SUNDAY SCHOOL: (Living The Lord's Prayer)

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Welcome back to the Shepherds Church podcast. Just like our Lord's Day sermon, we hope that this Sunday School message blesses you and strengthens you in your faith.

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Happy Easter to everybody. Happy Easter. As they say, he is risen. He is risen.

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Yeah, amen, wow, wow. You guys must all have grown up in the church. You guys are good at this.

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But let's begin with a word of prayer as we cover our last week in the Lord's Prayer. Patrick's volume okay, yeah.

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Our last week in the Lord's Prayer for this Sunday School lesson or season. But again, let's begin with prayer.

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Father, we thank you this morning, Lord, that we're able to come before you and worship not only this Sunday but every Sunday because of the resurrection of our

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Lord Jesus Christ. We ask you to help us to remember this, to rejoice in this today,

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Lord, that we would celebrate in our hearts the glorious truths of your kingdom that death was not able to contain, the life that is the

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Lord our God. May help us to build upon that, Lord, by the power of your spirit, not only in these moments that we have this morning of worship in your name, but Lord, help these things to fuel our building in all things that we would do, in all spheres of our lives.

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But Lord, in the time we have this morning, we ask you to help us to, again, rejoice and celebrate with cheerful hearts.

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In Jesus' name, and amen. Amen. All right, so, again, we're in the last week here of the

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Lord's Prayer. Really, Pastor Kendall last week covered the conclusion of the prayer, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen.

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This week, we're kind of looking at maybe a little bit higher view, like a 30 ,000 foot view again, of the

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Lord's Prayer in general and covering some questions, right? So I think that the idea that he and I had for this particular week was that it'd be really a time for kind of debriefing together, discussing some of the things.

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So if there are lingering questions or thoughts you've had over the past few weeks, this is a great week for us to cover those things.

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But, again, initially, we'll kind of recap briefly what we covered in the

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Lord's Prayer. In the prayer, we see three main parts of it.

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There's a preface, there are petitions, and there's a conclusion. So the preface of the prayer, our

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Father, which art in heaven, right? That's introduction of it. We are beginning our prayer with addressing the one to whom we are praying to.

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And then six petitions are included. First petition is that God would help us to hallow his name, right?

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We want to, as we approach our God, acknowledge that we are not him, we're not able, and so, therefore, we're going to him with our petitions.

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So the first request, even as we come before him, is that we're acknowledging our inability and asking him to help us, that by his grace he would enable us and incline us to revere his name properly.

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The second petition, thy kingdom come, right? We're acknowledging that we live in a fallen world.

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We're acknowledging that God, again, by his spirit and the work of his church, is now building his kingdom up that eventually will swallow up the entire world.

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That mustard seed of a kingdom will eventually swallow the entire world and cover it. But we are praying that as we come before him that he would destroy the kingdom of Satan, the kingdom of darkness and of sin, and that by using us he would cover that world by building his kingdom.

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The third petition, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Again, we're acknowledging our inability, our unwillingness to do the will of God, but we are asking him to replace our inclinations, the sinful inclinations of our flesh with his will, right?

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That he would help us to be vessels of the working out of his good will.

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All things happen according to the will and foreknowledge of God, right? But in the building up of his kingdom we're asking God to help us to be the vessels for good in doing that.

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And so we're acknowledging his sovereignty and also asking for his favor, that he'd use us for the good purposes of his will.

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In the fourth petition, we're saying, we ask God to give us this day our daily bread. Again, acknowledging our inability to sustain and provide for ourselves, we need

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God to care for us by his providence to provide for his people. We are in desperate need because of our fallenness, because of our sin to forsake

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God, right? To pursue our own. And so we're asking God that as he conforms us to his will, conforms us to the image of Christ, that he would continue to deal with us graciously, right?

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Each and every day, because we need those new mercies each morning, right? And so we're asking

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God continually to deal with us graciously. Not that he's forgotten who we are each morning, but we are, we're acknowledging our undeservedness, how unmerited that grace and favor are.

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And so we don't take it for granted as we ask him for these things and seek these things. The fifth petition, we ask

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God to forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Again, acknowledging that we and everybody else were all guilty of original sin and actual sin, right?

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We all were born in sin. We were conceived even in iniquity and we sin certainly in our lives.

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And so we have to continually ask God to forgive us. We should be continually asking God to forgive us. And we should be looking for his strength to be able to forgive others as well, right?

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To be able to work, to carry forward, right?

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The work of the Lord in our lives, that we would be salt and light to the world by bringing the ministry of reconciliation, of forgiveness and redemption to one another.

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And the sixth petition, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. We talked about this a few weeks ago, that this is a prayer that God always answers, right?

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In some form or another, we know that God will answer these requests to us to either lead us not into temptation, protect us from getting into situations where the testing would be too great for us, where in our flesh we would be too weak to overcome it.

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And we're asking him to deliver us from evil, to preserve us from those situations.

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But if we do fall into those situations that he would deliver us, he would help us to recover from it and to be brought out of it.

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And then in the conclusion, which Pastor Kendall again covered last week, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. We are again, the power of our petitions, right?

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The reason we have any confidence in our petitions is the beginning and the end. Our father, which art in heaven, and for thine is the kingdom,

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God, and the power and the glory forever. So if we have any hope of our requests being answered, we must keep these things in mind.

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We can only talk to God because he's our father in Christ. And we have hope that there will be answers, that we will have recourse, that he will deliver, right?

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Because he is the king. It is his kingdom and it's his power and it's his glory. So that it reinforces, this final point reinforces to us why our petitions are worth even stating and why we have hope that they will be answered, that our prayers join.

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Essentially, I love the way that the Catechism says it, but our prayers join our praises at this point, right?

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We have these six petitions that we've brought to God. And now our prayers have morphed into a doxology.

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I think Pastor Kendal emphasized this last week as well. Our prayers morph into a doxology of worship of who

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God is. The prayer turns into praise. That God, we have all these requests, these six requests, we need your assistance.

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And, but instead of dwelling on my need, let me look to the one whose is the kingdom and whose is the power and whose is the glory.

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So our prayers morph into praise or join to praise or join praise as the

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Catechism puts it. And so again, we're ascribing to God that eternal sovereignty and omnipotency and glorious excellency that he has.

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And again, this gives us our confidence. This gives us our assurance that the Lord would answer his people. Because he's able to.

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So, the last thing I'll say before we move into just kind of general Q &A or discussion if there's things that have stuck out is the

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Lord's Prayer as a form of prayer or even a recited prayer. I can't recall if Pastor Kendal in the first week discussed this very much.

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But it is an interesting thing that people have talked about over the years. And for myself growing up Roman Catholic, it was very important to remember, to memorize the

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Lord's Prayer among other prayers that were extra biblical.

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The Lord's Prayer being a biblical prayer. But the, you know, people not sure, should we just recite the

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Lord's Prayer verbatim? Is that appropriate as a prayer? Or is that just, you know, essentially is that reading of Scripture?

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Right, we recite the Lord's Prayer here every week. And so you have a sense of what our position on that question is. But it is something that people aren't sure about, right?

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Is reciting the Lord's Prayer, is that just rote? Is there something less spiritual about a rote prayer or a repeated prayer?

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Or is it more spiritual to pray spontaneously, kind of as things come to mind?

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That's the more spiritual prayer. I would argue, I think that's an interesting conversation in general, but I would argue obviously that the

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Lord's Prayer is a good prayer for Christians to pray, word for word, right?

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Not, it's not a cop -out, it's not lazy, it's not an easy prayer. It is, but it is a good and right prayer even for Christians to pray regularly.

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Because this prayer is not only, it is a model for us on how we should approach God with an introduction, you know, a preface of acknowledging who we're praying to with our petitions and then ending with a doxology towards our

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God, a thankfulness for who he is, right? It's a good model for us to structure the way that we would approach

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God in prayer. But it is even, in and of itself, a good and right prayer for Christians to pray regularly because of its content and because of its universality, really.

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These are not unique situations to first century Jews, not unique situations to the disciples.

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These are universal situations, universal petitions that apply to all Christians in all places at all times, right?

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So this prayer, it serves as not only a model of structure, but even as a good prompt for us when we don't know what else to say, may we at least say the

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Lord's Prayer and acknowledge our need for our God and our Father.

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Does this make sense? Yeah, all right. Any, with that, again,

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I wanted to, on this last week, we wanted to make this a little bit more conversational, well, obviously, every week's been more conversational.

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We've made that, been a little bit more intentional about that these past, in this particular series especially. But this week being kind of a recap week, are there things that have come up in your conversations afterwards or your thoughts afterwards as far as some of the things that we learned going through the

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Lord's Prayer? Or maybe you missed a week and you had questions on a particular aspect of the prayer. Are there things that stick out worthy of mentioning in conversation?

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Yes, sir. It's interesting, he starts this discourse off by saying don't be like the

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Gentiles with repetitious prayers. Yeah. Reminds me of praying the rosary in the

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Catholic Church. That's extreme repetition, you know? Yeah. Hail Mary. Yeah.

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Thinking that that meaningless repetition is gonna account for something, you know? Yeah. When in reality, it doesn't, you know?

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Real prayer has to come from the heart. It's actually interesting on your point as it relates to that, that in drawing the distinction between praying in vain repetitious ways and praying these sort of rote prayers, then

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Christ himself gives us a model to pray after him. He says pray like this. And so there's a distinction there where you can pray.

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I think the Psalms are obviously, that's the Lord's Prayer book for us, generally speaking, and then there's the specific example.

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But it's to say that if these prayers are aligned with the will of God and God himself gave us these prayers to pray after him according to his will, that they cannot, in their very essence, be rote, vain repetitions because of the heart, the very spirit that inspired them and inscripturated them in the first place.

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Mm -hmm, mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's an important distinction, I alluded to it earlier, between spontaneity and from the heart, right?

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We, I think, often conflate those two concepts, that we're not praying from the heart unless it's kind of just as I'm, you know,

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I'm just speaking as the thoughts come to me. That, I disagree with that, right, as the idea of from the heart, right?

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From the heart being, it could be something that you wrote down, you know, years ago, and that you continually come back to in prayer, or that you wrote down during the week, right, and decided that was gonna be, this, like, for a pastor's example, right, this is the prayer

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I'm gonna pray at this time in the service, and there's nothing aspiritual about that, right?

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That is, you know, the Lord uses those things, He uses that time to help you to better know how you'd like to pray in those, in this specific moment, and Doug Wilson actually had a really good point on this, that I thought, because I've always struggled,

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I would struggle with that in my, you know, naturally, I would be like, ah, well, you know, there's something about spontaneity, you know, you're kind of a little bit more attuned with what's happening in that moment, but his point was that when we, what he's noticed,

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I mean, it's anecdotal, but what he's noticed is that when people pray spontaneously, right, they're not reading a written prayer, they tend to pray the same things over and over again, and that's exactly what you talked about, right?

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Vain repetition, and not that, you know, when people pray the same things over and over again, necessarily they're

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Pharisees, right, but that, it's, there is something to sitting and deliberately writing out a prayer that will be prayed later, because it allows you, you know, a little bit more clear -minded to say, well, how do

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I make this different or more specifically applied to this situation or whatever, as opposed to, you know, we tend to pray our defaults, right, like the things that we're really passionate about in that time, or we're particularly studying in that time, and so, like, those are the things that come to mind, because we're more familiar with them in those moments, right, and so, but the written prayer can help us to avoid that kind of repetition, and it's not less spiritual, it's just a, it's just being intentional about it and viewing it as something that doesn't have to happen in that specific moment.

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You could even argue that in that very way, in preparing prayers and aligning, making sure that they're aligned well with God's will and God's purpose for prayer, that the very act of pre -thinking, of meditating on these things, of ordering your prayer and coming up with it beforehand actually is more in line with the image that the

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Lord has given us to bring an order out of chaos, to have a meditation, because when the

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Lord does things, it's not out of spontaneity, it's out of a, it's predestined for the foundation of the world, it's deliberate, so I think there's a way, as we pray in a more deliberate way, that we are taking up more after God and we are being more conformed to His image.

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Yeah, yeah, I can see that for sure. Absolutely. Yes, sir. One thing I like about the prayer movement is there's been this emphasis on prayer, but prayer should be short, concise, and that's why he even gives us this injunction, don't pray to be seen by men.

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My last year, we used to have a time in the beginning of the service where different men would get up and pray.

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I got to a place where I feel like we're almost in competition with each other. Oh, man.

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So I eventually stopped it. Yeah. I feel like that was so unhealthy or good for me, but we can't get into that kind of way.

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Oh, sure, yeah. We're so sinful in these ways, and it's easy for us, if we're not careful to protect our holiness, and then it's easy to succumb to those impulses, the fleshly impulses like that.

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And the leadership is encouraged to keep your prayers short, too. There's long prayers even from the leadership. I don't have a great attention span.

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I don't think most of us do. Yeah, yeah. So when they're short, you can focus in, when they go on and on, you tend to concentrate.

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Yeah, I think a lot of it is that people, a lot of churches, even,

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I mean, I don't want to get into the church bashing stuff, but I think that it's, oftentimes, prayer has its moment in service, right, as opposed to being throughout a service.

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So you need to squeeze a lot more into that one time of prayer, as opposed to, we can pray for a little thing here, another thing here, and so on and so forth.

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Whereas if you're squeezing it all into one point, you're thanking God that we're able to gather, we're thanking Him for His forgiveness.

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You know what I mean? It's all these things at one time, as opposed to kind of spreading those things out, acknowledging the moves of a service, of a church service, and allowing prayer as our opportunity to speak back to God.

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As He's ministering to us in our service, right, He's speaking to us, prayer is our means to be able to speak back in it, right, in prayer, in songs of praise, as well, obviously, we're singing.

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I have a question. Not to just put you on the spot, or anyone who hasn't thought about this, but what is the role of the

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Holy Spirit in prayer, specifically, because I've been in other church backgrounds, right, where, you know, whatever comes to your mind, or you feel led to say, must be

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Holy Spirit -led, and that's not necessarily true at all, and so I have received a lot of really bad teaching about that in the past, and I've studied it on my own a little bit, but I'd be curious to see if anyone else has any thoughts about what's the

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Spirit's role in prayer, specifically. Yeah, that's a great question. I'm gonna read from the catechism for you.

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Question 182 of the larger catechism. How does the Spirit help us to pray? We, not knowing what to pray for as we ought, the

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Spirit helpeth our infirmities by enabling us to understand both for whom and what and how prayer is to be made, and by working and quickening in our hearts, although not in all persons nor at all times in the same measure, those apprehensions, affections, and graces which are requisite for the right performance of that duty, so to summarize it, there's an element, almost like a half -truth in what you,

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I mean, probably not just you, Nikki, honestly, all of us, a lot of us have been taught over the years, is that feeling in your gut, that's the

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Spirit, or someone comes to mind, that's the Spirit, and I think that that's a half -truth because that could be the case, that where the

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Lord is bringing someone to mind for you in a specific area, even, where you should pray, whether it's for somebody else, for yourself, or whatever it may be.

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So I would say, in a way, it's a half -truth in that it certainly could be the case, but it also could be the case, we can't ascribe to the

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Spirit all of those inclinations because the heart is deceitful and desperately wicked, we have to be careful, to be able to discern, is this from God, are these things good and right?

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And so we should be careful to make sure that's the case, but also very willing to pray.

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Obviously, someone comes to mind, and we pray good and godly things for them. But I would say, also, that the

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Spirit gives voice to our prayers to the Father. So we might pray things that we have certain ideas of what that looks like in our minds, but the

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Lord knows, and so the Spirit delivers these prayers to the Father through Christ, and they're always effective, right, because they're delivered to God through the

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Spirit. So it's not an easy thing, necessarily, for us to formulate in our minds, but.

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You think almost like a Holy Spirit, sort of.

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Right, a purifier, a purifier, in a way, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I don't know. Yeah, no,

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I think it's not, I think, obviously, any metaphors are gonna fall apart at some point, and they can be dangerous, but I think that it's not a terrible way to think about it, right, that there's a purification process to our prayers that's happening.

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And it's not that, like, we can just say whatever, right, but that there's an element to which the

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Lord is at work, even as we pray, in our weakness. He is sanctifying it, He is making it good and right and pure and holy, and so, that's kind of how

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I would think about it. Yes, sir? So I remember when I was in the charismatic movement. Sorry, Patrick, we'll get you next. When I was in the charismatic movement, there were times when

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I really felt like I had that burning in the bosom, which I think the Mormons are really into that, you know.

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So, does that tell you there's something amiss in the charismatic movement? Because you tend to rely on it.

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Right, yeah. There's an emphasis on that, you know. Right, there's a huge reliance, in the charismatic movement, there's a real reliance upon feelings and even gifting, right, like where, you know, your prayers that aren't, like praying in tongues, obviously a major, majorly important thing in most charismatic churches, and that being, those are your most effective prayers.

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That's when you're speaking the heavenly language and the Spirit's really at work in you, and so it's, there's a lot of confusion there, for sure, a lot of strange assumptions.

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Patrick, yeah? I just wanted to express gratitude that we have the ability to bring prayer requests into service as well, because I've been to churches, even

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CREC churches, where, you know, someone who's visiting doesn't have that opportunity, and I just,

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I really appreciate that every week we're able to, even if we don't pray about it in service directly, but that the prayers are included, you know, in the newsletter, and they'll pray for each other throughout the week, too.

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I just think that's really neat. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I think it's such a tough, it is, like, our services are longer and shorter, depending on how long that part of the service is, right?

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It can be a pretty long part of our service, but I do think it's a good thing, at least to be able to give voice to them, because especially in the regulative principle sense, like, this is the only time per week that we're all gonna be in the presence of God together, and so it's, you know, it is a, it's a great blessing that we can share those things.

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Before him, and with one another, but before him especially, and so there's a, definitely the prayers of the people's important.

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How some churches do it, some churches, like, yeah, you submit it beforehand, or, you know, you submit it, like, if it's a visitor, you submit it afterwards, and then they'll pray for it the next week, or something like that.

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But, but yeah, I do, I enjoy the way we do it, as well. I think it's, it helps us to know how to care for one another well.

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All right. Well, praise the Lord, it's 9 .36, so we have about 20 minutes.

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This is the time we're supposed to wrap up these things, this anyway, so this is good. We have about 20 minutes before service starts.

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There, or, I mean, who am I kidding? Might be closer to 30 minutes. So, at any rate, why don't we pray together the

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Lord's Prayer as we wrap up, and so, with that, why don't we all stand, actually, and we'll recite the

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Lord's Prayer together. I'm kind of cheating,

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I have it right in front of me, just in case, I don't want to mess it up, but you guys don't have to, you guys don't have anything. But let's pray together. Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

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Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

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And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever, amen.