Prayer

Transcript

Good morning, my name is Chet. I'm one of the pastors here. Grab your Bible and head to Matthew chapter 6. We are in the third week of our Abide series. And what we are talking through is that if you are a Christian, if you've placed your faith in Jesus, if the Holy Spirit has regenerated you, you are in Christ, that you abide in Him. And then Jesus in John chapter 15 gives it as a command.

He says, Abide in Me. I'm the vine, you are the branches. And unless you abide in Me, you cannot bear fruit. You can do nothing without Me. And so what we are walking through in this series is as we abide in Christ, as we stay connected to Him, we're focusing on the part that connects to the vine, and He pours life into us, and He works through us, and then we bear fruit, and then we have joy, and then it shows up in life, but we stay connected to Him. And so the title of this series is Abide, Ancient Practices for Enjoying God.

So that we are going to learn certain practices that Christians have done forever to help us appreciate and enjoy what Christ has accomplished for us on the cross, what He has already purchased for us, this good and real relationship with God the Father. My wife and I periodically go on dates with one another. My four-year-old son asked his mama, he said, Why do sometimes other people come to the house and watch us, and y'all leave? And my wife got real close to his face and said, It's because we're sick of you. She didn't. It would be awesome if she did.

She said, Because your dad and I like each other, and we want to go just be with one another. We want to go hang out with one another. Now we go on dates, not so that we can get married, not so that I don't go on a date with my wife so that she'll fall in love with me. We go on dates because she's already madly head over heels in love with me. But we go on dates to enjoy what we already have.

And so what we're talking about in this series is that we get to do that with God. Christ has already done all the work. He's already purchased us. He's already placed us here. And we get to enjoy this real relationship with the Father. And these are practices that help that, that aid that.

And so one of the things we're talking about today is that we're going to be talking about prayer. And as we get started, I want to discuss this concept with you. I heard this recently and I thought it was helpful. It's the idea that the things you do, do things to you. So the things you do, do things to you.

That you are constantly, by your actions, training yourself. You're constantly, by your actions, equipping yourself for something. So let's talk about Kung Fu for a second. Boneweed's part of our church family. And he practices Kung Fu. And one of the things they do, is they take a bag, like a canvas bag, and they put mung beans in it.

So if you've got some mung beans laying around the house, and you were wondering what to do with them, put them in a canvas bag. And then you punch them, for about 15 minutes a day. You punch a canvas bag with mung beans. The first day you do this, the first time you hit it, you'll think this isn't that hard. It's kind of soft. This is kind of nice.

I hated these mung beans anyway. And you'll, you'll go to punch. And after about 15 minutes, your hands will be swollen. You'll wake up the next day, and you'll look like some sort of terrible thing has happened to you. And it takes a while to train your hands. But eventually, you can get to where you punch mung beans, until you just kind of turn them to powder.

And then when you're able to do that, after 15 minutes a day, for a considerable amount of time, you change to gravel. And you put gravel in the bag, and you punch that. And once you can turn gravel into, into dirt, or tiny rocks, smaller gravels, you go to lead shot. So, lead balls. And you're not able to do anything with those. They stay the same.

But you are able to punch things. I don't know if you've ever punched someone in the face. Your face is relatively soft. It doesn't feel terrible to punch somebody in the face. But if you're used to punching still shot, it's probably like your hands getting to take a nap on a pillow.

It's like delightful. And so, they would practice this to make their hands, they would practice this to change themselves. And in reality, we understand this. That if you play guitar for a long period of time, you get calluses all over your fingers, so that you can play. The first time I tried to play a guitar, I was like, this hurts. And so I quit.

I was bad at it anyway. But, you train yourself. And so, thinking through this, that if I wanted to make my hands really tough, I wouldn't say, well, I guess I should just punch this for eight hours today. It's, no, you have to do it slowly over time. You have to work your way towards it. It doesn't just happen overnight.

And in reality, when we're talking about reading our Bibles, when we're talking about prayer, we're talking about the same thing. That it is better for us to learn how to habit this, to have a practice of this, to make this a normal part of our lives, because the things we do, do things to us. They change us. So as I was thinking through this, if you practiced playing the piano an hour a day, if you practiced Kung Fu or Karate an hour a day, or two hours a day, and you did this for years, you would be pouring yourself, you'd be changing yourself. And so what I realized was, I am soon going to be a Kung Fu master of my cell phone and my television.

I've been diligently training for years. In reality, if you watch two hours of television a day, if you watch an hour of television a day, you are sitting, turning your brain off, accomplishing nothing, and you're training yourself. You're pouring into yourself. I've realized I used to spend some time on Twitter. I stopped because it was bad for me. For a couple of reasons.

One, Twitter is kind of aggressive. And so the more I looked at Twitter, the more sarcastic I got, and the more aggressive I got. And that's not a good turn for me, you guys. I didn't need to add to that. I need to come the other direction. And so that wasn't helpful.

Also, you're just kind of flipping through. They're real short. And I realized by the end of me, if I was looking at Twitter for 15 minutes, by the end of it, I wasn't even reading whole tweets. I just, I got to think about the other day, I was sitting in a doctor's office in the waiting room. And I got a magazine out, because I had my little boy with me, and we were, I was just showing him the pictures. But I got to thinking, if someone sat down in a waiting room, and flipped through a magazine, the way we flipped through Facebook or Twitter, they would look like a crazy person.

Like, you just, you wouldn't spend any time on it, you would look insane. But what happens is, we're flipping through our phones, and we're making ourselves more frantic. We're making ourselves, we're increasing our ADHD. We're lowering our attention span. We're pouring into ourselves. We're training ourselves.

We're equipping ourselves for no good purpose. And so what we're talking about is, that we might learn, how to daily practice, things that slowly over time change us, and make us into something else, that build into us. So we're going to talk about prayer today. And the point of this is not, that you would be able to do the most amazing prayer today, but that we might learn how to pray, so that you might practice this for the next 30 years. You might practice this for the next 20 years, 40 years, so that it builds into you, and changes you. So let's pray, because that seems like a good way, to start a sermon on prayer.

And then let's see what Jesus has to say about this. God, we thank you, that we get to speak to you as our Father, that you love us, and you know us. And we pray, that you would empower us to pray. That you would teach us to pray. That we might practice, and slowly walk with you for years. That you might change us, and grow us.

In Jesus' name, Amen. So we're going to talk about how. We're just going to try to look at some real practical, how do we pray? Because the point is, we need to learn how to make this a practice for ourselves. How to install this into our lives, and this becomes a normal thing that we do. So we're looking at Matthew chapter 6.

We're going to pick up in verse 5. This is Jesus teaching about prayer. And so we're just going to walk through this text, and we're going to exegete it. We're just going to pull out of it, what's in it, and talk through it. And then we're going to, at the end of this, kind of talk through this joyful experience, that we get to have in prayer, and how the Holy Spirit empowers it. So let's walk through and see what it says.

It says, And when you pray, you must not pray like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues, and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. That's what makes them hypocrites. They're not actually wanting to pray. They don't actually want to delight in the Lord. They don't actually want to enjoy Him, know Him, speak to Him. They just want other people to see them praying.

So he says, Don't do that. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. So if the point of their praying, was just to have people look at them, and people look at them, you did it. You get your reward. That was it. But when you pray, go into your room, and shut the door, and pray to your Father who is in secret.

And your Father who sees in secret, will reward you. Okay, so this is the context for prayer. First of all, he's saying that you get to speak to your Father who sees in secret, and He rewards prayer. That there's a reward for us that we would spend time praying, that it works into us, that the things we do, do things to us, that God sees us, rewards us. I think that's practical here and now. It's also reward in eternity.

But he says, Go into your room and close the door. If we would learn to do that, we'll actually start praying. If we would learn to have time where we got away from everything, and where we closed the door, when we got away from everything, and found time to be alone, and set it aside, that's the first thing that has to happen if we're going to make it a practice of praying, is that you have to find time for it. You have to make time for it. You have to have a consistent ability, and you have to get away. The other way that the Gospels will say that Jesus would always go off to desolate places to pray.

So he would go, here he says, Be alone, close the door. And he says he would go to desolate places. One of the things I realized with me praying is that it is not a desolate place if my phone is with me. I'm imminently reachable. I'm also very easily distracted. So if I'm trying to pray, and I quit praying, and just start thinking about things, in about two seconds, my phone will magically appear in my hand, and I will be doing something else.

Maybe I'm the only person who has that problem. I am not. So one of the things I've had to learn is that if I'm going to read and pray, and I need my phone with me for some reason, have to be reachable for some reason, which we just feel like we do, we don't, but if I need it, I will actually just take my phone as far as I can reach, and toss it away from myself. That way, when I suddenly, aimlessly, without thinking, try to grab it, my arm can't get to it. And then I go, oh yeah, I'm supposed to be praying. The other thing I'll do is I'll just leave it inside, and I'll just sit on my back porch, but what we have to do is find some way, so for you, that may be, you've got to find time with your spouse where they're going to watch kids for just a little while, so you can have 10, 15 minutes to go pray, and actually pray.

Don't be like, honey, I need to pray, and then go take a nap. No, pray. But find some time, if it's really early, if it's really late, whatever you've got to do, find some time to get away and pray. And if we'll make a habit of that, just getting away, just closing the door, it'll already begin to build into us this habit, so that we can begin to become people who pray, and this can begin to work in us. Verse 7, And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases, as the Gentiles do. Okay, so Gentiles are non-Jewish people, and so they were aware of their prayer practices, these pagan practices, where they would chant, where they would repeat the same things over and over again, where they would have these big ceremonies, where they would extend everything out, and he says, don't do that.

Don't heap up empty phrases, as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need, before you ask Him. And then He's going to say, pray them like this. Let's talk about that for just a second. I think sometimes we think, if we're going to pray, it's got to be long, it's got to have good, flowery, empty phrases, that sound nice. You hear somebody else pray sometime, and you'll be like, that was an express lane prayer.

That was fast pass, like that got to walk past the line, that was so good. And it's like, that's not how it works. He just says, pray. Talk like you're talking to your Father. We're not praying, having to use big, empty phrases. There's a story in 1 Kings, chapter 18, about Elijah, for real this time.

I got that wrong, two weeks ago, I said it was Elisha. Kind of wants me to give credit to Elisha, for this story, just to make up for it to him. But this is Elijah, and there are 450 prophets of Baal, and there is Elijah. And so they get on this mountain, they're going to have a God showdown, so they're going to have the 450 prophets. They said, we've got to choose. He says, don't quit going back and forth.

We're going to pick a God. We're either going to follow Baal, or we're going to follow the Lord God. And he says, so get your prophets together. I'm the only one on our team, but that's cool. And y'all set up a sacrifice, and I'll set up a sacrifice, and we'll pray, and whichever God answers from heaven with fire is God. Y'all can go first.

So 450 prophets of Baal set up their sacrifice, and then they start praying. And it says that for hours, they prayed and did their lame dance. I don't know what their dance was like, but it was lame. So it wasn't as cool as dabbing. It was way lamer than that, you guys. They're hopping around.

They're praying. They're chanting. They're saying stuff over and over. They go for so long that Elijah begins to make fun of them. He walks over to them while they're chanting and praying and repeating the same things and begging and asking. And he says, um, you think maybe he's just like deep in thought?

Is it? Think he went to the bathroom? He for real says that. He said, oh, maybe he left. Maybe he's on a journey. Does he have like an answering service?

He'll probably, he'll probably get back, you know, in a little while. He said, oh, maybe he's asleep. And he lets him go for a long time. And then they're still going on. They're cutting themselves. They're doing all this stuff and trying to make their prayer be powerful enough to make it up.

And he goes, okay, everybody over here. He pours water all over his sacrifice. He prays once. Fire comes down from heaven. He's like, grab him up. We're killing him.

It's a dramatic end to the story. God answers very quickly when Elijah prays because he does hear. And Elijah does not have to do all these things to make his prayer good enough. And that's what Jesus says. He says, that's something people who don't understand God do. That's not something you have to do.

You get to talk to God like he's your father. And then he says, your father knows what you need before you ask him. Now, do not apply that in a way that makes it, makes it where you don't have to pray. He's telling us to pray. He's saying when you pray, but when you pray, understand that he loves you. He knows you.

He knows what you need. And you can just go talk to him. You don't have to make it amazing. You don't have to say it over and over again. And so reality, what, what the Bible tells us is this. In your individual prayer, your prayer today does not have to be, you don't have to say the same thing over and over again.

You don't have to make it amazing. You just get to talk to the Lord like he knows you. But, you can say the exact same thing tomorrow. And you can say the exact same thing the next day. He actually tells a story to his disciples about a widow who had been deprived of justice. And he said she went to the judge every day and said the same thing.

And he says he took the stories told so that they might always pray and never lose heart. And that's what we're supposed to do. It's supposed to be a continual daily practice. Not, I'm going to go pray for three hours and it's going to be the most amazing praying I've ever done. And that'll be it. That'll cover me for a month.

It's not that. It's learning how to make this a practice where we do this over and over again. And did y'all hear he says he's our father who loves us and knows what we need before we ask. I have an 18 month old. His communication skills are very poor. He says this, mostly in regard to food.

If he's saying this, it's because he thinks he can eat whatever he's pointing at. He says, meh, which is some mixture of more and mine. Also only says it around food. And he says, bye, which means I'm ready to leave this place and go to sleep. If I pick him up, he'll go, bye. And we're like, you're not leaving, buddy.

And he's about to be real sad because he's ready to go to sleep. But here's what I don't do. I don't look at him when he wants to eat something and go, until you learn English, you will never eat in this household. That's not how it works. I try to figure out what on earth he's talking about. I'll hold things up.

This, this, this. It's like, well, buddy, you got to learn more words, but okay, what? This? And it took me a while to realize when you held up what he wanted, he would take off running. He was going to the place to stand next to where he wanted you to pour his food out. So I would be like, I guess he changed his mind.

I'd put it up. He'd come back mad at me. Like what? We just worked out a deal. We found it. I'm over here.

He'll run and smack an Ottoman and he just wants you to pour food on top of it. When he runs out, he'll say, ma, ma. You got to go get more. We learned what he was saying so that we could serve him. And here's what happens. We just went on vacation and we preemptively thought through.

He's going to need to sleep. He's going to need to eat. He's going to, and we planned ahead. We were ready prior to him asking for things to give it to him because we love him. And that's what he's saying that when you go to pray, God knows you, loves you. Sometimes I think my prayers are equivalent to me going, ma, dis.

And God's going, I love you. And yes, slowly, over time, he's going to teach me some words because he loves me. But he's not making it to where you have to say the perfect thing. So everybody, take a deep breath. You can pray. You can pray consistently.

You can pray well because you have a good father who wants to hear you and wants to equip you. And so, now he says, pray like this. And this prayer, you guys, is simple. This prayer will not have anybody going, oh my goodness, you just prayed, son. It won't. Somebody called on you to pray and you prayed this prayer, they'd be like, good, that's fine.

It's not the most eloquent, it's straightforward because he's saying you're talking to your father who knows you and loves you. So y'all ready? First thing, we're going to kind of break this up into chunks. I'm going to try to explain that these, I think, are sections of things that you can pray about. But he says, pray then like this.

I'll read the whole thing. 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. Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Amen.

That's his prayer. So when they asked Jesus, how should we pray? It's in Luke. They come to him. They say, how should we pray? Jesus says like this and he actually gives a shorter version of this because he's saying you get to talk to your father.

It gets to be clear. It gets to be straightforward. These are the types of things to pray about and it doesn't have to be amazing. It's better for you to learn how to pray five minutes a day, ten minutes a day for the next 40 years than to try to work really hard to be able to pray some big amazing prayers and not have it be a habit and a normal thing for you to do. So he says, pray then like this, our father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Hallowed means honored. May you be honored and worshiped above everything else. May you be more important and more glorious than everything else. I use this prayer as my model prayer. When I'm praying through things, I try to follow these sections. I was praying the other night with my four-year-old and I said, Lord, may you be, and I lost the word for a second and my four-year-old son went, honored.

And I was like, yeah, I apparently say the same thing all the time when we're praying, but he was ready. He knew that's how we're going to start. May you be honored above everything else. What that means is, may we love you. We just talk about idolatry for a couple of weeks and what we said was that our problem in idolatry is that we place things above Jesus. That we love something more than we love him and so we start our prayers off by saying, may you be above everything else.

May you be honored. May you be cherished. We worship. So this is kind of at the beginning of your prayers, spend some time worshiping. It doesn't have to be long. It's one sentence here, but you can spend as much time as you want saying, God, you are good and you are big and you are holy and you are righteous.

Worship. That'll help the rest of your prayer because you'll remember who you're talking to. But he says, our father, that's also, that you're remembering that he loves you like a father, like a good father. Some of us have very bad examples of what a father is. He is a good father who loves you, who knows you and you get to go to him and he wants to hear you and he knows your needs. Our father.

Also, it's communal, so it's not my father. So he's saying, when you pray, acknowledge that we all belong to him, that this is a communal thing. It's not just you alone. Then it says, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So he begins by being worshipful.

He begins by setting kind of the tone for how he's going to pray and it says, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And so I would say another section or the next kind of thing to think through is kingdom prayers. So the kingdom, a kingdom, is the extent of the reign of the king. And so we're praying that God's kingdom, that Jesus' kingdom would advance. And so that's, we're praying, this is where you would pray that the people around you would meet Jesus. This is where you would pray for your neighbors.

This is where you would pray for the place that you work, that God's kingdom would break in there, that people would be welcomed in, that people would repent, that people would love him. You'd pray for his kingdom. This is where he says, your will be done. This is also that we would surrender, acknowledging that God's will is above our will and so that we would pray that his kingdom would come but that ultimately his will would be done in whatever situation we have going on. So when the kingdom advances, that's people meeting Jesus, it's also kingdom life.

So it's people who come to know Christ but it's also, Jesus walks around healing people. It's because he's practicing what he's going to do in the cross which is reverse the effects of sin. And so this is where we'd also pray for healing. This is also where we'd pray for restoration in relationships. This is also where we'd pray for all the good things that Jesus can do, reconciliation and hope and joy. This is where we'd pray for somebody who we know that's walking with depression.

This is where we would pray for God's kingdom to work in their heart and their soul. They might know him, love him, feel loved by him. Spencer, when he was first coming down here was working closely with a lady who was helping him work on some church plant stuff and she's actually helped a lot of church plants do some paperwork and get some things started and he recently saw this past week that her son who's 17 years old had been in an accident and the doctors came to him and said, he's brain dead, he's going to be brain dead and y'all just need to go ahead and start being prepared for him to pass. And so they just started praying and they put out as much as they could to other people to be praying.

The internet's very helpful in that way. They put up a GoFundMe that basically just said we're asking for healing and we're asking for in this situation that we're going to either need to fund a lengthy recovery or we're going to have to pay for a funeral. We don't know which but we're raising support. Spencer told me about that earlier this week. He was praying about it. He came back in and said he's moving his fingers.

He can mouth I love you. They told him to blink once and he did. They told him to blink twice and he did. Now that's a long way away from healthy but it's also a long way away from brain dead. He's now starting to say some words. He's recognizing faces.

There are times where we're praying and we're saying Lord let your kingdom advance here and your will be done. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are about to be stuck in a fiery furnace because they will not worship another God other than the true one the real one. They look at the king who is about to burn them and they say our God can save us our God will save us but if he doesn't we're not worshiping that. And that's one of the ways that we get to pray. Our God can save our God will save but even if he doesn't Lord your will be done. Even if you choose not to in this situation we trust you we won't worship or love anything else.

And so we pray that he can that he will and so we get to pray these types of prayers. St. Augustine who ended up being a great leader in the church said he used to walk by and see his mama holding on to his shoes and praying that the Lord would save him. And he thought that was nice. He knew she cared about him but then he ran off and did whatever he wanted. and then Jesus saved him. And I wonder if he ever looked at his shoes and was like oh my goodness.

But we pray for the kingdom to advance. We pray for people to be saved for the Lord to work. verse 11 give us this day our daily bread. We pray for physical needs. This is also where we see very clearly this is a daily prayer. So this is pray this is how you pray on a regular basis give us this day our daily bread.

So for some of you who are in sales you ought to pray every day. Lord help me sell things today. For some of you who work in different places you pray for what you've got going on that day. Will you provide for me today? Will you care for us today? Will you provide the needs we have today?

And it says our daily bread so this is where you pray for other people's physical needs. Lord help me pay bills. Help me have enough food. Help me provide for my children. Help me to care. Help me to and you pray daily that he would be at work in our needs.

And he loves you. He hears you and he gives good gifts to his children so you can pray. Specifically I heard a pastor one time who's in China he said he needed a bike to do some ministry and so he said he started praying for a bicycle and he said when he prayed for his bicycle he prayed for what size? He prayed for what type? He gave a specific color. And you think hold on a second when I first read that I thought you just take the bike the Lord gives you son.

That's what I thought. And his point was he said now let's think about this if I have a good father who is wealthy and I believe that he might actually give me a bike if I was telling my dad this wouldn't I tell him what type? Wouldn't I talk to him like I believed he could do it? Wouldn't I lay it out for him? So I think there's some freedom for us to just know we're talking to a good father and just talk to him about what he can say no.

We're going to get to that in a minute. You can ask for something dumb and he can say no. My son my 18 month old is allergic to eggs milk wheat oats peanuts there's five of them and I may have missed one. When I'm eating cake he stands underneath me going ma nobody this this is poison to you. It's delightful to me but it is poison to you and I'll try to find him something else and there are times where we ask the Lord for stuff but you get to talk to him about your physical needs your actual needs and you get to be specific and you get to trust that he's good. Verse 12 forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.

Forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors and lead us not to temptation but deliver us from evil.