[Machine transcription]
For everyone who asks, receives, and the one who seeks, finds, and the one who knocks,
it will be opened. You may be seated. In the name of Jesus, Amen.
Dear Saints, we’ll consider the Lord’s Prayer today, but I can’t hardly pass over these last
few verses of the Epistle without at least mentioning them and putting the picture
in your head again for comfort. If you can imagine the devil running around
watching you and making notes of all of your sins.
Or maybe, let’s just get the devil, let’s give the devil a scorecard.
Here’s the Ten Commandments, and every time you sin, the devil just puts an X next to
the commandment.
Oh, the first commandment, the second commandment, the third commandment, the fifth, the sixth,
the seventh.
Every time you break a commandment, the devil just makes a little mark there, like a scorecard,
like he’s keeping score at a dominoes game or something like this, and he’s going to
present that to God on the Day of Judgment.
judgment.
But Jesus says to the devil, let me see that.
What do you have there?
And Jesus takes it from the hand of the devil and then He takes it with Him and He holds
out His hand and it is nailed to the cross.
That little list of all the sins that you have committed is nailed there to the cross
with Jesus and He keeps it in His hand and then finally when it is time for your judgment
Jesus hands that page to God the Father and He says, I can’t read any of this.
It’s covered in blood.
It says,
God made us alive together with Him,
having forgiven us all our trespasses
by canceling the record of debt
that stood against us with its legal demands.
This He set aside,
nailing it to the cross.
See the picture?
God be praised for that.
That all your sins,
all your transgressions,
all the things that you’ve done wrong,
all that you owe to God has been paid by the Lord Jesus Christ.
In fact, it’s in that confidence that Jesus teaches us to pray, but that’s for the end
of the sermon.
I’d like to â we have a lot to talk about with the Lord’s Prayer, and today we’re
only just going to kind of make a beginning and lay a foundation of our meditation on
the Lord’s Prayer, and I’d like to do that today with maybe four points and then an
encouragement.
Four points, that God commands prayer, that there are promises of prayer, that Jesus in
the Lord’s Prayer teaches our need, and lastly, that Jesus teaches us the words to
pray.
So, first, the command.
You and I are commanded to pray.
In fact, this is the content of the second commandment.
You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God.
When God tells us not to misuse His name, He’s telling us that we ought to use it rightly.
Like if someone gives you the keys to the car and says, don’t misuse my car, what do
they expect you to do?
Just to not drive?
No, they expect you, in fact, to drive it carefully.
The speed limit, you know, not in Austin probably.
You’re supposed, when God says, don’t misuse my name, He’s saying, you should use my
name rightly.
So we should fear and love God so we don’t curse, swear, use satanic arts, lie, or deceive
by His name, but we should give thanks to God.
We should call upon Him in every trouble.
We should pray, praise, and give thanks.
This is what the Lord wants us to do with His name.
Now, now, now, like every other command, this command as God’s law shows us our sin and
it shows us our guilt.
In fact, I would suggest, you can correct me if I’m wrong about this, but I would suggest
that there is perhaps no other commandment in the list of the Ten Commandments that causes
the Christian such consternation as this one, and at least let me just speak for myself
that whenever I go to confession,
this is always what I’m confessing.
I’m always confessing my laziness in my prayers,
my lack of prayers for my family
and for you and for the world.
I’m always confessing this.
It always is a burden to me
that I don’t pray as often as I ought to pray.
I don’t pray with the fervor with which I ought to pray,
that I neglect my prayers.
And it’s easy, too,
because if I just didn’t show up this morning,
you guys might notice.
I hope that you would notice, but if I don’t show up here in the front pew tomorrow morning
and say my prayers for you guys, then nobody notices that, it’s easy to skip these things.
So we confess that we do not pray as we ought to pray, but the law does not only show us
our sin, there’s something else, and I want to focus in on this part of the command to
pray, because the law of God also gives us boldness.
I don’t think we think about this very much, and we should probably think of it more, that
when the Lord commands us to do something, that we have the confidence of knowing that
that is His will for us, and so we can go about the task with boldness and with confidence.
Here’s the example.
Do you remember Queen Esther?
Esther, she was the queen of Ahasuerus in old Assyria, and that king Ahasuerus is convinced
that he’s going to kill all of the Jews.
Haman, the wicked guy Haman, came to him and convinced him that he should kill all
the Jews, and Mordecai, the second cousin of Esther, finds out about it, and he comes
to Esther and says, Esther, you have to go on before the king and you have to intercede
for us so that he won’t kill all of the Jews.
And Esther says, I can’t do it.
I just can’t go into the king because there’s a rule that if you walk into the palace of
the king, there’s guys standing there by the door with their swords ready to kill you.
If you’re not invited to the throne room of the king, you simply cannot come into that
place.
You risk your life.
You almost get the sense that that’s what Esther expects will happen.
And Mordecai says, well, and Esther goes on to say,
there’s one exception, the king has a golden staff,
and if he raises the golden staff,
then your life is spared.
But it’s almost like Esther said,
that hardly ever happens.
You walk into the throne room of the king,
and you’re done for without an invitation.
I mean, can you imagine a room like this,
and there’s a throne, and the king sits on the throne,
and all along the walls are these soldiers
armed with pikes and spears,
and if you walk in, whoomp, you’re dead.
I suppose they would glimpse, glance, both at the king and to see if he’s raising the
golden staff.
And if he is, then theyâ¦
Now Mordecai says to Esther, says, well, look, don’t think that you’re going to escape
the destruction of the Jews, I mean, you’ll be killed anyways, so you might as well go.
Take your chances.
And so Esther says, well, you’re right, I’ll go.
And if I die, I die.
And she has all of her attendants fast for three days hoping that when she walks into the throne room of the king that he will
Have mercy and lift the golden staff and let and give her an audience
Now, okay
So just imagine if that’s what it takes to have an audience with an earthly king
How much more to have an audience with the king of the universe?
How much more exclusive?
Should our access be to the throne room of God in heaven?
Can you imagine, just for a moment, imagine that the Lord had not given us the command
to pray.
That the Lord had never commanded us to bring our petitions before Him.
So that we just didn’t have that prayer.
Now we would need to pray, we would need to bring our petitions before the Lord, we would
need to tell Him the things that we need, but without the command to do it we could
never be sure if we would survive it.
I think about this a lot if the Lord hadn’t given us the command to pray.
I think what we would do is we would probably have a voters’ meeting once a year and we’d
all get together and we’d say, okay, everybody submit your petitions that we want to ask
the Lord and we’re going to vote on the one that we want to dare ask God, the one thing
that we want to dare and ask Him.
And then we’d say, okay, after we decided what to ask, then we’d have a vote to figure
out who’s going to do it.
But we’d probably pick the oldest guy who has the least amount of time left anyways
because we’re pretty sure that if he goes and he asks that prayer that he’s not going
to come back from the presence of God alive.
I’ll go and ask God for something and if I die, I die.
That’s how we would be if we didn’t have the command to pray.
Do you see then when God comes to us and He commands us to pray and He says to us, stand
before me.
Tell me the things that you need.
You have permission to come before me.”
That the Lord is granting us this unbelievable access to do something so bold that we would
never dare to do it without the command to stand before the King of the universe and
to tell him the things that we need.
It is an incredible gift, an incredible treasure.
Imagine if you just had like a telephone that went straight to the Oval Office.
It’s not to the oval, we have this line, it’s direct to the throne of the universe.
So this command gives us great boldness to stand before the Lord and ask Him to intercede
for our neighbors, to petition Him on behalf of ourself and our family and our church and
our state, to thank Him for the things that He’s done, to praise Him for His mercy in
Christ.
But that’s a command to pray and it should ennoble us, it should make us bold to pray.
Second, we have the promise of prayer.
Psalm 50 verse 15, I think this was the favorite promise of prayer for all the old Lutherans.
Whenever they talk about the promise of prayer, they go straight to this text and it’s a quite
beautiful text.
Psalm 50 verse 15, it says call upon me in the day of trouble and I will deliver you
and you will glorify me.
Or Jesus says, we heard it in Luke, I’ll read it to you from Matthew chapter 7, Jesus says
ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened
to you.
for everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks
it will be opened.”
So we have the promise that the Lord hears our prayers and that the Lord answers them.
Now I suppose we have a problem here, and this comes up a lot, and that is the problem
of unanswered prayer.
Pastor, I’ve been praying for this for weeks, I’ve been praying for this for years, I’ve
been praying for this thing for decades, and it seems like the Lord isn’t answering my
prayers.
Now, we have in the Scriptures a lot of promises that the Lord answers our prayers, but we
also have examples of how the Lord doesn’t answer our prayers.
I mean, remember, for example, Paul, he tells us, I prayed three times that the Lord would
take this affliction, he calls it the thorn in the flesh, he says, I prayed three times
that the Lord would take that away from me.
And what did the Lord say to Paul?
He said, no.
He said, my grace is sufficient for you, my strength is made perfect in weakness.
This thorn belongs to you, I’m not going to take it away.
So we have examples of prayer answered, but we also have examples of prayer not answered.
Now here’s a couple of things to say about this.
First, number one, we want to realize that every prayer begins as an unanswered prayer.
Every prayer we ask of God is an unanswered prayer.
I mean, that’s why we ask it.
If we had it, we wouldn’t pray for it.
So every time we ask God for something, we’re asking for something that we didn’t have,
which means that every prayer starts unanswered.
and this is why the scripture says that prayer
involves persistence and waiting
and trusting in other words prayer involves
faith because we live
in the gap between the petition and the fulfillment
in fact Jesus tells us we had it in the gospel text and it’s
it’s really kinda funny I mean I think Jesus is making a joke in this
parable
where he says he says which of you will go to his neighbor
and knock on the neighbor’s door and say hey quick I need to borrow three loaves
of bread I wasn’t expecting company and some people came over and I need some
bread and the guy’s in bed already his kids are tucked in bed and he says no
go away and the guy keeps knocking and knocking and knocking and Jesus says he
eventually gets his bread not because his neighbor loves him but because of his
impertinence. That’s the biblical word that’s used, the impertinence. It means
his stubbornness. It means he doesn’t go away. It means he’s like a five-year-old
kid. Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Can I have some bread?
Can I have some bread now? Can I have some bread now? And he doesn’t stop
asking until he gets what he needs. I know you’re in there. I know you’ve got
bread. I’m just gonna stand here till you open the door and give it to me. Now we
He would say that that is, if we had neighbors like that, we would not be commending them
to each other as examples of godly living.
But Jesus is commending them, Jesus is commending this to you.
Jesus says when you want to pray, you know how you ought to pray?
You should just knock and keep knocking and keep knocking and not go away until the Lord
gives you what you’re asking for.
that the Lord will answer your prayer because of your impertinence.
Earlier this morning we were talking about this picture of Jacob wrestling with Jesus
on the fords of the river Jabbok, this crazy incident where they wrestle all through the night
and finally Jesus tries to run away from Jacob and he goes and he jumps
and he grabs onto his ankle and he holds onto it and Jesus says to him,
let go of my ankle, and he says I’m not going to let go of you until you bless me.
And then he says, what’s your name?
And he says, Jacob.
He says, not anymore, your name is Israel,
which means wrestles with God.
Your name is Israel because you have striven
with God and with men, and you have prevailed.
And he blesses them.
Now this is a picture of prayer,
that we grab a hold of the ankle of God,
that we grab a hold of his promises,
and we cling to him with this tenacity,
and we’re not letting go.
We’re knocking and knocking and knocking
because we live between the time
of the asking and receiving.
That’s the first thing, that every prayer begins as an unanswered prayer, but there’s
a second thing when it comes to the promise of prayer or the answer of prayer, and that
is this, that the promise of answered prayer is connected to the name of Jesus.
We have over and over in the Scriptures these promises that the Lord will give us whatever
we ask, but it’s always connected to the name of the Lord.
John 14, Jesus says,
Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do,
that the Father may be glorified in the Son.
If you ask anything in my name, I will do it.
John 15, you did not choose me, but I chose you
and appointed you, that you should go and bear fruit,
and that your fruit should abide,
so that whatever you ask the Father in my name,
He may give it to you.
John 16, in that day you will ask nothing of me.
Truly, truly, I say to you,
whatever you ask of the Father in my name,
He will give it to you.
until now you have asked nothing in my name ask and you may receive that your
joy may be full so we pray in the name of Jesus and the promise that our
prayers will be answered are connected to this name of Jesus now what does
this mean the name of Jesus is not a magic formula that we tag onto the end
of our prayers to somehow make them work like Lord give me a new convertible in
In Jesus’ name.
Oh, yeah.
I heard a joke.
A Russian pastor told me this joke this week in Sweden.
I think it’s funny, but it might be a Russian humor.
There was a man being chased through the woods by a bear.
And the man prayed, Lord, make this bear a Christian in Jesus’ name.
And to his relief, the bear stopped chasing him and folded his hands and said, come Lord
Jesus, be our guest.
Now look, to pray in Jesus’ name, it really has to do with the source of our prayers.
Where do our prayers and petitions come from?
Are our prayers, in other words, are our prayers an expression of our own wants and our own
desires, or are our prayers an expression of the wants and the desires of Jesus?
To pray in Jesus’ name, this is what it means.
To pray in Jesus’ name means to pray for the things that Jesus wants.
It’s to pray that He would keep the things that He has promised.
Jesus says in John 15 verse 7, if you abide in Me and My words abide in you, ask whatever
you wish, and it will be done for you.
It’s amazing to think that even Jesus had to learn how to pray, not My will but Thy will
be done.
So when we pray in the name of Jesus, we’re not praying for our will to be done, but for
the will of Jesus.
Now you might say to me, Pastor, that’s an easy out, that’s just a way of saying if you
don’t get an answer to your prayer it’s because you didn’t pray for the things that Jesus
wanted.
Well, maybe.
But, number one, we’re Christians and so we know that the will of the Lord is best and
that He in fact wants the best for us so that when we pray for the things that Jesus wants
we’re praying for the best things.
And two, we know that we’re sinners so that we often want the wrong thing.
If we’re praying for the wrong thing, we in fact don’t want the Lord to give it to
us.
And, point three on this, that one of the things, one of the ways about our Christian
life, one of the ways that we grow as Christians is that the Holy Spirit works to conform
our desires towards those things which are good and beautiful and true, so that part
of our Christian maturity is that we want the same things that God wants, and that’s
what it means to pray in Jesus’ name.
And that the Holy Spirit cultivates in us a desire for the things that the Lord wants
to do and accomplish.
It’s not like I want this and God wants this so I don’t get what I want, He only gets what
He wants.
No, when we pray in the name of Jesus it means that you and God in fact want the same stuff.
You want the same things.
I think this is beautifully captured in Psalm 37.4.
This is one of those great little beautiful riddle texts.
Psalm 37, verse 4 says,
Delight yourself in the Lord,
and He will give you the desires of your heart.
In other words, the Lord is saying,
If you desire Me,
you will have everything you desire,
because you will have Me.
Now our desires then are shaped by the Lord’s command
and by the Lord’s promise so that when we pray
in the name of Jesus, we’re praying
that He would accomplish the things
that He wants to accomplish,
that His will would be done.
Now how do we know what the Lord’s will is?
How do we know the things that we’re asking for
or the things that the Lord wants to give us?
The answer is He teaches us this in His word
and in His promises and in the Lord’s prayer.
This is maybe point four, so we’ll get to it
in a little bit, but in the Lord’s prayer,
the Lord Jesus is teaching us what He wants to give.
So we don’t have to say,
Hallowed be thy name, if it be your will.
Forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us,
if it be your will.
We don’t have to pray that,
because we know it’s God’s will.
So we pray with this great confidence in His promises.
And sometimes we just don’t know, right?
Sometimes we don’t know if the things that we want
are the things that the Lord wants.
Like the Lord would heal somebody
and give them an extended life.
or that the Lord would give them a blessed death.
We actually don’t know what the Lord’s will is
in that situation, and so we pray for the things
that we think are best and say,
but not our will, but your will be done.
Now this is all about then the promise of prayer.
Point three, these points get a little bit shorter.
Point three is this, we have, the Lord teaches us
in the Lord’s prayer, he teaches us about what we need.
Now, this may beâ¦
I think this is the most wonderful point, actually, of all, when we start to consider
the Lord’s Prayer.
It might seem a kind of a subtle point, but before the Lord’s Prayer is our words to
God, the Lord’s Prayer is God’s Word to us.
In other words, before we are praying the Lord’s Prayer with our lips, we are hearing Jesus
teach us the Lord’s Prayer with our ears, and He is telling us in the Lord’s Prayer
All of the things that we need
All of the things that we need for this life
Now this is quite an amazing thing
I remember when I was a young man and I was in biology class and one of the topics that would always come up
Would be this what do you need to stay alive?
Remember those places ahead of the class and you’d say and you’d go to class and they’d say well it’s to stay alive you have
To have water and you have to have food and you have to have shelter and you have to have access to Wi-Fi
or whatever
You know, it’s just kind of like a minimum list of what you need to stay alive, right?
That’s what they would teach you.
Now look at what Jesus is doing in the Lord’s Prayer.
Look at what He’s doing.
He’s expanding your definition of life.
He’s expanding your definition of what you need to be truly alive.
Jesus Himself said, I came that you might have life and life in the fullest.
So, this is what you need.
You don’t just need bread for today, although you do, but you need God’s name.
You need God’s kingdom.
You need God’s will.
You need the forgiveness of sins.
You need God’s leading and you need God’s deliverance.
And this becomes the definition of a full life.
And Jesus teaches us to pray for these things.
He teaches us to want these things and to desire these things.
In fact, in the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus is expanding our desires.
Did I tell you guys about the ear-stomach yet?
Did I preach about that?
I can’tâ¦
I’ve only been preaching for three weeks and already I forget.
If you’ve heard this before, I hope you’ll excuse me.
Because one of the things that the Lord has given us to teach us what we need in this
life is our stomach, so that when you’re hungry, your stomach preaches to you.
It has one sermon.
It sounds like, which means, I’m hungry, feed me.
And you also have a conscience that preaches to you.
You know the pain in the conscience that tells you that something’s wrong in there, that
you need something.
Now, both the conscience and the stomach are very imprecise preachers.
They don’t preach very full sermons.
They just feed me something.
It could be anything.
I mean, it could be asparagus or it could be a Twinkie, you know, just whatever.
And one of the problems is our conscience is the same sort of way.
We have this pain in our conscience and we know that we need something, but we don’t
know if we need the blood of Jesus or we need to, like, go on pilgrimage to Mecca.
In other words, the conscience doesn’t tell us that.
We have to learn what we need from the Lord’s Word.
But here’s the problem, that while we have a stomach and a conscience to teach us to
pray for daily bread and for forgiveness of trespasses, we don’t have a stomach connected
to our ear that tells us that we need God’s name and His kingdom and His word.
Can you imagine if you did, how great this would be, like if you had a little stomach
behind your ear and every time you came to church and you’re like, Pastor, you preached
too long, I’m so full, I feel stuffed, you know, like after Thanksgiving.
And then you’d go away from the Lord and if you didn’t hear the Lord’s word you’d be hungry
and you’d want to come back for more and you’d be filled up this way or if you like accidentally
listen to a false teacher, you’d be like, you’d get ear, stomach poisoning and you’d
be puking out, you know, the false doctrine, and I’m never going back to that place again.
This sort of thing.
But if you had a natural, now think about how easy it would be to pray, Thy name be
hallowed and Thy kingdom come, if you had a natural desire for those things.
But you don’t.
You don’t know, and I don’t know, naturally, by my own flesh.
We don’t know that we need God’s name.
We don’t know that we need His kingdom.
We don’t know that we need His will.
We don’t know these things.
So when Jesus comes to us and teaches us the Lord’s Prayer, He’s teaching us all these
things that we need, that we need most of all, that are most important to us.
Jesus is, when He teaches us to pray the Lord’s Prayer,
He’s cultivating in us a deep and profound sense
of what the things we need to be truly alive
and, God be praised, these are exactly the things
that Jesus wants to give to us.
His name and His kingdom and His will
and a bite of bread and the forgiveness of sins
and His leading and His deliverance.
Fantastic.
So we have the command, the promise, the need
And then the last thing is Jesus actually gives us the words to pray.
I want to consider the gift of the words of the Lord’s Prayer.
Now a lot of people will reject this as a gift and they’ll say that the Lord’s Prayer along
with any written down prayer is an illegitimate form of worship because for many people they
think that the Holy Spirit works only through spontaneity.
If you’re making it up, that’s the work of the Holy Spirit, but if it’s written down
then the Spirit is far from it.
But Jesus fights against that in the words of the text when He says,
when you pray, say,
our Father who art in heaven. He tells us
to use the words. Now we can, of course, expand on the
petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, and we could pray them all day.
We can take a petition and pray one a day for a whole week, and take a week to
pray the Lord’s Prayer, and we can add
add all of these things to it and rejoice in all the gifts that the Lord gives there
and we should do that, but we should also use the words.
We were just talking about this in Bible class, that oftentimes when people forget everything,
even their own name, they still remember the Lord’s prayer.
It’s so deep, it’s become a part of them, it’s become part of our heart and our mind
and we should do this, we should pray the Lord’s prayer.
there.
And if we notice that even though we’re repeating it over and over and it seems like
our heart is very far from our lips or our mind is very far from what we’re saying,
we should not change what we’re saying.
We should in fact change our heart and our mind and pay attention and rejoice because
we can take up these words with boldness.
Again we say, lead us not into temptation.
We don’t have to say, lead us not into temptation if it be your will because we know already
it is.
And deliver us from evil if it’s your will.
No, we know that that is the will of the Lord,
so we pray these petitions with an astonishing boldness
when we stand before the Lord.
So there are four points to at least kind of lay
the foundation of our meditation on the Lord’s prayer.
I’d like to end with a bit of encouragement.
Jesus says, when you pray, say, our Father.
Now this word, Father, is a stunning word.
St. Paul says that we are by nature the children of wrath.
Your natural father’s name is wrath, condemnation, and judgment.
Jesus when He’s talking to the Pharisees says, you are of your father the devil, and that
is also true for us.
Because our natural family, the family that we are born into as sinners, as rebels against
God, is the family of darkness and sin, far from God’s mercy.
If you want to call someone father, you could call the devil your father, sin your father,
death your father, condemnation your father, but Jesus teaches us to call God our Father.
Now, how is it, how is it that when we sinners go to pray, we don’t pray our
destroyer who art in heaven, or our judge who art in heaven, or our fear and
trembling and fright which art in heaven? How is it that that’s not how Jesus
teaches us to pray? The answer is that Jesus has died for you, and that in his
suffering and death, and in His resurrection and ascension, Jesus has made a place for
you in the eternal house of God, in the heart of God itself, and that He has caused you
to be born again through the water and the Word so that you, dear saints, you are adopted
into the divine family, mercy upon mercy, and nothing we could ever expect or ask for.
You are loved by God and you are then given by Jesus this highest honor
Who says when you talk to God you call him?
Dad the one who loves you the one who cares for you
The one who delights in you and the one who will have you with himself forever
John writes this he says behold
What manner of love the father has given unto us?
that we should be called the children of God.
And so we are, amen.
May these words encourage you
as Jesus continues to teach us how to pray, amen.
Please stand.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ
and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit
be with you always, amen.
