The Lord’s Prayer
Notes
Transcript
Finish off the Lord’s prayer…
People tell me icy is the easiest word to spell, and now that I think about it, I see why
Never challenge Death to a pillow fight, unless you are prepared for the reaper cushions
Years ago, we were leading a church in the middle of cornfields in Southern Indiana, in a town called Lexington. When we got there the church was about 40 people and we started to grow and things needed to change a little during service to accommodate the growth we were having. One of those things we needed to deal with was our prayer time during the service, and thats not to mean we shouldn’t pray during service but sometimes this would get out of hand. Since it was small church the custom was in the middle of service to stop and ask what the prayer needs were so we would have these five to ten minutes where people would raise their hand and just start talking about the prayer needs in the middle of service. Listen, I understand we need to pray for those things, but sometimes as Christians we can do some praying just for the mere need for us to gossip. You know, “We can’t forget to pray for Mrs. Maybelle’s son, he’s drinking again and I think he got his girlfriend pregnant,” Maybelle needs all the prayers she can get for that boy.
Right? Maybe its not always that drastic but we can degenerate into a place like that. Immediately after we’d pray for those needs it was the custom to repeat the Lord’s prayer together, and when we started to make things more fluid and took out the Lord’s prayer it was a shock for some when I explained we were never supposed to repeat the prayer word for word, but instead Jesus said,
9 “Pray, then, in this way…
So, it wasn’t a prayer to be memorized, but it was an outline in the way for us to pray. So, its no surprise for Jesus to give us instructions in prayer, because there are many times when we need to be taught how to pray. For a lot of people they aren’t really entering into the presence of the Lord, there is no joy in their prayer, and I think the reason that is the case is because we are praying incorrectly, and I don’t like saying it with that word because there isn’t a right or wrong way, but we’re praying and our prayer life just feels empty because our hearts are not in it at all.
And the Lord’s prayer has three parts, the first part of the prayer is all about adoration,
9 “Pray, then, in this way: ‘Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name.
10 ‘Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.
“Our Father who is in Heaven, Hallowed be your name.” What we are saying is this is about you, you are holy, you are the one who is to be revered, its all about you.
The second part of the prayer is admission.
12 ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
We say, look we know we are sinners; we know we have messed up; we know our only hope is in you.
The third part of the prayer is the asking, we ask him for the things we need, we say give us this day our daily bread. We say, Jesus I know I can’t do it alone and I need you to fill in the gaps for me, please help me today with the things I need to get through the day.
Our problem is we tend to jump straight to the asking part of prayer. This is easy to understand, because there are things happening in our lives and we want something to happen in that space and we need something to happen so we want to jump to that part of the payer. As Christians we can understand that because most of us believe there is power in prayer; it is the engine of the church and we want to use it to get to the places we need to go.
There are couple of stories I love to share when we talk about prayer, quite a few years ago, at that same little church we talked about there was a lady who was pregnant with her first child, a little girl, and the doctors told the parents she would have turner syndrome, would would be a lifetime of medical issues for the child. For months, the church prayed and fasted asking God to touch the unborn baby, and when the girl was born, no sign of it. It had all completely gone.
Probably the time I share the most from my life is my own story, when I was born I was born with PFC, persistent fetal circulation. Its this condition where the lungs are fully developed but for some reason they don’t want to start. I was born through cesarian and they pull me out, I take a big deep breath, and they notice the cord around my neck so they have to push me back in and unwrap the cord and when they pulled me back out I wouldn’t start breathing again on my own. Here is the crazy thing, when one kid is diagnosed with PFC they know there will be a few in the same area who will get the same diagnosis around the same time. So, long story short, my parents are told at two different hospitals they can’t do anything, they should just be prepared for me to die, but they could send me for an experimental drug to see if it will work on me. I end up at the University of Kentucky with 8-12 other kids with the same diagnosis. While all this is going on my great grandfather is writing letters to every church in the area asking them to put me on their prayer lists. I saw in my thirties he told these churches he believed God had big plans for me to do his work in life. Anyway, out of all the kids in the hospital I was the only child who was saved from that drug. Years later, the doctor who saved my life had a son born with the same thing, he named him Adam after me, but he died as well.
Here is the thing, we don’t pray because many of us think prayer is boring. But the Bible gives this vision of power in prayer and this is why Jesus has to teach us how to pray, because we need to learn how to take the most powerful thing we have and use it correctly. I think so many of us think of prayer like the movie Aladin, we see Jesus as this God who has to do whatever we ask of him and hes like our little genie in a bottle. I think this is why he has given us this way to pray, it is a safety net to keep us from praying insecure things.
Truthfully, we’re not smart enough to understand what we are praying and how we are praying. Thats why Jesus said pray in this way your will be done, and we see, Yes there is power in prayer, but at the end of day it is all about Jesus will being done.
In verse 10 he says, “You’re Kingdom come,” and the thing you have to remember is in the Book of Matthew there are all these references to the Kingdom of Heaven, this time the Jews believed would be ushered in through the Messiah, a time when Israel would be put back in the place it belonged and all of the tyranny would be gone and they would no longer be slaves. So when they hear Jesus talking about his kingdom coming, they aren’t thinking the same thing as you and I do. For them there is no castles, moats, and alligators. They are thinking about this eschatological kingdom where there would be joy, peace, resurrection. This is what they believed would come in the kingdom of Heaven, and they believed all of that would be what happened in the End Times. And when Jesus is saying your kingdom come, he is saying “you are waiting for the end to come, and the kingdom came in me, I brought it all. Everything you are waiting on, its here in me.”
So, if you would, go with me to Philippians 3:20
20 For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ;
So, sometimes our culture keeps us from really understanding what Paul is saying, and when he says citizenship to the people of Philippi, here is what they would understand. The idea of citizenship in their culture as you were living in Philippi but you may have been a citizen of Rome and the point was you were supposed to bring the culture of Rome to bear on Philippi. This is exactly what Paul is saying we are supposed to be doing; we are supposed to bring the culture of heaven to bear on the world. This is why the church is supposed to be the group of people where materialism doesn’t exist, where we don’t hold grudges, why we are supposed to be the people that stepped from the heavenly into the world. This is why he is giving us all of this instruction on kingdom living, because we are supposed to be showing the world what heaven is going to look like.
We are supposed to be showing the people in the present world the way we are going to live in the Kingdom world, thats why he gives us instructions for money, not because we will need it in His kingdom, but to show us how our hearts are supposed to be and we are supposed to share with the world around us what that looks like.
When we pray your kingdom come, this is what we live for to bring the kingdom into the world now - to push in on the awfulness of the world this kingdom of Heaven that offers hope, love, mercy, grace; we aren’t just waiting on it to come in the future we are living in the Kingdom now and it is pushing out into the darkness of the world.
So, he tells us we pray that Gods kingdom and will be done and not ours in our own lives, and honestly, this is the same thing I pray for our church, “Jesus move in the life of this church, use us to reach our city so they will come to know you not for our glory but yours. So this is hwat we should be doing as we pray, asking that God’s will come into our lives NOW, not later. Don’t allow me to miss it, just bring your will into my life now, I just want to do what you want me to.
The world we are living in is pretty messed up right now, if you didn’t know that, you may have not watched the news or looked at any social media right now. I saw not too long ago that over 60% of the reason people are going to see doctors is because of stress and anxiety disorders. Its all because we are trying to do everything on our own and we have been told everything falls on us. We cannot mess up, we have to carry all the weight, if you just hustle a little bit harder you can have everything you dream of.
Parenting in 70’s and 80’s was like, “go outside and play, come back at lunch, and then go and play some more and I will flash the porch light when its time for you to come in and go to bed.” And people my age are stressing out, because parenting is hard, you can’t discipline your kids the correct way, because one article says one way, another says the opposite, and we’ve been told every decision we make is going to determine their whole life; mistake and its all over. We are stressed because we are trying to figure it all out, but we were never meant to handle that burden and weight of one decision ruining it all. That’s why we pray, “your kingdom come your will be done,” because his kingdom is what we are praying for.
drea
SO we pray for the kingdom to come, not our kingdom, not a kingdom of this world, but his kingdom to come as it is in Heaven.
When we pray pray this here are two things we are basically praying, 1. you can actually do will of God, 2. that you can bear whatever he decides to give you. And it kind of reminds me of Jesus in the garden. Jesus is there and he says, “if there is any way possible, take this cup from me”, and then he follows that up with “not my will but yours be done.” This is the tension of Christian life, how do we do this, are we going to say and do the will of God or the will of man. Then the question becomes how is God calling you to live in your dating situation, how is God calling you to live sexually, and Jesus is the model for our lives and there in the garden he says, “I’ll do it any other way if possible, but what is the most important is your will in my life.”
The question then would be, “What is the will of God?” Let me boil it down to two things; first, there is the revealed will of God and then the hidden will of god. So what then is the difference? The revealed will of God are the things God just says. Theres are the perfectly clear things we know from reading his word. Then, there is the hidden will of God, this may be questions like, “where we should move to have the biggest impact for the Kingdom. Most of us understand the revealed will of God. We get it when he tells us we need to serve the person we marry, the question we want answered is, who, like what is their name. We may know God wants us to move and share the gospel, but what city am I supposed to go to? The problem with these things is we can open our Bible and those specifics are not in there.
And we have this subculture where what we want is the psychic future teller and God says, “Look, whatever the name of the person is you marry, serve them like christ served the church.”
But we ask for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, and we don’t know what that is, but we plead for him to move, and then we get to 6:11 Matthew 6:11
11 ‘Give us this day our daily bread.
Daily, and it is so we will become dependent upon him, DAILY. The thing is we have figured out ways to store it up so we don’t have to depend on him, and this daily idea comes from the days of Israel walking around in the wilderness with Moses. And with the morning dew there is this manna they collect it and eat it for the day, and the word Manna means, “what is it,” yeah its manna, but what is it… yeah its manna, thats what its called, its like a Abbot and Costello bit.
If we wake up with breath in our lungs we are blessed. Then when we put ourselves into his hands, we put him in control. For many of us, we have prayed that things would happen and they don’t, and we get mad when that happens and think he has forgotten us but what we have to realize is sometimes God’s answer to our prayers is no. As much as we may hate that, what we have to realize is he knows better than us, and we have to trust he is a good father. Most of us know this, but its harder when it is put into practice. I bet there are some of you you can look back and thank God he told you not to some of your prayers. You may have prayed for that person in high school he’d let you marry. Now, when you see them on facebook you praise him for saying no, right?
The thing is, he knows more than you, he’s bringing you along in ways that you have to trust him. You and I are no better than Paul, and Paul says I have this thorn in my flesh and I asked him to take it and his answer has been NO. Why, because MY power is made strength in your weakness.
Jesus finishes this way,
12 ‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
If you don’t understand that you need forgiveness, that we’ve messed up we’re missing it. Whatever the world has told you about yourself, you have to realize you need Him; we need forgiveness. We may come here thinking forgiveness isn’t your issue, but it is because we can’t get back to a right status with God unless we get forgiveness. Our posture before God needs to be forgive us; forgive me like I forgive everyone else when they wrong me.
14 “For if you forgive others for their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
15 “But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions.
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This is terrifying because like we talked about before we must forgive others to be forgiven. Who do you need to offer that to?
Maybe you are here and you want God to move in your life. Maybe you need to see it.
Maybe you are here and you have never given your life to Jesus as your Savior, but listen, we talked about it, the only way for you to be made right…
