Teach Us to Pray

We had a great arrangement until the lockdown took effect, when we both had to start working from home. We had our own kind of social distancing. I kept my distance, and she kept allowing me to draw breath.

I’m not an easy guy to live with, and I always benefitted from that old thing about absence making the heart grow fonder. But now that we are together nearly all the time, she never has time to forget all the things that make me so irritating.

So pray for her. And pray hard for me.

Many of you watching today have found yourself with extra time on your hands lately, and I do hope that you have been spending it well.

I’ve seen more people walking in our neighborhood than ever before, and I’ve been amazed at some of the projects that folks have completed during this period of isolation. I have seen gardens planted where none had been planted before.

Maybe you’ve caught up on some reading. Or if you’ve got children at home, maybe you’ve come to have a new appreciation for teachers.

What I really DO hope, though, is that you have invested some of your extra time into prayer. Today, I want to talk about how to make the best of that investment.

Now, we tend to approach prayer from the perspective of asking God to provide for us — to bless us or to protect us, for instance. We pray for health and safety and deliverance, and there’s not necessarily anything wrong with asking God for those things.

After all, we see David asking for many of those things in the Psalms, and even Jesus said that we should pray that the Father would give us our daily bread.

But let’s think for a moment about that model prayer that is often called the Lord’s Prayer. You know the words. Say them along with me.

Matthew 6:9–13 NASB95

“Pray, then, in this way: ‘Our Father who is 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 do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’

Now, you might want to turn in your Bible’s to Matt 6:9 so you can follow along, as we’ll be looking back at this prayer line by line today.

The first thing I want you to see is that Jesus says, “Pray in this way.” What he’s saying is that this is a model for how we should pray, not necessarily a script. So if we pray according to this model, then we won’t go wrong.

This doesn’t mean you can’t pray quick prayers of supplication or that you can’t pray long prayers of praise. What I’m getting at is that your prayer life as a whole should reflect this model.

So if we’re going to pray according to this model, then one thing we should recognize right off the bat is that the majority of this prayer is God-focused.

Jesus prays TO the Father in Heaven, and He says right off the top that God’s name is hallowed — His name is holy. In other words, God is holy in His person and in His character.

He is completely set apart from us, completely other from us, and we are called to honor His holiness and the glory He has simply because of who He is.

When we talk to God as if He is simply a grandpa we can talk into giving us treats, we dishonor Him. When we talk ABOUT God in a casual way, we dishonor Him.

The Ancient of Days who spoke the universe and even time itself into existence does not sit on the throne of heaven to be cajoled into giving us anything.

“Hallowed be Your name” means that we come before God with the recognition that we are completely unworthy to stand in His presence, with the recognition that He is mighty and eternal and we are but dust.

We can come before God only through the mediating presence of His Son Jesus Christ, who died to saved us from our sins and who now sits at the right hand of His Father, who raised from the dead so that Jesus would be the firstfruits of a new creation.

This God deserves for us to come to Him in humility and absolute reverence, and I think too many of us approach Him far too casually.

So we are to pray that God’s holy name may be honored. When we do so, we are praying that “God shall be God, (and) that man shall not whittle God down to a manageable size and shape.” [Leon Morris, Luke: An Introduction and Commentary, vol. 3, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 212.]

And then note what comes next in this model prayer given to us by our Savior: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

So, let’s think about this for a minute. A kingdom has a what? Right. A king. And what does a king do in his kingdom? He reigns over it. He rules.

Who makes the rules in a kingdom? Who must be obeyed in a kingdom? What happens when someone disobeys the king? What if they participate in an outright rebellion?

Well, that’s just what Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. God, the creator of everything, had built a kingdom, and when he created man and woman in His image and then told them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, the idea was that they were to display His Kingdom throughout the earth. They would be His vice-regents.

But they chose to rebel against the rightful King, and for that the penalty was the same as it is in any kingdom — death — a physical death and a spiritual separation from the King who had created them for fellowship with Him.

We have inherited the curse of sin, and we also rebel, and only the sacrifice of God’s eternal Son, Jesus Christ, could pay the penalty for our our rebellion.

Knowing that there was no way we could save ourselves, God sent Jesus to take the punishment that we deserve for our rebellion. Jesus took our sins upon Himself on a cross at Calvary, where His death broke the curse of sin. And in His resurrection on the third day, Jesus overcame death itself.

His resurrection proved that He has the power to fulfill His promise to provide eternal life — physical resurrection, just like His — to those who follow Him in faith that His sacrifice is their only way to be made right with God.

And then Jesus ascended into Heaven, where Scripture tells us He sits at the right hand of the throne of God.

The Bible tells us that Jesus will return again to take home those who have followed Him in faith. It tells us that He will destroy those who have chosen to ignore who He is, that He will once and for all destroy sin and death and that He will make all things new as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

And finally, Jesus will turn the Kingdom that God has given Him back over to His Father.

Now, while He walked the earth during His incarnation as a man, Jesus often spoke of the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven, and He said that it had come in Him. He came with a message of salvation, warning of judgment for those who would not repent and follow Him.

His incarnation fulfilled the prophecies of what would need to take place before God would restore His Kingdom and re-establish His righteous rule over all of creation.

But all you have to do is look around to see that this world does not look like a place where the perfect, holy and righteous God’s kingly power is exercised over all of creation.

God is perfectly just, but the world is filled with injustice. God is love, but the world is filled with hatred. God is merciful, but the world is filled with retribution.

So there is an already/not yet aspect to the Kingdom of God. It has already come, but it has not come in the fulness that Scripture promises.

John Calvin put it this way: “To whatever extent iniquity abounds in the world, to such an extent the kingdom of God, which brings along with it perfect righteousness, is not yet come.” [John Calvin and William Pringle, Commentary on a Harmony of the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke, vol. 1 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), 320.]

So when we pray, “Your kingdom come,” we are praying that God will add to the fulness of His kingdom. We are praying that He will add righteousness to the world and take away unrighteousness. We are praying that His will be done on earth.

There is no doubt that God’s will is done in heaven, where angels continually sing, “Holy, holy, holy” and use their wings to hide their faces from His glory. The angels certainly recognize that God’s name is hallowed.

It is only here on earth, among those God created in His very own image, where His creatures choose to ignore and rebel against His will.

So we need to be careful about praying for His will to be done, because His will is often that we do hard things, things that put us into uncomfortable situations, things that the lost world considers to be foolish.

But that’s the model that Jesus gave us, both in this prayer and in His life.

Who would ever imagine a Master washing the feet of His servants? Who would imagine a King sacrificing His life on a cross? Who would ever imagine that the Savior of mankind would be the very triune God against whom man had rebelled?

The world considers these things to be foolish, but they were God’s will. And Jesus didn’t just say the words, “You will be done,” He lived them.

So He tells us to pray that God’s name will be hallowed, that God’s kingdom will come, and that God’s will be done.

And only THEN does Jesus mention praying about ourselves. “Give us this day our daily bread,” literally our “bread for tomorrow.”

This isn’t “give me what I need so I can have a comfortable retirement.” This isn’t “keep me from having troubles.” This is “give me what I need so I can do your will, whatever your will might be.”

When God delivered the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, He gave them manna to eat each day. They were to collect only enough to eat each day; whatever was left over would rot overnight and breed worms.

On Friday, they were to collect twice as much as they needed for a day, because they were not to collect anything on the Sabbath. And then on the Sabbath, the extra manna did NOT rot.

The point was that they were to completely trust God to provide for them completely. So when we pray “give us this day our bread for tomorrow” we are demonstrating that we trust God will provide just what we need to accomplish His will for our lives.

Most of us, frankly, don’t have that kind of faith. Most of us are like the rich man who had a bumper crop and built great barns to store it in, planning to kick back and relax — to eat, drink and be merry because of what he thought he had accomplished.

But that man didn’t realize that God would require his soul before he ever had a chance to enjoy any of it. How much better would it have been for that man if he had used the resources God had blessed him with to do the work of God?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with a bigger house or a nicer car unless those things keep you from doing the will of God, from serving Him by serving others, from bringing Him glory through the demonstration of your faith in Him.

If you have been blessed with abundance, then the God-honoring response is to bless others abundantly, not to bask in your blessing. God blesses us so that we can bless others.

If you are a follower of Christ, then the greatest blessing of all — your salvation — has been given to you so that you can share it with others, not so you can simply sit on the couch and tell everybody on Facebook how blessed you are.

Everybody in town would have known that rich man was blessed just by seeing the big barns he had built. What they needed was for him to share the blessing by sharing its source, the God who provides all good things.

And so we are to pray that God will provide our daily bread, but we’re also to pray for his daily forgiveness.

This one’s dangerous, folks.

“Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

Are you a forgiving person? Well, up to a point. Hmmm.

Well, what’s the model that Jesus gave us? As He was dying on the cross, He looked down at the very people who had nailed him there, and he said, “Father, forgive them.” That’s a pretty high standard for forgiveness, wouldn’t you say?

We all want forgiveness and mercy for ourselves, but we want justice for those who have hurt us.

Guess what? We are blessed so that we can bless others. That goes for forgiveness, too.

I don’t know what hurt you’ve experienced, but I know that there’s something. Every one of us has been hurt, and the fact of the matter is that some of us have been hurt in unspeakable ways.

The simple fact is that forgiveness is just not easy. And forgiveness usually isn’t something that we do just once and we’re done with it.

Especially if you have been hurt in some terrible way, forgiveness might very well be a daily activity. Today you forgive the person who wronged you, and tomorrow when that wrong comes to mind again, you have to forgive them all over again. And the next day and the next day and the next day.

Or maybe it’s not one wrong, but a series of wrongs that continues.

You have to release the right to vengeance and leave it to God. That’s what forgiveness is, and that’s one of the reasons it can be so hard — because we want to exact our own vengeance.

We have experienced injustice, and we demand to bring down the hammer of justice ourselves.

Let God handle that. It’s healthier for you, both physically and spiritually.

Forgive others as you wish to be forgiven by God, and if you’re not willing to do that, then be very careful about praying this verse.

There’s one more line from this model prayer in the earliest manuscripts of the Book of Matthew, and it’s this: “And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

This verse is tough to work out, because it’s a hard translation that is further complicated by its rhetorical nature. Folks, God will never lead you into temptation. If you’re being tempted, it is the devil who is tempting you, not God.

The New Living Translation rephrases the rhetorical statement and makes the translation from Greek to English in such a way that we can understand it better:

Matthew 6:13 NLT

And don’t let us yield to temptation, but rescue us from the evil one.

Now understand that God will ALLOW you to be tempted in order to help you grow in the Spirit and put to death the flesh.

But He has promised that He will not test you with more than you can handle in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Here’s what the Apostle Paul wrote about that:

1 Corinthians 10:13 NASB95

No temptation has overtaken you but such as is common to man; and God is faithful, who will not allow you to be tempted beyond what you are able, but with the temptation will provide the way of escape also, so that you will be able to endure it.

The Apostle Peter wrote about how God rescued Lot from the depraved city of Sodom, and he noted that if God was able to do that,

2 Peter 2:9 NASB95

then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from temptation, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment for the day of judgment,

Call out to God in your times of temptation. Turn to Him in prayer — perhaps even using the words of THIS model prayer, “Lord, don’t let me yield to temptation, but rescue me from the evil one.”

And then, as Paul put it to young Timothy, flee the temptation and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace. Call on the Lord with a pure heart, and He will respond.

And that’s the final thing I want to mention about prayer this morning.

What kind of heart will you take to the Lord?

God knows your weaknesses. God knows your needs. God knows your fears. What God wants is your authenticity.

Are you feeling broken? Tell Him that. Are you afraid? Tell Him that, and ask Him for His courage and comfort. Don’t go to God in the bluster of your pride.

Remember that the first words of this model prayer are “Our Father.” If you have followed Jesus Christ in faith, then the God who created the universe has adopted you into His family as a son or daughter.

And as your heavenly Father, He wants to give you good gifts; he wants to bless you and comfort you and provide for you.

Now those blessings and comforts and provisions might no always be what you expect, but He is good, amen? And He knows what is best for you.

Come to Him in reverence, but come to Him as His child, ready and willing to do what He wills, and He will respond as a loving Father.

I want to encourage you to spend some time this week with this model prayer. Pray the words Jesus spoke, and then pray your own words according to the model He gave.

I promise you that your prayers will have more power, that you will draw closer to the Father and that you will be blessed in the stronger relationship that develops between you and He.