Matthew 6:9-13 Lessons On Prayer

We pause our Philippians series to reset our prayer life around the Lord’s Prayer and the heart posture Jesus teaches before we ask for anything. We focus on praying with reverence, surrender, contentment, forgiveness, and real dependence on our Heavenly Father. 
• praying with right motives rather than seeking attention 
• rejecting empty repetition because God is already listening 
• using the Lord’s Prayer as a structure, not a script 
• relating to God as Abba Father while honoring his holiness 
• beginning petitions with God’s kingdom and God’s will 
• asking for daily bread as a practice of contentment and dependence 
• seeking forgiveness for our sins before judging others 
• extending forgiveness with wisdom and healthy boundaries 
• praying for protection from temptation and the evil one 
We’re going into 21 days of prayer, so “when you write down a prayer request on here, it’s not just flippant.” 

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Why Pause For A Prayer Season

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And as we enter into this season of prayer in uh starting next week, August 2nd through the 22nd, I thought it'd be appropriate to, and you can hold your applause, to pause our series in Philippians, and we can take a break and talk about prayer. Talk about prayer for a couple of weeks. And um we're gonna talk about the Lord's Prayer today, and I was I told you guys already, but I typically pray that, pray that. I typically I do pray that quite often actually, but I teach it, teach on it at least once a year, around once a year is the way it works out. Um we're only gonna talk about the body of the Lord's Prayer today, but I just think because prayer is so important, we can't ignore some of the other lessons that Jesus brings up right before he talks about the prayer. But all prayer is is communication with God. You're talking to God, and communicating with God is important just like talking to your wife or your husband is important, just like developing communication skills with your children is important, just like talking to one of your friends isn't is important. Talking to God should be on the top of your list of things that you should do and want to do right. And you can pray and talk to God. You can you can do it well, you should do it well and you should do it right. Um, first and foremost, Jesus offers some clarifying instructions before he gets to the body of the Lord's prayer itself. Let me quickly cover those, so we're not going to read them, but you have to have your heart right when you pray. In other words, Jesus points this out. You can't be praying for the wrong reasons. You can't be praying for attention from others. And you probably have some idea in your head of somebody who's prayed before, and it seemed a little bit whether it was true or not, but you thought maybe

Heart Motives And Empty Repetition

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they were sort of just trying to make themselves sound good, okay? We've probably all been around someone or a situation like that before. I'm not saying we have the right to judge whether it was or not, but you have to be careful. And when you pray, it is all about the heart. Why are you talking to God? Second, when you pray, you don't pray like the world prays. You are not attempting to communicate with God the same way that other religions and other cultures and other philosophies tried to dictate you to connect with God or the gods. In other words, or in the words of Jesus himself, he says, you don't speak with repetitive words, right? You're not just blabbling on in order to incite some sort of response. You can think back to the prophets of Bel and Elijah on Mount Carmel, right? They spent half the day babbling on, singing, chanting, yelling, screaming, cutting themselves in order to get their God's attention. And Jesus reminds us that's not how it works. Why? Because God's already listening to us. His ear is already attuned to us. He knows exactly what you need before you even ask it. He knows what you need, which by the way is better than what you want sometimes, because what you need is not necessarily what you want, and God knows best. That's a whole different sermon about his will and our submission to him. And of course, Jesus is teaching his disciples, and he's preaching this in front of a large crowd, and he is starting with an understanding that it's not if you pray, but when you pray. You're going to pray. You have to pray, you have to talk to God, you have to communicate with him. Like any earthly relationship, you a large portion of the strength of your relationship with God will depend on if you are talking to him consistently. It's easy, it's not difficult, it's not complex. And with those little lessons out of the way, let's read the Lord's Prayer here. Pray then like this Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us

Reading The Lord’s Prayer Together

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from evil. There it is. That's the example. Very simple, very standard. This is a wonderful structure that we can build a healthy prayer life on. Right? And before we jump into specifics, let me point out one thing. Jesus starts this by saying, pray like this. That does not mean that we copy this exactly, even though you can, and you should sometimes. It's very helpful. But it is like this. It's, it's, it's, uh, I don't know, it's a great example to follow. Now it's not mad libs. You don't just sort of fill in the blanks here, right? But each line of this prayer represents something, an aspect of your prayer life, an attitude, a thought that should define how you pray. Matter of fact, you could take each one of these lines of this prayer, and really that could, Manik, you could spend minutes on talking to the Father. You could you could spend minutes talking about forgiveness for yourself and for those that may have harmed you, right? And so it's just, it's a nice structure, it's a nice example. It displays, it gives us uh uh basically the attitude of a healthy prayer life. And the first part of this prayer is a recognition of who God is to you. Before you get to any request, your prayer life, your communication starts with who is God? And first, God is our father, our father, right? This is a Greek word, but if you think about what Jesus or what language

Abba Father And Holy Reverence

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Jesus spoke, he spoke in Aramaic. And the Aramaic word for father, in the way that this is used, is called Abba. And Abba is akin to calling someone dad, right? There is a relational closeness there. It's not just uh it's not just some sort of technical term, it's not just some sort of title. It is, you know, this person. This person is connected to you. This person, there's a warmness to this relationship that you have with God. And listen, I know not every earthly relationship and father relationship is what it should be or whatever, but I hope in general we are mature enough to know the significance of being able to call God our father. The special thing. He is all the great things a dad can be times 10,000 or more, without any of the negativity that might be associated with the failings of a father. So he's our Abba Father, and he is in heaven. So while we are close, while there is this familial connection to God, there's also this distinction that he is where we are not. He is what we are not. Right? We are somehow distinct from God, even while we are connected to God, which ultimately it makes the father relationship even more special that we can have that, even though he is not who we are. He is different, he's set apart. We're here, he's there. We've got to remember that. We're not of the same stuff. And that leads us perfectly into this hallowed be your name part. Hallowed be your name. Told you we were gonna briefly talk about Moses. When Moses was wandering in the desert, right, he'd murdered someone in Egypt. He went out and uh met Jethro. What a great name defined in the Bible. And he's a shepherd and he's guiding sheep out in the desert, and he sees a burning bush. You know the story. I'm not gonna recount it all here. But you recall that he was commanded to take off his shoes because it was hollow, holy ground. Hallowed. It was set apart, it was different, it was distinct, and so it deserved a different sort of action and reverence than the places around it. So that's what it means when we hallowed God's name is that when we approach who He is, there's a sacredness to that, a hallowedness to that. It's different. It's just different. He is different, and we got to have a respect for that. Part of what it means to hallow God's name is to recognize that there's a significant, heavenly, set apart uh peace of God that is well beyond us. And because of that, he deserves all complete reverence, honor, and glory. By the way, this is a reason why the commandment not to take his name in vain matters, is because his name is not flippant. It means something. There's significance there, there's gravitas there. And we need that. We need God's name to be hallowed in this world. Because there's no reverence for anything. There's no reverence for God, especially. There's no reverence for any religion. There's no reverence for authority, there's no reverence for any sort of tradition, any sort of hall. There's no reverence today at all, especially for God, but we desperately need it. And I truly believe that a person, a family, uh, an entire society that has reverence for the very name of God is setting themselves up for a form of blessing. Right? I don't believe in the health, wealth, prosperity stuff, but go ahead and tell you, if you hallowed God's name, you're going to avoid some problems as a society that normally you wouldn't have. So in our prayers, we have to start with a recognition of who God is. He's Father, He's heavenly, He's hallowed. And then, only then do we start getting into petitions. How often in our prayer lives do we so easily skip over the relational part, the the the identifying who we're actually talking to part, the hallowed part. The father. I know in my prayers I'll I will skip over so quickly. Oh, God, you're great, you're good, thank you so much. And then get right into I need this, I'm struggling with this, I need, I need this. Part of a healthy prayer life is pausing. And before we get into the I need part of our prayer life, let's give God his due diligence in our prayer life. Let's start there first. And even then, when we do get to our own request, right, Jesus starts somewhere a little differently than maybe we would start. Jesus starts his request not with uh asking for healing, not with asking for a loved one to be saved, even those things, even though those things are great. He's not asking for a new car in the parking lot, which would have been weird 2,000

Seek God’s Will Before Requests

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years ago. He's not asking, you can laugh about that later. I know there's only a couple of us in here, but you know, the mental image of Jesus praying for a car in the parking lot um 2,000 years ago. And people are like, what is that? It's amazing. It's like the scene in The Passion of Christ where Mel Gibson decides that Jesus invented table and chairs as a carpenter. You know what I'm talking about? It's been a while since I've seen that movie, but I remember one random scene where he's talking to Mary, his mother, and he's describing what a chair and what a table are. And I just thought that was funny. Uh, anyways, let's get back to this. Jesus doesn't start his petition with asking for something, he starts his petition by submitting himself to God's will. He starts his position by asking for something involving the kingdom of God. Remember, Jesus is in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. That's the context of where he gives his prayer. And the whole point of the Sermon on the Mount is to teach people what it's like to be kingdom people. And he starts the petition part of his prayer is asking for God's will to be done here on earth as it's done in heaven. That's where he starts his petition. He wants to get it right from the very beginning. Here's why that matters practically for us. Because so many times we're so fixated on what we want, and that's what we pray for, and we get frustrated when those things don't happen. But if you start your petition asking for God's will to be done here on earth as it's done in heaven, even when it seems like God's not answering your other request, you can lean back and have faith that even though things are going wrong, even though that person's not healed, even though this person's still not saved, even though you're still struggling with your job or with your finances, if you pray first and submit yourself to the will of God in your prayer life, you you can still lean back on that and know I'm I'm still okay. I am still doing kingdom work. God is in control despite the fact that I'm dealing with these unanswered prayers because the first prayer will be answered. You're gonna walk in his will, you're gonna do things that he wants to do, and in that you can take heart. Trust in God is a beautiful thing. I prayed this, but first I prayed for God's will to be done. And so even though I wanted this thing to happen and it didn't happen, I'm okay. I believe that I'm still walking in your blessings, I'm still walking in your purpose, I'm still doing what you need me to do. And I know that doesn't answer all the doubts when it comes to unanswered prayers, but it does offer a touch of comfort, I think. That if your life is first submitted to his will and you believe that and you're honest about it, then you can look at disappointment a little differently. Because maybe I needed to be in that pit. Maybe I didn't need God to deliver me right then because I needed to be there because of what I have inside of me, the Holy Spirit and the news of the gospel, needed to be shared in that context. God, I wanted you to break my hand, I wanted you to heal my broken hand faster. But maybe in that process of me having to go to the doctor or to rehab or whatever, I am put into a position where I'm able to share the gospel. We don't know God's will, other than the fact that He wants people to come to know Him. And so that ultimately supersedes what we might be praying for specifically. I'm convinced many of our spiritual failures and letdowns and disappointments stem from really what boils down to misplaced priorities and a big bit of misplaced selfishness in our prayer life with God. Start with his kingdom, start with his will, and then move on to the other stuff. And even when you do move on, Jesus doesn't move on immediately to sort of the personal stuff, he moves on to asking for daily bread. Daily bread. Lord, give me my daily bread today. What does that mean? Well how do I say this? Because we I don't know. I am ambitious.

Daily Bread And The Fight For Contentment

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I have dreams, I want to accomplish things, I want to be able to take care of my family. These things are not evil. So let me let me start this little piece by saying that having ambition, wanting to have success, wanting to have enough and even more than enough to bless your family and bless others, there's nothing wrong with that. But how often do we let that push us to a position where we're fixating on the future, fixating on what we don't have versus what we do have? There's a balance to it. There's nothing wrong with hard work and ambition, but it can't define our attitude. Our attitude has to be defined by the fact that we are totally reliant on our daily bread from Jesus, from God. He gives us our daily bread. Not a job, not our own work ethic, not our own wisdom, not our own understanding, not our own efforts, not what's in the bank account, not what's in the refrigerator, not what our house looks like, not what none of that. That stuff is good, but ultimately what we need is to be content with daily bread that only comes from Jesus. Daily bread signifies an appreciation and understanding of being content with what you need, not just with having everything you want. We have to be okay with having exactly what we need. Do we have clothing? Do we have a form of shelter? Do we have access to water? Do we have access to food? And I know this gets a little confusing when we think about the poverty of the world, but it's a sin-cursed world. And there are people out there who don't have those things. I get it. I get it. But this is not just talking about physical needs, it's talking about spiritual needs as well. Your daily bread, what you need to sustain yourself physically and spiritually, comes from God. Comes from God. Contentment. Contentment. Before we move to the area, I was a, you guys know this, I was a youth pastor at a church. And I like being there. It's a lovely place, a lovely town. I love, I love the pastor I was with. I love my youth group. But I I was getting frustrated. I was not content. I was getting a little frustrated because I didn't want to be a youth pastor anymore, because I'm getting older, I've got my own kids and things like that. And I'm looking for, I don't know, a way to move on that's healthy. Again, nothing wrong with the church, nothing wrong with the youth group, nothing wrong with the pastor. I just felt anxious to get out and get to what's next. And one December, Tara had been praying and she came to me and she was just as frustrated as I was, really. She says, Zach, we just got to be content. Daily bread. Wake up and realize that you're getting to minister. And it might not be the exact context you want to be in right now, but just be thankful and happy. And I said, You're 100% right, Tara. Tara, you better listen to this podcast. I know you're not here right now, but you better listen to this and uh be happy about it. But I said, Tara, you're right. I said, content. That's that's our word for 2000, whatever year it was, 22 maybe. Content. We get into to January, we're like three weeks in. I get a call from somebody, and and wham bam, here we are now. It's content, and then God, we just gotta be content. Daily bread attitude in our prayer life. Don't get so distracted and fixated about all the little material stuff. Daily bread. Daily bread. Then from there, Jesus wants us to move on to something incredibly important. Forgiveness. Forgiveness in our prayer life. Again, before we're asking for anything specific, before we're asking for grandma's corn on her foot, or anything like that. Sorry, Danielle. Before you're asking

Forgiveness That Frees You

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for any of that kind of stuff, we've got to talk about forgiveness. Forgiveness for your own sins and forgiveness for other people's sins. Forgiveness for our own stupidity first, by the way. There's order to this forgiveness. Right? Forgive me. Forgive me first. My sins. Luke says sins. Matthew says debtors. Sins. Forgive me of my sins. My craziness. My mistakes. My failures. For all of my stuff. Right? Self-examination before external examination. Right? This ties into the whole, right? Why are you worrying about the plank or the speck in someone's eye when you got a plank in your own eye? Examine yourself first before you move on to helping others. It's almost like you're on an airplane and the right, you're supposed to help put on your own mask first before you put on the mask of someone who might be struggling next to you. Worry about your own sins first. And I think that's practical for a couple of reasons. Number one, it gives you perspective. And number, number two, you absolutely just need God to deal with your sin before you have any right to worry about anybody else. But then once you are dealt with and you've received grace and mercy, you've received deliverance. You know what it feels like to be in the wrong and to be brought to the right. You know what it's like to be walking in darkness and to make that step into the glorious light of grace and mercy. Then you could look at other people and not look at them with contempt for their failures, but look at them with basically, I don't know, an aching heart, knowing that they need what you got.

unknown 21:35

Right?

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You're not looking at them thinking, oh, I'm better than they are. You're looking at them thinking, My gosh, I've been in your shoes before. I know what you need, and you can have it. Right? External for or external or internal first, external second. Forgiveness in your prayer life. Man, we need some forgiveness in our prayer life for our own selves and for others. For others. A lot of people can do a lot of silly, hurtful things to you. Sometimes they do it on purpose, sometimes they don't. But it still hurts. Forgive them and move on. It doesn't mean that you let them run back over you or something like that, depending on the circumstance. That's not what I'm saying. But you can let You can forgive people who have hurt you and done the wrong thing and move on and still not have them in your life and have a healthy distance between you. Right? Just forgive people. You needed forgiveness, they need forgiveness. If God can forgive you, you can forgive somebody else. There's a real liberty in forgiveness. Corey Tin Boone. I'll talk about Corey Tin Boone every once in a while. She's one of my spiritual heroes. But this was well after she had survived World War II. Well, after many things, and she was doing a speaking tour in Germany, of all places. Right? She's back where so many hurtful things happened to her. And she has this meeting and she has a chance encounter with this person. And it turns out that this person was one of the guards at one of the concentration camps that she was in. And the person came up to her and she recognized him immediately. He's mean. He's hurtful, painful. He represented so much of all the hurt that she had gone through, watching her entire family get carried away, watching her sister die in front of her. And there's this guard. And the guard comes and asks for forgiveness. And Corey Tin Boone, and I'm probably going to get this a little wrong. I'm doing it from memory, but Corey Tin Boone recalls this fierce feeling of anger. How dare this person ask for forgiveness? How dare they? How dare they even approach me? And she goes, but I know what I have to do. And she said, I forgive you. And just like that, all of that ferocity of anger and resentment. She said, It melted away just like that. How astounding. How astounding forgiveness is to get rid of the pains that we don't even know that we have or that we're dealing with. Forgiveness. And finally, Jesus calls our attention to the fact that our prayer life should properly include prayers for protection from the one person for from. Okay, let me reword this. I've already got it mixed up here. Prayers for protection from the one person who can actually protect you. Temptations. Right? There's an enemy of your soul,

Protection From Temptation And Evil

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right? And uh he will tempt you. Satan will tempt you. Your temptation will be different than mine, and there's there's spirits and principalities of the air and your own sinful nature embedded into your DNA. They're all gonna lead you to do things that you shouldn't do. Now, sometimes a good amount of healthy self-control can get rid of some of that stuff, but ultimately you can't get rid of all the temptations. You can't get rid of all the sin on your own. We need some help. We got to have some help in this thing. I don't have built inside of me the ability to get rid of all the temptations I face. And not only that, there are temptations out there that that are basically would overwhelm me if it wasn't already for God's hand on my life. So when you pray, God deliver me from evil, lead me not into temptation, you don't know what he is leading you from. You don't know what kind of things he's protecting you from that you never have to deal with because you've prayed this, and he is shielding your mind and shielding your heart from something that might be a temptation, but it never is a temptation because he is drawing you away from it. I think that's astounding. How many things have I been protected from because they never even arrived? Because he's protecting you. Lead me not into temptation. Deliver me from evil. Other translations say the evil one, specifically Satan, who roams around like a roaring lion seeking to destroy you. Protect me from him. I can't see Satan. I can't compete with him on my on a human level. God, do what all you can do. Protect me, help me, help my family. Pray for protection. Pray for protection. So when you pray, I'm finishing here. Let me just sort of wrap this up. When you pray, you're starting at a relational level. You're not praying to a dead God, you're not praying to an idol, you're not praying to some sort of pantheon of gods, you're praying to a real God who is your father. Your father, your dad. Maybe this is

Living Like God’s Name Matters

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more special now because I am a dad, but I just love the fact that I've got a heavenly father. I can go to him. And not just a heavenly father, but a heavenly father who is far and above everything that we can experience on a physical level. He is everything. A heavenly father. A father who created the heavens and the earth, who has his basically total control to do whatever he wants to do. So he's our heavenly father. And he ought to be hallowed. He ought to be made holy in our lives, and we ought to seek to make his name holy wherever we go. Wherever we walk around, we are walking, hoping and praying that we are bringing a hallowedness and a sacredness to his name. When people look at us, right, okay. Sometimes, I don't know. When people look at us, they should probably know, you know what, I don't think I should be making this joke right now. When people look at us, they should probably know, you know what, I've had enough to drink. Or I don't even need this drink. I'm fine. Water's fine. Coke's fine. Like, right? When people meet with us, they should probably change their language. There's a hallowedness to the presence of God, and the presence of God resides in your life through the Holy Spirit. So wherever we go, there should be a sacred hallowness that settles, that calms, that draws people back into proper order. That's part of your prayer life. Just by praying a simple line, hallowed be your name, this is what you're declaring. And when you are done with the relational, you enter into your petitions. But you've got to remember those petitions don't even start with yourself, they start with God. God, your will be done. God, I want this real bad. God, I think this would be the absolute best thing. God, I've thought about this, I've researched it, I've studied it, I've examined this from every angle. Lord, I think this is what needs to happen. I think this is what I'm going to pursue, but God, your will be done. Your will be done. And God, I need your daily bread. I need contentment in your daily bread. I need you to do what only you can do. What you don't realize is that little line there is connected all the way back to the children of Israel wandering in the wilderness when God gave them their daily bread in the manna. Every day they woke up and they had what they needed. The other lesson there is to just understand human nature that it's hard to be content with daily bread. But it's the best thing for you. Forgiveness. Forgiveness. Take time to listen, I I I ask God for forgiveness all the time. Okay? Just on a personal level. I ask for forgiveness all the time. Even if I can't recall some sin that I did during the day, I'm still gonna ask God to forgive me because I know there's probably something. Ask for forgiveness. But it is beautiful for you. And give forgiveness to others. It'll just release so many things, so many problems, so much stress in your life if you just say, you know what, I'm not gonna let you push push me around, but I do forgive you. And I do love you, and I'm moving on. Forgiveness. And ask for spiritual and practical protection from the one person who can do that. There's so much out in that world that I have no control over. There's so much in the spiritual realm that I have no control over. I don't have the tools in my tool bag or in my toolbox to deal with certain things in my life. And so, God, lead me not into temptation and deliver me from the evil one. Ask for help from your Heavenly Father who can actually do something about it. That's the beautiful thing about this, how it all ties together. Because you're starting with relational, you're starting with your Heavenly Father. And when you I even now I just think of my kiddos, when they come to me with a problem, they just assume I can fix it. I broke this, Dad. Can you come fix this? Dad, I what does this mean? Dad, what what does this say? Dad, what is this, what is this picture? Dad, come look at this buck. Dad, dad, dad, come here, come here. I need help. They just assume I can fix it. I'm gonna tell you right now, it's the same assumption I have about my Heavenly Father. I just assume he can fix it. I assume he's in control. I assume that he's not overwhelmed like I'm overwhelmed. I assume he sees my future, he sees my past, he sees my now. He I assume that whatever I take to him, he's got it under control, and that he will reach down and he will do what only he can do, what only a father can do, and fix my problems whenever I am at a loss. He's your heavenly father. And yes, he's holy, yes, he's righteous, he is hallowed. But go to him. Pray. Pray. And we're going into 21 days of prayer. So when you write down a prayer request on here, it's not just flippant. Right? It's not just not just random. These are these these are not just little letters on there that have no meaning, okay? They mean something. And God cares. He cares, and he has the answer. He is the

21 Days Of Prayer And Closing Prayer

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answer. Have faith this morning that prayer matters. Especially as we go into the season of prayer. Every prayer. The Lord's good, amen. He is. I'm just how thankful how thankful can we just be that He is who He is for us. I don't know. It's just it can be overwhelming in a good way to think about it. Let's pray together. And I think it's appropriate if we just pray the Lord's Prayer. Can we do that together? Just read it off the paper in front of you, or you can just whisper it if you want. But our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us of our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For yours is the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.