[SPEAKER_00]: Good morning, everybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's wonderful to be with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for coming this morning to worship, to be together.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we are going to open up God's Word with each other now, invite you just to pray with me as we prepare our hearts for that father.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you that we can be here together in your presence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I thank you for your word which is
[SPEAKER_00]: and able to divide between flesh, spirit, to go right to the very heart of things, to go deep into us, like a surgeon's scouple, to get to places that only your word can reach and the your spirit can reach.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I pray you would do that in all of us this morning, for Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: come Holy Spirit, we pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amen, so we are in week two of our series on the Lord's prayer, and I know we've already prayed it together.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me just repeat it one more time as we hear the flow of the prayer as we attend to what Jesus is saying to us here, our Father in heaven,
[SPEAKER_00]: Give us today our daily bread, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us, save us from the time of trial, deliver us from the evil one, for the kingdom the power and the glory of yours, now and forever are men.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I've been saying these past few weeks that the whole of Jesus' ministry, the very reason that he came, was not simply to forgive us of our sins by his blood on the cross as important as that is.
[SPEAKER_00]: It isn't really the main point of the gospel.
[SPEAKER_00]: The main point of his ministry, the preaching of the gospel, that we looked out a couple of weeks back from Mark 1, was to make us citizens of heaven, to make us citizens of the kingdom of God, that we would enter the kingdom of his father in heaven and live in that kingdom as children of God and as new creations in Christ Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even now, in the midst,
[SPEAKER_00]: of our lives here on earth, which is why Jesus teaches us to pray in this great prayer that we are looking at over the next few weeks to call the Lord's prayer, your kingdom come, your will be done on where earth as in heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not, prepare us for heaven, Lord Jesus, save my soul so that I can live in heaven with you forever.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the opposite of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father let me enter your kingdom so that your kingdom can come here on earth, so that it can be manifest among us here on earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you remember, we said that this prayer and this request for God's will and kingdom to come and be done happens within the context of what the sermon on the Mount.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is not just...
[SPEAKER_00]: doesn't just pop out of nowhere, this comes in the middle, in fact, it is right in the middle of the sermon on the Mount, which means the Lord's prayer is not here to teach us, I think, some kind of formula for prayer or technique for prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not some kind of methodology that we need to follow in order for our prayers to be correct and acceptable to God.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, and yet, it is intended to be a guide to us, to help us to pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think with understanding, to help us to pray, with understanding so that when we pray, Father, come your kingdom and be done your will.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not just asking for something that remains mysterious.
[SPEAKER_00]: an abstract, something undefined, and vague, and unclear, but in fact we are asking for very, very real and concrete outcomes so that when we pray, we can have confidence that we are in fact asking in accordance with the will of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many people have asked me over the years, how can I know the will of God?
[SPEAKER_00]: And the answer to that question, friends, is the sermon on the mouths?
[SPEAKER_00]: And therefore the answer to that question, how can I pray, according to the will of God, is, of course, the Lord's prayer?
[SPEAKER_00]: And what we're asking when we pray this prayer is specifically, specifically, that our thoughts, and our desires, and our actions, and our relationships,
[SPEAKER_00]: and our bodies and our possessions.
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, everything that we are, everything that we have, everything that we do, the totality of our lives here on Earth, would be shaped by the ethical, relational, spiritual, and physical vision of life that is outlined for us in the sermon on the Mount.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does that mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: It means when we say, your kingdom come, your will be done here on earth as it is in heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are asking specifically these things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, let me be poor in spirit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, let me be merciful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, let me be joyful in persecution.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, let me be salt and light in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, help me not to murder by my words and my actions, my thoughts and my posts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, help me not to worship you with my lips, while holding hatred in my heart for others.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, help me not to commit adultery in my thoughts or actions or online when no one is looking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, help me to honor marriage that divorce be rare among us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, help me not to lie.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, help me not to seek revenge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, help me to love my enemies.
[SPEAKER_00]: help me to give my money and my time to the kingdom and not just to myself, Father helped me to do good deeds not only for my sake, so that I can be noticed by others but for your sake alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father helped me so that when I serve I do it with right motives.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father helped me to store up treasures in heaven and not care what my friends or someone at work thinks or says about me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father helped me not to be consumed with worry and anxiety.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father helped me not to judge.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father, help me to stay on the narrow path and not follow other voices, other philosophies, other gods.
[SPEAKER_00]: They might seem more seductive, more beautiful, than your son, Father, help me to live into all truth, Father, help me to trust your word and obey your word and build my life on your word.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is what we are praying when we pray the Lord's prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the more that I study it,
[SPEAKER_00]: The more that I realise that the Lord's Prayer is a work of sheer and utter genius.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't often realize just how intelligent Jesus really was in that it manages in just a few short words, 57 or so, depending on the translation, containing just six clauses or petitions.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first three that focus on God and on His kingdom and use the pronoun Your or Yours.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the second three that focus on us, you're on earth living into God's kingdom, doing His will here on earth,
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of it takes about 30 seconds to pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: The six petitions in the Lord's prayer on his name long for his kingdom, desire his will.
[SPEAKER_00]: Us, so it's to God, to us, depend on his provision, live in his forgiveness, resist evil in his power.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is describing, I think, what it's meant to be describing is the shape of a mature and spiritually resilient and flourishing life in the kingdom of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: in such a brief amount of time and space.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus has gathered up the whole of the sermon on the Mount.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole of what it means to be a Christian who desires to live faithfully in a fallen and broken world.
[SPEAKER_00]: The whole of what it means to experience heaven on earth in the kingdom of the Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, this Darryl Johnson says in these six short petitions, Jesus gathers up the whole of life
[SPEAKER_00]: We are physical creatures, so it teaches us to pray, give us this day our daily bread, and your kingdom where this peace and wholeness and blessing come.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are relational creatures, so it teaches us to pray for give us our sins as we forgive those who have sinned against us.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are spiritual creatures, so he teaches us to pray your name be hellowed for we cannot live without knowing the name of him who made us.
[SPEAKER_00]: And save us from the time of trial, but deliver us from the evil one because we need deliverance and healing from evil and the brokenness of this fallen world.
[SPEAKER_00]: So again, as I said last week, the Lord's Prayer is not teaching us a technique for how to pray, rather it's showing us what we will need to pray for, because this is what we are trying to live.
[SPEAKER_00]: All in six short petitions, back let's just go back to that real quick, six short petitions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I noticed as I was preparing this week and I don't know if this is an accident or whether Jesus meant it, most likely he did.
[SPEAKER_00]: But just like in the six days of creation, this is describing life in these six clauses, describing life in the new creation that Jesus is making in the kingdom of His Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the seventh day, of course, which is not one of the petitions, but is mentioned at the end, where there is rest and blessing in Shalom forever,
[SPEAKER_00]: But yours is the kingdom the power and the glory forever and ever is describing what will happen when Christ returns.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so in this, in between time of Christ's first and second coming,
[SPEAKER_00]: We are, as we contend with the world, that it's still very much a fallen broken and hurting place, a place of evil, a place of temptation, the prayer therefore works as a kind of guide for us, as a kind of road map for our discipleship, a way of helping us navigate living a life faithfully shaped by the sermon on the Mount, which is another way of saying, living a life that is faithfully shaped,
[SPEAKER_00]: by the character of Christ.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a world that's really trying continually to push you in the opposite direction.
[SPEAKER_00]: And since none of that can happen unless we first enter the kingdom of the Father through the work of Christ, through the work of Christ the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus is not interested in asking any of us to try and do what this prayer is inviting us into to try and live this sermon on the Mount by our own determination and will power because that is simply impossible and if you have a try to do that, let me see your hand, we all need prayer, deliverance.
[SPEAKER_00]: because it's a task that is utterly beyond us, and it kills us, in fact, as Paul says in Romans 8, it is literally the way of death.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see what the law was powerless to do in verses 3 and 4, because it was weakened by the flesh.
[SPEAKER_00]: God did by sending His own son in the likeness of sinful flesh to be a sin offering.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the importance of the cross.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he condemned sin in the flesh in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fully met in us who do not live according to the flesh, but according to the spirit.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's what happens when we enter the kingdom of our Father and have filled with His presence and power.
[SPEAKER_00]: Christ has done, what is required for us to do that, to enter into this way of life?
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's not automatic.
[SPEAKER_00]: The reason we're asked to pray this way is because the gospel is not something done to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is something that is done with us and through us, we get to participate in the work of God's kingdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not just objects that he works on, we are people that he loves, and he works with us in our transformation.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have agency.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can choose to exercise faith or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can choose to be obedient or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: We can choose to participate in his will and in his kingdom or not.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's never forced upon us.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's an invitation and an invitation to participation in which blaze Pascal wants called the dignity of causality.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have the dignity of causality in God's kingdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not slaves, we're not just told what to do, but we are children as Jesus says called to be friends of God and we're invited therefore into the family business.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is why, as I said last week, what Jesus is doing in this moment, friends, he's sitting down with you at a table, he's pouring you a very strong cup of coffee and he's looking at you across the table and he's asking you.
[SPEAKER_00]: when we read the Lord's prayer, he is asking you, is this what you want?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is this what you want?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want what my father is offering?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want his kingdom and his will to come in your life?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you really want that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus said the same thing in one of his parables that anyone who puts their hand to the plow and looks back is not fit to be one of my disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, he's not saying he doesn't want you to be one of his disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not rejecting you.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's just telling you like it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Unless you can say yes to the question, is this what you want in regards to the kingdom of God and the will of God and mean it?
[SPEAKER_00]: Then there's not much point for you to be praying the Lord's prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, it's not that God doesn't want you to.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not that he doesn't love you, but it's because you don't want what the prayer is asking you to pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't really want it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there's no much point praying in.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the good news is, if we can be honest about that, and if this troubles us,
[SPEAKER_00]: Then we can ask God to change our hearts.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is one of the most amazing things about life in the kingdom of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we're actually honest about how we feel and what we think, we can bring that before God and he will work with us, invite us into participation so that he can begin to change our hearts and change how we feel and change what we think and change what we desire.
[SPEAKER_00]: He, in fact, loves us so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: That even those who don't really want him, like the father's two sons in the parable of the protocol son, even though his two sons rejected him, they didn't want him, he's the father, even so never stopped loving them, never stopped longing for them, he never gave up on them, he was looking for them and calling to them every single day to come home and he is doing that for you today as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: And since we started last week with Brennan Manning's beautiful story
[SPEAKER_00]: of the simplicity of prayer, let me quote him again here from his book, The Furious Longing of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: He writes this, sorry, it's a bit of a long quote, but you know I love long quotes, the gospel is absurd.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that he lived, died and rose again with one purpose in mind to make us a brand new creation.
[SPEAKER_00]: not to make people with better morals, but to create a community of men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the spirit that burns within who would live in ever greater fidelity to the Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes purifies and sets everything
[SPEAKER_00]: Joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love.
[SPEAKER_00]: This, my friend, is what it really means to be a Christian.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the gospel can be summed up by saying that it is the tremendous tender, compassionate, gentle, extraordinary, explosive, revolutionary revelation of the love of the father in the person of Christ the Son.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amen to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we want to then enter into what Jesus prayer means, then I think we have to begin where it begins.
[SPEAKER_00]: So today we're just going to focus on one word in the prayer, just on one word for it's really the foundation of everything else in the prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's the very first word in the original Greek, which is Pata or Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now Linda will complete the sentence next week, our Father in heaven, but there's, I think enough in just this one word, Father, to keep us busy this morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: So first of all, since we know that Jesus spoke in Aramaic, not in Greek, nearly all scholars agree that Jesus would have, when he taught this, would have used the Aramaic term, which is then translated into the Greek word,
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, we may not appreciate this given how familiar we are with the prayer, but this is actually truly incredible.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, Jesus doesn't start with Almighty One, or righteous judge, or sovereign Lord, or creator of the world, or even simply God as it doesn't Genesis 1.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, He starts with the word Father, and not just the formal version of Father,
[SPEAKER_00]: which is as you probably have heard before, is the more informal, familiar, tender kind of speech that a child might use with their dad.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, some of our youth, although this is controversial, that the closest kind of word we'd have in our own language today is Daddy, or Papa, or Data, as my own kids used of me.
[SPEAKER_00]: The point is, this is utterly preposterous,
[SPEAKER_00]: Jewish tradition held God's name in such reverence that it was actually never even spoken aloud.
[SPEAKER_00]: They used Adonai or Lord instead of Yahweh, or sometimes even Hashem, which just simply means the name.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they would never say Yahweh out loud, but they would refer to it by Adonai or Hashem.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the word was considered simply too holy to be spoken by human lips, sinful human lips.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you certainly never ever spoke to God in such informal familiar language as Abba.
[SPEAKER_00]: That would have been heard as audacious, presumptuous, bordering on blasphemy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet Jesus says, when you speak with God, you can call Him, dad.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dallas will had one's wrote that the most important thing a person, most important thing about a person is what they think about when they think about God.
[SPEAKER_00]: So what do you think about when you think about God?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you think of God as distant and cold and judgmental or angry or indifferent or distracted or uninterested, your prayer life will reflect that.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I'd argue your whole life will reflect that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you have learned to understand God as a loving father who delights in you, who always has time for you, who wants to hear from you.
[SPEAKER_00]: who loves it when you come to him with your needs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Prayer will become your greatest joy, not an obligation or a religious requirement, but a place of rest and relationship and renewal.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of the most amazing things about prayer is that the first thing Jesus wants you to know when he teaches us to pray, the very first thing Jesus wants you to know,
[SPEAKER_00]: When you pray, when you come to God in prayer, is that you can experience what He experienced, that you can come to God and you can call Him, Dad, you can call Him, Abba.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when Jesus is teaching about His Father's kingdom, or His Father's house, as He called it in John 14, He said this, I am the way and the truth and the life.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one comes to the Father except through me.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you really know me, you will know my Father as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: From now on, you do know Him and you have seen Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: You see a lot of people claim to know God, a lot of other religions claim to know the name of God, but Christians, as far as I can tell, are the only people on earth who know God relationally as Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus is the only door to the Father because as he says in the next few verses of John 14, I and the Father are one.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one else.
[SPEAKER_00]: is this is what Jesus is saying is that no one else can open the door to the Father because no other person has seen the Father or has come from the Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus is the only way not to God in the general sense, whatever people might want to believe about Him, but Jesus is the only way to the Father specifically.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason Jesus calls God Father is because at His core,
[SPEAKER_00]: God is relational.
[SPEAKER_00]: God is in fact a Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, coexisting in a perfect loving relationship from everlasting, to everlasting, and in a recent sermon on prayer, Pastor John Thompson put it like this, which I thought was well said, and I'm just paraphrasing here a bit, but he said that Father,
[SPEAKER_00]: in this prayer is not a statement of patriarchy and it's not a statement of gender.
[SPEAKER_00]: Father is a revealed name of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now for some of us, the image of a dad is hard because some of our dads were broken, some of our dads were never there and some of our dads just weren't what they were supposed to be and we who are dads and grandads who have tried or are trying our best.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even so, we still screw up all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I get an amen?
[SPEAKER_00]: But whatever that word Father might mean to you, this name, Father, for God, is so important.
[SPEAKER_00]: This name of God cannot be ignored or changed or tampered with, it needs to be redeemed for some of you, but not replaced.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the Hebrew Scriptures, God is almost never depicted as the Father of an individual.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the word Father only appears a very small number of times, and it is only ever used in reference to Him as the Father of His people Israel.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's collective, it's communal, not personal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus changes that in the Lord's prayer.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Pius Jews, aware of the gap between a holy God and sinful human beings, would never, never, never, never dare to address God as Abba, as Jesus did.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yet Jesus shocked his contemporaries when he called his father Abba and then invited screwed up and screwing up people like us to say the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So rather than depicting God as a kind of typical Middle Eastern patriarch who wields near total power and authority and control within the family, he depicts God.
[SPEAKER_00]: as a tender and compassionate dad who extends grace to both the sinner and the self-righteous.
[SPEAKER_00]: God is father and that means, theologically and experientially, relationally, that God is personal, that God is tender, that God is love, and that God is gracious.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we've already mentioned, the most powerful, most jaw-dropping, most life-changing expression of this name is found, of course, in Jesus' story of the prodigal sons, where the Father represents God to both the older and the younger son, to both the one who distrusts
[SPEAKER_00]: His father and gives his life over to wild living and to the one who distrust his father, but yet works even harder to try and get his father's attention.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here is what the parable is trying to say to a first century audience, and perhaps to some of us this morning as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: As represented so beautifully by Charlie Maccassie's sculpture of this story, that God is so, so, so, so much better and more gracious and more loving and more available to you than you could ever possibly imagine or that you could ever possibly deserve.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you've experienced that in Christ, what Jesus is telling you in John 14, if you've experienced that in Christ,
[SPEAKER_00]: Because Jesus is like his father, Jesus is the representation of his father, He was sent to show us the father.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this image behind me, I think beautifully represents the heart of the father.
[SPEAKER_00]: When was the last time you were embraced by God's presence in this kind of way?
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been a pastor long enough to know that many of us carry broken images of God,
[SPEAKER_00]: Often inherited from our fathers, or from fathers who were never available, or from authority figures, not just dads, but authority figures in the church, people like me, like pastors, or teachers at school, or other influential men in people's lives.
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of us felt judged, some of us felt neglected, some of us were ignored, that we felt
[SPEAKER_00]: and tragically some of us have been deeply, deeply hurt or by abuse either emotionally or physically or both.
[SPEAKER_00]: And those distortions, nearly always bleed over into how we understand God, how we see God, and our capacity to experience God as love.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've had many of those wounds, and for many years, I imagine God has been perpetually disappointed with me, like I was never good enough, and I always had to prove my worth in order to get his notice or to dare to come into his presence.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was laboring, and still do, I'd be honest, sometimes, under a view of God that is deeply transactional.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if I do what is right and do it well enough, then I'll be seen and maybe loved.
[SPEAKER_00]: And therefore, my prayer life was often such a guilt ridden burden because all I ever felt like I was doing when I came before God in prayer with a large helping of self-loathing was saying, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was like the frame of my whole prayer life.
[SPEAKER_00]: This sense that I just needed to continually apologize to my existence, and I am still tempted by these things even today.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the primary way I come into his presence is by grovelling.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yet Scripture tells me to do the opposite of that that when I come into the presence of my father, I should do it with Thanksgiving and praise in the freedom of the gospel, but it's so hard for us to get that beyond just what we believe theologically and into our hearts.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I became a dad, something deeply shifted in my understanding of my father and heaven, I came to understand, you know, in my heart, not just in my head, not just theologically, but relationally to an experience too, that the father's love for me is not based on my performance.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it never will be that I do not need to earn his attention or affection,
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I experienced this, I felt this for the first time when I held and looked at my own children, you know, moments after they were born.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the love that I felt for them struck me that this is what my father and heaven feels for me, but like times infinity, like my human experience of love is only a power reflection of what my father and heaven feels about me and about you.
[SPEAKER_00]: and just going back to Brennan Manning, he writes this that if you took all the love of all the best mothers and fathers who have lived in the course of human history, all their goodness, kindness, patience, fidelity, wisdom, tenderness, strength, and love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you knighted all those qualities in a single person, that person's love would only be a faint shadow of the relentless love and mercy in the heart of God the Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: address to you and to me at this very moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, this is what I think Jesus means when he introduces this prayer, when he uses this word Father as the first word in the prayer, that when you come to your Father in heaven to pray, you don't have to bow and scrape and grove all before Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to try and be better than you are.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to try and wear a mask as we were talking about last week, be a hypocrite.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to use especially spiritual language, or perfectly theological language.
[SPEAKER_00]: You just come honestly, as you are, as who you are, and you sit with your father like a child, and you can even call him dad if you want to.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the objection I've heard over the years and a lot of people to this is that it just sounds a bit tried.
[SPEAKER_00]: Does this make you feel uncomfortable?
[SPEAKER_00]: Does this make you feel a bit weird?
[SPEAKER_00]: Does this feel inappropriate?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you're in a good place because apparently, it also made Jesus first here as uncomfortable.
[SPEAKER_00]: and they felt that it was inappropriate, and it made them angry.
[SPEAKER_00]: They thought it was blasphemous, actually, if not foolish and dangerous, probably enough dangerous enough that this is the sort of thing that might get you killed.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Jesus said it because they needed his first hearers in the first century, not just the Pharisees, but everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: They needed a new image of who God was for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They needed to seek God in a new way and maybe we do as well, maybe you, as well, need a new image of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: One that perhaps starts with you learning to use Jesus' own words for your father and heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: Abba.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you need to pray this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Abba, father, I believe that you are not distant,
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe that you're not always angry, I believe that you're not constantly disappointed, but that you are present, that you are loving, and that you are delighted to be here with me in this moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: I believe this, please help me to believe this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I am so grateful, church, that God has healed some of my own wrong views about him over the years.
[SPEAKER_00]: That have really come from many of my own experiences in many ways.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's changed the way that I pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: It really has.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because who we think we're talking to when we pray, obviously is going to shape how we pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if we think of God as a strict judge,
[SPEAKER_00]: If we think he's distant, then prayer will just feel like I'm shouting into the void!
[SPEAKER_00]: If he's apathetic or uninterested, then why bother at all because he's probably not really listening?
[SPEAKER_00]: But if he's a father, and not just any father, but an abba, a loving present, father ready to welcome you and love you like a little child, then that changes everything, and it will change the way you pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love how Paul puts this later in Romans 8.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to invite the band to come on up now.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the spirit you received does not make you slaves so that you live in fear, again,
[SPEAKER_00]: Rather the spirit that you received brought about your adoption to sonship, to a daughter ship, to make you children of God, and by him we cry what?
[SPEAKER_00]: Abba, father, by him we cry, abba, father, for the spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children.
[SPEAKER_00]: When was the last time?
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me ask honestly this morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: When was the last time you felt the Holy Spirit testifying to your spirit?
[SPEAKER_00]: Speaking into your spirit, speaking into your brokenness, speaking into your pain, speaking into your sense of abandonment, speaking into your sense that you're an orphan.
[SPEAKER_00]: When was the last time you felt the Holy Spirit testifying to you that actually know none of those things are true about you?
[SPEAKER_00]: The truest thing about you now is that you are a child of God, a child of your father in heaven, and that he delights in you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as Paul will go on to say,
[SPEAKER_00]: He hasn't just saved you and brought you into his family, but he's now made you even a cohere with Christ.
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, everything that Christ has is yours.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything that Christ died for is yours.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everything that Christ will have in the future is yours along with him.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have received all things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Every spiritual blessing in Christ Jesus and the main spiritual blessing that you have received in Christ is not just forgiveness, but that you are now a child.
[SPEAKER_00]: of the living God your Father in heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is why He made you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean that literally, like literally the reason that you exist this morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: The reason that you existed all is that you might know an experience and discover the love of God as Father and find your deepest delight.
[SPEAKER_00]: and your fullness of joy in his presence.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think as Jesus says later in the prayer, like nothing hellows that name, nothing honors that name.
[SPEAKER_00]: More than when God's children come to understand what that really means for each one of us that we can call Him, Abba.
[SPEAKER_00]: I invite you to just stand with me now.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to take a moment just to sit or stand before the Lord in His presence before we sing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fights you to close your eyes with me and open up your hands, open up your hearts, just put yourself like a child in a posture of receiving.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just going to ask now, Holy Spirit, would you please come and do what it is?
[SPEAKER_00]: Paul said you would do, among us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's begin to testify to our spirits, to our minds, to our hearts.
[SPEAKER_00]: that we are God's children and that we're allowed to call you Abba, that you're not, eventually always disappointed with us, frustrated with us, angry with us.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you're inviting us deeper in, come, sit with me, be with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Receive from me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am good.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I want to give you good gifts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe if it's helpful, just meditate on that image behind me for a moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look at that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I know because I feel it too.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of us here in this room this morning who want to experience God like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who may be have in the past, but it's now just a distant memory.
[SPEAKER_00]: Calm, Holy Spirit, and make that alive in us again.
[SPEAKER_00]: A love of the Father.
[SPEAKER_00]: goodness of our Father, who embraces sinners, who embraces the unworthy, who embraces the diseased, who embraces the broken, who embraces the filthy, who embraces the rejects, who embraces the self-righteouss, who embraces those who are full of themselves, who embraces those who have no self-regard, who embraces every person who comes to him seeking help,
[SPEAKER_00]: And he holds us in a bear hug, unlike we've ever experienced, a hug that an embrace that goes right to the very heart of it all right to the deepest places in us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Come Holy Spirit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Embrace us in the Father's love in that way now and pray, come Lord, come Lord Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to invite the prayer ministry team just to come forward now if they could please and just be ready on the sides.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to sing together, but as we do, if you would like prayer, please come forward and receive some ministry.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that will continue on after the service is finished, but I feel like we should start that now.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, if I could get the prayer team to come on up, wherever you guys are, please come forward now.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to sing together, but don't be in a rush, although we have to be finished by Quadaponsten.
[SPEAKER_00]: take this time just to be with your father and if those things you need to talk about with him then take this moment to do that in Jesus' name.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.