The Lord's School of Prayer (Luke 11:1-28, Jeff Kliewer)

The Lord's Prayer as a School of Prayer

This morning, it was good to focus upon your name, who you are, your identity. Lord, you are the one that matters most in this universe. You are the creator of all, the sustainer of all. In you, we move and live and have our being.

Without you, we are nothing. God, this world is really all about you and not so much about us, Lord. Teach us that truth, God, and we thank you that you have welcomed us as your sons and daughters through the blood of your only son, Jesus Christ.

Thank you for the gospel this morning. We have thankful hearts and joyful hearts and the right to be here in your presence, that you have made a way for us to be here. And now, Lord, we pray that we could sit and learn at your feet as we open these sacred scriptures.

As we read your words to us, I pray that our hearts would be receptive and we would learn much and apply those things to our lives. In Jesus' name, amen. Well, it was exactly a year ago, the third Sunday of March, that I preached a message called How to Pray.

Came out of Colossians 1 verses 9 to 14. And here again this morning, the subject is how to pray. Now, what does that mean, that it's been an exact year? Absolutely nothing. It's just a strange coincidence.

But that passage in Colossians 1 verses 9 to 14 is worth remembering because there we see a model of how Paul prayed. And he begins by reminding them of how much he prays for them. And we learn about his consistency, that prayer was central to Paul's life.

Then we learn that he prays to the Father, through the Son and by the Spirit. So prayer was Trinitarian, we said. Third, we learned that prayer should be God-centered, that we should pray about things that matter to God, not only the things that are most near to our house.

And finally, the thankfulness that needs to be a part of prayer. As people who have been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, we should be thankful to our God for everything that we have. So we learned that a year ago.

And here again today we come to the Lord's Prayer. Now, I would say that if you wanted to go anywhere in the scripture to learn the Lord's Prayer, you should go to John chapter 17. John 17 might better be called the Lord's Prayer because there we have an entire chapter of Jesus praying for us.

And for those who would come to know him through the apostles' testimony, it could be called the Lord's Prayer. He prays for the unity of the church at that point. But what we currently know as the Lord's Prayer, because it's been called that over the years, our Father who art in heaven, that would probably be better called the Lord's School of Prayer.

Because as we turn now to Luke chapter 11, the chapter begins with a question wherein the disciples are seeking understanding. They want to be taught how to pray. That's the issue in Luke chapter 11. So from this chapter we receive the Lord's School of Prayer and there's really just seven quick bullet points, each one that deserves some short commentary on it.

And then there's an object lesson or two that round out the teaching. So it doesn't really just stop with what's formally called the Lord's Prayer. There is some continued teaching in Luke 11 about prayer.

So this morning, here's what we're hoping to do. As iron sharpens iron, as we look into God's word to receive sharpening in our prayer life, is there anybody here that wouldn't admit that at times your prayer life is lacking?

Maybe dry, maybe less than sharp. Maybe you can go an entire day without praying to God. Brothers, sisters, this should not be. Prayer should be the very heartbeat of our relationship with God. In fact, in Thessalonians we're told pray without ceasing.

I know there's been seasons in my life where I felt like that was happening. Where there just couldn't go a minute when I wasn't talking to God. And then there's been other times when I've been drifting away and my prayers have been dry and just sort of repeated, rote, just praying, bless this food to our bodies.

In Jesus' name, amen, then you eat. Or praying right before you fall asleep. And that I would call a dry prayer life. But a living prayer life is something where your relationship with God is constant.

You're constantly talking. And if that's you, you wanna know how to pray, then this passage, this message is for you today. To grow in your understanding and the way that you pray. Let's begin, Luke chapter 11.

We'll begin with what's called the Lord's Prayer and now call it the Lord's School of Prayer, verses one through four. Now Jesus was praying in a certain place. And when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray.

As John taught his disciples. And he said to them, when you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins. For we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.

And lead us not into temptation. Now you'll notice that that prayer, the Lord's Prayer, the Lord's School of Prayer, is slightly different than the one we have in Matthew. This is a shortened version of the same thing.

Matthew 6, nine to 13 is a slightly more expanded version, but it's the same teaching. And the first thing that we're taught about how to pray is that we address God as Father. So we pray to our Father.

And this is the ordinary way that we come to our holy God. We talk to the Father. We do so through the Son and by the Spirit. Now is it okay to sometimes pray directly to Jesus the Son or directly to the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity?

Yes, it is. Because each is equally God. And yet here we have the pattern, which we'll see throughout scripture, that the ordinary way that we come to God is to the Father, the giver of all things. According to James, he's the Father of lights.

And he doesn't change like shifting shadows. Everything we have comes from the Father of lights. So we go to the Father in prayer, recognizing, this is a beautiful thing, the only way that we can come to our Father is through the Son.

Because the Son has died on a cross and torn that veil in the temple, that way into the holy of holies, the separation between us and God, because we're sinful people, he's a holy God, that separation has been removed and he's bridged the way for us to get to the Father.

He's torn the veil and given us a way in. Now we can approach a holy God because we come through the Son. And our prayer is by the Spirit because it's the Spirit that helps us in our weakness. And it's by the Spirit we cry, Abba, Father.

We have the Spirit of adoption, according to Romans 8. So the Spirit is the one who is in us, helping us to approach the throne of the Father. That's the ordinary way we pray. So we address God as Father, but herein is a problem.

Because not all Christians were raised with a father that's easy to talk to. It's possible that some would have a wound from their father. Growing up, their father might have been harsh or unapproachable.

And so to say, pray our Father, is actually something that's difficult for many Christians to do. Because their conception of God the Father comes from their earthly father. Well, the scriptures present a father who cares for his children.

He says that a sparrow can't fall from the sky unless the father allows it. And even the very hairs on your head are numbered, for those of you who still have hair. The very hairs of our head are numbered.

He cares for us. He knows everything about us, and he's a loving and caring father. Now think about the access that we have to the father through the son. If our father was harsh and distant, he would have given us exactly and only what we deserve.

After all, the father is the creator of all. He made the farthest star in the universe. He's holy and he's righteous, and we are rebels against him. He is a God who's told us what to do, and each one of us has turned away from his path.

We've rejected him. We've rebelled against the father. If he were to have given us what we deserve, we would be separate from him forever. Cast away in punishment. If he were only so merciful as to have given us purgatory, a period of time to be punished, to refine us before going into heaven, he would still be giving us so much more than we deserve.

But that's not what we've been given. We have been forgiven completely of our sins by trusting in Jesus, and now we are right with him. And not only that, now he is calling us sons and daughters. These are the things that should be in our mind when we go to the father to recognize that our God is so good to us that he has given his one and only son, Jesus, that we then could be adopted as his sons and daughters.

Think about that love. If he would give us his one and only son, Jesus, how will he not also give us all things that we need? When we pray our father, we are talking to a God who cares, to a God who loves, to a provider, a protector, a loving God that we can trust.

So that's where we begin in prayer. We go to him as father. Number two, it's very common, I think, for us to make a mistake when we go into prayer. And that is, yes, we pray father, dear father, but right away we launch into a list of things that we would like for him to do for us.

And we often skip the very next part of the Lord's Prayer. See, the Lord's Prayer is not just something we need to recite word for word. It's a model for our prayer lives. We begin by addressing our father, but the very next thing we should do is begin to hallow his name, to uphold his name as holy, to begin to worship him and praise him for who he is.

So that second phrase, well, after the word father, hallowed be thy name, refers to praises according to who God is, his identity, his name that we sung about all morning. This is the God we worship. So when we first come into a time of prayer, we need to begin to say things like, God, you are holy.

God, you are righteous. There is no sin in you at all. God, I praise you for who you are. You're the creator of all things. Begin to say things like that to him, recognizing that although we have this access because we're his children, he's our father, we can come right to him like a child, and yet there still should be some distance.

And this is what I think has been lost in the evangelical church in America. There's not enough distance in terms of understanding that we are addressing the holy God of the universe in prayer, and our prayer lives reflect that.

How little time do we spend extolling his virtue and his love and who he is? The Lord's prayer reminds us to praise him for who he is. Begin your prayer with words of praise like hallowed be your name.

Third, thy kingdom come. Here again, before we even begin to request things of him, for ourselves, namely our daily bread and the needful things in our lives, before we go there, we need to take some time to pray for the things that matter to him.

And we matter to him, but there's something larger than us. So that God-centeredness of hallowed be thy name, that flows into your kingdom come, your plan on earth, the advancement of your name to the ends of the earth.

And so we begin to pray for others and his mission. We should begin by praying for missionaries who are on the front lines, taking to the gospel, to the ends of the earth, remembering all of our missionaries that we send out, and others.

Pray for churches. One of the things that's encouraged me a lot as a pastor in the last few months is that the pastors of the local churches in Mount Laurel, Marlton, many of us are getting together to pray together now.

So there's not that much competition. I don't see any competition between church X, Y, and Z, the largest churches in Mount Laurel and in Marlton. The pastors aren't competing, trying to build their own kingdoms.

But on Wednesday mornings, we'll gather and pray for one another, and pray for the health of each other's churches, and for one another as men. It's a really healthy thing. It's called the Acts 4 .13 network, and from time to time, we're gonna have big gatherings where all the churches gather in one of the larger buildings, and we can pray together.

It's an exciting time. Maybe this is the seeds of revival, but notice when the army of Israel was about to advance into the promised land. Before they went in to take that territory, a mysterious person appeared, and this person was brilliant, glowing, had a sword in his hand, and looked powerful.

And when Joshua, the commander of Israel's army at that time saw him, he trembled before him. And his question was this, are you for us, or are you for them? And the answer of the commander was this, neither.

But as the commander of the Lord's army, I have now come. You see, when we go to God in prayer, recognize, it's not that we need to align him to whatever our cause is. We need to be aligned to his cause.

So before we get into asking the things that are pressing on our heart, we need to align ourselves with his kingdom agenda, the advancement of his kingdom on earth. That's the third thing. Fourth, you know the prayer.

Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. There's something missing right here, isn't it? In Matthew, we have an explanation further. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

That's filling out that idea of God's kingdom first, God-centeredness, his will before our will. But fourthly, we have requests made to God. And this is a good thing. Requests for his provision. Asking him, give us each day our daily bread.

Notice first of all, that's a plural. Give us each day our daily bread. Which implies that the person praying this is in a group. Christians, and we pray this on our own, but Christians together need to gather in prayer.

As Jesus said, where two or more gather, I am there in their midst. When we come together to pray and to ask things of God, there is power in that place. Give us this day our daily bread. Notice also, I think there's something about our daily bread that's important for us to recognize.

It's not our Ferrari or our BMW, whatever car that we want, or the biggest house, or if you're a Creflo dollar, the $70 million jet. I'm sorry, I always pick on the prosperity teachers. But listen, there's something about this daily bread that refers to needful things.

Needful things. Give us this day our daily bread. The simple provision that we need to live. And sometimes that daily bread is health. It's healing because we're being plagued by an illness. It's appropriate to pray for that, or the illness of another person.

Food, shelter, love, relationships. Things that are appropriate to our role as creatures before a holy God. And the advancement of his kingdom first, not ours. So the fourth thing is we begin to ask things of God.

Now we're gonna come back to this in a minute because this is kind of like 101. This is the School of Prayer 101. Yes, we take our prayer requests to God. But after we finish this section, there's kind of a 201 coming with reference to our asking, and our seeking, and our knocking, and the persistence that we should have there.

But we'll leave this for the moment and go to point number five. Confess your sins and ask him, forgive us our sins. Isn't it a beautiful thing that we have a loving father who knows what we have done.

He knows our hearts better than we know our hearts. In fact, Jeremiah tells us that our hearts are deceitful above all things. Who can know it? We don't know the level of our sin in order to be able to confess it all.

And yet we have a God that forgives sin. We are to ask him, and I think we should be as specific as possible. As we go into that time of prayer, we should be able to go directly to the father, direct access through the son, meaning we don't need any other human agency to do that.

Although James 5 does tell us, it is good to confess your sins to a brother so he can pray for you in order that you would be healed. But because of Jesus as our great high priest, we can go directly to the father and confess our sins.

He knows them already. He knows them better than we do. And he here is inviting us to bring those things to him, to his mercy seat, where that forgiveness flows from, which is ultimately the cross of Christ.

Our forgiveness is complete in him, and yet we need to come before him. If we hold on to that sin in our heart, according to Isaiah, I'm sorry, according to Psalms, I think it's chapter 66, it says, if I had held on to sin in my heart, he would not have listened to me.

It's possible that as we continue to sin or we commit sins that we're not bringing to God, we create a barrier between us and the father. And he's waiting on us to come and confess those things in order to find that open and free relationship that we had.

So we need to confess our sins. Now, I don't think that we need to recall every single thing that we've ever done. Again, we don't know our hearts that well. But as specific as we can be, bring our prayers to him.

Number six, deal with unforgiveness in your own heart so that you can honestly say, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. Jesus tells about one who brings a gift to the altar, but before offering that, he needs to leave the gift at the altar and go away first and make good a relationship that has gone sour, and then come back and offer something to God.

Forgiveness. If we hold on to unforgiveness in our heart, it creates a wall, again, between us and God. Now, does that mean that as we forgive people from the heart, that we need to trust them exactly the way we did before they offended against us?

The answer is no. Trust and forgiveness are different things. We are called to forgive even our enemies, even the people who have persecuted us and offended us in terrible ways. In our own heart, we can forgive.

That's how come the martyrs who were laying down their lives in the first three centuries of Christianity would pray for the people who were killing them. Remember Stephen? Just like Jesus. Jesus praying from the cross, Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.

When Stephen was being martyred, he said, Father, don't hold this sin against them, even as he's being stoned to death, and he gives up the ghost. He was forgiving even in the moment of that offense, in his heart.

As Christians who have been forgiven, think about the relationships you have in your life, and I know all of us have been offended at some point in our lives. Is there somebody you need to forgive right now in your heart?

Forgiveness can happen in your heart in a moment, through prayer, letting go of that grudge or that thing that's holding onto you. Now if you do that, that doesn't mean that you don't have to set boundaries in your life any longer.

Boundaries are a way that you can protect. Even while your heart is forgiving, it may take time to rebuild the trust that you had before the offense. But forgiveness is something we're called to do right now at the altar, in our prayer times.

Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. And point seven, this I think is my favorite point. Kind of how the Lord's school of prayer ends. Ask God to lead us not into temptation. There's not a one of us here today that hasn't struggled with temptation.

And sometimes temptation can feel so strong that you think you'll never break free. Temptation is kind of, picture temptation as being like a baited hook. That bait that's being offered to you looks so good.

You're the swimming fish and you just wanna take the bait. It looks so good. But time and again, once you take the bait, you discover there's a hook inside. And once again, you find the pain that comes with that and the shame of what you've done.

And time and again, even as Christians, we get caught on these hooks called temptation. And sometimes it can feel almost hopeless. And the question is, why do we keep falling for the same bait time and again?

I think the answer is in this prayer. The prayer is not give me the strength, Lord, to resist that bait that I want so much. The prayer is lead us not into temptation. And Matthew expands that, deliver us from evil, from the evil one.

The freest you will ever be is on the other side of death. In heaven, you will have no taste for the things of this world, for the temptations of the enemy. Your will will be truly free. Freedom is not to be caught in the lurch between two competing opinions.

I think of 1 Corinthians 18, when Elijah was offering the true God to Israel, worship and serve Yahweh. But the false prophets of Baal were offering Baal. And there were hundreds of them. And Elijah says to the Israelites, how long will you waver between two opinions?

And the people were silent. They were stuck in the middle between two opinions. On the one hand, Yahweh, on the other hand, Baal. And it wasn't until God just showed up and by his power consumed the altar and the offering on it and licked up all the water and proved that Yahweh is the true God and the false prophets of Baal are nothing but liars.

And in that moment, they were set free because they beheld the glory of the true God. Here's how we overcome temptation. By setting our eyes on the truly valuable. When our desire for Christ and the things of God begin to consume us and burn in us, when we begin to behold his glory for who he truly is, then the things of this world become much less attractive in the first place.

He leads us out of temptation by leading us to himself. You won't be able to resist those temptations by stronger willpower. It's never worked because the answer isn't in yourself. The answer is in him.

And the more you fix your eyes on Christ and him crucified and you find him in his word and you begin to develop a taste for his word, this is how you become free. Not just by saying, I will never do that sin again.

I'm done with it because I know it's a hook. Guess what? You'll see people going back to the same hook over and over and over again. That should not be us, brothers and sisters, because we have the real thing to satisfy us.

I think about taste. See, I think it's not only a matter of developing our taste for the things of God. I think that in the fall of Adam, our tongues have been seared. Have you ever eaten some hot chicken soup or coffee or something that burns your tongue and all of a sudden you can't taste anymore?

Doesn't taste good. No food tastes good because your tongue has been seared like with a hot iron. In the fall of Adam and Eve, all of us who come from Adam and Eve, we have seared tongues. Our taste for the things of God have been stripped away.

Our taste buds have been stripped away. We can't appreciate who he is. We can't appreciate his word. It bores us to hear the word of God. The problem is not here but with us. Lead us not into temptation.

That path away from temptation is when your taste for the things of God, your desires for God, overwhelm the competing desires of this world. Before long, you'll be like Paul saying, I consider them rubbish, trash, dung, a worthless pile of nothing compared to the surpassing greatness of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.

Victory over temptation is not about willpower. It's about Christ's power in you. Christ in you, the hope of glory. Not by might nor by power but by my spirit says the Lord of hosts, Zechariah four. It's a spiritual victory and so we pray for it.

You can't do this on your own. Lead us not into temptation. Ask that God will crush the enemy under your feet. Like Romans 16 tells us, develop a taste for the things of God and that conquers the taste for that bait which is filled with a hook.

So we know the Lord's prayer which is now called the Lord's school of prayer but what do we do now? Do we stop there, it's enough? That's prayer 101 or do we have appetite for something a little more?

Let's take it one level higher. Let's take it to 201. Luke 11, five to 13, and he said to them, which of you has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, friend, lend me three loaves for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey and I have nothing to set before him.

Anybody got a neighbor like that and they just keep knocking on your door at close to midnight asking for eggs or milk or something? Hope not. And he will answer from within, do not bother me. The door is now shut and my children are with me in bed.

I cannot get up and give you anything. I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence, he will rise and give him whatever he needs. And I tell you, ask and it will be given to you.

Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives and the one who seeks finds and to the one who knocks it will be opened. What father among you if his son asks for a fish will instead of a fish give him a serpent?

I like Jesus' humor here. Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?

There's a lot in here. The beginning, we have a friend coming knocking in the middle of the night and we're told that a man will not get out of his bed just because he's his friend. You know, it's an inappropriate time to come.

But because of his impudence, he will get up. Now I had to look up that word, what does impudence mean? It's kind of a shameless audacity or a persistence in that shameless audacity. In fact, I looked up the Greek word and it says, it's something like A-N-A-I, it's an alpha iota, an idea.

And I was trying to figure out if I could pronounce that word. So I had to turn to my Greek scholar wife and I said, honey, how do we pronounce? Is it like the alpha and the iota run together like an A and an I do in English?

And she says, honey, I don't have an idea. Ah, very good. The Greek word, I guess it's something like an idea, but I don't know how to pronounce it properly and I confess that. But the word itself is translated as shameless audacity.

Now the King James says persistence or shameless persistence. The NASB has that. But the ESV says impudence. The idea that it's communicating is that yes, you have a friend. John 15, 15, I no longer call you servants from now on, I call you friends.

Yes, you have a friend in heaven. But unless you go and boldly, brashly request things of him, you have no loaf for your friend. It's the one who asks that receives. It's the one who seeks that finds.

It's the one who knocks to whom the door is opened. Listen, prayerless brothers and sisters, that's how I describe myself sometimes. Prayerless. You have not because you ask not. There are gifts that the good father will give you, but for lack of asking, you have not.

It's not always the reason. Sometimes, according to James, you have not because you ask with wrong motives. James 4. There are different reasons why prayer sometimes isn't answered in the way we expect, but oftentimes, and according to this Prayer 201 lesson, many times it's for lack of asking.

Yes, you have a friend, but you need to be bold and come before his throne and begin to ask. And there's an idea here of persistence in it. It's counterintuitive to how we think of submitting to the will of God.

To submit to the will of God, I actually have known people who have said that I never ask anything of God for myself. And they kind of have a pious, you know, nose in the air way of saying that. They think it's piety to never ask for themselves.

I call it unbiblical because we're told by direct command, ask, seek, knock. Our father wants us to come to him asking of things. We need to check our motives, that we're not asking things that are outside of his will.

But how do we know what God's will is? Well, here's the answer to that. We live by the prescriptive will of God. We live by what God has spoken to us in his word. And yes, God has a secret will. He has a plan that he is working out.

And sometimes it's different than what we would think. So we though are not called to account for the secret will of God. Deuteronomy 29, 29. The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever.

In other words, there's two wills in God. The secret will, his decree, his plan, what he's doing, why it is we have to suffer and have surgeries, and how all these things work together for good in the end.

We don't understand all those things and we don't get to see those things until we get to heaven. And now we're looking through a glass darkly, but then we see face to face. We are, however, called to live by the revealed word of God.

And that means that if you have a prodigal child and you say, well, God's will will be done, you're missing the point of this text. But you say, I've been praying for my prodigal child for 20 years and he hasn't come home.

Don't miss the point of this text. Keep praying, keep asking, keep knocking, keep seeking. Saying, God, I know that you're a good God and that you save sinners. Save my son, save my child. I've been praying for a father or a brother or a friend.

Become a prayer warrior for them. And if 20 years or 30 years go by, keep praying. That's the meaning of this text. Keep asking, persisting in prayer. I like how Jesus, again, compares this to a father at the end.

Remember how we begin our prayer? Our father. So we're to think of God as a father. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent? Don't you know your father loves to answer prayer?

And ultimately, this is a Trinitarian passage because it's Jesus the teacher now teaching us to pray this way to our father and the final conclusion in verse 13 of it, how much more, it's almost a twist in the plot at the end, how much more will the heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?

We're asking all kinds of things of our father. We're asking for bread to help a friend. We're praying for prodigals. We're praying all kinds of prayers. But in the end, what we really need is God. When God shows up in our lives and fills us with the Holy Spirit, this is what we need.

This is what our friend needs more than bread. God in us, God with us. How much more will the heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? Well, let's take this at least one quick level higher to 301 in verse 14 and following because there is a spiritual warfare aspect to prayer.

Before we read it, I'll just tell you this quick story. In Daniel chapter 10, Daniel prays for three weeks. It's a prayer marathon. He's mourning, he's fasting, tearing his clothes. And after three weeks, the angel Gabriel shows up to talk to him.

And he tells him something that's very instructive for us. He says, from the moment you humbled your heart and began to pray, I was sent. But I was opposed by the prince of Persia. That doesn't refer to the king of the nation of Persia.

It refers to the spiritual force, the spiritual prince that was over that physical kingdom. So Gabriel was sent to answer Daniel's prayer, but he was met in the air by a demon. And they wrestled for 21 days as Daniel kept persisting in prayer.

At that point in time, Michael the archangel came to help Gabriel break through and that's how Gabriel came on that 21st day. To give him the answer and to give him a prophecy of what would come, the things to come.

For us, we need to recognize when we're praying, there is a spiritual warfare aspect to our prayer. Things that we don't see happening. Spiritual forces in heavenly places. That's why we need to take on the full armor of God.

The helmet of salvation, breastplate of righteousness. Take the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God. Shield of faith, belt of truth. And Ephesians 6 .18 says, and praying unceasingly, praying all the time, keep asking.

Paul says, pray for me also that words can be given me. You see, prayer is warfare. And here we'll see Jesus in warfare. And I think it comes at the end, Luke arranges it after this prayer portion of scripture that we would recognize the spiritual war aspect.