Full Transcript

Welcome to Share the Word. There’s always been a question as to how we should pray. Even the apostles questioned it because they saw Jesus praying in a way that was completely foreign to them. Today, Pastor Paul unpacks that prayer that Jesus taught his disciples and gives us some more in-depth viewpoint of the Lord’s Prayer. Paul. Matthew chapter 6, part 2. 57 words, 18 seconds.

How far do your memories go back? Can you remember anything before five years old? Sometimes I’m not sure if I’m actually remembering stuff or whether I’m just remembering when I could remember it, if you know what I mean. One of my earliest memories is of sitting in Miss Andrews’ first grade classroom at my small desk with my hands folded at the start of a school day as she led us in reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Seems like another world ago, not only because of the time that’s passed, but because that’s almost unimaginable today, children sitting quietly and reverently in a public school classroom as their teacher leads them in prayer or a Bible reading. What we call the Lord’s Prayer was part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

Where we left off, we were considering what he was saying about acts of righteousness, our religious activities, and the danger of them being spoiled by hypocrisy. One of the areas he pointed to was prayer. Let’s pick up our reading at Matthew chapter 6, verse 7, and see how the Lord’s Prayer fits into Jesus’ sermon. And when you are praying, he went on, do not use thoughtless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. So don’t be like them, for your Father in heaven knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then in this way: Our Father who is 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 also have forgiven our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Only 58 words in the translation I just read, and takes me about 18 seconds to read it. Remember, this comes directly on the heels of Jesus’ warning about religious acts being ruined by hypocrisy, such as long showy prayers meant more to impress listeners than be any real attempt to communicate with God. Going further on in prayer, he added, And when you pray, don’t use the thoughtless repetitions the Gentiles do, who think they will be heard because of their many words.

Or as the NIV puts it, When you pray, don’t keep babbling on and on like the pagans. There was a popular news show on TV years ago called The O’Reilly Factor. At the end of each program, the host always invited watchers to send in comments or questions with the caveat, and remember, keep it pithy, no bloviating, no bloviating. That’s pretty much exactly what Matthew heard Jesus say about prayer. The Greek word he used translating Jesus was batalageo, which means no blah blah blah, no blah blah blah prayers, please. This is what the NASB is trying to get at with the translation meaningless repetitions, or the NLT’s babbling on and on.

What Jesus is pointing at is the way the devotees of pagan religions used mindless, repetitious prayers, hoping their gods would hear them if they went on long enough repeating the same things over and over. Jesus said, Never pray like that. It’s sadly ironic that the Lord’s Prayer itself is misused by some religions now in that very way, just repeated over and over as part of liturgies or assigned to be spoken X number of times as penance for sin. Jesus said, Do not be like the pagans and imagine saying the same things over and over and impress God. He knows what you need even before you ask. So, when Jesus offers what we call the Lord’s Prayer here, it’s as an example.

He’s saying, Pray something like this, and then use these now familiar words to model for his followers what prayer should be like. This episode lets think about our approach to God in prayer through this extraordinarily simple model Jesus left us. Our Father, he began. When you pray, pray like this: Our Father in heaven. What would be extraordinary about that? That address actually was extraordinary because the Jewish people used formal titles to address God in prayer, like Sovereign Lord or King of the Universe, titles that stressed God’s transcendence, his distance from us.

Nowhere in the Old Testament is God addressed so familiarly, so personally as our Father. The Aramaic term Jesus likely used, Abba, is how children addressed their dad in his society. It’s the word Jesus would have used to address Joseph as he chased him around the carpentry shop asking to use his tools, or any other Jewish child would have used to address their dad. But it was never used with God. Abba was a term that conveyed closeness, family connectedness, love, protection, security. I loved it when my kids called me Dad or Daddy or one of them, Papa.

Still do, actually, even though they’re adults now. When Jesus appeared on the scene and started using this personal term when he spoke of or addressed God, it literally angered the religious leaders of his day who considered it blasphemy. John comments at one point in his Gospel, the Jews, referring to the religious leaders, were seeking to kill him because he not only was breaking their Sabbath, but also was calling God his own Father. Of course, Jesus was God’s Son in a special sense. But the remarkable thing here is that he taught his followers to address God in the very same way as our Father in heaven. Is God everyone’s Father?

Well, in a general sense, we are all his offspring, as the Apostle Paul once put it. But we only have the right to address him as our Father if we’ve been born again into his family. The New Testament teaches that to as many as received Christ, to them he gives the authority to become God’s children, even those who believe into his name. It’s because of our relationship with Jesus by faith that we enter into such a personal relationship with the transcendent God, the sovereign of the universe. The Apostle Paul wrote to early Christians in Romans chapter 8, You have received the Spirit of adoption as sons and daughters, by which you cry out, Abba, Father. Now the Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.

I read about a website where people can submit prayers. Once at the site, you click on the prayer button, and the instruction says, Submit your requests, and we will transmit them to the only known location of God in the universe. The site claims that it can send prayers via radio transmitter to God’s last known location, a star cluster believed to be one of, if not the oldest in the universe. A guy named Crandall Stone, a Cambridge, Massachusetts engineer and freelance consultant, set up the site after a night of drinking and philosophizing with friends. The conversation turned to religion and to science and finally to the Big Bang theory of creation, and someone suggested that if everything was really in one place at the beginning, at the initial giant explosion of energy that started everything, then God must have been there too. Mr.

Stone said, So we thought that if we could find that location with a radio transmitter, we could send messages out to there. These guys weren’t just joking around either. They consulted with NASA scientists and settled on a star cluster, M13, as the likely location of the center of the universe, then built a radio wave transmitter that could send messages into space. Mr. Stone told the author they transmit about 50,000 prayers a week from people trying to get messages to God. If they only understood the gospel, if they only read the New Testament, they’d know that God doesn’t want to be an impersonal, distant deity.

He’s made a way for us to know Him, to become His own dear sons and daughters, His children, and welcome to come to Him in prayer at any time. Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Although welcoming and personal, our approach to God in prayer should not be flippant or disrespectful. Hallowed be your name means coming to God with a full awareness of who He is and so with the reverence He deserves. There’s a big difference between coming to God as our loving heavenly Father and doing it disrespectfully. Every parent knows the difference.

My children were always welcome to come to me as Daddy and jump on my lap and have my attention because they knew I’d love them. But if they were disrespectful, if they approached me with an attitude, that would not get very far. God delights to have us come into His presence through prayer, yes, but we should do so respectfully, reverently, remembering who He is, and that’s what hallowed be Thy name is about. Thy kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The Gospels recount more than a hundred times Jesus speaking about the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven. When He said, Thy kingdom come, what exactly did He mean?

Doesn’t the Bible teach that God is already the ultimate ruler of the world? Yes, He is. But as we’ve already learned, He’s also allowing evil to remain and progress even for a time. He’s giving Satan, who He calls the god of this world, a pretty long leash. We’re living in a time of testing now, a time to demonstrate who will choose God and His ways and who will believe and follow Christ and who will not. But the literal, physical kingdom of God, when evil is finally done away with, is coming.

That will happen when Jesus returns at the end of this age. Then, as Revelation 11 describes it, the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord and of His Christ, and He will reign forever. When Jesus said we should pray, Thy kingdom come, he was saying we should pray for that day’s arrival when God’s will and ways are the rule on this earth, just as they are now in heaven. The early Christians lived in the expectation that Jesus might return any time to establish his rightful kingdom. But because of his delay, we may not think of it as often, and we may live as though the second coming of Christ is far away. We should ask ourselves if Thy kingdom come was really answered and Jesus really came back today, are we ready for that?

What if it were today? Is that an exciting thought to you, or does it make you kind of nervous, like, of course I want Christ to come back someday, but I have a lot on my agenda and I hope to see it through first, and some things in my life probably need to get cleaned up before then. Then don’t pray Thy kingdom come, because that prayer means, Father, I know Jesus is coming back. Make it today, please. That thought of the imminent return of Jesus should motivate us to get and keep ourselves ready to be living out God’s will in our lives today, just as really as we will one day in heaven. Remember, Christ’s invisible kingdom, his rule in people’s hearts and lives who have accepted him as Savior and Lord, that’s been underway since the first century, since Jesus said these things.

And if we’re believers, we’re a part of that kingdom. So while we wait for his second coming for the literal kingdom on earth, our calling is to be salt and light here, as we’ve seen. We’re Christ’s ambassadors here entrusted with a message of reconciliation, the gospel message, how anybody who will repent of sin and believe into Jesus can become a part of God’s family too. Are those around us ready to meet the King when He comes? Is there anything more important to do, anything more consistent with God’s will now than inviting others to believe the gospel? If there is, I can’t think of it.

Give us this day our daily bread. You’re listening to this podcast. You’re still alive today. When you rolled out of bed this morning, did you take the time to say, Thanks God for another day? When you opened the cabinet to decide between what cereal looked good this morning and then went to the fridge to grab some milk and juice or whatever, did you thank God for the day and what He had there to put in your stomach? Many of the early commentators on this scripture, the Lord’s Prayer, the church fathers, as they are reverently called, believed that Jesus must have meant something more spiritual.

They just didn’t get how this prayer, which begins with lofty ideas about hallowing God’s name and His kingdom dawning and so on, could suddenly make a turn to something as mundane as our daily food. So they invented allegorical meanings for bread. Maybe Jesus was making an oblique reference to communion. Could it be a figure for the Word of God, that we need that every day? No, it’s best to interpret the Bible literally unless the context strongly suggests otherwise. By that I mean if Jesus said, Realize each day is a new gift from God and acknowledge what you need to make it through that day, even the food you eat is from His hand, that’s probably exactly what He meant.

In Jesus’ time and place, bread was the staple. They ate bread as part of most every meal. This is hard for us to imagine, but in that society, workers were paid daily for what they got done that day. So when you got paid that day, you probably bought food for that day or for the next day. And that’s how most people live, from hand to mouth, as we’d say, one day at a time. It’s harder for us to get a grip on this in our much more affluent society, where supermarkets are brimming with every imaginable kind of food, where we have so much more than the people to whom Jesus first spoke this.

Harder for us to keep in view that every day we have is a gift, and everything we have that day that we enjoy, like the food on our tables, is from God. The supply chains of it all lead back to our heavenly Father. There’s a memorable scene in the classic movie Shenandoah. Jimmy Stewart stars in it as Charlie Anderson, a Virginia farmer trying to keep his family out of the Civil War. With all his sons gathered around the supper table, he begins with words they’d heard many times before. Now, your mother wanted me to raise you all as good Christians.

I might not be able to do that the ornery job as well as she could, but I can do something about your manners. And he gestures, and they all bowed their heads, and he continued, Lord, we cleared this land, and we plowed it, and we sowed it, we harvested it, we cooked the harvest. We wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be eating this if we hadn’t done it all ourselves. We worked dog bone hard for every crumb and morsel. But we thank you just the same, Lord, for the food we’re about to eat. Amen.

Through the course of the movie, one tragedy after another strikes the Anderson clan. The youngest son is mistaken for a soldier and disappears for years into captivity. Another son and his wife are murdered by marauders. A third son is shot accidentally by a nervous sentry. Late in the film, you see Mr. Anderson at the same supper table, but there are several empty places as he begins his prayer now, and this time his voice is quivering even more, breaking at the awful realization that he is not in control after all.

His voice trails off as he finishes the words, If we hadn’t done it all ourselves. He stops, gets up, walks away, once very proud man, now looking broken. The truth is, the Lord gives and the Lord takes away. When Jesus taught us to pray, Give us this day our daily bread, he was not only saying we should bring our daily needs before our Heavenly Father, or even that our mundane physical needs matter to Him, but that we should remember that every good thing we have ultimately comes down from God, and that we are completely dependent on Him for their continuation. Do you acknowledge that when you pray, and are you thankful? Forgive us our debts, he went on, as we have forgiven our debtors.

Forgiveness is as essential to the health of our souls as food is to our bodies. Bitterness is poison to our souls. Sins are viewed here as debts to God. They are the ways and times we fall short with Him. Jesus was teaching that our prayers should include confession, being honest about and sorry for the things we do and say that disappoint God. As we’ve learned, God is ready to forgive us because Christ has already paid the debt for our sins, but we must own up to them, agree with God about them, and ask for His forgiveness to stay in a good relationship with our Heavenly Father.

And Jesus taught that the way we forgive others is the way God will forgive us. I remember reading a great line by John Wesley spoken once to a powerful man named James Oglethorpe. Oglethorpe was the British governor of Georgia during America’s pre-revolutionary war period. Wesley came to America as a missionary at that time at the invitation and expense of Governor Oglethorpe, who felt the colonists could use some religion. But Oglethorpe himself was a very harsh man who prided himself on never forgetting a slight and always getting even. For him, having an unforgiving spirit was a point of pride.

One day, Wesley overheard him say to an associate, You know I never forgive my enemies, to which John Wesley quickly responded, Then I hope you never sin, sir. Never forget how much you have been forgiven if you’re a Christian, how much you still need God’s forgiveness and grace all the time. As much as we need it, we must be ready to extend it to others. Our prayers will just be bouncing off the ceiling otherwise. And finally, he said, Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, or some translations say, the evil one. Temptation is part of the experience of every Christian.

Temptations are all around us as well as coming from what remains of our old sin nature inside of us. Enduring and overcoming temptation is part of what builds up our character, and we should not expect that God is going to deliver us from all temptations. What I think Jesus is particularly urging us to pray for, in view of the second half of that part, that line, is that we be delivered from the kind of temptations that could overpower and destroy us. To remember that we are weak and vulnerable, not get too full of ourselves, that we need God’s protection, especially from the evil one and his schemes. Fifty-seven words, only eighteen seconds. Prayer doesn’t need to be lengthy or complicated.

Jesus modeled by this simple, direct, heartfelt communication with our Father in heaven. Toward God, it reminds us of just who He is, how He should be approached, that His kingdom, not our personal agenda, should be of preeminent importance, and that His will is always best and what we should be desiring foremost. Toward ourselves, it reminds us how utterly dependent we are on God’s daily provision, how much we need to forgive others and stay in good relationships with them if we expect God’s grace and forgiveness ourselves, and finally, how vulnerable we are and how much we need His divine protection and power to overcome the evil one. The Lord’s Prayer was not intended to be a liturgy recited over and over and over. It is Jesus’ teaching example, a template of the way we should pray.

A great follow-up exercise to this lesson would be, I think, to sit down and write out a personal prayer to God based on Jesus’ model here, and then think about how that prayer compares with your usual approach to God. That would be a valuable exercise, I think. Thanks for listening. This is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul. You know, I believe that we tend to make prayer more complicated than it was ever meant to be.

The truth is that all God wants is for us to have a conversation with Him. And so often we use prayer like an ATM asking for God for things. I looked up how many books were written on how to pray, and the speculation is tens of thousands. So while we look for the formula on how to get it right, all we need to do is look to those 57 words that Jesus gave. The Lord’s Prayer is a divine example of how to pray differently than the Pharisees and the religious leaders did in those days, and it’s just as relevant today as it was then. As Pastor Paul so eloquently emphasized how the Lord’s Prayer gives us focus for the direction of our prayers, and what a great exercise Paul challenges us with today, to write out a prayer modeled after the Lord’s Prayer and compare it with your current prayers.

As always, we’d love to hear from you. Email us at info at sharetheword dot org. And from all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.