Lord, teach us to pray – Luke 11:1-13 – Grant Vissers

Good morning. Morning if hey, I wanna I wanna

say welcome to all of you. If you're new, if you're

visiting with U.S. special welcome to you.

My name is Grant and I'm one of the pastors here at the church.

And it is it's good to worship together.

So whether this feels like something you've been doing for

the entirety of your life or whether it's something that is

that's kind of brand new, I'm I'm glad that you're here.

It's good. It's good to be together.

Thanks guys. Perfect.

If so, we're going to be in Luke Chapter 11, and Luke Chapter 11

Luke 11 · chapter mention Luke 11 · chapter mention

is most of the way through your Bibles.

And so I just want to say we're going to work our way through

it. I'm not going to read it at the

beginning, but we're going to land in Luke.

We've been working our way through the entirety of the

Gospel of Luke and we're reading every single line, every single

verse, every single word, and really trying to wrestle it out

for our own lives, both individually, maybe in your

household as a family, as a church, for us, as a community.

What does this mean? What does it challenge us into

and toward? And we're almost halfway

through. So if you've been here since the

beginning, you can do a little bit of math.

We're almost halfway through. But I think the best thing for

you to do is to get in front of you.

I love as we gather, as we're able to worship together, to

read together. And so I'd encourage you to do

it. I'm going to have it up on the

slides here. And if you would like a Bible,

though, if you want like a real physical Bible, we do have those

hanging at the back of the sanctuary over here.

And I feel more than welcome to get up and go grab one.

If you write all over it and want to take it home at the end

of the day, that's fantastic. That's yours, our gift to you.

Take it, please. I would love to one day realize

that we need to buy more Bibles because all of our Bibles just

walked out the door and that we had no more left on that

trolley. So we love that for you.

But Luke Chapter 11, find it on your phones, find it on a tablet

Luke 11 · chapter mention

or read along with us on the screens.

But let me pray as we begin. God, thanks for your love.

Thanks for your grace. Thank you that you're with us.

Yeah, I'm grateful. I'm grateful that you in your

wisdom, choose to call us into community, not into isolation,

not into loneliness. We got into meaningful

relationship. And thanks to that, meaningful

relationship is with you and with others.

So, yeah, as we look specifically about prayer today

and how it might change our relationship to you and our

relationship with others, God, I do pray that you would challenge

us, kind of break down anything inside of us that needs to be

broken down, build up and encourage us in the places where

we need to be encouraged. Yeah, we're gonna trust that

you're gonna do this today as we wrestle out your word and what

it means for our lives. So God, thanks in advance for

what you're going to do, what you've already done today in

Jesus name, Amen. So today we are talking about

prayer and I've shared this story a couple of times in

different places and spaces. And so it may not be a new story

for you and I think that's OK. But a few years ago, this was

years, this was a few years before I landed here, I was

asked by someone to meet and this is how that e-mail went.

It usually how these emails go said, hey, Grant, can we meet?

I need to talk to you about something period.

And it gave a few times and suggestions about when we could

meet and you know, location coffee shops that we could go,

but that was it. And I gotta tell you, like when

you receive those emails, you know what that like that could

be anything, right? Immediately you start thinking

like, what is this about? What are we going to talk about?

What we need to like, what did I say?

What do we need to meet about? And so like I said, years ago,

had this request. And so we set a time and we met

at a local coffee shop and we sat down and we did the whole

small talk thing, like, how's it going?

How's your family? How are things in your life?

And then we got to the point in the conversation where I said, I

still don't know why we're here, so I gotta ask.

And I just simply said, hey, what is it that you want to talk

about? Like at some point in the

conversation, you just have to name the thing, why are we here?

And it's good. Like, let's talk about the real

thing. Let's not talk about the surface

level things. Let's get to what really

matters. And so this person that I was

meeting with, he paused. And then he looked up and he

said to me, after a few seconds of silence, he said, I, I don't

think I know how to pray. And I went, hey, thanks for

sharing that super vulnerable, honest thing.

And you gotta keep in mind like this is somebody who was active

in the church, like he was a follower of Jesus, grew up in

the church, spent many, many Sundays in the church worshiping

alongside other faithful members of the church, praying and

praying together, praying out loud and leading.

And still got to a point in his life where he really sat down

and thought about it and realized, like, I'm not sure

that I know how to pray. Or at least that I know how to

pray in the way I feel I should or need to.

Or I am called to or would like to and and want to.

And maybe that's not dissimilar to how you feel in certain

seasons, maybe even in this season, like you don't know how

to do the thing that you want to do that you feel you ought to

need to are led and called to do.

Like you might not know how to pray prayer when you get to

simply like the base value heart of it is talking with God.

That's it. Prayer is talking with God and

we all do it or need to do it at some point or another in this

life. Like whether it's the daily

prayers of the grandma who rises early to pray for her grandkids

every single day. Or whether it's the urgent and

unfamiliar kind of awkward prayers of the father whose kid

is sick in the hospital. He's not quite sure how to do

the thing that he knows he needs to do.

Whether it's doubt filled, angry prayers that you pray after

you've lost somebody significant to you.

When a relationship goes sideways in a way that you can't

now navigate and figure out, all of us come to a place where we

need to pray and where we do pray.

I think the problem is that for many of us, we resist for so

long. This interior life, this

contemplative life, this slowed down, introspective way of

really wrestling with the deep things of our heart and our mind

and our soul and our body and our relationships with God and

with others. We push against it for so long

that it takes a moment of crisis for us to be brought to a place

where we then need to pray. Something has to happen in order

to push us into a place of vulnerability.

Because I don't know about you, but I think like human beings

were really good at running from vulnerability with ourselves and

with others. And instead, we live these lives

that are so busy or so numbed, which are often the same thing,

that it takes something catastrophic to push us to a

place of prayer. When we live life this way,

Ronald Rolheiser writes, we end up as good people, but as people

who are not very deep, he says. Not bad, just busy.

Not necessarily immoral, just distracted.

Not lacking in soul, just preoccupied.

Not disdaining depth, just lacking in practice.

And prayer takes practice. So I Thomas Merton says if you

want a life of prayer, the way to get it is to pray.

There's there's no magic formula, there's no like if

this, then not say these words and all will be well.

Absolutely you will understand it.

The only way to do it is simply to do it.

Jesus we see all throughout the Gospels.

We've seen it already in the book of Luke.

He lives a life of prayer. He goes into these moments and

out of these moments. All of his ministry is filled

with Jesus moving into quiet places in order to pray.

And at the beginning of every single significant thing that we

see happening in Jesus's life and in his ministry, we first

see him moving into a time of prayer.

He prays and then he goes because it's in prayer that I

heard one person say Jesus gets his marching orders.

Prayer keeps him close to the Father.

Prayer for Jesus is where he spent time with his Father.

It's where his own identity was confirmed as Son of God.

It's where he steps into all of his life as it was directed by

the Father, and that's how he stayed in step and aligned with

the will of God all throughout his life and his ministry.

And so it's not surprising to me that we see Jesus's teaching on

prayer as rising out of his own moment of prayer.

It says now Jesus was praying in a certain place and when he

finished praying, so the ciples wait, one of his disciples said

to him, Lord, teach us to pray as John taught his disciples.

It's out of Jesus's own prayer life, his own interior life, his

own life of examining himself before God, that the disciples

go, Hey Jesus, can you teach us to pray like that?

Can you teach us to pray like you pray?

There's something about the way in which Jesus is praying.

For starters, the disciples see Jesus praying.

They're witness to it. And when Jesus finishes praying,

one of his disciples then says, Lord, teach us to pray.

Give us the same language, Jesus, that you have.

Give us the same posture that you have.

Whatever it is, whatever this is that we just witness it

witnessed, God would you give us that we want, whatever that is.

I tried buying my shirts Blue Jays or my I tried buying my

girls Blue Jays shirts this week and that wasn't possible or easy

at all. And listen like that.

Yeah, World Series. The week of the World Series is

not the right time to go out and try to buy a Blue Jay shirt for

your kids. I looked online, I looked in

stores. There were shirts available, but

I wasn't willing to price there to pay the price that they that

they cost. I couldn't, I couldn't find them

for starters. I just couldn't find anything

anywhere. And then when I found the the

shirts, they were just, I wasn't willing to pay that price for

them. When you cheer for a team, you

wear a shirt or a jersey. Or when you jump on a bandwagon,

you go out to buy a shirt. Or at least you try to buy a

shirt for your kids because at the end of the like, the shirt

is meant to identify you with something, right?

As a fan of the team, with the team alongside the team.

Like, so there's something about sports where like fans, I don't

know why we do this, but we say when the sports team wins, like,

well, we just, we did it. We did it.

Like what? We, I wasn't involved.

I'd like that's not the wheel I'm talking about, but the

listen, the jersey identifies you with the team and, and

really like at the end of the day, that's what Jesus is

disciples are asking him for. That's what I want us to see

here. When a person becomes a

Christian, a person becomes a follower of Jesus, their entire

life has changed. And it's not just on Sundays,

and it's not just on some days. Like it's all the time.

All of life has changed all of the time, and so this request,

Lord teach us to pray is a very specific request because I hope

you notice this. He says teach us to pray as John

taught his disciples. So it's a very specific ask.

They're not asking Jesus just to give us language of prayer.

They're asking for something very specific.

Teach us to pray as John taught his disciples.

They're asking for a team jersey.

They're asking Jesus to give them a prayer that would

identify them uniquely and specifically as Jesus's

followers. They're not just asking for some

generic prayer that will maybe get them to a place that they're

not already at. They are asking for Jesus to

give them very specifically his prayer as their rabbi, as their

teacher that they could then live into, and a prayer that

would form them and shape them into a community.

Jewish rabbis would teach their disciples specific prayers and

it was common. You could tell which rabbi A

disciple belonged to based on the prayers that they prayed.

And so John taught his disciples to pray.

People would know who's John who, who were John's disciples.

They would know who they were following as a rabbi based on

this prayer that John taught them.

Specific prayers that linked students, disciples to rabbis,

teachers. Something about the way that

they prayed and the words that they use communicated as a

disciple, who their teacher was. And so the disciples, what

they're really asking for is for Jesus to teach them to pray in a

way that would identify them uniquely as Jesus's disciples.

They're not asking Jesus to teach them to pray like John

taught his disciples to pray, as in in the way John taught his

disciples. They're saying, Jesus give us a

unique voice and a unique prayer that will show people that we

belong to you, that we are yours.

That's what their ask is. They want to be identified as

Jesus Christians. You, Christian, are those who

are formed by prayer. Christians are ones who are

identified in the way they pray as individuals and even more as

a community. We are a community that is and

needs to continually be shaped and formed by the way Jesus

prayed and how he taught us to pray.

Because it's through repetition of the prayer and its messages,

they get ahold of our hearts and our minds and they shape the

decisions we make and the lives that we live, the imprint

themselves on us as a community. And so the prayer that Jesus

taught his disciples to pray and the prayer that Christians have

said now for centuries, the prayer that we continue to say

as followers of Jesus, we become more of that prayer as we pray

it. Henry Nowen calls prayer the

breadth of your life. It is what gives you life.

Again, I want us to notice that the entire conversation rises

out of not Jesus deciding to teach about prayer, but out of

Jesus is praying life. And so I think an honest

question to ask yourself is simply, is prayer the breath of

my life? Like what gives me life?

Jesus was praying in a certain place.

Prayer is where God challenges you and where God convicts you.

Prayer is where God heals and restores you.

Prayer is where God longs to meet you in the midst of your

hurt and your healing. It's where you can work out the

deepest things of your heart and your soul.

It's where you workout the loss that you've experienced and the

ongoing pain of sadness and sorrow and grief.

It's where you work out and wrestle with the relationship

that is sideways and you don't quite know how it got there or

how to move forward. It's where you can wrestle out

and experience forgiveness that you need to receive, and it's

where you are challenged to give the forgiveness that you need to

go and hand out and live into. It's where we wrestle with.

It's where we face the false sense of self that twists our

understanding of who you are, who I am, and who God is.

That's how we understand who we are.

And the wonderful thing about prayer is that Jesus gives us a

pattern to follow. Anyone can do it.

Anyone can pray at any moment and Jesus gives you words to

utter when you don't know what to say.

Jesus says start here. Pray these words, and so he said

to them. When you pray, say, Father

hallowed, be your name, your Kingdom come give us each day

Our Daily Bread, and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves

forgive everyone who is indebted to us, and lead us not into

temptation. Now that prayer might be a

little bit different then the prayer that you are used to

saying. Matthew's version is longer.

If Matthew's version is like Jesus's master class on prayer,

this is like the Ted Talk version where it's like right to

the point. He's gotta stay on time and he's

quick, but I want us to see these same lines, he says.

Father hallowed be your name, she says.

Halo, make Holy Honor the name of God to how something simply

means to declare that it is holy, to name it as holy.

Now, I don't know about you, but God definitely doesn't need me

to declare him holy. There's nothing like there's

nothing changing about God when I decide to declare that Jesus

is holy. I like, I'm not that great.

What happens, though, when we pray this prayer is that I'm

forced to speak for myself when I hallow the name of God.

When I make God's name holy, I am forced to face the ways and

places and times in my own life when I have not made God's name

holy or when I have profaned the name of God.

My declaration changes nothing about who God is, but it does

change how I approach God to pray.

This prayer requires me to confront what is going on in my

heart and my mind and and the ways in my life that have not

honored God in His Holiness. And so we pray.

God, make me aware of your holiness.

Keep me open to your presence, which is all around me.

Give me eyes to see you at work in the world.

Help me to remember the greatness of the greatness of

who you are. And help me to forget a little

bit the greatness I think I can claim to have and hold on to, he

says. Father, hallowed be your name,

your Kingdom come. To declare God's Kingdom come is

to declare that my own Kingdom has to die, right?

This is a prayer of surrender. This is a part of surrender into

the hands of God and His coming Kingdom is to say I'm not gonna

build my own little Kingdom. It's to say I'm not gonna pursue

my own greatness in little ways. It's to say, God, your Kingdom

come, I'm all in on your Kingdom.

Help me to forget the ways I still try to claim and take hold

of and put stake in my own little ways of brokenness in an

attempt to make myself greater than I am or ought to be.

Your Kingdom come, we pray. God, allow what I do today to be

in line with your Kingdom and not mine.

Allow people to experience more of who you are and how I am.

Would people see me act not out of selfish ambition, but with

humility and grace, like we pray God your Kingdom come give us

this day, Our Daily Bread. Jesus continues.

He says listen as you learn to surrender, you also learn what

it means to depend on another. Jesus's prayer reminds his

followers not to take an extra shirt or spare change for the

road, but to go with urgency and to trust that God will provide

what you need. This prayer prays every single

day in words that I love. God, give me today what I need

for today. Help me to stay present to

myself and to others and to you. God.

Would you give me what I need? Yes, like physically bred for my

body but also for my soul. How would you speak to me?

Would you meet me in the moment of this day and would you give

me just what I need for today? He says.

Forgive us our sins as we forgive everyone who is indebted

to us and we pray. God, remind me of my need.

Remind me of my need to be forgiven.

Help me not to just keep forgiveness at arms length out

there with everybody who I need to go and forgive because

they've wronged me. Helped me to 1st recognize that

I need to be forgiven and then help me to experience Your grace

and Your Mercy. Remind me of my forgiveness so

that I can live out of that same place of grace and mercy and

forgive others. Help the way I am to be rooted

in Your grace and not my own. Doling out of forgiveness over

here but not over here and holding on to grudge here and

then offering grace here. How would you remind me of how

badly I need to be forgiven? And then you concludes here, and

lead us not into temptation. Finally, says God, keep me in

step with your spirit, Keep me in step with your will, Keep me

in step with your life and your love and not my own desire.

Help me not to slip mindlessly into evil.

Help me to be freed from fear. Help me to live released.

Jesus says when you pray, when you pray, say pray like this.

And I gotta tell you, on the one hand, I I say, if you don't know

where to pray or how to pray or where to start, pray these words

verbatim. Start by reading them every

single day. Try to do it today and then

tomorrow try to do it today and the next day try to do it today.

And she says pray this pattern. Live into this pattern of prayer

and then eventually find your own words.

Eventually make it such a part of who you are and how you are

and how you are before God that your own words flow out of this

same prayer. When you pray, pray this

pattern, pray like this. Follow these words.

Allow them to define you and to change you.

And one of the things that I don't ever want you or us to

forgive is this, he says. Give us.

Forgive us for we ourselves. Forgive everyone who's in debt.

Lead us not. This is a prayer that will

forever link you and bind you and shape you and form you

inside of community. And it's a prayer that you pray

alongside and with every other follower of Jesus who has ever

prayed it. Give us, Forgive us.

Jesus says when you pray, pray like this, follow this pattern,

use these words. But then he continues because he

doesn't just give the disciples words to memorize and recite.

It's not just a + b = C equation for Jesus.

It's not just when you get to the end.

Lead us not into temptation. Period.

You will be a master of prayer. He gives them a posture with

which to pray. He challenges them how they

ought to be as they approach God.

When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, they're

also asking them to teach them how to pray like Jesus prayed.

As in, they see something in him that is different.

And we have to remember the disciples weren't rookies at

prayer. They're not like, this isn't

like, oh, well, Jesus, we've been seeing you do this thing

and you call that prayer for a little while now.

Like, would you, could you just teach us how to do that?

Like the disciples have memorized Jewish prayers since

their childhood, and they have been reciting those prayers

since their childhood. They were in their own rights,

masters of prayer, and yet they still see something in Jesus

that is so different that they say, Jesus, teach us to pray

like that. Give us that same posture, that

same heart that you have, whatever that is.

Would you show us that? And so maybe like you, maybe you

feel to some sense like you've plateaued in your prayer life or

that like you've peaked or that you've hit a rut or that you're,

you know, you're doing the same thing, but it all just feels

rote or like maybe at worst, you feel like you've mastered prayer

and you're not quite sure what to do next.

Jesus continues. He says to them this Which of

you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him,

Friend, lend ME3 loaves. For a friend of mine has arrived

on a journey and I have nothing to set before him and he will

answer from within. Do not bother me.

The door is now shut and my children are with me in bed.

I cannot get up and give you anything.

I tell you though, he will not get up and give him anything

because he is a friend. Yet because of your shameless

audacity, he will rise and give him whatever he needs.

And I tell you, ask and it will be given to you.

Seek and you will find knock and it will be open to you.

For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks fines, and

to the one who knocks, it will be opened.

Jesus says more than a pattern, more than words to pray.

The posture of prayer that we are to live into is 1 of

boldness and persistent prayer. Jesus says pray boldly, and he

says pray persistently. Shameless audacity.

Now I've got to admit that I come to this line and I hear 2

very different things echoing in my ears.

I feel attention when I read this and when I really ask

myself whether or not I pray in this way.

And in the one year I hear echoing people like Kierkegaard

who said the function of prayer is not to influence God, but

rather to change the nature of the one who prays.

And so I say thank you. It's not about influencing God.

It's about changing me. OK, God change me.

But then on the other side, in my other ear, I hear people like

Karl Bart, who writes God is not Deaf, He listens.

More than that, he acts. He does not act in the same way.

Whether we pray or not, prayer exerts an influence upon God's

action, even upon his existence. That is what the word answer

means. And so I sit here and I go,

Which is it? Is prayer about God exerting

influence on me? Or when I pray, am I actually

changing what God would do? Sometimes my prayers are

answered. Sometimes my prayers aren't

answered, at least not in the way that I would have liked or

hoped or longed for. And I know that I don't need to

ask you if you've ever had a prayer feel like it's gone

unanswered or if you know the pain of a prayer that's answered

in the way that you didn't want. And so maybe you feel a little

bit like me and you come back to this verse and you struggle to

read this line. Ask and it will be given to you.

Seek and you will find knock and it will be open to you because

you say in your own prayer, God, you said, and I gotta tell you

like I've prayed these spurs got you said that you give good

things and good gifts like you. You're the one who does.

You said seek. You said breed persistent.

You said that we will find. You said that doors were gonna

be opened. God, you said ask and you'll

receive and I'm asking over and over again and it feels like

you're not answering it in the way that in the way that I'm

hoping for. You said everyone does my

prayer. Maybe this thought has gone

through your mind. Does my prayer even matter to

God? Like, why am I gonna pray if

you're just gonna disappoint me and let me down anyway?

And, and in some beautiful and complex way that I can't ever

hope to explain to you, the answer to those questions are

both yes. Does our prayer influence God?

Yeah, sometimes. Does it change me?

Hopefully all the time. Yeah, it does.

And that's the tension that we are challenged to live into.

That's what I need prayer to do in my life.

I need prayer to challenge me. I I need prayer to be the place

where I surrender my will in favour of God's will.

I need prayer to be the place where I commit to building God's

Kingdom and not my Kingdom, where I'm brought out of

alignment with my own desires and into alignment with God's

heart for compassion and humanity.

Humility. Like I need prayer to change me.

And you need prayer to be the place where God confronts you

and changes you, and where you wrestle out the deepest things

of your heart and your soul. And God's design is also that

you would be a coworker with him.

God likes to be asked. God doesn't need our wisdom or

knowledge or even the information that we bring to

prayer as we pray, But God invites us into relationship.

And that's the beautiful thing about prayer is God is inviting

you into relationship. He's not waiting for you to ask.

I'm like, well, I'm just gonna hold off and see what they do.

God longs to have you drawn into a relationship of intimacy with

Him, where you're known and where you know God.

And it's there. It's inside of that partnership

that God draws you into, that he involves you in the coming of

His Kingdom. And so we pray we watched a

video about Alpha, which I would highly recommend anybody and

everybody who can come out for those life groups.

But Nikki Gumbel, I once heard say, and we were talking about

this this week, say that essentially we we listen

sometimes. Sometimes God answers our

prayers in the way that we want, and sometimes He doesn't.

Sometimes people are healed, sometimes they're not.

Sometimes people are restored to life, sometimes they die.

Sometimes God shows up exactly how you were longing for, and

sometimes it feels like he's absent.

But sometimes he does. And so we're gonna keep on

asking. That's his line.

Sometimes he does, and so we're gonna keep on asking.

See a better translation of this line for the Everyone who asks

receives and the one who seeks finds the one who knocks, it

will be opened. And this I tell you, Ask, seek

and knock. A better translation would

actually be keep on asking, and there's a whole lot of great

reasons why that's the case, and I'm not going to get into them

because they're boring. But each of these verbs were

meant to see not as a past action, not as something that is

completed, not as a A + B = C K and you will find period.

What Jesus is saying is keep on asking.

It's a present action that continues forever until

Infinity. Keep on asking.

Keep on seeking. Keep on knocking.

God's not asking for you to say the right words and then you

know, so that you can finally dole out the answer that you've

been waiting for. God is inviting you to pursue a

relationship with Jesus, to continue to wrestle things out

in prayer, to do what Paul says when he writes pray without

ceasing. To be persistent and to be bold,

and to approach God and to continue to do it over and over

and over again. And in the rhythms of life.

As you are persistent and as you are bold and as you are asking

and as you are seeking and as you are knocking.

To determine whether God is changing you or whether God is

answering your prayer. And in it to explore, to find

out what you're being invited into and to see how God will

change you and how God will answer your prayer.

Last point, I promise as we wrap up Jesus ends like this.

He says what father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will

instead of a fish give him a serpent or snake?

In some translations, if you ask for an egg, will you give him a

scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know

how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the

Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?

How much more? How much more will God?

So what Jesus wants you to see is that the heart of God is 1 of

generosity toward you. God is generous with you and

longs to be and to continue to be generous with you.

These sorts of thought experiments in the Bible, and

especially when Jesus is playing with them.

What Father among you? If a son asks for a fish like,

of course not. That's the implication here.

Of course not. Of course you would never do

that. Of course the father's never

gonna give a hungry kid a serpent instead of a fish like,

or a scorpion instead of an egg like.

Of course they're gonna give what the kid needs, and the turn

is for you to wrestle with. How much more will God give you

the Holy Spirit as you seek, as you ask, as you knock, as you

pursue intimate intimacy with Jesus?

The gift of the Holy Spirit is what connects us to Jesus.

It's the Holy Spirit that leads and empowers Jesus in his

ministry. And it's the Holy Spirit that

leads and empowers you. And it takes us all the way back

to the beginning with the disciples.

First, ask Jesus. Teach us to pray because they

see Jesus praying in the power of the Holy Spirit.

What is going to allow you to pray like Jesus?

It's the gift of the Holy Spirit.

What should you ask of God in prayer and pursue?

It's the gift of the Holy Spirit.

And what is God gracious to give?

How much more will God give the Holy Spirit?

Fred Craddock says Without the Holy Spirit there was not there

is not the Church. And so God is gracious, and he

gives the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.

We're going to do something different than we've done in my

time here, and we're gonna pray together at the end of this

sermon, the Lord's Prayer. Only here's the awkwardness for

you, you who has been in the church for many, many, many,

many, many a year and has prayed the Lord's Prayer many, many,

many times. We're gonna pray Luke's version

of the Lord's Prayer. And so whether this is the first

time you're speaking these words out loud or wrestling them out

in your heart and in your mind, or whether you have prayed this

for many years in community and alone before God, I want us to

just slow down and read these words together.

And you're going to have to resist the the urge to continue

and to finish it and to make it tidy like Matthew does.

It hangs and it lingers, and that's OK because actually what

I want it to do is hang and linger with you as you leave

today and as you continue into tomorrow and the days ahead.

My prayer is actually that it would feel so unfinished that

you would continue to pray it. Over and over and over again.

And so I'm gonna pray. And then during the prayer, I'm

going to make it abundantly clear, we're going to pray this

together and invite you to open your eyes, look at the screen.

Please read this as we pray together.

God, thank you for your love and your grace.

Thank you that you are gracious and generous with us.

God, thanks that you have so much more for us than we could

hope for. Imagine.

And yet we need to wrestle out exactly what that is.

And so God in prayer, I, I do pray for us as a community and

for each person here, that we would find ourselves drawn to a

place of prayer. And in that place, we would find

more of who you are and more of who you've called us to be.

And so God, as we prayed these words, I pray, God, challenge

us, encourage us, convict us, change us, shape us, make us

yours for your namesake. And so we pray together these

words, Father hallowed, be your name, your Kingdom come, give us

each day Our Daily Bread, and forgive us our sins, for we

ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us, and lead us

not into temptation. Amen.

Amen.