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How do we come before God when our prayers so easily become empty phrases, desperate demands, or distant formalities? In Matthew 6, Jesus says our Father knows what we need before we ask, then gives His disciples words for approaching Him: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
How do we figure out how to do things? Well, there have been different means over time, but one that came out probably close to 30 years ago now was the Four Dummies book series. How many of you have used a Four Dummies book at some point? Or more than one? I am definitely someone who has used Four Dummies books. You have that bright yellow cover, right, and the hand holding up the little sign. Well, they took that off years ago, but for a while you had the little hand holding up the sign because you needed the dummy holding up the sign saying Four Dummies. And you could go into one of those books and flip to the section that you needed to find out information on, and it would have clear, plain English because it was a guide for the rest of us, it said.
Well, now, maybe today we aren’t as inclined to that, but perhaps we go on YouTube. It’s amazing how you can go on YouTube. You can find out how to do almost anything on YouTube. Maybe now you go on to chat GPT and you type into the AI, AI, how do I do thus and so? And you let it tell you, and sometimes it’s right, sometimes it’s not. But it’s always interesting. But we need places to go to find out how we do things, right? And why was the Dummies series such a hit when it came out? Why do people go on YouTube and watch how-to videos? It’s not because there’s just nothing else to do, it’s because we need to know how to do things.
And one of the things that we need to know how to do, really what could be more important for us to understand how to do, is how to communicate with God. How do we come before our God? And so in a sense, this series, we’re going to go through the Lord’s Prayer, and maybe what we could think of with the Lord’s Prayer is that this is prayer for dummies, and we’re all the dummies. Because God knows that we don’t know how to come before him. God knows that we’re going to mess it up. And so what does God do? He says, let me tell you how you can come to me. And that’s what we’re going to be thinking about over these next weeks.
Because if we look at each of the petitions, each section of the Lord’s Prayer, we see an area of need, an area that we do need to come before our God, and we see how God helps us to wrestle with that. This is how it works, Jesus is saying. This is how you come before me and you pray. We don’t know how to approach prayer. And I think if you look at some of the crazy things we do in prayer, that shows that. Jesus addresses that in the introduction to the Lord’s Prayer. We’re going to get to that in just a moment. But the simple thing is, we’re going to mess it up. And we need to be able to communicate with God.
Now, sometimes our prayers are going to look a lot more basic than what we’re going to be talking about over the next few weeks. But sometimes our prayers are literally, God, help. On Ash Wednesday, we prayed the litany, it’s a whole series of prayers, but it starts and ends with the prayer, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy. And you think about that. Think about praying that. That’s a wonderful, wonderful thing to pray. It’s not all we should pray, but certainly a good thing to pray.
But then what do we do? Because we’re in those times, Jesus was in those times. He came before his Heavenly Father, before he went to the cross, and he wasn’t praying huge, eloquent prayers like we see other examples from Jesus. It was a very simple prayer. So there’s those times we do that. But what do we do in everyday life? So that we don’t only come to God and say, God, help. God, give me. God, do this, do that. How do we balance it all out? Well, that’s what we’re going to be thinking about. That’s the prayer for dummies that we’re getting into.
And so let’s go ahead and start by, well, praying. Let’s pray. Father, would you be with us as we study your Word tonight? Would you help us to understand what it means to come before you? As we begin this series and we go through this series over the coming weeks, would you help us to be those who understand who our God is? Because as we do, it does such a transformative work to everything in life. Lord, tonight as we think about who you are in relation to us, would you bless us with that? Would you encourage us with that? And would you direct us with that? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
Well, here’s a starting point. Prayer is personal. And that’s what we see in the Lord’s Prayer. Prayer is not merely an abstract thing. It’s not merely a formality. Prayer is personal. Take a look at verses 7 to 9 of Matthew chapter 6. Jesus says, and when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do. For they think that they will be heard with their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
So Jesus starts with the ways that we mess up prayer. And if you think about it, when he says don’t pray like how those other people pray, those Gentiles pray, he’s not just getting a dig in on non-Jews here. That’s not his point. His point is the human condition. And the point is that a lot of people, the people that didn’t already know who the Lord was, what did they do? Well, they thought, there’s a God up there somewhere, but I have to get his attention somehow. So I’m going to load up my prayers with lots of words, because then maybe something will be heard.
Maybe it’s a little bit like if you think about, if you need to get notice out for something, it used to be that you would purchase an ad in the newspaper. And you’d put this ad in so that people would see it. You don’t know exactly where it needs to go, but you’re going to make a stir so that people hear it. And sometimes I think we do that, even if we are Christians, we think, well, I’m just going to pray a lot. I’m going to say a lot of words. And certainly we should, as Scripture tells us, pray without ceasing. But we think, I’m going to pray a lot of words so that maybe somehow through all the noise of everything going on, God will hear what I’m praying.
And in that, what we’re doing is we’re basically saying, I don’t believe that I have a personal connection to God in prayer. Because why do I need to make a bunch of noise? Why do I need to get God’s attention? It’s because I’m assuming that God is some big CEO in the sky that doesn’t actually hear what I’m praying on a regular basis. Jesus says, it’s not like that. Your Father knows what you need before you ever even pray it.
Why does God call us to prayer? It’s not because He doesn’t know what we need. It’s not like He’s trying to petition the White House to hear out this tragedy that’s happening in our community and we need somehow, some way to get the attention of the President so He’ll listen. It’s not like that.
Why do we come before God in prayer? We come to have a conversation with Him, to have a relationship with Him. He knows what we need, but He wants us to relate to Him.
Now, you may have noticed this series is called Our Prayer. You might say, is that some other prayer? Tim, what are you talking about? I know what this prayer is called that you just began here. It’s called The Lord’s Prayer. Don’t you know that? Come on. How did you go all this time here? You’ve been doing ministry here, and you don’t know this is called The Lord’s Prayer? But that really isn’t the most helpful name. We call it The Lord’s Prayer because Jesus gave it. But I think in our heads, what we do when we call it that is we start to think it’s the prayer for the Lord to give. Jesus can pray this prayer. He can come before His Father and pray Our Father who is in Heaven. But what about me?
But notice what Jesus says in verse 9. He says, pray then like this. Now, we actually have the Lord’s Prayer. If we turn to John 17, we’d see it. He has a beautiful, long, high priestly prayer. He prays this wonderful prayer about us being together as Christians, as one like the Father and He are one, and all this wonderful stuff. That’s the Lord’s Prayer. That’s a prayer from Jesus that could only be prayed by Jesus. We can’t pray that prayer. We can aspire to some of the things it says, but that’s not us. That’s the Lord’s Prayer.
But here, this prayer that we call The Lord’s Prayer, this is our prayer. This is a prayer that Jesus said to His disciples. When you’re trying to figure out how to pray, when you’re wondering how you communicate with your Creator, this is what you say. I think it’s so important that we start there because it transforms what we’re doing with this prayer. This prayer is not about somehow, if we’re corporately together as the body of Christ, we can somehow say this, but it’s really only for Jesus. No, this is a prayer that Jesus is saying, this is what all of you should pray. This is what it means to be a disciple of mine. This is what you’re going to pray.
And in that, He pushes away all that babble, all that chatter to try to somehow get the cosmic CEO to listen. But He also changes the way that those who already knew the Lord would pray.
Because you see, the Jews, they knew they didn’t just need to give all kinds of babble. They understood that God was personal. They understood that the God of the universe didn’t need to somehow be knocked over the head to hear them. They got that, but they didn’t get how close they could be to Him.
And so, sort of like if you think about the coronation of a king or a queen and they read off title after title after title that has been accumulated for centuries and it goes on, maybe 100 titles, 200 titles. They’d come up with all kinds of very appropriate titles to give to God. That’s not necessarily a wrong thing, but they’d come up with all these titles and they could pray all those and they felt very pious and holy for knowing all these different ways to refer to God. But every time they did that, what they were really saying is, God, you are very distant from us, but we’re going to communicate who you are.
Jesus begins differently. Our Father in heaven. Simple, sweet, and intensely personal. Now, you can look in the Old Testament and see some reference to father language referring to God, but this was not the way that a normal Jew of the time prayed. This was not what the rabbis were teaching people on how they should pray.
Jesus says pray differently. I’m going to give you your prayer. And here’s the first thing you need to know. God is personal to you. God knows you. God loves you. And we talk very differently to people who love us, don’t we?
If I’m talking to one of you in here and I say, oh distinguished lady from St. Peter’s who previously served here and there and who has hosted the Faith Tree Pool Party and who, you know, I go on and on and on like that. Well, you’re laughing because it’s absurd, right? Hi, Kathy. Isn’t that better? And if it went beyond a joke and you realized I was dead serious, if Kathy realized I was dead serious, this is how I’m now referring to her, she’d quit laughing because it’d be sort of like, we must not actually have any kind of relationship. We have to have all this formality.
Now, I’m not saying if we pray beautiful prayers to God, we’re immediately saying, God, I don’t want a relationship with you or we don’t. But what Jesus is saying is go beyond that. Don’t stop there. He’s encouraging us to understand that we’re actually encountering the God who already knows what we need and loves us.
How ironic that we turn this prayer oftentimes into a formality in and of itself. We say it, we’ve memorized it, and we say it not as a child coming to one’s father but as people who know how to drone on words. That’s a tragedy.
I did mention last week, and I sincerely mean this, if you haven’t memorized the Lord’s Prayer, I think that this would be a great practice for this Lent. Consider memorizing it. As we go through it, maybe if you struggle with memorizing, maybe each week try to memorize up to the point where we’re at and by the end of Lent you’ll have this in there. And it’s so wonderful to have this embedded in your head when you get to that point and you don’t know what to say and you want to say a little bit more than, Lord, help me, but you’re not sure how to even get the words out. How beautiful that the very words of Jesus are in our head as something to pray. It’s a wonderful thing.
So much more than that. I think sometimes what I was saying about titles gets lost in our current moment because we’re such a title-less society. We’re uncomfortable with titles. It used to be if you didn’t know someone, you used titles to refer to them. Or if you had an acquaintance, you didn’t call that person by his or her first name, it was Mr. So-and-so, Mrs. So-and-so. If you knew someone at work, it was Mr. So-and-so, Mrs. So-and-so. You weren’t just tossing out first names.
I don’t even know if they do this anymore. I remember in the language arts textbooks that I had to read while in elementary school, previously known as English textbooks, but now we call them language arts. In those books, they went over all the titles. Here’s the title you should use if you speak with a judge. Here’s the title you should use if you speak with the president. Hey, that’s pretty neat. Here’s the title you should use if you speak with the king or the queen. Here’s title after title after title.
Do we still, anyone, do we still do that today? Is that something? No, it’s not, yeah, it’s gone. That used to be what we’d teach. And so we kind of had an innate sense of how titles work.
And in that, then, maybe how radical it is when you blow them up. When we blow them all up, we don’t necessarily understand fully what Jesus is doing here, but Jesus is blowing up social convention. Jesus is saying, I am here to connect you with God in a way that you’ve never experienced before, and you need to understand that.
Now, the irony of what I said about how we memorize it, though, is that even though the words are there, when we don’t understand it, and when we just do it by rote memorization, what happens then is that we kind of get that same feel right back. And that’s why we need to confront what Jesus is actually doing here, so that we understand that it isn’t just a new title.
You know, maybe we’ll refer to it by the Latin, right? We can just change how we refer to this. We can make it sound very formal, and then everyone will understand that this is a new title. No, this is not a new title. This is a new relationship. Jesus wants us to connect closely, intimately, with God himself.
He and the Father are one, we’re told. That’s what he prays in John 17. And he wants us to approach him as someone who’s actually in his family. He wants us to approach the Heavenly Father as someone who’s actually a member of the family.
One of the ways that when we memorize it and we speak it that we lose that is when we just pray it exactly how it is on this page and don’t think about how nonsensical that is.
Now, what do I mean by that? If we’re all praying this together, and at the end of this sermon tonight, I’m going to suggest, why don’t we all pray this together? We do that every once in a while. We don’t do it nearly enough. I think we should do it more. But when we pray it together, it makes sense to say, our Father.
What about when we’re alone? Do we still say, our Father? Who’s our? Everybody’s. All believers.
But you know the challenge there? When we’re speaking to God by himself. Imagine you went up to your mom or your dad and you wanted to ask them a question. You said, our mom, our dad. And you’re alone. Your parents look around. They pull out a cell phone. I left mine in the other room. They pull out a cell phone and they call the psych ward and they’re going to see if they can get something for you because apparently there’s something going on. There’s a lot of our in here and there’s only one person out there.
We would understand immediately that it didn’t feel right. We would feel that. And that’s where we’re at. We would feel that. And that’s where we’re challenged and what we’re going to do as we break this apart over the coming weeks is to challenge ourselves to really think about the words.
And one thing you can do starting today, I would suggest, is if you do make it a practice to pray this prayer or you’d like to make it a practice to pray this prayer, start by changing the pronouns. My Father.
Now, when we pray as a group, we’re going to say it just as it is here. That’s good. That’s good. But if you pray it tonight, pray it tomorrow morning, whenever you’re inclined to pray it and it’s just you and God, change it to My Father. That’s where God is encouraging us to go.
Notice what Jesus says over in John chapter 20. It says, Jesus said to her, do not cling to me for I have not yet ascended to the Father, but go to my brothers and say to them, I’m speaking to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.
And I think sometimes the reason that we hold off on using my is it feels like it does make it too personal. Well, Jesus could say our Father, but, and he could also say my Father, but can I do that? Is that okay? Is God okay with that?
And what we see here in John 20 is that Jesus expected his followers, his disciples, to understand that the Father was also their Father. He says my Father, but your Father as well. That’s what Jesus was leading them to understand. As they encountered him, as they were encountering the God of the universe through him, they were now invited to come to the God of the universe, not as someone distant, not as someone only collectively somehow that we belong to, but someone that each and every one of us individually belongs to.
Isn’t that amazingly different? Isn’t it amazing when you actually say, I can come up to the one who made everything from the littlest speck to the grandest tree and the stars in the sky, and I can come to that one and say, my Father, who is in heaven.
We need to get away from making it into a new title and understand what Jesus is doing here. That’s how he can care about our individual needs. That’s how he can know what those are because he actually knows us.
Maybe you’re feeling a little uncomfortable though because you’ve always prayed to our Father and you’re saying now you’re changing it. Can we all be a little bit more uncomfortable now? Is that okay? Let’s just go a little bit further because here’s the other thing.
This prayer shows up in both Matthew and Luke in two different occasions. People have wrestled over that and skeptical people have said, well, someone didn’t know how to report it.
But if you actually look, they are two separate times Jesus is preaching and he teaches on how to pray. Why? Because it’s a popular For Dummies book. A lot of people need to buy this book. It should be the bestseller, right? We all need to know how to pray.
It seems as Jesus was doing itinerant ministries, going from city to city, place to place, Jesus would teach people how to pray. He didn’t use exactly the same words, very close but not exactly.
What does that tell us? It tells us Jesus’ point wasn’t to give, here’s the exact formulation, here’s the magical incantation. If you say this to God, he will do what you want or he will hear your prayer.
Do you see there what we’ve done again? We’ve gone right back to being impersonal. I come up to Jim and I say, hey Jim, how are you today? He says, I’m only going to answer that question if you say, hello James. How are things in your life in this day?
He wouldn’t do that, right? He wouldn’t do that and in fact, he might not answer if I say it that way. I don’t know what you’re doing but there’s something weird here.
But more to the point, we don’t expect our friends, we don’t expect our family, we don’t even expect people we don’t know to require us to say words exactly right.
Yes, maybe if we’re talking to Alexa or something like that, yes, you have to get the words exactly right because she’s not going to listen otherwise and she probably won’t even if you do get the words right.
But when we’re talking to actual people, part of what we understand in human communication is we’re expressing ideas. They don’t have to be said in precise formulas every single time.
And when Jesus says this in verse nine, he says pray then like this. That’s Jesus’ point. Understand what I’m saying here in this prayer. When you’re praying, because you have a relationship with the Father, He’s your Father, you can come up to Him and pray and you can talk to Him. You don’t have to say exactly how I’m saying it but here are the things that, these are things that are good to pray to God. These are things that are appropriate to come to the Heavenly Father and pray.
A really interesting prayer practice is to take these petitions we’re going through and remember the order of them, have them in your head, but then expand them. It slows you down if you’re just speeding through it. And you think about this first petition, our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name.
Next time you pray that, maybe stop and start praying to God a little bit more about the things that we’re going to be talking about through the rest of this message. In your own words.
Because I have to confess at times I’ve prayed through the Lord’s Prayer and I get done with it and then I pray it again because I can’t remember if I said all of it. Because it’s so in there, I can say the Lord’s Prayer in a prayer and not even have my head tuned into it. It’s just kind of coming out.
And when you actually do that, and when you actually say, well, let’s go ahead and think about, okay, my Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name. May your name be holy. And I’m going to pray some things about what that means.
We’re going to get to that in a moment, but start thinking right now, what does it mean when I say hallowed be your name? How many times do we say that and we don’t even think, what does that mean?
Well, it’s the thing you say when you open a prayer to God, right? It’s the stuff after the at sign in the email address. You have to have hallowed be your name, otherwise it doesn’t work. No, it is actually coming to God saying something very specific and how important it is if we take the time to think about what that’s saying so that it’s not just filler.
We wouldn’t want to say, spend our whole prayer just saying, um, to God. Um, God, um, um. And sometimes we don’t know what to say and I’m not saying, oh, now you’ve done it. You’ve used verbal filler when speaking to God.
But essentially, when we pray these things and we don’t take time to think about what they mean, it’s verbal filler even if it sounds really, really good. And we’re encouraged to something else because, again, he’s our father. We have a personal relationship. It doesn’t need to be distant and it shouldn’t be distant.
Have you ever come to someone’s house? I think all of us have had this experience. You arrive there and they say, well, make yourself at home if you’re hungry. Kitchen’s in there. Fridge is over there. Help yourself to something.
Well, I’ve heard that said plenty of times. I think most of us have, if not all of us. And you hear those words and I have a confession to make. It doesn’t make me make myself at home.
Someone says that and I don’t immediately think, you know, I’m just going to go to that person’s house and I’ll open their fridge and I’m going to sort through it and see if there’s anything I really like in there. And then let’s go over to the pantry and I’m going to pull out all the different snacks and maybe I’ll cook something. I think I’ll pull some spices out and here’s some flour and sugar and I can make something.
I don’t do that. It’s a very nice gesture. It’s a nice thing as a host or hostess to say, but it doesn’t make me immediately feel invited to everything in the house. Even if it’s sincerely meant because I think, well, I don’t know exactly how fully the person means to say this.
How true is this in this case? Does it mean I can go in and I can take a can of soda? Does it mean I can go in and take whatever I want? Does it mean I should go and start cooking something in the kitchen? What does this mean?
On the other hand, we’ve probably all also been over to someone’s house and you arrive there and they have this big buffet spread out. Maybe they have an island in their kitchen. They have all kinds of things. They say, just walk on over there and help yourself. This is all just for everybody who’s here’s enjoyment.
And you know what? When someone does that, I sometimes pig out a little bit. Oh, okay. That sounds good. Oh, I have to have one of these. I have to have one of those. My cousins always host Fourth of July. You go there and there’s like the standard snacks that I know are going to be there every single time.
I don’t go in the refrigerator and just help myself, but I do go over there and I have to hit the standard snacks and make sure to enjoy them. It’s just part of it. I know exactly what they’re offering to me because it’s laid out there. I don’t have to wonder. Oh, well. It’s right where it’s supposed to be and it’s right where they always say it is and I know I can take it.
In a sense here, God is setting out a party buffet for us. He’s setting out all the different things we need to be able to help ourselves to and saying, go ahead. This is for you. This is for you. I want you to know it’s for you.
God wants us to ask and sometimes, sometimes I think some of the things that we’re going to be talking about over these next weeks, we start coming up with very spiritual sounding explanations of them and what they really mean because we don’t feel like we have permission to ask what God really wants us to ask, to interact with God fully.
The point of this prayer, and as we start to break it down, is this is a personal invitation to have a personal conversation with God. What becomes clear is, no, this is, this is, this is the buffet. This is the heavenly banquet here. God is inviting us to come in and he’s making it very clear, all these things are on the table for you to enjoy.
All these things are part of how you relate to me. You can be a part of this. It’s not something only for the really important people. It’s not something for only the people that live in this house but not for you who I’ve just said to make yourself at home. No, it’s for you.
What does that tell us? It tells us when we come to God with the different needs we talk about. When we come to God and we just want to converse with him as our father and we don’t really even know exactly where we’re going, we’re confused, we don’t know what to say but we just want to come and we want to, the idea of actually being able to come to someone who understands sounds incredible. That’s okay to do that.
And that means we’re not bothering him when we do that. When you’re invited into a party and there’s that whole spread out, you know you’re not bothering the host or hostess to take part in enjoying it. You might actually insult them if you don’t. They want you to take part in it.
And that’s what we lose when we formalize this too much because then we feel like, well, I’m bothering God if I pray this. He has so many other things, so many more important things.
I can’t tell you over the years how many conversations I’ve had with people saying, but aren’t I bothering God if I talk about this or that with him? And as we see here, the needs that spread over the whole span of life that God is saying these are things that we can come to him and ask, God’s saying, you’re not bothering me. I’m inviting you to do this. I want this relationship with you. I know exactly what I’m getting into.
It’s not that I’m going to invite you and I didn’t realize it was the best day for dinner. I just thought you were going to pick up a few snacks and leave. No, God knows exactly what he’s inviting us to and he intends to.
He wants us to ask. And so Jesus, again, he teaches this on multiple occasions. Why? Because it’s so important. He wants us to understand we can come to him. He wants us to understand that prayer isn’t just for the church gathered together. It is that, but more. Prayer isn’t just for formal occasions. Prayer isn’t just structured prayer.
Prayer isn’t all the different things we make it into. Prayer is a constant invitation to actually communicate with God and to know that he cares.
If we can take that and hold on to that, that is perhaps the most important thing we can understand about prayer and perhaps even the most important thing we can understand about the Lord’s Prayer because everything else flows out of that. We need to understand that.
Now, there’s always two sides to things, right? And I think that’s the reason why we have these two lines here together. And I mentioned, do we really think about what Hallowed Be Your Name means? And sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t.
I’m not going to ask you to raise your hand if you’ve contemplated the depths of what Hallowed Be Thy Name means.
See there I just lapsed into King James. I can’t help it. Greg, you’re welcome.
And you think about that. Why? Because that’s how I memorized it. That’s how I know it in there and it just wants to just come out all King James-y and isn’t that… Yeah.
It’s really interesting if you have that inclination how helpful it is to wrestle with it. Paraphrase it.
You’ve been trying to communicate with someone and it just seems like you’re talking past each other and so you start the practice of trying to say as best as you can what the other person is attempting to say and you start trying to do that to each other until the point where you realize, oh yeah, we are actually starting to meet eye-to-eye. We’re starting to understand that we’re making that effort.
Try paraphrasing the Lord’s Prayer. Try to wrestle with it until you realize, yeah, I am faithfully saying the points that Jesus is saying here, but in my own words.
If you want to go back then because it’s so uncomfortable in a certain way that you memorized it, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with praying it in the King’s English if you’d like to. Just make sure you’re wrestling with it and whatever language you pray it in, make sure that you actually wrestle with it. That’s the important thing.
Because what we don’t want to do is think that it’s some formal invitation to maybe stop by and pick up a bottle of water when God is actually inviting us to a feast that will fill us for all eternity.
Yet so often we do.
But there is another side to this and that’s what we do when we wrestle with Hallowed Be Your Name.
Because the other tendency, and this is a tendency I think particularly in our cultural moment, we have abandoned all the titles. We, in especially many Protestant circles today, focus on how personal God can be. We have that relationship with Him. We have the catchy T-shirt that refers to the personal relationship we have with Him.
And in that, we start to lose whom it is we’re actually communicating with.
Do we have a friend in Jesus? Yes. Is He the majestic, sovereign King of all the universe too? Yes.
And so as we look back at this verse, notice our Father in Heaven, yes, that personal, but Hallowed Be Your Name. May your name be holy.
The personal and the holy right there.
Because on the one hand, we can fall into that trap of thinking God’s distant, but on the other hand, we can forget how majestic He is. We can forget that on our own, when we come before God, what do we do? We just disintegrate just by natural consequence because He is so holy and we are so sinful.
We can’t lose either one of those.
And I think Jesus puts those two right there together because He wants us to actually wrestle with that. To wrestle with, yes, we’ve been invited. Do we understand whom it is that we’ve been invited to be with?
And I think He knew that at times we’re going to emphasize the one too much and emphasize the other too much.
So what does He do? He puts them both together so we can’t miss it.
Here’s a turning point in this prayer.
On the one hand, we’ve been talking about all this family language and close friend language and all this sort of stuff, but here’s the thing that we need to understand.
On our own, we’re not really even invited to pray this.
The early Christians actually, when they were baptized, the early Christians actually forbid non-believers from praying this prayer. Until you were a baptized believer, they wouldn’t allow you to take communion, but they also wouldn’t allow you to pray this prayer.
Why? Because how can you come before the God of the universe and say, my Father, if you don’t actually have a relationship with Him? How can you actually come that close to Him if all you are is a sinful human being and all He is is the holiness?
And so they would forbid early non-believers from praying it.
And it sounds kind of cold, but it really wasn’t cold.
It was urging people to think about it.
Just like when we fence the communion table and we say, if you haven’t trusted in Jesus, please don’t take this. Not because we don’t want you to take it. It’s not that God doesn’t even intend it ultimately for you to take. It’s because until you actually know Him, it’s not good to just come and think you have a relationship with Him without actually having a relationship.
Why? Because He’s holy. And we’re not on our own. We’re not holy. We have no right to call God Father on our own. We haven’t earned it.
Why can we do it? Because Jesus has paved the way for us. Jesus has brought us into that presence. We’re adopted through the cross of Jesus. If we took on the sin of the world, then suddenly we could, yes, come and know our God.
It’s not just that we’re close. It’s we’re close to unimaginable holiness.
And so in confronting those two, we’re reminded of how much we need Jesus. We’re reminded of how much God loves us but how much we desperately need His love to even think about coming to Him.
Because God cares about holiness. God cares about us actually understanding who He is. This is the other side of that.
Leviticus 19:2 He says, Speak to all the people of Israel and say to them, You shall be holy for I, the Lord your God, am holy.
In Ezekiel 36, when referring to people who haven’t taken His holiness seriously, He says, And I will vindicate the holiness of my great name which has been profaned among the nations and which you have profaned among them. And the nations will know that I am the Lord, declares the Lord God. When you, when through you I vindicate my holiness before their eyes.
God doesn’t say this because He doesn’t care. God doesn’t say this because He’s not really as holy as we thought He was.
When we start to break down those walls and realize, Well no, I don’t need a formalized set of words to somehow access God.
The alternative isn’t, well God isn’t really that holy. God isn’t really that powerful. The alternative is, no God just loves me that much.
So the first step is to know Him.
And every time we pray, it also reminds us of how important it is for us who do know Him to help other people to know Him.
It’s not merely enough for us to recognize that and to have that relationship with Him and to come close to Him. But how much more should we want others to as well that we would see fulfilled what we read in Philippians 2 that every knee would bow and every tongue confess.
You think about how awe-inspiring God truly is and you think that I actually get to encounter that.
And the question we should ask ourselves is, how could I possibly not want others to as well? How could I not want others to experience both sides of this as well?
I’ve received a number of comments and I have to say that you appreciate this and I appreciate it too.
The slides we have up between services right now where it’s snowing on Little Hills and we had some snow this week so it felt very appropriate that that was still up.
We have our snowy winter scene over there. How appropriate because it was snowing this week. There’s even little bits of snow that didn’t melt away today.
But you know that last part is what makes me sad.
It was very appropriate for this week and yet the snow melted away today.
I was sitting there getting some things ready for everything that we’re doing today looking out the window watching the snow disappear and it just made me feel sad. I wanted it to last.
And when we encounter God and we think about here he is, here he’s the father, I can come before him and people can hear about how loving God is if we’re not actually thinking about how can I help them to know whom God is truly.
It’s like snow falling on a warm day. It’s like snow falling and hitting the pavement that’s heated up. It’s like snow falling and then it immediately rising to 50 degrees like it did today and melting it away.
We think about the beauty of whom it is that we’re confessing that God is here and how often is it that we look at that and we’re refreshed by that but we’re not challenged deeply enough to want to make sure that other people are experiencing in a way that lasts.
I think about that sadness with just that snow passing.
How much more sad is it, how much more sad is it when we actually think about the people around us and that some of them, they’ll hear things about God’s love, maybe they’ll even get a warm fuzzy feeling as they read something about it but they don’t actually know him and so that’s just a passing moment in eternity that snow is going to melt away. They’re not going to experience that closeness with God.
And so as we pray that may God’s name be holy what we’re really praying is may people know whom it is that God is. May people encounter whom it is that God is. May people experience that not just ultimately in judgment that they realize whoa there’s a holy God and I didn’t know him but may people experience it in a way that refreshes and restores.
May the snow not melt for them but may the beauty and freshness of it last for them.
I realize some of you don’t love snow and don’t love cold but may the beaches be beautiful for you and may it not have the fishy horrible smell that it often has. May the dead fish not get washed up on it but take away the pristine nature of a clean beach.
May those things happen.
Pardon? Mountains are the best.
May the mountains be beautiful and may it refresh but without all the ticks and chiggers that are going to get on you.
It’s that kind of thing that we’re really praying here.
May people actually encounter the wonder of God in a way that’s truly restorative.
Here’s our mission friends.
Here’s what we’re called to do.
That we’re called to help people recognize the holiness of God.
Why? Because we know God. We have a personal relationship with him.
We’ve encountered that this one who could wipe out the entire world because he made the entire world is a God that we can actually approach and say my father.
And if that is the case, if that is the case, we want other people to experience that too.
Let’s go ahead and we’re going to close in prayer and at the end of that prayer let’s go ahead and pray the Lord’s Prayer.
If you know it you’re welcome to say it out loud with me.
Let’s pray.
Father we come before you and we pray these things that we’ve been talking about. We pray about them asking that you would help us to understand truly whom it is that you are.
We pray that you would help us to never lose the personal connection that you offer to us but also not to lose your holiness.
And as we reflect on that combination Lord help us to want to enable others to experience the permanent refreshment of that and not just to see it melt away.
Not just to see the beautiful beach for a moment and then see all the dead fish floating up but rather to experience the beautiful beach forever.
Lord would you give us a passion for that that we would want to be those who are on a mission to see your name be made holy everywhere high and low far and wide in this world.
It’s in this way that we come before you Lord and we pray these words that your son our savior taught us to pray.
Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
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