Sermon Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.
Matthew 6: The Lord’s Prayer
So we’re going to look, don’t, don’t, don’t open your Bibles yet. We’re going to have a quiz. Okay, it’s not hard. I would never do anything to embarrass you. So I’m going to be here. Can you recite the Lord’s Prayer? So how many of you parents have taught your children the Lord’s Prayer, and they can recite it? So I read about this dad who was training his daughter to say the Lord’s Prayer and they’d go over it every night and he’d say a line and she’d say the line, he’d say the next line, she’d say it. And then eventually she got courageous enough like Greg was to recite it before the whole family. And when she got at the end, she said, “Deliver us from email.” And I’m like, that’s the right way to pray the Lord’s Prayer. Deliver us from email. Amen.
Matthew chapter 6, we’re going to look at the Lord’s Prayer. We’re studying prayer in the life groups and hopefully you will attend a life group. If you’re not signed up, you can do that. Also, you may not be able to commit to the life group schedule, but that doesn’t mean that when you’re free, you can’t come. So talk about the locations and times of the different groups and even if you can’t commit you can drop in now and then for the Word and prayer. So the theme right now is prayer. We’re going through the book A Praying Life. So I wanted to talk briefly about prayer again today. We read through Matthew 6 last week. We looked at 6 through 18. I want to look more closely at the Lord’s Prayer in verse 9. Jesus says, “In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” Now some of your versions will have this verse also, some will not. “For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.” I was reading the New King James Version.
God Comes First
So what I want to talk about today is the spirit, if you will, the attitude that permeates this prayer. And we can see it when we look at the very structure of the prayer. If you notice, as I pointed out before when I’ve taught on the Lord’s Prayer some time ago, there are actually six petitions and there’s two groups. The first three are “hallowed be Your name,” “Your kingdom,” “Your will.” The next group are bread, our debts, our need, deliver us. So the first group focuses on God, the second group focuses on ourselves. And so there’s this two-fold pattern. First God’s glory, then man’s need, right? And this structure here, some commentators point out the fact that it mirrors actually the Ten Commandments, in that when you look at the Ten Commandments, the first table of the commandments is about God and our duties to God, the second table is our duties to one another. So we see the same thing. So here in the prayer, the first thing we learn about prayer is that God comes first and we come second. Amen? This is not only the proper perspective on prayer, it’s really the proper perspective on all of life. God comes first, we come second. This was fundamental to Jesus’ teaching to His disciples. Go further in this very chapter of Matthew. Toward the end, notice this. Jesus says, verse 31, “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’” Notice we, we, we, ourselves. “For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” Look at Matthew chapter 8. Jesus is teaching and some people say, well that’s the wrong passage. I wrote down the wrong passage. Well I’ll tell you the story, I know it. It might be Luke 9, anyway don’t worry about it. So Jesus is preaching and somebody shouts out, Lord, I’ll follow You. But then he says, but let me first go bury my father. Another one says, I’ll follow You, but let me first go take care of, my wife. Lord, I’ll follow You, but, and Jesus basically said, no man, when he’s put his hand to the plow, looking back—the kingdom comes first. God’s will comes first. So that’s so easy to say, isn’t it? Isn’t that easy to say? But man, that’s hard to live. That’s hard to live. I mean, our will, my will, your will really wants supremacy. It really does. That’s our fallen nature. That’s almost a good definition of the fall. We wanted to be God rather than God. We wanted to be in charge rather than God being in charge, right? Jesus teaches us here that fundamental, and I don’t mean simplistic, I mean foundational, I mean profoundly important attitude when it comes to not only prayer but really being a follower of Jesus is to recognize the supremacy of God. That He is truly first. So our priorities as a community, our priorities as individuals, our priorities as families should be aligned with this fundamental perspective that the Lord is the Lord and He’s truly God. And thus it is our calling to follow Him and submit to His will, to do His will. The real question for all of us is, are we a real disciple of Jesus Christ? You know the Lord’s Prayer is really misnamed, you know, because it’s really the prayer. The true Lord’s Prayer is in John 17, the high priestly prayer. This is the disciples’ prayer. This is the pattern for all disciples to pray and to live out in their lives. And fundamental to this prayer is this attitude of God being first in our lives. If we pray this way then we’ll not be like the hypocrites that Jesus warned about. We’ll not be like the heathen that He warned about, but we will be praying as true disciples of the Lord Jesus. And if this spirit takes hold of us, if we truly integrate this into our individual, our families and our church, we will see a radically changed individual, family and church. Because this is revolutionary. Revolutionary. You know, Jesus, as I pointed out many times, one of the things that astounded me when I first started the Bible, and it still astounds me when I read the Word. Now I’ve been reading it for forty years, is how He turns everything on its head. He just flips things over. And it’s like so much of His teaching is contrary to the human perspective, which in many ways is the selfish perspective, right? The me perspective. So here when the Lord teaches us about prayer, He says, fundamental to praying is the recognition in the very structure of this prayer, fundamental is to recognize that while we pray we are to place God first, His name, His kingdom, His will first, and then we pray for ourselves. Now I think if we were honest, when we think about how we usually pray, you know what I mean? How often when we pray, and as I pointed out last week, sometimes we only pray when we’re desperate as if prayer is the last resort. And we come to God in our need. Now we should come to God in our need, amen? And this prayer acknowledges we need God. We need forgiveness, we need guidance, we need bread, we need provision. We need Him. But that’s secondary. But so often when we pray, the first thing that comes out of our mouth is, Lord, I need this, I need this, I need this, my friend needs this, we need this, we need this, right? It’s just we fall into bad habits in prayer, and this is one of them, of not putting the Lord first. So the spirit of this prayer is the spirit of first honoring God as God.
The Spirit of Humility
By its very nature prayer is an attitude, if you will, because as Maclaren said, to pray is not to just repeat petitions. I think it was the Scottish commentator, John Brown, who said, prayer is uttered desire. I love that. Prayer is uttered desire. So our hearts are fundamental to prayer in our prayer life. You know, it’s possible to pray the Lord’s Prayer, but not really pray, you know what I mean? And some churches actually recite the Lord’s Prayer on a regular basis, a weekly basis, and it just becomes, you know, it just becomes words. Now I’m not against reciting the Lord’s Prayer corporately. I think sometimes it can be beneficial. But saying the words and imbibing the spirit of the words, you know, the meaning of the words is a different thing, right. So just to say, “Our Father,” “hallowed be Thy name,” “my kidding, bless me.” That’s not prayer. Actually, you can imbibe the spirit of this prayer, and not even say the words. That’s possible. So the spirit here, this prayer, is one of honoring God, but by putting God first, it’s secondly a spirit of humility. Write that word down somewhere, your Bible, your phone, piece of paper, humility. Now we don’t hear a lot about humility today. As I said last week, I believe we live in the selfie culture, right? We do. We live in the image culture. We live in the self-promotion culture. I was advised years ago by people in the know how to promote myself as a pastor, how to promote myself as a writer, how to promote myself as somebody on the radio, and I declined to do any of it. Because I don’t believe it’s the godly thing to do to promote oneself. Now if anybody else wants to promote me, go ahead. The Word says, let another man’s mouth praise you. Right? That’s fine. But to promote oneself is contrary to the spirit. The spirit of this prayer is one of humility. Right? And why is this so important? Now, remember, Jesus here, back in the Sermon on the Mount, go back to where we were. He opens this very sermon with what’s called the Beatitudes in chapter 5. And in verse 3, he says this, y’all there, 5:3. It says, blessed are those who have the most likes on Facebook. Doesn’t say that, okay. Blessed are those that have the largest Twitter following. No, it doesn’t say that either. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” the poor in spirit. And what’s striking about this word poor, as there’s two Greek words for poor in the Bible, and one means poor like you and I. I mean poor like you’re just getting by poor, but you have food, you have clothes, you have something over your head, but you don’t have a lot of luxuries. Matter of fact, you probably don’t have any luxuries, but you have necessities. But then there’s the word poor, which means you’re poor in the sense of you’re utterly dependent on someone else’s provision. That’s the word used here. Blessed are those that recognized that they are bankrupt before God. Blessed are those that understand they are totally, utterly dependent on God. That’s what Jesus is saying. That’s an attitude of humility, isn’t it? Right? To recognize that we bring nothing to Him, we offer Him nothing, we deserve nothing. I don’t know about you, but I find myself sometimes thinking, I deserve things. Ever feel that way? Be honest. So I see, when I’m thinking because they’re going hard, I’m like, I don’t deserve this. And the Lord’s like, yeah, you’re right. You don’t deserve this. You deserve a lot worse. You know, I was thinking earlier today, you know, it’s like, you know, I want to be like Jesus until I’m treated like Him. True, right? It’s true. Man, indeed, He got betrayed by all of His friends. He was publicly humiliated. He was physically beaten and bruised and He was ultimately executed as a criminal. I want to be like Jesus? Wow. Well I do. Sometimes and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I don’t. It’s easier. Right? Sometimes I think I deserve something from God. But what the Bible tells me is I don’t deserve. That everything I have is a gift. Everything is grace. Everything is provision. Everything is God giving me love and grace and mercy that I don’t deserve because I offended Him. I have offended Him. I continue to offend Him with my sin. But He continues to bless me in so many ways, amen? Foundational to true prayer is this attitude of humility.
Let’s just look at a couple verses. We’re going to come back to Matthew here, but go to Isaiah and I could just quote these for you, but I want you to see them in your Bible. Isaiah 57 verse 15, “For thus says the High and Lofty One who inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy: ‘I dwell in the high and holy place.’” Who does He dwell with? Does He dwell with the lofty? He says, “With him who has a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.” Isaiah 66 verse 1. [audio unclear] “Thus says the Lord: ‘Heaven is My throne, and earth is My footstool. Where is the house that you will build Me? And where is the place of My rest?’” [audio unclear] The striking contrast here when he says in verse 2, he says, “But on this one will I look: on him who is poor and of a contrite spirit, and who trembles at My word.” And isn’t that good? God is not looking for the accomplished, the intelligent, the good looking, the successful. God is looking for the humble of heart. And even though He’s exalted, although He is all-powerful, although He deserves praise and honor, God’s not proud. He has a humble heart. And we see this when God became a man in the person of Jesus. What does Jesus say? He says, come to Me, you that labor and are heavy laden, I will give you rest, for I am meek and lowly of heart. Look at James chapter 4. And James, oh, it’s such a good book. James chapter 4. He’s talking here to them about various problems in this community, one of them being prayer and the fact that their prayers were not being heard. He says in chapter 4, verse 1, “Where do wars and fights come from among you?” [audio unclear] What this community did is they flipped it. And the focus of the prayers was them and their needs, their pleasure, their desire. And he’s saying that’s why God’s not hearing you because you put yourself first. And he says verse 6, “Do you think that the Scripture says in vain, ‘The Spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously’? But He gives more grace. Therefore He says: ‘God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble.’ Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.” Note here the order where he says first submit or humble yourselves then draw near to God because that’s the only appropriate passageway into His presence, right? It’s to come with a heart that is bowed down, a heart that is humble before Him. Look at Luke 18, is that right? That we’re looking at lost Scripture, is that a good thing? Now in Luke 18, Jesus is encouraging His disciples to pray, and He gives two parables, one regarding persistence in prayer. That’s in Luke 18:1–8. But then in Luke 18:9–14, He addresses the attitude in prayer. So also, “He spoke this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and despised others: ‘Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, “God, I thank You that I am not like other men.”’” Dude, you know this guy’s got a problem. I mean right away. Wow. “‘God, I thank You that I am not like other men—extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector.’” So the dude is standing in the temple praying, looking around at other people, judging other people, judging other people, judging other people while he’s praying. Holy Lord. You talk about self-deception. This is scary. Jesus, he carries, “I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.” 13, “And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’” So notice the contrast. It’s striking. The Pharisee, Jesus says, prayed thus with himself. He thinks he’s praying, he thinks he’s talking to God, but Jesus says basically the guy’s talking to himself because God’s not listening to him. And the tax collector has more sense, more religious sensibility, more spiritual astuteness, to realize that he doesn’t even deserve to address God. And so Jesus says he’s standing afar off. “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” “And I tell you, this man,” this tax collector, the one in Jewish society that was hated, was despised, that was ridiculed, “this man went down to his house justified rather than the other.” Why? “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted.” When you read the Gospels, Jesus repeats this teaching, almost verbatim, sometimes a little bit altered, over and over and over and over. This is so important. His opening sermon, poor in spirit. And from that point on, throughout all of His teaching, He taught the foundational importance of humility before God. Humility has been said is the soil in which all the other virtues grow. It is the doorway to grace, James says, the secret password to God’s presence, because God resists the proud but He gives grace to the humble. So this humility permeates the Lord’s Prayer. When we say “Our Father,” we’re acknowledging that in His eyes we are just little children. When we say “Thy kingdom come,” we’re really saying, God, we’re willing to submit to Your reign. When we say, “Thy will be done,” we’re saying, God, You deserve our obedience. We’re resigning ourselves to Your will. When we say, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we’re recognizing our dependence on God’s provision and His providence. When we say, “Forgive us our debts,” we are acknowledging our sinfulness before Him. Amen? When we say lead us not into temptation, we’re acknowledging our frailty and our vulnerability to seduction of various forms. This is humility. This prayer breathes humility. The thing that scares me about pride, which is the opposite of humility, is this. By its very nature pride is a blinding vice. Now some vices people have which are obvious even to the person that has them. I’ve had people say, you know, I got a problem with anger, I got a problem with lust, I got a problem with covetousness, I got a problem, you know, and they can see it. But you don’t hear people say, I have a problem with pride. Why? Because it’s intrinsic to the very definition of what pride is, you see. Because by self-exaltation, it blinds oneself to one’s faults, including pride. So it’s very difficult, and I’ve asked myself many times, you know, am I proud? I’ve asked God, am I proud? And it’s very difficult to see one’s own tendency to pride. And just as a footnote, if you really want to know, if you have a problem with it, the best thing to do is to ask people that are close to you. But don’t ask, unless you first promise that you will not retaliate when they tell you the truth. I’m serious. I’m deadly serious. But as the Word of God says, I think it was David in one of the Psalms he wrote where he says, “In Thy light,” talking to God, “in Thy light we shall see light.” If you go to the Lord and you’re honest and say, God, You know, search my heart, try my heart, see if there’s any wicked way in me, and show me. Maybe I’m prideful about some accomplishment, or I think I’m better than other people in some way, or maybe I think I’m better than my wife, or I think I’m better than… Open yourself to God’s instruction as you go to Him in prayer. So when we look through the Lord’s Prayer, all of these petitions really are different manifestations of this attitude of humility. Childlikeness, submission, resignation, dependency, confession, etc. They’re all different aspects of the spirit of humility. And it’s this spirit of humility which is the genuine spirit of prayer. It is this heart attitude which Jesus would have us adopt if we would pray as He taught His disciples to pray.
A House of Prayer
So let me conclude and say this in summary. As we study prayer in the life groups, and as I said, maybe you can’t attend because of your schedule. Get a copy of the book anywhere you read it. Drop in when you can. Whether you’re in the life group or not, we should be a praying people, amen? It’s just one of the things the church ought to be doing. And Jesus, you know, when you read the Gospel, I don’t know if you read the Gospel much, but you should read the Gospel a lot. Okay. I mean, it’s like Jesus, you know, He’s important. It’s about Jesus. One of the striking things about Jesus to me is how self-controlled He is. I mean, people were really rude to Him. Doesn’t say that in the Bible. Doesn’t say they were rude. But they were mean to Him, right? They were disrespectful. They were hostile. I mean, He was just treated terribly by people. And the amazing thing is how Jesus kept this stuff together, right? I mean, He did. But there’s a couple times when you see Him get angry. Just a couple. One is when His disciples forbade children to come to Him. That made Him mad. And Mark, the word used, I think the King James might say He was displeased. That’s putting it mildly. Because the original means He was mad. He was really mad about it. Well, children, Jesus always talks about the kingdom being like children. If you want to be in the kingdom, what are you going to do? Be like a child. In other words, He’s advocating humility again. But the other area where you see Jesus get intense is when He’s in the temple and He goes in and they’re selling and they’re merchandising, they’re profiting off the things of God, if you will. And we know on two different occasions, He threw out the money changers and the sellers. And He said, “My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.” My house is to be a house of prayer. My house, my heart should be a house of prayer, amen? Our community, this house should be a house of prayer, amen? We ought to be a praying people. One final quote because I just love the quote. You ready? Prayer involves struggle. I mean, like, not like just an in-the-moment kind of throw up a prayer kind of prayer. I mean, real prayer, disciplined prayer. I’ve been reading about prayer, not just in the book, but in other books, and it’s amazing. I’m rambling now. Here we go. It’s amazing that the people that are well known in church history, they all have a couple things in common. You know what one of them is? They really prayed. I mean you’re talking guys praying three or four hours a day, every day. I mean, when’s the last time you spent an hour in private prayer? Seriously. That’s not rhetorical. It can be done. David said in the Psalm, he says I wait for You like the watchman. And I don’t think that’s poetic license. I think David meant exactly what he said. That he’s, I don’t know how long that is. It’s probably at least eight hours, right? That it’s dark. You know, eight, depending where you are, time of year. But eight to ten hours probably when it’s dark. So he’s saying that he was seeking God that whole time. Man, that’s a man after God’s own heart, amen. So prayer is like so important and it’s obvious that people who pray, you see God in their life, communities that pray, see revival. Prayer is blessed, prayer is a good thing. So why not more prayer? As Ferguson says, prayer is a struggle. It’s a struggle. And let’s all just admit that, okay? It’s a struggle. But he says the struggle is not the struggle of persuading God. Rather, it’s the struggle involved in being subdued by God. Oh, give it up for that, amen? Coming out of the dark and secret places in which we have been hiding the truth about ourselves and laying the whole of our lives before Him. Yeah, that’s it. True prayer, true humility, true surrender, true honesty in the presence of God. Listen, when we pray, we don’t talk to God, we talk with God. Let’s stand together. Lord, we thank You that You’ve taught us how to pray. I thank You, Lord, that You are giving us as a community a spirit of prayer. I thank You, Lord, that You are so kind and generous, condescending, just merciful toward Your people. We do acknowledge, Lord, like that tax collector, that we are not worthy. We are not worthy. But we thank You, Lord, that You’ve given us Your robes of righteousness. That because of Your death on the cross, because of Your payment for our sins, because of Your resurrection from the dead, Your victory over evil, that You have removed the sentence that was against us, that You have removed condemnation from us, that You have removed every impediment on Your end from us having to enter into Your presence. You have removed every obstacle on Your end from us having fellowship with You. We thank You for that. We praise You for that. And all You ask from us is that we would humble ourselves before You and draw near. I pray, Lord, that You would grant us the grace to really learn to live in the place of grace, the place of humility. And Lord, we do acknowledge our utter dependence on Your Holy Spirit to be the kind of people we’re called to be. We ask for His transforming work in our hearts, our homes, and our church. We ask that He would grant us revival, Spirit-wrought, Spirit-anointed revival. We thank You, Lord, that Your way is the good way. The narrow path is the right path. Thank You, Lord, that You’ve granted us Your Word and Your Spirit to guide us into all truth. So may we walk in it in the power of Your Spirit, we pray in Jesus’ name, amen.