How’s your prayer life? What I mean is how are your prayer habits? Do you pray much? After all Jesus said, when you pray. now he seemed pretty definite at this point, he didn’t say, if you pray, instead he said when you pray. He seemed pretty convinced that Christians would pray. And he said that when we prayed that we should not pray like the hypocrites or the heathen.
Now the word hypocrite is actually the Greek word for actor, and it literally means one who wears a mask. And so Christ is saying don’t pray like someone who is playing a part. You ever see someone who has a very definite prayer voice, neat huh? Christ said that they stood on the corner and prayed. Now Christ is not denouncing public prayer, he says not just that they stood on the street corner and in the synagogue and prayed but he tells us that they did it for a very special purpose. That they might be seen by men.
I went to Bible College with a guy, whom I will call Kirk, mainly because that was his name. And when a bunch of us went out for a burger we never asked Kirk to say grace because he said grace for everyone in the restaurant. In contrast was Mabs Fernley. Mabs was the wife of Walter Fernley a retired pastor on this district. One evening when Mabs was saying grace at supper Walter said, “Mabs I can’t hear you” to which Mabs responded by saying “That’s O.K. Walter I wasn’t talking to you.” We need to make sure that our prayer life isn’t just a way of demonstrating how spiritual we are.
And so as well as not praying like the hypocrite, Christ also cautions us not to pray like the pagan using many words. The KJV, uses the phrase, “vain repetition”. I wonder if that could mean praying without paying attention. You’ve prayed the prayers so long that you can say them without really thinking about them. It’s just like a repetition of words, one word after another. And so Christ says don’t be like them either.
And so he’s laid out how we shouldn’t pray and now he lays down how we should pray, beginning with Matthew 6:9 Pray like this: : and Christ goes on to lay down the most famous prayer in the history of man. Most of us could reel it off by rote. Indeed in many churches they pray the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday. I wonder if it’s come to the place that it’s JUST a repetition of words, one word after another. Almost a vain repetition? I wonder if Jesus would find it amusing that we have taken the very thing which he condemned and made it sacred.
A funny story, Tony Campolla is the head of the sociology department at Eastern College in Philadelphia, he tells how as a young assistant pastor he gave the pastoral prayer one Sunday morning after he’d been out late Saturday night and so he said he was pretty well in auto pilot. And so he got to the last phrase he says “In the name of our Lord who taught us to pray, our Father. . . And what he actually says is “in the name of the lord who taught us to pray, now I lay me down to sleep.”
Let’s look at the Lord’s prayer.
Last week we talked about the opening phrases, Matthew 6:9 Pray like this: Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. And we mentioned that we can’t let our concept of our earthly father color the words of Christ. Because he was speaking from his concept of father, a loving, affirming, protecting father.
We all know the rest of the prayer, as a matter of fact most of us could probably recite it by heart, but have we actually thought about the content. Not just the words but why the words. What would happen if your prayers were interrupted like Christian’s were.
The first thing that Jesus tells people to prayer for is Matthew 6:10 May your Kingdom come soon. May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. The question is what are we praying for? The people that Jesus was talking to would have had a very definite view of the Kingdom of God. To them it was going to be an actual physical place where the Roman oppressors were going to be overthrown and all good Jews were going to live in some form of political Utopia. This may not have been what Jesus had in mind when he spoke of the Kingdom of God. Remember the very first line that he spoke in what is known as the Sermon on the Mount Matthew 5:3 “God blesses those who are poor and realize their need for him, for the Kingdom of Heaven is theirs. That wouldn’t seem to be indicative of a political kingdom but the fact that Jesus spoke often about the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven would indicate that it was something in the forefront of his thoughts. The Gospel of Mark was said to be the first written account of Christ’s ministry and the very first words that it records of Jesus are found in Mark 1:15 “The time promised by God has come at last!” he announced. “The Kingdom of God is near! Repent of your sins and believe the Good News!” In the book of Luke 4:43 But he replied, “I must preach the Good News of the Kingdom of God in other towns, too, because that is why I was sent.” So it would appear that the need to preach about the Kingdom of God was a priority for Jesus almost to the point of being an obligation.
It’s always important to remember that Jesus was a Jew. And as a Jew he thought like a Jew, he reasoned like a Jew and he taught like a Jew and in this instance he uses a very Jewish literary device called parallelism. And what that does is to make a statement and then it clarifies the statement by restating it. That is it repeats it a different way. It would be like saying “It’s a great day out there. It’s hot and sunny.” Two statements “It’s a great day out there” is the first one, the second statement clarifies the first one “It’s hot and sunny”
One of the most famous Psalms is the 23rd Psalm, and it begins with a parallelism, Psalm 23:1 A psalm of David. The Lord is my shepherd . . . I have all that I need. David actually uses this device quite a few different times. Psalm 44:1 O God, we have heard it with our own ears . . . our ancestors have told us of all you did in their day, in days long ago: Psalm 46:1 God is our refuge and strength . . . always ready to help in times of trouble.
Most of the Psalms make use of parallelism to teach and that is what Jesus is doing in this verse, listen to what he says, May your Kingdom come soon. That’s the first statement the next statement then clarifies the first statement May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. When does God’s Kingdom come? When His will is done on earth as it is in heaven. It’s interesting to note that in different places in the New Testament Jesus uses the term Kingdom of Heaven in the past, present and future tenses. Something that happened, was happening and would happen.
The Kingdom of God comes when his will is being done. So the very essence of the Kingdom of God is to obey the will of God. This Kingdom has nothing to do with nations and countries instead it is something which happens in the heart of each one of us.
The kingdom of God is a personal responsibility because obedience happens with my heart and my will and my thought life. The most important thing in the world is to obey God and the most important words that we can speak are, “Your will be done” But only if we mean them.
Two things you can be assured of as a Christian when you say “Your will be done”.
1) You Can Always Be Sure Of God’s Wisdom. Have you ever taken anything to an expert? You know to have it repaired or altered or built? What do you tell, “Do what you have to do”, “Do whatever you think is best.” Why do you say those things? Because you know that supposedly they know more about the subject then you do or you wouldn’t be using them.
Do you know what really frustrates an professional or an expert? It’s when someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about tries to tell the pro how to do it. You know when the guy takes his car to the garage and tells the mechanic what’s wrong and how to fix it. I’m sure more then one mechanic has wanted to say, “Hey if you know so much why’d you bring it to me?” God knows what needs to be done and he knows how it needs to be done.
2) You Can Always Be Sure Of God’s Love. We talked about this last week. How Jesus was praying to a Father whom he knew loved him, period. There was no doubt at all. And God loves us We don’t serve a cruel God who plays games with us. Thomas Hardy finished his novel “Tess” with these words, “The President of the Immortal had finished his sport with Tess.” That’s the way some people see God, some cosmic chess player who gets his chuckles out of losing a pawn. But we serve a God whose greatest attribute is love. John was one of Jesus closest friends and he wrote in 1 John 4:16 We know how much God loves us, and we have put our trust in his love. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. No man can look at the cross and see the sacrifice God made for us and not see his love.
And I’ve heard the questions, “If God is a loving God then how can he allow ____________?” Allow what? Allow world hunger? A problem that man could solve. Permit AIDS? A disease that has spread through man’s immortality? Permit war? Conflict which is caused by humanity? God has given us the where with all to solve those problems, if we want, and that’s a big if isn’t it.
When we are sure of the love of God then we can find it easier to say “Your will be done”. You notice that I said easier and not easy, because by our very nature it’s difficult to give control to somebody else. And when we surrender that control we have the option of doing it begrudgingly or willingly.
You ever struggle with the term “holiness?” The best definition of holiness that I ever heard came from Mother Theresa. “You hear that Martha he’s going to quote a catholic.” I remember once someone asked Jimmy Swaggert if Mother Theresa would go to heaven? “Heaven’s Martha, first a Catholic and now a Charismatic, just goes to prove what I’ve always said about Guptill, doesn’t it”
Swaggert’s response was “She will if she’s born again.” Not a bad answer. Anyway where was I, oh yeah Mother Theresa said, “Holiness can be summed up in one word, obedience.” How you doing?
Jesus goes from the spiritual, the will of God to the physical, Matthew 6:11 Give us today the food we need, or the more familar Give us today our daily bread. Now this would appear to be the simplest part of the Lord’s prayer. Well let me tell you that nothing is so simple that it can’t be complicated by a theologian. Someone once said, “A theologian takes the simple things and makes them difficult, it’s up to a preacher to take the difficult things and make them simple again”
1) Some say that bread is to be identified with the last supper and so we are asking to be able to celebrate the sacrament of communion on a daily basis.
2) Others say that this actually refers to spiritual food, that is the word of God, the Bible. And so these people would maintain that this is actually a request for spiritual feeding.
3) Then there are those who tell us that the bread actually is a reference back to Jesus who called himself the bread of life in John 6:33-35. And so the prayer is “Lord let me feast on your presence daily.
4) And there are others who say that this is a purely Jewish request and the daily bread is a reference to the feast that will follow the coming of the messiah. The Messiah’s Feast
Now in keeping with all of those eminent scholars theories let me share with you my theory, now hang on because it’s deep. I think that what Jesus meant by “Give us today the food we need” was “Give us today the food we need”. I think it was just a request for God to provide the things that we need on a daily basis. Deep, huh?
And that tells us some different things. “Give us today the food we need”. It’s About Our Physical Needs. Jesus didn’t just come preaching, he came healing as well. And he took the time out to feed people, and provide for their thirst. Do you remember what the Bible said when Jesus saw that the people he was teaching were hungry? It said that he was filled with compassion. Why, because they were hungry. Not only was Jesus concerned about the hunger of the people he did something about it, he fed them.
2) “Give us today the food we need”. It’s About Our Immediate Needs. This teaches us to pray for our daily bread, not our weekly bread, not our monthly bread and not our yearly bread but our daily bread. Do you remember the Exodus, the event not the movie. That was when Moses led the Jews out of Egypt. And during that time God provided the people with manna, which was a food stuff that lay like dew on the grass in the mornings. But the people could only collect enough for one day, any more and it would rot. So this portion of the Lord’s Prayer should help us to keep worry in the proper place, we need to take care of today not next week.
3) “Give us today the food we need”. It’s About Our Limitations. This gives God His Proper place. It admits that we receive our daily needs from God. When we pray this we are acknowledging that everything we have comes from God. Our job, our home, our food, our clothing everything comes from God. When it comes right down to the basics you have to admit that it all goes back to God. Man has yet to develop a totally synthetic food. It all goes back to the seed, the seed that requires a God to create it.
4) “Give us today the food we need”. Jesus didn’t teach us to pray “Give me the food I need” but “Give us the food we need.” It’s About More than Me. You see when we talk about world hunger we talk about it as if there was a supply problem. Wrong! There’s all kinds of food, it’s not a supply problem it’s a distribution problem.
Because when you have Canadian farmers stockpiling wheat, Australian farmers shooting sheep and American farmers pouring milk out on the ground while people are starving on the other side of the world we’ve got a problem.
And however you look at it, it’s the countries which call themselves “Christian Countries” who have the excess. The countries that have been taught to pray “Give us this day our daily bread”
But let’s never forget that the Lord’s prayer isn’t a prayer for everyone but only for those who call him Father. Only for believers. It is only his children who can call him Father, and that the only way into that category is to realize that you can’t do it yourself.
As the worship team comes to sing, you need to ask yourself if God is your father? And if He isn’t but you’d like him to be then during that song just ask him to come into your life and forgive your sins. You don’t have to pray out loud God will hear you. Just invite him in, you could pray something like, God I’m sorry for the things I’ve done to displease you, forgive me for those things and accept me as your child.
Many of the ideas for this message originated in William Barclay’s “Daily Study Bible”
PowerPoint may be available for this message contact me at denn@cornerstonewesleyan.ca
