The Person

Good morning church! So good to see you this morning! If this is your first time worshiping here at East, let me say WELCOME! We are pumped that you are here and we hope you feel the warmth in this place and that God will help you know him more today. We actually have a gift for you. Please take the card from the seat in front of you and fill it out with as much info as you feel comfortable with. And on your way out today, hand that card to someone in our next steps area in the lobby. They will get you a bag with some church info and will find out your t shirt sizes and hook you up with a nice East shirt.

Also, I am so excited to step off into this new series of messages today because we are going to be looking at something that is probably familiar to most of us but taking it down real deep and making sure we understand it.

Back in the fall of last year, we studied through the Sermon on the Mount which is a big block of Jesus’ teaching from Matthew 5-7. When we got to what we know of as the Lord’s Prayer, we didn’t spend much time on it. We spent more of our time on the statements around it.

So, today, we are coming back to those verses we skipped. In May, we are asking God to help us understand what is being conveyed in the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9-13.

Matthew 6:9–13 CSB

“Therefore, you should pray like this: Our Father in heaven, your name be honored as holy. 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 do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

PRAY

It feels weird to pray after reading the Lord’s prayer by the way...

But anyway...

This morning, we are gonna start this four week walk through this cool prayer that Jesus gives.

The first thing to note about this prayer is that Jesus didn’t pray this prayer. He wasn’t voicing this before his meals or when he snuck away from them to spend time alone with God. The disciples who would later go back and write down the ministry of Jesus may not have ever heard Jesus pray this prayer.

Point number one note takers,

1. It is DISCIPLESHIP

Jesus gives this prayer to his followers as a way to TEACH them to pray! It is recorded two different times in the accounts of Jesus’ ministry.

The first is here in Matthew 6. It is smack dab in the middle of Jesus’ largest block of teaching recorded. In what’s called the sermon on the mount. But again, Jesus gave this as a way to teach his disciples to pray.

It begins with the word THEREFORE! If you have heard me teach more than 2 or 3 times, you know we probably won’t just blow right past it, right? This is a connecting word that ties what Jesus is about to say, to what has just been said. So, we have to look back before we look forward.

Jesus has just given a short talk on how prayer was being done poorly by the Jewish leaders of their day. He is using these leaders’ showmanship and grandstanding as a bad example of real prayer. He drives home the point that his followers shouldn’t pray out loud just so others will think they are holy. And he says that God is not impressed when you use lots of big words and pray for a long time. God knows your heart and knows your needs!

It’s with this truth in mind that Jesus then says THEREFORE!

Because God is not impressed by your fancy long prayer because he already knows your heart, THEREFORE Pray like this...

You see, this is not necessarily just a prayer Jesus wanted them to mindlessly pray through the day. This prayer is not in itself worship!

Instead, this prayer is given so that they might understand what prayer is, who it is directed to, and what prayer can and should include! This prayer is designed to teach you to pray not give you a prayer to pray? Do you see the importance of that distinction?

What I am not saying is that if you have ever prayed this prayer in your life, that it did not honor God and was definitely not worship. That’s not it. You can absolutely pray this prayer, meaning every piece of it and honor God greatly. But, again, not the intent.

So, this prayer was designed to be a way to disciple Jesus’ followers and help them learn to pray.

One of the things we learn about prayer from the Lord’s Prayer is that...

2. It is INTIMATE

Jesus begins teaching his disciples to pray, by showing them who they are praying to. It would have been totally acceptable for Jesus to begin this prayer with,

God or

Creator of the heavens and the earth or

Lord or

God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob

God of Israel

There are many ways this pray could have started, but Jesus begins it with, Father. That is important!

In fact, when you look at the prayers that Jesus prays in the first four boooks of the New Testament, in all but one of those prayers, he calls God Father. This is part of what ticked the first century Jewish world off! John records in chapter 5 verse 18...

John 5:18 CSB

This is why the Jews began trying all the more to kill him: Not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal to God.

I read this week that a German scholar was doing research in New Testament literature and discovered that in the entire history of Judaism, that’s the Old Testament books and several books written in the 400 or so years prior to Jesus’ birth that are not in the Bible- in all of that history, he couldn’t find a single account of someone referring to God as Father in the first person. Not Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, David, NOT a single person!

However, in the first century, some new hot shot rabbi comes on the scene, and he is referring to God as Father like crazy! And the Jewish leaders didn’t like it.

Jesus talked to and about God in a way that no other Rabbis did. It was very intimate, personal. There were ways for the Jews to pray to God and talk about God, but the names and ways felt much more formal than casual! Jesus is shaking the Jewish world up here! But then he takes it up a notch!

Not only does he talk to God in this intimate way, he teaches his disciples to do the same! In an effort to teach them to pray he doesn’t say, Our God, Our Lord, Our Sovereign one. He says OUR FATHER!

I have children. That means that I am a father. And I can tell you that there is nothing I hear more clearly than my child’s voice.

When Elsie Jo or Dan come up and sit in my lap to tell me something, I want to listen. They can get my attention. My lap is off limits to the rest of you! You don’t have that privilege. You can send me a text or email. You can call. You can talk to me after the service. We can share a meal together. But the intimacy of conversation that I have with my children will always be greater than what I can offer you.

(Y’all are OK with that, right?)

You and I get to lock eyes with the God of all Creation. We get the full attention of the one who spoke things into existence and continues to sustain everything by his word. We get that attention because he is our FATHER!

Why in the world do we have a hard time praying!?

If we truly do have needs… (and we do)

And God can do something about them (and he can)

And he is our Father who loves us and desires to listen, then WHY WON”T WE TALK TO HIM! And that question is as much for me as it is for you! You have a pastor who struggles in his prayer life too! But that don’t give you a pass! That just means we all can grow in that together! Amen?

If we will recognize these truths before we pray, man what a difference it can make in our walks with God.

But let me show you ONE MORE THING about the Lord’s Prayer.

3. It is COMMUNAL

You see this? Jesus didn’t tell them to pray MY FATHER. YOUR FATHER. He said OUR FATHER. The importance of that possessive pronoun OUR is heavy!

I think this has two implications for us.

The first is that we need to pray for one another!

If you were to make two columns on a sheet of paper, one column being Me, the other column being others. And you were to make tally marks based on all the things you asked God for last week or last month, which column would be larger?

I will say that I can be SUPER SELFISH in my prayers. If I don’t do it intentionally, I can wear God out for the things I would like to see him to in my life and totally forget all yall existed! That aint good!

We need to pray intentionally for one another. If you need to keep a prayer list in your home, on your fridge. Or if you prefer a journal or notifications on your phone. Whatever works, but make sure that you are spending time praying for other people.

The second implication for the term OUR FATHER in Jesus’ teaching on prayer is that Jesus wanted his disciples to know that they were in the same boat together. Their lives as his followers were not to be lived separate from one another, each traveling in his/ her own direction! The life of following Jesus is a communal one.

And let me just speak to this for a second. Using two analogies: one I know very much about, and one I know very little.

Kelly and I like to kayak. We have paddled several creeks and rivers around here. Since having kids, we haven’t gotten to go as often as we would like (as in our kayaks are in the attic......)

When we first started our favorite ride was Sugar Creek in West Limestone. You put in on HWY 99 at Todd’s Bottom and you get out at Cotton Belt. Don’t go under Cotton Belt! It’s a long slow ride from their to the Elk River and Sportsman’s park!

Anyway, on Sugar Creek, there are some spots that are pretty quick moving. There may be a deeper hole on the right that’s got a descent current to it, but there is a big rock or a tree down on the left that is causing the water to redirect. When this much water is forced through a spot this big, guess what happens? It often goes faster!

So, as I’m going down Sugar Creek, my head is on a swivel. I’m looking for these beautiful white capped rapids! Not to avoid them but to roll right through them as fast as I can! I love it. I’ve ruined a cell phone, several cans of Sun Drop and lost my first wedding ring to Sugar Creek. But I love hitting those rapids.

Kelly is also watching for them! But not to ride through them. She goes around them. Unlike me, she has never fallen out of her kayak! I have a whole bunch!

Kelly can do that because she controls her own boat, right? I want the rapids she doesn’t. She can go in her own direction.

But what happens when we share a canoe? It’s a lot harder! We have to communicate our path now. Are we going towards that rapid or skipping it? We have to make sure we are working together and not paddling in circles. Let me just say, it is so much more difficult riding in a canoe with someone than it is in a kayak by yourself.

However!!!!!!!!!

When you communicate, and when you work together, you can absolutely cover some ground! Two people working together in a canoe will smoke a kayak any day!

I know there are people who would look at our church and others and say, “What a mess! They call themselves Christians, but they can’t even get along with each other!”

To those people I would say, You are right! There is nothing easy about coming together for the purpose of seeing the glory of God in us our neighbors and the nations! It is hard! A lot of days, life would be much more simple to just live life alone, outside of the church. But we don’t do this together because it’s easy!

We do this together because it is the only way we can see it accomplished! If Heath Haney lives a sold out life for Jesus, yet tries to do it alone, I will see some fruit from my efforts, no doubt. But if I get a few people to help me, if we rally around a common goal, heading in one direction together? That will be hard at times. And we will butt heads, no doubt. But we will see God do something really cool.

Jesus says that we should pray to OUR FATHER!

You know we like to talk about Next Steps here. Every week, we say, “How did God speak to you during the message and what Next Steps can you take this week with God’s help that will help you look more like Jesus? Well, I can’t think of a better Next Step for you to take today than to simply lift this church up in prayer. You may be like me and know just about everybody in this room. Or you may be a guest and not know anybody! But most of you are some where in the middle. You have a small group of friends here maybe, but that’s it. Can I challenge you a little? Don’t just pray for those you know! Let your prayers this week be for those outside your closest circle of friends or maybe even your small group too. Lift up prayers for our church as a whole and call names of people that you don’t know as well.

Just a reminder that one of our Next Step Resources is a prayer guide that is tailor made for our church. You will pray directly for specific names, ministries, and efforts in our church.

You can also grab a small copy of the prayer that we prayed last week in our service together. So many of you talked about how impactful that prayer was in thinking through what God might really use us to do! We will be coming back to that prayer over and over this year!

Those resources are available at Next Steps in the Lobby. Talk to the lady behind the counter with a badge on and they will hook you up with whatever you need.

Before we dive off into the rest of this prayer over 3 more weeks, let’s take an opportunity to think about who we are praying to. We get to bend the ear of God, our Father, Creator of all things! He hears our prayers church!

Today, if you need prayer over anything, you would like to come link arm in arm with us here at East as a member, you’ve never been baptized and would like to talk about that, or if you realize today that you are not walking with God and you would like to surrender your life to Christ today, I would love to walk with you through that!

We are gonna sing one more song today. I don’t know how you need to respond, but let’s respond in whatever way necessary.

PRAY

(Maybe allow some quiet time before standing.)