The Protestant Reformer Martin Luther once said, “Just as the business of the tailor is making clothes and the business of the cobbler is making shoes, so the business of the Christian is praying.” If that’s true, I have a question for us this morning: How’s business? If you’re like most Christians I know, your prayer life isn’t all that you wish it was. At our elder retreat back in February, our elder board spent a lot of time talking about this issue of prayer and how we as a congregation could grow stronger in our life of prayer together. Most other pastors I talk to echo a similar experience, that they long for their congregations to grow deeper in prayer.
Perhaps that’s why Amazon.com carries over 8,000 different books on prayer. Perhaps that’s why earlier this year we saw a book about prayer climb its way past Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to the top of the New York Times bestseller list (Hanegraaff, "The Prayer of Jesus", p. ix). That book, of course, is Bruce Wilkerson’s book "The Prayer of Jabez," and whatever you think about the book its success I think exposes a deep longing on the part of many people to pray better. If the business of the Christian is prayer, how’s business?
A few years ago LIFE magazine asked the Gallup Organization to conduct a poll on American prayer habits (http://www.gallup.com/poll/releases/pr990506.asp). The Gallup organization found that 90% of Americans claim to pray, with 3 out of 4 claiming to pray on a daily basis. Most Americans pray alone, in isolation, with only 11% praying with other people. Yet for all this prayer going on, most people remain ignorant to the basics of the Christian faith, devoid of a close relationship with God.
How’s business in your life this morning? Are you satisfied with where your prayer life is? Or do you mostly feel guilty when your mind starts wandering as you try to pray? Do you hear stories about people who spend entire days in prayer and only feel inadequate and defeated?
Today we begin a new five week series called “Teach Us to Pray.” In this series we’re going to look at the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer Jesus gave his followers. In some ways, reading a book or listening to a sermon on prayer is a little like trying to get marriage counseling by correspondence. There’s no substitute for actually praying, actually spending time with God, learning, trying new things, experimenting, persevering, and seeking. However, it’s my hope that this series on prayer will motivate us to spend a little more time actually praying. In fact, we have a midweek home Bible study starting later this month just focused on learning how to pray. Perhaps some of you will be motivated to attend that home group.
Every Sunday Christians across the world recite the Lord’s Prayer. This prayer is prayed in a variety of different circumstances, from wedding ceremonies to funerals. I first learned this prayer in Alcoholics Anonymous, where after every meeting we’d join hands in a circle and recite this prayer together after our meetings. Yet few people seem to really understand how Jesus intended his prayer to be used. Instead of being an invitation to a rich, deepening life of prayer, for many it’s just words.
Today as we start our series, we’re going to first look at what the Lord’s Prayer is intended to be, and then at three invitations that come from the Lord’s prayer. So take out your outline and turn to Matthew 6:9.
1. What is the Lord’s Prayer?
We start with the question, “What is the Lord’s Prayer?" The answer to that question might seem obvious, but perhaps it’s not so obvious. Actually, according to the New Testament, Jesus taught people this prayer on two different occasions. The first of these occasions—what we find here in Matthew—is during Jesus’ famous sermon on the mount. In this sermon—perhaps the most famous sermon of all time—Jesus presents us with the marks of an authentic follower of Jesus. It’s in that context that Jesus introduces the Lord’s Prayer. Look at v. 9. In the previous 8 verses, Jesus told his followers how not to pray. Here he tells us how to pray. The key word here is the word “how.”
Here we learn that the Lord’s Prayer is A MODEL FOR AUTHENTIC COMMUNICATION WITH GOD.
In other words, Jesus did not intend this prayer to be a formula to recite, but he gave it as a model for what authentic communication with God is like. Jesus didn’t say, “Here’s WHAT to pray,” but he said, “Here’s HOW to pray.”
Now I’m not against reciting the Lord’s prayer. I look at reciting the Lord’s Prayer as like a kindergartner learning his or her ABC’s. It’s good to recite the ABC’s, but the goal of reciting the ABC’s is to get the child to the point where he or she can read and write. Reciting the Lord’s Prayer is helpful in assisting us in understanding how it functions as a model for prayer, but reciting it alone doesn’t get us past the ABCs of prayer.
On my computer word processing program I have several templates. These templates are preexisting documents that are already preformatted. For instance, I have a resume template, so it’s a document preformatted with a place for my name, a place for my employment history, my academic history, my references, and so forth. When you use a template, you enter in your own personal information in the various fields that are preformatted in the template. That’s kind of like what the Lord’s Prayer is like, a prayer template. It shows us how we should approach God, what kinds of things should characterize our communication with God. If I was looking for a job and gave an employer the resume template without any of my personal information, I’d never get the job. If all we do is recite the Lord’s Prayer without filling in the outline with our own unique information, I haven’t really begun to use the Lord’s Prayer the way Jesus intended. In the previous verses of this chapter of Matthew, Jesus told his followers what Prayer was not.
There Jesus tells us that PRAYER IS NOT A SHOW.
In vs. 5-6 Jesus warns us against praying like religious hypocrites who pray in order to be heard by other people. Unfortunately preachers do this all the time, as they rehearse their main points from their sermon during the closing prayer. I face this temptation whenever I’m asked to pray publicly, like when I was asked to pray for public officials at the Inland Valley National Day of Prayer breakfast back in May. There were hundreds of people there, a photographer from the LA Times, and so forth. It was really quite tempting to pray for the people, rather than addressing God from my heart. There’s nothing wrong with praying out loud, but we need to constantly guard against praying for show. Prayer is not a show, it’s authentic communication with God.
PRAYER IS ALSO NOT A TECHNIQUE. Many, many of the teachings about prayer in our culture—and even in the church—present prayer as a technique for getting what you want from God. We hear promises like, “If you just pray this prayer for thirty days, you’ll experience God’s blessing and get what you want in life!” We’re sometimes led to think that it’s the right words or the right combination of words that causes spiritual breakthrough in our lives. Jesus warned in vv. 7-8 against praying like pagans who babble their prayers, thinking that they’ll be heard for their many words. The Greeks and Romans of Jesus’ day believed that the key to getting what you want from God was using just the right combination of words, and in so doing, they’d reduced prayer to a technique. The Lord’s Prayer is neither a show or a technique, but it’s a model—a template—for authentic communication with God.
2. INVITATIONS TO PRAYER
Now that brings us to the three invitations we find in the Lord’s Prayer. As I mentioned earlier, Jesus taught his followers to pray this prayer on two different occasions, and I’d like to talk for a few minutes about the other occasion Jesus taught about this prayer. In Matthew we find this prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, but in Luke’s gospel we find Jesus instructing his closest followers about this prayer during a private conversation. You don’t have to turn there, but let me read Luke 11:1-2.
Luke gives us more details about Jesus’ prayer life than any other biography of Jesus we have in the Bible. And here in chapter 11 we find that it’s as Jesus himself is praying that his followers see something different. Somehow Jesus’ prayer life is characterized by a level of intimacy and a richness that was different. So Jesus’ friends ask him to teach them to pray. Apparently John the Baptist’s followers had a set way of praying, and we know that the Jewish people of this time had a set prayer called The Eighteen Benedictions that they often prayed together. By asking Jesus to give them a distinctive way of praying together, Jesus’ followers are realizing that they’re a unique community, that they’re bound together in a special way. It’s in response to this request that Jesus gives his followers what we know of as The Lord’s Prayer. So this is the first invitation.
IN THE LORD’S PRAYER JESUS INVITES US TO SHARE IN HIS OWN PRAYER LIFE.
It’s sometimes pointed out that Jesus never prayed the Lord’s Prayer. We know that because we know that it would be inappropriate for Jesus to pray, “Forgive us our sins” because according to the Bible he never sinned. However, I do think Jesus did follow the same basic pattern of prayer we see outlined in the Lord’s Prayer. In fact, one study I read this week found several parallels between the Lord’s Prayer and Jesus’ extended prayer in the 17th chapter of John’s gospel. So although Jesus never had to ask for forgiveness, it’s important to remember that the prayer Jesus gives us comes out of his own life of prayer. It’s only because Jesus dared to address God as his father that we can address God as our Father. It’s only because of Jesus’ message about God’s kingdom that we can seek God for his kingdom will in our lives. It’s only because Jesus was obedient to the Father for his needs that we can seek God for his provisions in our lives when we pray, “Give us this day, our daily bread.” It’s only because of Jesus’ death and resurrection that we can find forgiveness of sin.
Jesus is like the son of a famous president who we would never have access to on our own. Without knowing the son personally, we’d have to write letters to the president that would probably never get to him personally. We’d probably get a form letter back written by some lower staffer, if we got any response at all. But because we know the president’s son, he shares his own relationship with his father with us, he shares his own access, his own intimacy, his own ability to go straight to his father with a request. When Jesus gave us the Lord’s Prayer, he was inviting us to share in his own prayer life.
The Lord’s prayer begins by approaching God as “Our father in heaven” we see in Matthew 6:9. Now Jesus probably originally taught this prayer in Aramaic, and when Matthew and Luke wrote their biographies of Jesus, they translated the Lord’s Prayer into Greek. That of course has been translated for us into English in our English Bibles. Aramaic was the primary spoken language of the Jewish people of Jesus’ day, and Greek was the written language. If Jesus originally gave this prayer in Aramaic, then the word for “Father” Jesus would’ve used would’ve been the Aramaic term abba. Now this has nothing to do with the 70s disco band ABBA. Abba is an Aramaic term for Father. In fact, we find Jesus addressing God using the Aramaic term abba in Mark 14:36, and we find evidence of this being a common term for how Christians addressed God in prayer in Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6.
Now the term “Abba” was a familiar term of endearment that a child would use to address his father in the context of a family. It’s not quite the equivalent of the word “daddy,” but closer perhaps to “dad” or “dearest father.” A first century Jewish person would’ve never dreamed of approaching God in this way. To call God abba would’ve seemed too irreverent and familiar. Yet this is the way Jesus invites us to approach God.
We also sometimes have difficulty approaching God in this way, but for very different reasons. When we think of God as our dad, we immediately think of our own fathers. I think of my biological father who abandoned my mom and me when I was about three years old. I think about not hearing from him from the time I was three until I turned 14 years old. I think about the fact that he came back into my life when I was 14 years old, made all kinds of promises to me, introduced me to cocaine, and then disappeared again. I haven’t heard from him since. It’s not easy approaching God as my father with that kind of baggage. I think of my adoptive father, who adopted me when I was about 10 years old after my mom remarried. I think about the fact that he had a short fuse, and often flew off the handle. I think about the fact that we wouldn’t talk to each other for weeks on end, and it seemed to suit him just fine. I think about the fact that he viewed his role as a father in my life as meeting my physical needs, but nothing much beyond that. It’s not easy approaching God as my dad with that kind of baggage as well. We have a real tendency to project our experiences with our own father onto God, to shape God in the image of our own father.
Next week’s play Father’s Anonymous really focuses in on this aspect of fathering, how we tend to project these things onto God without realizing it. In fact, one scene in the play shows a father trying to help his son pray, and his son says he’s having trouble praying because he can’t see God. So his dad says, “Just picture someone me when you pray.” The boy asks his dad, “Does that mean God just grunts and nods when I try to talk to him?” Well you can see where that line of reasoning goes. The play deals with all the different stages in fathering, from a new dad to a father struggling as his 30 year old son wants to move back home. At the end of the play I’ll be sharing part of my own story and then giving people an invitation to come to know God as their heavenly father, not a pale reflection of their imperfect earthly fathers, but a father who is always faithful, who loves us completely, who always listens. I want to encourage you to come and be a part of Father’s Anonymous on Friday and next Sunday. It’s going to be a great presentation and a great outreach opportunity to bring unchurched friends and neighbors to.
We’re invited by Jesus to approach God as a father unlike any father we’ve every known. You see the reason why we know if our own fathers were inadequate is because somewhere, deep inside of us, we know that there’s a standard for being a good father. We know dads aren’t supposed to abuse or neglect their kids, refuse to pay child support, or abandon us. We know that because we know that a real dad wouldn’t do that. We know that because we have a hunger to know a father whose character is far beyond the imperfections of our earthly fathers, because we have a need to know God as our Father. We don’t come to know God as our Father just by observation or religious experience. God is not our Father merely because God created us. God becomes our Father through Jesus Christ, God’s Son. That’s how we come to know God as our Father, because of what Jesus Christ accomplishes for us. This is why it’s essential for us to experience what the Bible calls a “new birth” in order to come into the family to know God as our Father.
We become adopted into God’s family through Jesus Christ’s work on the cross on our behalf. One must first be a follower of Jesus in order to pray this prayer as Jesus intended it to be prayed, and without trusting in Jesus as Savior and Lord, this prayer is nothing but empty words. When we come to know God as Father, we come to that knowledge in a sense of community. Notice the prayer doesn’t go, “My father in heaven” but “Our father.” You’ll look in vain for the pronouns “me” and “my” in this prayer; instead you’ll find “we,” “us,” and “our.” We pray this prayer as part of a community, not simply the human race, but as part of the Christian community, who have together come to know God as our Father through Jesus Christ, God’s unique Son. When we pray this prayer we affirm our place in Jesus’ church, that we’re distinctively Christian, and that we can only love, serve, and obey God as part of the Christian community. Whether we pray this prayer alone or with other, we pray this prayer as part of a community.
But notice the phrase “our Father” is balanced by the phrase “in heaven.” God is not a passive sugar daddy, who simply gives us whatever we want when we want it. God is uniquely different from any father we’ve ever experienced because he’s the creator of the universe, the sustainer of the galaxies. God isn’t just an exaggerated projection of our own need for a father figure, but he’s the awesome God of the galaxies. The theological term for this is God’s “transcendence,” the fact that God is beyond creation, that he’s far more awesome and incredible than we could ever begin to imagine. So this is an odd combination of terms, putting together a term of intimate endearment like Father with a transcendent phrase like “in heaven.”
Here we find the second invitation: IN THE LORD’S PRYAER, JESUS INVITES US TO APPROACH GOD WITH REVERENT FAMILIARITY.
Far too often we get out of balance with this, either approaching God reverently but without familiarity or with familiarity but without reverence. When we approach God reverently without familiarity, we approach God as the creator and judge of the universe. We’re careful to use just the right words, for fear we’ll say something about God that’s unworthy. We tend to approach with a high level of formality, perhaps using King James Version language like “thy” and “thou.” We approach with fear and with our faces downcast because of our failures, and we don’t dare ask God for anything because we figure God can’t be bothered by our petty problems. Perhaps we’ll ask God for help on really big things, like cancer or divorce, but not for daily problems like an unfair boss, a habit we’re trying to break or a relationship we’re trying to restore. We approach God reverently, but not with familiarity. That’s not how Jesus invites us to approach God.
Other times we’re tempted to approach God with familiarity but without reverence. We rush into God’s presence with our list of things we want, like a prodigal child who only calls her mom and dad when she’s in jail and needs bail money. We tend to bring God down to our own level, calling him “the big guy” or “the man upstairs,” blinding ourselves to his awesome greatness and incredible power. We go through our list of wants—like a child reciting his Christmas list to Santa—and then we’re on our way, without another thought about God. Jesus doesn’t want us to approach God that way either.
Jesus invites us to approach God as our Father in heaven, with reverent familiarity, familiarity that dares to approach the majestic and awesome creator of the galaxies as our father because of what Jesus has done for us.
That brings us to the last part of Matthew 6:9, which is really the first request in the Lord’s Prayer: "Hallowed be your name."
Did you hear the one about the little boy who recited the Lord’s Prayer, saying, “Our Father who art in heaven, how’d you know my name?” We don’t use that word “hallowed” very often unless it’s with the word “Halloween.” The word “hallow” means “to make something holy” or “to treat something as holy.” The word “Halloween” simply means “holy evening.” Now this prayer doesn’t mean that God is somehow lacking in holiness, so we’re praying, “God, I hope you can get holy enough real soon.” It’s a prayer for God’s holiness to be manifested and vindicated, for people to treat God with the holiness that already belongs to him. This is the same idea that comes out in the doxology of the prayer, “For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” These things belong to God, but our world doesn’t treat God in this way. And it’s God’s name we’re asking to be treated as holy. In the Bible, a person’s name is a reflection of that person’s character. So names aren’t just arbitrary words, but they are reflections of who the person is. God’s name is a reflection of his character, his nature. So in asking God’s name to be treated as holy, we’re to ask God’s reputation to be honored. So here’s the third invitation.
IN THE LORD’S PRAYER, JESUS INVITES US TO PARTICIPATE IN HONORING HIS NAME.
The holy, awesome creator of the universe is not treated, as he deserves in our world today. Some people deny that he even exists, while others hold to ideas about God that entirely unworthy of him. Some people think God is cruel, others that he’s petty. God’s reputation has been slandered by his own creation, and rather than simply snuffing out creation, God invites us to participate in vindicating his reputation. This invitation is really an invitation to worship God, to seek the honor of God’s holiness first in our own lives. When we come together as a congregation to sing praises to God, to lift up our adoration and love to God as we sing, we’re seeking the honor of God’s name. As we offer up sacrifices, be it our time, our ministry, or our financial giving, we’re honoring God’s name. Our corporate worship is a part of participating in honoring God’s reputation. But we’re called to live this way throughout the week as well, as we express our love and adoration to God in worship while we drive on the freeway, wait for a client or drop our kids off at school.
Do you want a model for how to share in Jesus’ prayer life, how to approach God with intimate familiarity, and how to participate in honoring God’s name? If so, then you want to learn the Lord’s Prayer, not just to recite the words, but to use it as a model for your own life of prayer. This is the invitation Jesus gives us when he teaches us to pray, not to just say prayers, but to enter into a deepening, rich life of authentic communication with God. Now again, just knowing these things about the Lord’s Prayer really don’t help our prayer lives much. What counts is actually trying these things in our own relationship with God. We’ve given a new format to our weekly growth guide, and now you’ll find various spiritual experiments you can try throughout the week to actually begin applying the message in your life. I want to encourage you to try some of those spiritual experiments this week, to actually begin deepening in your life of prayer.
