Matthew 6:9-15: Prayer Right Way Up — A ‘Christian Growth’ Message

Transcript

Heavenly Father, we thank you for this morning, and we thank you for the freedom, the privilege of being able to pause and to consider your word. And we ask that your word would be our rule and our guide. That your Holy Spirit would be our teacher. And that your honour would be our great concern, in Jesus’ name we pray, amen.

Well, most of you know we’re following the Sermon on the Mount. This is our 10th Sunday in the Sermon on the Mount. We’ve got 8 more to go, and I have the privilege of looking at this portion of the Sermon on the Mount which we call the Lord’s Prayer.

Now you probably know that sermons are a little bit like meals, lunch or dinner, that is, really the purpose of them is to feed your faith.

And I must have listened to thousands and thousands of sermons in the time that I’ve been a Christian, and like meals, some of them have been wonderful and some of them have been terrible, but the most significant sermon that I have ever listened to, not the best, not the worst – was a sermon given by a layman, In 1980, and he preached on the Lord’s prayer.

And he said, and this was the piece of genius, which changed my life completely, he said, and I quote: the first half, comes before the second half.

And a little light went on in my brain. And I said to myself, that’s it.

It was as if this passage became a lens to see everything. And it completely changed my life.

I don’t mean that I became great or godly.

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But I became clear as to what God thinks is important. And I wanna suggest to you that the Lord’s Prayer is in some ways the lens in order to see the world properly, so that you’ll know what’s important and what’s not important. It’s in some ways the key to the world.

It will revolutionise you if you think like the Lord’s prayer. The gift of the prayer is a piece of genius.

It’s like a miracle that Jesus could spontaneously give 53 words that pretty well sum up everything that’s of value, and it’s a great gift to us.

So this prayer is always gonna be a billion times better than any sermon that ever gets preached on it. And if you forget this sermon completely in a few minutes after we’ve finished, you’ve still got the prayer as God’s gift.

Now you may remember from last week that Jesus had been teaching his disciples that they were not to do their spiritual exercises in public for boasting or for applause or for praise but were to have a secret life.

And he teaches that they’re not to pray on the street corners in a boastful way, and they’re also not to go into prayer in a blabbering kind of way. That is, we’re not to be looking for some kind of praise from men as we pray, rather we’re to go in secretly to God and he will reward us.

And we’re also not meant to blabber when we pray as if we are to batter him with our words. Sometimes you may hear somebody pray, you may even do this yourself, and the prayer just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on, you think it could have been said in a quarter of the time or 10th.

As if we kind of need to bend God to give in, which we don’t of course, because he’s keen to hear and answer.

So Jesus gives us this Lord’s prayer, 53 words in the English, 57 words in the Greek, and it pretty well covers everything. It’s a gift, it’s a gift, it’s a gift.

And I was gonna say to you that you should look it up in your Bibles in front of you on page 1443, but you probably know the prayer off by heart.

So you can sit there this morning thinking, I know this bit of scripture backwards.

Well, I want to give you a few introductory comments on the Lord’s prayer, and then we’re going to look for a minute about the priorities of God, and then we’re gonna think for a few minutes about the needs of people. So first of all, some introductory comments.

First of all, the Lord’s Prayer is for personal use.

When you’re completely stuck and you don’t know what to pray, the Lord’s prayer is a gift.

And we know it’s for personal use because Jesus has said when you singular go into your room.

Shut the door and your father who sees in secret will reward you.

But it’s also for corporate use because it begins our Father and therefore it’s appropriate to pray in a gathering of believers, it’s personal and it’s corporate.

The second, introductory thing is it’s concern for immediate things. Is God being honoured today, that’s important.

Is daily bread arriving today? That’s important. There is immediacy about the prayer.

But there is also the long-term, wanting the kingdom of God to come in all its fullness, the day when people will kneel before Christ and admit that he’s king of kings. So the Lord’s Prayer has got an eye on the present very important, but it’s also got an eye on the goal.

The third thing is that the Lord’s Prayer is very comforting indeed. Just imagine this week you’re going for a job interview, you’re pretty nervous about it, you’ve been out of work for a while. Or imagine you’re sitting in the hospital waiting for some test results, you know what that can be like, very stressful.

Or imagine that you’ve got to have a difficult conversation with somebody in your family and the closest bonds are always the most difficult.

And you’re about to pray something like this, oh God, help me, help me, help me, help me fix it, make it go well, do what I need, give it to me now, something like that.

And you stop and you say actually there’s something more important.

Be honoured God. May your kingdom come. May your will be done.

And then you remind yourself that he’s perfectly capable to look after your body and your soul.

And there’s nobody better to be talking to. It’s a very comforting prayer.

But it’s a very challenging prayer.

Not only because if you pray this prayer, you’re not going to be aimless and foolish and selfish anymore, it’s going to correct all of that.

But also because you’re gonna find yourself saying something like this, Dear God, I want you to be honoured.

Even though there’s a part of me that wants me to be on it. I’m praying that you’ll be on it.

And I want your kingdom to come, even though there’s a part of me that likes my own little kingdom, I’m praying for your kingdom.

And I’m praying that your will will be done, even though there’s a lot of me that wants my will to be done, I’m asking that your will will be done, it’s quite a challenging prayer.

So it’s comforting and it’s challenging.

It’s also a very traditional prayer. It’s prayed in churches of all denominations all around the world all the time.

And um wonderfully, it’s prayed by believers in every country, in every generation, but it’s also tragic that it’s mumbled and prayed meaninglessly and carelessly. By people like me and you.

When Jesus taught it specifically so that we would be thinking when we prayed, and it’s a revolutionary prayer because it’s got nothing to do with our agenda or the world’s agenda, it’s got nothing to do with what the media tells us it’s important, it’s got to do with what God tells us is important. So it’s traditional but it’s revolutionary.

And the last thing to say by way of introduction is that it’s Godward and then manward: it’s Godward because, we’re about to pray to God, and we may think to ourselves, I’ve got to kind of bend his ear down to my urgent needs.

And the prayer says no, God is going to bend your mouth up to his important needs. So it’s a Godward prayer, it causes us to articulate what is important to God.

And it’s also a manward prayer in the sense that we’re able to bring our physical and our spiritual needs to him, and we discover we’re talking to somebody who is more capable and more caring and more wonderful than anybody in all the world.

So my friends, God has given us many great gifts, supremely, of course, his son, our saviour.

But don’t underestimate the gift of this of this Lord’s prayer, it is a really wonderful gift to us.

So let’s think for a minute about the priorities of God in the first few verses, verses 9 and 10 of chapter 6.

And you’ll see how this prayer begins, and dear friends, I know that you’ve heard this so many times, and so it’s difficult isn’t it, to look at something that’s so familiar.

But Jesus says, I want you to say our Father.

He doesn’t say,

When you pray, say, dear angel.

Oh dear saints.

Or dear Mary.

Now he doesn’t teach that at all.

He says, I want you to approach God as Father.

We can of course pray to the Father, we can pray to Jesus, and we can pray to the Holy Spirit.

But it’s the privilege of the Christian to go straight to the Father through Jesus the Son, with the help of the Holy Spirit. That’s really how we pray. Jews didn’t normally say our Father.

Jesus began to say it, and he taught his disciples to say it as well. Now can anybody in the world start praying and say, our Father to God?

Can anybody who around the world just says, I think I’ll pray, and I think I’ll call God – father, can they call God – father?

Can the person who comes into this building for a funeral or a wedding or a carol service or something like that, and they have no real interest in God and they have no real interest in Jesus, can they just suddenly talk to God and call him their father? The answer, my friends, is no.

Because you only really have God as your Father when you have Jesus as your saviour.

John chapter one says those who received his son, he gave the right to become his children.

So you only really have God as your father when you have Jesus as your saviour. Membership in the family of God is not a human right.

Membership in the family of God is the privilege of receiving his son.

And Don Carson says in his book on the Lord’s Prayer, this is quite a shocking comment, but he says the early church was right to forbid non-Christians from reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Can you, can you imagine that? Can you imagine me taking a carol service?

Here in a few months’ time and saying we’re about to pray the Lord’s prayer, and if you’re not a real believer, don’t speak it.

It’s quite a challenging, confronting thing isn’t it, but I think it’s biblically right.

We can really only call God Father if we know his son, otherwise it’s really just words.

We who are saved by grace and have nothing to boast about except our saviour, we come to this perfect Father in prayer, and we remember that he’s in heaven, that is, we remember that he’s very glorious, and he’s in complete control.

And we pray that his name will be honoured, which means we pray that he will be honoured, his name is his character. We have names, don’t we, name tags that we stick on us, that really don’t describe us.

You know, you could have Mr. Short and be 6’6. You could have Mrs. Green and be perfectly healthy.

But when the Bible gives names to God, all the names are true.

Shepherd he is shepherd – rock he is rock.

And so when we pray that his name will be honoured, we’re praying that he himself will be on it, and he, friends, he deserves to be honoured.

He deserves to be thanked by people who get lots from him but never thank him. He deserves to be respected for the greatness and the goodness. He deserves to be trusted, he deserves to be obeyed, he deserves to be loved.

And it is a tragedy, it is an insult. It is a grief that he is so little on it.

He is the unsung hero in this cosmos and we want things put right.

There’s a famous story of a missionary called Henry Martin, who was a brilliant Cambridge student and he went off to be a missionary in India and then Persia. And on one particular occasion, he was talking with a Muslim friend, and the Muslim friend sensed that Henry Martin was a little downcast about the spread of the gospel, and the Muslim friend said this, you should get your Jesus to ask Muhammad for help.

And Henry Martin said to this man, Jesus Christ the King of kings has all the power and all the glory.

And he wrote in his diary these words at the end of the day.

I could not endure existence if Jesus was not glorified. It would be hell to me.

I hope you feel a little bit of that, when Christ is dishonoured.

Because he deserves to be honoured.

And we must ask God in this prayer that he would cause his honour to increase in us, of course, in our family, among our friends, in the church here and in the wider world, cause one day he will be perfectly honoured, and every knee will bow to Christ, but in the short term, we’re praying for his honour to increase. And then we pray for his kingdom to come, and this is not just praying for the second coming of Jesus.

What we’re doing is we’re asking that the rule of God, and he does rule would be acknowledged.

And that that rule of God would be acknowledged more and more widely, it would spread like a blanket across the world.

The kingdom of God is the rule of God, where God rules, there’s the kingdom of God and the rule of God is the care and the control of God, so that’s what we want for people.

We want people to recognise the king and come under the king and be looked after by the king, and have their lives ordered by the king, and he will one day be honoured.

And we want this to spread widely because we want him to be more greatly honoured and we want people to be saved.

So the kingdom of God is to spread extensively as more and more people belong to Christ. But the kingdom of God is also able to spread intensively as somebody like me and you lives more appropriately to the king.

We want his will to be done as well. We know a lot of what God’s will is, don’t we? Because God’s will has been told us in the scriptures. We know what God wants, we know what God’s doing, we know what God’s planning, we know what God will achieve. It’s there in scripture. But we’re praying that his will will be done because there are so many contrary wills to God’s will.

I mean my will is wayward and your will is wayward.

And so when we pray that God’s will would be done, it’s a courageous prayer that he would overrule the wayward wills of people.

And often we don’t know the best way, do we? And so we ask in the face of a whole lot of uncertainty that his will would be done, that he would overrule the whole circumstances. And not only did Jesus preach this, but he practised it, because you remember that when he was in the garden of Gethsemane and he was faced with the crucifixion and humanly he longed to get out of that.

But he said, you remember those famous words:

Take this cup from me, I don’t want to drink it. But your will be done. Your will be done.

So those very simply and briefly are the priorities of God, that his name would be honoured, that his kingdom would come, and that his will would be done. They’re absolutely wonderful priorities of God for his universe and world.

Now, secondly and quickly, the needs of God’s own children, this is verses 11 to 15.

You see in verse 11 that we are unashamedly and confidently asking for our daily bread, our physical needs, because we’re not super spiritual.

We need food.

And daily bread, of course, is shorthand for everything that we need physically, it could be that somebody’s sick, they need his help, it could be they’re hungry, they need his help. It could be that they’re weak, they need his help.

Now we forget, don’t we?

That we depend on God for our food, because we’ve got shops and warehouses, and everything is under control. And so it’s easy to pray this line in a kind of careless way. Give us our daily bread, yeah, of course. We’re not in any trouble.

But many years ago, there were some books produced by the Lion Book Company for children, which were thank you books, and the books were titled things like, Thank you for an Apple, thank you for a book, thank you for a loaf of bread.

And you would open the first page, and there was a little child receiving, let’s imagine a loaf of bread, and he says to the shopkeeper, thank you for the loaf of bread, and the shopkeeper says, oh you shouldn’t thank me. You should thank the big company that delivers the bread to the shop.

So the little boy goes to thank the company that delivers the bread to the shop. And the company says, oh, you shouldn’t thank us. You should thank the, people who actually produced the bread. So he goes to the factory where the bread is produced and says, thank you very much. And they say, you shouldn’t thank us, you should thank the farmer because he’s the one that did the hard work. So he goes to thank the farmer, and the farmer says, you shouldn’t thank me, you should be thanking the rain and the sunshine that has basically worked on this seed.

So he sends up his prayer to the sunshine and the rain, and they say, you shouldn’t be thanking us, you should be thanking God. In other words, the book traces everything back to God.

And dear friends, I just remind you that if God stops the beginning of the process, it all falls apart.

We may think it’s all under our control, but it’s all under his control.

And therefore it’s a very wise thing for us to pray, give us our daily bread.

And then forgiveness for our sins, chapter 6 verse 12, this is for our debts, because when we become Christians, we go to God and we ask him to forgive us, and we enter the family. But when we are in the family, we go to our heavenly Father and we say to him, I know I’m completely forgiven.

I know all my sins have been paid for by Christ, but I’m very conscious of what I’ve said, thought or done lately, and I’m asking that you’ll forgive me because you’re my heavenly Father.

So we aren’t praying this line chapter 6, verse 12, in order to become God’s children.

We’re praying this line because we are God’s children, and we want to go and enjoy his fellowship. You remember Jesus expands on this at the end of the sermon at the end of the prayer, and he says, if you don’t forgive, your heavenly Father won’t forgive you, but if you do forgive your heavenly Father will forgive you, and they’re verses that of course have always troubled people but what Jesus means is – not that God is only going to give you the reward of forgiveness if you have given someone else forgiveness. What he means by that is that God expects you to be a channel of his forgiveness.

It’s very difficult, isn’t it, to be given forgiveness for a billion dollars and then be stingy about 10.

And so as we come to God and ask for forgiveness, we’re conscious that we’ve been forgiven a massive, massive amount.

And that’s why we say to him, we are seeking to be forgiving people, as well as people needing forgiveness.

Well, the last line in the prayer is that we might be protected, deliver us from evil. Chapter 6, verse 13. Not, of course, that God would do anything evil to us. He will not do evil things. But what we’re asking is that if we face evil, and we will face evil, cause even Jesus faced evil, we’re asking that we don’t fall into it.

We’ll face it, there’ll be temptation. And we’re asking that we’ll not fall into it. So again, my friends, this is a very brave prayer.

I mean, if you’re planning some sin this afternoon and you dare to say, your will be done, deliver us from evil, how might he answer that?

He might just wonderfully cancel or destroy all your plans for the afternoon.

It’s a very brave prayer to pray. So the first half of the prayer. Covers the crucial things for God.

And the second half of the prayer covers the crucial things for us.

And the very fine words that are often printed in our prayer books, for yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen. They’re not in the, all the original manuscripts, but they’re in some of the old manuscripts, and they make a very fitting way to finish the prayer, but they may not be part of the original.

Well, the great preacher, Martin Lloyd Jones said when he was preaching on the Lord’s Prayer, he said, I’m often comforted by this thought, that when I go to God in prayer:

And my prayer is so feeble,

And so wayward.

And so self-centered.

And so imperfect.

That when I pray the Lord’s prayer, I’ve really covered all the important things, and that’s what God enables us to do, and I finish where I began and say to you that when you’ve prayed the first half of the Lord’s prayer – everything else falls into place.

Well, let’s thank him, let’s bow our heads.

Our dear heavenly Father.

We thank you for the great gift of your son.

Our saviour and King, and we thank you for the great gift of this prayer. And we pray that you would help us to look to you as we ought with the right priorities for you.

As well as bringing the needful things for ourselves.

Help us in our praying.

Hear us in our praying.

Be honoured in our praying, we ask in Jesus’ name, amen.

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