The Lord's Prayer - Sermon Audio/Slides
Notes
Transcript
Welcome and Prayer (little Fish)
How do you go with prayer? I must admit I am consistently trying different practices and ideas to deepen my prayer life. I have tried to be intentional about it with a prayer book in my back pocket and an alarm that goes off at 12:30 every day to remind me to pray. It is hard to form new habits of prayer, and it is easy to read or hear prayers and think I need to do more to pray like that. I know I can fall into that trap.
But I have learnt a thing or two about prayer, and prayer is not about the words we speak; it is about the life we seek, in constant connection with God.
This is something that Jesus' disciples recognised. They could see in Jesus that at the core of his ministry was his prayer life.
And so the disciples didn’t ask Jesus to teach us to preach, or teach us to plant churches, or teach us to share our faith.
They asked Teach us to pray because they could see that this was the key to everything about their rabbi’s ministry.
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”
Jesus' disciples went on to have amazing prayer lives, praying over the sick, raising the dead and praying for those who persecuted them. But it starts here when they humble themselves and say I need help in this area.
This is what these next 8 weeks are going to be about. A humbling and asking, Lord, teach us to pray.
Over the next 8 Sundays we are going to unpack prayers on what to ask, what it has to do with identity and covenant, and prayers on Encouragment, repentance and confession, forgiveness and grace and spiritual warfare.
But as we begin, we start where Jesus disciples started,
With the Lord's prayer, and I want us to understand the intention of this prayer that maybe you haven’t considered before.
And how the Acronym P. R. A. Y. can also be used in our day as a tool that deepens our quiet time practice.
And then I will finish with ways you can stretch and try different prayer tools.
The Lord's Prayer is not Information its to be Imitated
The Lord's Prayer is not Information its to be Imitated
In our last series, we could see that Paul had a method as he went to each new town, and he lived in a way that others could imitate him.
Well, it is the same with Prayer.
Jesus wanted to teach them a prayer that would not only be recited (information) but imitated and integrated as we practice it.
When Jesus teaches us to pray, He is not simply giving us a list of requests. He is revealing who God is — the Father we are praying to — and inviting us to let His character reshape our own.
Last week I said the Holy Spirit reveals to us who Jesus is.
And Jesus reveals who God is.
This prayer that Jesus taught us and the Spirit guides us to reveal the character of God, who he is.
I did a similar practice to name the aspects of my life that make me who I am.
Father - husband - captain and guide.
As I walk through life, these are the roles and responsibilities I carry.
As we go through the Lord's prayer, now listen for the roles and responsibilities God has, and that we are also invited and challenged to imitate.
“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.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.’
This prayer is a framework for relationship — a way of seeing God clearly and letting the Holy Spirit form that same character in us. The Spirit takes what is true of God and makes it true in us. The Spirit helps us integrate what we pray into how we live.
God is most interested in relationship, to walk with us. Life is a process of learning to walk with God, learning how to relate and communicate with God. How we interact with God is vital for our lives. So, when Jesus is teaching his followers to pray, he is showing them how to walk with God.
The Lord's prayer as taught by Jesus contains six elements. When we learn to pray these segments in the right way, we also will learn to align our lives with God’s will for us and have an understanding of who he is.
And today, I want to share a framework that has helped me see this more deeply — a framework I’ve learnt from Building a Discipleship Culture. It’s a simple way of understanding how God shapes us, how we imitate His character, and how prayer becomes the place where our lives are aligned with His heart.
To remember this, we have the Hexagon shape
Aspects of God as we walk together and pray
Father
Father
‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name,
Jesus begins with relationship. When He teaches us to pray “Our Father,” He is giving us permission to approach God with the same intimacy He Himself enjoys. This is not distant formality; this is a term we use in our families.
Yet “hallowed be your name” reminds us that our Father is also holy, pure, and unlike us. Prayer begins by holding these two truths together: God is close, and God is holy.
Invitation: Draw near with confidence.
Challenge: Honour Him with reverence, letting His holiness shape your desires.
King
King
your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Jesus now expands our vision: Do you realise who your Father is? He is the King. To pray this line is to align our hearts with His heart — to want what He wants, to long for His kingdom of light, love, justice, and forgiveness to break into our world.
Invitation: Desire what God desires.
Challenge: Surrender your will so His kingdom can advance through your life.
Notice too that these 2 identity names, Father and King, help us draw close to God.
Provider
Provider
Give us today our daily bread.
Prayer acknowledges our need. We are creatures, not self‑sustaining beings. We need physical provision, emotional strength, spiritual nourishment, hope, love, faith — daily.
How wonderful that we can pull up a chair at God’s table is an act of trust: He has what we lack, and He delights to give what we need.
Invitation: Ask boldly for what you need.
Challenge: Trust Him daily rather than living from scarcity or self‑reliance.
That challenge hit me this week as I prayed through these aspects.
Forgiver
Forgiver
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
Sin is stepping outside the good space God has given us — trespassing into territory that isn’t ours, grasping for what God has not provided. Every sin says, “Father, what You’ve given me is not enough.”
We ask forgiveness because we want to stay on the path He has set for us — His calling, His kingdom, His life.
And when others trespass against us, we forgive because we are imitating the Father’s heart.
Invitation: Receive mercy freely.
Challenge: Extend mercy freely.
I see that these two, provider and forgiver, are also how we are to be in community. Providing for the needs of Christ's body, the church and forgiving as God has forgiven us.
Now that is easy to say, simply forgive, and it is important to God, so we will spend more time later in this series unpacking the complexity and steps we can take towards forgiveness.
Guide
Guide
And lead us not into temptation,
Here the prayer shifts outward. As God sends us into the world to carry His love and His message, we ask for guidance. We want to be in the world but not shaped by it.
Temptation is not just moral failure,
It is anything that pulls our hearts away from God’s purposes.
Invitation: Follow His leading into the world.
Challenge: Resist the pull of anything that distracts from His mission.
Protector
Protector
but deliver us from the evil one.’
There is an enemy who seeks to steal joy, distort God’s and our own identity, and derail our calling. Evil wants to pull us off God’s path and into eternal destruction.
We pray for Protection because we recognise the battle,
and because we trust our Father, King, Provider, Forgiver, and Guide to also be our Protector.
Invitation: Walk confidently under God’s protection.
Challenge: Stay alert to the enemy’s schemes and cling to Christ.
Whatever is on your heart at the moment, you can pray through it using the prayer Jesus teaches us as the model. In doing this, you are communicating with God as he has taught us to.
Some of the best times for me to pray are walking to and from Church from my home. As I was thinking and praying about this sermon, a question popped into my head: how many blocks is it from my house to the church? Of course, as I counted, it is 6.
So I am committing over these 2 months of prayer to each block, be praying through these 6 aspects of the Lord's Prayer, and there are 2 ways I will do it.
On the walk-in, I am going to see what sticks. As I pray through and invite the holy Spirit to guide me, I will stop when I feel convicted on one of these aspects, maybe if I am concerned about some provision not being met, or someone I need to forgive, or an area I am not letting God be king of.
On my way back, I use this model prayer to pour over a request, or for people.
Take, for example, someone who is sick: that the Father would draw near, that in your kingdom there is no sickness, provide for them, help them sort through any unforgiveness that might be weighing them down, that they not be tempted to turn from you, their healer, and protect them from the powers that want to do them harm.
This is how we go deeper with God into his character and our relationship with him.
If you have a daily devotional time but still struggle to pray, you can also think of the acronym PRAY
On the front of your newsletters is a QR code that will take you to the App I have been using for the last 12 months to pray morning, noon and night.
The morning prayer follows this PRAY acronym
P - Pause - slow and centring
Causes us to pause, slow down, and I like what it says in the midday prayers that focuses on the Lord's prayer every day. It teaches me a way of prayer in two parts:
The first gets me in on God’s world,
The second gets God in on my world.
When we pause, we open our eyes to be looking for how God is already at work, where we can praise him.
But we are also having a moment to say I need you, God, and he wants us to talk to him about what is going on.
The fear you feel in meeting new people
The anxiety of the test you have in the morning
The joy of a new baby in the family
The pain of loss of relationship.
We pray - Dad, your name be praised, your kingdom come and will be done on earth, in my life, as it is in heaven.
R - Rejoice - Adoration
This leads us to rejoice in who God is - I have just discussed 6 of them.
Put this is a good time to read a psalm or reflect on a moment when God’s will and kingdom did come into your life or shifted something for you or others.
The kingdom of God is a glimpse of heaven on earth, and we are called to pray and seek and rejoice in the times that heaven and earth overlap. When people experience the freedom, liberation, restoration and generosity of God. We rejoice, and we show God our Adoration, our worship.
A - Ask - Petition (asking God), Intercession (asking God for others).
And then we ask, from your kingdom, to give us today our daily bread. From peace in the Middle East to parking places, we have access in Jesus' name to the Father as Jesus did. To Petition and ask God
Y - Yield
We yield to God’s power and authority: let your kingdom come, forgive us, deliver us. These things are not in our control; God invites us to participate, but God is the one with the power and authority to respond, and we need to listen and respond to God’s invitation and challenge in our lives. To yield when the answer is no, or not yet.
How we have our services set up
P - God’s word
R - response in song
A - share time
Y - prayer and fellowship after the service
One model of prayer but different ways we can integrate it into our days so that God is centre to how we live.
Over the next 2 months I want to give you a range of options to go deeper into prayer.
Our Strategic Plan Implementation Team are meeting this afternoon to finalise the document that will help guide us for the next 5 years.
And prayer was a major theme when we gathered together in June to input on the plan.
The starting point is
Releasing and equipping a praying community
Measure: High majority of those in our church report they are confident and regularly praying for others.
You will see in your newsletter this week different ways to pray and stretch your prayer muscle.
I am not asking you to get to them all, but I do plead with everyone to ask how I can grow in my prayer and choose one or 2 ways to set out to do that and tell someone so that they can encourage you and keep you accountable; maybe they could even be your prayer partner.
Practical ways we will be interacting
Wednesday Lifegroup - 24/7 prayer course - 1:30 pm
Stephens prayer training - (now) Monday nights starting from the 17th August - 7:30 - 9 pm
Lectio prayer App
21-day prayer devotional starts in September
And you will also see some book recommendations
Prayer
