A Disciple's Model Prayer

“And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. 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. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

Intro:

Today we jump back into our series though the Sermon on the Mount called Greatest. Sermon. Ever. And as we jump back in, we come to yet another passage that will be familiar to many of you and many people in general. My hope is that today we can see it with fresh eyes and understand what Jesus is teaching in the Word of God. If we are not careful, the Lord’s Prayer can become so familiar that we recite it with rote repetition. However, this was never what the teaching of Jesus in the prayer was supposed to be about. An example, in high school, before our football games at my public school, the team and the coaches would recite the Lord’s prayer together in the locker room. Now these guys were not Christians but they tossed it up hoping for something. That’s not the point here.

This passage is situated in a way that Jesus is teaching His followers to pray rightly in God’s way as opposed to the hypocritical way of the scribes and Pharisees that he had just described. So He teaches them to pray humbly and worshipfully and not in the way of pagans.

Sinclair Ferguson says,

[This prayer] serves two purposes.

First, it provides a model prayer, an easily memorized outline that serves as a lesson in how to approach God as Father and how we are to speak with him.

Second, it serves as an outline of the whole Christian life by providing certain “fixed points” of concern for the family of God. It underlines life’s priorities and helps us to get them into focus. (Sermon, 120)

It is because of this that some refer to it as the Disciple’s Model Prayer or the Model Prayer of a Disciple.

As many do, we are going to look at the natural division of the prayer into two sections which each contain three requests or petitions. The first three deal with requests focused on God and the second three requests focus on our needs. We’ll begin with the first section and learn that when you pray, you should start with your Heavenly Father.

I. When You Pray, Start with Your Heavenly Father (6:9-11).

What does this mean?

When we come to prayer, we are running to our Heavenly Father for it is only He who can help us and who truly matters.

We have the privilege as followers of Christ of being adopted into the family of God. We have been bought with a price and redeemed and added to His family. We must not take for granted the incredible privilege we have to run to our Father and worship Him as well as tell Him our needs.

Jesus teaches them and us to begin with three parts of prayer that focus us on God the Father.

J.I. Packer wrote:

You sum up the whole of the New Testament teaching in a single phrase, if you speak of it as a revelation of the Fatherhood of the holy Creator. In the same way you sum up the whole of the New Testament religion if you describe it as the knowledge of God as one’s Holy Father. If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all. (Knowing God, 182)

A. Pray for the Lord’s name to be honored (6:9).

Value God and His name as holy.

Be radically God centered.

The purpose of prayer is not that you be honored and lifted up. We want to honor and lift of God and his name in prayer. He is unique, pure, undefiled, righteous, transcendent, supreme, and the most excellent, amazing, and complete treasure in the universe. Everything else pales in comparison to Him.

B. Pray for the Lord’s kingdom to come (6:10).

This request comes from a mission minded heart.

You’re to pray with a healthy balance of thinking of the end when Christ will reign forever and the desire for more people to know Jesus. You want His kingdom to come with people coming to know Him and His kingdom to come in eternity as well. The world is at war even if people don’t recognize it. There is a cosmic battle going on and one of the greatest weapon we have is prayer. We are not fighting for our own kingdom or our own way but for God’s name to be honored, not ours. It’s praying that every sphere of our lives will start to look like it will look like in the new creation. It’s asking God to roll out the troops around the world and being more people into the kingdom.

C. Pray for the Lord’s will to be done (6:10-11).

Jesus, as often has been said, is the best commentary on His own teachings. His life was of course, exemplary of the character of a child of God. This includes the way He prayed and conducted Himself in relation to the will of God.

Matthew 26:39 ESV

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.”

Verse 44

Matthew 26:44 ESV

So, leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words again.

This kind of prayer is the antidote to sin in the heart. We have been continually saying the heart of the matter is a matter of the heart. Because sin begins in the heart it will only be killed in you when your heart desires God’s will more than your heart desires your will. Only the grace of God can produce this in your heart. You can’t muster it up on your own. Only the person who has been redeemed from the kingdom of death can truly pray for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done over their own. It’s submission to God’s kingdom over your own selfish kingdom.

II. When You Pray, Share Your Concerns with Your Heavenly Father (6:11-15).

As we hit verse 11, this model prayer of a disciple shifts focus from our heavenly Father to our needs.

Wiersbe wrote: “Satan wants to convince us that prayer is a waste of time, but the Word of God and our own Christian experience assure us that prayer is a key to God’s treasury of grace.”

A. Ask for your daily needs to be met (6:11).

The prayer for daily bread would bring to mind God providing manna from heaven for the Hebrews during the Exodus from Egypt in Exodus 16. They were to only gather what they needed for that day. The next day He would provide once again.

We tend to take our daily needs being met for granted but we should pray this with humility and know that if the Lord doesn’t supply what we need to live, we will die. Understand that He is holding the entire universe together and sustaining you daily. If He were to stop, you’d be done. It’s a recognition of that and trusting Him as you ask Him to provide. Unfortunately, the high availability of food around us sort of trick us into thinking we are self-sufficient…

Job’s story should remind us that we are dependent on God for all things.

D.A. Carson teaches that this prayer for daily bread should not be empty rhetoric. It’s not to be just something we say out of memory or some kind of ritual.

It’s like we forget

James 1:17 ESV

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.

He provides our daily needs and our eternal needs.

B. Ask for God to forgive you as you forgive others (6:12,14-15).

Next, the prayer moves into a petition for God to forgive you as you forgive others. If we look down at verses 14 and 15 we see some commentary on this.

It is understanding if some people may find this petition confusing. I mean, this is the prayer of the child of God and the child of God has been forgiven for their sins. They have been justified before God and forgiven when they first repented of their sins and trusted in Jesus Christ for salvation.

Romans 8:1 ESV

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

So how should we understand what it says here in the prayer of a disciple?

Exalting Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount The Lord’s Prayer 6:9-15

J. I. Packer once again is helpful at this point when he says,

The Lord’s Prayer is the family prayer, in which God’s adopted children address their Father, and though their daily failures do not overthrow their justification, things will not be right between them and their Father till they have said, “Sorry” and asked him to overlook the ways they have let him down. (Praying, 79)

Paul Tripp adds,

When I live this lifestyle I find joy in telling Jesus, day after day, that I need what he did in his life, death and resurrection. This lifestyle is about growing to acknowledge that in some way, every day, I give evidence to the fact that the cross was necessary. And this lifestyle of forgiveness makes my daily attitude one of heartfelt gratitude and joy. (Quest for More, 159)

Gospel here:

We had an insurmountable debt that we owed. We were in rebellion against God. Our debt was wiped out by the work of Christ on the cross. Jesus washed all of our sins away in the doctrine of justification. In sanctification, He now washes our now sins away daily.

We have been forgiven so much that we there is no excuse for us to not to forgive others who sin against us. We have no grounds for holding onto it. We can’t be like the ungrateful servant in Matthew 18:21-35. We can’t hold a minor debt against someone when such a huge debt was forgiven us. Our forgiving others does not earn us God’s forgiveness, rather it’s a sign of our having been forgiven.

Thomas Watson helps us with applying this. He wrote,

Exalting Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount The Lord’s Prayer 6:9-15

“We are not bound to trust an enemy; but we are bound to forgive him”

Forgiveness of others should be like breathing for a Christian because it’s the only way that we have hope… because we were forgiven by God in Christ at the cross.

And the last petition Jesus includes here is asking God to deliver us from the evil one.

C. Ask for God to deliver you from the evil one (6:13).

John Piper’s words about prayer are helpful:

Prayer is primarily a wartime walkie-talkie for the mission of the church as it advances against the powers of darkness and unbelief. . . . Prayer malfunctions when we try to make it a domestic intercom to call upstairs for more comfort in the den. (Let the Nations, 65)

1. The importance of prayer in the life of a Christian

War time call for support. Not nonchalant.

2. The importance of prayer in the life of the local church

We are in a battle and we are on mission for the Lord. We must be comitted to prayer.

Conclusion:

We can’t overstate how important prayer is in the life of the Christian or in the life of the church. We want to pray rightly, with right motives. The heart of the matter is a matter of the heart.

I want to encourage you to call out to God.

Make time for prayer. Don’t let it be an afterthought. Call out to your Father for help, for forgiveness, for your needs, and focus on HIM. Pray for the mission. Pray for your church to fulfill its mission.

In Andrew Murray’s classic book With Christ in the School of Prayer, he wrote this prayer that I want to end our time with this morning.

Exalting Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount The Lord’s Prayer 6:9-15

Lord Jesus! Enroll my name among those who confess that they don’t know how to pray as they should, and who especially ask you for a course of teaching in prayer. Lord, teach me to be patient in your school, so that you will have time to train me. I am ignorant of the wonderful privilege and power of prayer. Lead me to forget my thoughts of what I think I know, and make me kneel before you in true teachableness and poverty of spirit. Fill me, Lord, with confidence that with you for my Teacher, I will learn to pray. . . . Blessed Lord! I know that you won’t put that student to shame who trusts you. And, with your grace, that student won’t shame you, either. Amen. (With Christ, 15)