk in a monastery a long time ago.

But I like it, and I think it’s important to put there, because after we share our hearts with God about all those things we need, after we talk about our troubles and our limitations, we go right back to the truth of God’s complete sufficiency.

And that’s how we should end all of our prayers — with our hearts at peace, knowing that nothing — nothing — can ever snatch away the kingdom, the power, and the glory of our loving Heavenly Father.

Prayer can be tough. Prayer definitely takes practice. But here’s our guide, right here in these verses. The Lord’s Prayer is a summary of all the prayers in the Bible. The words we use when we go to God may be different, and they should be different, but they should also follow these words from Jesus.

So talk to God. Talk to God every day. Not because you’re supposed to, not because you have needs, but because he wants to hear from you. Because he’s your dad, and because in that brief moment in time, you touch heaven itself.

Let’s pray.

Father, you are a great and loving God. Thank you for the gift of your son, and thank you for his instruction on how we should approach you in prayer. Today we ask that we honor your name among the world. We ask that our lives be governed by your precious will rather than our own. Give us what we need, Father, and keep from us everything we don’t. Forgive us for the things we do that don’t honor you, and help us to forgive those who wrong us. Strengthen us in the face of temptation, and protect us from the evil of this world. For you, father, are holy, and so make us holy as well. For it’s in Jesus’s name we ask it, Amen.

Benediction

Now Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly, teaching and admonishing one another in all wisdom, singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.