You've Been Praying the Lord's Prayer Wrong | Dr. David Chotka

What if you've been praying the Lord's Prayer your entire life... but never stopped to consider what Jesus actually meant?

In this episode of The Valiant Forge, I sit down with Dr. David Chotka—pastor, author, and founder of Spirit-Equip Ministries—for a conversation that begins with an extraordinary testimony and leads into a powerful discussion about prayer, spiritual warfare, distraction, and intimacy with God. 

Growing up surrounded by darkness, Dr. Chotka shares the remarkable story of how he came to faith in Jesus Christ and how that experience launched a lifetime of studying Scripture, the Holy Spirit, and prayer. But this isn't just a conversation about the supernatural. It's about becoming the kind of man who walks closely with Christ every day. 

We discuss:

• Dr. Chotka's unforge

ttable testimony of coming to faith
 • Jesus' authority over darkness and spiritual warfare
 • The distractions that pull Christian men away from God's purpose
 • Why spiritual disciplines are essential for growth
 • Learning to develop a meaningful prayer life
 • The question that changed the way Mark thinks about the Lord's Prayer 

This conversation ends by introducing a question that deserves an episode of its own:

Have you ever studied what Jesus meant when He taught us to pray, "Our Father"?

That's exactly where we'll pick up in Part 2.

If this episode encouraged you, consider sharing it with another man who wants to grow deeper in his walk with Christ.

Connect with Dr. David Chotka:

SpiritEquip

Join the Brotherhood:

https://www.skool.com/the-cave-of-adullum-1668/about

Want to be a guest on The Valiant Forge Podcast? Send Mark Osborne a message on PodMatch, here: https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/17432638464878159623a121d

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Because I got started by having an unclean spirit fly out of my body. I could say God, I could say Christ, I could say Bible, I could say church. I could not say Jesus' name. I looked up and I watched this inky, cloudy black mass fly out of my mouth. It went straight through the wall, and then I saw a shining vision of glorious light. Then the light came inside of me. I stood to my feet and I said, Thank you, Jesus. I said Jesus' name. That was my first second as a Christ follower of believer. My friend, have you ever examined what Jesus meant by the words that are in that prayer? Have you ever studied what Jesus meant by Father?

SPEAKER_02 0:44

I have been to this day. I never really understood the weight of saying our father.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Jesus has commanded us to pray using that model, because that model is a collapsed hyperdose of everything he ever taught.

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Welcome to the Valiant Force Podcast, where we help men overcome life's battle, show up better in the world, and become a valiant warrior for God. This is a place where we give practical strategies that will equip you on life's journey to help you become the man of God is called. Are you ready to overcome your doubt and fulfill your purpose just like gideon? If so, let's go.

SPEAKER_02 1:34

Welcome back to the Valiant Forge, where Christian men come to forge strength and purpose in Christ. My guest today is David Chocta. Uh funny story about this. I recorded this interview back in October of last year. And if you listen to the end of the interview, I said something about a part two. And so we scheduled, we were going to schedule a part two, but he, because David Chocta is a very busy man, he goes on mission trips in other countries all the time, as well as being an author and a pastor and all the things that he does. He kind of dropped off the face of the planet for a little bit. I mean, he didn't, but I didn't know where he was. So I just held on to the episode. And then he reached out to me about a month ago and said he was back, and you know, he's willing to make part two. And I went back and listened to the episode, and we could have actually just ended it there. But the great thing is I have a second conversation with him that I'll we'll share next week. It's not really a part two, it's more of a continuation. As you've seen in the trailer, he has a powerful testimony, which you know is great. And one thing that's awesome about Dr. David is he has a laugh that is just infectious. He talks about uh demons and and spiritual warfare, and he laughs the whole time. It's uh it's amazing. You're gonna love this one, but we don't just talk about his testimony, he's an author of many books, and recently he put out a book on the Lord's Prayer, and we do talk about that book. We also talk about we talk about prayer in general, we talk about distraction, our identity in Christ. The way that he broke down just a few verses of the Lord's Prayer was like eye-opening for me. And in honestly, like I said, I recorded this back in October of last year. It changed how I pray, it changed how I viewed the Lord's Prayer. I think you're going to really enjoy this one. Like I said, this was one of my favorite podcasts I ever recorded. Here is my conversation with Dr. David Chocta. David, welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Well, thank you very much. It's good to be here, Mark, and I'm thankful to God for the opportunity to be able to share with you.

SPEAKER_02 3:52

Yeah, I know we're I know we're going to be talking on kind of a more sensitive subject, but I will tell you, I I told you this in uh the pre-interview. I listened to some of your podcasts and I love your laugh. It's it's infectious. Every time I heard you laugh on a podcast, it just brought joy to me.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

So yeah, I'm glad that it didn't bring despair to you. I love to laugh. I love the Lord, and uh, I'm just thankful for the opportunity to talk about him in every opportunity.

SPEAKER_02 4:22

Amen. Same here. So tell the audience a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

Well, actually, I'm a I'm a I'm an ordained licensed ordained pastor, and I have a doctorate and so on. And my doctorate is in listening to the voice of Jesus, how to do that. And I have a thought, I have a master's thesis that got to study with a marvelous scholar named Gordon V, who was looking at spirit and Paul, and I was studying spirit, Paul, and the unclean spirits, and so on. But the reason I wound up studying about those issues is because I got started by having an unclean spirit fly out of my body. And uh I was a 16-year-old lad I I know where the demon came from. You don't have to persuade me about this. My dad was a bouncer in a strip joint, his sister ran the strip joint. And so my early life was filled with um all kinds of uh navigating around this issue and uh how to deal with it. And when I got saved, of course, uh we had to navigate the issue again. It was all kinds of family dynamics that were strange and wonderful at the same time. My dad broke away from the lifestyle he founded a restaurant. But I mean, um, I don't my my earliest memories of Christmas were going into the strip joint on Christmas uh Eve or day and decorating the Christmas tree in that place and smelling everything as it was. Wow, yeah, and you know, we do these little feasts at that place that was filled with things that I know now are completely contrary to goodness and godliness and so on. But of my family, right? I mean, what are you gonna do? Right, right. You don't you choose your friends, you you receive your family. Right anyway, I could I could say God, I could say Christ, I could say Bible, I could say church. I could not say Jesus' name. And I was um I would get um how do I say this? I would get disturbed and interested at the same time if I heard people talking about the blood of Christ or their faith, and but it would be a combination of intrigued and appalled and wanting to stop them and wanting to listen at the same time. That's the best way to describe this. At any rate, uh, here's what happened. Uh, that this is a high school story, it goes back to my my early years. I got saved when I was 16 years old. But uh, that my older brother and I, and my younger brother, they're three brothers in the family, we all belong to the drama guild. We liked acting. If you can imagine that kind of thing. At any rate, we were all three of us in this drama guild. And um, there was another person in the drama guild, and uh his name was John, and he was a Christian lad, and he he was a midnight kid, and he had made a commitment that if he couldn't get his Bible study in the morning first thing, he would take his Bible with him, find some time during the day, and read the scripture. So one day at lunchtime, this guy pulls out his black leather-bound King James gold-edged Bible, opens it up while he's having lunch, and starts to read while he's munching away. And a couple of the students from the drama guild came up to him and said, Uh, are you reading that because you're studying Shakespeare? Because we're going to do a play. And he said, No, no, no, not at all. No, I'm reading it because I believe it. And they said to him, You believe that book? He's the guy too. So, well, what do you believe? And he he quickly explained the gospel to them. And within about 15 minutes, uh, the three of them got saved. And uh this started a whole movement uh of people who were getting saved, and it included a significant number of people who were in that drama guild. And they were, for the most part, my older brother's friends, and I knew them before and I knew them after. And there's a funny story about how they got a room in the high school. There had been a smoking room in the high school, and uh the the inner school Christian fellowship wanted a room where they could go and pray and they could talk about faith or bring people in and give them a cup of coffee or something like this, anyway. As it turned out, the smokers fought in the room and they broke a bunch of furniture. And so the principal in the school removed the smoking room from from the school, just as the inner school Christian fellowship walked in and said, Can we have a room to have our meetings in? The principal would like the idea of Christians instead of smokers fighting. And so they got the room, and everybody in school called it holy smoke because they go in there and they pray.

SPEAKER_02 8:34

That's hilarious.

SPEAKER_01 8:36

So they started praying for all the people they knew, and of course they were praying for me, they were praying for my brother. Uh, they did try and shove the faith down my brother's throat. He did not like that. But I remember distinctly having many conversations with them and beginning this process, and I don't even know how it happened, but there was this English Methodist evangelist who had come from Great Britain and he was going to meet in some oversized living room somewhere. And I don't even know how I got persuaded to come. Oh, now I do remember this. I was walking down the hallway, and there was one of the girls from the uh from the drama guild, and she was singing about the being washed in the blood of Jesus. She was at her locker, trying to open up her locker to get her books for her next class as I was walking by, and I heard her sing about Jesus in the blood, and this violence rose up inside of me, and I wanted to stop her and push her up against the locker and shout at her and so on. I stopped myself. I didn't know why I had that weird reaction, but I stopped myself from doing this, and uh, and and I just kept walking, but I just barely stopped myself from doing something I would regret later. That same girl invited me to come and hear this English Methodist preacher, and I don't even know why I said yes. I wonder if it was because I was curious. Uh, I don't know. I think I wonder if it came to mock. At any rate, I walk into this oversized living room and it would have sat 20 people nicely, and there were about 45 of us sitting in concentric circles around the front where a guy was standing at the front with a guitar and uh and he didn't have a PowerPoint in those days. In those days, it was um it was um chart paper with songs on it.

SPEAKER_02 10:11

He had these songs like an overhead.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Yeah, yeah. Well, it wasn't even an overhead, it was more primitive than that. It was a piece of paper with some words on it. At any rate, he he looked at me as I walked in, and suddenly he just said, In the name of Jesus, you will sit down, you will say nothing, you will not disrupt this meeting, and you will not be freed to leave until I finish my presentation in Jesus' name. And I was sitting there and I couldn't speak, I couldn't move, I was utterly unable to do anything except listen. And this guy got up and he taught an old Wesleyan Methodist hymn, My God, I am thine, what a comfort divine! What a blessing to know that my Jesus is mine and the heavenly lamb, thrice happy I am, and my heart it doth dance at the sound of thy name. I remember the song to this very day because that actually they recorded the meeting, and I got in those days it was cassette tapes. I got a cassette tape to listen to this thing after it happened, and he started to preach. And I thought that the guy was you know excessively insightful, he was saying things that were just astonishing and amazing, and he preached a sermon called The Marks of the New Birth. And what I didn't know was that it was a classic standard Wesley sermon for lay preachers. So I don't know if you know this about the Methodist Revival, but uh Wesley would have you know a bunch of standard sermons that he would hand out to his lay preachers and he'd give them illustrations and they would use those things. It was one of those. And you know, what I did, I remember writing down copious notes about each of these nine marks of the new birth after I was after I was born in this period. But the bottom line was uh this guy preached this thing, and it was the strangest thing. I had never experienced anything like it. I was unable to move, I was appalled at what he was saying, but I was strangely drawn, and he began to shine with gentle light. And he talked about having Jesus in your flesh glory. Hallelujah. That's the way he talked about he'd rub his hands together, sweating profusely, his glasses would go down his nose, he'd look at you like this, and he'd say, Glory. Have you got Jesus in your flesh glory? He talked that way. And so the girl that was in the hallway answered his question, and she said, Hey man, yes, I do. I wanted to answer the question, and the word stuck in my throat. I couldn't say yes, I couldn't say no, I couldn't say Jesus. But by now I was intrigued because other people in the room were able to say his name and I wasn't. At any rate, he he he he gets to the end of his sermon, and then he says, If anyone here wants Jesus in your flesh, glory, come forward and I shall pray for you. And I leaped out of my chair, and I was the first one down there when he said, No, no, not now. When I finished my sermon, he said there I was at the front. He had about five more minutes, and then he gathered about 15 souls out of the 45. And I knew most of them because they were my peers from high school, they were friends from the Interschool Christian Fellowship or people that I'd known from the drama guild or whatever, and we they were all gathered there. And I knew the first we were in a semicircle at the front, and I looked over to where the man was standing, and there was a girl there who came from a she was a broken girl. She'd been through all kinds of stuff. She was very pretty, but she was broken and sad, the best way to describe her. And he looked at her and said, Tell Jesus you love. Uh she tried, but it was very clearly, you know, pushed, it was forced, it wasn't true. And he said, Can I pray for you? And she said yes. He said, Can I put my hands on you? She said yes, and he put his two hands on her head and he started to pray softly. And as he prayed, I had an experience that I had to verify from scripture much later. So I don't know if you know this. In the Bible, there were people who did not know the Lord who saw the Lord. You have Balaam seeing the angel, you have the donkey seeing the angel. The donkey didn't know God. Anyway, the donkey sees the angel. You have Saul of Tarsus seeing and hearing Jesus before he says yes to him. You have all kinds of people in the Bible who have this. I saw this man shine as he prayed in Jesus' name. And I saw the light from him glow and come into that girl and fill her heart, and then I saw her cry beautiful tears. And then she said, Jesus, I he said, Now tell Jesus you love him, and she did, and she shone. Well, that was a broken girl, but the next girl to her was one of them rules and regulations sergeant major types, you know, when the had a rule for every kind of pencil that you had broken anyway. So he said, Tell Jesus you love him, and she barked out this, you know, Jesus, I love you kind of you know, industrial kind of format thing. And he said, No, no, no, no, you don't mean that. Would you let me pray for you? And she nodded her head. He put her hand his hands on her and prayed. And this it was the same thing. He started to pray this quiet, soft-spoken, gentle prayer. I saw him shine as he mentioned Jesus' name, and this light came inside of her, and he went all the way around the circle to all the different people who were at the front, came to me last of all. And I kind of think it was because I was the first one there. But he gets to me last of all, and he shoves his finger in my belly and he says, Get out. I thought, get out? What's this? And I looked down and his hand was shining. And around the center of my abdominal region was an inky cloudy black mass. It was like um a cloudy darkness, and his hand was pulsating with beautiful light, and he kept saying, Get out, get out of that young man in Jesus' name. Out you go, out you go. And I watched as his finger rose up my belly, and the black cloud rose as his shining hand moved higher and higher. He got up to my chin, and then I looked up and I watched this inky, cloudy black mass fly out of my mouth. It went straight through the wall, and then I saw a shining vision of glorious light. Then the light came inside of me. I stood to my feet and I said, Thank you, Jesus. I said Jesus' name. That was my first second as a Christ follower believer. Man, my first second.

SPEAKER_02 16:35

I I don't know if you saw, but when you were talking about the the spirit coming out, I I shivered because I got goosebumps.

SPEAKER_01 16:43

It's the true story.

SPEAKER_02 16:45

The Lord Oh, I I believe it. I I have not I haven't had that happen to me, but I have been in the presence of a demon getting cast out of someone, and I experienced I didn't see a black ink, but I knew I heard the demon screaming, No, I won't go, I know I won't go. And then another preacher is like, No, I command you to go in the name of Jesus. And out it went, and you could tangibly feel the presence just it went out into the room, and I don't know what happened after that, but all of a sudden it has nowhere to go.

SPEAKER_01 17:26

That's uh in fact, when Jesus casts the demon out of the lead uh of the man with the legion, puts in this line later on in in Luke's gospel, what happens to the spirits when it leaves? It's that they have they go to dry, waterless places. It sounds like they they're the how does it say this? It sounds like the judgment is that they have no place to nest and they cannot feel and they cannot be satisfied. And when they're cast out, they're in this kind of place. So it's imperative that the person who from whom the demons have gone out says yes to Jesus and has the power of the Lord for him. And that's what happened to me. Anyway, years later, years, years, and years and years later, I was studying John Wesley's revival, and I ran into this sermon called The Marks of the New Birth, and there was the same outline as I heard the guy preach. He was an English Methodist preacher, and uh it was this amaze. Then I realized I became a student of the Wesley Revival, and I'm I I'm a born-again evangelical Methodist, if I'm anything else. Um I'm a strange combination, I'm a sacramental evangelical charismatic, if you want to use that kind of noteworthy to describe it. But I believe in the power of the spirit of Jesus. I believe that Jesus is far more powerful than the demons. And I know I know this beyond all knowing that you can ramp up your authority in the spiritual realm through the practice of spiritual disciplines and in particular prayer and fasting when you're face to face with something unclean or something like that. So I went to Regent College Vancouver uh because I kept having to cast out demons, and I had this experience. I mean, there was this um how do I describe this? I wound up working with uh with Metis people, half French, half uh English. And uh I had to I had to uh cast an unclean spirit away that where a shaman was trying to curse me. I came back home after praying for all the young people in the meeting. It was a it was a half an hour drive to get home. There were dead animal parts in the front of my house and blood and this animal stuff sitting on my front lawn, and I didn't know what it was. And I heard the Lord say, Don't touch it. Walk around it and tell it to return from where it came from. So I did a I did the Jericho thing. I went seven times around how many times I was supposed to do it. I went around that the that animal part seven times, and I commanded that whatever it was, whatever that kind of curse it was to return to where it came from. And then the Lord said, now you can pick up these animal parts and put them away. And I discovered there had been someone who had cursed me, and the curse went back and hit them. Anyway, this kind of stuff was happening to me all the time. And I didn't know what it was or what was the biblical basis for this. I was strangely drawn to the epistle to the Ephesians. And now I know exactly why. It was because God was trying to teach me that when you are joined by the Holy Spirit to Jesus who is ascended in the heavenly places, you are far above all principality, power, and authority. And the Lord uses your life to put you on display to embarrass the demons. That's the whole point of the book. And you can pray for Jesus to embarrass the demons through your life as he puts you on display to demonic authorities to mock their former experience of having you captive. And as the church grows and expands, the Lord adds more and more believers to his body. That's put on display to them, and he says, Your doom is sealed by the existence of the church and filled by the spirit of heaven. That's what the book's about.

SPEAKER_02 20:56

Wow. That's amazing. I I uh I've had some experiences, I've not been a part of casting out demons, but I've been around when they've been casted out. And like I said earlier, you you can feel their tangible presence. But I do also remember that that particular moment I was talking about earlier, after that presence left, it was almost instant peace filled a room.

SPEAKER_01 21:25

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 21:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:26

So the Holy Spirit's presence is characterized by three identity markers. It's in Romans 14. Righteousness as we walk with Christ. Peace is eternal serenity. And joy. Eternal celebration despite external circumstances. In the Holy Spirit. So when the Holy Spirit infills you every Christian gets different spiritual games. So I don't know what your spiritual games are. I know that mine are a particular cluster, and I suspect you have yours too. But every believer gets those three identity righteousness, peace, and joy. Inside the framework of your experience of the Holy Spirit. And when the Spirit who manifests himself in holiness shows up inside of you, the first mark is a sweet walk with Christ. The way I describe it in my book on hearing the voice of God is God will never, ever, ever distract you from Himself. He's not gonna do that. And so when something happens in your life that makes your walk with Jesus sweeter, he's in that. If something happens in your life and you're distracted from him, that ain't the Lord. It's either your flesh or it's an unpleasant or some your bud trying to distract you to the wrong thing, we know it's his flesh or whatever. God will always, always, always move in you, and through his assignments on your life will make you more Christ-like through them. Always.

SPEAKER_02 22:50

I didn't know we were gonna go in this direction, but you talked about distractions. Yeah, it's so easy today. And this is a podcast for Christian men. It's so easy for us to get distracted. We get distracted by our jobs, by bills, the cares of the world, our our cell phones. How do how do we avoid those distractions?

SPEAKER_01 23:13

How do you avoid distraction? I don't know. Well, you know, there's lots of ways to be distracted, and there's lots of ways to avoid distraction. I would if this is for men, let me just say this as clear as I can the biggest distraction is the pretty girl who smiles and leers at you and invites you to something you shouldn't consider.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

Right.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

So what I say to any man who's praying about a girl is if the girl distracts you from Jesus, that's not your girl. If the girl makes you more godly, you need to take a second look at that one. Yeah, and uh if this person enhances your walk with God, then you know you found your soulmate. And that's that's the first one. If if this becomes an invitation to experimenting with the edges of uh what it means to be barely Christian, you've picked the wrong girl. If you found someone who drives you deep in your devotion and makes you more like Christ, then you need to prayerfully consider that person as your partner in life. So the way I do I avoid distraction is to focus on whatever purpose the Lord has called me to. When I'm outside my purpose, I'm distracted by anything. It could be something as simple as the fly on the wall, you know, or you know, some random thought going through your head. If I'm in my purpose, I I discover that the power of the Lord lands on who I am, and then it fills me with whatever it is that that the assignment that's before me that needs to be accomplished. And uh, of course, all of this is fed by the practice of spiritual disciplines. So I'm the founder and director of spirit equip ministries, and the the purpose of spirit equip is to equip spiritual disciplines one small step at a time. So when I I just told you my conversion story, but I didn't know how to pray, nobody taught me how to pray, right? And so, you know, the the most helpful advice I got was okay, picture you know, Jesus on a log sitting beside you and have a chat with him, you know, that kind of thing. And that would work for about three minutes until you're not sure what you're supposed to say to him.

SPEAKER_03 25:15

Right.

SPEAKER_01 25:15

And somebody said, Oh, take the psalms, pray the psalms, and of course they open me up to Psalm 23. You know, the Lord is my shepherd, I give one. That's not hard to pray at all. Okay, you're my shepherd. What do shepherds do? Oh, you're gonna take care of me, you're gonna lead me besides still waters, isn't that nice? That psalm worked, but if you go just a few psalms later, there's psalms that say things like this Oh god, I'm surrounded by wicked, nasty men. Would you please kill them and break their teeth while they're biting on gravel? This kind of thing. That wasn't helpful for me in my prayer life. I discovered that that wasn't going to take me any further along in the road that I needed to travel. So, in the course of time, I actually bumped into this book. I'm gonna show it to you. This is not my writing, this is somebody else's writing. This is called the Workbook of Living Prayer, and the author, his name is Maxie Dunham. And this book changed me from being someone who didn't quite know what shape I should give my prayers to someone who made prayer a living discipline. And it's designed as a seven-day-a-week prayer journal. There is always scripture in italic, so you can see the scripture as soon as you open the page up. There's always a theme for the day, there's always a couple of paragraphs of teaching, there's always scripture in italic, so you know where it is. There's always a reflect and record section, there's always a during the day challenge, and you write your prayers out. And this is a six-week journey, and it shaped me and stamped me forever and taught me how to pray. So, as a result of using this, I wrote this living out the Lord's Prayer, line by line. This is uh me with a deep study on the nature of the Lord's Prayer and how it works. And here's what I discovered. Um, I don't know how you pray the Lord's Prayer. Most of us do it this if you're in a sacramental church, halfway through the service, everybody together closes their eyes and they recite the thing. It might take 30 seconds, it might take 40, but you say it all together until you say the amen. If you're in a Baptist prayer meeting, you will you'll pray about all your needs and all your situations, and you'll end the prayer meeting by saying the Lord's prayer and you'll all go home, right? Yeah, and people don't stop to consider what's in the prayer, right?

SPEAKER_02 27:31

Right.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

So there was a moment, so I I was the pastor of a church in Chatham, Ontario, Canada. We brought in uh a small groups guy because we were trying to teach our church to do community life together as well as to attend the big public service. And so the small group emphasis was what this guy was teaching. But he had just been overseas and he had met someone who prayed a minimum of three hours a day, maximum five hours a day, as he built a church of 850,000 people in small groups sharing life together. That's what I said when I heard the story. I didn't say wow, I said wow. Those days my church was 800. And if you wanted to see me, it would take you a week unless there was an emergency. If there was an emergency at sudden death, or you know, somebody deathly ill at the hospital, they'd call me and away I'd go. But if you wanted just to talk about a program or you wanted to have some prayer time with me, it'd take you a week. Can you imagine getting an appointment with that boy? He's got 850,000 people in his church.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

So plus he spent through five three to five hours praying each day.

SPEAKER_01 28:41

That's right. So listen, the guy who was speaking in my church finished his seminar and he had one hour left. And he had just been in that church, he had just been there and he met this pastor. And so he was he was trying to learn about small group theories and how it worked. And this guy had 850,000 people in small groups.

SPEAKER_02 29:01

We're not talking about a lot of small groups, yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:04

So he wanted to know how he did it, and uh he prayed, he got an hour with him, and he said, Well, God, I'm gonna need to be guided about what I talk to this guy about. And uh, as he was praying, he thought, Well, I'm praying. Maybe I should ask him about those three hours in prayer. And so he sat down at a lunch table with this guy and said, I understand that you pray a minimum of three hours every day, and sometimes as long as five hours a day. Do you do that? And the man said, Oh, yes, at least three hours. And then he asked the question that you would ask, and I would ask, What do you pray during those three hours?

SPEAKER_02 29:42

Right.

SPEAKER_01 29:43

And he said, Oh, it's very simple. I use the Lord's Prayer, and after that, I use other methods. And then he asked the question that you're thinking right now. He looked at him and said, What do you do? Repeat it. I could make 30 seconds, maybe a minute and a half, you know. And then the man looked at him across the table. Now, you need to know something. The trip that he was in had been like a month before the trip in my church. He was still processing the lunch hour conversation that he had had sitting across from that prayer leader. And I it was a pastor's conference, and it was in my congregation. I was the host pastor on the platform with this guy telling the story in my pulpit, and I'm looking out over my friends and peers, and I've known them for a decade, you know. So these are all the guys that I know. And um, as I'm looking out over them, they're all asking the same question. What do you do? Repeat it. And then came the defining moment that changed me forever. He said, Well, my friend, have you ever examined what Jesus meant by the words that are in that prayer? Have you ever studied what Jesus meant by father? Now, at that moment, I'm looking out over the congregation and I'm seeing all my pastor pure friends. I am perturbed because I realize I have been praying that prayer since I was a kid, but I have never ever assumed that that word father meant anything. And so I thought, well, I guess I haven't done that study. And my presenter said, Well, I haven't done that study. And then the Korean guy looked at him and said, Well, how can you obey Jesus if you don't know what Jesus meant by his command? He said, When you pray, pray this way, our father, you don't know what father means. How can you obey Jesus? Well, suddenly my inner being was quenched. I thought, oh, brother, I guess I'm going to have to study that. Then he went on to the next word. How about heaven? Have you ever studied what Jesus meant by heaven? Now, if you're like me, you believe in heaven, you probably taught about heaven, but you've never studied it. You assumed it's real. So I thought I scratched my head. You can see why there's no hair in my head. I kept going like this. My eyebrows pushed my hairline back, so it's large tufted.

SPEAKER_02 31:59

That's right.

SPEAKER_01 32:00

I never processed it. And they got to name, and I hadn't studied name. My only consolation was that I had done in-depth research on the doctrine of the kingdom. Your kingdom come, your will be done in earth as in heaven. Anyway, here's what happened in the middle of that. I made a commitment before the Lord that I would get myself a bunch of notebooks and I would put each of the key words of the Lord's Prayer on the cover of each notebook. And then I would read through the Gospel of Matthew, because that's where the longer version of the Lord's Prayer is found. And anytime I found one of the keywords of the Lord's Prayer, I would circle the word. I would then open up one of those notebooks and I would write down my impressions about what the word meant inside the context of Jesus' teaching. And I thought that I could finish that up in three, four months. That's what I thought I could do. It was three months on the word father.

SPEAKER_03 32:56

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 32:57

Do you know every single time Jesus prayed, with the exception of him on the cross, when he's quoting Psalm 22, or he's saying, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? I actually don't think he was praying. I think he was quoting Psalm 22 because it's the Psalm of Dereliction and it describes the crucifixion. But if you can put even whether he's praying it or not, put brackets around that one moment and look at every other prayer that's recorded in the Gospels from Jesus' lips. All of them start with one of three phrases. He either says, Father, my father, or holy father. And he says nothing else when he begins his prayer. And so I I finished this thing in Matthew, and I thought, I don't think I've sounded out of the depths of this word. I'm gonna have to look at Mark, Luke, and John, I'm gonna have to look at the Acts, I'm gonna have to look at the Pauline epistles, I'm gonna have to look at the Catholic epistles and the Revelation. I'd better look at the Old Testament development of this material and see who called God Father before we get to this moment where he tells us to do this. And here's what I discovered. No one not one person in Hebrew history before Jesus of Nazareth called God a Bob Daddy, not one. They didn't do that because there was one who was prophesied who would come from the line of David, who would call God father, and God would be his father, and he would be the son, only the Messiah. And that person who would say Father Abba for God would have a messianic awareness, he would know that he was the begotten of the Father, and he would then impart the spirit, and he would raise the righteous dead, and he would do miraculous acts of power, he would become the king of the nation, he would restore the land. So when Jesus is in the temple at 12, and there was this big, you know, festival, and I don't know if you've been to an ethnic wedding. In ethnic, I'm Ukrainian by background, and I'll just tell you this. If there was a wedding, there were 300 people at least, and sometimes as many as seven or eight hundred, and every cousin and every second cousin and every third cousin took care of all the other cousins. And in a society where there was no birth control, there were a lot of cousins. So minimum 10 kids in the family. That's how many there were. Jesus gets lost in the crowd, and his parents aren't concerned because the crowd's all related to them, and they can't find him. Of course, they're they're in a terrible way. They search high and low and then eventually go back to Jerusalem, find him in the temple. And he he's talking with the rabbis and he's astonishing them by his depth of insight. Mother and dad, I don't know if you ever lost you. I lost my son once in a grocery store, and I searched high and low to find the kid. And when I eventually found him, I didn't know if I should hit him or hug him. I was just grabbing the first words out of my mouth is, Why did you do that? The first words out of Mary's mouth is, son, why did you do that? Right, and he says, I had to be in my father's house, didn't you figure it out? Of course, Mary knew, and Joseph knew, and nobody else knew, and so he only tells mom and dad, and away they go. But that means that at 12 years of age, Jesus was aware he was Messiah. When the Holy Spirit lands on Jesus at his baptism at 30 years of age, the voice says, This is my beloved in whom I am well pleased. And from that point forward, Jesus calls him Father. Anybody who is Jewish would not call God Father, they would call God Elohim, or they would call God Adonai, and they would start the day by reciting you know Hebrew scripture, the Shema, Hero Israel, the Lord our God is one Lord. And they would not use the tetra grammaton, they would not say what we have transliterated to be Jehovah, because they were so afraid of profaning the name they wouldn't say it, and they would substitute Adonai or Elohim and they would say this at the beginning of the day. Nobody would utter the name of God, and nobody would say Abba for God, because there were seven prophecies in the Old Testament to indicate that the one who said that would be the Son of the Father, who would be filled with spirit, who would raise the dead, bring up a mighty army, bestow miraculous acts of power on the people, get the land back, put the 12 tribes in charge and be the ruler to reunite the north and south. So Jesus calls God Father, he knows he's Messiah. Jesus calls God my Father, he knows he's Messiah. Jesus calls God Holy Father, he knows he's Messiah. And he says, When you pray, pray this way. Our Father. Now listen, I think you're a nice guy. I hope you think I'm a nice guy, but neither you nor I can raise the dead and restore the land. It's not something we have the possibility of doing. How then can we do this? It's because the word is not my father, it's our our father. It means that you get joined to Jesus. Actually, Romans 8 actually says this. If I could, if you could bear with me, I'll look it up. I've got the New American Standard translation here. That's my favorite translation because it's very literal. Sometimes a little too literal to understand, but when you're trying to get at the exact meaning in the English Bible, you'll do no better than the New American Standard.

SPEAKER_02 39:00

Anyway, yeah, it's one of my favorites as well.

SPEAKER_01 39:02

Well, it's so the 95 is better, even better than the 2020 in my mind. But regardless, yeah, anyway, he he talks about what it feels like to get born of the spirit, and it's a very striking. So we're in X, uh, in Romans chapter 8, and he talks about um what it means to be born. So is you have not all who are being led by the spirit of God are the sons of God. And in this passage, a son of God is not a male, a son of God is someone who's been joined to the spirit of Jesus, the son. So you don't say brides and husbands of Christ, you say bride of Christ, and we understand that means that we have been joined to him in that role. And but we wouldn't tell you, we wouldn't dare to say husbands and wives to be inclusive. This text does not talk about men and women, sons and daughters, it talks about participation in the spirit of Jesus, the Son, to make you a participant in being a son of God. So that's how this passage goes on. So here we go. If the spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Jesus Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his spirit who indwells you. So then we're obligation to not live according to the flesh. For if you live according to the flesh, you must die. But if by the spirit you're putting to death the deeds of the body, you'll live. Those who are being led by the Spirit of God are participating in the sonship that is ascribed to Jesus the Son. They're sons of God. You have not received a spirit of slavery. You've received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out Abba, Father. The mark of receiving the spirit of Jesus is that his prerogative of being able to call God that gets melded together inside who you are, and you're joined to Jesus' messianic privilege. Oh that's why you say our and not mine. It's you and Jesus joined together in this. And by the way, it talks about becoming a joint heir with Christ right after that. It says that we are co-heirs with him because we've received the spirit that belongs to him, and we get the glory if we share in the suffering. And by the way, suffering and glory are intertwined in the experience of receiving the spirit. But the pin the print picture here, distraction. You cannot be distracted when the spirit of Jesus the Son calls you into who you are.

SPEAKER_03 41:50

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 41:51

You cannot be distracted if that is true in who you are in Christ.

SPEAKER_02 41:58

Amen. I gotta be vulnerable for a minute here because I've so I a little bit of my story real quickly. I've been a I've been I've gone to church for over the past 40 years now.

unknown 42:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:13

And I've walked in the way some, and I walked away, and I came back, and within the last five years, I started getting closer to God. I started developing, I started getting some spiritual disciplines. And I started praying every day. At first, I didn't know what to pray. So I started every prayer with Jesus, thank you for I start every prayer with Jesus, thank you for your love, your grace, and your mercy. I don't know if it's similar to our father with, but as I ended every prayer, I would say words. Oh God, I'm thankful, grateful, and pray for certain people who had a prayer list, but I would always end every prayer now. The background that I grew up in, it was Pentecostal. We didn't we didn't quote the Lord's Prayer in service. There were a lot of different kinds of prayers going on in Pentecostal prayer. No, it was never prayed. In Sunday school we would pray it when I was a kid. Yeah. But even in the denominations, I've been non-denominational for a while now. It's never really prayed in a service. But I would pray it at the end of all of my I pray every morning without question, and sometimes throughout the day. My discipline was for sure in the mornings the first thing I do. I still do it now. But I would pray the Lord's Prayer at the end of it. I have been to this day. I never really understood the weight of saying our Father. I understood the whole sentence, Our Father, who art in heaven, how that be thy name, because I'm worshiping, I'm giving him glory by talking about the glory of his name. But that explanation just gave me a man, it's when I pray tomorrow morning. It's gonna have a lot more meaning.

SPEAKER_01 44:01

Here's what it means. Actually, you started well, you started by saying I'm in Christ, and by virtue of the fact that Jesus and I have been joined together, I can say our only because he lends it to me. And here's what it means. Actually, this is the application that just absolutely astonishes me. If you are merged together with who Jesus is by the power of his spirit, you get two things. You get his um blessing. So you participate in all the blessings that are part and parcel of who Jesus is, you get his mission and you get his prayer life. The spirit of Jesus flows through his union with the Father. In fact, when Jesus was infilled by Spirit, the word was that he was the Son and God was the Father. And his prayer life is rooted and grounded in his experience of the Spirit. And when you receive the Spirit of the Son, you are joined to the messianic identity that's found in Jesus. And that's why it is said in John's gospel, you're gonna do greater works than I do. That's why it says it. It's not because you and I think we're special, it's because he is. It's because his work isn't done. He only spoke to several thousand people in his lifetime. And there are at this moment in history, I think what, 8.5 billion people on the planet. About two and a half billion of them don't even know how to spell his name. And he said this in in Matthew 24 this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in every nation. And then the end will come. That means God tied his hands. The end can't come until all the rest of those 2.5 billion, or even more if they're born in the next 25 minutes, however many there are. They got to hear the name of Jesus and understand that his name is the name of salvation and power and grace and forgiveness and goodness and love and kindness and infilling and power and anointing. And his prayer life can be your prayer life.

SPEAKER_03 46:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 46:11

So what I what I started to do is uh I'll tell you how the how the journey with the Lord's prayer started. In Maxi Dunner's book, the workbook of living prayer. Uh, I think second or third week, can't remember where it is. He says, When you pray, follow the directions. So he says, We're given this prayer. Why don't you put a slash between each of the thoughts? You know, and so I put a thought, a slash after father, I put a slash after heaven, put a slash after name, I put a slash after kingdom, put a slash after will. And then he said, Now take all those separate thoughts and expand them. And I didn't realize at the time I was doing that, that that was the beginning of what I just told you. That was way back in the 1980s, and before that in the 1970s, I got saved not knowing anything about how that prayer was linked to all of his teachings. So let me give you a beautiful verbal picture for this. If you could take the 28 chapters of Matthew's gospel and put them on a wall 28 feet long and 10 feet high, and put all of Matthew's chapters in separate columns and make sure that chapter six, where the Lord's Prayer is found, has extra room. Expand the Lord's Prayer so that it's three times the size of the other words and put it in bold uh bold italics so you can see it as soon as you look at the 28 feet of wall. Then pick a color. So let's say you pick the word uh the color blue for the first one, circle the word father and then draw lines to all the places where God is called father in Matthew's gospel. You're gonna have 46 blue lines in 28 chapters. That's a lot of lines. All right now go to the next one, heaven. Circle the word heaven, pick another color. Let's say you pick yellow, you're gonna have 58 lines from the Lord's Prayer to all the places where heaven is described in Matthew's gospel. That means there's gonna be blue and yellow, and there's gonna be overlapping green because sometimes they overlap. Under the word name, there's only 12 lines. So let's say you pick purple. You got 12 more lines, but that's 12 lines in 28 chapters. That's just about 40% of the book that's got reference to the name. Kingdom. You have hit the jackpot. Pick your favorite color for kingdom. You you're gonna draw lines all over this. Listen, by the time you get to will, there will be so much color on the wall, you won't see the words of Matthew's gospel. All of that collapsed into this thing called the Lord's Prayer. And here's the genius of Jesus' prayer. It is absolutely astonishing genius. All of his teaching is condensed into 57 words. All of it. We are to commit those 57 words to memory. And as we reflect on what those words mean embedded in the teaching of Jesus, we say them by memory because it helps us. And then we pray out each of the key thoughts that are attached to all of the meaning that's ascribed in Jesus' teaching, to all of that teaching from start to finish. Jesus has commanded us to pray using that model, because that model is a collapsed hyperdose of everything He ever taught. And so it's to be the framework or the grid that underscores and anchors our devotion forever. It's to be the means by which we pray. So I've learned that.

SPEAKER_02 49:47

And you talk about all this in your book?

SPEAKER_01 49:49

I talk about this in many books, but the one that I yeah, this one, this one here that I just showed you, living Living Out the Lord's Prayer. That's what I do in it. I so here's what I did. It took me 12 years, and I journaled all the key words of Jesus' prayer. Took me 12 years in all these different notebooks, and then I got to the place where I realized that most people hadn't a sweet clue what they were praying when they prayed it. And then I needed to break it down into reflections that people could use so they could acquire the discipline of praying the prayer one small step at a time. So I produced a book that was published by um by prayer shop publishers that gave the rights back to me after I used it as the prayer mobilization tool for my denomination in my country, Canada. I'm a Canadian, and so uh we used that resource to teach people all across the country, and then um then what we that they passed it, but I didn't like the way the guy formatted the book. It was put in the wrong size, so it was hard to journal. So I got the rights back and I put it into an eight and a half by eleven, and it has lots of um, it's got a preface here. Let me let me show you um how it works. So um there's the title of the book, Living Out the Lord's Prayer. This is the fourth day of a five-day week. There is the theme for the day, there's teaching, and you read the teaching so that you can appropriate what you're trying to learn, and every day there's always scripture in bold italic. Awesome. Okay, so if you get stuck for time, you can go straight to the scripture, reflect on the scripture, and head off to your assignment if you got called up to work or something like that. But once you go through it, there's always room for a pen to paper section where you journal what you're praying or thinking or questioning or wondering. At the end of that, there is a challenge for the day where you pray out what it is that you have learned in that reflection, and then we have there's five days for a week, and at the end of the fifth day, there's a video at the at the front of the book. So you click on the QR code right here, it brings you to a video for week one, a video for week two, a video for week three. Each one has seven to ten minutes of teaching to help you ferret out what it is that you've been learning about the Lord's Prayer, and you do that inside the framework of a small group.

SPEAKER_02 52:08

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 52:09

Then you bring the pieces together and then you pray movement one, movement two, movement three, movement four, movement five, and movement six. And actually, kingdom and will are so big, those two words are so big. I tried to put that into one week. There ain't no way in all of God's being earth we could possibly collapse all that teaching into five days. You can't do that. So there's a week on kingdom, and there's a week on will, and of course, where the will is done, the kingdom is come. The two of them overlap, but uh, so there's seven weeks on that, and one week of introduction on learning how to pray by way of discipline and habit. So the point, the principle, so here's what I've just done. So so I was just in the Philippines, I was just overseas, and before I went to the this, this is this is a crazy, astonishing, amazing thing. So I was invited to go to Vietnam. I told you some of this in our introduction, and I met the leaders of 26 different denominational branches all across Asia and the Asia Pacific region. The leader of the Church of the Philippines invited me to come and speak at his General Assembly, where there were 4,000 pastors. All right. So that was fine. I'll just tell you that. But before that, so so here's what happened. Just before that invitation, I went to help a church planter. He was uh a Filipino guy in a small little Baptist church on the in the center of a new subdivision in the city of Evington, Alberta. And I went to help him because he had a small little church and he he asked me to help, and I knew his dad, and he was a good guy, and he was trying to do a church plant to win the lost. So I'm in this this church plant and I'm doing my little study, and they all think it's wonderful and nice. And I'm standing in the hallway after the event is done, and there are three ladies talking to each other, and they looked at me and they said, Do you want to go to the Philippines? I said, Um, what for? And they said, Well, you could teach a bunch of pastors what you just taught us. Could you do the Lord's Prayer pattern in the Philippines? I said, I'd be delighted to. So they booked me in to fly with their team to be in uh the northern Isabel Island of the Philippines. And while I was there, there were four teachers. And what I did not know was that they were the leaders of the denomination I belong to. So in August, I said yes to this Filipino trip in February. In November, I said yes to the General Assembly of the Philippines in June. And so I arrived in February and I'm teaching 120 pastors the principles that some of the things I just started to tell you about. And they looked at me and they said, Can you make a resource so that we can do that quickly instead of having to dedicate eight weeks, five days a week to learn this? Can you do it in 10 days? I said, you know, uh, it's it's kind of gonna be kind of like you know, sipping soup instead of eating steak. But yeah, it's not it's not impossible. So I just today did the last video for a short form of this book. Oh, this is the deep one, and anybody who wants to go deep can do this, and it's gonna take you eight weeks. Five days a week, it'll help you. The one that I just got done today with the last video is called Six Short Steps to Pray the Prayer. It's two five-day a week um studies. It's got an introduction, it's got a week one reflection, a week two reflection, and it has a prayer assignment video. I just did the prayer assignment video today in real time. This is the day when I got it.

SPEAKER_02 55:37

Wow, it's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 55:38

Is being put together. I sent it to the Philippines. They are now test running it as a training tool for their pastors to learn how to pray the Lord's prayer pattern. So that book will be available by the time this podcast comes out. It'll be available anywhere books are sold, it'll be available on Amazon, it'll be available in bookstores and so on. You could go to Walmart or the thing. And if you do that and you and you like the book in 10 days and you're praying the pattern, and you want to go deeper, you can take this one, and the two of them do not overlap. They they're separate, distinct teachings. The pattern is the same. One section from this book is reproduced in the small one. I could not improve on what I had written about the Lord, about forgiveness and how forgiveness works. And so that pattern to forgive, but the Lord actually tells us you by the way, if you don't forgive, you're not gonna have your sins forgiven either, right? So it's a very painful thing, right? So I I produced a section in that over five days where people can get past their pain and come to a place where they they can practice forgiveness. It's not, by the way, learning, it's not trusting people who wounded you, it's not being reconciled, the people who wounded you, and it's not forgetting about what happened to you. It's called forgiving them. And oh, by the way, uh, when you forgive them, you're not treating them as their sins deserved, but you're handing them over to God for judgment.

SPEAKER_03 57:03

Right.

SPEAKER_01 57:03

If they don't repent, uh, you're not required to be reconciled or pretend that everything is nicey nicey when it's not. Jesus forgave the man who was driving the nails into his wrists, but he didn't make him part of the apostolic band. Oh, they're forgetting, they don't know what they're doing, forgive them. That didn't mean he trusted them, that didn't mean he commissioned them.

SPEAKER_02 57:27

Right. Amen.

SPEAKER_01 57:30

Yeah. So listen, if your audience wants to learn how to do this, the simplest approach is the six short steps to pray the prayer. It'll be available. When will this podcast come out? Is it going to be a few years?

SPEAKER_02 57:41

Uh I'm thinking it probably around early October.

SPEAKER_01 57:45

Oh, yes, then it'll it'll be done. If it's early October, by by the middle of September, the new book, the the short one, will be out available on Amazon or anywhere books are sold. It'll be called Short Steps to Pray the Prayer, and it'll have my name on it, C-H-O-T-K-A, like my name at the bottom of this.

SPEAKER_02 58:00

Uh okay. And I'll I'll have a link in the description. Okay. For sure.

SPEAKER_01 58:05

And then if people want to go deeper, and once they've done the first one and they realize they want to pray the prayer pattern, then you can go much deeper and dive deep, deep, deep into the teaching of the Lord's Prayer and get my 12 years of research that are in this book around how to pray that prayer. 12 years of research. So distraction will not be an issue for you once you start to pray the Lord's prayer pattern. Are you gonna have an issue or two? Oh yeah. You're gonna have a test issue? Oh yeah. You're gonna want to pop that guy in the nose when he cuts you off in the in the driveway? Oh yeah. Are you gonna be able to do that and pray the Lord's prayer? Oh no. Oh no, no. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 58:44

We're kind of running, we're almost out of time. There's a question I ask. I'm gonna have you on again because I believe there's a lot of topics we can dive into. But there's a I may not ask you the next time you come on, but there's a question I ask every man that comes on the podcast. Since this is your first time. It's uh around this is since this podcast is for men. It's around David in the cave of a doom. I think it's first Samuel 22. David is hiding from Saul in the cave of a doom. The men of the king the men of the kingdom are disgruntled, discouraged, disheartened, they don't know what to do next with their life. Apparently David said something to them in that cave. The Bible doesn't tell us exactly. It does say in Chronicles in another part where he started appointing men to do certain things in the cave of a doom. I don't know if that's a different instance or not. If you have this instance today, you have a bunch of disgruntled, disheartened, discouraged men in front of you, and they're looking for encouragement, direction, leadership, what to do next to become the men that God has called them to be, what would you say to them?

SPEAKER_01 59:54

I would say practice godly mutual submission. Um, the thing that David had that Saul did. David practiced submission. Saul practiced arrogance.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:09

David submitted to the movement of the spirit, but Saul rejected it. In fact, uh I I can even say this to you the doctrine of the kingdom is attached to the doctrine of the spirit. Because in Israel's history, only the prophet and the priest and the judge got the spirit. And when the prophet, the priest, and the judge would lead the nation, they would not become that until the spirit landed on them to oversee an army or to intercede for them or whatever the issue that they happened to be. When the elders of Israel said to Samuel, Your sons are not walking with God, uh, give us a king like the other ones. He was ticked, and he went off and told God, I'm ticked. And God said, You're ticked, they're rejecting me, not you. They don't want to be led by spirit at all. Thank you very much. But answer their prayer, give them a king, and I'm gonna fix it. And then you know the story of how Saul chases donkeys and he winds up in the presence of Samuel. Samuel pours the oil on him and says, The following things are gonna happen, and he names a series of signs. But the last one was the critical one. He meets prophets coming down from the hill playing musical instruments, and the spirit lands on Saul, and Saul gets infilled by spirit, and he becomes the king. Then, when Saul does not listen to the spirit and abandons listening to the spirit, the spirit is lifted off Saul and is put on David, and David becomes the king. There is no kingdom where there is not submission to the spirit. The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking. It's righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. It is submission to each other as men of God to pace each other in those three disciplines: righteousness, peace, and joy. The kingdom comes when you walk in the power of the Spirit by submitting to the voice of the God who would speak to you.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:25

Amen. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:30

Well, one of the best answers.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:33

Yes, you too. Yeah, look, we're gonna we're gonna be having many podcasts together.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:38

So well, listen, I'm a co-host on a podcast, and maybe we'll have you on ours too. Mine is called the Graceful Warrior Podcast.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:45

Oh, I'd love to come on.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:46

Okay, then let's let's uh let's swap our our our constituencies and share resources together.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:52

Absolutely. David, thank you for coming. God bless you.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:56

God bless you too, and delighted that you uh that you and I waited our way through getting through how to how to book on to make this happen.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:03

Amen. Wasn't Dr. David wonderful? Like I he's such a jovial person and such a delight to be around. So I I hope you enjoyed this this conversation. But my takeaway for this episode wasn't the great stories and the great time I had with David Chocta, but it was the Lord's Prayer. Jesus didn't just teach us what to pray, he taught us how to approach God. When he taught the disciples to pray, our Father, he was inviting us into that same relationship with God that he has. The Lord's Prayer isn't just a prayer to memorize, it's an invitation to commune with God. So I want to challenge you this week. I want you to pray the Lord's prayer, but don't just recite it. Pray it. After each phrase, pause and reflect on what it's saying. Our Father. You know, if you've listened to the podcast, you already know where you can go with that. You realize how deep just saying our Father is, who art in heaven. Now I'm gonna tell you in the next episode, he breaks more of that down. So uh make sure you're subscribed so you can follow and click the notification bell. I don't know if you can do that on the podcast stream, but just make sure you're subscribed so you'll be able to hear the continuation of this. But I digress. Pray this week when you pray this prayer, reflect after every phrase and ask for the Father because you're already in intimacy with him at that moment. Ask him, what does this mean? And the Holy Spirit will reveal it to you. So I will look forward to seeing you next week. And if you listen to the Sova podcast on this Monday, I'm gonna be talking about Samson, not necessarily Samson's strength, but how Samson kept sabotaging himself and how us men tend to sabotage ourselves in the greater purpose. With that, stay strong, stay valiant, keep forging your path, and be blessed.