Model Prayer

All right, well, good morning, guys. We’ll go ahead and start to find our seats. A lot of meaningful interactions happening. Lifelong friendships are starting. Recipes being swapped. Very good.

Well, as we come to this part of our service, I just, I can’t reiterate enough my gratitude to everybody that served and helped and led in various capacities for VBS, really. It takes an entire church to pull something like that off. And it’s just one of those great moments where you see the reality of Ephesians chapter four, where Paul is saying that God gives to local churches this multitude of people and giftings and capacities for the sake of the entirety being built up into maturity, into the image of Christ. And I think VBS was a great display of how it takes an entire church to accomplish what God has for it. So thank you guys for that. Yeah, seriously.

If this is your first time on a Sunday morning with us, I just wanted to say welcome. We have been doing something for the last few months, just a moment of congregational prayer. For the last six weeks or so, we’ve been praying specifically for VBS, that God would use it as a tool for more folks to love Him and be loved by Him. So what we’re going to do right now is we’re going to pray again, and we’re going to pray one more time for VBS, asking that God would take the seeds of faith that were sown into the hearts of kids and students, and He would bring growth to that. And ultimately, it would take root and transform their lives. So grab a partner, grab a neighbor, buddy up, and just pray for just one more time for VBS, that God would bless what we just did the past week. And I’ll wrap this up here in a second. Y’all take it away.

I just want to say thank you again. Lord, thank You for the dozens of children that got to hear the gospel, the dozens of children that got to be fed and loved on. Lord, the families in our community that we got to partner with for a couple of days. Lord, thank You for all the chickens and the chicken coops that we got to buy. Lord, thank You for all the socks that got donated. Lord, thank You for seriously the countless hours that were given to prayer, to planning, execution, cleanup. Father, thank You. Lord, we trust that You’re the one that ultimately is at work in our community. And we just, we’re grateful that we get to have a little front row seat into Your work and the lives of people.

Father, for right now, for this morning, for the next few minutes, God, I pray that You would get a hold of me. Lord, You’d help me to communicate Your word, only Your word and nothing but it. And God, that where it speaks, I would speak. Where it doesn’t, Lord, I’d refrain. Father, ultimately, I pray this would transform all of us. And it’s in Your great name that I pray. Amen.

We’ve already seen a handful of pictures this morning. I just want to show you three more. Many of you guys know that Becca and I got to spend a couple years. We’ll hang out on this one for a moment. We got to spend a couple years in Southeast Asia where we served some local churches, trying to help them grow through discipleship and helping them learn how they can share the gospel for themselves. And Becca and I got to do a lot of that ourselves. We took some language and culture classes at a local university. And that’s where we met a couple of our friends there in the picture.

If you’re not aware of Asian culture, like I wasn’t until 2018, really, I did not know the country we were going to was the most populated Muslim nation in the world. A Muslim person, they worship Allah. They say that they are members of the religion of Islam. All of our friends right there, they are Muslim folks. You see a couple of the girls are covered. You see the guy off to the side because he’s trying to make sure he doesn’t cross some sort of taboos. We are standing at the regional mosque for our islands where we were. You could progress to the next one.

At that mosque every Friday, that’s their day of worship. They would open up those enormous umbrellas where hundreds and thousands of people would be on their knees saying their Friday prayers. That’s what the outside of this particular mosque looked like. As you could see, it’s Just a bunch of covered heads. All the women would be praying outside. You go to the final picture. All the men would be praying on the inside. Now, this is a typical Friday at that mosque where we were. You see all these people, hundreds of thousands of people across our country in particular, billions of people across the world. All these people engaging in this regular practice of prayer.

Now, see, what they believe about prayer is different than what we believe. They think if they say a certain set of Arabic words, long enough, hard enough, well enough, then they will be forgiven by what they call God. I wonder. You wouldn’t say it on the outside. You certainly don’t look like this. But I wonder how many of us in the room feel like them. We think if we just say the right words long enough, hard enough, well enough, day after day, week after week, just maybe God might forgive us as well.

I think if you’re like me, you would recognize, you would admit prayer can be hard, frustrating. You doubt whether God’s even listening. I believe prayer should be easy. It should be life-giving. It should feel natural for us. The good thing is Jesus understands this tension that we all experience. You can go ahead and open up your Bibles to Matthew chapter 6 with me. Jesus understands this tension that we all experience. And Jesus wants so much more for us. He wants more for you. He wants more for your family. He wants more for our community. Jesus wants more.

So one day, Jesus, out of His kindness, teaches us how we ought to pray. This is Matthew chapter 6, verses 9 through 13. The scripture will be on the screens. It is so much better in your hands if you’ve got your Bible either physically or on your phone. Matthew 6, 9 through 13. It says this. Therefore, you should pray like this. Our Father in heaven, Your name be honored as holy. Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread and forgive us of our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. Finally, do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

Jesus knows the difficulty that we all experience in our prayer lives. Anybody else ever sat down to do prayer and you’re just saying these words and you lose track of where you’re at and all of a sudden you’re thinking about what you’re having for dinner later that day? Anybody else like that? Is that just me? Or anybody else? You get to the end of the day and you’re trying to pray. You want to be spiritual for a moment and you’re praying about the day, but you’re also in bed. The next thing you know, you come to and you’re like, huh, I’ve been sleeping the last, I don’t know how long. Anybody else like that? Or anybody else? You get to this moment in your life and you’re like, Lord, I really need some help. And you’re trying to talk with Him about it. And you’re like, God, I don’t even know if You hear me. Are You even out there? I wonder if anybody in the room has ever felt like that.

You see, Jesus wants to give us a model because He understands how difficult it can be. So He says, you should pray like this. He’s not telling us that we can’t say anything other than this. He’s not saying that we need to chant this over and over again. He says, I’m going to give you a model. This is how you can pray. Pray like this. You see, God wants us to use the colors and the strokes of our own lives and our concerns, the events of our days, so that we can make a painting of prayer for Him. That would be different than what you might do than what I would do. God wants us to be real in prayer. That’s what He wants for us.

And I believe that to have the life that you want, a life of peace, a life where you’re self-controlled, a life where you feel like you’ve got a grip on where you’re going, to have that type of life, you need to pray this type of prayer. So He models prayer for us. If you take only one thing away from my sermon today, this is what I want you to take away. God designed our prayer to be about His priorities, His provisions, and His protections. I’m full Baptist now, I can’t get away from the alliteration, it’s just how it is. God has designed our prayer to be about His priorities, His provisions, and His protections. You see first, our prayer is centered on God’s priorities. Look at verses nine and 10, again with us. We are praying to our Father in heaven.

Now when Jesus said those things, that claim was way more meaningful than we would ever be able to give credit to. You see, when Jesus says, Father, He is using a name for the covenant God of Israel they would not have used. The people of Israel would have known God as a warrior. They would have known Him as a judge. They would have known Him as a law giver. They would have known Him as holy. They would have known Him in really abstract or very strong terms, very separate from them. God’s creator. God is powerful. God is up there. God should be magnified. Jesus calls Him dad.

What we know of the best father figures in our lives is that they come close to us. They put an arm around us. They say, I love you no matter what you do. Jesus addresses God in a new way, but He also addresses God in a communal way. He’s not just my father. He says, our father. Jesus has a communal way to address God. It’s not just that Jesus had a type of relationship with God that we can’t tap into. It’s that Jesus was inviting us to enjoy something with the Father that He Himself had. Jesus is the Son of God. And He came that we may be sons and daughters of God as well. So we pray our father. And that father is in heaven. A reverent way to address God.

Yes, Jesus was making and revealing how God can be close and intimate, but not at the expense of how great He is. You see, there are so many folks in the world that want to make God either one or the other. God is either only high and above and powerful, or He is only close and He accepts you no matter how you are. These folks want to make any rules of the Bible go away because why would God tell me what I can’t do? Or these folks want to make God only a rule giver. When Jesus is saying God is both, He’s a good dad. One that knows when to discipline and correct, but also one that knows when to just be close to us and hold us. That is God.

And that God, our father prioritizes that His name would be honored as holy. Jesus says, our father in heaven, your name be honored as holy. Again, we don’t understand the power of a name. For us, a name is purely about the family you come from, or maybe even the area you grew up in. For us here at Sauldam Baptist Church, last names are a big deal because we are able to trace the grapevine of connections of various names, right? You move into the area and you start realizing who in the church is related to who else in the church. And you just wonder, I asked Buck one time, hey, can I get like a family tree of who everybody’s related to? And he says, buddy, it’d be a grapevine. So for us, name is mostly about who you come from.

But in the Bible, especially the Old Testament, name is that it’s personhood. It’s the essence of who they are. Which means when God revealed Himself in different ways to the people of Israel, He would say, my name is Jehovah Rapha, Jehovah Nissi. I am the God who does X. I am the God who does Y. His name would mean His person. So when Jesus says, we pray that God’s name would be honored as holy, it’s that we are praying that God’s personhood would be honored as holy.

For all time, people have been struggling to honor God the way He deserves to be honored. Truthfully, the kids just learned about this this past week, that God created all things good. And He created mankind to exist in a perfect relationship with Himself. A relationship where we could talk with God, we could pray to God, and it’d always feel natural and easy. But the moment Adam and Eve disobeyed God, and they brought corruption into the world, that’s the moment that we started struggling to honor God the way He deserves to be honored. And ever since then, God has had to continually bring His people back to Himself, continually recalibrate them, continually help them to honor Him as holy. That’s the story of the Bible. It’s the The story of God persisting in His kindness like a good dad, continually correcting His people. We must be taught to honor God as holy. But we are also taught to prioritize that His kingdom would come. Jesus says this, verse 10, “Your kingdom come.” You see, God’s plan has always been to have a worldwide kingdom of people spreading His image, worshiping and serving Him, living for His glory alone. That’s God’s plan. I’m letting you in on a secret of the Bible. It’s not about us. It’s about God. The Bible is a story of God inviting people to rejoice in and glorify the very greatest being and thing in the world.

Sometimes I think our prayers feel like they hit the ceiling because they’re actually centered on building someone else’s kingdom. And God will not tolerate any rivals. He will not honor prayers given to growing someone else’s kingdom. God honors prayers given to growing His kingdom. In fact, the Bible ends this way in the book of Revelation chapter 7. It says this, “And all the angels stood around the throne.” The culmination of history, the end of all things will be this day where God’s kingdom has come here the way it was always meant to be. A universe filled with people that are so caught up in loving Him most that everything else would feel like a distant second. There’d be no competition in our love for Him.

To use our C words from VBS, there was a creation. There was then a corruption when sin came into the world. Christ entered the scene and died on the cross. And one day there will be a consummation where God’s plan and His kingdom will come in perfection. All of history is sprinting toward that great moment where Christ will return. It begins a new age where all people will either enter God’s new heavens and new earth with Him forever in joy or will enter hell to be under His wrath forever. This is a weird message if He came only just for a good pick-me-up. But this is the story of the Bible. Jesus is inviting us into it. The costs, my friend, are enormous. The sentences are eternal. And the terms are exact. We must be living for the kingdom of God.

And unfortunately, God’s kingdom has not fully come yet. His name is not fully honored as holy. So naturally, we plead and we beg to God, “God, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Obviously, God’s will is always done perfectly in heaven. The greatest thing for our community, for your home, and for the entire Lowcountry would be that God’s will would be done here perfectly. If God’s will is done here perfectly, that means no more divorce. That means no more addictions. That means no more division. That means no more drug dependencies. That means no more death or suffering. When God’s will is done perfectly here, this will be as heaven. That’s what we long for. That’s why we will always share the gospel.

That is why everything we do as a church will be about Jesus. That is why we have to do anything as a church. That’s why God has gathered us here since 1841, that we would be a beacon and a lighthouse for that message. When Becca and I were in seminary, we were members of a church. The pastor routinely would ask this question: What would happen if God said yes to every prayer I prayed last week? I’d be comfortable. My back wouldn’t be hurting right now. 31, my back hurts. I don’t understand this. My kids would always obey me. What else? I’d have that vehicle I want. Would God’s kingdom really be any different though? Would there be more people going to heaven because of the prayers I prayed last week? If I truly want God’s will done on earth as it is in heaven, I wonder how that would change my prayer. How would it change yours? I think on some level, we’re all able to say we want God’s will to be done here. We want God to make this world a better place. We want God to intervene and to change and save and help. Do our prayers on a day-by-day basis reflect that though? I’m being honest, mine don’t.

So as we center our prayer on God’s priorities, Jesus also taught that we can boldly ask for God’s provisions. This is verses 11 and 12. I’ll read it again: “Give us today our daily bread, and forgive us of our debts as we also have forgiven of our debtors.” Jesus starts with daily bread, something that we may not be totally accustomed to because most of us don’t have to worry every single day about what we’re going to eat the next day. But in Jesus’s day, in a very agriculturally driven society, that was a very legitimate prayer request. God, give me my bread today because I’m not sure where it’s coming from. For us here, that would include all physical needs. And it’s not because God doesn’t know or care about what you need, but because God wants us to trust Him and to ask Him, that we would treat God like a good dad who isn’t bothered by the requests of His kids. The God, picture this, the God who sits on the throne of the entire universe, the God who is holy and deserves all glory and honor, is also the one who knows your every need and loves to provide for you, to care for you, even to feed you. Jesus later in chapter six of Matthew’s gospel says, look at the birds. Consider the birds. Do you ever see them going to Walmart or Publix or Food Lion buying all their groceries? No, yet God feeds them every day. Or look at the flowers. Do you see them going to the store to buy clothes? Do you see them making jackets for themselves or picking out the right shoes? No. Yet they’re more beautiful than any king could ever be dressed. If God so cares about feeding birds and clothing flowers, how much more He cares about you and you and you and you and you and you. He cares. He cares. He knows your needs. So we don’t pray to Him to tell Him what we need. We pray to Him because it helps us trust Him because He knows what we need. And it’s not just the needs of food and clothes that we boldly ask for. It’s also the needs of spiritual provisions. He says, forgive us our debts. Verse 12, forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. Just like daily bread will be all our physical needs, debts there will be all of our spiritual needs. Starting with the very greatest spiritual need, which is the forgiveness of our sin. You see, I said it a few minutes ago that God, He made people to be His particular image bearers, that we would have a special type of relationship with Him that would be unique in all of creation. Nothing else in the entire created world, including angels all the way down to [inaudible], would have a relationship with God the way God designed our relationship with Him to be. And we existed in that type of relationship for at some length of time. We have no idea how long Adam and Eve got to walk in the garden with God, got to talk with God, got to eat food that they didn’t have to dress up with salt and pepper. Maybe they just did because it just tasted so sticking good. We have no idea how long they lived in that type of relationship. What we do know is that one day it all came crumbling down and corruption, sin was thrust into the world. And every person born since then, including you and me and mom and dad, we are born in a state of sin. The Bible says that our sins against God, anytime we disobey Him, anytime we go against His desire, anytime we step across the boundary of His will, we trespass against Him. Every time we do that, we are adding to this debt before God that we can never pay off. We can never pay the debt. There are a million plus people on the islands that Becca and I just lived in. There are two million people in the city we lived in that think they can pay off their debt before God if they pray long enough, hard enough, well enough. If they just get to go to Mecca in the Middle East, if they can just give enough money, if they can just do all the right things and they’ll be forgiven. And some of them are sitting in the room right now with me. There are some of us in the room that I genuinely believe, unfortunately. There are some people that believe if I do enough good stuff, God will forgive me. The Bible says a different story. The Bible says that all of the good things that you do before God, who is perfect, it’s really not that good at all. There’s only one who did well. There’s only one who did good and His name is Jesus Christ. And here’s the good news. You had good news, bad news. I can give You some good news again. Jesus Christ came and lived the perfect life in our place that we were supposed to live, that we were designed to live, that God wants us to live. But He actually did it. Jesus lived that perfect life being tempted like you and I are, being tried like you and I are, but never once. No, not even one time did He ever give in to the temptation. Not once did He ever sin. Jesus did that perfectly throughout His entire life so that He could give you His perfect standard. So that whenever God would see you, it’d be through the lens of Jesus Christ. It would be as if God is looking through Jesus when He sees you. And instead of seeing our junk, instead of seeing our sins, instead of seeing our disobedience, He would see Jesus’ perfection, Jesus’ righteousness, Jesus’ goodness, instead of our badness.

And Jesus not only died or lived the perfect life for us, but He also died as a sacrificial lamb, as a sacrifice for us. The kids got to learn that this past week, that Jesus on the cross did not just die as a martyr, did not just die as a political insurrectionist, did not just die as a completion of some weird promise thousands of years ago. Jesus died as a sacrifice for us so that anybody that would place their trust in Him for their salvation and the forgiveness of their sin would be forgiven by the Holy God. That’s the transaction point. That’s the cash register where God says, “Okay, I will pay for this on Jesus’ card, not yours, because you’re broke and you will never be able to pay off this debt.” But Jesus has infinite credit. Anybody that comes through here, going to keep swiping the Jesus card, not so that you can buy all the sin you want to buy, but so that you can be forgiven no matter what you have ever done.

Jesus then did not just stay dead in a tomb after dying on the cross. No. What did He do next? He rose. I think I’m the only person excited about this. What did Jesus do? He rose. He came back from death into life, putting the ultimate foot down on sin and death so that we would never have to fear those things anymore. We don’t have to give into those things anymore. That’s what Jesus has done for us so that we can pray, “God, forgive us of our debts.” And if you believe that story I just told, if you have received that forgiveness, how could you then not forgive others when they sin against you? The reflex of those who trust in the gospel when we are slighted or sinned against or just offended is not to get revenge, it’s not to get revenge, it’s not to not to do kind for kind. It’s not to make ourselves look good. The reflex of those who trust in Jesus is to forgive. It’s to forbear. It’s to get over it. That’s hard to do. Jesus knows that He’s got grace for us.

So finally, after centering our prayer on God’s priorities, boldly asking for His provisions, we cling to His protections. We cling to His protections. The first one is the protection from temptation. Now, temptation is something that we cannot fight that’s inside of us. This is what James chapter one says. James chapter one, verse 14. Each person is tempted when he’s drawn away and enticed by his own evil desire, which means temptation’s not something that happens to me from the outside. Temptation is something that bubbles up within me on the inside. Temptation only happens according to what I want anyways. I’m not tempted with the same things that you may be tempted with because I don’t want the same things you want. I don’t deal with the same temptations you may deal with and vice versa. But we are each tempted by what is inside of us that what we want. So we pray, God, protect us from those things.

The good thing is James also says this. No one undergoing a trial should say, I’m being tempted by God since God is not tempted by evil. And listen to this, God tempts no one. God may test you, but He will never tempt you. So then we pray for God’s protection against those temptations. Indeed, as Leon Morris says here, God tempts no one. But the worshiper of God, the Jesus follower, the Christian, us in this room, we know his own weakness. And in this prayer seeks to be kept far from anything that might bring him into sin. Here’s the truth. None of us graduate out of temptation. None of us reach a point of spirituality where we’re just never tempted anymore. None of us get to this maturity in Jesus where the things that are inside of us no longer have any sway over us at all. No one gets there. The entirety of your life as a Jesus follower is not spent trying to get to a point of perfection. It is spent in repentance. Repentance is this fancy church word that means to turn away from the things you want and turn toward the things you should have. You turn away from your temptations. You turn away from sin. You turn toward God and you are just trying by God’s grace to take a step this way. And then you’re gonna turn back this way and you’re gonna be tempted to go that way. And you said, by God and your grace and your help, help me turn back to you and take another step. That is Christianity. That is the life that God wants to bring us into.

So Jesus says, pray for the protection against temptation, but also verse 13, the second half there, pray for the protection from Satan. Don’t bring us into temptation, Jesus prays, but says, deliver us from the evil one. Now, if temptation is something you can’t fight inside of you, Satan obviously would be something you can’t fight outside of you. This word calling Satan the evil one implies that God and us have an adversary in this world. Someone who is not holy, who does not provide, who does not forgive, who is not as a father, who is not near to us in love, who does not instruct us in the way of life, who does not have a worthy kingdom and will for us. Someone who leads us into temptation, not away from it. Someone whose entire being is dedicated to your destruction and misery. That is Satan. And none of us in this room are as strong, clever, or biblically literate as Satan. Do not fight him on your own. No, God never designed it that way. God designs that you would depend on Himself as you resist Satan. And when you resist Satan and when you cling to God, that’s when Satan runs away from you. We pray that God would protect us.

So as I begin to wrap up, I’ve got a couple questions for you just based on Jesus’ words here. If you will, I just want to have a moment with you. Can you just close your eyes and bow your head? I want to ask this question out loud, and I want you to answer it in your heart. Where do you want to see God’s kingdom come and His will be done? You got a family member and their life is just going off the rails. Maybe there’s a road close to you, and you just see that. That road’s dominated by dark things. Or maybe it’s yourself, and you see I need to enter God’s kingdom. Where do you need to see God’s kingdom come and His will be done? The second question, have you accepted the provision of the gospel? Have you accepted God’s forgiveness? Have you embraced forgiveness in God through Jesus Christ, or are you just kind of playing this thing? Finally, where do you need God’s protection to cover you? Is there some temptation that’s just dominated you? Or do you even believe that the presence of Satan is in your life?

Father in heaven, Your name be honored as holy. God, would You be honored as holy? Would our lives and our words and our thoughts give You glory? God, Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Lord, may You make Sauldam and the low country and the world like heaven. Would You bring Your kingdom here? Give us today our daily bread and forgive us of our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. God, thank You for taking care of our every need and honestly, most of our wants. God, thank You for giving us way more than our daily bread. Lord, You pay us an annual bread. God, You give us retirement bread. Lord, You give us bread stocks and bread bonds. Lord, thank You for giving us those things, but help us to treasure our spiritual provision in the gospel so much more. Lord, for someone in the room that doesn’t know You, who has not been forgiven of their sin, who has not embraced that spiritual provision, Lord, would You help them right now to open their hearts to You? Finally, don’t bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil God, I speak for myself. Lord, I’m weak. Can’t resist temptation the way I want to. Lord, I continue to be surprised by how foolish and how weak I really am. Lord, You protect me from what I want. Would You protect us from the things that tempt us? God, would You cover us? Would You protect us? Would You deliver us from Satan and his influence? God, that this would be a place that calls on Your name collectively. There’d be no influence of evil in here, please. Lord, we love You. In Your name we pray, amen.