Our Father

Now Jesus was praying in a certain place.

And when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.

And 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.

Well, good morning and welcome to our Church of the Grove online services this morning.

My name's Nathan, and I'm one of the pastors here.

And we're just so thankful that you're joining us today.

Whether you're at the lake, on vacation, or just at home this morning, thank you so much for spending part of your weekend with us.

If you're just joining us, we're in the middle of a series we just started last week called Teach Us to Pray.

And we really wanted to spend this summer spending time looking at how Jesus teaches his disciples on how they should pray.

And as a result, we want to be people that are praying people.

Now, if I was being honest, prayer has always been one of those things that's been confusing and difficult for me, especially at certain seasons in life.

There's been times when I've thought, man, is am I really praying to somebody?

Am I really talking to somebody that doesn't, you know, they don't see right in front of me?

And then I'm supposedly supposed to be listening to them as well.

It's always been kind of confusing in that way.

There's been seasons where I've been like, you know, does prayer really even accomplish anything?

Is there really a point in me praying and spending this time?

I could be more productive doing other things, I've thought in my head.

And prayer's just been difficult for me at times too, just because of busyness and just the noise of the world.

And I think that's something that probably deep down inside we all struggle with to some degree.

Prayer can be confusing.

I mean, you're talking to somebody that's not in the room with you.

Um, you're supposed to be listening to them as well, and that can be a confusing kind of thing to think through.

But then you also got the busyness of life and just the chaos of your day-to-day operations and work and kids and school and all the stuff that comes with life, that prayer can just be a difficult thing to do because of our busyness.

It's also we're, you know, bombarded with noise all the time, and it's hard to just spend time in the quiet and to spend time just dedicated to silence and solitude and spending time in prayer, and so prayer can be difficult.

And so this has been my story.

This has been the story of my life up until a few years ago when I read a book called A Praying Life, and it totally revolutionized the way that I viewed prayer and ultimately the way that I viewed God Himself.

And there was this quote that stood out to me, and it said, if you're not praying, then you're quietly confident that time, money, and talent are all that you need in life.

When I read that quote, it jumped off the page for me and it stood on my office wall for the longest time that I had written out.

It was a constant reminder that if I'm going to try to make an impact in this world, if I'm going to try to be an influencer and try to connect with people and love people and share the love of Jesus with others and see God do amazing things in this world, that can't rest on the shoulders of just what I bring to the table.

It can't just be about the time that I have because I don't have a whole lot of time.

It can't be about just the talent that I have because I certainly don't have a whole lot of talent.

And it can't be about the money that I have because I don't have a lot of money.

And so I need something above and beyond myself to work and to move.

And so it forced me to become a praying person.

And one of the foundational ideas when it came to prayer was that I understood that how we see God determines how we relate to him.

This is what changed my perspective on prayer altogether was how I saw God determined how I related to him in prayer.

And when you think about it, we all have different ways that we view God.

For some of us, we might view God as kind of the grandpa God.

You know, the grandpa God.

He's been around forever.

He's moving a little slower and slower each and every day.

He's got a white flowing beard like Gandalf, a voice like Morgan Freeman.

He's got candies in his pocket that he's always willing to give you when you come over.

But you don't see him so that often, and he hasn't quite kind of figured out how to text.

He's not kind of up to date with the current culture, he's out of touch with reality.

And that's how some of us view God, that kind of grandpa out of touch with reality God.

Some of us view God more as like a Santa Claus, and it's just about what we can get, and he's watching us when we sleep, he knows if we've been good or bad, and we just kind of bring him our wish list, and as we bring him our wish list, then hopefully we get everything that we have put on the list.

For others of us, maybe we see God as the scorekeeper God, where he's kind of keeping a ledger to determine how our good deeds or our bad deeds are going.

And so if we go to church, maybe that's one point.

If we swear on the way to church at another car that cuts us off, that's negative two points.

And he's just constantly updating our score to kind of see where we stand with him.

For some of us, maybe we see God more as a kind of a cosmic force where he's just kind of impersonal, it's nameless, this universal force.

There's no way to have a relationship with him.

It's just abstract, distant, and elusive.

For others, maybe you see God as this uh angry God.

And the angry God is someone that loves to push people around and to make them pay.

He wants to crush them under the thunderbolt of destruction.

I meet people that have this view of God all the time.

They'll say, Man, I can't come to church because if I came to church, man, the walls, the roof would cave in on me, the lightning bolts would strike me dead as I walk through the doors of the church.

We all have different views of God.

And how we view God ultimately determines how we relate to Him.

And there's millions of different views, some that are more accurate than others, but I think the best way that we can understand who God is is by looking at the person of Jesus and what Jesus ultimately teaches us about God Himself.

And so when you think about biblical times, if you rewind back and you read the Bible kind of story and you kind of look at biblical history, back in the time of Jesus, when he comes onto the scene, the Jewish people were worshiping the one true God, but it wasn't in this personal relationship way.

There were sacrifices, there were outward practices that had to be done, there were rituals, there were priests, there were temples that had to be attended.

There was not a personal relationship that people had with God.

And Jesus comes on the scene and Jesus transforms everyone's view of who God was.

In fact, people thought that Jesus was a heretic.

I mean, one of the reasons that he was crucified was because Jesus pretty much held up this view that God was a personal God and the way that he related to God was so radically different from how the world and how the religious traditions of the day had related to God.

Jesus comes onto the scene and when he's talking to his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount that we've been walking through in Matthew chapter 6, and he starts to talk to them about how to pray.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

This is how he says, Matthew 6, 9, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Now you can imagine as Jesus says these words, he's saying, he's talking to a personal God, and he's calling that God Father.

We know from other parts of Scripture that this is not just a kind of formal father, but this is an intimate relationship where he's saying Abba or Daddy or Papa, if you want to say that.

I mean, this is an intimate relationship that he's inferring that we can have with a holy God.

Now I know when you hear the word father, for some of you you might think, man, that doesn't bring up good memories in your mind.

For some of you, when you think of your father, you think of your earthly father, and you think about maybe how he was distant.

Maybe you don't even know who your father was.

He was absent from an early age.

Maybe your father was there for you physically, but he wasn't emotionally present in your life.

And so it doesn't have positive views when you hear the word father.

For others of you, maybe you had a great father, maybe you had a great dad that was there to celebrate your successes and pick you up from your failures.

And it doesn't matter really what your father figure was like when you were growing up.

Our heavenly father isn't a bigger version of our earthly father, but he's the perfect version of our earthly dad.

And so when Jesus comes on the scene and he's saying, hey, it's our father that we're praying to.

It's about we're calling to our daddy.

It's this personal, intimate relationship that we can have with him, this intimate connection.

And we have to understand that if we uh have a warped idea about prayer, it's probably because we have a dysfunctional relationship with our Heavenly Father.

Once we begin to understand that we are communicating with our Father, our good and perfect Father, then it changes the way that we pray and the way that we relate and communicate with Him.

I love that Jesus gives us four Gospels that all give us four different perspectives in on the same life of Jesus.

And in Luke chapter 11, Jesus is sharing the same thing that he's sharing in Matthew chapter 6, but he's giving it to us from a little different perspective.

Luke 11 · chapter mention Matthew 6 · chapter mention

This is what it says in Luke chapter 11, verse 1.

Luke 11:1

It says, Now Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, Teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.

And he said to them, When you pray, Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us of our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us and lead us not into temptation.

We see Jesus teach his disciples that we should come to God as Father once again.

But then listen to how Jesus continues the passage in verse 5.

And he said to them, Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, Friend, lend me three 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 is not to get up and give him anything because he is a friend, yet because of his imprudence, his 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 every one who asks, receives, and the one that seeks, finds, and the one that knocks, it will be open to you.

Now this story doesn't make sense unless we have a correct view of God being our Father.

If God's our boss, which is how many of us view God, if God's a boss to us, then this story makes absolutely no sense.

I mean, we would never show up at our boss's house, right, and knock on the door at midnight and beg for bread to be given to us.

And certainly after the boss says, go leave me alone, I'm already in bed, we wouldn't continue to knock on the door, right?

Because that's just not how we have a relationship with our boss.

I mean, with our boss, we want to make sure that we're not gonna do anything that's gonna cause us uh to possibly lose our job or caught question, you know, our profession or our career or any financial uh repercussions that might come from that.

But if we view God as father, then this story begins to make sense.

Because here's what we know that children pray aggressively.

Children pray aggressively.

I've got two kids.

I've got a six-year-old and a three-year-old, and uh we've got one more on the way that will make her appearance literally any day now.

And I know that my kids will ask aggressively for whatever they want or need.

Um, it's without a doubt, every single day, you know, they'll be on the porch and they'll come to me and they'll say, Hey, um, like we're thirsty, we need something to drink.

And I'll be like, okay, hang on, let me do something.

I'm trying to figure out something, I'm trying to finish this up, give me a minute.

And without fail, it's a constant asking until I actually get up, go to the refrigerator, and get them something to drink.

They have no qualms and no concerns about asking aggressively for the things that they want and the things that they need.

And this is why Christian prayer only works in family terms.

If you view God as a boss where you have to work and you have to earn your approval from him, then you'll never truly understand prayer.

Because if you view God as a boss, then the only time that you're going to ask your boss for something is when you know that you've done a good job.

You know that you've been working hard, you know that you've kind of lived up to a certain standard, and as a result, you deserve to get the promotion or get the raise or to get the new office or whatever it might be.

And that's the only time you're going to approach your boss if you uh are confident that what you are asking for has been made available because of the way that you've worked and lived as a result.

But when we view God as a father, then it changes everything.

We no longer come to him based on our achievements or based on our success or based on all the accomplishments that we might have.

We instead come to him just because of the relationship.

We come to him because what he has to give us is what we need, and a good father gives good gifts to his children.

And so we don't come with the formal statement.

We don't have to get all dressed up and we don't have to come to him and use proper terms and different language.

Instead, we come to him in an intimate way, much like my kids will come to me and they are themselves.

They don't act a certain way so that I'll give them what they want.

Instead, they are themselves.

They come to them and come to me in an intimate way.

And that's the same way we should approach the Father.

I always thought it was funny that in church world that you would occasionally run into people, and as they began to pray, maybe it was for a meal or maybe it was a prayer meeting of some kind, and they would begin to pray and they would totally have like a different prayer voice.

It would be deep, right, and they would start using all these real big words, theological words that no one truly undernew understood what they meant.

And you kind of would go, like one time you were talking to me like a normal person, and now you're talking in a completely different voice, and that's totally missing the point of what prayer is.

Prayer is approaching our father as children, and we come to him in an intimate way.

But Jesus doesn't stop there.

The story continues in verse 11 of Luke 11, it says, What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent, or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion.

Um, so you see that the children pray trustingly.

They trust their heavenly father to give them what they need.

No father in their right mind, if their child asks for a reasonable request of a fish or an egg, would give them a snake or a scorpion.

There's no father in his right mind that would give them something not only that they don't need, but something that would cause them danger or cause them harm.

Little children expect good gifts.

They trust that their father is going to give good gifts to their children.

And this is ultimately what the child-parent relationship is all about.

And the younger the child is, the more trusting they ultimately are in their parents to give them good gifts.

Now here's the interesting thing: that your father gives you what you would have asked for if you knew everything that he knows.

See, there's times when my kids will come to me and they'll want something.

Typically, it's like candy or some snack or chocolate or something in our pantry.

And I know that dinner time's coming and that it's not good for them to get the sucker right before dinner.

And so I say, no.

I tell them no to their request because I know that dinner's coming and they need dinner and the nutrition that it's going to bring more than they need the sucker or the candy.

Um, this happens all the time with our kids, right?

That they want things, but we know as parents that that's not the best thing for them, so we say no.

But our kids continue to ask aggressively, they still trust their heavenly, they still trust their parents, and that's the same result that we should have.

You probably have prayed things in your life that, man, you felt like God didn't hear you or didn't answer you or told you no on certain things.

But God gives us what we need if we knew everything that He knows at the time.

And so we've got to understand that prayer is not just coming to Him as Father and coming as children that pray aggressively, but we also pray trustingly.

But then listen to this.

In verse 13, he closes out this passage and he says, This if then you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those that ask?

So he makes this comparison here and he says, Listen, you who are sinful, parents, sinful, fathers, earthly fathers are sinful.

We have a depraved nature within us.

He says, If you are sinful, how much will your heavenly father, who's perfect, give you good gifts when you ask?

How much more will your heavenly father give you the Holy Spirit when you ask?

This is the Father that we have.

And so when it comes to prayer, the foundation of prayer, as Jesus lays out an example of how we should pray, it always starts with our Father.

We come as children to a good Father that gives good gifts to his children.

And so when we come, we come with boldness.

We come aggressively asking, asking, not in an irreverent way, but we come as intimate children relating to our Father.

We come as children that are trusting that our Father is going to give us the good things that we need for our lives.

See, how we see God ultimately determines how we relate to Him.

And so if you're struggling with prayer, if prayer has always been kind of a confusing thing for you, if something that maybe you have never really made a priority in time for in your life, the first question I would ask for you to answer is how do I see my God?

Do I see him as a boss?

Do I see him as a grandpa?

Do I see him as Santa?

Do I see him as angry?

Or do I see him as a father that I can come to, that I can crawl up in his lap and have an intimate conversation with?

A good father that will give good gifts to his children.

Listen, I fell so often on my fatherly duties.

I'm busy, I can be distracted, I can be easily annoyed, I'm not always patient.

But nothing brings joy to my soul than when one of my boys will come and crawl up in my lap and begin to tell me a story or tell me about their day and just the joy that that brings to me.

Ben, our youngest, who's three, he's a cartoon character.

He's just full of life and personality, and um, he's so funny when he talks and tells stories.

And so we'll sit on the couch and he'll tell me about something that happened to the day, or tell me about a TV show that he watched, and he'll recount all of it and his facial expressions, and just hearing his voice brings me so much joy as a father.

And as a father that's earthly, that's sinful.

I want to give good gifts to my children when they ask.

And so prayer is about relating and connecting to our heavenly father.

And we don't do so in a formal way, we do so with an intimate father-son, father-daughter kind of relationship.

You know, that's the thing about Ben when he sits in my lap and we begin to talk and converse back and forth, and he's telling me stories.

Sometimes the stories go all over the place, sometimes they don't make sense, sometimes I don't even understand some of the words that he's saying.

Um, and they're they're, you know, always interrupted.

There might be the word poopy, you know, thrown in there in the middle of the conversation.

But he comes to me in an intimate relationship.

And that's how we should approach our God, our heavenly Father.

We should come with an intimate relationship.

And I know that as we talk to God in prayer, a lot of times our minds can wonder, yeah, that happens with kids when their kids talk to their parents.

Sometimes we can say things that don't make total sense.

Yeah, that happens in that type of relationship.

Sometimes we can be so distracted that we're talking about one thing and then we start talking about the other.

Yeah, that happens in a parent-kid relationship.

And so when we come to God, we have to understand that we are coming to a perfect father as his imperfect children.

And if we don't understand that, if that's not the foundation of our prayer life, then we will never understand prayer and we will never make prayer the priority it needs to be in our lives.

Now you might be listening to this this morning and watching today, and you might be going, Man, I've never thought of God as being a heavenly father.

I've never thought of him being a good dad, a papa that wants to give good gifts to his children.

And today, you want to have that intimate relationship with Jesus.

Man, I would encourage you to do so.

There's no greater decision that we can ever make than following Jesus, putting our faith and trust in Jesus, and making him our Lord and Savior of our life to be in an intimate relationship with our Heavenly Father.

And so if that's the decision that you need to make or you would like more information about how you can take your next steps and how you can begin to have that intimate relationship with your Heavenly Father, we would love to have a conversation with you.

And so you can do that by simply texting the word, start to follow, all one word to 9700.

And we'll have somebody follow up with you this week and give you some resources and some tools to help you begin to have that intimate relationship with your heavenly father.

And for those of you that are followers of Jesus, man, spend time this week.

Spend time looking to your God as a heavenly father, a good father that wants to give good gifts to his children.

And as you relate to him in that way, I promise you, it will take your prayer life and your intimacy and your trusting nature to your God to an entirely different level.

How we see God ultimately determines how we relate to him.

Man, see God as your perfect Heavenly Father and see God change your life as a result.

Let me pray for us.

Lord Jesus, I thank you so much for who you are.

And Lord, I thank you that you are our Father.

You are not a replica of our earthly fathers, however difficult those situations might have been, but Lord, you are the perfect Heavenly Father.

And so, Lord, we look to you as our imperfect children, looking to their Father for guidance, for wisdom, for the good gifts that you desire to give us.

Lord, thank you that we can come to you and relate to you as your children, that we can trust you and we can come to you aggressively and boldly because we are your children and you are our father.

Lord, help shape our mind and transform our minds to see you as our Father.

Take all the other mindsets and the thought processes that we have about who you are and remove them so that we can see you as Jesus and as the Bible clearly tells us that we should.

And so, Lord, we love you.

We thank you again for this message, for your word and for your truth.

And we thank you that we are your children and we can come to you in an intimate way through prayer.

And it's in your name we pray.

In the name of Jesus.

Amen.