Matthew 6:9 | The Epicenter of Prayer

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Please take your Bible and open it to the Gospel of Matthew.

If you are joining us for the first time or visiting, we've been working our way through Matthew's Gospel bit by bit, and we're in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount currently.

Matthew chapter 6.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

The last time we were together, we looked at verses 5 through 8.

And there we were reminded of some guidelines for prayer by the Lord Jesus.

He reminded us that when we come to Him in prayer, that we must do so with genuineness, that we have to be careful to not manipulate God, seek to twist his arm.

And then he reminded us to remember our Father who knows what we need even before we ask him.

Those were some good and helpful reminders.

And now as we begin verse 9 this morning, we approach not simply the reminders, but the instruction on how to pray to our God.

So if you have a Bible, I really encourage you to follow along as we read.

We'll read this whole section, which is verse 9 through verse 15.

And if you don't have a Bible, you can just follow along on the screen here in the sanctuary.

Again, that's Matthew chapter 6, beginning in verse 9.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

Jesus says to us, Pray then like this.

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 bread for today, our daily bread.

Forgive us our debts as we have forgiven our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Jesus makes a comment here for if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.

Amen.

Our focus for this morning is primarily verse nine.

Pray then like this.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

It's been said that crisis makes people good prayers.

Crisis makes people good prayers.

I'm not so sure I agree with that.

I know in my own life, I think crisis drives us to pray more.

It moves us to pray more and more and more, but it doesn't necessarily help us pray better.

It doesn't necessarily help us improve our praying.

I tend to agree with R.

C.

Sproul, who said that no one is born a good prayer.

He said there is nothing more repugnant to fallen man, to natural man, than to spend time alone with God.

That can only come when we are redeemed, restored to fellowship with God, and reconciled to Him through Christ.

End quote.

In other words, if I may summarize RC.

Only children can pray to their father.

Praying often is good.

Our culture likes to say practice makes perfect, right?

I'm still not sure about that because I've practiced a lot of things a lot of times and do nothing perfectly.

So but we have that saying.

But simply performing the act of prayer is not the only way to learn to pray.

In fact, it may not even be the primary way to learn.

You see, Jesus' disciples asked him to teach them to pray.

And they asked him in the midst of a cultural expectation that every Jewish man would pray at least three times a day to God.

And these disciples had been praying like that for years, perhaps even for decades.

Praying three times a day, over and over again, day after day after day, and yet they still knew that something was missing.

Something was not quite right with their prayers.

So, first, we heard the Lord give us some guidelines in verses 5 through 8.

Now he begins to teach us to pray.

And we have this section, this Lord's Prayer, in both Matthew and Luke.

Luke has a shortened version of it, but other than that, it's pretty much the same.

And if I may make a very controversial statement, you'll let me, right?

It's not exactly proper to call this the Lord's Prayer.

It's not exactly proper to call this the Lord's Prayer.

You see, Jesus did not pray this prayer.

It's an example that he gave to his disciples in how to pray.

So this would perhaps more appropriately be called the disciples' prayer.

Now there is a Lord's Prayer.

There is a Lord's Prayer, but that's in the Gospel of John, where Jesus Himself prays.

This is where the disciples, those who have come to trust in Jesus and to follow him, is where they come to learn to pray.

And they learn not to repeat a prayer as if it's some kind of magical set of words, but they come to learn how to pray.

So this is a guide to the content of our prayers.

Now, as we consider what we are to learn here, we need to understand first and foremost that this is not a prayer that Jesus gave for us to memorize and to repeat for the sake of repetition.

Last time we noted in Matthew chapter 6, verse 7, that the repetition of words is meaningless.

Matthew 6:7

God does not want meaningless prayers.

Now I know that many religious traditions include the repetition of this text in their worship.

In fact, I've been told that our worship services here are not complete unless we have the Lord's Prayer said in our worship services.

That's normal in many traditions of the Christian faith.

And it's not necessarily wrong to pray this prayer if we are actually praying with a heart that is genuine and intent on communicating to God through them.

But to simply repeat what Jesus says here in a meaningless way is not what Jesus is teaching.

If that's what we think, we've missed the point.

Jesus was not giving the disciples a scripted prayer to repeat again and again and again to God at appointed times of prayer.

That's what the disciples were trying to avoid.

That's what they were trying to move away from.

That was their standard, that was their modus operandi.

That's what every Jewish person did.

No, this is a prayer that disciples are called to analyze.

We need to think about it, to consider what it's really saying, what the intention is behind the words and the phrases that Jesus has chosen.

And as we do that, we will learn how to pray rather than what to pray.

Significant difference there.

And as we hear from Jesus how to pray, we will see three essentials of prayer that comprise the epicenter of prayer.

Jesus says, pray then like this.

Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

That statement is the foundation of all proper prayer.

It's the epicenter from which everything else radiates.

It's the hub from which all of the spokes come.

It's the rock upon which true prayer builds.

And it's based on the first and third commandments given to the nation of Israel.

Moses came down from the mountainside with tablets of stone, and on those tablets of stone were written, You shall have no other gods before me, and you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.

It's been pointed out by many that this prayer mirrors the entire set of those ten commands, or literally ten words, given to the nation of Israel.

Those commandments express obedience related directly to God.

That's how they start.

And then they shift to obedience to God that is expressed to others and to ourselves.

In the same way, Jesus in this prayer teaches us to pray with content directed first toward Him and then to others and ourselves.

Now, God gave those ten commandments to Israel as part of his covenant relationship with them.

They were the sign, if you will, of the covenant.

God said, These are my commands, do these.

These are the sign that you obey me, that you are part of my people, my children, because they were his chosen people.

They were redeemed out of Egypt, led by God, out of Egypt to their inheritance as his people.

Those commands, then, were the standards of the covenant.

They were the guide to the relationship between Israel and God.

Now, in this instruction in prayer, we need to understand that, like Israel, this is a statement of our covenant relationship with God.

In a few moments, we're going to celebrate communion together, participate in the Lord's table.

What did Jesus say on that night when he had that supper with his disciples?

At the end of supper, Jesus took bread and he broke it and he gave it to them, and he took a cup and he gave it to them.

And about the cup, he said, Take and drink from this, all of you.

Why?

Because this is the new covenant in my blood.

This is a symbol, a declaration of the new relationship that you have with me, with God, through my blood.

We need to understand that the first essential of prayer is a relationship.

Jesus teaches us to begin with a relationship to God, our Father.

You must have God as your Father.

You see, as ancient Israel sought to obey those original Ten Commands, they came to fear, literally, to be afraid of taking the name of God in vain.

They did not want to take the name of God in vain.

In fact, there are some accounts of scribes who would copy the Old Testament.

In those days, they did it by hand.

They didn't have Xerox back then.

And whenever they would copy the Word of God by hand and they came across the personal name of God and they wrote that name, Yahweh, there are accounts that say that they threw their pen away.

Apparently, the thought was that the pen was unworthy to write anything else once it had written the name of God.

Now, eventually, they arrived at the point, and this is still true today, where they even refused to verbalize the name of God out of fear of saying it improperly.

Now that's an extreme.

And it's not what God intended with the third commandment.

Now we could probably use a little more of that fear today, but Israel had taken it to an extreme.

Unfortunately, that fear of God led to an impersonal view of God.

He was just some far-off, distant God who sort of ruled over everything.

Referring to God, the term Father occurs only 15 times in the Old Testament.

Think of that.

About two-thirds of your Bible is Old Testament.

And of all of that, referring to God, the term Father is only found 15 times.

And of those 15 times, none of them are found in prayer to God.

And if we look beyond that to ancient Jewish literature outside of the Bible, nowhere is God referred to as my father or our father.

That was because he came to be feared as the father of the whole nation and as the father of the world in terms of the as creator.

But he was not thought of as the father of individuals.

In fact, the first time that we see this is probably Luke 2.

When the Lord Jesus was 12 years old, some of you might remember this account.

His family had gone to the city of Jerusalem for Passover.

They celebrated the Passover, then they started walking back to their homeland and they got to their first night's camp and they set up camp, and his mom and dad realized, um, our son isn't here.

So after checking around, they make their way back to Jerusalem and they start looking through all of the city, trying to find Jesus, and they search and they search and they search.

And finally they find him sitting in the temple, teaching the teachers.

And they're sort of exasperated by him.

Jesus looks at them and says, Listen, you should have known where to find me.

I must be in my father's house.

My father's house.

For Jesus to claim that God was his father was unheard of.

And it was tantamount to Jesus equating himself to God.

In fact, we read, read in John chapter 5 of Jesus healing an invalid.

John 5 · chapter mention

The Jews had a problem with that, not because Jesus healed him, but because he healed him on a Sabbath day.

That frustrated them, that was considered to be breaking the commands of God to them.

So Jesus responded with, My Father is working until now, and I am working.

Then there's a commentary by the writer of that gospel, and it says, This is why the Jews were seeking to kill him.

Because he was not only breaking the Sabbath, but he was calling God his own father.

We find then in Luke, in Luke's gospel, Jesus saying, Be merciful.

Even as your father is merciful.

That would have taken the Jewish crowd by surprise.

Murmuring would have ensued, and then after the murmuring, there would have been exasperation, and after the exasperation, they would have started picking up stones to throw at him.

This is a different side track that we won't go down now, but let me tell you in our current culture, pronouns matter.

My father.

Matthew records that Jesus said to pray to our Father.

See, Jesus was bucking the cultural system.

The culture said God is far off and impersonal.

God doesn't care about your daily life.

God isn't involved in your daily life.

The culture said God was to be feared absolutely.

And because he's feared absolutely, there's no relationship there, there's no love there, there's just commands to be obeyed.

The culture said, considering God as your father was not only taboo, but blasphemous.

Our culture today tends to say that God doesn't exist, so it doesn't matter what you believe.

Or believe whatever you want, because whatever you want fits you, it may not fit me.

But Jesus, the Lord of the commandments, said they're all wrong.

In order to come to God properly in prayer, that close familial relationship, that father-child relationship is not only proper, but indispensable.

If God is not your father, he is your enemy.

If God is not your father, then you have no channel through which to approach him.

If God is not your father, you have no basis upon which to speak with him.

Without Christ, we are all enemies of God.

But look what God did.

Just look for a moment at what God did.

Consider Romans chapter 5, beginning in verse 8.

Romans 5 · chapter mention

God shows his love for us that while we were sinners, enemies of God, Christ died for us.

Well, there was that gap between the holiness of God and our sin.

God himself bridged that gap by becoming the payment for our sin.

And so we are saved from his wrath.

That then displays for us the love of God.

That's what John tells us in 1 John chapter 3, verse 1.

1 John 3:1

Look! Look and see what kind of love the Father has given to us.

We can actually be called child of God.

And so we are.

We're still on the outside.

Because those who are not sons and daughters have no right to call him father.

First essential characteristic of prayer is a relationship with God, by which we call him our father.

Why?

Because we are his beloved children, whom he has adopted as his own sons and daughters through the blood of Christ.

And so prayer then becomes very natural.

It's speaking to my dad, to my father.

But we can't stay there.

Jesus also says that prayer requires knowledge.

We have to understand who our father is.

He said to pray like this Father, hallowed be your name.

Hallowed be your name.

What does he mean by your name?

My dad's name was Lynn.

Lynn Holm.

Who is Lynn Holm?

What does his name mean?

Well, it's everything that is about him.

He was a pastor for some 30 years.

Almost 40.

He was a carpenter.

He was a disciplinarian.

Why did I put that one in there?

He was a teacher.

That's what my dad's name means.

You see, in scripture, when we find God's name and we find it over and over and over again, it's biblical terminology for God Himself, who he is, what he's like.

God's name stands for who God is.

So who is God?

Scripture, a person's name represents his character.

For example, when Moses went up on top of Mount Sinai, Moses asked God, God, show me who you are.

Show me, I want to see you with my own eyes.

I want to know who you are.

I want to be able to experience your person and your name.

And God said, No, you can't do that because you'll die.

But I'll do this for you, I'll put you in the Hollow of a rock, and I'll cover you with my hand, and you can see me after I've passed by, and I will declare my name to you.

What did God declare to Moses?

It says, Then Yahweh passed before him and proclaimed, I am Yahweh.

Yahweh.

I'm a God who's merciful and gracious.

A God who's slow to anger.

I'm a God who is abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.

Keeps going.

I'm a God who keeps steadfast love to thousands.

I'm a God who forgives iniquity, forgives transgression of sin, but is still just.

Because I will by no means clear the guilty.

God has all of those characteristics.

That is God's name.

God is all of those things, and his characteristics are included in his name.

So praying, hallowed be your name, means to know the God to whom you're praying.

And maybe we should back up from that.

Because when we ask for God's name to be hallowed, we are knowing and recognizing, first of all, that he exists.

In writing to the Hebrews, the author of that book says that whoever draws near to God must believe that he exists.

That means if you're an agnostic or an atheist, you can't be praying to the one true God.

In fact, that's what God's personal name, Yahweh, means.

It means the self-existent one.

When God sent Moses to Egypt, Moses was a little uncertain.

He said, God, when I go back there and they ask me, who sent you?

What am I supposed to tell them?

And God said, Tell them Yah sent you.

Yahweh, the living one, the one who always lives.

It is impossible to pray to the Father if you do not believe that he exists.

So we must know that he exists.

We must understand his character, his being, who he is, what he is like.

You see, knowing God now has the relationship as the prerequisite.

It's not possible to truly know God without first knowing him as Father.

Proverbs illustrates this principle.

Proverbs 18, 10 says the name of Yahweh is a strong tower.

It is the righteous who runs into it and is safe.

Only the righteous one.

Only the one who has come to the Father as poor in spirit, mourning over his sin, seeking restoration to the Father, who now comes through the Son to the Father, who is righteous, who has the righteousness greater than that of the Pharisees, because it's the righteousness of Christ given to him.

It's that person who now knows that his father is a strong tower to which to run.

The name of God is what God has revealed about himself to his people.

It's what he's made known to us so that we can understand, know more about him.

That's become incredibly significant in our present world.

We could go on and on and on this morning about many of the beliefs about God that float around.

Some today, like most of us, believe that Jesus is God in the flesh.

He's the fulfillment of Emmanuel, God with us, right?

But there are some beliefs that say that Jesus was just an angel.

There are beliefs that Jesus was no more than a human being.

Oh, okay, he was a good prophet.

He had a connection with God, but he was just a human being.

Then there's the belief that Jesus is God's greatest created being, and that Lucifer, Satan, is his brother.

There are beliefs that say the way to God is through meditation.

There are beliefs that say that the way to God is through mediation.

That is, you need a priest to get to God.

There are beliefs that say the way to God is through doing good things, through being a good religious person, coming to church, doing your religious duty.

There are beliefs that the way to God is by following the teaching of another human being who, by the way, is most likely dead.

And then there's what we find in the pages of scripture.

That the only way to God is through Jesus, who is the Messiah.

God in human form, who opened the way to the Father by his death on the cross.

Now, each of those beliefs, startlingly, no matter how strange they might sound, each of those beliefs is convinced that when they pray, they're praying to God.

But if God has revealed himself, if he has revealed his character, if he has revealed his name to us and said, This is who I am, if we are praying with a belief that contradicts what God has said about himself, then we're praying to another name.

Not the true God.

When Jesus teaches us to pray, he instructs us to know God, to know who he is, to know what he is like, to know what he has done.

Because prayer requires a relationship that is deepened by knowledge of the Father.

But there's a third essential.

Prayer requires worship.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Heaven establishes who God is.

That's his throne.

That's where he lives, that's where he rules over everything.

He is the God of heaven and earth, whose abode is in heaven, and he rules over everything from heaven.

You remember Jonah, right?

The guy who thought he had a great idea to run away from God.

So he got on a ship, he sailed across the Mediterranean Sea, thinking, yeah, God won't remember me.

God can't find me if I'm out in the middle of the sea.

And then God, who's in heaven, hurls a storm at the boat.

Everybody's going crazy.

They're fighting for their lives, trying to control the ship.

They're throwing over everything that's on board.

Then after they've thrown everything on board, they start crying out to their gods.

And after they've been crying out to their gods and nothing changes, they discover Jonah's asleep in the bottom of the boat.

So they wake up Jonah and tell him, Cry out to your God.

And he says, Um, I have something to tell you.

My God is the God of heaven and earth.

He's the one who threw this storm at us.

Hallowed means holy or set apart.

So the Jewish people who considered God to be distant, to be far off and away, were partially right.

They got part of it right.

But they took it too far.

They couldn't see that God desired to have that covenant relationship with his children.

They missed that God's intention was to be a father to them.

And when Jesus came, that was opened up to everyone who believed in him.

But we tend to have the opposite problem of the Jewish people.

I think we tend to get a little too cozy with God so that we neglect to honor him with the respect and dignity that is due him.

I have a friend on social media who it feels like at least once a week puts something out on the internet referring to God as the big guy.

Or the man upstairs.

God is our father.

And we are his children.

And so he is our Abba.

But he is still to be respected as holy and awesome.

Let me show you from a few passages of scripture.

Isaiah, Psalm 111, verse 9.

Psalms 111:9

God sent redemption to his people.

He has commanded his covenant forever.

There's that relationship, right?

There's that covenant identity, that covenant connection that God had with his people.

What is the result of that?

Holy and awesome is his name.

Those two go together.

And the key text and all of Scripture on the holiness of God, Isaiah chapter 6, verse 3.

Isaiah 6:3

Holy, holy, holy is Yahweh of hosts.

The whole earth is full of his glory.

And what happens next?

Isaiah falls flat on his face, afraid that God's going to kill him.

He's in the throne room of heaven.

There's a connection, there's a relationship, and God declares his holiness.

And Isaiah says, I'm going to die.

You see, Jesus teaches us to remember that our Father is holy.

And when that becomes a part of our prayer life, we begin asking God that He would act in such a way in His world that everyone would begin to see and recognize and honor my Father's holiness.

We're asking God to bring about a situation in us, in our communities, in our countries, and in our world where people would worship him instead of dishonoring him, that they would believe in him instead of ignoring him.

Praying in that kind of way is an act of worship.

It's lifting him up and saying, look at my God.

When we ask God to display his holiness and his glory and his greatness, we praise him for who he is.

When we ask him to show how unique and how awesome he is, we are worshiping the holy God whom Isaiah saw as high and lifted up.

When we pray for God's name to be set apart from all other names, we're praying that people everywhere, including ourselves, would see the distance that has been created between ourselves and our sin and the holy God.

And when we pray like that, we're worshiping the one who removed that distance himself so that the holy, awesome God would be our Father.

When we are prepared to pray that God's name would be made holy in all the earth, we don't worship him flippantly.

We don't take his name in vain or use it as an expression of cursing.

No, instead, when we can truly, authentically, genuinely come and pray to the Holy One who is set apart, who is distant from sin, and when we can come and pray to him as our Father, and we genuinely desire that He become famous in all of the world, that His glory would be seen and known, that His holiness would be known by every person on this earth, then and only then will we begin to be praying properly.

Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Let me ask you three questions.

When you pray, do you come to God as one who was predestined for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ?

The praise of his glorious grace?

Do you come as a child of your father?

When you pray, are you overcome by your knowledge of who your father really is?

Are you overcome by your understanding of his character and of his actions?

When you pray, do you come in awe of your father?

With a desire that he be known, that he be worshipped.

Or is your prayer a begging for your own desire?

So what's next?

Praying.

Praying.

Practice may not make perfect, but practice helps us learn.

As we begin to learn what proper prayer is, we need to do it.

And we should be able to speak to our dad, shouldn't we?

We should be able to come to our father.

Yes, with awe and respect and reverence, but we should be able to speak to him.

So practice it.

Talk to your father.

And the father who is in heaven, who sees your desire to approach him with humble awe and respect of a child to his holy father, will see and hear you, even if you stumble a bit.

Your father wants to hear you.

He wants to listen.

Andrew Murray said, reading a book about prayer or listening to lectures and talking about it is very good.

But it won't teach you to pray.

You get nothing without exercise, without practice.

I might listen for a year to a professor of music playing the most beautiful music, but that won't teach me to play an instrument.

Practice your prayer.

By going to your Father, who is in heaven, seeking his glory.

So as our orchestra comes up to lead us in song, would you bow in prayer with me as we begin practicing our prayer?

Our Father.

We come as your children, recognizing that we are not holy than you are.

So we come seeking your forgiveness, your cleansing, and your restoration.

We thank you for sending your son, your only son, whom you love, to be hung upon that cursed cross.

In your might, you could have rescued him.

You could have taken him down from that cross.

And in an instant, you could have wiped out all who conspired to put him there.

That would have been just, that would have been perfectly right in your holiness.

It would have showed your holiness to a watching and yet unholy world.

But we would have been left without hope.

Thank you for fulfilling your justice in another way.

Thank you, Father, for sending your son, your only son, whom you love, to hang upon that cross as you afflicted him with the judgment for my sins, for the sins of all who would come to believe in him.

Thank you for not rescuing him.

Thank you that you determined that he would taste death for us, so that we might be authorized to claim sonship with Jesus.

Thank you for displaying your holiness in the death of your Son, your only Son, whom you love, so that our sins might be atoned for, so that we might be justified through his blood, forgiven of our trespasses, and loved as your sons and daughters, and sealed by your spirit for a promised inheritance, all to the praise of your glorious grace.

Now make us images of your grace, till all will sing the praises of you, our holy God.