In this manner, pray

We have a good number here this evening, seeing most of you have attended three services today and this will be your fourth one. It's good to see you and it's a sign of a very strong and healthy church. It's also a sign of a good church when, or I should say a sign of a church upon whom God smiles with his favor when God chooses to call one of its number out into full-time service and I know you are praying much for Byron and for Brianna to know God's will first in connection with whether this is his call to full-time service to gospel ministry and also if that is so what seminary that they should go to. and I just want to assure the two of you that your church will not only be praying for you but Muriel and I will be praying for you as well. This is a very serious step and I know that both of you want to be very sure of God's will and we pray that God will lead you very clearly in that direction. If you will turn to Matthew chapter 6 You may have noticed that I have been focusing quite a lot on prayer at our evening sessions because having visiting churches for about a year and a half to try and find a true spiritual home, it really came home to me how little prayer is praying in the public worship of the church today. And it has been so refreshing to come to Jefferson Park Baptist Church and to see prayer given its proper priority and those prayers conforming to the model that Jesus gave us in the pattern prayer. So let me read you the background to the pattern prayer, the model prayer, and then speak or give an introduction to that pattern prayer. Matthew 6 verse 5 to verse 15, Jesus says, And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your father who is in the secret place, and your father who sees in secret will reward you openly. And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Therefore, do not be like them, for your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him. 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. For yours is the kingdom, and the power and the glory forever. Amen. For if you forgive men their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. So reads the Word of God, the Lord by His Holy Spirit. Blessed to our hearts and our understanding. I want to give an introduction to the pattern prayer tonight, and next Sunday night, God willing, to deal with the first petition, or the address, Our Father in Heaven. And then the following Sunday, God willing, the first petition, Hallowed Be Your Name. And at the church's pleasure, if they are still seeking for a pastor and I need to come back, then we will look at other petitions in the prayer as God's providence allows. If we do just the first half of the prayer, that will be a great blessing to the church. This prayer that Jesus taught his disciples is a prayer that is repeated again in Luke chapter 11, and it seems that it was taught on two separate occasions. It seems that the disciples, like us, were slow learners. It was given first earlier in his ministry, in the first year of his ministry, in the Sermon on the Mount, in Matthew 6 But then about a year later in Luke 11 and verse 1 we read, And it came to pass, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, that one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples. Now, I have two reasons for doing the introduction tonight. To begin with, in evangelical and non-liturgical churches, the Lord's Prayer is rarely in danger of being neglected. much of once was customary is now regarded as belonging to a bygone era and therefore out of date, just as some of the great hymns of the faith are being discarded and sent into the archives because they are out of date. And, of course, the occurrence of words in the prayer that we pray at times in our worship service of old-fashioned English words like thee and thine and thou only enhance or enforce this view. Indeed, it seems to me that all prayer in Christian worship is in danger of being sidelined. Often the invocation, the opening prayer of worship, which is never a prayer of worship, but simply a prayer of, Lord bless us all who have gathered here today, we are waiting on you, bless us. And then the offertory prayer are the only two prayers that are offered in many of the churches I have visited over a period of almost two years of looking for a good family church home. And again, it's very obvious that in too many churches there is no expression of repentance or of confession of sin and little or no intercession for the church itself, universal and of the world at large, missions and evangelism. To use the Lord's Prayer in our Sunday services from time to time, I think, can only be beneficial. Its beginning reminds us of our need for a personal relationship with God as our Father. It also tells us that prayer is to be primarily taken up with the hallowing of God's name, the coming of His kingdom, and the doing of His will. And in putting our own personal needs after the interests of God, like our need for daily bread and forgiveness and deliverance from evil. We learn from that example of Jesus and that teaching of Jesus that God's glory, God's interests are always to take precedence in our prayers. Of course, there is the risk that people will pray the Lord's Prayer without thinking. But surely that's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Jesus clearly instructed us to pray this prayer together. In Matthew 6 verse 6 he says that individual prayer is to be prayed in the privacy of our own room with the door shut. And there in secret our Father will hear our secret and private prayers. But in the authorised version there is a significant change in verse 9 of Matthew 6 from the second person singular, thou, to the second person plural, ye. So that we read, when thou prayest, enter into thy room and close the door, when thou prayest, But when it comes to verse 9, it is, in this manner, therefore pray ye, all of you together. And I think the change is all the more striking when you notice that throughout the Lord's Prayer itself, the first person plural is used. Surely if Jesus was choosing this as a model for private prayer, he would have said, My Father, this is how you must pray, My Father who is in heaven, give me this day my daily bread, forgive me my trespasses and deliver me from the evil one. But he doesn't. He says when you pray, you must pray Our Father, because it's a community prayer, it's a corporate prayer. Give us, forgive us, lead us, deliver us. That's why the Lord's Prayer, you know, is often called the family prayer. It's the prayer of the family of God. And it's fair, I think, that our Lord intended it to be used in a corporate rather than in an individual way. And you know the early church fathers, Tertullian in the second century and Cyprian in the third century, all tell us that this prayer was used regularly in the public worship of the churches in those two centuries. However, our Lord gives us no instruction as to how often it should be used, and so we should not lay down rules. We should not say, well, this has got to be said every Lord's Day, or this has got to be said at every communion service. But that it has a place in church worship, I think, is beyond dispute. My second reason for doing this series on the Lord's Prayer is its importance. It is one thing, it is one, let me say it like this rather, the Lord's Prayer is one of three fundamental things that every new Christian should be taught for the health of their soul. The first thing I think is the Apostles' Creed, which gives us a statement, a simple and a brief statement, in which we can affirm our faith in one true God, who by His Son has obtained the forgiveness of our sins, and by His gift of the Holy Spirit has baptized us into the fellowship of the Church and given us life everlasting. So we must know, every new Christian must know what they believe and in whom they believe. And then secondly, every new Christian ought to have an understanding of the Ten Commandments as God's rule for Christian behavior. especially in a society where everyone today, like those in the book of Judges, is doing what is right in his or her own eyes. The Ten Commandments perfectly reveal the character of our God, and they indicate the moral direction in which He wants our lives to go. After all, He made us in His own image. Although given under the old covenant, The Ten Commandments remain a permanent guide to our Creator's will. They are not a means whereby we earn salvation, but they are a guide to the way we should be sanctified and the way we should live. And Jesus not only came to fulfill them, but he also came to give us the resources to keep them and obey them. And then thirdly, I think every new Christian, and especially our children, should be taught the Lord's Prayer, and not only to recite the prayer or to pray the prayer, but to understand what they are praying, because it gives us unique insight into the converted Christians' new relationship to God as his or her Father. You see, the gospel we believe in and the Ten Commandments we want to obey to please God require fellowship with God, which is found in prayer. Our modern world is preoccupied with fast and effective communication. It only takes seconds to speak to somebody on the other side of the world by phone. And every day business people are using their computers to instantly convey information from one part of the globe to the other. But you know, no communication is more wonderful and more instant than prayer to our God. Isaiah 65 verse 24 says that God actually anticipates our prayers. So quick is the communication. Before we begin He knows exactly what we are going to pray. Isaiah 65 verse 24, before they call I will answer and while they are still speaking I will hear. The lines of communication between God and ourselves have been established by the death of Jesus Christ on the cross. And God requires us, He calls upon us, to call on Him in prayer. So we fail new Christians if we do not teach them how to pray. Surely one of the major purposes of Christ dying on the cross was to give us access to God in prayer, to open the door by a new and living way into God's presence. So in the words of one of our hymns, prayer is the Christian's vital breath, the Christian's native air. It's our spiritual lifeline. It's as natural, spiritually speaking, to a Christian as breathing is to a living human being. Now, this was what Paul was doing shortly after his conversion, you remember. When Jesus sends Ananias to restore the site of Saul of Tarsus, and to welcome him into God's family, he says, Arise, and go to the street called Straight, and inquire at the house of Judas of one called Saul of Tarsus, for behold, he is praying. That's significant. Christians instinctively know their need of prayer. As Spurgeon used to say, God has no dumb children. If they are converted, they are going to pray. Of course, that's not to say that prayer is easy. True, prayer is most important, and yet nothing, if we are honest with ourselves, is more difficult than regular spiritual prayer. Because Satan is going to do his utmost to keep you and me from prayer. He knows that any time spent with God in prayer is only going to strengthen us in our resistance against his plots. And he is very skillful in bringing to our mind all those things that demand immediate attention to keep us from going to God in prayer. And when finally we do go to God in prayer, He is going to plague us with wandering thoughts and sidetrack us into praying in a mechanical and detached way to get it over with as quickly as possible. So, just like those disciples in Luke 11 verse 1, if we are Christians we should feel the need for our Master's help to pray like He prayed. Lord, teach us to pray as John taught his disciples. This was an ardent request from one of his disciples who saw that this was our Lord's habit and it was the secret of his strength. When the disciples woke early in the morning, they would find that our Lord had already been up for several hours, and had been a long while in prayer, seeking His Father's face. And although they knew the mechanics of prayer, for they were Jews, and every Jew prayed, There was an intimacy about the praying of Jesus that made them want to pray like He prayed. Now, from Luke 11 it is clear that they were impressed by two things, and that's what I want to leave with you tonight. It's been a long introduction, but it's a necessary introduction. And the two things that they were impressed by was first the quality of the prayer life of Jesus. I'm sure you've heard it many times, but prayer is the measure of a Christian man and a Christian woman. What a man is alone on his knees before God, said the saintly Murray McChain, that he is and no more. This is what the disciples felt when they observed our Lord at prayer. They measured the quality of their own prayer life against His and they saw how far short they fell. There was an intimacy, there was a confidence about Christ's praying that filled their soul with wonder and wanted and made them want to be close to God the Father like that. How pleased our Lord must have been to hear this disciple come to him again and say, Lord teach us to pray as John taught his disciples. Not just with the right words, but also with the right spirit. And so when Jesus replied and he gave them this prayer, I do not think that he intended that they should just repeat these words parrot fashion. His intention was that they should enter into the sense and the spirit and the meaning of the words that he gave them, and that they should feel very deeply for these things that he tells them they should pray for. In other words, Jesus was saying that all prayer is only going to be acceptable to God when the attitudes, the thoughts, the desires expressed fit the patterned prayer that He had given them. And friends, when you analyze the Lord's Prayer, there are seven distinct activities that make up its spirituality, and they all begin with the letter A, so that we may remember them easily. First of all, the Lord's Prayer shows that it requires approaching God in adoration and trust as a little child. Our Father in Heaven. Secondly, it requires acknowledging his work and his worth in praise and in worship. Hallowed be your name. It requires admitting sin and seeking pardon. Forgive us our trespasses. Fourthly, it requires asking that our petitions be met primarily for the glory of God. that we seek His interests first and ours second, and ours also should be for the glory of God. Fifthly, it requires arguing with God for blessing just as Jacob did in Genesis 22, when in his weakness, having been paralyzed by God striking him on the hip bone, having been crippled He says, Lord, I will not let you go unless you bless me. And that's what we do in the Lord's Prayer when we come to the end. We've asked for all these great petitions. What do we say at the end? For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory. These great things belong to you. You need to do what we are asking for these reasons. And your power, your kingdom, and your glory is sufficient reason for you to do them. And you can do them. Please, do them. It's a reasoning with God as we come to the end of the prayer. And sixthly, it requires accepting from God the circumstances He has willed for our lives. Your will be done. And seventhly, it requires adhering to God in faithfulness through thick and through thin. Deliver us from the evil one. Now this is a spirit in which Jesus prayed, and the Lord's Prayer should be constantly used to direct and spur our praying accordingly. To pray through it, expanding on its various clauses as you go along, is a sure way to prime the pump of prayer when it has gone dry. The Christian life begins with prayer. You can't become a Christian without praying. the sinner's prayer without coming to Christ and asking for forgiveness and asking for salvation. And that is what Peter implies surely when he says to the three thousand who are going to be converted, whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Whoever prays for salvation will be saved. But the Christian life also develops and matures in prayer, because prayer is talking to God. And just as we gladly give time to talk to those who love us and are willing and able to help us by advice and to action, so the Christian should never feel it is either pointless or tedious to seek times of communion in prayer with God. When the Methodist Saint Billy Bray used to say, as he often did, I must talk to father about this, he was always speaking about prayer. And this is why Jesus sought the face of his father in prayer every day and sometimes all night. On many occasions when there were important things coming up in his public ministry, he resorted to long periods of prayer. before choosing and calling the apostles. He spent the whole night in prayer. We read in Luke 9 that it was after he had spent a long time alone praying that he asked his disciples at Philippi Caesarea, who do you say I am? And then he disclosed to them his divine sonship. And again you will remember the night before he died, he spent in intense prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. The disciples couldn't fail to notice that prayer surrounded every part of our Lord's life and of his ministry. And it was observing him pray like that, that prompted this man to say, Lord, teach us to pray. just as John taught his disciples. Are we then to expect God to bless us and help us when we pray? Of course we are. We shall probably not hear voices from heaven as often happened in the Old Testament and in the days of the Apostles in the New Testament, but as we analyze and verbalize our problems before God's throne and tell Him what we want and why we want it, And as we think our way through passages of Scripture that have a bearing on the things for which we are praying, we will find that God will give us assurance that what we are praying for is right, and that He will grant it in His own time and in His own way. If we ask, well, Lord, why is this happening to me? No light may come. No answer may come. Because Deuteronomy 29 verse 29 says, the secret things belong to the Lord. There will be times in our prayer life when we will not receive an answer to our requests. There are some answers we are only going to get in heaven. But if we ask, how am I to serve and glorify you here and now in this situation, in these circumstances, there will always be an answer. True prayer is a two-way conversation from us to God and God to us. I love that old hymn which goes, I come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses, and the voice I hear falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses. And He walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own, and the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known. Well, that's the first thing that inspired this request, Lord teach us to pray. The disciples wanted to have the quality of prayer life that they saw their master had. And then in the second place, and we'll be brief, the disciples made this request because they wanted to pray the same God-centered prayers that Jesus prayed. Now, We must beware of being formal in our prayers. We do not want to pray formally. And any structured prayer has that danger. And yet, on the other hand, every prayer needs some form or structure. And the Lord's Prayer lays down a basic foundation to guide our prayers or on which to build our prayers. And you know, it's helpful to think of the Lord's Prayer as a pattern or a template for our prayers. Joiners, you know, make templates when they want to manufacture some item. And dressmakers use patterns to make garments of the same size. Likewise, the Lord's Prayer is made up of several petitions, and they provide us with the basic pattern upon which the Lord wants us to construct our prayers. It's the only model that Jesus has given to us as his followers, and although we are not bound to its exact words, we are bound to its basic content. When we pray along these lines, we can be sure that we are praying according to the will of Christ and the will of His Father, and that these are the kind of things that the Father will surely give us. As a pattern, it identifies the most vital topics, and by the order in which they appear in the patterned prayer, they guide us as to the priorities of our prayers. Like a mold, the patterned prayer shapes our prayers into an acceptable form to God the Father. And that's very important. With the clamoring voices of the world all around us, and its multitude of needs and appeals, we will find ourselves bewildered at times with where to begin with our prayers. But the Lord's Prayer directs us where to begin. He teaches us, you must put God's interests before your own. Interests, personal, which tend normally to dominate our thoughts and our cares, and therefore our prayers. Indeed, Jesus is telling us in the Lord's Prayer that every prayer we pray must be God-centered. Even the petitions we ask for ourselves must be God-centered. They must serve the interests of God primarily, and not just ourselves. Let me show you what He is saying. The way we begin our prayer should be God-centered. When Jesus told his disciples to begin with the words, Our Father, or Abba, the diminutive word that a child would use for their earthly father, the nearest we can get to it is Daddy, or Dear, Dear Father. It's a term of intimacy. He must have startled those Jewish disciples. Praying intimately to God as their father was something that no Jew would dream of doing. To Jehovah Jireh, yes. To Jehovah Nissi, yes. But not to our Father in Heaven. Jesus, however, directs us to do so on the ground that we now, through Him, are God's children, and He loves us, and He cares for us. At the same time, we are to recognize that He is our Father, who is in Heaven. In other words, that He is the God who is there, in the control room, in the throne room, and He is in charge. That is how we are to begin. God's fatherly love and His transcendent greatness are to permeate all the petitions that we bring to Him. And then follow three petitions, seeking and desiring the glory of God. For Jesus taught us that the first and the greatest commandment is what? Love the Lord your God with all your heart. and with all your soul and all your mind and all your strength. So the first petition is that God's name should be hallowed. That it should be regarded with respect and reverence and awe. And, of course, God's name is not just a combination of the three letters G-O-D. God's name refers to His person and His character. And to hallow God's name means acknowledging God and respecting God and reverencing God for who He is and giving Him the worship and the obedience that He deserves. The second petition is that God's kingdom should come. that God should invade the hearts and lives of men and women and set up His saving rule in their lives, so that His kingdom may come into the world, His church be completed, and Christ return. Your kingdom come. Your rule be established. not just over governments, but over the hearts of men and women in salvation. And the third petition is that God's will may be done. That is to say that all his commands and all his purposes are going to be perfectly fulfilled here on earth as the angels fulfill them in heaven. Now the next three petitions could be interpreted as man-centered or as self-centered, but they are not. They are rather pleased for God's grace to meet our personal needs in a way that is going to serve God's interests. So we are told to pray for our physical needs. Give us this day our daily bread. And for our spiritual needs, forgive us our trespasses. And for our moral needs, deliver us from the evil one. Lead us not into temptation. Now, these are all God-centered. Because we need daily sustenance if we are going to serve God properly. For the only way we can serve God properly is in this body He has given us, and this mind that He has given us. And you know, for the first 12 to 15 years, and I shouldn't be saying this, it's taking up valuable time, but for the first 12 to 15 years of my ministry, I had the most difficult time serving God. I was tired through the day, could hardly study my Bible, hardly prepare a sermon, and then at night I couldn't go off to sleep. And the doctors all said, oh, you've got endogenous depression. You're a square peg in a round hole. You think God wants you to be a minister, but really this is not what you really desire. This is not what you are cut out for. And so you are bringing depression upon yourself. And so they put me on about 15 different types of medication and nothing helped. And I then had to resort to the extreme measure of resigning from my third church where we were extremely happy and the church was just growing. And I had to say to them, I need to take time off. And I don't want to take three months off, and then I find that I'm still not right, and you're without a pastor. Let me just resign, and you can go ahead with calling a pastor. If God wants me to come back, then you won't call a pastor, you won't find a pastor, and I'll be able to come back when I've sorted this out. But I just can't carry on a moment longer. I'm burnt out. And you know what we discovered? It was 11 months break. No pay. And we suddenly discovered, as we were seeking God's will, Muriel was the one who discovered it. That my problem was a lack of calcium because I never drank milk. All I drank was Coca-Cola. Don't laugh, it's a serious business. And in those days there was no caffeine-free Coca-Cola. So what was happening with drinking a 2 liter bottle of Coca-Cola and some more was that I was feeding my body with so much caffeine I couldn't sleep at night. So the psychotic drugs weren't doing me any good at all. And you know the moment I came off any kind of caffeine. Now, my body is extremely sensitive to drugs. If I go in for surgery, I am knocked out for 24 hours after the operation. I mean, my wife can't talk to me after 10 hours in the recovery room or coming out of the care. I mean, my body is extremely susceptible to drugs. And the moment I stopped, I was like a new person. And from that moment, which was my fourth church in South Africa, that would be five, and I was served 23. For the next 28 years of my ministry, I had a wonderful vigor and a wonderful freedom to prepare. But before that, it was always going back to the pantry and digging out old sermons so that I could reheat them and dish them out. And of course, I never felt good about that. And I've gone off the tangent because I want you to know that when we pray for our daily bread, we are not praying for cheesecake and for this and for that and the other thing. We are praying for good solid food, because if you're going to serve God well, you must serve him in a body that is fit mentally, physically, emotionally. And then we pray We pray for pardon for our sins so that we may continue to have fellowship with God, that our fellowship is not broken with God and the Holy Spirit is quenched. And then we need protection from the evil one, so that we may not yield to temptation and dishonor God's holy name. The whole prayer, you see, is God-centered. Even the ending is God-glorifying, as I said. It ascribes to God the kingdom. It hails Him as the God who is on the throne of the universe and can do everything we have asked Him to do. It ascribes to Him the power, it adores Him as the God who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we can ask or think. And finally it ascribes to God the glory and declares that He is worthy of the praise and the honor for which we are praying that it may come to Him. My friends, we can never get beyond this prayer. Not only is it our Lord's first lesson in praying, but I venture to say it is His chief lesson. If we avoid using this prayer because of a fear of repetitiveness, we will rob ourselves of an invaluable gift from God to aid us in our prayers as individuals and as a body. If, however, we pattern our prayers after it, we will discover the intimacy and the God-centeredness with which Jesus prayed to his Father in Heaven. Well, I thank you for giving me time and listening so attentively. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you for this prayer of the disciple in Luke 11, and we want to echo his prayer. We ask that you will forgive us for the feebleness and the shallowness and sometimes the selfishness of our prayers. Teach us to pray like you prayed, Lord, with the intimacy and the reverence and the confidence of one who knows that the God who rules from heaven is our very own dear Father. and help us to always offer God-centered petitions to him, even when we are asking for our own personal needs to be met. Lord, we need to be taught. Make us teachable, we pray, for your great namesake. Amen.