Who Do We Pray To?

Good morning. It's great to see you today. We are gonna talk about prayer today, but before we get there, I wanna double back for just a moment to something that Adrian talked about a few minutes ago, and that is Impact Week that is coming up September 14th through 19th. This is gonna be a really big deal, and this is not just some side thing. This is who we are as a church.

We want to serve our community in the name of Jesus. And so I want to challenge and encourage every single one of you to visit the Hub and sign up for one or more of those Impact Week projects. So there will be things going on daytime, nighttime, all ability levels, all mobility levels. There is something for everyone. So we would love for 100% of our church family to be a part of Impact Week.

And because this is a big deal, because we're taking what has been Serve Day for the last 8 years and we are expanding it into Impact Week. I feel like the only appropriate way to say it is to put on your best monster truck rally voice and say, "Impact Week!" Okay, so September 14th through 19th is Impact Week. That's right. So don't forget that. We want you to get that on your calendar, be a part of that day with us, or a part of that week with us.

We've spent the last few weeks talking about spiritual warfare. The Apostle Paul in Ephesians chapter 6 gave us some insight, first of all, into our enemy, the devil, whose agenda is to demoralize, to discourage, to deceive, to destroy. He talked to us about several pieces of spiritual armor that God gives us that represent truth and righteousness and faith and peace and salvation and the Word of God. We talked last week about our actual battle tactic, which is prayer, and so we got into some specific prayer strategies last week. We talked about praying in the Spirit, praying on all occasions, praying alertly, praying always, praying for all God's people, and praying for bold and fearless proclamation of the message of Jesus.

For followers of Jesus, what scripture emphasizes is that prayer should be a regular and natural and life-giving rhythm. But I know from personal experience, and I would bet that and you do too, along with a number of conversations with people, that prayer is sometimes a struggle for us. Sometimes we just feel like we're too busy to pray, or perhaps we're too distracted by our phones and our endless to-do lists to pray. Some of us try to pray, but we aren't even sure what to say. You know, sometimes we, we try to pray and then we're just overcome with conviction and we feel guilty about sin that is still a part of our lives, and that sort of shuts us down.

We may struggle to pray because we're not even certain whether God really hears or cares. Some of us have just been raised in the school of self-reliance, and so we just figure the best way to get something done is to do it yourself, so why bother asking God for anything? Some of us struggle to pray because frankly, we just don't know how to sit still. We've gotta be doing something all the time, and prayer just feels like the opposite of that. But Scripture has way too much to say about prayer for us to simply ignore it.

So for the next few weeks, we're gonna take a deep dive into something that Jesus taught us about prayer. We're gonna look at his relationship with prayer, because one of the things that jumps out at you immediately as you read through the Gospel accounts— Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John— is that Jesus prayed a lot. Jesus always had people who were looking for him, always had people who wanted something from him, so he just developed this regular routine, often getting up early in the morning, sometimes staying up late at night. He would retreat by himself to solitary places where he could pray. And I want us to not miss that reality, that in his humanity, Jesus himself depended on God.

The one who walked on water, the one who fed multitudes with a sack lunch, who healed the sick and disabled, who calmed a storm with just a word, who repeatedly sent demons packing, who even raised the dead. He saw prayer as vitally important. And it seems to me that if Jesus, the Son of God, needed to pray, you suppose maybe we would benefit from that too? If the Son of God needed to pray, then so do we. And we ought to listen carefully to anything that Jesus said about prayer.

Now Jesus delivered one of his most famous teachings about prayer in the Gospel of Matthew. We find it in chapters 5, 6, and 7. We often call this the Sermon on the Mount because this lengthy passage of teaching was delivered on the side of a hill, on the side of a mountain near the Sea of Galilee. And in this sermon, Jesus taught all about life in his kingdom, but as he did that, he didn't just regurgitate oral traditions like other rabbis tended to. Jesus spoke with the power and the authority of God, and that was not lost on his listeners, and they were amazed by it.

Now, the other religious teachers of that day tended to be short on divine power, but they loved to offer showy, wordy prayers in very public places. Now these leaders felt threatened by Jesus' growing influence, and they wanted to keep a close eye on him. So they often joined in the crowds that gathered to listen to Jesus. They were always looking for him to say something that they could latch on to, always looking for something that they could twist, or just trying to catch him in some sort of a misstep. And Jesus knew that about them, so he often called out their hypocrisy.

Case in point, Matthew chapter 6, verse 5. Jesus said, 'And when you pray,' notice Jesus didn't say, 'And if you pray.' He said, 'When you pray.' Jesus assumed at the outset that prayer would be a part of our lives. 'When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites,' the mask wearers, the two-faced people, 'for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.' Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, again, not if you pray, when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father who is unseen. Then your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

He said it again, and when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, 'For they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.' So Jesus prefaced his most famous teaching about prayer by emphasizing 3 things. Number 1, prayer is not about impressing people. Jesus said to those who enjoyed praying in public because they liked the spotlight and they wanted people's attention, He said whatever attention they got would be their only reward for that kind of prayer. God isn't looking for fancy words.

God is looking for open hearts. Our eloquence is not what gets God's attention. So a lack of confidence in our speaking ability doesn't need to keep us from praying. That's not what God is looking for anyway. Jesus emphasized that prayer is between God and us.

He encouraged us rather than praying in public to pray in private. Not that praying in public is wrong, but he said when you pray in private, you won't tend to be distracted. You certainly won't be tempted to perform for anyone. Jesus urged us to pray from the heart in our own words. And number 3, Jesus stressed that prayer is about connecting with God, not informing him.

Jesus said, did you catch that? Our Heavenly Father knows what we need. He knows what we need before we even ask. So if we say, "Lord," he doesn't say, "Wait, who is this?" Not gonna happen. If you say, "Lord, I'm really frustrated with my job," he's not gonna say, "Where do you work?" If you say, "Lord, please heal my marriage," he's not gonna say, "Now, what was your wife's name again?" He knows what we need before we even ask.

And after giving these examples of how not to pray, Jesus said, "This then," is how you should pray. And what he said next, you probably heard before.

If you were here right as the service got started today, we spoke these words out loud together. It's often called the Lord's Prayer. If you grew up in the Catholic or the Anglican or the Lutheran or an Orthodox church tradition, you may have learned to call this prayer by its first two words. Many people just call it the Our Father, right? When I was in 2nd, 3rd, 4th grade, my family lived for a couple of years in a small town in rural Oklahoma, and every day in our public school there, we started the day by reciting 2 things in our classrooms.

The first was the Pledge of Allegiance, and I know that's been a staple in a lot of public school classrooms for a lot of years. But what was more unusual in my experience was that after the Pledge of Allegiance, we recited the Lord's Prayer. In our public school classrooms every day. So as an 8-year-old, I memorized those words. I memorized them in more of a King James-y kind of dialect, but every day we said, "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors." And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. Now I'll bet that many of you know those words by heart as well, but because it's so easy with things that are familiar to us, words that we know really, really well, it's easy for us to just sort of drift into autopilot. I think it's often helpful to hear those words in a fresh way. So what I want us to do is we're gonna put the words to the Lord's Prayer in the Message paraphrase on screen.

I'm gonna ask you to pray these words, or read these words out loud with me. It goes like this: Our Father in Heaven, reveal who you are. Set the world right. Do what's best. As above, so below.

Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others keep us safe from ourselves and the devil. You're in charge. You can do anything you want. You're ablaze in beauty.

Yes, yes, yes. That last part feels like it ought to be read in an Impact Week kind of voice, right? Yes, yes, yes.

But there's more than one way to say this, right? There's more than one way to convey what Jesus taught about prayer. Remember, Jesus introduced this prayer by saying, "This then is how," how you should pray. Jesus didn't teach us what to pray. He taught us how to pray.

He didn't teach us a script to memorize and then just recite verbatim. Instead, he spoke to the attitude and the focus of our hearts as we pray. This morning, I want us to zoom in in the time that we have remaining on the the first verse of the Lord's Prayer, Matthew 6, verse 9. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Couple of weeks ago, I ordered a USB hub for my computer direct from the manufacturer, right? I found they had a better price than Amazon did, so I ordered it direct. And I got an email that my order had been received and it was being processed, and then a third email let me know that it was out for delivery. But then a third-party shipping company attempted delivery on a Wednesday evening when our church office was closed, so I got an email notifying me that delivery had failed and that they would try again the following Saturday, also outside of business hours. And this shipper provided no customer service number, so I replied to the email that Saturday wouldn't work, and because their website suggested it, I, I asked if they could perhaps deliver to my home instead.

No reply. So I then explained my dilemma through the chat window that was available on their website, and I, I was told that my request couldn't be processed and that I should contact their customer support line. You know, the one that doesn't have a phone number. So a few days later, I finally gave up. I ordered the exact same product from Amazon.

They had it to me within hours, and my original order is still floating around out there somewhere. So 3 days ago I received this message: "Your order has a delivery exception. Hi Matthew Gebler, your order is undergoing unusual shipping condition. This may be due to package destroyed. Please contact carrier at the soonest possible to resolve the issue." I don't know whether I'm ever gonna see that USB hub or not.

At this point in time I don't really care. I got what I needed, but I got nowhere with that company because I had no direct connection.

And I can't help but wonder if sometimes we don't think about prayer in much the same way, like we are trying to reach someone who doesn't really want to be bothered and who doesn't really want to help us. But the Lord's Prayer teaches us exactly the opposite. That first phrase, Our Father in heaven, means we pray relationally. Our Father in heaven means we pray relationally. I'm curious, how many of us can remember a time before smartphones and caller ID?

Man, there are a lot of old people in here.

In those days, if you remember those days, you know, answering the phone was sort of a gamble, wasn't it? You hear the phone ring, you pick it up, you have no idea what you're gonna get. Sometimes I would pick it up and I would hear a voice on the other end say, "Hello, Mr. Gibler." or "Good afternoon, Mr. Geibler," and I knew when that happened that I was talking to someone that didn't know me at all, usually a telemarketer. But if I picked up the same phone and I heard a voice on the other end say, "Daddy," I knew exactly who it was, and I wanted to listen. What Jesus emphasizes at the very beginning of the Lord's Prayer is that we can know God listens to us because He's our Father.

He loves us. He wants to talk to us. He wants to hear from us. Now, the Lord's Prayer that we're focusing on, Matthew chapter 6, but this is not the only place where scripture records this prayer. The Gospel of Luke also records the Lord's Prayer, and in Luke's account, Jesus went on from there to say this.

Luke 11, verse 5, Jesus says, suppose you have a friend and you go to him at midnight and say, 'Friend, lend me 3 loaves of bread. A friend of mine on a journey has come to me and I have no food to offer him.' And suppose the one inside answers, 'Don't bother me. The door is already locked and my children and I are in bed. I can't get up and give you anything.' I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless, 'audacity,' he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.' Now I'm thankful that my neighbors don't typically knock on our door at 1 AM to ask for an egg or a cup of sugar. I hope you don't have that experience either.

But sometimes, the point Jesus is making is sometimes we do things we normally wouldn't just to get somebody off our back. Parents, have any of us ever been hounded by our kids into doing something we originally had not planned to do. Ever been there? That kind of goes with the territory. We experience this on the daily with our dogs.

We have two golden retrievers. This is Sunny. Sunny just wants to be petted all the time. So if you're sitting there, she's gonna come over and shove her nose under your hand just to remind you, pet me. And if you stop, you know, she'll paw at you.

Luna is a, just a fiend for chasing balls. So she will bring her ball over to you, toss it into your lap, she's a really good shot, and if you sit with the ball long enough and you don't throw it for her, she's gonna whine to remind you to do that. They've trained us really well. See, Jesus went on to say in Luke 11, "Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find.

Knock and the door will be opened to you, for everyone who asks receives." The one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. Now, this is not an ironclad guarantee that anything and everything we ask for God is gonna be given to us exactly in that moment. The point Jesus is making is that as a rule, we have to ask before we receive. We have to look for something if we wanna find it. We have to knock if we want the door to be opened.

So Jesus urged us to pray persistently. And if that were all he said, we might conclude that prayer ultimately boils down to our just relentlessly pestering God until we wear him down and he finally gives us what we want. But that would make prayer all about us, which it's not. So Jesus went on to say this in Luke chapter 11: Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?

'If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?' So Jesus asked all of the dads sitting on this mountainside beside the Sea of Galilee this question: if your son asks you for something to eat, will you give him something harmful instead? I know you just asked me for some popcorn, but how about a nice cobra instead? That'd be ridiculous. Jesus' point was that if even imperfect, sinful human fathers genuinely want to do good for their kids, how much more does our perfectly loving and compassionate Heavenly Father wanna bless us? And because God loves us, because God wants the very best for us, rather than just always immediately giving us whatever we ask for, John 16:14.

Jesus said God wants to give us his Holy Spirit. His Holy Spirit helps us to discern and to know and desire what's best. That's God's ultimate desire for us. So Jesus taught us to pray, Our Father in heaven, because God knows us and he loves us and he wants to be in relationship with us. God doesn't demand that we impress him.

Before he's willing to care about us. He invites us to come because he created us to live in fellowship with him. And as we get to know God better, and as we grow in our relationship with our Heavenly Father, and as we come to understand his nature more and more, we discover a second very important reality about prayer, and it's this one. That second phrase, "Hallowed be your name," means we pray worshipfully. Hallowed be your name means we pray worshipfully.

We're created in God's image.

There is much about God that translates into the way that we are wired, but he is on an altogether different level than we are. God is infinitely bigger and smarter and stronger and kinder and more righteous and more powerful than we are. He is set apart. He is altogether different. The word "hallowed" literally means "holy," which means "set apart." God is in a different category than we are.

God's very name is holy. It's worthy of our honor. Now, the word that is most often translated "worship" in the New Testament is a word that literally means "to kiss toward." It's the picture of bowing down in reverence and kissing the ground in the direction of someone that you want to honor, and that is clearly an act of worship. But that isn't the only way, that isn't necessarily the literal way that we worship. Have you ever encountered something so big, something so beautiful, something so powerful that it just stopped you in your tracks?

I've had that experience numerous times. I think back a few months ago, Allison and I were in the Dominican Republic, and I looked out the balcony of our hotel room and saw this sunrise over the Caribbean. I just had to stop and soak that in. I had a similar experience a few weeks later. We were in Nevada and I got to look over the edge of Hoover Dam.

And by the way, that's a really good place to be stopped in your tracks because that next step would be a doozy, right?

I've had that experience in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina driving through the fall foliage. I had that experience a few years ago sitting on a boat in the middle of the Sea of Galilee. I've had that experience several times visiting Vienna, Austria, looking up at this 900-year-old structure of St. Stephen's Cathedral. Had that experience a few months ago. Allison and I spent some time hiking in the Smoky Mountains and just stopped and listened to the river rushing over these rocks.

I had that experience being face-to-face with a tiger. At the Exotic Feline Rescue Center. If you haven't been there, you gotta check it out. You know what they say about the eye of the tiger, right? It's the thrill of the fight.

You don't wanna miss that. Really, really powerful experience there. Just staring out at the blue water of the Caribbean. We were in Cozumel a few years ago. Allison and I climbed a lighthouse and just had this spectacular view.

A few years ago, my son Brendan and I visited Washington, D.C., and we had a chance to just stand and look up at the U.S. Capitol at night. Our family was in the Rocky Mountains several years ago on a vacation, and, and there were just lots of scenes like this that we just had to stop and soak in. Now, you know as well as I do that photos never fully capture those experiences, right? You see something that's just breathtaking and the picture never does it justice. But I take a lot of pictures because when I see something remarkable like that, I want to remember it and I want to be able to tell people about it.

I think you know what I'm talking about. If you've ever seen a great movie, or you've read a fascinating book, or you've attended an amazing concert, or you've eaten at a spectacular restaurant, or you've witnessed a dramatic game-winning play, you want to tell somebody, right? You want to capture that moment. You want to talk to people about it. If you've ever been so in love that you just can't stop thinking about that person, you know what I'm talking about.

See, we have no difficulty gushing words of praise over whatever amazes and captivates us. And I am convinced that experiences like these point us to how big God is. I mean, God has the power and the imagination and the creativity to bring together these spectacular natural wonders that we have to call national parks, that we have to make postcards of because they just demand to be admired. But God doesn't stop there. He also blesses people with the intelligence and the talent and the ingenuity to follow his artistic lead in creating beauty of our own.

And he is the source of love. So stopping to notice and appreciate these things reminds us of how vast and how powerful and how good God is, and it actually urges us to pray to him, which, if you think about it, is actually an act of worship. I mean, whether we are speaking words of praise and thanks to God, or we are asking him for help, we are acknowledging with our prayers that we need him, that he is stronger than we are, that we depend on him. The Old Testament priests in ancient Israel, as the people came to worship and offer their sacrifices, they would burn incense at the tabernacle or at the temple. Our prayers to God are a form of worship, and it's interesting to me that the book of Revelation compares our prayers to incense being offered before God.

When we pray, it's an act of worship. Now, we're only one verse into the Lord's Prayer, and we already have a lot to think about. We're going to hit pause right here at this point. Let me summarize what we've said so far. I think this opening verse of the Lord's Prayer has simply taught us that we pray to an amazing God who knows us, loves us, and invites us near.

I mean, we pray to an amazing God, don't we? He loves us. He knows us. He invites us to draw near him. And on that basis, we're gonna do something this morning that we did last Sunday as well.

I wanna invite you in just a moment into an intentional time of prayer together. We live in a busy and hectic world, so if we talk about prayer, in here without making any attempt to practice it, I'm convinced many of us will quickly walk out those doors and we will bury God's invitation to pray under a fresh layer of noise and distraction. So before we scatter from this place, let's take a few moments to just quiet ourselves and practice what Jesus taught. Let me just give you a few thoughts as to how we might use these next few moments together. For starters, I'm going to invite our Next Steps team down here to the front.

They're This is a reality of every service, every Sunday. Throughout these next few moments, we're gonna have some friends who are available down here. If you'd like someone to pray for you, pray with you, anyone down front here would be glad to do that with you. You might consider during these next few moments what Jesus taught us in the Lord's Prayer, that God is our Father, not just because he made us, but because through Jesus' sacrifice at the cross in our place, He adopted us into his family. He made us his children.

So you might use this time just to, to thank God for loving and pursuing you in that way. And if you haven't yet surrendered your life to Jesus as Lord and Savior, could I urge you to use this time perhaps just to talk to God about why that is, about whatever it is that's holding you back? Let me remind us too that the hallowed be your name part emphasizes that God is holy. God is beautiful and good and pure and righteous on a level that you and I can't even begin to wrap our heads around. But we worship him as we acknowledge to him what we do see and what we do understand.

So you might use this time just to sit in quiet awe of God. Think back through some of the, the most powerful demonstrations of the goodness of God that you've experienced in your life as of And then just speak to him whatever he brings to your mind in that moment. You're free in these next few moments. If you want to get up out of your seat, if you want to move, if you want to come down to the front, if you want to go to your knees, if you want to go pray for someone else here in this room, we invite you to do any of that. But let's use these next few moments to listen and reflect and pray however God leads us.

And then a few moments from now, I will call us back together and we'll have a few parting instructions and a prayer over all of us before we go. Let's pray.

God's invitation to pray never expires. So I don't want to interrupt your prayers. If I could just, uh, punctuate them really briefly just by reminding you that God invites us to know him, and we exist as a church to help all of us to know him and draw near to him. So we're going to remain down front after the service if you'd like to talk to someone, pray with someone. We'll still be here and we We would love to do that.

We would also invite you, uh, this is especially true for our online friends, just text the word next to 317-707-9997. Just reach out to us. Let us know what God is stirring in your heart. We would love to hear from you and we'll reach right back out and we'll begin that dialogue. And then we also wanna make sure that you're aware that we offer a series of classes called Next Steps.

Uh, they happen at during the 11 o'clock service every Sunday. We're gonna start a new cycle. 2 weeks from today on September 6th. The Next Steps Discover class is a great way to just learn some, some quick things about Greenwood Christian Church and how you can find your place here. With those things in mind, I wanted to call our attention to Psalm 8.

Let me just pray these words over us. I'll invite you, if you would, to close your eyes and just listen to these words that the Holy Spirit spoke through David. Lord, our Lord, How majestic is your name in all the earth! You have set your glory in the heavens. Through the praise of children and infants, you have established a stronghold against your enemies, to silence the foe and the avenger.

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them? You have made them a little lower than the angels and crowned them with glory and honor. You made them rulers over the works of your hands. You put everything under their feet, all flocks and herds and the animals of the wild, the birds in the sky and the fish in the sea, all that swim the paths. Of the seas.

Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. Friends, God loves us. He knows us, and he invites us near. So let's seek him and let's share him this week. Thank you for being with us.

God bless you.