Let Him Hear It Part 1

Announcements

Escape Room Mid February. Let me know by January 20 if you want to go.

prayer request

Let Him Hear It

What frustrations has 2020 left you with?

I’ve been left with tons, more than what any of you may know. I’m about to be extremely honest with you.

I’ll be honest, I let 2020 get the best of me and clammed up from almost everyone. I’ve struggled with tons and lots of things suffered for it.

Something that suffered that shouldn’t had was my relationship with God. I turned from Him when i shouldn’t have. I stopped praying daily. I stopped reading the Bible daily. And now that I look back I can tell how negatively that impacted me.

I realized what was going on and kept telling myself I was going to start back, but things conveniently kept getting in the way.

God can and will take everything and bring you to a point where you have no place to turn.

During one of Bro. Shane’s sermons he mentioned that maybe those nights where you can’t sleep is God saying, look now you have time. It’s just you and me.

I finally broke. I told God everything. All my issues, all my problems, I confessed it all to Him and there was a change. There was a feeling of don’t you feel better.

I know we’ve discussed prayer before, but I feel it’s something we need to get into again and this time go a lot deeper.

It’s often the last resort when it should be the first resort.

For the next few weeks prayer is going to be our main focus.

We’ll look at different examples of prayers in the Bible, we’ll look at different ways we can pray, and we’ll look at ways of keeping up with our prayer life.

So to get started let’s turn to Matthew 6. Verses 5-15 will be our main verses for the series and it’ll be the verses we look at tonight. Just two things I want to point out tonight.

Verse 5-15 says:

Let Him Hear It In The Right Way

This is part of what is called the Sermon on the Mount. In the verses around this, Jesus is giving some instructions to His disciples. He’s already completely blown their mind on a few different things, like hating someone is the same as committing murder to God.

Where we pick up Jesus has started talking about prayer and how to pray.

He says that when you pray you shouldn’t be like the hypocrites that love to stand and be seen by people.

So is Jesus saying we shouldn’t pray out loud? no of course not.

He’s addressing something very specific here.

The religious leaders of the time viewed God as seeing everything outwardly. No one looked inward towards their own thoughts. It was all about show.

The religious leaders would pray loudly in the synagogues and make sure everyone would hear them. They would over exaggerate their prayers to look more holy in front of their fellow Jews.

Jesus actually gives an example in one of His parables.

Luke 18:10-14 Two men went to temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a Tax Collector

The Pharisee prayed in public where everyone could hear him and thanked God he wasn’t like other sinful people and look at all the stuff I do for you God, by fasting and my giving

The other man couldn’t even lift his head up to God because he understood he was sinful and was begging for God to forgive him.

Jesus said the tax collector was the one who went home justified that day.

So we shouldn’t be turning our prayers into a huge show public showing, but instead we should be humble when we pray.

How can we do that?

by praying quietly to ourselves. Not drawing attention from everyone else.

focusing on our conversation with God and not if the person next to me hears or sees me so they know that I am praying

What’s awesome about praying and focusing solely on God is the fact it opens up so many opportunities to pray.

driving down the road

before you go to bed or when you wake up

when you go for a walk

when you’re sitting there staring at nothing

Verse 7 tells us not to babble like the idolaters who think their many words will impress God and He will hear them more than others.

Sometimes the best prayer is the shortest one

Lord save me

it’s three words, but yet it’s still a prayer

sometimes we tend to just run on and on and on about the same thing and sometimes it’s about nothing.

How many of you have prayed like this

Dear God, Thank you for today and for your blessings. Insert phone beep, oh God yeah sorry I got side tracked… And then we start right back over

One we need to stay focused, which we’ll work on that later, but we also need to remember that God already knows everything we are going to ask for or need before we do.

Let Him Hear It By His Example

So what should our prayer look like?

Well in verses 9-13 Jesus gave us an example. Now not every prayer will look exactly like this but it has components that we need to have in our prayer

Verse 9-13 says

let’s break it down

Verse 9

Our Father in heaven, Your name be honored as Holy

Jesus is pointing out that before anything else, we need to recognize and acknowledge that we’re talking to God.

Jesus addresses God as Father and we can address Him as Father as well

He is the Father of the Universe, He created all things and is in control of all things

We recognize that God is holy and show Him respect when we pray because of that holiness.

Remember none of us are truly worthy of speaking to God because we are all sinful, but it’s by His grace we are saved from our sins through Christ, and through Christ we’re able to speak to God.

So we give God glory when we speak to Him. We give praises to God because again, without Him we would be completely lost.

Verse 10

Your Kingdom Come

Here Jesus is saying we should recognize that God’s Kingdom is coming.

We know that Jesus rose from the dead and He will return. After His return there will be a new heaven and new earth and everything will be made right

We should be looking forward to that. Praising God for that day.

Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven

Here we’re recognizing that God is in complete and total control of the universe. Whatever God wants to happen, happens. He said let there be light in Genesis 1 and boom there was light

So we should want the same thing for us. As believers we should want His will to be done in our lives.

Now is that going to be exactly what we want? Most of the time probably not

Why would you think that?

It’s because we can’t see the big picture of things. We don’t know what happens tomorrow but let alone 10 minutes from now.

There has been plenty of times I’ve prayed God I really want this to happen, but something completely different happened.

Then later on down the road I can see why, but at the time I had no clue what was going on.

God knows exactly what’s going to happen and everything that does happen, is for our good and His glory.

Verse 11

Give us this day our daily bread

So now Jesus is letting us know we should pray for things we need.

He’s not saying we pray for God to give us nothing but bread, but the things that keep us going throughout life

We pray and give things for the things we have, the gifts He’s given us.

Do you thank God for the food you have or the clothes you wear?

We don’t tend to think of it this way, but they are all gifts from God.

This also teaches us to focus on today and not worry about tomorrow

Jesus didn’t say give us our weekly bread He said daily.

We need to turn to God on a daily basis for everything and not worry about what tomorrow will bring

a few verses down in Matthew 6:34 Jesus said not to worry about tomorrow because tomorrow will worry about itself.

God’s got everything under control

Another thing Jesus is teaching is praying for others.

He said US not me. Give US our daily bread.

We should be in prayer for others.

Lots of people we know need prayers. We went over some earlier, but I’m sure we can think of hundreds of people we could be praying for.

Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors

So here, Jesus isn’t talking about a money debt. He’s talking about sin.

We all owe a debt to God for our sins. We can’t pay that debt. However, Christ did pay that debt with His death on the cross.

When we accept Christ, it doesn’t mean we automatically become perfect and never sin again.

It’s our nature unfortunately. It’s easier to lie than to tell the truth.

When we do sin, we need to ask God for forgiveness. We should recognize we did wrong and say God I’m sorry. I did this and this and this

Then ask Him to help you turn from that sin

Jesus also threw in as we have forgiven our debtors

So let me ask a question. If I owe Renee $10. She looks at me and says you’ve been an amazing husband, you’re so awesome, don’t worry about the $10.00. But then I go to (pick someone) and say hey, you owe me .50 cents. Pay it up now. How fair is that?

It’s not fair. Here Renee was being gracious and forgave the $10 I owed her, but I can’t return that same grace for a mere .50 cents?

Jesus tells a parable in Matthew 18:21-25 that covers the same story.

explain the story

If our holy God is willing to forgive us for EVERYTHING we have done or will do against Him, then we should be able and willing to forgive each other when they do something wrong to us.

Verse 13

And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

Here Jesus is letting us know that we just asked for forgiveness now ask God to help keep us out of trouble.

We should pray to stay away from the sins we commit.

God doesn’t tempt us, but always gives us a way out when we are tempted with sin.

Think about the last time you sinned. Don’t say it out loud, but think about it.

Did you have a way out? The answer is yes.

Would it have been an easy way out? probably not but there was still a away out

example you told a lie to mom and dad because you thought you were going to get in trouble for something you did and you were afraid of the consequences.

What was the out? Telling the truth and facing the consequences. Is it easy? No because you have to face the consequences.

Keeps us from the evil one.

We ask God exactly that. We ask Him to keep us from sinning. We ask Him to guide us and direct us in His ways

We know what His ways are through reading the Bible and knowing His word.

So closing out for tonight

We’re really going to be looking into different prayers over the next few weeks.

We see from our main verse here, that Jesus wants us to be humble when it comes to our prayers. Not shouting out for everyone to hear, making a huge scene.

Again doesn’t mean we can’t pray out loud together but we should pray by ourselves, all the time. No matter what we are doing where we are going we should be in constant prayer.

And we have that example that Jesus showed us on how to pray

How we should recognize God for how holy He is

want His will to be what happens in our lives

that he will provide for our needs daily and not worry about things to come

Giving thanks for what He has given us

seeking forgiveness when we sinned against Him and asking Him to keep us away from that sin.