[SPEAKER_00]: You are listening to audio from Citizens Church located in Plano, Texas for more information about this ministry or to give to this ministry Please visit citizenschurch.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: Good morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: Peo Bible turned to Matthew 6 and find verse 5.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to be in the passages this morning that Jenny just read for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: As you're turning there, if you are visiting us this morning, welcome to Citizen's Church.
[SPEAKER_00]: My name is Jayman and I'm one of the pastors here.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you call Citizen's home and you're here, it's good to see you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Few years ago, Tim Keller passed away.
[SPEAKER_00]: And while he was still alive, he lived the last few years of his life with a terminal cancer diagnosis, and he gave most of those moments he had left to ministering to the church.
[SPEAKER_00]: And someone asked him a question during that season.
[SPEAKER_00]: Looking back on 50 years of life in ministry, is there anything you would have done differently?
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is a man who had been faithful.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had built a faithful Christ-exalting ministry, Keller planted a church in New York City, a place where it's hard to plant a church, and then he started a church planting movement that went beyond New York City to around the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had a broad ministry.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was invited to speak at seminary chapels and invited to speak to the executives of Google.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote prolifically some of the best books that I've ever read.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a time when many public church leaders are not finishing well.
[SPEAKER_00]: He died with a good name and with his integrity in hand, and heard well done from his Savior.
[SPEAKER_00]: So all that to say, we should pay attention when someone of that character who live that consequential life answers a question like this, especially when they thought of that question in the face of their own mortality.
[SPEAKER_00]: Looking back on 50 years of life in ministry is there anything you would have done differently?
[SPEAKER_00]: And Tim Keller said, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: I should have prayed more.
[SPEAKER_00]: In another interview, he was asked, what's one thing you would tell your younger self, something you wish you knew that you now know about the Lord?
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, I would tell him, my younger self, that prayer is way more important than he thinks it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: I imagine many of the room have that kind of relationship to prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: We know it matters, but it probably matters more than I think it does.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's something we know should be a part of our life, but it's not as much a part of our life as it should be.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, think with me about this past week, from last Sunday to this Sunday, did you pray?
[SPEAKER_00]: How much did you pray?
[SPEAKER_00]: What did you say when you prayed?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you mostly pray when other people were around?
[SPEAKER_00]: Did you pray at all just by yourself in secret with God?
[SPEAKER_00]: Keller in his sermon on prayer that he preached, he says this, your prayer life is the litmus test for your relationship with God.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you know if you're really a Christian?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a hard question, but I'll tell you this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your prayer life is the best way to find out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't look at whether you witness day and night on the street corner.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't look at whether you're a moral person.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't look at whether you go to church.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't look at even how much of your Bible you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's possible to be motivated out of a desire to look good.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's possible to have an external kind of religion and be motivated by environmental factors, but only God sees when you pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a result, it's your prayer life that tells you what you're really made of spiritually.
[SPEAKER_00]: The infallible test of spiritual integrity is your private prayer life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that didn't feel good.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know my own prayerlessness, you know your prayerlessness.
[SPEAKER_00]: I pray less than I should, and here's what's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would pray even less than I do if my job didn't remind me how important prayer is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this is me confessing.
[SPEAKER_00]: If my private prayer life is what I made of spiritually, I'm just not made of a whole lot, or I'm not made of as much as I should be.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's this famous quote by Martin Luther, where he says, I have so much to do today,
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't like that quote.
[SPEAKER_00]: It makes no sense to me if you've got so much to do then you don't have time to pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everybody knows that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what it exposes when I hear things like that and I'm honest about my reaction to it, it's some, I believe being productive in a day, matters more than being present with God in a day.
[SPEAKER_00]: All that to say this, all of that to say this, it does not take a whole lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: to convict me of my prayerlessness.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trending towards a life that will one day say, if I could have done things differently, I would have prayed more.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I imagine I'm not the only one.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is our last week in our becoming like Jesus series and we're spending it on prayer because even if I don't feel as faithful in it as I should, and maybe you don't either, it is essential to life with Jesus and it's essential to becoming like Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why is it so important?
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, what is it about prayer that makes it the test of our spiritual integrity?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is it about prayer that's so important that it makes a faithful pastor look back over 50 years of faithful ministry and say I should have done more praying than I did.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look at verse 5, chapter 6.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you pray, you must not be 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.
[SPEAKER_00]: Truly, I say to you, they've received their reward, but when you pray go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who's in secret.
[SPEAKER_00]: And your father who sees in secret will reward you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases if 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.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus names two wrong ways to pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: in and explaining those wrong ways to pray, and then responding to that, we hear why prayer is so important.
[SPEAKER_00]: So hypocrites pray to be seen by others.
[SPEAKER_00]: We talked about this last week.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hypocrits are mass squares, and so prayer is a mask they wear to appear godly, and behind that mask, they're hiding a shallow relationship with God.
[SPEAKER_00]: So prayer for them is monologue in front of an audience.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's never dialogue and secret with God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus offers the antidote to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret.
[SPEAKER_00]: The word room there is a specific room of the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the innermost room of the house.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in most first century homes, it was the store room where you kept supplies and food and all that.
[SPEAKER_00]: What was significant is that in most homes, the innermost room was the only room with a lock on it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus is saying, get alone in the one place where nobody will bug you, get alone where you can have uninterrupted time with God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Frederick Bruner wrote a commentary on Matthew, and he says, using the word inner room would have made Jesus' original audience think of the Holy of Holies in the Temple.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus is implying that when we pray to God alone, we have temple like access to God.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says it like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a single sentence,
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus revises the whole Old Testament cultists.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is no longer the Holy of Holy's that's a special meeting place between God and the believer.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the room with a lock.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when you pray like a hypocrite, you get people's praise.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you pray in secret, you get God's presence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And only one of those last.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the other wrong way to pray is like the Gentiles.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gentiles believed in Greco-Roman gods.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were pagans, in the way that they prayed was they multiplied their words because they did not know what their gods wanted.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their gods were impetuous and temperamental and they changed their mind all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they didn't know what mood their god would be in.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so they thought, if I just keep talking, if I just keep stacking words on words on words, I will say something that pleases my god and then my god will respond.
[SPEAKER_00]: to my prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like in first kings, when Elijah is on Mount Carmel and there's 450 prophets of Baal and they're asking their God to respond.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's this test of which God's the one true God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for morning till evening, the 450 prophets of Baal just prayed and prayed and prayed and nothing happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so then they prayed more and they rambled and they rage and they cut themselves and Baal was silent.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then Elijah steps up.
[SPEAKER_00]: and praise a two-verse prayer to the God that has revealed Himself, the one true God in God response.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus is saying here, don't multiply words like the Gentiles.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't multiply words like the prophets of Baal.
[SPEAKER_00]: As if you don't know who God is and as if God doesn't already know what you need.
[SPEAKER_00]: So see something.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Gentiles have experience without knowledge.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they pray and pray and pray and maybe they pray in secret and maybe they pray out loud, but it doesn't matter because their prayers have no substance because their gods aren't real.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they have experience without knowledge.
[SPEAKER_00]: The hypocrites though have knowledge without experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: They have knowledge of God, they have no experience with God.
[SPEAKER_00]: They know what to pray, they get the words right.
[SPEAKER_00]: When people listen to them pray, they think, wow, what a godly person.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they have nothing to show for their prayers other than the applause of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their relationship with God is like a travel agent selling trips to places they themselves have never been.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so following Jesus, we know this, following Jesus is about both knowledge,
[SPEAKER_00]: and experience, truth about God and encounter with God, and private prayers were those two things meet.
[SPEAKER_00]: So here's how a pastor named Matt Smith, her says it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Experience without theology eventually leads to heresy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Theology without experience often results in hypocrisy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Prayer though is the key that turns theology into experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: Christianity that lacks a real encounter with God will eventually be no Christianity at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need theology and experience, experience that is theological and theology that is experiential.
[SPEAKER_00]: What God is doing together, let no one separate.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't make bad theology true, no matter how hard you pray it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what the Gentiles do.
[SPEAKER_00]: They pray all kinds of things to gods that are not real.
[SPEAKER_00]: So God, you are not holy.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not true.
[SPEAKER_00]: So think it out loud, felt very uncomfortable, actually.
[SPEAKER_00]: No matter how hard you pray that, no matter how long you pray that you can't make that true, God you hate me, that's not true.
[SPEAKER_00]: So no matter how fervently you pray that, you can't make it true, you can't make bad theology true.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you also can't intimately and personally experience good theology, unless it's prayed, but can less it makes its way into conversation with God.
[SPEAKER_00]: In college, I had a roommate,
[SPEAKER_00]: who is training to be a waiter at a really fancy restaurant in downtown Dallas.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if he made it through the training, he would make lots of money, at least you'd make lots of money for a poor Bible college student.
[SPEAKER_00]: And training was weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and he would come home with the menu and he would study the menu.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because they wanted their readers to be able to just know off the top of their head, what was on the menu and then he would study cuts of meat and where those cuts of meat came from and all that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he came home one night after work and I said, how is work?
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the end of his training, and what the restaurant does for workers at the end of their training is they serve them dinner.
[SPEAKER_00]: They sit them at the table, and then other staff come and serve them, and they order from memory what they know is on the menu, and they can order whatever they want, and there's no limit.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my buddy went for it, like ordered in order to order, and when he came home, he's miserable.
[SPEAKER_00]: He could barely sit down and he ate so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: the waiters to know how good the food is.
[SPEAKER_00]: All that in that moment when he sits down at the table and he orders from memory, all that he knew about the menu became experience when he sat down and ate the meal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we don't want to be Christians who don't know the menu.
[SPEAKER_00]: The heart cannot love what the mind doesn't know, but we also don't want to be Christians who never eat the meal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Christianity that lacks a real encounter with God will eventually be no Christianity at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so this is what makes prayer so important.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the only way, but the primary way
[SPEAKER_00]: that your Christianity becomes encounter with your God is when you get alone in secret.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody else knows only God hears and you pray to a God you know the things that you know about Him, that you might pull up to the table and enjoy what you know about Him, and experience what you know about Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what makes these next verses so special on a walk through them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Verse 9, Jesus says, Pray then like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: and has experienced God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus, he knows God best and has experienced God most intimately as the God man.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he teaches us to praise saying, when you talk to the God that you know, these are the things that you should tell God about God.
[SPEAKER_00]: So to be on a slide behind me, this is the entire Lord's prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very familiar.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's five parts of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's who he is, tell God who he is, tell God where he is, what he's worth, what he wants, and what he gives.
[SPEAKER_00]: don't just know these things, pray these things, don't just know the menu, eat the meal and hopes of experiencing our theology as reality.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanna walk through each of them, each of them could be a sermon series, each of them could be a sermon.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm gonna walk through them quickly because here's what I wanna do.
[SPEAKER_00]: This will not surprise you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wanna end this morning, giving us time to pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give us time to take these things that we're hearing about God and turn them into conversation with God.
[SPEAKER_00]: So very quickly, who he is, Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you pray, call God your Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus refers to God as Father 17 times in this sermon.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the largest concentration of references to God as Father in the entire New Testament.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus, when He calls God Father, when He teaches us about His Father, He's speaking from an eternity's worth of experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first person of the Trinity is God the Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, is God the Son.
[SPEAKER_00]: They have always been in this relationship.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Michael Reeves wrote a book on the Trinity called Delighting in the Trinity.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's exceptional.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I've used this quote a few times.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just worth our time again.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says this, God has revealed himself to be, not first and foremost creator or ruler, but father.
[SPEAKER_00]: Perhaps the way to appreciate this best is to ask what God was doing before creation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus tells us explicitly in John 1724, Father, he says, you loved me before the creation of the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is the God revealed by Jesus Christ before he ever created, before he ever ruled the world, before anything else, this God was a father loving his son.
[SPEAKER_00]: The most foundational thing in God is not some abstract quality, but the fact that he is father and since God is, before all things, a father.
[SPEAKER_00]: and not primarily Creator or ruler, all his ways are beautifully fatherly.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the truest things that you can know about God is that he's father.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what you should do?
[SPEAKER_00]: You should get alone or no one sees and only God hears, and you should pray to God and call Him your father.
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't just know it, don't just know it,
[SPEAKER_00]: A room this size holds a lot of father-waves.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of us had dads who were easily angered and could be really cruel.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of us had dads who were just never around.
[SPEAKER_00]: They seemed disinterested, no matter what we did.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of us had dads who were just right in the middle of messy sanctification and they were not then who they are now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hear this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus is not inviting you to pray to God based on what the word Father means to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's inviting you to pray to God based on what the word Father means to Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He has eternally existed in a relationship of pure, righteous, holy, love with the Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when you call God Father, you're not talking to a God who is like your earthly Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are talking to Jesus as eternal Father, who loves you so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: He sent His Son to live, to die, to come back to life, so that you might be adopted into His family.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's why we've been given a spirit of adoption by which we cry out,
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, last week, God, the Father, sees you more clearly and loves you more deeply than anyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: No is everything about you and loves you still.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so what the Father says to Jesus that His baptism, He says to you at your conversion, this is my beloved child in whom I'm more pleased.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so get alone and pray, it's different, friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's different for you to just be in conversation or be in class or be in group or answer the question is God a father and you say yes, God's a father.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's different when you're alone and it's just you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And nobody can hear and you say, God, you're father to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're good to me, and you're good for me, and you don't scream at me when I fail.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't give me silent treatment when I don't meet expectation.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see me clearly and you love me deeply.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus is saying, when you pray, begin your prayer relationally, saying to God, your father, I have been welcomed into eternal trinitarian love.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what you're talking to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Where he is, in heaven,
[SPEAKER_00]: The word heaven carries different connotations in the Bible than maybe what it carries for us culturally.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think culturally it's just kind of clouds and paradise.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when the Bible talks about heaven, heaven is as one commentator put it, the command room of earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: So heaven's a place of power.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you think of a room that when you hear that room, you think of some sort of powerful person, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like rooms that hold power,
[SPEAKER_00]: the C-suite of a big company, something like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Heaven is the oval office of the universe.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if Father speaks to our closeness with God, heaven speaks to the transcendent power of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's really good news.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our Father being in heaven is really good news.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father means he loves us.
[SPEAKER_00]: In heaven means he is in complete control of everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: A few weeks ago my daughter came up to me and she said, Dad, what kind of mood are you in right now?
[SPEAKER_00]: I was like, I think I'm in a good mood.
[SPEAKER_00]: She said, well, like, are you stressed right now or not?
[SPEAKER_00]: In my mind, I thought, I'm probably about to be, based on what's coming next.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I just said, what's up, Dave?
[SPEAKER_00]: And she said, well, I'm going to ask you for something, but I only want to ask if you're in a good mood.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's why she has to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm her dad on Earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And because I'm part of Earth, I'm a limited frail human being, and I can often be stressed by life, and I can often be overwhelmed by life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when she needs something, she has to wonder, if I ask for something, how is that gonna make that feel?
[SPEAKER_00]: What kind of mood is he in?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is he able to handle it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or are my needs gonna stress him more than he already is?
[SPEAKER_00]: And you, beloved, you never have to wonder that about your father in heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are always praying to your father in heaven, which means he is always in complete, peaceful control of all things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I never have to wonder is God anxious today.
[SPEAKER_00]: No God's in heaven today.
[SPEAKER_00]: I never have to wonder is God afraid today.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is he overwhelmed today?
[SPEAKER_00]: No God's in heaven today.
[SPEAKER_00]: I never have to wonder, does God have time for me today?
[SPEAKER_00]: Heaven is outside of time.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not limited by hours and days.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's eternal.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's never behind.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's never late.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's in heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if I were to ask you,
[SPEAKER_00]: around this enough, you know this enough, you'd say, yeah, God's in control.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of us need to not just know that as a menu item.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to enjoy that as a meal.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to get alone with our father and say, even though the circumstances of my life feel like they're in shambles, you are father and heaven, you're in complete control of all things.
[SPEAKER_00]: What he's worth, how
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't use this word.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only time you ever say this word is if you're saying the Lord's prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello.
[SPEAKER_00]: What Hallow means is it means to make something both sacred and ultimate.
[SPEAKER_00]: Name is the sum total of a person.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's character.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's authority.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's reputation.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all tied up in name.
[SPEAKER_00]: So to Hallow, the name of God is to say, you are sacred and you are ultimate and your entire being.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus says, when you pray, tell God what He's worth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello, his name.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no one like him.
[SPEAKER_00]: We see this kind of prayer all over the Psalms.
[SPEAKER_00]: Psalm 73, whom have I in heaven but you?
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's nothing on earth I desire, beside you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Psalm 16, you are my Lord.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have no good apart from you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Psalm 84, how lovely is your dwelling place.
[SPEAKER_00]: A Lord of hosts, my soul longs and faints for the courts of the Lord, my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the Psalmist Halloween the name of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's none like you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here's what's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: The human problem, my problem, your problem, is that we will hollow in our hearts things that are not God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we don't pray it, we just live it with our desires and our wants and our ambitions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if we did pray to be our Father in heaven,
[SPEAKER_00]: or hallowed be my relationships, or hallowed be my name, my reputation, my talents.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have hearts that will hollow as God, things that are not God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus knows that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so He invites us in this prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: As you begin the prayer, our Father and heaven, you love me, you see me, you're in control of all things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my fickle heart is prone to hollow things that are not you.
[SPEAKER_00]: not uniquely sacred like you, not majestic and powerful, and supremely beautiful like you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when I'm getting alone and I'm praying, I am warring.
[SPEAKER_00]: fighting for, contending in my heart to give God the worship that I've given other places that when I'm alone with God, I'm saying only you deserve this God, only you deserve this.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of our elders when he prays, he will just pray the attributes of God that we teach our kids in elementary ministry.
[SPEAKER_00]: It'll just pray through them.
[SPEAKER_00]: God, you're just, you're holy, you're loving, you're wise, you're generous, you're merciful, as a way to hollow the name of God in His heart and stir affection in His heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: For God, tell God what He's worth.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know we know it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's different to pray
[SPEAKER_00]: What he wants, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've heard this from me, one of my all-time favorite authors is a lady named Cory Tinnbu.
[SPEAKER_00]: She survived the Holocaust and suffering did not destroy her faith, that refined her faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so she wrote prolifically after she survived.
[SPEAKER_00]: My favorite book she wrote is called The Hiding Place.
[SPEAKER_00]: During her experience in the Holocaust, she just learned to pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fervent, honest, desperate prayers.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so one of the things that she offers a lot of wisdom about is prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here are a couple quotes from her on prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: She says, anything too small to be turned into prayer is too small to be made into a burden.
[SPEAKER_00]: She says, what wings are to a bird and sails
[SPEAKER_00]: So prayer is to my soul.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then she asks a question about prayer that captures this line in the Lord's prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very simple, it's very earthy, it's very quaint.
[SPEAKER_00]: She says this, she asks this, is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire?
[SPEAKER_00]: A steering wheel controls the direction.
[SPEAKER_00]: A spare tire is needed only in case of emergencies.
[SPEAKER_00]: So she's asking, does prayer drive your life or just solve your problems?
[SPEAKER_00]: And for many of us, we have a spare tire relationship with prayer because what I want in life, what I most want in life, does not require prayer until something goes wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my purpose in life is something that I can mostly handle, I'm self-sufficient, I'm self-determined, and I can mostly handle that until crisis or something unexpected happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, here, Jesus says, when you pray, your father in heaven, hollow his name, and then tell God what he wants.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tell God what the desire of His heart is, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what God wants.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is God's desire for the world and for our church and for your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what He's been doing since Genesis 3.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sin enters the world, heaven and earth are separated and God immediately launches His plan to redeem the world and reunite.
[SPEAKER_00]: Heaven and earth, it's why the end of the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: that we find in Revelation is heaven coming to earth and God forever dwelling with His people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus is saying, when you pray, before we tell God our needs, before we ask for anything, remember what God wants, and hopes that God's desire would start to shape our desires.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we're building our kingdom, we will only pray when our kingdom feels threatened and our tires are flat.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we want God's kingdom, that includes us, but that's way bigger than us.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we desire God's kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, that will drive us to pray more and more.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to be part of answered prayers that are just bigger than my world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your kingdom come, your will be done.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to want that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to desire that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to see God do things in my day, in our season, in the time God has given us.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to see God do things and say, the only thing I had to do with that was I prayed for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it was bigger than me, larger than me, exceeded my gifts and my talents.
[SPEAKER_00]: That all I did was pray in secret.
[SPEAKER_00]: Nobody else knew and then God answered that prayer because I wanted his kingdom to come.
[SPEAKER_00]: What He gives, give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lead us not into temptation, but to deliver us from evil.
[SPEAKER_00]: See this?
[SPEAKER_00]: These are needs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before we ask for our needs, we have prayed what we already have.
[SPEAKER_00]: So before it's, I need daily bread, I need grace, I need help resisting temptation.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have already said, I have a father who sees me and loves me.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's in heaven, he controls everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is worthy of my worship.
[SPEAKER_00]: And his desire is to heal his world by bringing his kingdom through his king and his gospel.
[SPEAKER_00]: So before I've asked for anything, I have prayed in conversation with God, all of the things that I already have.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then this father who's in heaven, he says ask for these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not just what he invites us to ask for.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what he promises to give.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daily bread, what we need to get through the day, God knows every need before we ask.
[SPEAKER_00]: Daily grace, forgive us our sins.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, this prayer is the exact center of the sermon on the Mount.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are 116 Greek lines before this prayer and 114 Greek lines after this prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's right in the middle of the sermon on the Mount.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you know anything about the sermon on the Mount, it's the ethics of living the kingdom life.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you don't know anything about that,
[SPEAKER_00]: You know that it's a really hard life to live.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus right in the middle says, if you, you know what you're gonna need a lot of, forgiveness and grace.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to sin a lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to fail a lot.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he doesn't say if you've sinned as for forgiveness, he just assumes it, he just assumes it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what has to be included in that is the sin of prayerlessness.
[SPEAKER_00]: God, what we could do right now in a sermon on prayers.
[SPEAKER_00]: We could sit here and we could just feel guilty.
[SPEAKER_00]: We could feel embarrassed.
[SPEAKER_00]: We could kind of check out and feel disinterested because it's just feels so familiar but we're unmoved by it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what Jesus would say is God is not surprised.
[SPEAKER_00]: We won't tell him anything that he doesn't already know.
[SPEAKER_00]: So even in our prayers, there is grace for our failure to pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he invites that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus says we're going to need to offer a lot of grace to those around us, those who have sinned against us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give us our Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so the prayer is private, it's personal, but our lives are lived in community with the people of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's for us, but it's not just about us.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need grace for our sin and grace for others.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus says, ask for it, ask for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: God's not surprised to discover all the things in us that we need grace for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: You just seek forgiveness for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then daily help, he says, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sin is strong, God is stronger.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need His strength to avoid evil.
[SPEAKER_00]: OK.
[SPEAKER_00]: So much more to say, I'm going to stop so that we can pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in praying, my hope is that we will do something now that will be a continuation of what we've been doing before today.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if not, that it would be the beginning of something that we keep doing alone and secret with God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember why this matters.
[SPEAKER_00]: The prayerlessness is functional atheism.
[SPEAKER_00]: Prayer is where knowledge of God becomes experience with God.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want more for my life than knowing a lot about a menu, and never enjoying the meal.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want more for our life church, the knowledge of God, absent of encounter with God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Christianity that lacks a real encounter with God will eventually be no Christianity at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: And God wants more for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: God wants more for us than to feel guilty about prayerlessness and never talk to him about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So here's what we know, here's what we know, what invites us into encounter with God, what invites us into no one in the room is going to look back on the whole of life and regret the time that we spent praying.
[SPEAKER_00]: What invites us into encounter with God is a belief that God, the moment that we start talking to him is eager to meet us with grace.
[SPEAKER_00]: The way that we teach our kids this, God wants to talk with us.
[SPEAKER_00]: God wants to talk with us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So would you pray, make time now?
[SPEAKER_00]: And we'll pray the way that our Savior, who knows as experienced, is very God, a very God.
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll pray the way that He taught us to pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: Would you just call God Father?
[SPEAKER_00]: My Father, and remember, you're not praying based on what that word means to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're praying based on what it means to Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're praying to an eternal, loving, holy, merciful, just Father in heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: Would you pray to Him?
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, in heaven, in control of all things, sovereign of all things.
[SPEAKER_00]: How would be your name?
[SPEAKER_00]: You are wonderful God, ultimate and sacred.
[SPEAKER_00]: supremely worthy of all of our affection.
[SPEAKER_00]: Holy, just, wise, merciful, true.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: Would you mend everything that's broken?
[SPEAKER_00]: Would you restore everything that's been lost?
[SPEAKER_00]: Would your kingdom come in our homes, in our neighborhoods, in our schools, in our city, in our country?
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of the world got.
[SPEAKER_00]: Give us today our daily bread.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what we need.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're asking for what you are eager to give.
[SPEAKER_00]: Forgive us our sins, give us grace for all of the ways that we fall short.
[SPEAKER_00]: Would we believe there's grace even now if we're stumbling through prayerlessness?
[SPEAKER_00]: And from that place that received grace make us ready to offer grace to those around us God.
[SPEAKER_00]: We will never forgive anyone else, for more than you have forgiven us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lead is not in temptation, but deliver us from evil, protect us from the lies of the enemy, from the false promises of the world, and the desires of the flesh, deliver us.
[SPEAKER_00]: God, for me, for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: In this God, here's our confession, we don't just want to know about you.
[SPEAKER_00]: We want to know you.
[SPEAKER_00]: So my prayer God is that just collectively as your church, as the people of Citizen's Church, that what we just did together would make its way into our evening in our Monday and our Tuesday, that we would imperfectly but faithfully carve out space to encounter you through prayer God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in a world where escape, distraction, all of that is just so much easier that we would be the people who put our face towards fruitful, faithful time with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then,