Our lives are still numb from the events of this last week. We’ve experienced a national tragedy of unparalleled proportions. Our hearts are broken for the innocent lives that have been lost, business people and commuters, pilots and flight attendants, firefighters and police officers. We’re struggling to understand how people could be so hateful as to plan such an heartless act of evil against so many innocent people. We’re angry and vengeful, wanting to see the people who’ve done this suffer for what they’ve done.
But we’re also hopeful, believing our nation will recover, that this hateful act of war won’t undermine our nation’s resolve and our people’s resiliency.
I’d like to make a few suggestions for how you and your family can honor Jesus as you walk through this time of pain and grief. I’ve listed these suggestions on your Growth Guide in your bulletin, as well as posting it on our church web site.
First, PRAY. We gathered spontaneously here at the church Tuesday night to humble ourselves and seek the face of God. We’ve prayed together as staff, as ministry leaders, as pastors. We need to intercede for President Bush and his advisors, we need to pray for our intelligence community, our military, the emergency service personnel who are working even as we speak, for the survivors and family members of victims. There will be a prayer vigil here tonight at 7:00 PM to remember those who died. It will start at the fire station and then we will proceed down Euclid to 16th street. The more we pray together about this the better.
We also need to TALK about what we’re experiencing. We don’t deal with grief of this magnitude and traumatic stress by bottling it up, but we need to express it.
We need to talk about our anger and frustration, our pain and grief, our hope and resolve. We need to talk about it with our spouse and our friends, with our coworkers and our neighbors. Perhaps most of all, we need to talk with our kids, listening to their fears and anger, assuring them as best we can.
Third, we need to SHARE our faith in Jesus with those around us. This is no time for timidity or fear because we have hope to share. We need to proceed with gentleness and love, but we need to explain how our faith in Jesus is helping us get through this.
We need to explain how according to the Bible every human being will give an account before God of their actions.
Fourth, we need to RESTRAIN ourselves and encourage those around us to restrain themselves. We’re angry because we’ve been victims of a terrible evil. But since we can’t see the object of our anger, we’ll be tempted to let our anger spill out onto other people.
Even at my son’s elementary school on Tuesday afternoon there were two altercations with people because of their ethnic origin and religious views. We need to realize that if this is the work of Muslim extremists, that this does not reflect the vast, vast majority of Muslims or people of Arabic descent. To lump all Muslims into the category of terrorists is the same thing people do with us as Christians when they claim we’re all cruel and bloodthirsty because of what Christians did in the name of Jesus during the crusades of the middle ages. We can’t let our anger spill over onto people in our communities just because we know they’re Muslim or because they appear to be of middle eastern descent. History will judge our nation as to whether we restrained our anger, and I’d hate to think our grandchildren would look back on how we as a nation treated others with regret.
The Bible tells us that followers of Jesus must resist the temptation to lash out. The Bible tells us to leave room for God’s wrath. It’s hard to do in the heat of our grief and outrage, but these teachings of the Bible are given for times just like these.
Its at times like that that we demonstrate whether we really believe what the Bible says or whether we’re simply being religious. Now according to the Bible, God’s wrath against evil is sometimes executed by the government. The Bible calls government officials “God’s servant” who exist as “agents of God’s wrath” in Romans 13:4. So as our government investigates what’s happened and takes appropriate action based on their intelligence information, we need to support our government in those actions.
But as individual people who claim to follow Jesus, we need to leave room for God’s wrath to come both imperfectly through our government’s response, and ultimately through God. We need to encourage those around us to restrain themselves from letting their anger spill out onto others, especially our children. We might even find ourselves growing angry because of a longer wait at the airport or because some of the classes had to be canceled today in children’s ministry, and we need to work at restraining that anger rather than letting it spill out on those around us.
Finally, we need to PERSEVERE as people.
We must press forward, even in the midst of our outrage and brokenness, believing that maintaining a sense of routine and normalcy will help us and our families through this time. We need to demonstrate to the world that our national life will not come grinding to a halt, but that we can endure the toughest of circumstances. As followers of Jesus we persevere, knowing that the Bible is true when it promises ultimate vindication on the other side of perseverance.
But we must pray, talk about it, share our faith, restrain ourselves, and persevere if we are to get through this unprecedented time of suffering together.
Now I struggled a lot this week about what to say this morning. Do I continue our series through the Lord’s Prayer, do I stop our series and just talk about what’s happened? And as I struggled with that question, I thought about another sermon series preached on the Lord’s Prayer over 50 years ago.
You see, in Germany during World War 2 there was a professor of theology at the University of Heidelberg named Helmut Thielicke. Because of Professor Thielicke’s outspoken criticism of Hitler, he was dismissed from his post and was confined to the city of Stuttgart in Germany under constant Nazi surveillance. Professor Thielicke became the pastor of a church in Stuttgart. Professor Thielicke began preaching a sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer during the last days of World War 2. His preaching was frequently interrupted by air raid sirens and allied bombing. Three weeks into the sermon series, the church they met in for worship was destroyed in an air raid. That Sunday they met in the bombed out rubble next to what had once been their place of worship, and Pastor Thielicke said these words:
“Isn’t there a comfort, a peculiar message that in fact [I can bring], after all the bombs that have swept through our wounded city?…[But I don’t believe] We don’t need to interrupt and search the Bible for texts appropriate to this catastrophe. The words of the Lord’s Prayer are immediate to every situation of life…It can be spoken by everybody in every situation, without exception, and we can see this with a special clarity in this hour as we gather together, a little remnant of our congregation, in the ruins of our church…Is God any less the Father than he was before? Do the overwhelming events which have just happened have no place within the Message?…So we continue: The Lord’s Prayer encompasses the whole world, and therefore it includes us too in this terrible exceptional situation of life in which we are all involved” ("Our Heavenly Father" pp. 55-56).
I found those words to be prophetic as I reread them again this week, and God used those words to lead me once again to this prayer Jesus taught us to pray.
Perhaps providentially today we come to that part of the Lord’s Prayer where we bring our needs to God.
We come to that phrase, “Give us this today our daily bread” (Matt 6:11).
In that prayer we’re asking for our daily allotment of food, and by implication, our daily allotment of all the resources we need in life. When we pray for our daily bread, we’re asking God to meet all our basic needs. We’re not just asking for food and water, but we’re seeking God to meet whatever we need at that moment. All of our needs, trivial and enormous, are brought before our Father in heaven.
So praying for our daily bread is asking God to meet our needs.
There’s an overwhelming array of needs facing us today in the wake of this week’s events. We need comfort, as tens of thousands of Americans grieve the loss of a family member or friend. Children have been left orphans, spouses widowed, parents have lost children.
The grief is almost surreal, too horrible to imagine, as tens of thousands of people numbly allow the reality to sink in. We need comfort. We need answers, wondering how this could happen to us. We need resolution, as we want someone to answer for what we’ve experienced. We need economic health as our economy was already showing signs of slowing. We wonder about our jobs, about our business surviving, about supplying for the needs of our children. And we still face all the ordinary needs that confront us in the daily details of life. The need for a deal to close, for a relationship to be reconciled, the need for our car to be fixed, the need for a medical test to be run. We face the same needs that confronted us last Monday, and as trivial as they seem in light of the events of Tuesday, these mundane, ordinary needs still weigh on us.
By instructing us to pray for our daily bread, Jesus invites us to bring our needs before our Father. He invites us to lay our needs at the feet of our God, to bring the big ones and the little ones, the crushing ones and the irritating ones. Professor Thielicke says, “God be thanked that we can talk to him the way we feel and come to him just as we are. We can cast all our cares upon him—all of them, not just the great and ideal concerns but also the small and foolish ones” ("Our Heavenly Father" p. 88).
In our remaining time together I want to give you four reasons to bring all your needs to your Father today.
We begin with the words of Jesus in Luke 12:29-31. Jesus is contrasting the way our world operates with how he wants his followers to conduct their lives.
Our world is characterized by an obsession to chase after their needs. People in our world devote their entire lives to making money, saving money, spending money, building houses, making investments, buying toys and so forth. They yearn for security, yet the more money they make and the more possessions they accumulate, the more vulnerable they become.
We’re reminded here that our Father knows what we need. He’s not ignorant of our desperate needs, he’s not on vacation or distracted with what’s happening in New York and Washington, D. C. to notice our needs here today. He knows what we need, even before we ask him to meet our needs.
This is the first reason. When we bring our needs to God in prayer, WE ADMIT THAT WE ARE NOT SELF-SUFFICIENT.
We want to believe we’re self-sufficient, autonomous and self-reliant people who have life by the throat. We meticulously build around us an illusion of security, lulling us into the delusion our lives are untouchable. We plan months and even years in advance, believing that we are the captains of our own fate, the masters of our own destiny. We enjoy our life of illusion because it makes us feel safe and secure.
Yet one action can make our house of cards come crashing to the ground. That’s what happened to us Tuesday morning, as the safety and security we believed we had was exposed to be no more real than the wizard in the Wizard of Oz. We realized how vulnerable and needy we really are.
Prayer continually reminds us of that. When we bring our needs to God in prayer we’re admitting that we can’t handle things all by ourselves. Prayer becomes a way of breaking through our denial and giving us a reality check, as we admit before an infinite God that we can’t take care of ourselves. We bring our needs to our Father because we can’t meet them in our own strength. This is the first reason to bring our needs before God.
Now through the years, generations of Christians have learned how to pray by reading the Bible’s book of Psalms. Whereas the rest of the Bible gives us God inspired communication to us from God, in the Psalms we find God inspired prayers and songs addressed from people to God. We experience the depths of real prayer in the Psalms.
Let me quote to you Psalm 55:1-2: "Listen to my prayer, O God, do not ignore my plea; hear me and answer me. My thoughts trouble me and I am distraught" (NIV).
The psalmist cries out to God in distress, pleading with God to respond to his request. He asks God not to ignore his plea, not because there’s any possibility that God might ignore it, but because he feels desperation. The psalmist’s heart is deeply restless in light of the terrible needs he’s experiencing. I can well imagine our president praying these very words as he tries to figure out how to best respond.
From this inspired prayer we find another reason to bring our needs to God. When we bring our needs to God in prayer, WE OPEN OUR HEARTS TO GOD.
Our tendency is to build walls between what we’re feeling and God. We figure God would be horrified to know what we’re thinking, the thoughts of vengeance and anger. When we feel desperate we fear our impure thoughts would shock God, driving God further away from us in our time of need. So we build walls, pretending to do the right thing, when inside we’re seething with resentment, bitterness, even hatred.
Prayer opens all of that up to God, the anger and the rage, the doubts and the fears.
When we truly pray about our needs, it’s like a dam crumbling, with our torrid emotions and thoughts flooding into the presence of God. We can’t censor the flood, because it just gushes, beyond our control or ability to control. Suddenly we’re exposed, the real me and the real you, with all of our anger and hatred, with our thoughts of vengeance and doubts.
That’s exactly where God wants us, to be who we really are before him. Not that God will leave us in the same condition as when we came to him, but we can only come to God as we truly are.
Professor Thielicke says, “We really do not need to pretend to be anything but what we are [when we pray]. We do not need to put on a show of being above the little and the big things in our life. God wouldn’t believe us anyhow” ("Our Heavenly Father" p. 84).
God’s not shocked or horrified by our hearts, but he gently cleanses and molds our hearts as we stand with our hearts gaping open in the presence of our Father.
This is why some of the Psalms shock us with their cries for blood and vengeance, because God wants us to open our hearts to him in prayer. When we bring our needs to God in prayer, that’s what we do.
Now turn to Philippians 4:6-7. We’ve had plenty to be anxious about this last week. Our hearts skipped a beat as we wondered about friends and families who were flying on Tuesday, as we thought about people we know in New York, Washington, D. C., and Pennsylvania. I worried about my friend who’s on a missions trip in Mexico and my in-laws who are in Canada. We were afraid to drop our kids off in school for fear of another attack here in the LA area. I worried about my cousin who’s a federal agent for the department of customs and my nephew who’s in the Navy. Perhaps some of you have friends or family who are still missing or who are helping with the rescue work.
Paul tells us that anxiety isn’t the answer when we face desperate needs. Anxiety only paralyzes us in fear, as we think about all the “what ifs” that might happen. Those “what ifs” can drive a person absolutely crazy.
So instead of tormenting ourselves with anxious thoughts, Paul tells us to pray, to bring our needs to God in prayer. Not just in terrible tragedies like we’re experiencing right now, but “in everything” we’re invited to come with our requests. To pray for an open parking place, to pray for help on a test, to pray for traffic to be light, and so forth.
We’re promised that if we bring our needs to God in prayer, that God’s peace will guard our hearts and minds. Like an armed sentry posted at the edges of our thoughts and emotions, God’s peace protects us from obsessing about the “what ifs” and fills us with peace. Not the kind of peace that can only exist on a snow capped mountain or a beach at sunset, but the kind of peace that exists even in the midst of terrorist attacks. This peace of God goes beyond what we can see or think, it transcends our understanding, because it goes to the very core of our being. Even the midst of horrible suffering and uncertainty, it’s the kind of peace that guards our hearts. Perhaps it’s the kind of peace helping the urban search and rescue personnel see horrible carnage and yet persevere in their efforts, refusing to give up.
By now you can see what the third reason is. When we bring our needs to God in prayer, WE EXPERIENCE GOD’S PEACE.
Recurrent anxiety is usually a symptom that we’re not bringing our needs to God in prayer. It’s an indicator, like a warning light on a car, that we’re holding on, that we’re trying to guard our own hearts. Anxious thoughts should trigger us to automatically bring our needs to God in prayer, to seek God’s intervention in our needs, no matter how big or how small they may seem.
In times like these, in the face of desperate needs and so many uncertainties, this is a process.
We feel anxious, so we bring our needs to God in prayer and we experience peace for a little while. But a few hours later we’re filled with anxious thoughts again, so we come to God in prayer again. It’s a process, a process of bringing our needs to our Father, again and again, as we learn what it means to let his peace guard our hearts.
Let’s look at one more passage, Matthew 7:7-11. Here Jesus invites us to persevere in our prayers. It could be translated, “Keep on asking and it will be given to you, keep on seeking and you will find, keep on knocking and the door will be opened to you.” God responds to those who persevere, those who view prayer as a relationship with God more than a Christmas list to be sent off to Santa.
But Jesus also speaks about how the Father views our requests. He assumes that most of us at least want to be good parents, and which of us as fathers would give our son something dangerous or evil when asked for something good? No father worth the name father would give his son a rock when his son is hungry and asks for some food. No father worth the name father would drop a deadly rattler into his son’s hand when his son asks for a fish to eat. God gives good gifts to his children, and he gives these good gifts in response to our prayers. Often we don’t have because we haven’t asked yet, and Jesus wants to encourage us to ask.
But what this text doesn’t deal with is what happens when we as children ask for a stone or a snake. I think the converse is true as well, that even when we ask for things that are bad for us, God still gives good gifts to his children. How many of us as parents have had our kids ask us for things we know aren’t good for them? We don’t buckle under, but we refuse to give a gift that we know will be destructive to our kids, even when they throw a tantrum and refuse to talk to us. Our answer is, “I love you too much to give you what you’re asking for.” God is like that too, only for us its often hard to distinguish a good gift from a bad gift.
So here is the last reason to bring our needs to God.
When we bring our needs to God in prayer, WE LOOK FOR GOD TO MEET OUR NEEDS IN A VARIETY OF WAYS.
God meets our needs all kinds of different ways, and often the way he meets the need is in a way we didn’t expect. We pray for God to heal us of a disease, and then the doctor prescribes a treatment that cures the disease. Did God answer that prayer? Absolutely. We ask God to meet our financial needs, and he gives us an opportunity to change jobs. We ask God for a spouse, and instead he gives us the grace to live content as a single person.
You see, often we don’t know what the real need is.
Professor Thielicke warns us that we often pray for bon bons not realizing that we’re naked and desperate. Often what we pray for isn’t the deeper need, but as we bring what we think we need to God, God addresses himself to our deeper need. So when we bring our needs to God, we come looking for unexpected ways God is going to meet our needs.
That’s what we pray when we pray, “Give us today our daily bread.” We bring our needs to God in prayer, and as we do we admit that we’re not self-sufficient, we open our hearts to God, we experience God’s peace, and we look for God to meet our needs in unexpected ways. Give us today our daily bread.
Let me once again quote Professor Thielicke.
“Here we are gathered in a ruin [of our church] and here I am standing before you in my old army boots because I no longer possess proper clothes…But we do not say all this in any mood of skepticism or negative resignation. On the contrary, all these experience have a place in the message and in the sermon only because they make us turn our eyes…to that reality against which the gates of hell will not prevail…And if we are not deceived, our generation of death will have instilled in it by God a keener sense of what belongs to the transitory side of life and what has to do with God’s eternity. Perhaps we are being given a new sense…that in all these things there is hidden the rock of God, which…is the very foundation of life…and which will abide until the kingdom of God has come and the kingdoms of this world will pass away” ("Our Heavenly Father" 63).
By the time Professor Thielicke finished that sermon series, Germany had surrendered, Hitler was dead, and the war was over. I’m not a prophet, but my hope and prayer is that as we continue to be taught to pray by our Master and Savior Jesus, that by the time we get to the end of this series, we will have some answers and resolution to this terrible evil we’ve experienced this week.
Sources:
Helmut Thielicke, "Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord’s Prayer" New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953.
