 |
 |
 |
||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||
|
 |
The Lord’s Prayer I
Overview of the Lord’s Prayer
The first in a series of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer by Joel Gillespie, Pastor of Covenant Fellowship Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, Greensboro, North Carolina, copyright 2001.
Twenty five years ago God called me into a relationship with Himself. He then began then the process of teaching me what it means to be his child, to be his disciple. That process continues. Over these years I have had to learn much and unlearn much.
When we come to Christ we have to learn how to do all sorts of things. We learn to love. We learn to worship. We learn to do our daily work for God’s glory. We learn to pray. What could be more basic to our relationship with our Father in heaven than our praying.
Most of us feel very inadequate when it comes to our praying. We don’t pray enough. We don’t go away from praying with the right sense of being close to God. We don’t pray with passion. We pray in a haphazard disorganized way. We pray selfishly. We pray childishly.
It’s easy to understand this when we listen to ourselves pray
“Uh, God, you know, uh, thanks for a good day, help us to have a good day tomorrow, uh, you know, please help Mrs. Smith get better, and help me do good on my test, and help my cold get better….”
Sometimes we see our brethren, and maybe we ourselves, get caught up in prayer gimmicks, prayer fads, different types of prayer speech that will we are promised will make our prayers more effective.
We realize after we have been at this life of faith for a while that whereas we thought maybe we simply knew instinctively how to pray -- after all, we were told, prayer is just talking to God – that maybe we really don’t know how to pray after all.
We would like to be able to pray as our Lord Himself prayed, and pray he did, though it was hard for him sometimes to find the time, to find the space away from everyone, so he often slipped away at night to the mountains to be alone with his father.
The disciples rightly looked to him as master even when it came to prayer. So they asked him, “Lord, teach us to pray.”
And you know what, Jesus did teach them. Indeed, we suspect that in his three years of ministry Jesus probably taught about prayer over and over again, always using a similar outline, though free to vary it somewhat.
We have examples of two of his teachings about the manner in which we should pray – one in the book of Luke one in the book of Matthew.
We call this prayer “The Lord’s Prayer” and by that we mean the prayer the Lord taught us to pray, though I suppose you could make a case for calling it “The Disciple’s Prayer” meaning the prayer we as the Lord’s disciples are to pray.
Now over the next several weeks we are going to draw out the meaning of the Lord’s prayer section by section. Doing so will greatly help us better use the prayer as an outline for our own prayers.
We are going to use the version found in Matthew which is a little fuller and has been the version used most often in the history of the church.
Speaking of the history of the church, we stand here today in step with our Christian brethren of almost two thousand years ago seeing to understand and use this prayer as the model for our own prayer lives. In the very earliest Christian documents we find the praying of the Lord’ prayer taught and encouraged. In the church fathers we find its meaning drawn out and taught over and over again.
In most of the great catechisms of the church – Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic alike -- we find the expositions of the Lord’s prayer included. Thomas Aquinas devoted a whole section to the Lord’s prayer in His greatest work. We find it exposited in the Catechism of Trent, as well in the new Catechism of the Catholic Church. We find its meaning drawn out in the Westminster Larger Catechism, in Luther’s Shorter Catechism, and a whole section given to it in Calvin’s Institutes.
Throughout the ages the church has known that disciples need to be taught to pray according to the pattern and model given to it by Jesus and passed on to it by the apostles.
I believe it is time we rooted ourselves again in this great tradition.
Some of us have bad memories of the Lord’s Prayer. We remember being dressed up and dragged to church and made to recite and say things we didn’t understand or care about. We remember all these people reciting this prayer in unison, knowing that most of them, many being our neighbors and parent’s friends, were going through the motions to get a few checks on their religion checklist. We remember giggling as some folks couldn’t remember whether they were in a church that got forgiven for debts or forgiven for trespasses!
Some of us came through all that vain and empty formalism with hearts determined never to be hypocrites like our parents, never to subject ourselves again to vain and empty formalism, and certainly never to lay these trips on our own children.
I’m here today to say that we as a generation have thrown the baby out with the bath water. In our search for “authentic” and “real” and” relational” religious expression we have uprooted ourselves not only from the dry lifeless formalism of our parents’ church generation, but from the teachings of Jesus as well! And our prayers have come to reflect our self obsessed selves more than passion for God and his kingdom.
Well, Jesus understands us and our tendencies. He knows what we need even before we ask. He knows that even after we come to him we are sinners in the process of change, and that without instruction and help from him even our praying will be radically impacted by our selfishness and sinfulness. And so he gives us instruction. He gives us a framework upon which to hang our prayers. He gives us a form which will gradually change the way our minds and hearts work. He gives us a pattern that when followed will change how we see God and ourselves.
The Lord’s Prayer contains the entire Christian gospel. It covers the most essential aspects of the Christian life. it is filled with the deepest theology of the Christian church. It’s riches cannot be exhausted in a lifetime of earnest praying. Yet it is accessible to the youngest child learning to pray. It is both theologically rich and invitingly simple, all at once. It is the prayer of prayers, and is to become our prayer!
When you pray, do you not wish to know with utter confidence that you are praying according to the will of Jesus? Do you not want to know that you are praying in His name? Do you not desire to know that He is predisposed to grant to you the thing for which you pray?
When we pray in the pattern of the Lord’s prayer we can rest in the comfort that we are praying as Jesus wants us to pray, and that we are asking nothing outside of His desires for his world and his children. This is what it means to pray in His name.
So let us look together at the Lord’s Prayer as given to us in the gospel of Matthew chapter six. It is very important that we understand its basic structure. The Lord’s Prayer is not so much merely to be said verbatim over and over, but is to be used a framework upon which we hang our prayers. It is a guide, a pattern for our prayers. As a pattern, its flow, its order, is quite crucial to its overall helpfulness to us.
Notice that the prayer starts out with an invocation:
"'Our Father in heaven”
In this first line of the prayer we invoke the name of God, that is, we come to him and address Him and call upon him. We do not come to him babbling incantations and formulas hoping beyond hope that He will hear us. No, we come to him as his children, addressing him as our Father through Jesus Christ our Lord, but also as a holy Father who is mighty and great, On who is “in heaven.”
After the invocation we come to the first group of three requests, or three petitions. These petitions are
“Hallowed be your name” or put rightly in the form of a request, “Make you name to be hallowed”
Your kingdom come
Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven
Notice that in the pattern of prayer the Lord has given to us we do not jump first off into laying forth our personal needs. Jesus, in giving us this prayer, is trying to help us get our priorities in order. He wants us first of all to be concerned with God’s glory and God’s honor, then with God’s agenda, then with God’s revealed moral will, and only after all that with our needs. Jesus says that we are to seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and this prayer has us first off concerned about His kingdom and His righteousness.
Then we come to the second group of three requests, or three petitions. These requests are
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.'
Here we see the Lord addressing our most basic needs as his disciples - -that our bodily human needs be met, that our sins be forgiven, and that we be protected from the evil one.
Our father does indeed care about us as His children: He knows that we are frail and needy and dependent upon Him. And so He wants us to lay out our needs, just not right off.
Now most of us grew up ending the Lord’ Prayer with a doxology or praise, “For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory.”
It is uncertain whether these words were included in Jesus’ teaching as given in Matthew or Luke. You will notice that they do not appear in the NIV. These words are not contained in many of our best manuscripts. It is possible, perhaps likely, that as Jesus taught the prayer on different occasions he sometimes ended it with such a doxology, and that is why it became part of the tradition of the early church and crept into some of the manuscripts. But even if these were not part of Jesus’ original words they made a fitting ending to the prayer as they reorient our thoughts again on the glory and honor of our Lord to whom we pray. Thus I will include them in my exposition of The Lord’ Prayer.
How is it that we can best use the Lord’s Prayer as a model or guide for our own praying?
First of all, we need to look at the prayer as a framework, as a guide for our prayers, rather than just praying the actual words of the prayer over and over. It is not wrong to pray the actual words, and I will get to that way of praying in a moment. But generally we should look at the Lord’s Prayer as a guide for our prayers.
When we look at the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer we can easily discern what sorts of prayers fit in with each petition.
So when we invoke God’s name and come before him as “Our Father who is in heaven,” we very naturally praise Him for bringing us to himself, for adopting us into His family. We thank him for Jesus’ work on the cross. We praise him for being holy and mighty and yet loving us as his children through Jesus.
When we come to the petition that God would hallow His name, we think of the ways that God’s name and reputation come to be honored and we pray for those things. We pray that God would call people to Himself that they would then call out to him and honor His name. We pray that we ourselves would so exhibit good works before the world that people would praise our Father who is in heaven. We pray that our speech would hold his name to be precious and sacred. We ask him to keep us from ever doing anything that would give Him a bad name in the minds of others.
So we learn in time the general pattern of the prayer, and what sorts of things fit under each aspect.
We are then ready to pray for different persons or different spheres of life using the framework of the Lord’s prayer.
We can pray the Lord’s prayer with respect to ourselves individually. We can pray the Lord’s prayer with respect to our church. We can pray the Lord’s prayer with respect to our city. We can pray the Lord’s prayer with respect to a particular person for whom we might be praying.
If you were praying for me for example, I would first wish for you to give thanks to God that he has adopted me as His child in Christ. I then would want you to pray that God’s name would come to be hallowed through my life. This is most important thing in the world to me. I would rather be dead than for this not to be the case. Then pray that I would submit to God’s reign over my life, and that I would live obediently to His revealed will. You may think of ways that I need to become more obedient. Please pray for me in those ways. You may think of all my responsibilities, all of the people God has given mew charge to love and serve. Pray for me to be faithful. Then pray for my needs – for God’s provision of food and shelter and clothes and safety and health and strength. Pray that God would forgive me of my sins, that He would grant me assurance of such forgiveness, and that He would lead me to be forgiving of others’ sins against me. Pray that God would not lead me into temptations that I cannot bear or withstand, but that He would protect and deliver me from the evil one. And then praise God.
You can pray using this same pattern for our local church, for the city we live in, for our country, for the work of missions in the world.
Some people like to pray for different spheres of life or groups of people on different days of the week – for family on Monday, for church on Tuesday, for city on Wednesday, for country on Thursday, for missionaries on Friday. Each of these prayers can be prayed using the Lord’s prayer a as guide and a model.
Some people like to pray different aspects of the Lord’s prayer on different days of the week. On Monday they pray worshipfully the “our father in heaven,” and pray this prayer for all the different groups of people or spheres of life. Then on Tuesday they pray for God to hallow His name, and pray this at various levels and so on.
Some people like to pray the Lord’s prayer three times a day and simply pray whatever comes to mind each time.
There is a place for simply reciting the prayer as it is. For example, sometimes when we are rushed about and hassled and pushed to and fro by the pressures and surprises of every day life we may find value (if we can break away for a few moments) in simply very slowly saying the Lord’s prayer over several times. When we truly understand the prayer we can fill such a few words with great heart devotion and longing, and not always have to articulate every possible request.
However the Lord’s Prayer is specifically used, we should not feel free to ignore it. Jesus gave us this prayer and this prayer only as a guide for our praying as his disciples. We should not let fears about getting caught up in empty formality or fears about not being spontaneous hinder us from praying as Jesus taught us. We should not assume that we simply know how to pray. Jesus in his grace and mercy gave us this prayer knowing that we needed his guidance.
Let us join with the saints through the centuries and become faithful prayer warriors for the kingdom in the manner and way in which Jesus has taught us.
Amen.
|
 |
|
 |
|
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
||||
