May 24, 2026: Amen - Matthew 6:13.

As we come to our conclusion of our seventeen week series on the

Lord's Prayer, as some of you are thinking, that is 16 more in

a row than I've ever heard on the Lord's Prayer, and that's

OK. That's OK.

I'm also aware that the Lord is warning us about wordiness this

morning as we come into this final message in this series.

All joking aside, I've enjoyed very much engaging with many of

you about this series, and some of the most striking comments to

me have been from people who have, who are now or have in

their past been going through very deep water, whether that's

challenging trials or the waters of grief.

How important this prayer is to your devotional life and to your

processing of your grief, really to clinging to the Lord and

faith. And that's what we're going to

talk about this morning. I thought that it would be good

for us to do a review, sort of fly over of the whole series

this morning and then try to land the plane as we conclude on

this last and very pregnant word.

Amen. What does that mean?

We'll talk about that, but first of all, to remind us of why we

even did this in the first place.

In my beginnings as lead pastor at UCC, I wanted to start off in

the spring giving series on the basics.

And for centuries, the church has used the Apostles Creed, the

10 Commandments, and the Lord's Prayer as a very important way

to teach the basics of biblical Christianity and deep

discipleship. You can think of this, these

three also as a way of a believing, a way of behaving and

a way of communing, communing with our Lord, things that are

very important for our Christian journey with God.

Again, to review, we looked very carefully at the opening our

Father in heaven. We spent several weeks just on

talking about what this means that the word father implies a

family. It is a word of family and it

also implies if you are going to learn about Christianity, the

Christian God, which is the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son and

the Holy Spirit. And the only way we can have a

relationship with God and call him Father is through a theology

of adoption. Made possible because of God's

will, made possible because of the mission, the person and the

work of his Son, Jesus Christ. Also, God, the God man by the

Holy Spirit, who is called the Spirit of adoption.

So we really focused in on that first word and talked about

prayer being a family affair. We cannot even pray without the

good news of the gospel rescuing us from ourselves in order to

restore relationship with God. Focused on Ephesians to build

out that theology. We also consider how important

this first word is, which is a plural possessive pronoun that

reminds us that we are a part of a family, That indeed God is not

just adopting us as individuals, but he's adopting a whole group

of people to be related to one another as brothers and sisters

in Christ his church. Very important to remember that

we pray this not only as individuals but as family

members of God's family. We also looked at this term

Father and continue to think about what this means with this

close association with heaven, our Father in heaven.

And we went to Isaiah 40 to talk about the fact that God is both

very close and intimate with us as a father.

Indeed, He knows the number of hairs on our heads, which is a

far smaller number for me than it is for many of you.

God be praised and yet he is also in this intimacy, the one

who made the heavens and the earth.

He is the one that made the farthest galaxies and he's he's

has the the whole oceans in the palm of his hands and the the

size of him. His immensity is beyond

comprehending. And yet this God, this big God

is also intimate and close with us because of the gospel.

These two things, his, his intimacy and his greatness are

hard, hard to hold together. But the Bible does, our songs

do. And it is important for us to

know that he is not only a loving Father who is willing to

help us, He is also the maker of heaven and earth.

And he's able to do the same. He is able to help us.

So with that framework, that theology which is grand and

beautiful and took weeks to unpack, we can now begin to make

our petitions known to God. And we can notice that the

Lord's Prayer is presented as six petitions.

The first three are God centered and the latter 3 are according

to our needs. The order is very important to

getting our hearts tuned to God's heart, very important to

pray through His agenda before we pray through our needs.

They're very important for us to pray for His, His name to be

honored and glorified throughout the earth.

That His Kingdom would continue to advance and come someday and

that his His will would be done completely and eagerly here on

earth and even in our own lives, as much as it's done with

eagerness and completeness by the angels in heaven themselves.

And so we prayed through these and we worked through these and

thought through these and hopefully those have settled

down deep in our hearts as a, as a way for us to, to pray not

only in our private lives, but also in public.

The latter 3 petitions now focus on our needs.

Now we're ready. We're ready to pray for our

needs. And we talked about our daily

needs that we pray and ask God for daily grace for the daily

needs. He tends to give us grace like

manna one day at a time. We also talked about our need

for forgiveness, not only our vertical forgiveness, our pardon

from God, but also to work consistently in life by

forgiving others around us as they sin against us.

One of the ways we show that we're a forgiven person is that

we become forgiving people, and that is hard work, particularly

for very difficult things. And like the manna coming one

day at a time, we pray daily for the the strength to forgive yet

again. That thing that has been done to

us didn't help us to remember to be quick with this as much as we

can. The final set of petition or the

third petition in this latter set has to do with protection.

We pray against evil, we pray against the evil. 1 and we ask

the Lord to guard us and to guard our families and to guard

our communities. So we worked our way through

those, thought carefully about each of those.

And then we got into the last section, which is not in the

text of your Bibles, but you'll see it down in the footnote.

This doxology, this glory word, this word of praise, the way the

church has been in public worship concluding the Lord's

Prayer for centuries upon centuries, that as we go into

the last things, we, we just thank God for what He has done.

And we noticed that this also, we broke this out into 3

sections. First we thanked God and praised

Him for His Kingdom and power. And we also the second week

talked about His glory being our chief end and our prime purpose.

And then finally this morning I'm going to talk briefly with

you about this word. Amen.

Amen is a Hebrew word actually, and it comes through into the

Greek New Testament as Amen. They just bring it right through

from Hebrew into Greek as Amen. And in English we've done the

same thing. So it's kind of a nice little

tradition we have going. It's a Hebrew word that we tack

on to the end of our prayers. It means it's true.

It means may it be so it means don't you agree?

And we use this all the time, even in our normal way of

talking. You hear people say in Spanish

verdad, right. Verdad means is it true?

True. Do you agree?

True. In English, you hear people

saying, you know, you, you know, you say something, you know, you

know, you trying to get people to say, yeah, I know and agree.

Yeah, but we do. We do this.

Notice that it's exclamatory, right?

You got this punctuation on there that lets you know it is a

it is a Hardy thing to say. It is a firm agreement and

endorsement. Yeah, I'm in.

Amen. That's right.

Preach it. Miles of babes and infants.

Praise God. Amen.

Thank you, Liz, we notice it all through scripture.

I will not regale you with text after text after text.

I'm going to give you some this morning.

They're important, but it's all through your Bible.

Lately in my devotions, I've been going slowly through

Matthew in the Greek because I want to see more what's going

on. And it's amazing how often

Jesus, when he really wants to emphasize, will say Amen, Amen,

truly, truly, I'm I'm real listening now.

Listen to me now when he's about to really emphasize something

that he wants them to remember you have in Psalm 106 verse 48.

Psalms 106:48

Blessed be the Lord. This is a word of doxology, a

song of doxology. Blessed be the Lord, the God of

Israel from everlasting to everlasting and let all the

people say good job, praise the Lord.

See how exclamatory that is. The new English translation

brings out this agreement thing with a we agree, praise the

Lord. So when you hear people give a

hearty Amen, they're they're lending their their whole

reputation to the thing that you're saying, punctuating it

with a a hearty affirmation. We're supposed to do this.

We're supposed to do this in public.

It's interesting that Paul in a couple of places in the New

Testament kind of assumes that it happens in church.

One place is in First Corinthians chapter 14, verse

1 Corinthians 14:16

16, this context GR Paul is giving out instructions for

corporate worship. He's concerned in Corinth about

people just talking over each other and not really caring

about the people around them to make sure that they understand

what's happening. And so he asked this question,

how can anyone say Amen to your Thanksgiving when he does not

know what you are saying? Paul is concerned about order

and accessibility in corporate worship so that we can agree

verbally with one another. Amen.

Now I'm going to switch over and talk a little bit about faith,

because what I think's going on when you give a hearty Amen is

that you're giving voice to some aspect of your faith.

Essentially by saying Amen, you're saying I believe that I

affirm that I want to live as though that's true Amen.

So we got to talk about faith for a moment.

Hebrews 11, verse 6, verse 6 says this.

Hebrews 11:6

And without faith it is impossible to please him.

For whoever would draw near to God must believe that He exists

and that He rewards those who seek Him.

Very important doctrines of faith.

What is faith? How does faith work with prayer?

And now we're entering into that place.

Faith is the breath of your prayer.

Your prayers are the breath of your faith.

Faith and prayer are very, very closely related.

Before I go a little further with this, we need to just

define faith a little bit more and a little bit better.

And I gave you some English words on this next slide.

But also if you like other languages and you think that's

easier to learn some of the theological words that go with

this, I've put those up there for some of you who like that

kind of thing that the rest of you can completely ignore it.

There are three aspects when we teach about the definition of

faith and the aspects of faith, we like to talk about 3 aspects.

1 is knowledge. The second is ascent or

agreement, and the third is trust.

Third is trust. It's going to be hard to

understand, but I like to illustrate with airplanes.

OK, imagine you got yourself in a time machine and you went back

in time and you went back to to a time and a place before

airplanes. And you're trying to explain

from the future to these people in the past that in the future,

people are going to be able to fly through the air in these

special machines called airplanes and in helicopters.

And you will probably be met by this person with disbelief.

And you can argue and you can talk, and maybe you could

eventually convince one of them. Yeah, OK, I understand what

you're saying. I think and kind of

intellectually agree with you that, yeah, maybe people could

fly if they had the right thing. Right.

But maybe then you want to really kind of prove it.

You really want to get them to believe.

And so you do a demonstration because your time machine is

also a flying machine. So you say, OK, I'm going to get

in the fly. I'm going to get in The Time

Machine. I'm just going to show you how

it flies. You're going to see.

And then I'm going to land and you're going to see and you're

going to you're going to then you're going to really believe.

You're going to have a sense, you're going to agree with me

that humans can fly. You just saw, saw me do it.

But then there's a third level of faith, which actually has to

do with will you stake your life on it?

Whole different matter to think, yeah, intellectually people can

fly in planes or agree. Yeah, I agree with you.

They can fly a place. Whole different matter to get on

the plane, strap yourself in the seat and trust your fates to

whoever's driving. And so when we talk about faith,

saving faith, we just say you got to, you got to know

something about the gospel. Then you have to agree that it's

true. You have to have a cent.

But then saving faith is a trusting faith, a submitting

faith, a living out as though it is true.

And this is a kind of faith, a biblical faith that is

important. How does it intersect and inform

our prayers? Bible teaches that it's

important for us to pray from this faithful frame.

Look at James one. If any of you lacks wisdom, let

him ask God. That's a prayer should be

praying that probably every day. Lord, help me have wisdom.

Let him ask God, who gives generously to all without

reproach. It's a beautiful fatherly thing,

and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith with no

doubting. For the one who doubts is like a

wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.

For that person was not supposed you'll receive anything from the

Lord. He is a double minded man,

unstable in all his ways. Now that verse can make it.

You feel afraid like, oh, will I ever have enough faith to ask

God? And how will I ever really

receive anything that I need if I can't know for sure if I have

enough faith? And I don't think that's exactly

what James is saying. He says we need to know

something about the character of God, that he knows what we need

and that he's generous. Pray to that guy.

He's going to give you what you need, right?

Also, it's important to note biblically, faith and doubting

are often commingled. They're often together.

Look at this text from Mark 9. His father wants his child to be

healed immediately. The father of the child cried

out and said, I believe, help my unbelief.

That is an encouraging verse, isn't it?

Such an encouraging verse. The Lord Himself makes up the

lack and the defects in our broken prayers.

He covers them in blood and the power of the Holy Spirit and and

causes them to be effective and powerful even when our faith is

weak. So may this be our prayer as we

think about our relationship between our faith in God and the

things that we are praying for. When we say Amen, we are trying

to strengthen our own faith, strengthen the faith of those

around us and to believe that which we have prayed about.

Now, what are some pitfalls to prayer?

What are some pitfalls to prayer?

Important thing to think about, the verses that I'm going to go

through now are actually right before the Lord's Prayer if you

have your Bibles, and it's in Matthew chapter 6.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

Two important pitfalls that we need to be aware of, defects of

faith, perhaps even unbelief that we need to be aware of as

we conclude this series in the immediate context of the Lord's

Prayer, Matthew chapter 6, beginning in verse 5.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites.

So the first pitfall is hypocrisy.

For they, the hypocrites, love to stand and pray in the

synagogues and at the street corners that they may be seen by

others. Truly, I say to you, they have

received their reward in the context.

You had professional holy people who had amazing reputations

because they could go out in public and make long showy

prayers. Jesus doesn't like this.

He's thinking that is not even prayer at all.

It is performative self seeking nonsense.

His antidote to this type of hypocrisy is secrecy.

If you don't want to be a hypocrite and you have a problem

with trying to perform in your prayers to get people to like

you and think you're good. Jesus says I got the answer.

The answer is secrecy. Go practice in private for a

long time before you're ready to come out here and try again in

public. He's not forbidding public

prayer. He's forbidding hypocrisy in

public prayer. But when I but when you pray,

verse 6, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your

father who is in secret and your Father who sees in secret will

reward you. This is a way to grow your

faith, to grow your faith in prayer, to learn how to depend

on the Lord and submission in privacy and secrecy before you

go out and attempt to lead others in corporate prayer.

The first pitfall is hypocrisy. The second pitfall is

superstition. Verse 7.

And when you pray, do not keep up empty phrases as the Gentiles

do, for they think that they will be heard for their many

words. Do not be like them, for your

Father knows what you need before you ask Him.

This type of person is just adding words upon words upon

words, particularly words about little details, thinking that

superstitiously I will get God to do what I want by praying all

of these words. Inane babblings about details

and a couple of comments on this.

One is from CS Lewis commenting on this verse.

He says this. We say that we believe God to be

omniscient. That means all knowing.

Yet a great deal of prayer seems to consist of giving him

information. And indeed, we have been

reminded by our Lord to not pray as if we forgot his omniscience.

And then he quotes the verse For your heavenly Father knows you

need all these things. Lewis says this is final against

one very silly sort of prayer. I have heard a man offer a

prayer for a sick person which really amounted to a diagnosis,

followed by advice as to how God should treat the patient.

Hilarious. Hilarious.

We're trying to teach God. We're trying to explain things

to God. And Calvin writes this.

Christ does not forbid us to pray long prayers with much

feeling, but He requires that we should not be confident in our

ability to wrest something from God by beating upon His ears

with excessive talkativeness, especially on trivial matters.

This flow of talk, as if He was going to be persuaded as men are

this this talkativeness childishly mocks God.

It is no wonder that it is forbidden by the Church, in

order that nothing shall resound there except what is earnest and

comes forth from the depths of the heart.

Now before you get too worried about your word count when

you're praying, we need to think about relationship.

These verses make more sense in relationship.

If my children who are some of them are teenagers.

Now we're excessively worried about the food in our home and

we're constantly giving my wife, she does the lion's share, 99.9%

of the food acquisition in our home.

God bless her. She's very worried if something

happens to her that I will try to survive on McDonald's.

She might be right. I don't know.

I think I would get sick of it. It's an ongoing debate.

What if my kids were constantly worried about, did you remember

to get this? Did you remember to get that?

Here's my list. I got another list.

Don't forget that. Don't forget this.

And don't forget that at some point, she'd be like, I got it,

I got it. I I've done this a lot.

Thank you. Please show your trust in this

situation so it's not to clamp down and not make them ever want

to talk again. We're supposed to pray, but what

do you really need? Do I really need to give so many

nitty gritty details about all the things to an omniscient God?

No, I do not. He knows what I need before I

ask Him. We're about to go on a trip.

We're going to be gone for a few weeks.

We usually have a prayer before we leave the driveway.

We have a prayer. It's good to have a prayer.

My kids would be annoyed if that prayer went on and on and on,

praying against the potholes and praying about the semis and

praying about, you know, the the traffic and on and on and on and

on. We don't need to do that.

It's fine to just say, Lord keep us safe on the road today.

Luther points out with this, Jesus then demonstrates the very

brevity he's trying to communicate.

Have you ever thought, wow, the Lord's Prayer so short, it's one

of the shortest prayers in all of Scripture?

Loser says, yeah, because the problem is if with show offs,

with hypocrisy and people who are superstitious, who are

stacking words on words and words, they need brevity, right?

We still pray, but it needs to be shorter.

Luther says it should be frequent and intense and

authentic. That's much better than long

drawn out and eloquent. Good advice.

Now, I don't also want you to think that people who pray too

long that we're judging you or that there's a problem here,

right? But I also want to say I'm glad

that in the corporate prayers in this church, I know the men who

pray up here and they are coming from a deep well of walking with

the Lord. You learn how to pray in public

by praying in private, and you come in and they're brief.

They're to the point. They're not informing God of

what He needs to know, but are usually thankful and presenting

a request in a pattern very similar to the brevity

demonstrated by a Lord in this prayer.

Very helpful, very, very practical.

The Bible says this in Ecclesiastes chapter 5 regarding

Ecclesiastes 5 · chapter mention

corporate worship. Guard your steps when you go to

the House of God to draw a near. To listen is better than to

offer the sacrifice of fools, for they do not know they are

doing evil. Do not be rash with your mouth,

nor let your heart be hasty to utter a word before God, for God

is in heaven and you are on earth.

Therefore let your words be few. I need help with this.

I got a lot of words. I'm sorry.

Lord help us. Lord help all of us.

As we're thinking through our Lord's warnings and these

potential pitfalls, I want to end with thinking about Christ

ourself being our amens. We introduced a little bit about

what this word means. Now let's talk about Jesus

himself being our Amen as we land this plane.

Ji Packer in his extremely helpful book, Short, Accessible

Praying the Lord's Prayer, he goes back through the Lord's

Prayer and asks if you and I can give our Amen to that section of

the prayer. So I'm going to lead you through

his words, thinking about giving, whether you're ready to

give your Amen to certain sections.

Some things you may not be ready to give your Amen to.

Some things are going to be seem impossible.

That's on purpose because the impossible things are going to

force us in humility to ask God for his strength and to confess

our sins and ask Him to be the one who prays with and for us.

So I'll lead you through this and you can hear each part of

the prayer. The traditional doxology, or

this word of praise at the end teaches us to round off the

Lord's Prayer with Amen. This is right.

Amen. Best said loudly and with

emphasis. I love that is our final

profession of having meant what we have said and identifying

completely with the attitudes, hopes, and goals that the Lord's

Prayer expresses. So the fittest way to end, he's

saying, end his book. The fittest way to end these

brief studies in the prayer that takes a lifetime and more to

master is with a checklist of the main items involved.

Therefore, I ask, do you identify with the trust in Jesus

as your own Savior and the faith in God as your own God through

Him, and the recognition of every Christian as your own

brother in God's family that is expressed by the words our

Father? Amen Is the hallowing of God's

name in and through you, whatever that may cost your own

controlling purpose in life. I hope so, Amen.

Do you want to see God triumph in His Kingdom and to see

everything that does not match His perfection come to an end?

Amen. Will you labor and suffer for

the Kingdom, if need be, so as to become its agent, the means

of bringing it into lives and situations where the gates have

been locked against God? Amen.

Do you happily take God's will of command for your rule and

God's will of events for your destiny, knowing by faith that

both are supremely good? Lord, help us.

Amen. Is there any matter in which you

are flying in the face of God's will of command?

Places where we're being wilfully disobedient, excusing

ourselves on the grounds of there being other commands that

you faithfully keep. If so, what will you now do

about it? He talks about how the prayer

confronts us, asks us to confess, and He'll even lead us

in these words in a time of confession.

Do you see and know that unless God acts to provide for today's

needs and to and to pardon today's sins and to protect you

in today's temptations, you are lost?

Amen. Do you make it an issue of

conscience never to bear a grudge or cherish bitterness

against anyone, but to show forgiving mercy always because

of the forgiving mercy that God always shows you?

Lord help us. Is there any person whom

hitherto you have refused to forgive for what he or she did

to you? Will you ask the Lord this

moment to help you change your attitude and get right with that

person? Do you make it your habit to

watch and pray against temptation?

Will you make it your habit from now on?

He asks us, Is the Lord's Prayer really in your heart?

Are you honest when you say Amen to it?

His next word is a direct quote from the English Prayer Book.

He's a Anglican minister and in their prayer services, the

congregation will respond with these brief words of confession

and contrition. So you're going to see this next

sentence in quotes because it's coming from the prayer book.

It's for the the words of the people in the response to all

these questions. They say, oh God, make clean our

hearts within us and take not thy Holy Spirit from us.

They're pulling directly from Psalm 51 there.

And then Packer will end with his own prayer.

Lord, teach me how to pray by teaching me how to live for

Jesus sake. And there's that word again,

Amen. May it be so.

It can only be so through Christ our Amen, which comes so clearly

to us from Second Corinthians chapter 1, beginning in verse

2 Corinthians 1 · chapter mention

19. For the Son of God, Jesus

Christ, whom we proclaimed among you Sylvanus and Timothy and I

was not yes and no, but in Him it is always yes.

He's talking about Christ's faithfulness.

He's not flaky. Neither are the apostles.

For all the promises of God find their yes in Him.

That is why it is through Him that we utter our Amen to God

for His glory. Your faith may be weak.

There's a big Amen at the end of your prayer, and it's Jesus

Christ the righteous, and it is God who establishes us with you

in Christ and has anointed us, and who has also put His seal on

us and given us His Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.

Besides this big Amen, which is Jesus Christ, there's the

anointing of the Holy Spirit who groans and utters prayers on our

behalf even when we're so full of grief we can't do anything

but cry. When our our hearts are cracked,

we are shattered and we moan out to God by the Spirit.

ABBA, help me man who has also put his seal on us and given us

his spirit in our hearts as a guarantee it will happen.

Amen. So I don't know what your

experience is. I don't know where you're at

right now. Our community is wracked in

grief right now, even as we're trying to celebrate graduations.

We are hurting. And all I know how to say as

your pastor is to do what I'm doing is just try to model and

follow the all that are better than me at this is to cling to

Jesus as he clings to us. I'm so thankful for the the life

and the ministry of Rich Mullins, who is now with Jesus.

Because when my faith is weak and I feel fragile, I just

resonate so much with the words from this song.

And even the melody that he uses is so is so prayerful and achy.

But it sounds like this. I'm not going to sing it to you,

but I'm just going to read it to you.

Well, sometimes my life just don't make sense at all when the

mountains look so big and my faith just seems so small.

So hold me Jesus, because I'm shaking like a leaf.

You've been king of my glory. Won't you be my Prince of Peace?

And I think that just hits right where a lot of us are living day

by day right now. Hold me Jesus, because I'm

shaking when we need his tranquility.

That comes from the hope of knowing that all the promises of

God find their, yes, their Amen in Jesus Christ by the power of

the Holy Spirit. Praise God, praise God.

You know, there's a tradition, a long tradition of having Amen at

the end of songs. Some of the Psalms end with

Amen. If you find a hymnal, a lot of

times there's tacked on to the end Amen.

We don't sing those that often, but it's that corporate

affirmation of the truth of the song.

And we're going to have a separate song of response.

But I I thought that I could just lead us this morning in the

doxology because I want to hear y'all say Amen to each other,

sing Amen to each other. I want you to hear the harmonies

that will inevitably come out of you and the consolation that

comes from this word which means Jesus.

Are you ready? Praise God, from whom all

blessings flow. We've been concluding by saying

the Lord's Prayer together. If you don't know it, that's OK,

Just listen. When we get to the line about

debts or sins or trespasses, we've been saying trespasses.

So we pray with me to conclude, our Father who are in heaven,

hallowed be thy name, Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done

on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day Our Daily

Bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those

who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation, but

deliver us from evil. For thine is the Kingdom, and

the power and the glory forever. Amen.