Matthew 6:7-9

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The way A Study Through The Sermon On The Mount.

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I tell you what, it is good to be able to worship with you this morning.
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I was encouraged as we were singing that last song, I was watching the little girls up here up front stomping and enjoying this time together.
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And I think that God is honored in that. I believe that these young children learning what it means to sing out to the
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Lord to praise God with not just an emotionlessness, but God has made us as emotional beings, hasn't
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He? Truth and forming emotions is the way that God has designed us to worship
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Him. And so I'm encouraged by that and thank you for worshiping and being an example to our children as they watch us.
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Even before they are saved, they see that we mean what we're singing and we love what we're singing.
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So let's jump in and let's look here. As a matter of fact, let me lay it out before we jump into our passage this morning.
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Last week, if you were with us, we looked at verses 5 through 8 of chapter 6 here in Jesus' sermon on the mount where He begins to speak about prayer.
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And we see that prayer, that really true prayer, is a posture of the heart.
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It's not about where we pray, it's not about when we pray, it's not about the beauty of our prayer, it's not about the length of our prayer, and it's not even about the words that we say, right?
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It's not necessarily the words that we're saying to God. But true prayer is about a heart of humility, it's about a heart of reverence, a heart that knows and acknowledges its need for God.
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That's what true prayer is. And now, here in the next few verses that we're going to look at, we see that Jesus is jumping into what we refer to as the
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Lord's Prayer. I think most of us in here know it well. We mentioned Luke 11 last week, where this is the other place where Jesus is teaching
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His disciples how to pray, and He essentially prays this same prayer, it's the Lord's Prayer. And so, now in contrast to what we talked about last week, not in contrast, with what we talked about last week, if prayer is not about the words that we pray, and about a specific set of prayers, then why does
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Jesus give us this prayer, the Lord's Prayer? Why is Jesus giving this?
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Is Jesus' intention here to replace the prayers of Judaism?
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Remember, we talked about the Shema, the morning and evening prayers, and then we talked about the 18 prayers that were memorized to pray throughout the day for different circumstances.
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Is Jesus saying that He's replacing those memorized prayers with this new memorized prayer?
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Was that Jesus' intention here? Well, it's unfortunately become that in some circles.
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People memorizing the Lord's Prayer and using it in the same way that they did then as Jesus is preaching this sermon in Judaism.
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They would memorize a prayer and just repeat that prayer. Some of us in here have probably memorized this prayer.
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As a matter of fact, who in here knows the Lord's Prayer? You may not have it totally memorized, but it's close, so you can recall it, right?
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And that's a good thing. I'm glad so many hands were raised because we should memorize it.
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We should know it. We should meditate on it, because we should memorize and meditate on all scripture, all scriptures breathed out by God.
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And that's a good thing. And there's nothing inherently wrong, honestly, with quoting this prayer. Quoting the
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Lord's Prayer as you're praying, there's nothing wrong with that. As a matter of fact, there's nothing wrong with even reading a prayer.
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As a matter of fact, before our Lord's Supper, I've got this book up here. I want us to read a prayer. I'm going to read a prayer to you.
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It's not about quoting a prayer that you have memorized or about reading a prayer, as long as it is coming from an appropriate posture of the heart.
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That's what Jesus is getting at here. And so it was Jesus' intention to give us, was not his intention to give us a memorized rote prayer.
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So what was Jesus' intention with the Lord's Prayer? His intention is to give us a blueprint, give us an example of what true, heartfelt, humble prayer looks like, right?
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This is his purpose here. And this is so important that we're going to spend the next few weeks talking about this.
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We're going to spend the next few weeks looking at this particular blueprint of prayer. And I want to extend a challenge to us right up front here.
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What I want us to do, most of your hands were up and you've memorized or you know the Lord's Prayer very well.
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By the end of the next few weeks, as we get to the end of the Lord's Prayer, I would like for each one of us to be able to write the
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Lord's Prayer in our own words. I think what that's going to do is that's going to help us really begin to understand the purpose behind the
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Lord's Prayer. That it's not a memorized rote verbatim thing, but it's a heart matter.
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And I want us to be able to write out the Lord's Prayer in our own words. And so we're not going to be handing that in, it's not going to be homework.
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I just want to extend the challenge. It's something that I've been thinking through and working on on my own as I've been doing this.
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So all that being said, let's open up our copy of God's Word to Matthew chapter 6. Matthew chapter 6.
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Our primary text today is going to be verse 9, but we're going to look at verses 7 and 8 like we did last week.
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And I want to read through the prayer itself. So we're going to start reading in verse 7 of chapter 6 in Matthew.
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Jesus says, This is the reading of God's holy perfect Word.
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Let's go to him and pray once again and ask that he would illuminate our hearts and minds. Lord we come to you humbly once again and we thank you for your
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Word. And we pray now that you would penetrate our hearts and minds with this truth.
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God, we are fallible people and we misinterpret and we misrepresent at times,
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God, but I pray that you guard us from that. Lord, that we would only speak truth from your
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Word. Lord, prepare our minds to understand.
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Lord, that we would be doers of your Word and not just hearers only. In Christ's name, amen.
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Last week, like I said, we spoke about verses 7 and 8 and we saw how there in verse 7 when he says, and when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the
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Gentiles. We talked about that a little bit, but I wanted to talk through that, setting the groundwork up to building up to verse 9 a little.
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Some translations, and yours might say this, refer to it as empty babble, that the person do not babble on as the
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Gentiles do. Some of your translations will say vain repetition and all of those are good translations.
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Most believe, most scholars believe that it's referring to a repetition of words.
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It's a repetition of phrases that the Gentiles would do in their idol worship.
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As they're worshiping other gods, they would have these chants and they would say this same phrase over and over and over and they would continue these.
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It's almost like monks, you know, we've seen the chants and the little, what do they do?
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Do they hum? I don't know. It's a chant that they just repeat something over and over again, kind of like a
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Hillsong song, right? This is over, over, over, we're going to say this a hundred thousand times, right?
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But that's what these people would do, these Gentiles would do, and so most people believe that when
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Jesus says this, he's speaking about these Gentiles and this repetitiveness and long drawn out prayer to their gods that had now infiltrated and affected a lot of these
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Jews in this time and they had kind of adopted some of that process into their prayers.
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They would even bring it into their Shema, their praying to God, and they would repeat and some of it was probably due to the fact that, man, you hear some of these.
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You go and you hear these, like I said, these monks chanting. That seems pretty pious, doesn't it? That seems like, wow,
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God must really hear this prayer because of the fact that, man, they're repeating that phrase over and over.
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They're not going to let go. They're hanging on and they're going to continue to do this, and so I believe Jesus could be talking about this, but others believe that because of the way the language is, others believe that he's referring to kind of a nonsensical babbling, and this would have been common also.
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A number of Gentile religions would speak in their prayers and it would be very similar, from what
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I understand, historians say that it would have been very similar to what we would probably experience with speaking in tongues.
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There's a lot of babbling going on. There's not any sense to it. It's not translatable.
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There's not someone there saying, hey, this is a translation of what this person is saying in this other language. This is just gibberish, and so Jesus could be speaking about this.
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We see this in our modern day, of course, in certain churches, in certain circles, but these
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Jewish people would have picked up on this. There was some of this gibberish that was happening that was somehow not interpreted, but both of these interpretations certainly have historical merit to them, but today
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I would like for us to hone in on the reason why Jesus brings this up. That's the important thing here.
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We need to understand the historical context, but what's the application? What is Jesus getting at?
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It's important that we do so because I think we have a tendency to think about the sin of others when reading passages like this, don't we?
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We have a propensity to think of others. We read this passage here in verse 7 and we say, okay, so do not babble on, do not continue these chants, whatever it may be.
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We look at it and we say, aha, he's speaking about our Catholic friends over here.
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They're up there giving their memorized prayers and re -quoting those and the Lord's prayer and all of that, and we say, okay, well, it's probably them.
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Or we look at our more charismatic brothers and we say, ah, he's speaking about the babbling, he's speaking about the nonsense and the unorganized whatever it is that they're doing.
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This is what Jesus is talking about, for they think they will be heard for their many words because that's what
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Jesus says there in verse 7, right? But we do that and yet rarely stop to realize
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Jesus is speaking to me. Jesus is speaking to us here. And we've missed the main point.
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And the first thing that I want us to see that I think Jesus shows us here about prayer is that true prayer demands a knowledge of God.
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So let's look at ourselves for a moment and evaluate what Jesus is speaking about, what he's referencing.
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True prayer demands a knowledge of God. After all, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, right?
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That's what God's Word says. And the Gentiles did not fear God. They had no fear of the
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Lord. They had a fear of some deity, they had some level of fear of some creator, but they did not know the
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Lord and hence they did not fear the Lord because they did not know the Lord. And so when Jesus is referencing the
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Gentiles, I think the purpose and the heart of what Jesus is getting at is the fact that you must have a knowledge, a true knowledge of the true
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God that leads to a fear of that true God before prayer can even begin.
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They can use all the oxygen in their lungs. The people that don't know
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God, they can pray all they want. The Muslims, they can bow before their temple and pray all they want.
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They can use up every ounce of air that they can possibly muster up. They can speak the most beautifully poetic speech and language in their prayers.
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They can sacrifice their time. They can sacrifice their resources. Yet the creator of all things will not hear their petition.
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Do you see it? I think that's what Jesus is getting at here in verse 7. God's not going to hear their petition.
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Why is God not going to hear it? Well, the writer of Proverbs says in chapter 15, 29, the
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Lord is far from the wicked, but he hears the prayers of the righteous. It's a knowledge of God.
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A knowledge of God that leads to a fear of God. And God only hears the words of his saints.
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So, we must never look to this world's idea of lofty speech and magnanimous prayers.
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We must never look to them and think, well, God must be impressed.
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God must be impressed by the fact that I can chant these things over and over again.
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God must be impressed by the fact that I sacrifice so much of my time given on my knees towards this temple.
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God must be impressed with that. But he's not. God's not impressed with it because he didn't even hear it, if you don't know him.
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What does impress God? This is a trick question. What does impress
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God? It's not us, is it? It's not his children. It's not the things we do and the kindness that we show others.
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It's not the prayers we pray. God is only impressed by God because he's the only impressive thing in this universe.
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He's the only entity in this entire universe that is worthy of being impressed by.
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All other things fall short. And God desires for us to worship him through our prayers, doesn't he?
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That's why we must have a knowledge of him in order to pray to him. Because the desire is for us to worship through prayer.
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And how can we worship something we do not know? If we don't have a knowledge of him, we can't worship him.
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And how do we know him? This is an easy one, guys. Come on, that's not a trick question.
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How do we know him? Through his revealed word, right? That's the only place we can know him.
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We can get some general ideas when we look at creation. I love hearing guys that say, you know,
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I don't go to organized religion. I worship God out on the deer stand or out in the fishing boat. If I look at creation,
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I'm like, oh man, God is great and I really get to know God there. And I'll tell you what, I do see
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God in creation. But it's informed by his word, right?
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We see a general understanding of God and we can see God. He's made himself evident to all men.
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But for us to worship him, we must know him. And his word informs us as to how we are to do that.
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We can't just worship God any way we feel. We can't just say, this is how I want to worship
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God, so I'm going to worship God in this way. I mean, think about it. What if you came in this morning, you walked through those doors, and me and Pastor Jeremiah stand up here, we go, you know what guys, we've decided that today we're not going to sing, we're not really going to pray, and we're not going to preach.
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We're not going to open up God's word. As a matter of fact, what we are going to do is we're going to continue our time of worship here this morning, and we're going to supplement it, and we're going to watch the new
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Marvel movie on the screen. Yeah, thank you, Adam. Right? And then we said, hey, this is our time of worship this morning.
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Every one of you would have been like Adam and said, no, that's wrong.
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We're not doing that. Hopefully you would. Hopefully you'd run the two of us out of here. But you would think that was absurd.
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Why is that? Why would that be absurd? Because you would say, this is not how
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God has prescribed for us to worship him as we gather today. And you would be right.
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That would be wrong. It would be sin. Because that's not what God has prescribed.
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So how do we know how God has prescribed for us to worship him? Again, through his word.
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That's the only revealed way that we can understand how God desires to be worshipped. So you see, worshipping through prayer is no different.
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We must know God. We must have an intimate knowledge of what God prescribes and who
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God is and what God does for us to really be able to pray to God and worship him through prayer.
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And Jesus is telling us how we should do it. And he says, don't be like the Gentiles. Remember, those who have no knowledge of God.
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Those who have no understanding of how to pray to God. How to worship
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God. So do we in here, do we desire our prayer life to be an act of worship to God?
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We should. And if we do desire it, it will begin as we grow in our knowledge of God through his word.
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We see this true prayer demands a knowledge of God. Second thing I want us to see is that knowledge of God provides certainty in prayer.
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Knowledge of God provides certainty in prayer. Look at verse 8. He says, do not be like them.
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Who is he talking about? The Gentiles. The unknowledgeable. Those who have no concept of God.
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Those who don't know him. Do not be like them. For your father. I love that Jesus says this.
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The intimacy there. And we're going to talk about that here in just a moment. But he says, for your father knows what you need before you ask him.
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So we have no need for pomp and circumstance.
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Ritual and fancy speech. We have no need for any of that because a knowledge about God leads us to see that God is omniscient.
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That God knows all things before they even happen. God's already answered our prayers according to his will.
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God does all things good. Every molecule in this universe is at the perfect providential hand and will of God.
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He knows what we need before we even ask him. So we can approach him as children. Remember that intimate language of the father.
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We can approach him as children knowing that we will get the right answer every single.
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You hear me? You get the right answer from God every single time you go to him.
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And I didn't say you get the answer you want every time you go to him.
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But you get the right answer. And the reason is because God knows.
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He knows what you need because he's omniscient. Before you even come to him.
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We don't have to coerce him or impress him with something. There's no need to try and bring something to the table in prayer that is going to bring
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God and force God's hand to give us what we want. That's not what true prayer is. He knows our need before we even know our own need.
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He knows our circumstance before we even know that we're in the circumstance. He knows what we're asking for before we even ask it.
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And he knows what's best for us. Whereas we do not. We have a limited perspective. So with that being said and when we understand who
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God is and that this knowledge of God brings about a certainty in prayer. Does this mean we can be lax in our prayers?
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That we don't really need to pray? I mean let's be honest. The scripture teaches that God's sovereign, right?
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And God does what he wants. And all that he does is good. So why not just not pray?
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Why do we need to pray? Because he's already going to do what he wants, right? Well there's this paradoxical nature in scripture that God, he does do what he wants.
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And he uses means to carry out his perfect plan and will. And part of those means is the prescribed means of his saints coming to him and petitioning and praying.
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And it's not for his benefit. It's for ours. We get to experience him working in our lives and around us.
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We get to force ourselves to fall before his mighty power and sovereignty and acknowledge his control.
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And we get to set before him and plead our case with him because he is our father.
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But look at verse 9 too. Jesus doesn't give us any wiggle room as to his prescribed means for prayer.
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Verse 9 says, Pray then like this. Now, in the language here, in the original language, the way this is written, which is the way
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Jesus spoke it I believe, this statement by Jesus is not in the imperative mood.
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Meaning, it's not a command. This is not a command by Jesus. He's not saying, hey, you pray like this.
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He's not saying, hey, if you're going to pray, then pray like this. Or I command you to pray.
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That's not Jesus' intent here when he says, pray then like this. As a matter of fact, the way it's written, it's actually in the indicative mood.
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Meaning that it is, this is a statement of fact. And pray then like this is a statement of fact.
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What does that mean? It means that it's implying that if God is your father, if you are in Christ and God is your father, you will most certainly pray.
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You hear that? You will most certainly pray. Praying is like breathing to a saint.
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Jesus is telling us here, pray then like this, that there's no question you're going to pray.
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It's just how you're going to pray and what you're going to pray. We need to be taught that, don't we?
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But the instinct of communicating with God for a saint from the moment we're justified is deep within us.
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You know why? Because the Holy Spirit is in us praying and interceding and calling out things that we don't even know.
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And it's just drawing us and pulling us into praying because that's like breathing for us, communicating with our father.
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So, when you pray, pray then like this, our father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
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So we've seen that true prayer demands a knowledge of God. We've seen that knowledge of God provides certainty in our prayer.
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The third thing I want us to see is that knowledge of God ignites worshipful prayer.
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Knowledge of God ignites worshipful prayer. That's why we need God's word.
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That's why we need to understand who God is because once we're saved, we have a very limited knowledge of God, don't we?
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We come as infants, as children, and we've been awakened and we see enough about God to know our sin, to know our need, and to know what our savior has done.
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And we pray to him, but we need to be taught how to pray through his word and a knowledge of God, a deepening knowledge so that we can grow into mature manhood and womanhood as we pray.
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And our prayers will grow as such. So this very first phrase of the Lord's Prayer, it gives us insight into how we should approach
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God. So this is the very beginning of this Lord's Prayer, how we should approach God.
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We should approach him with a knowledge and an acknowledgement of who he is.
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Jesus starts off with, Our Father. Again, we spoke about that a second ago in verse 8, and I said we'd come back to it.
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We're coming back to it right here. Our Father in heaven. This, Jesus, he refers to God in two very seemingly contradicting ways.
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I say that, seemingly contradicting ways, okay? The first one is he tells us to call him
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Father, right? He says, when you pray, pray in this way,
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Father, Our Father. You've got to understand, in this context, these people that have been entrenched in Judaism, this would have seemed like borderline blasphemy to them.
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For Jesus to say, you're supposed to call him
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Father? This is blasphemy. How dare you refer to the Almighty God in such a personal way?
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How dare you go to God in that way? And here's the thing about that.
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They would have been right, if not for Christ.
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For a person to come before the Almighty Creator, outside of Christ, that would have been blasphemy to call him
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Father. Why is that? Well, John tells us in chapter 14, verse 6, he says,
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No one comes to the Father except through me. It's Jesus speaking, right?
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No one comes to the Father except through me. You can't get access to the Father without me. And then
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Paul mentions it in Ephesians 1, 5. He said, he predestined us for adoption. Adoption as children, right?
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It means that we weren't children before, but now we are. Adoption to himself as sons, through what?
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Through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.
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So we have been brought in through Christ, and now we have the right to call him
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Father. If not for Christ, none of us would have the right to call him Father. It would be blasphemy to call him
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Father. Because outside of Christ, what is God? If we're not in Christ, what is
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God to us? He is our judge and our executioner. He is by no means your
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Father. And how dare you call him that? But we need to remember, even now, we don't deserve to call him
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Father, according to our own merits. And in and of myself,
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I don't deserve to call him Father, outside of Christ. That's why we must trust solely in the merits of Christ, isn't it?
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That's what gives us the right to come before him. Which is why we can boldly come before the throne room of God, and call him
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Father. Because it's not dependent on how good
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I've been this week. It's not dependent on how many times I've read my Bible this week, or how many times
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I've prayed this week, or how many people I've witnessed to this week, or how many ladies I've helped cross the street this week.
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It has nothing to do with that. I can come boldly into the throne room of God, because of the perfection of Christ that has been imputed unto me.
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This also speaks to what theologians refer to as the eminence of God. This simply means
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God is near. God is accessible. Now, with that being said, we can't make the mistake of thinking that God, the
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Father, is distant and merely tolerates us. I think some of us feel that way at times.
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I know I do. That, yes, he's accepting. I can come into the throne room boldly. But when
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I do, it's almost as if God is looking at me. The Father's looking at me, and he looks at Nathan, and he's like, you know, honestly,
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Nathan, I really don't like you. You did a terrible job this week. I'm not impressed with you.
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I don't care for you, but I tolerate you because of my son. Right? It's that one kid that comes over to play with your kid, and you tolerate them because they're your son's friend, right?
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That's not how God sees us. That's not the Father that looks at us that way. I've struggled with that in my life in the past, thinking, man, and that caused trepidation in me to come into the throne room of God, to not come to him and think of him as a loving
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Father. This couldn't be any further from the truth. Paul says back there in Ephesians 1 that we mentioned a moment ago, but earlier in verse 4 he says,
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Even as he chose us, who? The Father. Even as the
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Father chose us in him, in who? In his Son, before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him in love.
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In love. The Father is the one that sent the
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Son to redeem us. You get that? The Father is the one that sent his
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Son to redeem you and me. Not to merely tolerate us, but because of his great love for us that he had set onto us before the foundations of the world.
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Before he'd ever even created the Garden of Eden and put Adam and Eve in it. He had set his great love on us.
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So when we come to him in prayer, we acknowledge his great love for us. We acknowledge our standing with him as children.
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He loves us. He doesn't just tolerate us. He loves us with a perfect love.
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A love that we will probably never even begin to comprehend. That being said, however, we must be careful not to become so lax that we lose our reverence and fear.
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I don't know about you, but I hate it. I hate it so much when I hear people. I hear somebody start to pray and they say,
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Oh, Daddy, God. You know, have you ever heard somebody call God Daddy in a prayer? I hate it.
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It makes my skin crawl. Like, I hate it. It's like, where's the reverence for? And I know they're using the excuse of in Scripture it says
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Abba, Father, and that Abba kind of means Daddy. As a matter of fact, it's more infantile than that.
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It's actually more Dada. But it's talking about our dependence as infants with a parent.
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It's not talking about us speaking about God in such a nonchalant way or speaking to God in such a nonchalant way.
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There should be a reverence. Because Jesus goes on in this prayer. Look at it. He says,
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Our Father, the intimate, in heaven. Every word that Jesus speaks is intentional.
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He gives us right here at the beginning of this prayer. This is how your heart should be in prayer.
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First, Jesus speaks of the eminence of the Father, of the accessibility of the Father, of the love of the
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Father, and then immediately refers to His transcendence. This is referring to the fact that the
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Lord God, the Almighty God, created all things on this earth.
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Created all things under this earth. Created all things in the heavens above. And yet He exists, not among it, but above it and independent from it.
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All of it. There's a transcendent nature about God. Everything else in creation is dependent upon Him.
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But He is not dependent on any ounce of it. You see that? Our Father who is in heaven.
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This is the transcendent God that has no need of us.
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He didn't need to create us. You've probably heard people, pastors, or somebody say,
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God created us for companions, as companions. God created us just because He needed something.
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God needs nothing. God is fully, completely sufficient in and of Himself within the
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Godhead. With perfect communion amongst the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.
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He has no need of us. Anything created is below. And He's not in it and just greater than.
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He's completely separate and independent from. This is the transcendence of God. So do you see what
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I mean when I say seemingly contradicting things about God here? We have the eminence of God.
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And we have the transcendence of God. We have a Father who is near. And we have a God who is great.
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We must keep these two things in sight as we go to our
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Father who is in heaven. All of our prayers should be approached with this knowledge of God.
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This knowledge of this great transcendent God. But that gives us access and is accessible to us through His Son.
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So how can we boldly come before the Lord with a reverence and awe for who He is? How can we do this?
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Well, we see the goodness of God. The Father, the one that we call Father. The one that we can access.
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And we see the greatness of God. The fact that He is transcendent in heaven. But these two things together, they lead us to the glory of God.
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This is where the knowledge of God begins to strengthen our prayer and brings about worshipful prayer.
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This is the glory of God. Look at what He says next. Hallowed be your name.
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I don't know too many people who use this phrase in regular conversation. Has anybody heard somebody use hallowed this week in a regular conversation?
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I don't think any of us have. We've not seen it on our television show. Most people don't use it. This is an old
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English word that was put in the King James Bible when it was translated into English.
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This word hallowed. And because of its popularity, because so many people have memorized the
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Lord's Prayer, the newer translations have merely kept this word for the sake of it's just so well known.
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You can change some these and thous and whatnot. But hallowed is just a word that we've grown to know within this.
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It's kind of like John 3 .16. It's such a well known verse that the new translations just keep the translation the same, but it's not really the best translation, if that makes sense.
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But it doesn't change the fact. And that's not the only reason that they haven't changed it.
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I think partly why they haven't changed it is because we really don't have a word to replace it with.
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We really don't have a modern word to use. I would say the closest one would be sanctified.
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Because this is really what this means. Sanctified. And what is sanctified? It's regarded as holy.
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Regarded as holy. But that even has limitations to our understanding because it's different from the fact that we've been sanctified in Christ.
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Because we have been, haven't we? There's the initial sanctification in our lives that we've been made holy.
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We've been regarded as holy. But then we have this process of sanctification that God is working in us until glorification.
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Because when Jesus says, Hallowed or sanctified be your name, He's not saying that God in our prayers is the highest name out of all other names.
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That's not what Jesus is saying here. He's saying that God's name is altogether separate from the other names.
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That's why we don't really have a word that we can use here. He's infinitely higher than all other names.
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Just as we said a moment ago about His transcendence. He's fully independent.
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And there's something to a name. You remember when Moses said, Who should I say sent me?
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God says, I am. God's name is above all other names.
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In the sense that it is not dependent on the greatest amongst names. Hallowed be your name.
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Sanctified be your name. In my heart. In my life. He's saying we should pray that the holiness of God's name would be made holy to us.
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The transcendence of God's name should be made holy to us.
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In our hearts. And we can only understand this truth through a knowledge about God.
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You see how a knowledge of God, a knowledge of God's word, informs every ounce of our lives.
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If we don't know God, we don't even know how to pray the way God has prescribed for us to pray.
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We can't even begin to understand what it means to pray and have a worshipful prayer life going up before the
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Lord. And so how does this happen? How do we see a transcendent holiness of God?
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How can we see God for who He is when we read His words? The fact that our language and our comprehension and our understanding is so unbelievably limited that we can't even scratch the surface of comprehending such a transcendent
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God. How do we see it? Well, praise God, He's given us a way.
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John 1, 14. And the word became flesh. The logos, the second person in the
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Godhead, dwelt among us. And we have seen
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His glory. Glorious of the only
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Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. This is how we see the transcendence of God.
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We see it through His Son. He has shown us through His Son.
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So my prayer for us this morning is that we would continue to grow in our knowledge of God here. Each one of us would grow in our knowledge of the word, our knowledge of our
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Savior, that we can look to our Savior and see the majesty of God.
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That we would see His eminence, His transcendence. That we would see Him through His word, through His Son that has been revealed to us.
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And that this would drive each one of us to our knees and we would pray, Our Father in heaven.
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Our Father accessible. We come before you. Boldly. Like a child coming before the throne of His Father who is
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King. Playing with our Tonka toy on the ground.
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Right? And we can come before our Father who is in heaven. That King is great.
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That King is transcendent. Hallowed be your name. That your name would be made holy to me in my heart.
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This great truth should saturate all of our prayers. Jesus' intention was not for us to verbatim quote this prayer.
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That was not the purpose of it. The purpose of it was the intent of the heart.
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That we should see God for who He is.
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And worship Him through prayer the way He is prescribed. So let us prepare to go to the
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Lord's table in light of that. I'm going to read a prayer.
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I want you as you hear this, I want you to remember what we have just said.
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This is not about a rote prayer. I want you to hear the words of this great prayer.
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This is a book of Puritan prayers. And this particular prayer here is about communion.
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I want you to listen to these words and have a worshipful heart of prayer in your hearts as I read them.
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As a matter of fact, let's bow our heads and close our eyes as I read this. So we not get distracted. How good it is,
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Lord, to receive a broken Christ into a broken heart. We feed on your body broken and your blood shed as the soul, the only, the all -sufficient means of salvation by faith.
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Lamb of God, keep your table sacred from all leaven. Both in the persons approaching it and the offerings made upon it.
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Do not allow the leaven of hypocrisy and wickedness here. But let us all who meet around your table be of the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
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And Lord, please come into your house, to your table, to your people.
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Let each person here and joyfully accept the invitation of the kind Master.
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Eat, oh friends. Drink, yes, drink abundantly, oh beloved.
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Then Lord, make us yours, altogether yours. Let your whole body, soul, and spirit be all, let our whole body, soul, and spirit be all yours.
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Both by the conquest of your grace, as they are justly yours, and by the purchase of your blood.
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Never, never more may we depart from you. But as did the church of old, may we exult in this blessed assurance.