Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

As we continue walking through the sermon on the mount.

Today we dive into prayer

And I want to tell you that I am not sure if what I am about to give is a sermon or a testimony or a little bit of both.

And I want to begin right away with this part of your notes

Prayer is not a task to be done but a relationship to be cultivated

When I was a teenager and I first started following Jesus and going to church I was always a little weirded out by prayer times in church.

I was like, why do you all need 30 minutes to pray…God knows our thoughts just say what you need to say.

So because I did not have a reverent view of prayer, I saw it as a task to be done…Just pray and move on

So I developed some bad habits surrounding prayer

In my early 20’s when I was a youth pastor, my senior pastor would make prayer time the most central thing about our church service.

And I know that I hit rock bottom in my prayer life when there was one day when we were praying in church and there were just a tn of prayer requests that day.

and we prayed for everything…

Aunt Bertha’s hang nail…You name it we prayed for it

So I am sitting in church...

Assuming the prayer position...

and at that time I sat with all of my youth students who came to church

Well before I knew it, this youth girl who sat next to be elbowed me in the arm and I was like “hey! why did you do that?”

Well it turns out she was just trying to give me the offering plate

I had been asleep for like 15-20minutes

And you know teenagers....

“PASTOR DAVE< WERE YOU SLEEPING THROUGH PRAYER TIME”

And I obviously lied to them and said…You see I was just so deep in prayer that it must have looked like I was sleeping

They didn’t buy it...

I had been caught as a leader in the church sleeping through the prayer time...

And the reality is that when you see prayer as a task…You will always kind of sleep through it...

But if you treat prayer as cultivating your relationship with God then it will always be a high priority in your life.

What happens when you treat your other relationships as a task...

I’ve already spent my mandatory 5 minutes with you

I realized something about the way that I thought about God highly affected the way that I prayed and it turns out that I had an incorrect assumption about God

I had realized that my theology about what kind of God that God is is highly affected by Aristotle and I didn't even know it

The Un-Moved Mover

See in the world of Ancient Greek Philosophers.

God is this un moved mover

They way they viewed God is that you and I have no influence at all over what God does but God just moves and acts as he pleases

If we were to get really honest about it, probably the Greek Philosophers live in our theology too...

We believe that prayer is like a cosmic slot machine in the sky at times.

We throw a request out and who knows, maybe God will answer prayer maybe not...

But the problem with the un-moved Mover concept is that is not Biblical.

Instead the Bible paints the picture that God is the Most Moved Mover

That God hears us and responds to us.

In Exodus 32:12b-14 Moses goes and speaks to God after Israel had just made the Golden Calf..

And what you have to understand about this is that God is Mad…He is ready to wipe his people off the face of the earth

Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people.

13 Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.’

” 14 Then the LORD relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.

So Moses asks him to relent which means to change your mind.

I mean imagine the audacity of Moses right?

Hey God would you change your mind?

and then verse 14 says everything about prayer

Then the LORD relented

When I understood this…Prayer for me was changed from a TASK to a RELATIONSHIP

In fact, When Jesus talked about prayer

He has the same idea

That God moves as a result of our request

Look at this parable with me real fast

So when Jesus talks about prayer in the parables...

He talks about a widow...

And the Judge is supposed to be God and the widow is us

Because of this woman’s relentless badgering of the Judge…The Judge moves

Jesus is saying that this is what God is like...

We have to be the sort of people who are relentlessly going before God requesting God to move

Really this is also the way that Jesus defines faith too...

How willing are we to relentlessly come before God and request of him when we

1. do not see him and

2. our request isn't being met?

When Jesus asks, when the son of man comes, will he find faith on this earth...That is faith…The faith of the widow who will continue to go back to the judge…The faith To continue to go back to God.

The point is that we follow a God who wants to have relationship with us…He is not some Stoic un-moved object in the sky, He is the living God who is moved by what we pray

And all of this helps us as we get into our text on the Sermon on the Mount today...

This is an extension of what we looked at last week but applied to prayer

Last week we talked about giving in secret, not letting your left and right hands know what you are doing.

And if you remember just to recap…What Jesus was saying was that in his Kingdom he will form us to be the sort of people where God’s goodness effortlessly flows out of who we are

Jesus wants the same with prayer...

Prayer is just simply the air that we breathe…Jesus wants us to cultivate a sort of life with him where prayer is our normal language, we pray without ever thinking about it

So here

Jesus moves prayer from a public Spectacle to a private relationship

So then Jesus tells his disciples how to pray...

And absolutely everyone has heard this prayer

so as a pastor, I don’t want to preach it as much as I want to again give you a testimony of how this prayer has affected me

There is an absolute travesty in all of our Bibles...

That is this…In English, the word “Heaven”

Now this first part says, our father in Heaven....

To a 21st century person this communicates distance.

‘

This communicates that God is far off, it gives him a Location…it gives God a space that we couldn't possibly inhabit.

Now if you were to translate this from Greek Straight to English it would Say

Father of us, the one in the Heavens

Do you see the subtle difference…

There is a singular heaven and a plural heavens…You would think oh no big deal…

This is really small and it might look even petty to you that I am pointing it out, But in my mind, one of the single greatest Bible editing flops of all time is making this word heavens singular to heaven….

Now here is why: to 21st century Americans heaven is some physical location way out there, beyond our reach

But to the first century Jews the word “heavens” meant something very different…There were three levels:

The first heaven is here on earth in the realm of where people are at..

The other Heavens are the air and the sky

The next is the universe…

So when the Bible says the Kingdom of the heavens it is all of that space that is around us...

It is not far off

Jesus is communicating that his Farther is close to humanity

The first century people understood “heavens” as even the air that is around your head…

Jesus saying, “in the heavens” meant that God is always near you.

This is why I always say that God is closer than the air that you breathe