Please remain standing, if you would. We'll all give attention to the word of God. It comes to us this morning from Matthew 6.
In a moment, I will read verses seven through 15 of Matthew 6.
This is the first in a series of sermons that I am preaching at our home church in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, and I expect it to be around eight messages when it is done.
So since I preach here at Bay Haven about once a year, I should finish this off at some point, as I calculate, in the year 2033, if the Lord should preserve me and preserve you.
But I want us all to be comforted this morning by the fact that God has invited us to come to him and to call him our father.
That name, father, as a name for God is nearly absent from the Old Covenant, as you will soon hear, but we have been invited to use that name because of the work of Christ and the example of Christ and the command by Christ that we should call The God of heaven our very father.
So let's give attention to this as the Lord's Prayer in its entirety. Though the sermon is only on the first words,[7] “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. [8] Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. [9] Pray then like this:“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. [10] Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. [11] Give us this day our daily bread, [12] and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. [13] And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. [14] For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, [15] but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
This is God's word. May he add his blessing to its reading.
Let's take a moment and ask for his blessing, Father, we do pray that You would help us now to understand and to love this prayer. We need you to come and to give us insight and to move us to pray with sincere hearts to you, our Father, we pray these things in Jesus name, Amen. Please be seated if you would.
How do you start reading a book?
Do you read the preface?
Or do you start with Chapter One?
I usually at least skim the preface and then give it more attention if it looks interesting, but I never read it twice. How about you?
There is one preface that all of you have read countless times.
It is the preface to the Lord's Lord's prayer. And what I want to read to you now is a question answer from the shorter catechism we've already read the larger catechism. This is from the shorter catechism question number 100 what does the preface of the Lord's Prayer teach us? And here's the answer, the preface of the Lord's Prayer, which is our Father, which art in heaven teaches us to draw near to God with all holy reverence and confidence as children to a father able and ready to help us and that we should pray with and for others.
If it were not for the Catechism, I would not know to call the opening words of the Lord's Prayer a preface, but it is a preface that no reader should skip, and that every Christian should read again, again and again our Father, which art in heaven, or who art in heaven? Same thing today's message is on two words our father, two amazing words.
They are words of comfort and words that draw us all into the common life.
We enjoy as those who belong to Jesus Christ with these two words, we approach the father of love and power, and we do it together as His people, as his family.
And so I want us all to consider this great reality that God has invited us to come and call him our father in these two ways.
It's the outline for the message. So two points, pretty good. Number one, we approach the father together. It's important. And then number two, we approach the Father with intimacy. So let's take up those two concepts.
The Lord's Prayer is the best known prayer in the Christian church. It may be the best known of all prayers, I don't know. It provides a pattern for our prayers, and it can be recited as it was given to us by Jesus in the sacred gathering of his people, as it was recited this morning in this very assembly.
It is a prayer for Christians.
We call it the Lord's prayer because the Lord gave it to us.
But actually it is a prayer that Jesus Himself does not pray, at least not in its entirety, because it includes the request for forgiveness.
Jesus was like us, tempted in every way as we are, and yet, as the Scriptures teach us, he was without sin. That's Hebrews 415 he did not sin, and so he does not ask for forgiveness. We say, Forgive us. He says, Forgive them.
So the Lord's Prayer is for Christians, though it is recited by a lot of people who do not believe in Christ, like me when I was young, I learned it in a class. I recited it in the church services, but I did so with little reflection on his words and no faith in the One who gave us the words.
I was probably guilty of heaping up empty phrases, as Jesus warned against. You've heard those words using the very words that Jesus provided.
The phrases were not empty. Of course, they weren't, but I recited them mindlessly and with no faith.
I do remember how that changed when Christ Saved me during my college years. And maybe some of you remember when you first said our father with faith in His Son.
People who do not have Christ as their brother cannot claim God as their father. So if you're here today and you do not trust in Jesus Christ to save you from your sins, then the Lord's Prayer is not really for you.
Yet it can be. It can be today, if you come to Christ and receive him.
The Father's love and care are offered to all who call upon his son for the forgiveness of their sins and peace with God and joy in the Holy Spirit and the gift of everlasting life, that invitation to trust in Christ and to enter the family of his father is extended to all people.
It isn't an invitation to all of you.
Now let's take up those two descriptions on how we ought to approach the Father. First, we approach the father together, the warnings about prayer that Jesus gave in the Sermon on the Mount are clear and they are penetrating.
You see them in his words that lead up to the prayer and and they are very convicting if you read them carefully. Prayer is a gracious and generous invitation from God to enter into His fellowship, to speak to him with liberty and to expect from him things that only he is able to do.
So, prayer is not an exercise in verbosity many words. It is not an occasion for public display.
It is not a means to attract attention from other.
Others, or to gain their approval or to get their respect. Prayer isn't any of those things, and yet it functioned that way for those who practiced prayer in the days when Jesus lived so well. Here's the sum up.
Don't pray with the hope of public praise. Don't pray with mindless repetition, but go into your room. Pray in secret, and your all knowing father will hear you, and He will reward you. So there you go. Christ's warnings along with the father's generous invitation.
It's so interesting and instructive. I would say that once Jesus exposed the public abuse of prayer and invited his disciples to be alone with the Father in their prayers, He told the very same disciples to pray together.
Public display of pious conduct is not the same as gathered family corporate prayer, the first Jesus forbids and the second he commands, go to your Father in secret and now pray this way, not my father, but our Father.
We can say, my father, of course, we can. We ought to do so. But let's never neglect the hour in our Father, don't neglect the hour. This is the sweet hour of prayer, as we might sing, not no h in the word the sweet O, you are the sweet hour of prayer.
And it's not only the words our father that call us to pray together. It is the whole of the Lord's prayer that calls us.
Have you seen it? Give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts. Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil. I think you can see it.
Our us, our us, our us, us.
Jesus is not giving us a formula for private prayer. As important as private prayer is, it is corporate prayer.
It is praying together.
It is a prayer for the church gathered in groups of various sizes, but also, and I believe especially, gathered in Sabbath worship.
He's not forbidding the use of these words in our private prayers. Of course, he has not used them absolutely.
But as you do, be conscious as you pray that they really are for the whole church, it's not just you.
It is a precious thought. I think you will agree that all of God's people in all of the world approaches him through Christ with these precise words on their lips and in their hearts.
Jesus is calling the church to pray together, to use these words as a framework to guide us when we pray together, and even use these very words that Jesus gave us as we pray, as we approach the father together in our worship.
Let me put it plainly, we practice prayer in secret and we offer prayers in our worship.
Never allow one of those things to displace the other don't say I don't have to go to church I pray privately. And don't say I don't have to pray privately because I go to church. These exclusions do not honor Christ, and they do not reflect the teachings of Christ on prayer, approach the father together.
How beautiful and How precious is this?
It is the father who is saying to his children, come to me. My children. Be with me. Know that I am your father. Offer your praises, bring your requests. I will hear you all, and I will bless you, all of you, every one of you as you, come to me together.
This is the church, one body, one temple, one family, one flock, one bride, entering the presence of the one true and living God. We are his, and he is ours. He is our Father, and we should offer our prayers to him together, and so let's all do that with sincerity and with confidence in him.
We approach the father together.
And the second thought is this, we approach the Father with intimacy. I wonder if you've given that much thought.
I was speaking with one of my mentors, oh, a long time ago about worship. He was an important person to me, someone your pastor knows. I'll tell him the name later. Had some questions for him. I was entering my first full time preaching ministerial call, and I had questions, how do you conduct a worship service? What do you say as you lead people in corporate praise? How do you pray for God's people to honor Christ in their in their worship and to benefit from the experience of worship?
These were the questions I had, and these were the questions I asked. And he took a piece of paper and he wrote three words on it that he believed described a proper worship service. Can you imagine what they were?
Three words, here's what what he wrote down, reverence, celebration and intimacy that's interesting, isn't it? And he said it was this third word that remains under appreciated in the church. And he confessed in his own in his own heart, as Christ's church, we are to bow down in reverence. We're to rise up with joy, and we are to rest secure in the presence of a father who loves us very deeply and who welcomes us as we come to Him through His Son, Jesus Christ. Do we do that?
I hope we do. I hope when you come into the worship room, you are sensing the welcome of the Father because He is welcoming you.
One of our elders once said, When he opened a worship service, he said, The Father wants to be with you more than you want to be with him.
That's a good statement. We bow down before Him. We rise up in rejoicing with him, and we are assured of his fatherly care and his invitation to be in our in his company.
I've heard it said that the new covenant name for God is father.
Have you heard that?
Read the Old Testament, scriptures? Take your time.
There are a lot of words.
The number of times God is called father is very low, fewer than 20 actually, and mostly in general usage, like God is the Father of Israel, phrases like that, and yet, father is the word that Jesus used in his prayers and the word he told us to use in our prayers. What an honor.
Abraham did not use the name Moses didn't call God his Father, at least Scripture doesn't record him doing so.
And yet, Jesus did not address God directly without calling him father, and he gave us the very same privilege.
How does that make you feel?
He did cry, my God. My God. Why have you forsaken me while he was giving his life for your sins, he didn't call him father then, but those were Old Testament words, weren't they?
Psalm 22 and they spoke of Christ, and they were cried out by Christ, as the Son of God was receiving the punishment for our sins, as the father turned his face away from the son, as we sometimes sing, do you know the name Abba? Have you heard that before?
It's another way to address God, and it contemplates a close, warm relationship with a loving father, used especially during times of grief, trial, trouble, but not always.
Jesus used it, and he gave it for our use. He doesn't require the name itself. It's not our language. We may use it, but he doesn't insist upon it.
But.
He does invite us to enjoy sweet fellowship with a loving Father, our loving Abba Father, and it's the Holy Spirit who moves us to cry out to God with his fatherly care in view, approaching the Father with intimacy is a supernatural work of the Spirit. It's not natural.
It doesn't come to us automatically. We have so many fears when we pray, don't we? We all feel them, but Jesus is telling us not to be afraid to pray and to pray in the most intimate, transparent, faith filled way, God will not judge you. He judged Christ for you.
He will not judge you. He will not reject you. He will not mock you. He will not require you to pray with perfect words.
You may think that your prayers are not worthy, that they don't measure up to God's majesty, but God doesn't think that way. He receives your prayers through Christ. He receives Christ's prayers for you and your prayers, they are caught up with our Savior's prayers, and together, they express what is nearly impossible to say with words.
And that is why we need the Holy Spirit when we pray, isn't it?
And praise God we have the Holy Spirit. We have the spirit because we are children and because God is our Father.
Galatians, four, six. Do you know these words? And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba Father, or these words for you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, Abba Father, the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God. Romans 815, through 17, your sense of being a child invited to commune with your dear father is one measure of your Christian maturity.
If you've read J i Packer's knowing God. You may recall this well known statement on this.
Let me read it to you.
This is Packer. What is a Christian?
The question can be answered in many ways, but the richest answer I know is that a Christian is one who has God as Father, if you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child and having God as his father.
It is possible that some of you struggle with the idea that you have a perfect, Heavenly Father, one who loves you perfectly, one who pays attention to you when you speak, one who provides for you completely.
You reflect on your own natural father and his character, and you realize that he did not provide the best model of fatherly care.
And then you wonder even about God, do I even know what a loving father is?
Do I really believe that God can be dear to me? It is, it is. It is a long, even lifelong lesson for some of you, perhaps maybe to some degree, it's a lifelong lesson for all of us.
There is no perfect father, human father, of course, but you can learn about fatherhood from a good, if flawed example.
And you can also learn through contrast, your heavenly Father is everything. Your own father was not.
Martin Luther knew this. You know that name.
He had a stern, demanding father. Both of his parents were that way. Actually, Luther wrote this. He said, For the sake of stealing a nut, my mother once beat me until blood flowed when Luther decided to end his pursuit of law and enter a monastery for religious training. We.
His parents were angry.
They felt disgraced, and they did not hide their anger and abiding disappointment in their son.
Luther did not reach his father's expectations, and his father told him, and Luther felt it deeply.
His religious understanding was in part, shaped by his upbringing, and yet, when the gospel came to him and did its transforming work in him, he learned what he had not known before, that he had a loving, welcoming, accepting Father.
Listen to these words from his Small Catechism.
The question is, Our Father, who art in heaven? What does this mean? Here's his answer.
With these words, God tenderly invites us to believe that he is our True Father and that we are His true children, so that with all boldness and confidence we may ask him as dear children, ask their dear father as true and dear children. We have a true and dear father.
That is what the gospel gives us.
Let us all pray in that light, I want to read to you what you've already read this morning. That is the larger catechism Question and Answer 189 and just to highlight a couple of phrases in it, let me read this to you. The question, as you know, is this, what does the preface of the Lord's Prayer teach us we're still in the preface.
Here's the answer the preface of the Lord's Prayer, contained in these words, our Father, which art in heaven, teaches us when we pray to draw near to God with confidence of his fatherly goodness, not good.
I'll keep reading and our interest therein with reference and all other child like dispositions, heavenly affections and due apprehensions of his sovereign power, majesty and gracious condescension, as also to pray with and for others.
Are you confident of his fatherly goodness?
Do you find in your heart a childlike disposition?
I hope we all are, and we all do, but be honest with yourself right now.
Do you ever even in your prayers? Sense that God is less than fully loving toward you, that he does not really see or understand your needs, that he will hear you, but he won't really answer your prayers.
Do you see him as measured and stingy, rather than one who is overflowing with generosity, who told you to think in that way.
Who told you to pray in that way?
Jesus would have you believe precisely the opposite. In fact, it's all right there in the Sermon on the Mount Matthew Matthew five through seven. And what I mean by that is an examination of the words, the verbs that are used in that sermon. Let me, let me. Let me give you those verbs. These are the verbs that Jesus uses with the father's name.
And you can read the whole sermon, and you'll see them there. Let me give them to you.
The father loves, the father rewards. The father sees, The Father knows, and the Father gives. This is the father of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in him, this is your father, and you are His children.
We need such help with this, don't we? It is so easy for us to pray mindlessly, or if we set our hearts in meaningful ways, to wonder if our father really does love, reward, see, know and give.
But we must not wonder.
Jesus says that the father does all of these things. He does more things, but never less than love, reward, see, know and give, and he doesn't change. He will, He will never be less than all of this for you, let's convince our hearts that this is so.
Pray with his promises before us, the father's generous promises before us. Let's pray in our homes and in our closets and in church with the father's own description of himself in very close view.
The challenge of the Lord's Prayer is that it's so dense, it addresses so many different things, and I don't know if it's possible to reflect on every phrase when we recited. I don't think it's necessary, but let's all at least come to know and appreciate that our father is the one who welcomes us and blesses us and provides for every need that we have and we can do that. We can as the Spirit helps us to do it.
And don't skip the preface with your voice or in your heart.
I grew up in a church where the pastor would launch the prayer without notice and the congregation had to catch up after a word or two. I sometimes missed the preface altogether myself.
But it's not merely a matter of words.
It's a matter of corporate intimacy coming together to offer praise and to call upon our dear, loving Heavenly Father. May all of our hearts rise to heaven as we enjoy the presence of our Father in our prayers to him, let's pray together. You.
Father, Father, teach us to see ourselves as you. See us as dearly loved children, and teach us to see you as you.
Have invited us to see you as our dear father.
Thank you for promising that you will welcome us as we pray and answer us when we call upon you with faith in your son, our Lord, Jesus Christ, we do pray these things in His name, Amen.