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New brief series starts today “Prayer”

I and leaders felt this was a vital reminder about praying, especially in the run-up to a spiritual growth campaign like 40DITW.

If you’re a Christian here this morning, I know a guaranteed way to make you feel guilty

• “How’s your prayer life doing?”

• just as true for pastors as it is for anyone else.

Inducing guilt is not my motive! I want ot encourage you, urge you, inspire you to turn to your heavenly father in prayer because He hears and responds

• and because his heart is thrilled by hearing the voices of his children, whether they are urgent prayers of helps, crafted prayers using carefully chosen word or just the chit-chat of an ordinary day.

You will almost certainly have seen the series of books “something or other for dummies”. There is an amazing collection of titles

French for Dummies, cheese … Car servicing … Cognitive behavioural therapy …

Some fascinating examples

• Hacking for dummies

• Raising smart kids … for Dummies

• and if you just can’t decide there’s always “a little bit of everything for dummies”

• “procrastination for Dummies’ – it hasn’t been published yet

each book has a crafty subtitle “… and a reference for the rest of us”

If you’re knowledge of a subject is nil, you can turn to this book to get yourself off the starting blocks. It will act as an overview. But if you know a little about it, you can still turn to this book as a reference source that will take you deeper and signpost you to places where you can get a much deeper understanding of Blue cheese, CBT, Cooking pasta,

The Lord’s prayer in just like this! It’s praying for dummies.

It’s a prayer which, if you’ve never (or at least only rarely) attempted to pray, will get you off the starting blocks

But if you’re an experienced pray-er you’ll still come back to this time and time again. And every time you do you’ll find more in it!

What is prayer?

<ppt>Prayer is deliberately entering into communication with God – and it’s the type of communication that leads into communion, intimacy, to experiencing all the love, fulfilment and direction that your loving heavenly father wants you to have as you walk with him.

prayer is simply the best way to experience and deepen our relationship with God

• and if you don’t yet have a relationship with god, this is how to get going.

I use the word ‘deliberately’ deliberately because prayer is not a casual or accidental thing (except for times when we pray in panic of course!)

• True prayer is intentional, it’s done because I’m called to do it as Christian and it connects me with my heavenly Father.

It comes in all sorts of guises:

It may be an ask – a Big ask or a small ask.

Your heavenly Father delights to hear us ask for things and Jesus encouraged us to do it

“Ask and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Matthew 7:7).

It may be to marvel at him

You can praise him or adore him or give expression to your wonder about him. The Psalms are full of expressions of praise to the Lord

“Every day I will bless you and praise your name forever and ever. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised, and his greatness is unsearchable” (Psalm 145:2-3).

I fact, at times when we are down or struggling there is a real place for deliberately and specifically praising the Lord, not necessarily because we feel it, but because it cleanses the soul!

It may be to thank him –

to pour out our gratitude to him for his love and goodness.

You can thank him for his gifts and his acts (which is not the same as praising him for his nature).

“We give thanks to you, Lord God Almighty, who is and who was, for you have taken your great power and begun to reign” (Revelation 11:17).

It may be to apologise or confess

Saying sorry for our sin and wrong-doing powerfully opens the channels of communication

“I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the iniquity of my sin” (Psalm 32:5).

It may be to complain.

Now you may say to me “surely the Bible tells me not to complain

Philippians 2:14: “Do all things without grumbling or complaining.”

Surely it’s not good to have a complaining heart. We ought to trust the Lord in all circumstance, whether happy or sad, easy or tough,

• So why then do you say we should complain to the Lord? Because sometimes our hearts do complain about the circumstances God has given us,

It is better to consciously direct it toward the Lord than to think he doesn’t see it. Acting like you are not complaining is hypocrisy and will make you a very phony, shallow, plastic person in the end. – Listen to the psalmist:

“With my voice I cry out to the Lord. . . . I pour out my complaint before him; I tell my trouble before him” (Psalm 142:1-2).

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me! Why are you so far from my groaning!” (Psalm 22)

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beware!

In Jesus’ teaching about prayer, he gives us two things to beware of.

Two aberrations of prayer that he’s seen and that still bother us today:

v5 “Whenever you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites, for they love to say their prayers standing on the street corners so everyone will see them”

Beware exhibitionism!

Their motive was to be seen and admired because of their supposed spirituality! The message these people are sending out isn’t ‘I want to engage with you, Lord’ it’s ‘Just look at me! – see how godly I am! – I’m much more spiritual than you! After all I’m praying in public and not ashamed of it!’

How dangerous this attitude is!

This sort of praying makes other people listening feel guilty – feel less spiritual – feel inferior

What Jesus is attacking here is not praying in public – actually we want to more prayer in the public square – he’s attacking motive – exhibitionism – showing off.

This is the prayer of the bragger

Do you pray because you want to be seen to be praying, or because you want to engage with the Lord? Do I want to see the hand of God at work, or I subtly want people to notice me?”

The other danger Jesus warns us about is in v7

V7 What is more, said Jesus, don’t babble on like the pagans, who imagine they will be heard because of their flow of words!

Beware theobabble

I’ve been in prayer meetings where I’ve heard someone stringing together all the biblical cliché’s they can think of. The message the undiscerning hearers pick up is “Oh how spiritual, how Godly! … to be able to come out with all this grand sounding stuff

Yet Jesus said that all this babbling is no better than pagan people who pray to some artificially invented god!

Jesus once heard some Pharisees praying the temple like this. Using lots of high-faluting theobabble to impress actually got them nowhere with God.

• At the same time there was a man elsewhere in the building who wouldn’t even lift his head to God but said under his breath “Lord, be merciful to me a sinner”

• “OK,” said Jesus “which one left the temple justified?”

Jesus’ conclusion? Be – real – with – God.

Your heavenly Father knows exactly what you need – in fact he knows before you even ask him!

(isn’t that wonderfully liberating?!)

So, I can almost hear you saying, “why ask him anyway?” If the Lord knows all I need and all he can give me, why bother to pray?

The answer is as simple as it is profound: prayer is not about what we can get out of God, it’s about what he can do in us!

His desire is that his love and his compassion and his discipline and his direction will transform us back into the people he originally made us to be in Christ

to change us from the inside out.

And he does this because he genuinely loves us.

In just the same way that a loving parent understands their little child much more than a stranger would – so our heavenly Father understands us much more deeply than any other people do – in fact he knows us better than we know ourselves!

So if we are going to avoid the errors of showing off and using theobabbling,

and if we want to be real with God and receive the love and strength of our heavenly father, how should we pray

Jesus gives a telling example

Prayer primer

This is Jesus prayer primer

Key stage 1 of prayer – or Prayer 101 –

This is prayer for dummies, but don’t be confused by that analogy. This prayer may be basic, but it’s also profound

• and I find myself coming back to it time and time again.

I see a mathematical parallel here.

• One of the foundations of mathematics is numbers and arithmetic

• However far you go in mathematics, you still need numbers and you still need arithmetic. Numbers may be the first thing you master, but you can never leave them behind.

• That’s the Lord’s prayer. It may be the first prayer that we might use to engage with the Lord, but even if you’ve been a Christ-follower for decades, you’ll still find yourself coming back to it!

Connecting

‘our father in heaven’

OK, God can be thought of as the father of all men in a general sense, but that’s not the way Jesus is using the term here

It is clear that not everyone can call God their father. It’s only those who have begun a relationship with him and let the Lord into their lives.

The really striking fact here is that the God of the universe encourages us to call him Father!

Paul: ‘You didn’t receive a spirit that makes you a slave to fear, but you received the Spirit of son-ship. And by hiom we cry “Abba”, Father! The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are children of God!

And if we’re children then we’re heirs to the inheritance.”

adoring

“hallowed be your name!”

In Ancient times the name was not merely a handle, it was often a description.

E.g. in the early church there was a man who sold a piece of property – a field – and brought the proceeds and gave them to the church.

Just imagine how that encouraged them. He had the name (or nickname) Bar- Nabas – i.e. son of encouragement!

The name summed up who he was

So the name of God sums up all that he is. So, Lord, I want to keep it special,

To hallow God’s name means to hold it in reverence because it is so special.

In fact in the Old Testament times (and still today) Jewish people would never pronounce the name of God – JHWH

in vact they would replace it with Adonai

and if you take the consonants of the Hebrew for God and the vowels of Adonai you get the word ‘Jehovah’ – a word that can be pronounced, but carries the weight of the unpronounceable.

Praying God’s will

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven

If you’re in Christ, you#re part of God’s kingdom! He is your king

So we’re saying to the Lord “bring in your kingdom!” Use us to show the power of the kingdom in our lives and our praying!

Use us to help people place you in the ‘king’ of their lives!

And that happens when your will is done!

When our lives are disciplined – or framed – by You and your purposes for us!

Lord, you will is done in heaven – that’s obvious – now let it be done in the same way on earth!

praying your needs

Give us this day our daily bread.

Have you noticed this whole prayer is in the plural?

It’s not my needs, or my Father, it’s our father and our bread. It seems that Jesus was not expecting this prayer to be privatised, or individualised but used by Christians together

‘This day’ is a tough word to translate out of the original. There’s no easy English equivalent. It carries the idea of ‘enough for today’

That has all sorts of counter-cultural spin-offs

(See Hendriksen)

moderation – we’re praying for sufficient, not abundance

trust – Jesus is not saying we shouldn’t prepare for the future (actually he says we should) – He saying we need to trust God for today

total dependence – we recognise we are totally dependent on the Lord for all our resources

humility – everything that is on my table is a gift from God and we are the custodians of his provision

willingness to work – daily bread takes time and effort to produce (kneed for 10 mins!). So if someone can work, they should. And our society has skewed this principle to it’s detriment

generosity – We’re not praying for my bread but our bread. That people who can’t provide for themselves should be helped out of the generosity of others.

(4.6 tons to Food Bank – well done!)

Pray for your daily provision!

praying forgiveness

Forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors

This prayer for forgiveness tells us that there is no other way that our debt before God can be wiped out.

It is a prayer for grace. !

praying protection

Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil

We’re asking the Lord to protect us in times of trial and testing

To be rescued, saved, delivered from evil, both from within (in the form of temptation) and from without (in the form of trials).

Finally Jesus teaches us to

celebrating the kingdom!

Yours, Father, is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever!

It’s not our kingdom – it’s yours!

It’s not our power that achieves your purposes – it’s yours!

It’s not for us to take the glory – it’s yours!

It’s not just for now we worship you like this – it’s for ever!

My friends – when we pray like this we will experience the mighty powerful presence of God

Shall we do it?

I’d like to give you a project for us to do together.

Take the Lord’s prayer and write your own prayer around it. Use Jesus’ headlines as your starting point and expand on them. Write, or draw it (no bigger than A3 please) and we will put them up in the Welcome centre for other people to see. “Here are the prayers of God’s people at Victoria!”

If you e-mail them to the office we could also put them up on the web site.