Matthew 6: 9-10, December 1, 2024

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So we're continuing our emphasis and our focus on prayer this week.
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Remember, we started with some general discussion of prayer last week. We'll get a little bit more specific this week because, as we said, prayer is one of those things that is probably one of the most misunderstood and therefore, for a lot of us, one of the most neglected aspects of our
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Christian life. And we have to acknowledge something and we have to acknowledge that prayer is powerful.
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Again, Scripture over and over discusses prayer, gives us examples of prayer.
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And it's just because it is powerful, it's a gift from God and it's a privilege that we have to come before our
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Heavenly Father. Just a brief survey of Scripture shows us what happens when we pray.
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Obviously, we can't get into all the examples right now, but just by way of a couple, Abraham's servant, when he was sent out to find a wife for Isaac, prayed and she appeared, she showed up right there.
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Hannah, who had been barren, prayed to God that she would be able to have a child.
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And then she became pregnant with Samuel. And again, there's so many different examples that we could give, but we have to know that there's a right way to pray and there's a wrong way to pray.
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There's right motivations for praying and there's wrong motivations for praying. So as we get into this, our topic today is something that everybody here,
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I'm sure, is familiar with. We're gonna be discussing, as we continue in the
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Sermon on the Mount, what's known as the Lord's Prayer. And hopefully, this will be boring to all of you because you're so familiar with it.
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And you've heard it preached on probably multiple times. So let's just hope that there's nothing new that I can tell you this morning, nothing that you don't already know.
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But yes, so as we continue in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is giving us here in these verses a very specific teaching on prayer.
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So we call it the Lord's Prayer. It's also referred to as the
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Disciple's Prayer or the Model Prayer, but we can continue using the phrase the Lord's Prayer. So last week,
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I shared several verses on prayer, including the one that I told you to memorize, 1 Thessalonians 5, 17.
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What was it? Pray without ceasing. Very good. Hopefully, you memorized that the second that we said it.
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But I would venture to guess that for a lot of us, we've been guilty of doing just the opposite of praying without ceasing.
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In fact, we basically just pray when we're going through something difficult or when we feel like we need something.
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And this shouldn't really be a huge surprise because some of the most popular books on prayer that we have as Christians, especially in our current era, they teach us to pray for the things that we want.
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Or at the very least, they teach us to pray in a way that focuses on us. When I think of these kind of books,
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I'm thinking of books like The Prayer of Jabez, if you remember when that was a phenomenon in the
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Christian world, or The Circle Maker. And please note,
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I don't mention these books so that you will read them. In fact, I would discourage you from reading them. There are plenty of better things to read, including the
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Scripture, but I mention those because they are the kind of things that we should be avoiding. Because it's important that we understand the true purpose, the true nature, and the true aim of prayer.
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And the true purpose, nature, and aim of prayer is not that our desires should be fulfilled.
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It's not that we should be removed from the difficult or challenging circumstances in our lives.
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Now, it's certainly fine to pray for those things, assuming that the prayers are prayed properly.
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And we'll look at that idea today. Because we can see this, we can see in James 4 .3
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that there is a right and a wrong way. James 4 .3 says, you ask and do not receive because you ask with wrong motives so that you may spend it on your pleasures.
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So what our desire should be and what we're seeking to do last week, this week, and next week is to seek out a biblical model of prayer.
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And while we could go to Amazon or the Christian bookstore or wherever and find plenty of books about praying, the first stop should always be for us to go to God's word.
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The first stop should always be for us to head to Scripture to learn what it is that God has given us to know about prayer.
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And more important, we should look at all these things in context. We should look at them in their proper context within the rest of Scripture.
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So today, especially, we're gonna do exactly that. We're gonna focus on the example that Jesus gave us in the
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Sermon on the Mount. Now, we don't know all that much about Jesus's earthly life, honestly.
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He was alive for about 33 years. We have one story in Luke when he was a child going back to the temple.
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And we have the accounts in the Gospels that cover roughly the last three years of his life. So we don't know a tremendous amount about him.
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But what we do know is that he spent a tremendous amount of time in prayer. We read the accounts of the
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Gospels. We see that he rose early in the morning to pray. He prayed during the day. He prayed in the evening at the
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Mount of Olives. We see that he was constantly in prayer. He was constantly speaking with God the
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Father. So it's only natural, given the combination of the fact that the disciples were watching
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Jesus and watching his behavior, and the fact that the disciples were truly convinced that Jesus was the promised
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Messiah from their scriptures, that they would ask him how to pray properly.
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So let's look at the entire Lord's Prayer this morning, although we'll only be discussing the first couple of verses.
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This starts in Matthew chapter six, verse nine. Jesus says, pray then in this way.
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Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
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Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
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And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen.
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So this is our prayer. Now the first thing we wanna do is discuss a couple of preliminary concepts to better understand exactly what this prayer is.
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So the first thing that we have to understand is this is not a required word -for -word prayer that Jesus is giving us.
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Jesus is not, in this situation, telling us the exact words that we should say every time we come before God in prayer.
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And I think that's obvious. I hope that's obvious. Now can we memorize this prayer? Can we recite it? Can we read it together in our church service as part of our worship?
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Yeah, absolutely we can. And we do. And it's right to memorize this, because memorizing this will help us with what the true purpose of it is.
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But if we consider our work to be done just because we've memorized and recited the
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Lord's prayer, then we're robbing ourselves of something. Not only are we missing the point of the prayer, but we're robbing ourselves of what will ultimately be a much richer and more biblical prayer life.
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And the reason for that is what the Sermon on the Mount is, is Jesus teaching us a format or teaching us a pattern for prayer.
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Now a lot of times, we may speak carelessly, or we may not have quite the right words to convey our meaning or express what it is we're trying to say.
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But we can be sure that this is never the case with Jesus. And as we look at the Sermon on the
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Mount, as I've said over and over, it's just amazing how this has been constructed, how perfectly it flows from one idea to the next and builds from one concept to the other.
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So we know that Jesus did not carelessly use words. He used words that have very specific meanings.
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And in our passage today, it starts out with him saying, pray then in this way. And that's important.
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This is how we know that this is a pattern, because he did not say, pray then these words or something along those lines.
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And keep in mind what we discussed last week in verse seven. Jesus said not to use meaningless repetition like the
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Gentiles. And if we simply repeated a memorized prayer, a prayer that's roughly 70 words or something along those lines, we could find ourselves engaging in meaningless repetition.
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We could find ourselves praying a ritualized prayer simply to check a box rather than truly speaking with God.
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And that's the kind of thing that was taught against in that verse. Now, another point on the idea that Jesus is not teaching a specific prayer, but that he's teaching a pattern is that we'll note that this passage has a little bit of a parallel in Luke 11, one.
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Now, we do see that the teaching in Matthew is more detailed than what's in Luke.
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But what's noteworthy here is that Jesus is delivering a similar teaching in Luke in response to the request of his disciples.
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The disciples asked him to teach them to pray just as John also taught his disciples.
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So the teaching in Luke came as a response to a request from the people that were following him.
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Now, when we see that these passages are a little different, they're clearly the same concept, but with some differences in the wording or in the aspects that are there in the prayer, people sometimes get stuck on this kind of thing.
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And they ask questions like, why is the prayer different in Luke than it is in Matthew? And there could be a variety of reasons for this, ranging from anywhere from the
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Holy Spirit inspired Matthew and Luke to emphasize different things about this prayer, or very likely that this was a teaching during his ministry that he gave multiple times and Matthew summarized it more thoroughly.
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And again, all this is the idea that there's not a very specific prayer, exact words that have to be used, but that there are concepts that need to be present as we pray.
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So the emphasis here is that the prayer provides a framework for the things that we're to pray, not the specific words, but ideas that are to be included every time we pray.
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So in that sense, we can look at the Lord's prayer as we have it in Matthew or even in Luke, and we can consider it a complete prayer in that it has everything that needs to be included in prayer.
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So we talked about the power of prayer as we open. And I know that I tend to oftentimes, when
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I say there's a right and a wrong way to pray, and we're gonna do it here in just a little bit, but I know that I'm constantly highlighting things that seem negative.
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I'm always talking about the things that we're doing wrong or the wrong way to go about things.
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And often, the way that Scripture tells us we're supposed to do this is very much in conflict to what we want.
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And I do that a lot of times because I feel the need to combat the sort of name it and claim it or easy believism kind of concepts that are so pervasive in our
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Christianity. But it's not wrong for us to pray for things.
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James 5 .14 tells us this. I talked about James 4 .3 earlier where we don't get what we asked for because we prayed wrong.
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But James 5 .14 tells us a couple of things. It says if anyone is sick, they should call the elders and have them pray.
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And then in 5 .16, James tells us that the effective prayer of a righteous man can accomplish much.
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So we are to pray and we can't ask for things. And it is important. Martin Lloyd -Jones says this.
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Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God.
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So we have to pray. And I would go so far as to say that we'd be severely limited in our
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Christian life if we did not pray on a regular basis. But with all that said, let's go ahead and throw one more important concept into this idea.
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And that concept is that the purpose of prayer is always and only to glorify
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God. We may benefit greatly from prayer. We may get exactly what we want sometimes.
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But still, that doesn't change. The purpose is always for God's glory. And there can be no better way to glorify
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God than to offer our prayer in the way that Jesus shows us, in the way that Jesus instructs his disciples to pray.
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So we'll take this example so that we know what these parts of the prayer mean and how we can follow them and how we can better pray when we come before the
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Lord. So that's probably enough preliminaries for now. So if I've forgotten anything, we'll throw it in here later.
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But let's just start with the first words of the prayer. So Jesus says, pray then this way.
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And then he says, our Father. So right at the beginning of the prayer, we have an important idea about how we structure our prayers.
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And it begins with how we approach our prayers and how we approach God when we pray. I'm sure that we've all heard someone say, maybe we've said it ourselves, something like,
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I prayed and prayed and nothing happened. So it seems as if prayer doesn't work. I remember one time
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I heard somebody say, well, I prayed about this for two weeks and nothing changed, you know, and we laugh.
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But that actually tells us a lot of sad things about this individual's approach to prayer, which is an approach that a lot of people share.
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Because when people say things like this, I prayed and nothing happened, prayer doesn't work.
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Part of the reason for this is the approach that we're taking. Martin Lloyd -Jones, again, says this.
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We tend to be so self -centered in our prayers that when we drop to our knees before God, we think only about ourselves and our troubles and perplexities.
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We start talking about them at once and of course nothing happens. And there's a teaching, and this is a very, very old teaching on prayer that we seem to have forgotten.
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It's been lost somewhere along the way. And this is what's called recollection. And in a sense, what this means is just to pause and to collect your thoughts.
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It means to remind yourself of what it is that you're about to do when you pray.
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You're about to address God. You're about to address the one who created you.
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So it's right just to take a moment, to pause and consider what is about to happen.
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And then you begin your prayer with an invocation. An invocation is basically invoking the presence of God.
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And in a lot of the ceremonies that we do, when I'm away for those weekends, we'll have an invocation, a prayer just to bring
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God to mind as we begin a service. And our prayers should begin with an invocation as well.
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And that's exactly what the words our father do. They serve as an invocation for our prayer.
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And Martin Lloyd -Jones was so influential in this discussion of prayer this week.
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So forgive me if I quote him over and over. He says that if you can truly from the heart refer to God as father and mean it as a redeemed
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Christian, then your prayer is already answered. Because if you can truly refer to God as your father, then your prayer is gonna be coming from the right place.
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We'll get to that in a minute. But back to the invocation idea. Notice also that as you read your
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Bible, every prayer that is prayed begins with an invocation.
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Old Testament, New Testament, whether a situation is good or a situation is bad, whether it's a dire, urgent situation or just an everyday prayer, the faithful believers in both
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Testaments begin all their prayers with an invocation. You will see that they don't just get right down to business asking
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God for what it is that they want. And we could go all over the Bible for some examples of this.
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But one of my favorites is the prayer that Daniel prays in chapter nine. Now there's a variety of reasons for this, but it's also a perfect example of what we're talking about today.
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So if you'd like, turn in your Bibles with me to Daniel chapter nine, and we'll start in verse four.
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Daniel chapter nine, starting in verse four. It says, and I prayed to Yahweh my
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God and confessed and said, and here's where the prayer starts. Alas, O Lord, the great and awesome
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God who keeps His covenant in loving kindness for those who love Him and keep His commandments. We have sinned and committed iniquity and acted wickedly and rebelled, even turning aside from Your commandments and judgments.
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Moreover, we have not listened to Your slaves, the prophets who spoke in Your name to our kings, our princes, our fathers, and all the people of the land.
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To You, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us open shame as it is this day. To the men of Judah, the inhabitants of Jerusalem and all
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Israel, those who are nearby and those who are far away, and all the countries to which You have banished them because of their unfaithful deeds which they have committed against You.
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O Yahweh, to us belongs open shame, to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, because we have sinned against You.
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To the Lord our God belong compassion and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against Him. And I could keep reading, but one thing you'll notice is that He hasn't asked for anything.
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He's still addressing God. He's still invoking God's presence.
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He's humbling Himself before God in this prayer before He ever dares to get to what it is that He's praying about.
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Because Daniel recognizes who God is. And Daniel recognizes what
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He's doing when He prays. Now, I wanna give you one more example of this just to drive the point home.
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Nehemiah chapter one, starting in verse five. Nehemiah one, starting in verse five.
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I said, I beseech you, O Yahweh, the God of heaven, the great and fearsome
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God, who keeps the covenant and loving kindness for those who love Him and keep His commandments. Let your ear now be attentive and your eyes open to hear the prayer of your slave, which
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I am praying before you today, day and night, on behalf of the sons of Israel, your slaves, confessing the sins of the sons of Israel, which we have sinned against You.
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I and my father's house have sinned. We worked in utter destruction against You and have not kept the commandments nor the statutes nor the judgments which
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You commanded Your servant Moses. Again, could go on. These are long prayers and they're wonderful examples of prayers.
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But I just want you to hear an example of invocation before we petition
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God for something that it is that we want. And when we return to this concept of invocation, we have examples.
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You could look at these and turn them into templates, but Jesus formalizes this idea in the
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Lord's prayer, in the disciples' prayer, in this model prayer, when He begins with the words, our
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Father. So our Father serves as an invocation. But there's a couple of other things that happen when we use these words.
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Now, the first one is probably gonna make some people uncomfortable. But if you recall in our many discussions of the
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Sermon on the Mount, this is a teaching that Jesus gave specifically to Christians. The Sermon on the
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Mount, the lifestyle rules and the beatitudes are for redeemed
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Christians. They're not for unbelievers because what's required in these verses is impossible for those not indwelt by the
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Holy Spirit. It's impossible to ask unbelievers to do these things.
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And what this means is that only true followers of Christ can pray the Lord's prayer.
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Only true followers of Christ can begin a prayer with our
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Father. And the reason for this is because God is not the spiritual father of the unbeliever.
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God is not the spiritual father of the unregenerate. God is not the spiritual father of the person pretending to be a
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Christian. Now, God is still the creator of that person.
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But beyond that, we see in Scripture, we see things like John 1, 12, which say, but as many as received him, to them, he gave the right to become children of God.
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As many as received Jesus, he gave the right to become children of God. And when
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Jesus was arguing with some of those Jewish religious leaders who were intent on killing them, one of the things that they said, they didn't believe they needed the teachings that Jesus had for them because they said
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Abraham was our father. And then they said that God was their father. They said that in John 8, 41.
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But do you know what Jesus said in response to that? In John 8, 44,
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Jesus said, you are of your father, the devil. And in Proverbs 15, 29, we see that God is far away from the wicked, but hears the prayers of the righteous.
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So whether we like it or not, the Bible draws a very clear line between believers and unbelievers.
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And the Bible draws a very clear line between sons of God and sons of the devil.
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And does this mean that there's no hope for those outside of the spiritual sonship of God? Obviously, it does not mean that.
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There is hope. Those that aren't believers, those that are far from God could have the ability to pray our father.
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Because we know some things that are laid out in scripture. We know that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, and nobody comes to the father except through him.
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We know that scripture teaches that justification is by faith alone. Nothing else can be added or required to that.
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But we also know that all who call on the name of the Lord will be saved. And that Jesus said that all the father gives him will come to him.
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And the one who comes to him, he will never cast out. The one who comes to him, he will never cast out.
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That's John 6, 37. So yes, there is hope. There is hope for the unbeliever.
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There is hope for the nominal Christian. But for this prayer, the way we're talking about it today and the way
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Jesus was teaching it, it is only those who can truly, with their whole heart, without reservation, call
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God their father. And this demonstrates the folly of the universalist approach to salvation.
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And it also gives us an explanation for why people consider their prayers supposedly unanswered.
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And this is also why people who try to split their allegiances between the world and God hate this idea.
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They hate this doctrine. People that wanna come to church on Sunday, but be committed to something entirely different the rest of the week, they don't like this because whether they know it or not, whether you know it or not, they might pray, but they don't truly have confidence in the fact that God will answer because they can't fully commit themselves and their lives to God.
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So it's hard to fully commit their prayers and it's hard to align their will fully with God.
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Again, this is the essence, if we go back to the Beatitudes, I always like to tie back a Beatitude if we can, about the idea of having a pure heart, which was a heart that was not divided, a heart devoted wholly to God.
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So this is a distinctly Christian prayer only for those that are truly, fully in Christ.
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So at this point, I would ask before we move on, is this you?
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Can you truly pray this prayer? Can you say our Father with the confidence that that's who
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He is? So that's one thing these words do.
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But the other thing the words our Father do is they highlight something else important about God.
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And that's the fact that He is our Father. He is the Father for those who believe, for those who have been changed by the
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Holy Spirit. And this means that He loves you. He cares for you.
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He hears your prayer. And He desires to do what is in your best interest.
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It is not a small thing to truly call yourself a child of God.
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It's not an insignificant thing to consider yourselves as one of the adopted children of God.
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We see a passage in Galatians 4, verses four through seven. I suggest that you take a look at that one a different time.
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Galatians 4, four through seven, which talks about the adoption of God.
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So God is our Father. God loves you, God cares for you, God hears you. But immediately,
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Jesus moves into this next phrase. We add this on to our Father. Our Father who is in heaven.
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This adds context to the idea. And it does this for a couple of reasons. And the first is because a lot of us have a debased or corrupt idea of what fatherhood is.
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A lot of people have a low view of fatherhood.
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And it's because they had a father who was neglectful. A father who was absent.
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A father who was abusive. A father who was something significantly less than what
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God is. And as a result, when you tell those people that God is their father, it brings up a lot of negative connotations.
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It, people think, well, if God the Father is anything like my father,
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I want nothing to do with him. And I don't want to pray to him.
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So we use these words to differentiate God. We use the words, or Jesus uses the words,
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I should more appropriately say, who is in heaven to help us understand who
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God is specifically. The idea of our Father who is in heaven should bring to mind his holiness, his perfection, his power.
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But it also reminds us that he is totally different, totally separate from our earthly father.
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I hope that you had an earthly father who gives you at least a positive view of what
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God the Father could be. But if you don't, know that it's not the same thing.
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Read your Bible, learn who God is. If you can look past the things in the
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Old Testament that you don't understand about why he seems wrathful, you will understand that every bit of that was purely out of love.
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So we're reminded again of his power and that when we come before him, we come before God on our knees, weak, broken, undeserving, that he already knows all about us because he's
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God. And this reminds us, this reminds us who he is so that before we start just spouting off all the things that we want, all the things that are wrong, the things that we don't have, the people that we wish were different, that we pause and we pause and remember who
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God is and who we are. Now, I know that some of these ideas are gonna be hard to rationalize.
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They're gonna be hard to work out right next to one another. But I'll tell you this, we should never be hesitant and we should never be afraid to approach
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God in prayer. We should never be afraid ever at any time to come before the throne of God.
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But at the same time, we should still maintain a respectful fear of who
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God is. So I'm telling you not to be afraid and I'm telling you to fear, right? All at the same time.
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Maybe awe is a better word because here's what's happened. We've lost something as we've changed our approach to church over the years.
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And really, this is over centuries. But we've dumbed down church in order to appeal to people who aren't actually
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Christians. We've dumbed down church to make it easier for people who are nominally committed
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Christians to feel comfortable at our services. You know, we don't want people to feel excluded so we stay away from certain doctrines because if people don't truly believe them, they might not be happy about the things that we're saying in church.
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So we've completely watered stuff down but in the process of that, we've also downplayed the holiness of God.
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We've lost our reverence for God. And we're encouraged to treat
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God as if he's our buddy as opposed to God. And having
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Jesus remind us of this is important to a proper approach to God in prayer. Again, you can't fool
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God and as we mentioned last week, Jesus told us God knows everything that we need before we ask.
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So I'm gonna say this seemingly contradictory thing one more time before we move on. You should never hesitate or be afraid to approach
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God in prayer. But remember who he is. We still fear
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God. We fear his power. Ecclesiastes 5, one and two gives us a wise reminder in case we still needed some convincing on this.
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He writes, guard your steps as you go to the house of God and draw near to listen rather than to offer the sacrifice of fools for they do not know that they are doing evil.
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Do not be hasty with your mouth or impulsive in your heart to bring up a matter in the presence of God for God is in heaven but you are on earth.
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Therefore, let your words be few. So our invocation, our father who is in heaven reminds us both who we are and who
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God is. It reminds us to pause as we approach him in prayer and then this invocation is followed by three petitions which are just fancy words for requests.
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Now if you look at the prayer in its entirety, you see the invocation, you see three petitions about God and then three petitions that are related to us and then a benediction.
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So it's this beautifully perfect structure especially in the
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Greek but that's the way it's laid out. So now we're gonna get into the petitions. The first one begins when we say hallowed be your name.
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So we remember again that our prayer is ultimately for God's glory and we come to the first petition and the reason these petitions are important are these are the things that we should be praying for every time we come before God.
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You'll also notice that the three petitions that we're discussing this week come before the other three that we'll look at next week.
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So those other three requests are related to our desires but we should never flip -flop the order of those things.
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So hallowed is just an old -fashioned word. It basically means to make something holy and in this part of our prayer, it should be the desire of each and every one of us, the desire of each and every believer that God's name would be revered throughout the entire world and that obviously starts with us.
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So if we live our lives in ways that don't show reverence, love, respect for God, if hallowing
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God's name doesn't come through every bit of our external lives and our words and our actions and if it doesn't come through our internal lives, our prayer life, our thought life, then there's no way that we can ever create that sense of reverence in other people.
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So not only is this our prayer that hallowed would be God's name but it's a reminder to us.
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It's a reminder to approach our lives in such a way that God would be revered and God would be seen as holy and it's a petition to him.
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Now, hallowed be your name. The concept of a name is important too.
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We don't view names quite the same way now as they did in the first century Jewish culture but the idea of a name, it encompasses a lot more ground.
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Martin Lloyd -Jones says the name means all that is true of God and all that has been revealed concerning God.
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So the name is not just an identifier. A name speaks to absolutely everything that that person, individual, whatever, named is.
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So when we say God, hallowed be your name, we're also talking about everything that's true and has been revealed about God.
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So we're praying for the world to understand who God is, all of who he is.
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We call these attributes and among them are love, justice, wrath, righteousness, power, majesty, holiness, all of these things.
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We want the world to see and to know that God is holy. We want the world to see and to know that we think
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God is holy but ultimately, everyone will know that God is holy.
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Isaiah 45, 23 tells us that God says this, that to me, every knee will bow and every tongue will swear allegiance.
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That eventually will happen. We pray for our fellow man that it happens in a positive way rather than a negative way.
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Now the next words, your kingdom come. This is another area where we need a reminder of whose kingdom we should be praying for.
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Whose kingdom should ultimately be our priority because most of the time or a lot of the time or whatever, our own needs and our own desires and our own kingdom that we're building crowd out the desire for God's kingdom.
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We want what we want. We want to have the things that we wanna have. John MacArthur reminds us that the greatest hindrance to God's kingdom is the kingdom of the world.
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And as we alluded to earlier, the kingdom of the world is ruled by Satan. God's kingdom is something completely different.
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So when we look at this phrase, your kingdom come, this is representing something else. It's representing our eschatological hope as believers.
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Eschatology is the study of the last things. This means when God returns. When we pray for his kingdom to come,
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I believe that the second coming of Jesus will usher in a 1 ,000 year millennial kingdom.
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Now what will happen in this 1 ,000 year millennial kingdom includes a lot of the stuff that we see in Revelation and some of the other prophecies.
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We see the final defeat of Satan, the judgment of humanity. We see the fulfillment of many of the prophecies in the
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Old Testament and the end of the 1 ,000 years culminates in God's eternal kingdom.
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But this kingdom will result in the perfection of all creation and a fulfillment of the kingdom mandate that we see in Genesis 1, 26 through 28.
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Again, that's a subject that is far too deep to go into today, but that's what we're praying for.
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The kingdom that's described in many of Jesus's parables and the kingdom that we see in much greater detail in Revelation.
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And while there are a lot of different beliefs as to how exactly the kingdom will happen, it's nevertheless what we're all to hope for as we see in the closing words of Revelation 22, 20, where John writes, he who bears witness to these things says, yes,
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I am coming quickly, amen, come Lord Jesus. And this part of the prayer constantly reminds us of our ultimate hope.
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Now, moving on, your will be done. This one, this third petition, the beginning of the third petition probably doesn't really need a whole lot of explanation because the meaning of it is right there.
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It's contained within the words, they're very clear and they can't be misinterpreted. Your will be done.
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But as you know, the way that we've treated the Lord's prayer is just to read it, blast by the words, we know them so that they don't actually sink into our brains.
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So we'll talk just a little bit about this anyway. And it's the same as everything else because one of the faults of our prayers, again, apologies for how many times
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I've said this concept, we're overly focused on our own situation, our own wants, our own troubles, our own needs or whatever it is.
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And we forget or we've never been told that our greatest desire should be for God's will to be done.
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It should not be for our will to be done. However, as this is a
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Christian prayer, the sanctification process that comes, that follows salvation, the long road of sanctification, part of that involves aligning our hearts and our desires with those of God.
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We've read Psalm 37, four a bunch of times, but once again, that one says, delight yourself in Yahweh and he will give you the desires of your heart.
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And that's because for the sanctified believer, the desire of your heart is that God's will will be done.
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However it is that looks, because we know that God's perfect will is exactly what is right for us in every situation.
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This is spelled out in Romans 12, verses one and two, where Paul writes, therefore,
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I exhort you brothers by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a sacrifice, living, holy and pleasing to God, which is your spiritual service of worship.
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And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may approve what the will of God is, that which is good and pleasing and perfect.
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When we're saved, our will aligns with God's will and it becomes easy and it becomes second nature, frankly, to pray for God's will to be done.
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So that's the first part of the prayer. We're gonna stop here this week. We'll get to the second half of the pattern prayer next week.
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And part of the reason for that is because, frankly, I think we need time to reflect on the implications of this first part of the prayer.
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Again, it's all God -focused. And this is the pattern for all of our prayers, not just the special one that we say on Sunday, but this is the framework, this is the pattern for everything.
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So as we focus on that, I wanna move into just a little bit of application as we close.
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So the first point is that, like we just said, this prayer focuses our mind on who
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God is. And rather than jumping right out with the self -centered emphasis in our prayer,
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Jesus teaches us a method that puts the emphasis where it's supposed to be. Jesus teaches us this method that puts the emphasis on God and on his glory.
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And it reminds us that we're to focus on him before we focus on ourselves. So take that invocation and take those three initial petitions to help guide you in the right direction.
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And when you pray, pray for the hallowing of God's name, the coming of his kingdom, and his will being done.
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Now, second, just to revisit this, this is not necessarily a prayer to be prayed verbatim, but it's a framework.
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It's a list of elements that should be contained within our prayers when we come before God.
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And the specific words can, and they will be different every time we pray. And they'll be different from person to person.
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The specific words will be different from situation to situation. But these are the elements that we wanna make sure that we have included.
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Now, we pray that his will would be done, and I don't think I said on earth as it is in heaven, but those two things go completely together because in heaven and in his eternal kingdom, all things are exactly as he would have them.
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In those places, in heaven, everyone's will is the same as God's.
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So that's two. But the most important point of application relates to one of the first things that we discussed about the prayer, and it relates to the words, our father.
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And I would just ask, do you truly pray to God as your father?
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Do you believe that God hears and answers your prayers? Are you willing to seek
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God's will and his word? And beyond that, are you willing to submit to God's will above and beyond yours?
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With the knowledge that God's perfect will is not always gonna align with your will.
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Are you the individual right with God yourself? Does the
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Holy Spirit dwell within you? And if you say yes to these things, does your life show it?
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Are you truly a believer in God? Do you love God's word? Do you make time in God's word a consistent part of your day?
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Is God's word something you desire to hear more about or is it something you can take or leave, especially if something more interesting comes along?
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So I would say that if the only time you hear God's word is Sunday, if the only time you open up a
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Bible is a pew Bible at church on Sunday, and the only reason you do that is because it's a habit, and if you don't spend time in prayer unless somebody else is doing it, or because your situation is so dire that you can't think of anything else to do, or if you spend more time on your personal, your professional development, or you spend more time on your hobbies than you do on your spiritual development, then you might not actually be a part of God's church.
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And as God's children pray for his kingdom to come, it's a joyous thing on one hand, but it should be a terrifying thing for you because God's kingdom coming means nothing more than your judgment.
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So if any of those things describe you or if you wonder if they describe you, your prayer at this point should be different.
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We've talked about this before. Your prayer should be that God grants you salvation.
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Your prayer should be that God is merciful to you. God is merciful to you, a sinner, and your prayer should be that God creates in you a clean heart.
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Again, we pray for God's kingdom to come, and if there's one thing that we know about the coming of God's kingdom, it's that we don't know when it's gonna happen.
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So this may be the last time that you hear me speak, and maybe some of you will be glad of that. But if you cannot pray to God as your father, get right, fix that today.
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Pray to God, and if you need help, if you have questions, let me know. I'd be delighted to talk to you about that because again, we've already said, all who call on the name of the
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Lord will be saved. Pray for your own salvation. It is something that you can do.
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Charles Spurgeon said this, oh, that all who say this prayer may display on earth the holy alacrity which is seen in the happy, hearty, united, and unquestioning service of perfect saints and angels before the throne.
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Our heart's highest wish is for God's honor, dominion, and glory. Let's go to the
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Lord in prayer. Our almighty, merciful, heavenly
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Father, we thank you for who you are. We thank you for the teaching and the instruction that you've given us in your word.
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We know that so many of us don't pray the way that we should. We don't pray in a way that honors you.
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And now we have no excuse. We have your word. We have the very teaching from Jesus that tells us exactly what we need to do.
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God, we ask the Holy Spirit to help us when we're stuck, to help us pray, to give us the words that we need, to approach your throne humbly and reverently, but also in the knowledge that you love us and that you want to hear our prayers.
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Help us to pray your will. Help us to pray that your kingdom would come and help us to pray that your name would be made holy, that your name would be hallowed by everyone within a hearing of our voice.
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And for those that are far from you, Lord, we pray for their salvation. For our family members, for our friends who don't know you, or for our family members or our friends who are just pretending, we pray that they would come to know the truth.
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God, we pray for the Holy Spirit to change that heart. And we pray for the mercy that can only come from you and the salvation that can only come from you and not through any good deeds, church attendance, or any other thing that we could do.
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God, you've given us everything that we need for salvation in your word. Help us use it.