What to Say to God When You Pray--Life With God Series

            We all know that communication is very important in relationships, but sometimes our communication with others can be hindered by nothing more than that nagging feeling that we just don’t know what to say to them. Every one of us has avoided conversations at times because we felt like we just didn’t know what to say to that other person, or if we did have some thoughts in mind, we didn’t know how to express them in just the right words.

            As we’ve been learning in this series recently, we have a cycle of communication in our relationship with God – he communicates with us through the Bible, and we communicate to him through prayer. As with all of our other relationships, our efforts to communicate with God through prayer can be hindered by that same old feeling that we just don’t know what to say.

            Fortunately for us, Jesus has given us a model prayer that teaches us the kinds of thoughts and statements that we should express to God when we pray. By getting more familiar with this model prayer, we can get a better understanding of what we should say to God when we pray. So today, we’re going to take a look at what we usually call “The Lord’s Prayer,” as it is recorded in Matthew 6:9-13.

A Striking Observation

            Once you find that passage in your Bible, if you will just take a glance over the page on which it’s written, you might notice something rather striking about this model prayer – it’s not very long at all! The Lord’s Prayer only takes about 25 seconds to read out loud, and that’s if you read it carefully with great expression!

            Now it could be that this model prayer is short because it is, after all, only a model, an example. We know that these verses don’t say everything that Jesus wanted to communicate about prayer because he had more to say about prayer at other times in his teaching.

            But it could be that the length of this model prayer is meant to teach us that our prayers don’t necessarily have to be very long. I believe we get the same impression when we remember what Jesus had to say back in verses 7-8 [READ Matt 6:7-8].

            Notice the main point of these verses – a multitude of words does not make our prayers more effective, so we should not think that they do. We don’t need to drone on and on because our Father knows what we need before we ask him. These observations have led me to think that it is okay – and perhaps even preferable – to keep our prayers short.

            This thought may not be earth-shattering to you, but I’ve got to tell you, it’s been very challenging to me. To be honest, I think I’ve spent most of my life believing that effective prayers have to be long prayers – in other words, if I want to have any chance of God answering my prayer, I need to make it long.

            I don’t know when or where I picked up that idea, but I can tell you, it really has affected my prayer life. For a long time now, I know I’ve thought that if I want to truly have a “good” prayer time, I’d better be prepared to pray for at least 20 or 30 minutes – the longer the better, even if I wind up repeating myself, and even if I find my mind wandering a lot during that time.

            But as I’ve started to reflect on Matthew 6 and some other passages of Scripture, I’ve started to think that a much better principle to follow might be this:

When you pray, say what’s on your heart, then say no more.

            At times, you may have many people that you’d like to pray for in the same prayer, or you may have a heavy burden that you need to bring to God. Those prayers will naturally be longer, and of course, there’s nothing wrong with that! But at other times, you may simply want to say “thank you” for a small blessing or you may need to confess a sin that you’ve become aware of. I believe we should feel free to simply say those things without feeling like we have to make a 10-minute production out of our prayer.

            Effective prayers are not necessarily long prayers. When you’ve said all that’s on your heart, that will suffice. Don’t drone on with half-hearted words just because you feel like your prayer needs to be a certain length. Say what’s on your heart, then say no more.

A Well-Balanced Prayer Diet

            Now I do believe that The Lord’s Prayer mentions the kinds of thoughts that we need to express in our overall habits of prayer. We don’t want to neglect any of these thoughts even though we may not include all of them in every single prayer we pray.

            To help us remember these thoughts, I’d like to tie The Lord’s Prayer together with a commonly used acronym that serves as a helpful memory device. It’s the acronym ACTS. As we go through this acronym, please don’t think of this as a hard-and-fast outline that each of your prayers must follow. Think of it more like a guide for a well-balanced prayer diet. You can achieve a well-balanced diet for your body even if you don’t eat foods from every food group in each meal. Likewise, you can have a good balance in your prayer life even if you don’t touch on every part of this acronym in every prayer that you pray.

A—Adoration

            The letter “A” in this acronym stands for adoration. That word refers to statements that express our praise to God or our love for Him.

            In The Lord’s Prayer, we find adoration expressed in the statements, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” The Lord’s name refers not just to the title that we might use for Him, but to His reputation and His fame as well. It’s similar to when we say, “So-and-so is really making a name for himself.”

            “Hallowed” is not a word that we use often. We may use it at times to refer to the “hallowed grounds” of a battlefield, and we mean that that location has a sacredness to it and is worthy of special honor because of its history.

            So “hallowed be your name” might be paraphrased as “may you receive the unique honor that you deserve.” It’s a statement that expresses how valuable we believe God is, and that He’s worthy of our love and honor. These are ideas, then, that we want to regularly express to God in our prayers.

C—Confession

            The “C” in this acronym stands for confession. In this model prayer, Jesus teaches us to confess our sins to God when he says, “and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Notice how Jesus ties this aspect of our relationship with God together with the way that we treat other people. Tuck that thought in the back of your mind for now, because that idea is going to be the subject of another sermon soon to come. We’ll talk about how our relationship with God is affected by the way that we treat other people.

            For now, I want you to remember that this model prayer is given for people who can call God “Father.” In other words, it is given for followers of Christ – Christians. This little observation would teach us that even after we have become born-again, there is still a need for us to confess our sins to God and ask him for forgiveness.

            It’s not that we’re asking him to save us all over again or to adopt us into his family all over again. The reality is this – when we are born again, our relationship with God moves out of the courtroom and into the living room, because we are his children now, we’re family. And as with any family, we have a need to ask for forgiveness when we have done hurtful things that bring grief to our family members.

            And so, we need to confess our sins to God when we become aware of them. If you sense that you are not regularly aware of your sins, ask God to give you a greater sensitivity toward your sins. If we ask God to make it clear to us when we have sinned, I think he will be happy to answer that prayer.

T—Thanksgiving

            The “T” in this acronym stands for thanksgiving. Ironically, we don’t find the words “thank you” in this prayer, although we can certainly see gratitude peeking out from between the lines of these verses.

            Other passages of Scripture make it clear that we should offer thanks to God in our prayers. For example, Philippians 4:6 says, “do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” Colossians 4:2 likewise says, “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving.”

            If we would keep this thought in mind, we would find ourselves with numerous opportunities every day to say thank you to God. In fact, this could be a good way to carry out the command of 1 Thessalonians 5:17 to “pray without ceasing.” If we would offer a very brief prayer of thanks to the Lord as our various blessings come to mind, we would find ourselves saying thank you quite often.

S—Supplication

            The final letter in this acronym stands for supplication, which is just a fancier word for “making requests.” This may be the most humbling truth about prayer – we are invited to bring our requests to the Lord. It certainly makes sense for us to speak statements of adoration, to confess our sins, and to thank the Lord because after all – we are speaking to our superior, our Creator and Savior. The fact that he is willing to hear our requests is an example of sheer grace.

            We see supplication communicated in the three statements of this prayer: 1) your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven; 2) give us this day our daily bread; and 3) and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

            Notice how the first statement of supplication is based on promises that God had already made. He had already promised that he would establish his kingdom of righteousness in this world; he had already promised that one day his will would be done on earth as it is in heaven. So Jesus was teaching us that some of our requests at least should be informed by and fueled by the promises that God has made in the Bible.

            So for example, we can request that Christ would return soon; we can request that God would show us how his strength is made perfect in our weakness; we can request that God would make his presence with us clear to us, since he promised that he would be with us always. Knowing God’s promises, then, gives us an important base of knowledge that should influence what we ask for in prayer.

            As far as the other two examples of supplication, notice how they give us a balance between our physical needs and our spiritual needs. We need to pray about both kinds of needs without neglecting one or the other. Sometimes our physical needs can feel so urgent that they dominate our prayers and leave us with little energy or concentration to pray for our spiritual needs. On the other hand, it might feel selfish at times to pray about your own physical needs when you remember the great spiritual needs of so many people all around you.

            The goal would be to not get off-balance in either direction. Remember your physical needs and remember your spiritual needs. Remember your own needs and remember the needs of others.

            So by learning some lessons from this model prayer, we don’t have to remain tongue-tied whenever we pause to pray. With these thoughts as our guide, we can simply say what is on our hearts, then we don’t have to feel pressure to say more, as though God has a minimum word count requirement for our prayers. With Christ’s example before us, may prayer become more delightful to us all the time.

Pray Then Like This (Part 3)--Sermon on the Mount Series

            Last Sunday, the members of the music team and I got to talking briefly about the old party-line telephone systems that used to exist. If you’re not familiar with a party line, it was an arrangement in which you and your neighbors literally shared one phone line, so that if they were on the phone, you couldn’t make a phone call until they were done (or, if you wanted a little entertainment, you could just listen in on their conversation without them knowing about it!). That kind of arrangement seems completely foreign to us today with technology like cell phones, but it was fairly common not that long ago, especially in rural areas.

            Now, we are going to finish our study of The Lord’s Prayer today, and when we think about prayer, I suspect we normally think of it as a private conversation between us and the Lord—we feel like other people really have nothing to do with it. But as we will learn today, prayer is really more like a party line—not in the sense that other people can listen in on our prayers, but in the fact that the way we treat other people may “clog up the line,” so to speak. Our behavior toward others may cause interference for the prayers that we pray to God.

            Let’s quickly review the lessons that we have drawn from The Lord’s Prayer over the last two weeks, and then we will move on to consider two final lessons from this model prayer. So far, we have seen that we should pray in…

1. A manner that is personal

2. A manner that is respectful

3. A manner that is worshipful

4. A manner that is confident

5. A manner that is submissive

6. A manner that is petitionary

7. A manner that is repentant

            Now before we touch on our final two lessons, let me answer a question that you may have—what has happened to the words that we recite at the end of The Lord’s Prayer: “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.” If you are following along in our pew Bible, you’ll notice that the words aren’t there. No matter what kind of Bible you’re using, you’ll probably find that those words are either omitted or included with a footnote that says something like, “these words are not found in early manuscripts.” What’s going on here?

            You may remember that a few months ago, when we looked at Matthew 5:22, we talked about the history of how the Bible was copied. Well, when we look at the ancient copies of Matthew 6, we find some copies that contain the words “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.” and some copies that don’t contain those words. Our English translations are left to sort that out, which is why some translations omit those words and others include them with some kind of footnote.

            In my opinion, Jesus most likely did not speak those words on that occasion. Its hard to imagine why any copyist—let alone many copyists—would have omitted those words if they were in the original Gospel of Matthew. Here’s what seems to have happened—The Lord’s Prayer was apparently recited in church services from a very early date in church history (just as it is still recited in many church services today). In the earliest days of the church, Christians all shared a Jewish background, and at that point in history it was common for Jewish people to end their prayers with a statement like, “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever amen,” in the same way that we end most of our prayers with a statement like, “in Jesus’ name I pray, amen.” So its likely that The Lord’s Prayer was recited in church services with those additional words from an early date, and over time some copyists added them into their copies of the Gospel of Matthew.

            This discussion has more sentimental value than anything else, because it doesn’t affect anything that we believe as Christians and shouldn’t shake our confidence in the text of Scripture at all. But many of us have recited The Lord’s Prayer with those words since we were kids, so there is a sentimental connection there. Honestly, I don’t think there’s any problem with reciting those words when we recite The Lord’s Prayer; we can simply understand that we’re doing it as part of a long-standing Christian tradition rather than something that comes specifically from the text.

But let’s move along to our final two lessons from this model prayer.

8. A manner that is circumspect

            This statement simply means that we should pray with an eye toward our surroundings—not our physical surroundings, but our relationships with other people. This is why I said that prayer is more like a party line than a private line.

            Last week, we learned that is appropriate for us to ask for forgiveness when we pray, but there is a specific way in which we must show that we understand our need to be forgiven. In v. 12, the Lord teaches us to say, “and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” That’s very interesting—Jesus ties our request to be forgiven together with our obedience to God in forgiving others. The idea is that by forgiving others, we have shown our understanding of our own need to be forgiven.

            Since the Bible commands us to forgive others, we are sinning if we fail to do so, and that means that if we ask God to forgive us, yet we fail to forgive others, we are sinning at the same time that we’re asking for forgiveness! That doesn’t make any sense. That would be like asking someone to forgive you for being a bully while you’re punching them in the gut!

            When we fail to forgive other people, that reveals that we haven’t fully come to terms with the depths of our own sins, and that is a requirement for being forgiven by God. The biblical term “confess” literally means “to say the same thing as another,” so when the Bible speaks of confessing our sins—as in 1 John 1:9—it means that we must say the same thing about our sins that God says about them—that they are vile and despicable and a great insult to Him.

            But if we fail to forgive others, that is a sure sign that we are downplaying the severity of our own sins. Jesus tells a great parable to illustrate this idea in Matthew 18 [READ Matt 18:21-35]. That’s what its like when we fail to forgive others—it reveals that we have minimized the severity of our own sins.

            That’s why Jesus elaborates on this thought in Matthew 6:14-15—“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” When we forgive others, we are displaying a truly repentant heart, which is what God requires of us for our sins to be forgiven.

            Now let us not read vv. 14-15 as a requirement to either gain or keep our salvation. Notice that Jesus calls God “your heavenly Father”—He is speaking to those people in His audience who were already believers, those who could already call God their Father. We’re talking about the “family” forgiveness that we discussed last week—the kind that wipes away not any sort of legal charges, but the barriers that may hinder the fullness of joy and intimacy and inheritance from a father to his children.

            So we must understand that the way we treat others can cause “static on the line” when we pray to God; it may cause our “call” to be dropped, like when you drive through a dead spot in your cell phone network. Psalm 66:16-19 sums up the same idea: “Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for my soul. I cried to him with my mouth, and high praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But truly God has listened; he has attended to the voice of my prayer.”

9. A manner that is trusting

            We draw this lesson from the final two phrases of the prayer: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Our English word “temptation” really does not do justice to the Greek word that it is attempting to translate. When we talk about “temptation,” we think of some enticement that is designed to make us sin, and its very confusing to think that we would need to ask God not to put us in a situation that is designed to make us sin. As a matter of fact, James 1:13 tells us that God cannot even do such a thing: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.”

            What we have to understand about this Greek word in Matthew 6:13 is that it can refer to all kinds of difficult situations. It can refer to temptation if the one doing the tempting is Satan or simply our own sinful desires, but it can also refer to times of persecution or even the hardship that comes from dealing with a physical illness. So we might do well to translate this term in a more general way—something like “lead us not into difficult times.”

            In my opinion, even the words “lead us” kind of obscure a beautiful word picture that comes through in Greek. This Greek verb translated “lead us” is the same verb used to describe the actions of the men who carried their paralyzed friend to Jesus and lowered him down through the roof. Here in this phrase, it creates the picture of God literally carrying us through life, and our request then is that He would not carry us into difficult times.

            When I think of this request, then, I think back to times when my family used to go for walks when I was very young. I had a hard time keeping up, of course, so when I got tired and we still had a long ways to go to get home, I would say, “Dad, its shoulder time for Timmy,” and he would put me on his shoulders and carry me the rest of the way home. I think with this request to God we’re basically saying, “Lord, could we just always make it shoulder time? I’m so weak, Lord, and I know that my strength might give out, so would you carry me out of these hard times?”

            But as every parent knows, our children must learn to walk on their own and to keep going even when they’re tired. God knows and has even told us about all the good that can come out of hard times, so sometimes He does carry us into difficult moments—even moments when we face attacks and temptations from Satan, who of course is “the evil one” mentioned in v. 13. We need only to think about Job, or the Lord Jesus Himself, who was tempted by Satan in the wilderness, or the Apostle Paul, who said in 2 Corinthians 12:7 that he was given “a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.”

            The book of James tells us that we should actually rejoice when we face hard times because of the good that such moments can produce within us: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials [the same Greek word as “temptations” in Matthew 6:13] of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

            But this encouragement from James sets up an odd situation—if James tells us to rejoice when we face hard times because they can do us good, why does Jesus teach us to ask God not to carry us into those times? I think the Lord is teaching us two lessons. First, that it is okay for us to bring our requests to God. Even though we know that hard times can be good for us, it is okay for us to ask God to do things a different way. Jesus prayed this very way in the Garden of Gethsemane when He said, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” He made His request for God to do things a certain way, but of course He ended that prayer with the words, “nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”

            Second, I think Jesus is teaching us that its healthy for us to pray in this way. Whenever we pray for God to do something about our circumstances, we are acknowledging our belief—our conviction—that God really can do something about our circumstances. In the same way that it is healthy to tell your spouse “I love you” over and over throughout your marriage, it is healthy for us to continue to acknowledge the truths we believe about God. When we pray about a certain need, we are again affirming our belief in God as provider. When we ask God again and again to forgive us for the sins we commit, we are reaffirming our belief in God as Savior and Redeemer. And when we ask Him not to carry us into difficult times, we acknowledge again that He is in control—our lives are in His hands, and we pray to Him because we know that He can intervene in our lives and because we know that He loves us enough to consider our requests.

            And though Jesus may not have spoken these words on that day, it is not a bad way to express our praise to God by saying, “thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”

Pray Then Like This (Part 2)--Sermon on the Mount Series

            Today, we’re going to pick up where we left off last week in our discussion of prayer, and in a way, I think that’s a fitting way to discuss this subject. Its similar to the way that we might actually think of our own prayer lives—one extended conversation that’s interrupted every so often but that we just take up again with a statement like, “now as I was saying.” We might not actually begin our prayers with a statement like, “now as I was saying,” but that can be a helpful way to think about our habit of prayer. Our prayer lives should be like one ongoing conversation that we just keep coming back to time and time again.

            And we don’t necessarily have to pray for a long time every time we pray. One thing that many people have pointed out about this model prayer that we call The Lord’s Prayer is that its very short—it doesn’t take much more than about 30 seconds to recite it out loud. Now on one level, that makes sense, because this passage is part of a larger sermon, and the sermon overall isn’t really about prayer. So its understandable that Jesus didn’t spend too much time talking about prayer on that particular occasion, but I think we can draw the lesson that we don’t always have to pray for long stretches of time.

            Last week, we drew four lessons from The Lord’s Prayer. We learned that pray should be offered in…

1. A manner that is personal

2. A manner that is respectful

3. A manner that is worshipful

4. A manner that is confident

We’ll continue today with three more lessons.

5. A manner that is submissive

            We learn this lesson from v. 10—“Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” This verse presents us with a reminder that prayer is not about an attempt to get God to do our will. We can certainly bring our requests to Him, but the bottom line is that we are to align ourselves with God’s will, not the other way around.

            Its like the old joke about the sea captain who noticed a light directly in the path of his ship. So he got on the radio and said, “This is Captain Jones of the US Navy. Our boats are on a collision course. Please change your course by 10 degrees.” The person on the other end said, “This is Ensign Smith of the US Navy. Please change your course by 10 degrees.” But the Captain said, “I am a captain and you are a ensign. You change your course by 10 degrees.” But Ensign Smith replied, “You change your course by 10 degrees.” Finally, Captain Jones said, “Smith! I am the captain of a US Navy destroyer! You change your course by 10 degrees!” And Ensign Smith replied, “I am a radio operator in a lighthouse. You change your course by 10 degrees.” God is not the one who needs to change course—we need to get our course in line with His.

            As I mentioned last week, this request for God’s kingdom to come is a reference to the many prophecies in the Old Testament in which God said He was planning to establish a kingdom in this world. When Jesus taught His audience to express this desire, He was building on the fact that they were familiar with these prophecies about the kingdom. In other words, they were knowledgeable about the Bible they had at that time, which was the Old Testament.

            This observation should teach us that knowledge of the Bible and effective praying go hand in hand. After all, if we’re going to pray for God’s will to be done, we need to be familiar with His will, and the place to gain that knowledge is the Bible. As we learn more about the way that God wants us to live, we gain an almost limitless source of inspiration for prayer. We learn, for example, that God wants us to be humble, so we can pray for God to help us become humble. That may bring to mind certain situations that really tempt us to be proud, so we can pray more specifically by praying about those particular situations.

            Bible study and prayer form a cycle of communication that belong together and feed off of each other. If you often feel like you just don’t know what to say in prayer, it could be that you just need to become more familiar with God’s desires for you as He’s expressed them in the Bible. You can’t knowingly submit to a plan that you’re not familiar with; likewise, we can only pray for God’s will to be done as we become more familiar with His will.

            As in basically all matters, the Lord Jesus is our best example for what it looks like to pray submissively. You may remember that in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus was about to be arrested and crucified, He made a very clear request of God the Father. He said, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me (which was a reference to the suffering He was about to endure).” He certainly made a request, but He ended His prayer by saying, “nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.” We can certainly bring our requests to God, but it must always be in a submissive manner.

6. A manner that is petitionary

            This simply means that we come to God as people who are in need and asking for help. We learn this lesson in vv. 11-13, where Jesus teaches us to make specific requests about our various needs. Notice that He mentions both physical needs—like daily bread—and spiritual needs—like forgiveness and protection from temptation. As Jesus said in Matthew 4:4, “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” Thus, as we pray so often about our physical needs, let’s not forget that we have many spiritual needs as well.

            But let’s do focus for a moment on our physical needs as Jesus expressed them in v. 11—“Give us this day our daily bread.” When Jesus told us back in v. 6 that God knows what we need before we ask Him, He wasn’t telling us not to pray about our needs. In fact, I think He was encouraging us to pray about them with even more confidence in God’s faithfulness to meet our needs. After all, we must have confidence in God’s faithfulness to pray such a modest request as we find in v. 11. Notice how modest it really is—if I may paraphrase, the request is, “Give us the food we need for today.” That’s a very modest request.

            Now if you’re like me, you feel more like praying, “Lord, give me what I need for the next ten years, then I’ll handle it from here.” After all, I listen to Dave Ramsey! I’ll just make an envelope for each year over the next ten years, and I’ll have it taken care of! That’s what I feel like praying for—a big, lump-sum payment that I can manage myself.

            But that’s not the request of v. 11—the request is, “Give us the food we need for today.” I think its very likely that Jesus meant for us to think back to the story of God providing manna for the children of Israel in the wilderness. When the people of Israel left their slavery in Egypt, they were a family of at least 1 million people (perhaps more like 2 million depending on how many children they had). That would be a logistical nightmare to feed that many people every day, but God fed them every day with what Exodus 16 calls a “flake-like” substance that was left behind on the ground every morning after the dew had evaporated. The people were able to gather these flakes and make them into flour that they would then bake into bread. Exodus 16:31 says it was like coriander seed and tasted like it was sweetened with honey. The first time the people saw it, they asked each other, “What is it?” which in Hebrew is simply man. Before long they simply decided to call it man, so its name means “what is this stuff?”

            Now God gave the people a regulation about the manna—each day, they were only supposed to gather the amount they needed for that day and no more. God actually caused it to spoil overnight if the people tried to store more than they needed. The only exception was on the day before the weekly day of rest. On that day, the people were supposed to gather enough for two days, and the Lord kept it from spoiling overnight.

            So each day, the people received enough for that day but no more. Talk about a faith-building experience! Every day, you would wake up with no food, but God’s rations for you were there for you to gather so that you would be fed. It is this kind of daily, moment-by-moment dependence on God that Jesus calls us to have when we pray about our needs. In light of such a humble request, many of us have more thanking to do than requesting, because we already have our daily needs met for many days to come. Perhaps an appropriate challenge for us, then, is to consider how we should be generous with our excess and how we need to cultivate contentment rather than placing an ever-growing number of things into the category of “needs.”

            But let us do remember this lesson that Jesus teaches us to pray to God about our needs. And as we see in this model prayer, our needs extend beyond merely our physical needs. We have spiritual needs as well, such as the need for forgiveness. And so we are also taught to pray in…

7. A manner that is repentant

            We find this lesson in v. 12 with the phrase, “forgive us our debts.” Some of you may have memorized The Lord’s Prayer with the word “trespasses,” which simply comes from the other record of The Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11. Jesus offered The Lord’s Prayer as a model prayer on another occasion as well, and on that occasion He used the word “trespasses,” but on this occasion in Matthew 6 He used the word “debts” to create a metaphor that compares our sins to financial debts that we might incur.

            The meaning of the phrase is clear—it is a request for God to cancel those debts; to forgive our sins so that they are no longer held against us. Some people have taught that once we are saved, once we become Christians, it is no longer necessary for us to ask God for forgiveness. In fact, they would say that it is inappropriate and wrong for us to ask God for forgiveness. To them, such a request dishonors and disregards the forgiveness that we have already received.

            But I think the context of this statement teaches us that it is fully appropriate for Christians to ask God for forgiveness. Just think again about what Jesus has already taught us to pray—He has taught us to call God “our Father,” to express a desire that God’s reputation be honored and that His will would be perfectly accomplished. These are statements that can only be genuinely expressed by Christians. Only Christians may call God “Father;” only Christians would even want God’s will to be perfectly accomplished. So when we get to v. 12, why would we think that Jesus would mention something that is only appropriate for non-Christians to pray? The Lord’s Prayer is given as a model prayer for those who are already saved; thus, everything in it is appropriate for a Christian to pray.

            To understand our continued need to ask for forgiveness, we simply need to understand how our relationship to God changed when we were saved. Before we repented of our sins and accepted Christ, we related to God as our Creator and Judge. We had broken God’s laws, and we deserved to pay the penalty for our law-breaking. But when Jesus died, He paid that penalty for us, so that when we repent of our sins and accept Christ, the payment He made is applied to us, and on that basis God declares that our case is closed. The penalty has been paid in full and our legal troubles in God’s court of law are settled.

            According to Scripture, God then adopts us into His own spiritual family, so that now we relate to God as our Savior and Father. Now in our biological families, when we disobeyed our parents, it was appropriate for us to ask for their forgiveness—not from any sort of legal penalty, as though they were pressing charges against us, but from the hurt and pain we had caused them, from the damage we had done to our relationship.

            That is the sense in which we as Christians come before God to ask for forgiveness. We’re not asking Him to once again forgive the legal penalty of our sins, because that case has been closed. Instead, we’re asking Him to forgive us for the damage we’ve caused to our relationship, in the same way that we should ask our parents for forgiveness.

            We’ll continue with a few more lessons next week, but let’s briefly review what we’ve learned today. We should pray in a manner that is submissive. Our attitude should reflect a willingness to adjust our lives to God’s will, rather than thinking that prayer is a way to get God to adjust to our will. I think we encouraged to have this kind of attitude when we remember the great many needs that we have, and that God alone is able to meet those needs. We thus humbly come before him with our requests, and one of those requests that we should make is to be forgiven of the sins that we’ve committed, so that our intimacy with God will be all that it can be.

Pray Then Like This (Part 1)--Sermon on the Mount Series

            One of the most common problems we face in communicating with others is the problem of simply not knowing what to say. When we’re young, for example, there may be a lovely lady or a macho man who catches our eye, and we’d like to talk to them, but we never do because we feel like we simply don’t know what to say. Or perhaps as your parents grow older you feel a desire to somehow express to them all that they mean to you, but you hesitate for a long time because you just don’t know what to say.

            Since prayer is a form of communication, we might face this problem when we think about praying. I suspect most Christians would say, “I don’t pray as often as I’d like to,” and perhaps a major factor in that reality is the feeling that we simply don’t know what to say. Well, the Lord Jesus very graciously has given us a model prayer to teach us how to pray. Notice that I did not say what to pray, as though Jesus was saying, “You should pray the following words and these words only.” Rather, the Lord has given us something like an outline for our prayers that will help us pray with the proper attitudes.

            This teaching comes through the passage that we normally call today, “The Lord’s Prayer,” and we find one record of it in The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6:9-15. Let’s read this whole section, then we’ll begin to pull out the lessons that we should learn from it [READ 6:9-15].

            Remember that Jesus has just warned us not to pray with a desire to gain praise from others or in a manner that tries to manipulate God (as if we needed to do that!). So now that He’s told us how NOT to pray, He tells us how to pray, beginning in v. 9 with the statement, “pray then like this.” Notice that Jesus didn’t say, “pray this,” but rather “pray like this.” He is giving us an example of how to pray, not telling us what the exact contact of all our prayers must be.

            You may have grown up in a church or denomination that recited this prayer on a weekly basis, and that’s fine as long as we know what we are praying. But therein lies the problem—many people have recited this prayer without having any idea what they were actually saying! How many people actually know what the word “hallowed” means? If we recite a memorized prayer without having any idea of what we’re actually asking for, then we’re right back to that kind of pagan praying that Jesus warned us about in vv. 7-8.

            The point of Jesus’ instruction was not to give us specific words to pray—though again, it is fine to pray these words as long as you know what they mean. But the real point of Jesus’ instruction was to give us a model to follow, an example to imitate, in the same way that you might teach your children to imitate the style of your prayers.

So what is the manner or the attitude in which we should pray?

In What Manner Should We Pray?

1. A manner that is personal

            We draw this lesson from the simple address “our Father.” The Sermon on the Mount strongly emphasizes that we enjoy a relationship with God that is like that of a child to a father. In just these three chapters that comprise The Sermon on the Mount, God is referred to as our Father 16 times. This kind of repetition clearly makes a deliberate emphasis, and I think there’s a very practical reason for it—the kind of choice that Jesus is calling His audience to make is a choice that may put them out of favor with their own parents. As it is in some parts of the world today, when people at that time accepted Christ, they ran the risk of being rejected by their own family members. So as Jesus calls His audience to make that choice, He repeatedly reminds them that if they embrace Him, they will have God Himself as their Father.

            Through Jesus, we have a personal, intimate relationship with God, and we can express that reality through the privilege of addressing God as our Father. Remember how different that notion is from the way that the Gentiles thought about their own gods. They had no concept that their gods played the role of a father to them. Their gods were indifferent toward them, and perhaps if you did the right things in the right way you could move the gods to act in your behalf, but to think of the gods having the loving compassion of a father was completely foreign to them.

            This address—our Father in heaven—is also notable for how short it is. Last week I mentioned that the Gentiles would often pile on titles of honor when addressing their gods. That manner of speaking was found in Jewish circles as well. But for the Christian, we don’t have to go on and on with titles and formalities when we speak to God—we can address Him simply and plainly, because that’s the way that personal relationships work, isn’t it? We don’t use titles and formalities with friends and family.

            Last week, I was back at my alma mater, Calvary Bible College. I ran into several of my old professors, and I kept calling them “Dr. so-and-so.” But they kept telling me, “Oh, just call me Jim.” It’s a little awkward sometimes to make that transition, but they were letting me know that there was no longer any need for titles, no longer any need for formalities. They considered me a friend and a colleague now, so I could address them as such.

            And so it is with God—He is our Father, and we can address Him as such. Along with that, we don’t have to use formal language when we pray. We can simply speak using our normal vocabulary. We don’t need to get out a thesaurus and use all kinds of high-fallutin’ language—we can speak to God in a manner that is personal.

Yet of course we must remember to speak with…

2. A manner that is respectful

            Though we can relate to God on a level that is personal rather than formal, we must remember that our spiritual Father is still “our Father in heaven.” The fact that He is our Father does not diminish by one iota the fact that He is majestic and glorious and worthy of our worship. As 1 Peter 1:17-19 states, “If you call on him as Father who judges impartially according to each one’s deeds, conduct yourselves with fear throughout the time of your exile, knowing that you were ransomed from the futile ways inherited from your forefathers, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot.”

            So, as we embrace the freedom to speak to God in a way that is personal rather than formal, we must still pray in a manner that is respectful rather than flippant.

3. A manner that is worshipful

            Remember that the idea of “worship” or “praise” is the idea of declaring how valuable something is. I take this lesson that prayer should be worshipful from the phrase “hallowed be your name.” I think this is a place where traditionalism has not served the Church well. “Hallowed” is not a commonly used word today, yet modern translations of the Bible continue to use it, mainly just to uphold tradition.

            I read an article once by the man who served as the chairman of the New Testament translation committee for the English Standard Version that I preach from, and he said that when the committee discussed this verse, he pushed for a different translation. But the rest of the committee said, in effect, “Everyone has memorized this verse as ‘hallowed be your name’—we can’t change it!”

            And so we live with this word. The word “hallowed” simply means “set apart.” I think the best way to translate this phrase might be “may Your name be uniquely honored.” Remember that the idea of God’s “name” refers to his reputation. It’s the same idea we’re talking about when we say that someone is “making a name” for himself or “you’re dragging my name through the mud.” We’re talking about a person’s reputation.

            So Jesus is teaching us to express our desire for God’s reputation and fame to be placed in a class all by itself. Perhaps you can see then how this is a statement of worship. We are acknowledging that God is worthy to have his name or reputation honored in such a way.

            As we think about how to express this thought in our own prayers, I think we can take a lesson from the Old Testament book of Psalms. In the Psalms, the authors would frequently praise God by describing how they could see what kind of God He is through the things He has done. Think of Psalm 139:14 for example: “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” If I can paraphrase, King David was saying, “God I praise you because I can see how powerful and intelligent you must be through the way you made me.”

            So we might express an idea like “hallowed by your name” through statements of thanksgiving for example. We might say, “Lord, I praise you for being so generous in meeting my needs today.” And of course, when we express a desire for God’s reputation to be uniquely honored, we’re expressing a commitment to do what we can to honor God’s name. So we could also express this idea with some requests: “Lord, help me to honor you today with the things I say and the way I act.”

4. A manner that is confident

            I take this lesson from two phrases—first, the address “our Father.” Remember when we talked about pagan praying last week, I said that the Gentiles had no confidence that their gods even cared about them. But we have a very different context for our prayers—we are praying to a God who has actually taken the initiative to make us His children. Our Lord Jesus understands us inside and out, and now He is in Heaven as our advocate. That’s why Hebrews 4:16 says, “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”

            I also draw this lesson from the first phrase of v. 10, “your kingdom come.” In essence, this statement is a request for God to carry out the promises that He has made in the Bible. All throughout the Old Testament, God described His intention to establish a kingdom in this world ruled by His Chosen One, the Messiah. This kingdom would be a kingdom of peace, joy, and justice. It will be, when Jesus returns to establish it, the pinnacle of human history in this world.

            So this statement in v. 10 is a plea for God to move forward with His plan, to fulfill the promises that He has made. When we remember that we pray to a God who has a plan and is in control of history, that should give us tremendous confidence. Praying to God is far above the level of simply wishing upon a star or making a wish as you blow out the candles on your birthday cake. It isn’t just some shot in the dark all dressed up in religious language. We are praying to the One who actually can make a difference, the One who is in control. He has a plan and He has given us many details about it.

            This lesson is one that can keep us going through those times when it seems like we’re not receiving any answer to our prayers. Perhaps you have prayed for years for reconciliation with a family member or for some kind of need in your own life like a health problem or a financial need, and it just seems like you’re not getting any answer. In those moments, it is so easy to feel like there’s no rhyme or reason behind things or that nothing will ever happen. It is so helpful in those times to remember that God does have a plan. He has an overall plan for history about which we know many details, but that also means He’s in control of our daily lives to bring our stories into resolution with His plan. You may be five days, five hours, or five minutes away from receiving an answer to your prayers that is totally unexpected and better than what you had originally asked for in the first place!

            I want to close our time today by reading a parable that Jesus told in Luke 18:1-8 [READ Luke 18:1-8]. The Lord’s question is the question that we must wrestle with—will Jesus find us living in faith when he comes? According to this parable, faith is expressed by persistence in prayer. Will Jesus find us persistently coming to God with our needs, despite an apparent delay from God? Remember that God does have a plan will help us remain confident in prayer.