"Prayer and Our Father" Matthew 6:9 Sunday Morning Worship Service

Matthew six, verse nine.

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

Lead us not into temptation to temptation, but deliver us from evil.

And we're going to look specifically this morning at verse 9.

Pray then like this, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

I heard a story this week of a pilot, flying single pilot, running out of fuel, and all of his engine lights were on, and he radios the tower for help and says, Tower, I'm at 600 feet and in an uncontrolled descent, and I have no fuel, and the airport is 60 miles away.

I need help.

Tell me what to do.

And the tower responds with, Okay, listen to me, this is very important.

Repeat after me.

Our Father, you are in heaven.

This prayer is given to us in the New Testament as a pattern for prayer.

You even hear the phrase, our Father, who is in heaven, and immediately your mind is tuned into what this is.

A generic phrase like our Father, and you know you're talking about the Lord's Prayer.

It has this prayer has a uh capacity to unite people, to transcend really ethnicities and nations and languages and centuries and cultures, and it forms the outline of what an authentic prayer looks like.

This prayer transcends ages, of course, and it is easily the most famous prayer in the Bible, and that makes sense, is at the middle of the most famous sermon ever preached, the Sermon on the Mount, and Jesus now turns his attention in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount to prayer.

And so we're going to look at this prayer over the next uh probably several months.

We're gonna go through it one verse at a time.

We began last week with Jesus contrasting what ungodly prayer looks like, and that's why this uh transition to verse 9 is surprising, where Jesus teaches us how to pray.

Because if you remember last week we looked at the wrong ways to pray.

He says, Don't pray like the Gentiles do, where they're heaping up phrases and they think they're gonna be heard because there are many words, and so last week was a negative sermon.

Do not pray like the Gentiles.

Do not pray like the hypocrites, it says from two weeks ago we looked at verse 5.

Don't pray like the hypocrites who uh you know put on the mask and they are praying really for others to hear, not for the Lord to hear.

Um, don't pray like them, Jesus says.

When you pray, pray in secret, in your room, bring your words before God.

And so now Jesus turns and is going to instruct us of the content of our prayer, what our prayers should actually look like.

And so I want to work our way through this passage this morning, prayer and our father.

First, we're gonna look at prayers prerogative.

Prayer's prerogative.

It begins in verse 9.

Pray then like this.

It's a command to pray.

I use the word prerogative because it starts with a P, and we're gonna use a lot of those this morning.

Uh, but it is an imperative.

Prerogative might even be too soft.

It is an imperative.

The verb in verse 9 pray.

In the Greek, it is an imperative.

It's a command, you are supposed to pray.

Now, this is startling that Jesus is telling us to pray.

We take it for granted because we're Christians, we pray all the time in our worship services and at home and before we eat, etc., that you could lose sight of how unusual this kind of command is.

Not everybody can pray.

Not everybody knows how to pray.

In the book of Acts, Paul says that God made the nations and designed them so that they would go their own way over the face of the earth.

The nations dissipate, they they go apart, they scatter from Babel and they scatter around the world, and they are going away from God.

Away from where God was and where God's voice was, they they go out from that and they don't call on him.

Acts says they go out into darkness, knowing that one day God lets them go that way, knowing that one day they might turn and pray, turn and seek, turn and come to the Lord.

So the nations dissipate, they go to the corners of the earth, so to speak, and then the gospel goes off like a bomb in Jerusalem, and the clouds, the reverberation, the shock waves of the gospel start to gradually go around the earth.

And they're chasing the nations down.

It's like the storm that's on their feet.

The gospel goes to the earth and chases the nations down as the nations are still scattering.

Now, if you're running from God, you don't want to pray to God.

And the shock wave of the gospel catches people as they're fleeing from God.

Now, it doesn't catch every individual, of course.

It saves particular individuals, but it saves people from every tribe, every nation, every language group, every culture, every ethnicity in the world gets saved.

Not every individual does, though.

And so when you get saved, you turn and you pray to God.

You're running from God, and the gospel overtakes you, and your heart is changed by the Holy Spirit, and you turn to God and you call out to Him and you repent, you confess your sins, and you turn your life over to Christ.

So that is prayer, and people often ask, can unbelievers pray?

And will God hear an unbeliever's prayer?

And the answer is yes, if it's a prayer of confession and turning.

The scripture is filled with unbelievers who pray, like the thief on the cross, for example, or those in Nineveh, to use the most flagrant example of ranked paganism in the Old Testament, those in Nineveh and they raised up their voices and prayed to Yahweh a prayer of repentance and confession, and God heard.

They turned and God turned away his wrath.

So, yes, unbelievers can pray if they're praying to the Lord in confession and repentance.

But the issue is that most unbelievers don't want to pray because they're fleeing from the Lord.

Or they don't know how to pray.

They don't know to whom to pray.

And sometimes it's not even a lack of intensity or devotion.

Think of the prophets of Baal in 1 Kings 18.

They were praying.

They were praying loud and they were lancing themselves and prancing themselves and dancing themselves or whatever they were doing.

All the reindeer, lancer, prancer, and dancer, they were they were doing it, trying to get God to hear them.

But God's ear was not inclined towards them.

They didn't have a relationship with God.

And so that's the status of the world.

They've gone away from the Lord.

They don't know what's required of them.

Even if they wanted a relationship with God, they don't know how to have one.

They don't know what God demands of them.

And so, in the absence of clear instruction from the Lord, people invent their own standards, of course.

They say, God would hear me when I pray if I, it's usually conditional.

God would hear me if I do good, and if I try to be the best I can, or if I'm kind to others, or they invent their own standard, which they then keep, and they think that God hears them, but it is all deception.

And by the way, even within believers in the Bible, prayer is often absent, isn't it?

There's a very interesting verse, Genesis 4.25.

You don't need to turn there, but if you just think about what's happening in Genesis 4, it's well after Genesis 1, 2, and 3.

Genesis 4.25 is the first prayer in the Bible.

You understand that Adam and Eve didn't pray because they were in the right relationship with God.

They were walking with God.

You don't need to pray to God in heaven when he's walking with you on earth.

But they sin, when they sin, they don't pray.

Remember, when they sin, they hide.

It's the opposite of praying, hiding.

God finds them, communicates with them, curses the earth because of them.

Then God communicates face to face with Cain and Abel.

That doesn't go well for either of them.

Abel ends up murdered, Cain ends up banished, Cain runs and is a mark on him.

Cain's not praying.

The offspring of Cain aren't praying.

People, Cain is populating the earth and they're not praying.

Adam and Eve have a new child.

Seth, they name Sid, for the gospel promises now with Seth.

There's no record of Adam and Eve praying when they had Seth.

Seth grows up.

There's no record of him praying.

Seth has Enoch.

So we're a few generations into this thing now.

This thing here being the earth.

We're a few generations into it.

When Seth has Enoch, Enoch grows up, and then the scripture says, Genesis 4.25, it was at that time people began to pray.

What a contrast.

The whole world is the line of Cain, and there's this privileged line, the line of Seth and Enoch, and it is those that pray.

They begin to call on the voice of the Lord.

Prayer is an unusual blessing that believers have.

We've been brought to God through Jesus Christ so we can pray to him.

And God hears our prayers.

That's what's underscoring this.

The Gentiles out who are heaping up words, the hypocrites, God does not hear their prayers.

It's not very popular to think about today that there are certain prayers God doesn't hear, but the scripture makes that very clear.

James says that you ask and you don't receive because you are asking to spend it on yourself.

In other words, God doesn't answer selfish prayer.

First of all, he says you have not because you ask not, so you're not praying, but then you ask and you don't get because you're asking to spend on yourself.

Selfish prayer.

God doesn't hear selfish prayer.

Psalm 66, verse 18, the psalmist says, If I guard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me when I call.

Psalms 66:18

If you're treasuring sin in your heart, if you're not turning to the Lord, if you're guarding sin in your heart and walking in a life of sin, the Lord will not hear you when you call on him.

Isaiah 59, verse 2.

Isaiah 59:2

Your iniquities have separated you from God.

Your sins have hidden his face from you.

Your sins obscure God's look at you.

Now we know God can't hide from God.

We know God knows all things.

You're ever before his face.

But when it comes to prayer, the idea is that your sins mute your prayers.

It's the TV with the mute button on.

If you're guarding iniquity in your heart, if you're treasuring sin and walking in your sinful ways, your mute button is on when you pray.

And you know, God sees you and your lips are just moving.

Proverbs 1 says the same thing.

Because I wisdom have called, Proverbs 1 verse 24 says, and you have refused, because I wisdom stretched out my hand to you and you did not heed my counsel, then you will call on me and I will not answer.

Proverbs 1:24

Proverbs 1 28.

You'll seek me diligently, but you will not find me.

When people refuse what the word of God says, they may pray to God, God won't answer.

They may seek the Lord, the Lord won't answer them when they're rejecting his word.

In other words, God speaks to you through his word, you close the book, reject the word, and then pray to God.

It's, I mean, the line has been hung up.

Proverbs 28, verse 9.

Proverbs 28:9

One who turns his ear away from hearing the law, his prayer is an abomination before the Lord.

James 1, verse 6.

James 1:6

The one who asks in doubt ought not to assume that he will receive anything, because he's unstable in all of his ways.

What a contrast.

A dozen verses right there.

Say the kind of prayer the Lord doesn't hear.

What a contrast that is with a verse like Colossians 4, too.

You continue steadfastly in prayer.

What a contrast that is with Matthew 4, or Matthew 6, verse 9.

Matthew 6:9

Pray then like this.

So the Bible is chock full of illustrations to people whose prayers God won't hear.

And then after all of that, Jesus says, you're not like that.

You don't worry about that.

You can pray and God will hear.

Paul says, pray all the time.

Continue in prayer.

He doesn't tell you God's not going to hear your prayers.

He says, of course, God will hear your prayers.

You have a special relationship with God through Christ.

So you pray.

And then he teaches us how to pray.

This whole, what's called the Lord's Prayer, it's in Luke's gospel as well.

In Luke 11, it's there as an answer to the question, Lord, teach us how to pray.

And that leads to our second point.

First, the prerogative of prayer or the imperative of prayer.

You are supposed to pray.

Secondly, the pattern of prayer.

This prayer is given to teach you how to pray.

Like I mentioned, Luke 11, the disciples say, Lord, teach us to pray.

This prayer is the answer to that question.

Here, Jesus is teaching it in the context of a sermon.

This is what your prayer would look like.

So you don't pray like the hypocrites, so you don't pray like the tax uh like the uh Gentiles, so you don't pray like people who are heaping up their words.

You instead pray this way.

This becomes a pattern for our prayer that we are supposed to imitate.

There was a period of time in like the 1980s and 1990s, American evangelicalism, where it was a popular crazy things happened in the 80s and 90s.

Let's forget about all of them.

But it was a popular theological thing taught then that the Sermon on the Mount wasn't for the church.

And so this prayer wasn't for the church.

This was like a sermon that was effective or spoke to the ethics and prayer that spoke to the method of prayer until the church age.

And once Acts 2 energizes the church, the Holy Spirit energizes the church, the Sermon on the Mount kind of times out, or is for a bygone era.

Even those that taught, oh, maybe this is for the future kingdom, but not for the church age, to try to push this prayer all the way to the kingdom.

But negative on both of those, this is a prayer that is a pattern for you right now.

This is how you're supposed to pray right here and right now.

Uh Matthew was written after Acts 2 took place.

Jesus was aware of uh the future when he taught his disciples to pray like this.

Matthew's aware of the growth of the church when he communicates this to us.

This is how we are supposed to pray.

This is a pattern.

You can even memorize this prayer to be like the outlines of your prayer.

That's how a pattern works.

Now, last week I talked about uh mimicking prayer or just reciting with empty words prayer or uh just reading scripture back to God as if that were praying, and it's possible I overstated my case last week.

It's possible.

I I know a lot of you ask with confusion, are we not supposed to pray scripture?

Are we not supposed to pray this prayer back to God?

What I meant to communicate, and I'm glad Sunday comes every week because I get to come back every week and tell you what I meant to say last week.

What I meant to say in this is just reading words back to God is not prayer.

God knows what the Sermon on the Mount says.

Just reading it to Him is not you praying.

Scripture, just reading Scripture back to God, is not you praying.

But you are to appropriate Scripture in your prayer life.

You are to take these patterns in the Bible and use them, assimilate them and appropriate them.

So the word appropriate just means you take something that's not yours and you possess it as if it were yours for your own use.

That's the way you use scripture in prayer.

So you are familiar enough with the Bible that when you are praying, the words of the Bible are coming out in your prayer towards God.

The best example of this in the Bible is probably Jonah chapter 2.

Jonah 2 · chapter mention

Jonah chapter.

Now, what prayer in the Bible are you supposed to pray if you are swallowed by a whale while you're running from God?

Like where would you turn?

So Jonah finds himself in a situation unparalleled.

Nobody else has been in this situation before.

His prayer is a chapter long.

And if you remember when we went through Jonah a few years ago, I pointed this out.

Every phrase in that prayer is from Scripture.

It's from the Psalms, it's from the Torah.

He's gathering Scripture from all over the place.

Now, he's not reading the Bible in the whale's belly.

He doesn't, there's no, he doesn't have a headlamp, remember, he wasn't planning for this.

He didn't bring his Torah with him, and if he did, he couldn't see it.

It's internalized.

He knows the word of God so well that he's just calling out to God and it's scripture.

That's how you're supposed to pray with the Sermon on the Mount, with the Lord's Prayer here.

You're supposed to know it so well, and you're supposed to make it your own that when you pray, you're speaking back to the Lord.

And it's it's these words, but they've been appropriated and owned and possessed by you.

You've made them your own.

That's the power of this kind of prayer.

So, yes, you should memorize this prayer.

And yes, the church teaches this prayer.

Like we teach it, obviously, we're teaching it right now.

We teach it to you so that you learn it and know it and are familiar with, so you can use it.

And you don't use it by just reading it back to God.

You do use it by appropriating it and letting it guide your prayer.

And I get that there's a pedagogical value to you memorizing it and reciting it, because it is teaching you how to pray or the form of prayer.

I think a contrast, I started earlier with a silly joke about a flight, but a contrast with a serious example, this was United Flight 93, if you recall, when the the passengers on the flight took over the plane from the hijackers, some of their last words before storming the cockpit was reciting the Lord's Prayer together.

How do so many people different people from different walks of life, different backgrounds, different parts of our country, they know they're gonna die in defense of our country right now?

These are their last words.

Why would they choose these?

Because of the pattern of prayer.

It's the power of this kind of pattern.

It can tie people together from different backgrounds and have that kind of, it's the outline of prayer.

It has that kind of border to it that has an effect on it when it is used in that kind of way.

So I would encourage you to memorize this prayer, to own it and to use it.

It is a pattern for you to pray.

Even basically, like when you pray, you can follow this format by you start your prayer addressing it to God.

You then move to that through a prayer for God's will to be, you know, regardless of all your prayers, you're praying that his will would be done through them.

You're praying, you're confessing your sins.

You don't just say back to God, forgive me of my sins, but you personalize it.

You confess to God your sins.

You don't just pray, Lord, forgive me as I forget and forgive those who've sinned against me, but you personalize it.

You think of people who have sinned against you, and you pray for the strength and the courage to forgive them.

You're praying not just lead us not into temptation, but you're personalizing it and thinking of specific events in your timeline where you could be tempted, and you're asking the Lord to deliver you from that.

You're personalizing this prayer.

That's the pattern of prayer, but you're appropriating it and using it in your prayer life.

That's why Jesus teaches it to you.

So this is a prayer.

You see this in verse 9, pray then like this.

The word like it's a simile word, right?

Like it's a comparison of two things.

You're supposed to pray as this pattern, like this.

Not this, the word like is important.

Not pray this, but pray like this.

Thirdly.

Prayer is paternity.

Prayer is paternity.

It begins, the first words of this prayer is our Father in heaven.

The prayer begins by addressing God as Father.

This is the only part of the prayer that is not a petition.

Everything else in the prayer is asking God for something.

This is the only part that is direct address, it's a statement of fact, our Father who is in heaven.

That's where he is.

God is a person, he is our father, and he is in heaven.

The prayer doesn't begin by asking for some need, it doesn't ask for protection from some danger, it doesn't ask for anything at all at the beginning.

It simply addresses God with a term that describes an already existent family relationship.

He is our father, we are his children.

Now there is, reminds me when I read this, it's a statement of fact of God's voice from heaven addressing his son at baptism.

Behold, you are my son.

This is my son, God says to Jesus.

There's a statement of fact.

Jesus is the Son of God.

So when Jesus is teaching that God is our Father, there's a personal way.

This is true for Jesus.

God is the Father of Jesus in a unique and personal and eternal way.

It is different than us.

Jesus is the eternally begotten Son of the Father.

He's the Son of the Father from all eternity.

He is the true Son of God in eternity past.

The Father is the Father of the Son in eternity past.

That is different than us.

We are creatures.

We're made.

God is our Father for those who are in Christ.

When Jesus is saying our Father in heaven, there's an exclusivity in this.

It's not talking about the universal fatherhood of every, you know, that every human is has God as their father.

That might be true in some broad sense that God is the father of all creation.

But that's not how we're praying to God.

We're not praying to him as the father of all creation.

We're praying to him with Jesus, addressing God as our father.

God is the Father of Jesus in a very personal and unique way.

As we are praying with Jesus' pattern, we are praying as brothers and sisters in the Lord to God, who is our Father in a particularly exclusive way.

Way.

We have a relationship with God as Father because we're praying with Jesus.

We're united to Him.

We can come to Him and address Him as Father because we are, through faith, His children.

Notice the R, by the way, our Father.

Does it strike you as odd?

Do you remember where this prayer is happening?

If you look your eyes back up at verse 6, go into your room and shut the door and pray in solitude.

Pray that you won't be seen like others.

Pray in secret.

That's where this prayer is happening.

Nobody's in the closet with you here.

It's just you.

And yet, you're using first-person plural.

Our Father.

Who's the R?

Got a mouse in your pocket?

Who's the R here?

Your brothers and sisters in the Lord.

It's a pretty sobering reminder that the most personalized aspect of your worship, your prayer life, is still corporate.

When you pray to God, you are bringing before the needs of brothers and sisters in the church.

You're calling to your Father, who is not just your Father alone, but the Father of all those who have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

This is corporate prayer in an individual location.

Your prayer binds you together with brothers and sisters in the Lord.

You have fellowship with the saints, even in your personal prayer.

You who are once strangers and aliens to God have been adopted into his family.

So he is truly our Father.

For those who are in the Lord, he is our Father.

And so prayer follows this pattern.

We can pray to the Father because we are praying through Christ, through the Son.

If you're in the Son, then God is your Father.

If you have faith in Christ, you're adopted into the family of God.

Jesus Christ is your brother, and you have act, he's your older brother in that sense, and you have access to the Father through your brother.

So biblical prayer is to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit.

And you need the rest of the New Testament to fill that out.

But the Spirit, Romans 8 says, is interceding with you.

The Spirit is at work in your heart.

The Spirit is taking your prayers and bringing them to the Son.

The Son is acting as a mediator before the Father.

So all prayer is Trinitarian.

It is to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit.

And this is seen in the very pattern in which you pray.

This is how it's taught to you.

Pray like this.

You're addressing our Father.

The R here is roping you in with Jesus.

You can pray to the Father because of your faith in Jesus.

And he hears you.

He hears you right away.

The first words of this prayer, our Father.

And the image here is of God answering your call.

His ear is turned to you.

When I was a little kid, I had my dad's work number memorized.

And this is the days before cell phones, the days before text messages, if you can believe it.

And I could call him at work.

I had that privilege.

And I would call him at work.

He was a car mechanic.

And I didn't understand what went into this call at the time, but I would call him and the receptionist would answer and I would say, Can I talk to my dad?

And she knew my voice, and she would put me on hold, and then my dad would pick up the phone a few minutes later, and I would ask, you know, can I have a snack or something?

I asked very silly things.

It wasn't until I was 14 and I got a job at this car dealership that I understood all that went into that phone call.

Like the receptionist answers.

Puts me on hold.

She then goes on the intercom and pages my debt through the loudspeakers that everybody in the shop could hear.

All other 20 mechanics could hear.

All the customers in the showroom could hear.

Everybody on the lot looking at a car could hear.

People at the restaurant eating outside next door could hear.

And she had a tone in her voice, too, whenever it was somebody's wife or child on the phone.

There was a that it was just communicated to the loudspeakers that it's not a customer who's on hold.

And after working there a few days, you could pick up on that tone.

That happened every time I called to ask for a snack.

And then my dad, who's under a car, like fixing a transmission or something, has got to climb back down, take down all the parts, get all the screws and nuts out of his pocket, go got oil all over his hand, wash his hands, go grab the phone.

Yes, you can have a snack.

I was mortified once I saw what was happening.

I'm never gonna call again.

My dad never hinted to me as a kid that it was an inconvenience to call him.

He never discouraged me.

I think of all the times he did all that.

What an image of prayer to your Heavenly Father.

You know, the loudspeaker in heaven.

Jesse, line two.

And God is eager to hear.

And he picks up the call.

And he never says, Oh, there's too much going on.

He never hears you pray and thinks, you know what, there is a do you know what's going on in Ukraine right now?

So you in Northern Virginia, Fairfax County, just wait on a hold a week, okay?

Come on.

No, he's eager and he hears.

And he's our Father.

And it is a long-distance call.

Notice the location: our Father in heaven.

That's where he is.

This is a long-distance call.

Jesus is not addressing God on earth.

I know God is omnipresent, he's in all places, but when you think about omnipresence, what does that mean?

It's more along the lines of God's omniscience.

God is God doesn't have a body, he's not physically located anywhere on earth.

And yet he knows all things on earth.

You can't hide from him, and yet Jesus, when he addresses them, addresses him as our Father in heaven.

That's a long way away.

And you can't even imagine the personal emotions Jesus would have in saying that and addressing our Father in heaven.

That's where Jesus is from.

That's his home country.

When he's praying here on earth, he's praying to where he rightfully should be.

And he knows his father hears him when he prays.

God is in heaven.

Not on earth.

No one would be more aware of that than Jesus.

Our Father is higher than those on earth.

He has sovereign power over those on earth.

He's free from the bounds of time that take place on earth, the bounds of limitations that we have on earth.

He's free from all of that.

He's in the heavens.

He's the majestic one who rules time from his throne, which is outside of time.

And from that throne, he sends his son into time to be the savior of all who would believe, to die for them on the cross.

And then through our faith in Jesus Christ, we are brought in with Christ and we can pray to him in heaven through his son.

That's the paternity of prayer.

Fourthly, our prayer's petition.

Now we get to the first request.

Hollowed be your name.

That's the first request in this prayer.

Hollowed be your name.

The word hallowed is not a word any of you would ever use.

Unless you're reciting the Lord's Prayer.

Hollowed is a it's an odd word.

It's the word for sanctify or to make something holy, which we would call sanctified.

But it's passive.

Normally you would say, yet in an active voice, how do you passively make something sanctified?

But that's what, you know, active is you do it, middle voice, you're doing it to yourself.

Passive, it happens to you.

So this is a request that God's name would be made sanctified by something outside of it.

That's what passive means.

So it's a request that something would act on God to sanctify him.

Now we know God is eternally and perfectly holy.

God doesn't need any sanctification.

That would not even be conceptually possible.

So what's behind this is the idea that we would act, or people in creation would act towards God's name in such a way that God would be set aside as he really is, that God would be treated like he deserves.

That's what this first request is.

That people would treat God as holy.

And you can recognize why you wouldn't want to say, as you're translating this in English, you wouldn't want to translate it.

God, I pray that you would be sanctified.

And so kind of a new word is invented, a passive sound of the word holy.

Hollowed.

That's where that word comes from.

You want God's name to be hollowed.

And I, first hour I said, you would never ever say this in normal conversation, because it's a word that really only works here.

And somebody came up to me and said, I'm a tour guide at Arlington National Cemetery.

And we have the sign that says, respect these hollowed grounds.

Which means the ground has been sanctified by something outside of it.

But she said, the only person who's ever asked me about that was an eighth grader who came up to me and said, What does hollowed mean?

And then she said, Oh, now that I say it out loud, I know it means hollowed, like all the graves have made it hollow.

So never mind, and wonder way.

It doesn't mean that.

It means sanctified.

So it's a prayer that God's name would be treated as God is.

Now, God's name, of course, represents who he is.

Your name is who you are.

Your name represents all of who you are.

It's everything about you, even things, you know, if you were to use my name, you would say, or even a title, you would say, Pastor Jesse said today, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot.

You don't have to go on explaining who Pastor Jesse is.

And then if one of my friends don't call me Pastor Jesse, my friend might say, Jesse said, is Jesse the same person as Pastor Jesse?

Yes.

What about Deedre's husband, Jesse?

It's the same, the name represents all of who I am.

You might not know I have three girls, but when you use my name, you're speaking of the person with Madison, Savannah, and Geneva.

Everything about me is connected to my name.

Whether you know those facts about me or not, that's who I am.

And so when you use my name, that's who you're talking about.

That is true, obviously, with God.

When you use the name of God, when you address him as father, everything about him as father, everything about God is in view there, whether or not you know it.

It's who God is, his attributes, his will, like what he wants done.

If you pay for a credit card, if you pay for something on a credit card, and it's one of those old school places, they might have you sign their seat.

You know, the receipt outz zzz.

And you sign the piece of paper at my dry cleaners.

I sign their seat, and the this dry cleaner lady, and she is like the she is on it.

She is a pr a woman of precision.

She takes his receipts and she sticks them on this metal pole that runs up, this needle, and there's like you can do archaeology on this thing of receipts.

You can trace this thing back hundreds of years, I guess.

It reaches, it's like the Tower of Babel.

It reaches to the heavens, this receipt.

I have no idea why.

And so I asked her once, why do you keep all those?

And she said, Well, if somebody were to challenge the expense, I could go through and find the receipt.

And I'm thinking, yeah, right.

It would take a thousand people, a thousand years to find anything on that.

But the idea is that she finds it, and oh, I did sign for that, so you're on the hook.

Your name is there, you're on the hook for it.

That's what it's meant by the name of God.

His name is connected to everything he does.

And you're praying that his name would be sanctified, would be treated as holy.

Which comes about when you know God.

You want him set apart in a way that the reverential awe that is due to him is experienced in this world.

You want God to be pleased with people treating him as he deserves.

Psalm 9, verse 10.

Psalms 9:10

Those who know your name will put their trust in you, the psalmist says.

If you know God's name, you trust him.

If you know who he is, you trust him.

Or think of it from a different perspective.

The angels, when Jesus was born, said you will call his name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.

That's what the name means.

God saves.

Philippians 2 says the name of Jesus is above every other name.

It's a statement of fact.

His name is exalted.

It is above every other name.

So this prayer is a prayer that God would be treated by the creation, that he made, by people, like he deserves and like he really is.

Now, this is a prayer, this is the best part about praying this.

Guess what?

It's gonna happen.

This is a prayer that is guaranteed to be answered.

But here's the catch, and this is true.

I love this is true at the beginning of the Lord's Prayer, because if you understand it here, you'll understand it with every other prayer.

And it is true with every other prayer, even though it's most evident here.

This is a prayer that will be answered by God, but just not when you think it will be.

You pray right now, Lord, be sanctified in this world, be hallowed, be treated as holy.

And that will happen.

One day, Philippians 2 goes on to say, one day every tongue will confess he is Lord.

One day every knee will bow.

People who don't believe in Jesus right now, one day they will.

One day their knee will bow.

When they die, they will go to the grave.

God will resurrect their bodies so they will have a knee to bow on before him.

And why?

Philippians 2 says, because his name is greater than every other name.

That's gonna happen one day.

It's gonna happen whether or not you pray for it.

It's also not gonna happen unless the Lord returns tomorrow.

It's not gonna happen tomorrow.

It's not gonna happen next week unless the Lord returns next week.

It's not gonna happen.

Yet you're still supposed to pray for it.

Why?

Because it demonstrates your connection to the Father.

It demonstrates your obedience and submission to Him.

That's why.

That's true with all of prayer.

You're praying not because God's gonna answer your prayer tomorrow the way you want it answered.

You're praying because you are a dependent child of God and you want to call your dad on the phone.

That's why you're praying.

And you're praying that his name would be treated as holy, and he will answer that prayer intentionally, deliberately, but incrementally, like he will with most prayers.

You know, there might be a prayer that God answers immediately.

But most prayers you pray, God will answer slowly and over time.

I was talking to one of our elders this week who told me that he just recently God brought to his mind a story from a person from his past, and he was in the metro, and he was thinking about this guy.

He hadn't seen in forever, and so he prayed that God would open up an opportunity to talk to this guy, and at the next metro stop, the door opens, and that guy walks off the train right in front of this elder church.

That's an incredible story.

That is not how God answers most prayer, though.

It's nice to have those in your life because that fuels your prayer, but that's not how God answers most prayer.

Most prayer, most prayer God answers over time and incrementally.

You have some of this prayer in your control, though.

You can sanctify the Lord's name in your own life.

As you pursue a sanctified life, you're sanctifying the Lord's name.

As you think better thoughts of God, his name is treated as holy.

Get better doctrine, and you will sanctify his name.

You think about God more rightly, and he will be treated as he truly deserves.

You take your thoughts captive for Christ, and that will sanctify him in your own mind.

That will set apart God as holy in your own mind.

That will make his name holy.

So anyway, we've seen prayer's prerogative, the imperative.

You're supposed to pray.

We've seen prayer's pattern, Jesus has taught us how to do it.

We've seen prayer's paternity, that we're praying to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit.

We've seen the petition of prayer, that prayer begins by speaking to God and praying for his glory to be seen on the earth.

That leads to the final point, God's priority.

I wouldn't want us to skip this observation, taking this all together.

It is noteworthy that this prayer does not begin with your problems.

This prayer doesn't even begin with your petitions.

There's an order here.

Before asking anything for yourself, prayer begins with an appeal to God for his name to be glorified.

This reminds me of the Ten Commandments, where the first four commandments are about the relationship with God before you get to the six that are about your relationship with others.

It's God first, you second, and that's a basic principle of all of life.

And that's so hard, isn't it?

That's so hard because we we all live in a Jesse-centered world, don't we?

Okay, I live in a Jesse-centered world.

And I assume you live in the same world I live in.

That's the way we are.

We put ourselves in the center of our world.

And you know, if you are having a good day spiritually, you had your devotions, you prayed, you read the word, you feel like particularly sanctified today, on those good days, on those best days, you might be able to put your family in the center of the world.

But that's not where the prayer begins.

It's not even it doesn't even begin with petitions for others.

It begins with addressing God as God.

You come next.

I was reading a book by Terry Johnson on the Lord's Prayer, and he has a great line in it.

Quote, our problem in prayer is not usually selfishness, but self-centeredness.

And he goes on to talk about how, you know, most of the time when you pray, you are praying for other people's requests.

You are praying for other people.

So it's not selfishness, it's just that all the other people are connected by you.

It still can be self-centeredness.

Prayer begins by this Copernican revolution of putting God in the center of your universe.

Once you wrestle yourselves out of your solar system and put the Lord at the center of it, then your prayers are addressed to the right person with the right priorities.

And this will shape the rest of your petitions.

We won't go through them all again, but as you're thinking of normal petitions, people might ask to do good on the test tomorrow, to have a safe flight, to get a better raise, to have a problem with kids worked out, or a problem with brothers and sisters worked out, or a problem with parents to work out, or a problem with your husband to have a better marriage, a better job, a better paycheck, a better grade, a better anything.

Those are a lot of our prayers, aren't they?

Better health.

But if you enter those prayer requests through this gate of God's glory has the priority, that's going to shape how you pray for the other things.

Maybe God will be glorified through you getting the grade you deserve, not the grade you pray for.

Amen.

Maybe God will be glorified through you not getting the rays and you being content with less.

Or maybe God will be glorified through your flight getting canceled and rerouted in some obscure Albuquerque place.

Maybe God will be glorified that way.

God could be glorified through the cancer staying and not through it leaving.

And if your prayer begins with God's glory being first, that's going to shape the way you experience the rest of your prayer.

Not that you don't pray for the cancer to go away or the marriage to be restored.

Of course, you pray for those things because they're in your heart, but this pattern of prayer is to approach even those things through the little window here of God's glory being first and foremost.

God's glory having the priority.

And you can move to supplication, which we will do next week once everything else is in place.

Let me close today with one more illustration from my short life working at a car dealership.

We would wash the cars that were worked on, the cars that came for service, we would wash them in the wash bay.

And one time, this only happened to me one time, the customer walked back into the wash bay and is watching me wash his car.

Now that happened a few times.

What made this guy unique is he started offering me helpful advice.

Like, oh, I think can you get this spot here?

I think you missed a spot over there.

Can you redo the middle of that, you know, the rim there?

And he's almost bad, not almost, he's badgering me about spots in the car or spots in the wheel that need to be cleaned differently.

And I'm thinking, first of all, I'm thinking this guy is gonna have problems in life.

Okay.

14-year-old may recognize that this guy probably doesn't have a lot of friends.

But moving past that, I also thought this guy's gonna drive the car off the lot.

And it is going to get dirtier than it is right now by the time he hits the first stoplight.

And what's what's he doing?

I think oftentimes our prayers are hindered because we pray like that.

We're so consumed with fixing this spot or that spot or the other thing when they will all be there tomorrow.

Don't pray like you're getting your car washed.

Don't pray like you're ordering things from the waiter.

Pray like you're a dependent child who just wants to talk to his dad.

When you pray like that, it puts your dad first, you second, and he's eager to hear.

That's the privilege we have of praying to our Father through the Son.

God, we're grateful that you have opened the ear of heaven towards us.

We do pray, knowing that you often don't answer our prayers the way we would want them answered on the timetable we have.

And so so much of this pattern of prayer here is learning to wait.

But it is easier to wait knowing that your ear is towards us because we are in the Son.

We are one with Christ through faith in him.

So, God, teach us to wait while we wait for you to answer.

Uh, but give us the faith to do that holding fast to Christ.

It's in his name we pray.

Amen.

And now, for parting words for Pastor Jesse Johnson.

Thanks for joining us.

If you're in the Washington, D.C.

area, I would love to see you at Emmanuel Bible Church.

For more information on our church or our current service times, go to ibc.church.

For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.

location, go to TMS.edu.

I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with Jesus.