Jesus’ Top Priorities for Our Lives

Good morning, everyone.

Um, I don't know if the Lord's trying to tell me to preach a different sermon or not.

Uh, but the text in the in the program here, the bulletin, is not the right text.

But what do you think?

You think the Lord wants me to do this one?

Probably not.

Okay, let's just assume we put the wrong number in there.

But if you'll turn to the front page, okay, it happens to be there.

So if you don't know this passage of scripture by heart, and many of you do probably because we learned it even as children, way down at the bottom where it says invocation and the Lord's Prayer, the um the scripture reading this morning is going to be from the Lord's Prayer.

And so I'm going to read it to us here as if we were reading from a Bible, okay, because it's right, it's right there in the Bible, okay, in Matthew chapter six, and um I'll read this passage of scripture, remembering that this is the word of our God to us.

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.

Amen.

Let's pray together.

Our Lord Jesus, we have just heard these words that you taught your disciples thousands of years ago when they ask you to teach them how to pray.

These words are precious to us.

Many of us have memorized them, have known them our whole lives.

But we turn to you today, asking you, Holy Spirit, to come and to open our eyes to see in ways that you never have before, to hear you speak as you have not done before, and to melt our hearts, just melt our hearts, so that we may serve you more faithfully because of this your word.

And as you do that, we will give you the praise, we will honor you for it all.

Amen.

I'm so glad to be at a church that's celebrating the mission of the church.

If you didn't know that and you came to church, well, this is their missions focused month, and this is a particular part of that month where they're focusing on what Christians call the mission.

Let me see if I could just encapsulate it for you in case you don't know what that means.

Jesus set his followers on a mission.

And the mission is basically this.

I mean, you can say it in other ways, but here it is in a nutshell.

Jesus told his disciples to make sure and to do all they could to make sure that everyone in the world heard about him.

That's the mission.

And it's something that every follower of Jesus is commissioned to do in one way or another.

And so this church is focusing on that to sort of remind us of this fundamental pillar of the Christian faith, that we have a mission that Jesus has put us all on.

And he expects his followers to pursue that mission.

Now, if you're a Christian and if you knew that this was going to be a missions weekend and that that's what the sermon was going to be about, and all those kinds of things, but way to go, because you're a brave person.

Because you already know, you already know what's going to be said.

And it's basically this Jesus wants you to pray about the mission, Jesus wants you to support the mission, and Jesus wants you to consider even going on mission in some special way.

So if you came knowing that's what was going to happen today, I'm proud of you.

But we're going to look at this thing called the mission in a way that maybe you haven't heard it before.

And that is by reflecting on the words of Jesus that we just read.

That part of the Bible that we often call the Lord's Prayer.

Now, let's just start off this way by asking ourselves this question.

When do people pray?

It's a good question because whether you're a follower of Jesus or not, there's a tendency for everybody to pray at certain times in life, especially when something really important is happening.

I mean, you can find someone who doesn't even believe there's a God up there in heaven.

And if they get in serious trouble, they're going to cry out to heaven.

They're going to cry out to God, help me, help me.

And even followers of Jesus will do that.

So you know as well as I do that if something important in your life is happening, you may be the kind of Christian that on a day-to-day basis doesn't pray all that much through the day.

And maybe you're the kind of follower of Christ, and it's okay because that's where most of us are.

We lay our heads on the pillow at night and we go, you know, I haven't prayed all day.

And you say, Lord, please bless my children.

Yeah, that's, I mean, praying is a great sleeping pill.

How about that?

Great sedative.

It'll put you right to sleep.

Try it.

If you have trouble sleeping at night, start praying.

You'll go to sleep, okay?

If that's where you are, it's okay.

I understand it because we have busy lives, we're doing all kinds of things.

But if you have a child who's seriously sick, you're going to find yourself praying.

If your marriage is in trouble, you're going to find yourself praying.

If you can't find a job, you're going to find yourself praying.

And the reason for this is because we all know it.

We pray, I mean, we really pray, when big things are happening, when important things are happening.

So there was this day when the disciples of Jesus came to Jesus and they said to him, Lord, teach us how to pray.

And we all know, we who know the Bible at all, we know that Jesus gave them this prayer called the Lord's Prayer as a model for prayer.

But it's more than just a model, it's also an expression of Jesus' own heart as to what was important to him, what was critical in life to him, and what he expected his disciples to make important for them too.

And, well, what he wants even today to be important for you and me.

The critical things of life, the things we really pray about.

And I suspect that everybody in the room can find one or two of those things somewhere in that prayer.

Can't you?

But let's be honest about it for just a minute, because I would say that most of us probably tend to find those important things in life that we will pray about if they're strikingly in need of attention.

We'll find those things in the bottom half of the Lord's Prayer.

You know how it goes.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Don't you pray about money a lot?

About your job a lot, about the bills a lot.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Forgive us our debts.

Oh, Lord, I'm so sorry I've done it again.

Can you forgive me again, please?

Lead us not into temptation.

And a lot of us know that the world around us is just pulling at us, just tugging at us, trying to follow this, trying to get us to follow this direction or that direction, to go wayward this way or that way.

And we just feel overwhelmed sometimes.

There are so many temptations in this world.

And so we pray, Lord, deliver me from the evil one.

It's just too great.

I can't resist on my own.

Yeah, we can find the sort of centerpieces of our life in the Lord's Prayer, especially in the bottom half.

But it's the bottom half.

And something comes before it.

It's the part of the prayer that we normally just sort of mumble our way through until we get to something that means something to us.

Give us this day our daily bread.

We kind of mumble our way through the opening.

You know how it goes.

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

May your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

And then the second half.

You know, there's an odd thing about that, isn't it?

The bottom half is all about give us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts, lead us not into temptation.

And the first half is all about our Father, may your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

May your name be kept holy.

See the difference.

There's a lot to learn about the priorities that Jesus had for his life and for his disciples from this prayer.

A lot for us to learn and to reflect on and to try to be honest about where we orient our lives.

And we can do it by just sort of looking briefly at the top half of the Lord's Prayer.

So let's get going.

The first thing Jesus talks about is at the very top of the list.

And it's about God.

God Himself.

Those are familiar words to followers of Jesus.

They're precious words to us because they tell us that the one who made everything, and I mean everything, and the one who sustains everything knows you by name.

That he cares about you.

He's interested in you.

He pays attention to you as a person, as an individual.

Our Father who art in heaven.

Hallowed be your name.

But very often, especially in our society, when we hear those words, our Father, something happens to us.

I don't know, something clicks.

Maybe we get it from children's books, maybe we get it from movies, somewhere we get it, that this sort of image of who God is runs something like this.

That God is like a sweet old granddaddy.

And he's sitting up in heaven, long white beard, sitting in his heavenly rocking chair, rocking back and forth like this, and looking down on the earth at all of his little children down here and wringing his hands in frustration, saying to himself, Oh, I wish my children on the earth would just pay more attention to me.

I mean, after all, I exist to make them happy, and I would make them happy if they would just pay attention to me.

As if that's what God's all about.

As if he's your sweet granddaddy.

Now, I know what a sweet granddaddy is.

I'm the sweetest of them all.

Okay, and there's nothing more important to me, nothing.

Ask my daughter, she's here, she'll because she feels slighted by it.

There's nothing more important to me in all the world than for my grandchildren to love me.

They want one thing, I'll get them two.

They want the little one, I'll get them the big one.

Okay, whatever it is, I'll do it for them just to make them love me.

You with me?

And a lot of people feel that that's the way God is.

That God is just sitting up in heaven, just waiting for people to pay some attention to him.

After all, he lives for that, right?

Just like every sweet grandfather in this room lives for that.

Well, let me just tell you something.

That's not what Jesus had in mind, and we need to get it straight.

And the first clue that he had didn't have that image in mind is he doesn't just say, pray our Father.

He said, Pray our Father in heaven.

And when you think about the Bible and you think about the way the Bible, Old Testament and New Testament, describes heaven, the picture is always the same.

It's not God's living room.

It's not where he sits on a rocking chair.

Heaven is the throne room of God.

It's where God sits on a throne and blinding light radiates from him.

And there are myriads upon myriads upon myriads of creatures that are surrounding him and shouting out day and night: holy, holy, holy, hallowed be your name.

You see what I'm saying?

That's what Jesus had in mind.

God in heaven, may your name be kept holy.

Now it might surprise you to know this, but in the days of the Bible, both Old Testament days and New Testament days, it was very common for people to call their human kings, I mean the real kings on the planet here, to call them their father.

A little bit like we call George Washington, George Washington the Father of America, of this, of our country.

They called their kings their fathers.

So now you know what Jesus meant when he said our father in heaven.

This is what he meant.

Our royal father, our royal king, our kingly father.

May your name be kept holy.

May you be lifted up, may you be honored, may you be delighted, may all creatures on earth praise you and acknowledge you for how magnificent you are.

And that's a really tough thing for Americans.

And most of you look like you're Americans.

Why do I say that?

Because we don't have a clue what it means to have a king rule over us.

Not a clue.

I come from Virginia.

Glad for it.

But let me tell you about the Virginia state flag and the seal of our state, the Commonwealth of Virginia.

A lot of people know the Virginia state flag.

You can Google it right now if you don't trust me, okay?

I'm happy for you to look at it because you'll be amazed.

It's so beautiful.

It's got this nice blue-satin background, and in the middle of the flag is a circle.

Most people know that much about our state flag, but in the circle is a picture.

And it reveals the attitude that Virginians have toward anyone who thinks they should be king.

And here's the picture: there's a man lying dead on his back on the ground.

And there's a crown that has fallen off of his head onto the ground next to him.

You got the picture?

It's a dead king.

And standing over this king is a woman who has a spear in one hand and her foot on the chest of this dead king.

And written underneath that, usually, are these words in Latin: Sick Semper Tyrannis, thus, always to tyrants.

Have you got the message?

We will not have a king in the state of Virginia.

And if anybody tries to be our king, we will send our women after them and they'll take care of it.

What?

You don't think that's the message?

We're not going to have one.

And you know why?

It's because kings are not convenient.

Kings are not convenient to have around because they have these weird ideas that their agenda is more important than yours.

That their glory is more important than yours.

That you ought to be willing to sacrifice the things in your life to serve their things and their purposes.

That you ought to consider it a privilege to make those sacrifices.

You ought to be willing to die for your king.

And man, if you have people around you that believe those kinds of things and they have any power, they are not convenient to have around.

No wonder we say we will not have a king in the United States of America.

I could get an amen from Presbyterians on that one.

You see what I'm saying?

But we do have a king.

He is our royal father enthroned in heaven, and his name is to be kept holy.

And I think that tells us something right away as we start thinking about the priorities Jesus had in his life, the top priority for him, for anybody who considers his mission and wants to be a part of the mission he had, it's this.

If your religion has become convenient, if your faith has become something that kind of fits easily like hand in glove into your life, if you're not challenged to change your life in ways that you couldn't have imagined before, because of things that our king tells us, then maybe, just maybe, you're yet to understand what it means to say that God is your king.

Don't you know he gives you every breath you take?

Don't you know he gives you every heartbeat?

And if you're a follower of Christ, don't you know he gave his only son for you?

He owns us.

Like a stock and barrel.

We are his.

And even when it's inconvenient to consider how God wants you to participate in the mission, it's the call of our king.

I love that.

I just love it that Jesus is so plain and so simple.

Hey, everybody, it all begins with you and me realizing we have a king who rules over us and we belong to him.

What a magnificent thing to be able to say.

Because our king is good, and our king deserves our whole lives.

He's that wonderful.

But Jesus doesn't just start stop, he doesn't stop right there with God as King.

Instead, he moves on to something else, and it's the purpose of this king, what his goals are.

Remember that agenda I talked about that's going to be inconvenient to you and me?

He tells us what that agenda is right there in the first half of the Lord's Prayer.

So listen to it again.

Here it goes.

Our royal father, enthroned in heaven, may your name be kept holy, may your kingdom come.

You see, I told you he's thinking of God as King.

Our Father, may your kingdom come.

Now, in the old days, back when I was a young child, that was a long time ago.

I think it was what, 1918 or something like that.

Um, people used to talk, even in Alabama, they would talk about the kingdom coming.

And my grandmother loved to talk about that.

And I can remember a dramatic time when we were there for Thanksgiving, all 19 of the grandkids, and we had finished our lunch, Thanksgiving lunch, and we'd gone outside and were playing around, and we got hungry and came back in, and Mama was standing there at the kitchen sink, no dishwashers in 1918.

Okay.

So she was washing the dishes all alone, and we came into the kitchen, all 18 of us, and we said, Mama, mama, can we have another piece of pie?

And she folded up the dish rag, set it to the side, spun around and looked at us and said, Sure, children, you can have some more pie when the kingdom comes.

So I learned about seven years old or so that when the kingdom comes meant no.

Never.

Maybe if you're lucky in the sweet by and by, somehow, somewhere out there in the distant future, you could have another piece of pie.

We used to use that expression, when the kingdom comes.

I don't hear it very much anymore.

Even among faithful Christians, we don't talk about, well, when the kingdom comes, such and such, such and such.

But Jesus is talking about the kingdom coming.

So let's just assume we don't know what he means.

So, Jesus, what do you mean when you say, May your kingdom come?

Well, he goes immediately and tells us, May your kingdom come, may your will be done.

All right, that makes some sense to me.

I can kind of get that.

I mean, what kind of king would our God be if his will was not being obeyed?

So, all right, I got the idea that you're the king, and now what we're praying for is that your kingship will be acknowledged, that people will do what you say, that they'll be faithful to you, and they'll be glad to serve you because you're the king.

And it's a great honor to serve such a magnificent, glorious, good king.

That's great.

That's great, Jesus.

Thank you very much.

So may your kingdom come, may your will be done.

But now, Jesus, I have another question.

Where do you want that to happen?

May your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Now, watch out.

Jesus is about to turn your religion upside down.

You ready to be turned upside down?

Here he comes.

May your kingdom come, may your will be done on the earth as it is in heaven.

I want you to notice something.

The goal for which Jesus lived was not for God's will to be done in heaven.

That's always true.

When you look in the Bible, remember heaven's like a throne room.

Remember this?

God's on his throne, blinding radiance, a river of fire is pouring out from beneath his feet.

All these creatures are around him.

Well, when you're there, when you're in that throne room before the blinding radiance of God, when God tells you what to do, you say, okay, I'm doing it as fast as I can.

Even in the Bible, even when the devil is there before the throne of God, he does what he's told to do.

Job chapter 1, if you want to know a Bible reference.

Job 1 · chapter mention

He's respectful in that throne room.

I don't know what happens to you if you disobey.

Maybe you melt or something.

That's what Raiders of the Lost Ark tell us.

Okay, you melt like wax or something.

I don't know.

But it won't be happy.

I can tell you that.

So you don't mess around with God when you're in the throne room.

But Satan, just like we, when he leaves the throne room, he does what he wants to do.

When he's not in the throne room, he's like you.

He's like I am.

And that is, we tend to pursue our own will.

Oh, yeah, God's the king.

Okay, whatever.

I've got things to do down here.

So I'll just do things the way I want to do them.

I'll set up the priorities I want to set up.

I'll pursue and spend my time on the things that I want to pursue and spend my time on.

Yeah, that's the way we live.

That's the way we live.

But this is Jesus' vision.

This is why Jesus came to this planet.

It was to turn this earth into a place like the throne room of heaven.

Where God's will would be done here, like it is in heaven already.

Heaven's not the goal.

Heaven's the standard.

The goal is the earth.

In fact, the story of the whole Bible is all about that.

How Jesus of Nazareth was raised from the dead and seated on his throne, the throne of his father David, next to the Father in heaven, and directs how the world is going to be turned into the kingdom of God.

That's what your Bible is all about from Genesis to Revelation is how the earth will become the kingdom of God.

So that God's will is done on this earth as magnificently and as widely as it is already being done in heaven.

Do you live for that?

Most of us don't.

Most of us have as our priority our own personal lives.

Remember the bottom half of the Lord's Prayer?

Making sure that we can pay the bills, making sure that we're dealing with our own personal sins and struggles with sin and struggles with temptation, making sure we can make it through that.

And those are big things, and those are important things.

So don't hear me diminishing that.

But this is what I want to ask you to ask yourself, and it's this.

Why should I want to have my daily bread?

Why should I want forgiveness of my sins?

Why should I want to be delivered from temptations that surround me?

And the answer is not for you, not for me.

The answer is we pursue those things because of what's in the top half of the Lord's Prayer.

Yes, you want to eat.

Yes, you want to make good money.

Yes, you want to make good investments.

Lord, give me my daily bread.

But for what purpose?

It's so that God's will may be done throughout the earth and his kingdom may come to this earth.

That's why.

Why do you want to have forgiveness of your sins?

So you can squeeze your way into heaven?

No.

The ultimate reason is so that you can be a part of God's kingdom coming to this earth as it already is in heaven.

Why should you seek deliverance from all those temptations that trouble you so much?

It's so you can be a part of the kingdom of God on earth.

And brothers and sisters, that is the mission.

A lot of people have what they call a bucket list.

You ever heard that expression before?

Bucket list is this list of things you want to do before you die because you're never going to have another chance to do them.

And Christians even have those bucket lists.

People that are unbelievers usually have evil things in their bucket list, okay?

But Christians will have good things, like, I don't know.

I want to go to Paris, okay, before I die.

Okay, or I want to climb this mountain before I die, or I want to do this before I die.

Because after all, um I'm going to die soon, probably, and well, I'm never going to have another chance to do those wonderful things on this earth.

Well, I want to give you some good news.

You don't just have one time or one opportunity to enjoy the things of God's creation.

Because when Jesus comes back, he's not going to take you to heaven and say to you, here's a golden harp that you can play, and here's a choir you can sing in forever and forever and forever and forever.

And frankly, that sounds to me more like the other side rather than heaven.

Okay?

But okay, now I could do it for 10,000 years, okay?

Like the amazing grace says, 10,000 years.

Okay.

I can do it for a long time because I'll be so delighted to be in the presence of God.

But that's not the goal.

In fact, even our King Jesus is not satisfied with being at the right hand of God the Father.

Jesus is waiting, waiting for the Father to say, go for it.

And what's he going to go for?

Coming back here and making all things here new.

And it will all belong to him in what the Bible calls the new creation, the new heavens and the new earth.

And it will all belong to him.

And he will look at everyone who has ever followed him, and he will say, It now belongs to you too.

Welcome to the kingdom of God on earth.

You are going to really like that you chose the way of life.

You're going to be so blessed because you will rule over this creation with me, Jesus will say one day.

Do you know what that means about your bucket list?

If for the sake of the kingdom of God, now there's nothing wrong with the things I'm about to say right now, doing what I'm talking about, but if for the sake of the kingdom of God you sacrifice, and maybe you never see Paris your whole life, just wait until you see Paris in the New World.

Right now, Paris is an ugly, filthy, crime-ridden city.

You don't want to go there without about six bodyguards surrounding you the whole time.

I can just tell you that.

I go to these places and I can tell you that's true.

But wait until you see the glory of Paris in the world to come.

If for the sake of the kingdom of God you give up things in this world, you will miss nothing because of what's going to be given to you in that new world.

If for the sake of the mission of the church you sacrifice time, you sacrifice money, you sacrifice energy and prayer for the sake of the mission of bringing God's kingdom to this earth, you will miss nothing that this world has to offer except its evil and its disappointment.

Because you will inherit the earth one day.

It will be yours to enjoy with our King Jesus forever.

You see what I mean when I say it turns your religion upside down?

You're not going to float away into the clouds and live as disembodied spirits forever up there somewhere.

You're going to be resurrected from the dead, and you're going to inherit the kingdom that Jesus came to bring us.

And for that, for that kingdom, you can get on mission.

So no matter what the sacrifice, even the sacrifice of your life, the mission will be worth it because of what you will inherit one day in Christ.

Can you believe that?

I remember about 20 years ago, I decided I'm no longer going to make it easy for people to believe in Jesus.

Because you can make it easy by telling them little soft stories and things.

Instead, I said, I'm just going to tell them the truth.

And it happened one time with a man that I met in Indonesia who was American, Jewish, who had converted to Buddhism and moved to Bali.

And I was in his home and I was about to die in his home because I'd gotten real sick and I really was about to die.

And he calls me up on the phone in Montgomery, Alabama, outside your church, Claude, outside of Trinity, one Wednesday night after I'd spoken there about 10 years ago.

And he says, Richard, when you were dying, you looked at me and you said, I'm ready to die.

Don't worry about it.

I'm ready to die.

He said, I couldn't get that out of my mind.

How are you ready to die?

And I told him, I said, Charlie, let me tell you what's true.

If you will come to Jesus, Jesus is going to give you a new world, a glorious world to live in.

All the troubles of this world, all the troubles of this life will vanish, and it will be a new creation.

He will reign in it, and you will reign with him too, if you'll come to him.

And I looked at him and I said on the phone, I said to him, Charlie, do you want a piece of that kingdom?

And there was silence on the phone.

I thought I had lost the connection to Bali, Indonesia.

And after about a minute, he said, Richard, I want to be a part of that kingdom.

Well then come to Jesus and He will give it to you.

He's the king of the world.

And he did.

And I have never seen a man who has more radically changed than that man for the last 10 years.

A fantastic testimony to the ways of Christ in a person's life.

So here you are on a day when your elders, when your pastors are challenging you to consider your role in the mission.

It's a top priority for Jesus.

Is it a top priority for you?

Listen to the way Jesus put that top priority.

Our Father who art in heaven, may your name be kept holy.

That's what I want more than anything.

My great King.

May your kingdom come.

May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

If you will live for that, you will not be disappointed.

Because that kingdom is the place you want to be.

Let's pray together.

Our Lord Jesus, how we bless you for these precious words you gave thousands of years ago.

And now, Holy Spirit, will you please write these words in our hearts?

May we never forget them.

May we never say them again without realizing that we're committing ourselves to your kingdom, that we're committing ourselves to your mission.

Have your way in our lives and turn us into your people who seek your kingdom to come to this earth as it is in heaven.

And as you do that, we will praise you.

We will honor you for it all.

Amen.