The Kingdome Way: Pray Until Heaven Moves with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch podcast.

My name is Clayton.

I'm the pastor at MetaCurch, and I hope that today's message is inspiring and enlightening and really builds you up wherever you're at in life.

I want to welcome you into MetaCurch.

I'm so glad that you joined us today.

God is moving here.

If you weren't here last week, uh man, it was our seven-year anniversary.

Yeah, it was a good time.

If you're new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here.

I'm so glad that you joined us today.

Uh last week we talked about how God is moving us into a new season here at MetaCurch.

He's challenging and convicting us to take our faith more seriously.

That's the journey we were on in 2025.

We're taking more steps in 2026.

Uh, we are going to create more space in our Sunday service because we believe that the Holy Spirit is moving.

Uh, the Holy Spirit is expanding us.

Uh, wherever you joined service from, if you're here at our Holotus venue or if you're with us online, I want to welcome you in as well.

Uh, what this looks like practically for us is starting next Sunday, we have new service times at Petrenko.

Our new service times are 8 30, 10 30, and 12 30.

And in Holotus, our new service time is gonna be at 11 a.m.

Now, um, at Petrenko, our 1030 is very full.

And so, man, I would love if you normally go to 1030 at Petrenko, I would love for you to pray about uh sacrificing, coming early to 8.30 or coming later to 12.30 because we are growing.

And here uh at Petrenko 1030, we do not have a lot of room for that growth.

And so we do whatever it takes to get people to Jesus.

Is that right?

That's who we are.

We do whatever it takes.

One of the simplest things you may be able to do is just make sure that we create some actual space for people.

I'm so excited.

Uh, next week to get into our new service times.

I need you to know if you were not here last Sunday, this is not a logistics move.

As a matter of fact, all of our teams that put on Sunday service, this move is much harder for them.

They get here earlier, they leave later, it's a more difficult schedule.

This is not a logistics move.

This is a move out of conviction of what God has been saying to us, especially last year in 2025.

If you miss that, I'd love for you to go to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash metachurch, watch last week's message because we go into detail about that.

Uh, we talked last week about what it looks like to rest in the Lord.

This doesn't mean to stop ambitiously building the kingdom or spreading the gospel.

What it means is that in the early church, the most effective season of the church, the first three centuries, we can look back at all these milestone moments where the gospel spreads around the world, and there is this pattern that is very evident in scripture.

Here's what we see the church doing.

They come together and we see waiting on the Lord.

They are willing to make space in their life and in their rhythms to wait on the Lord.

Waiting and praying.

They wait and they pray and they pray and they wait and they wait and they pray until something happens.

As long as they are willing to wait and to come together and pray, eventually you see an outpouring of the spirit that leads to incredible, history-defining, generation-marking, ground shaking power.

Now, in the waiting, we do not just like twiddle our thumbs and scroll TikTok and put together conspiracy theories and waste time.

In the waiting, we pray and we pray together.

And what we said last week is we are going to learn to pray until heaven moves.

Pray until heaven moves.

Now, this is a powerful idea, and we talked last week.

One of the things we're gonna do, making more space for the movement of God in our Sunday services, is we are going to begin praying together corporately as a church.

Every single Sunday, we will have space in our service to pray together corporately.

Now, uh, there are many people who are kind of nervous about this new rhythm for our church for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is I said corporate and you heard public.

So let me tell you what's not gonna happen in Sunday service.

We are not going to call you on stage randomly, put a microphone in your face, and be like, pray.

And then you pray, and then all the pastors hold up scorecards, 7.5.

Corporate is just the opposite of individual.

If you are a follower of Jesus, you should be developing an individual prayer life where we go and we get alone with the Lord and we spend time, not just talking, but also listening.

That is a call on our lives as believers in Jesus.

And as the church, the body of Christ, we are told over and over and over again in the New Testament that we are to pray corporately, to come together and to get on the same page and to pray for things.

And when the early church was willing to give time to corporate prayer, that is when you would see these unique moves of God that would equip local churches with power to reach a generation.

The very thing we have been praying for and longing for to see revival in our city, in our world through this movement.

And so some of you are nervous because you were afraid you were gonna get called out.

The second reason is because as a modern American Christian, most people in the church today, many Christians in the church today, do not have an active prayer life and don't really feel like you even know how to pray.

If you are going to like a life team or you have a Bible study or something, for many Christians, one of their greatest fears is for the Bible study leader to point at them and go, Would you open us in prayer out loud in front of everybody?

It's like anything fake a heart attack, grab your stomach, run to the bathroom, like anything to not have to pray out loud because we don't have confidence in our prayer life.

It isn't something we've been taught, it isn't something that we do often, we just don't really feel all that good about it.

Now, if that is you, and that is a lot of Christians today, so don't feel bad, I want to actually encourage you, because if you lack confidence in your prayer life, you are exactly where the disciples were when they started following Jesus.

The very same disciples who last Sunday we saw in Acts chapter 1 and chapter 2, after three years of following Jesus, the same disciples who prayed so fervently, so consistently, and so powerfully that the Holy Spirit fell on Pentecost, 3,000 people got baptized, and the church got started.

Acts 1 · chapter mention

Those same disciples, three years earlier, they didn't know how to pray.

Now, here's what's even more surprising is these were Jewish men, and in the Jewish culture, you prayed at set times in the day, every day from the time you were young.

So on paper, they knew exactly how to pray, but for some reason, when they started following Jesus, how Jesus prayed contrasted so severely to how they prayed, they decided we don't even know how.

We know this because Luke's gospel tells us right before the Lord's prayer, the actual context for that is the disciples come to Jesus and they say, Lord, teach us how to pray.

You do not ask someone to teach you something you already know how to do.

They feel like, in contrast to Jesus, they don't know how to pray.

Now I want you to notice it says, Teach us how to pray, not teach us what to pray, not give us the exact words.

As a matter of fact, as Jewish men, the prayers they prayed at set times every single day were wrote, memorized, structured prayers, meaning they would go to the same place, they would say the same words in the same order with the same inflection over and over and over again.

That's how they prayed, it's not how Jesus prayed.

They're like, bro, we thought we knew how to pray, and then we hear you, we're doing this like structured, memorized thing with Jesus.

It just kind of sounds like you're actually in conversation with God.

And so, Jesus, we want you to teach us how to pray the way that you pray.

This isn't teaching you what to pray, that religion.

This is teaching you how to pray that relationship.

And this really matters, and what comes next is what we often call the Lord's Prayer, or you might have grown up calling the Our Father.

The one prayer that everybody knows.

And let me just point out the irony.

These Jewish men had memorized, structured prayers.

They prayed every day, but they didn't want to pray like that.

They wanted to pray like Jesus.

And so Jesus gave us the Lord's Prayer to teach us how to pray, and what did we do with it?

We turned it into a structured, wrote, memorized prayer that we say word for word over and over again.

We took an example of how to have relationship with God, and we now use it for religious purposes.

See, it's actually not a good title.

We call it the Lord's Prayer.

A much more accurate title would be The Model Prayer.

This is Jesus modeling for us not what to pray, how, how to pray.

Some of you don't feel confident in your prayer life because you don't know what to pray.

You don't know the right words to say.

And maybe some of you grew up in a church context where they would let really good prayers get on the microphone, you know?

And they would have a bunch of words that you didn't really know.

Dear, reverend, holy, transubstantiated God, and you were like, I don't know, bro, I don't have a PhD.

They still spoke in old English, will and shall and willeth, and it's like, I don't know, man, I don't know what to pray.

I can't pray like these people.

Did you know in the New Testament it tells us that even when words fail us, not if we know what to pray, but if we know how to pray, if we know how to approach God, that when words fail us, the Holy Spirit will actually intercede for us.

That there are seasons in your life where you are going through such deep grief, sadness, or depression that you can't put words to it.

There are some times where you are going through seasons of such joy and excitement and love, you don't know how to put words to it.

And the Holy Spirit, who lives inside of every believer in Jesus Christ, will actually intercede on your behalf and bring all of that to God.

Today I'm not near as concerned about what to pray, about you getting the exact right words in the exact right order.

What Jesus gave us in this model is how to pray.

Teach us how to pray.

And if we learn how to approach God in prayer, I think we will build our confidence because starting next Sunday, we will corporately pray together.

Now, let me give you just uh before we get into the model prayer, let me give you a few qualifiers about what's coming next week and moving on into the future.

Uh, MetaCurch uniquely has built a culture for the unchurched, the dechurched, even those who are anti-church.

You grew up, you were hurt by church, you want nothing to do with it.

That is not changing.

Our goal at MetaCurch is to do whatever it takes to get people to Jesus.

If our Sunday services are not accessible to people outside of the faith, we will be failing in our own mission.

We refuse to do that.

And so we will create an environment of prayer where everyone feels welcome and everyone feels like they can participate.

One of the ways we're gonna do that is our prayer time will happen during our worship time when our band is on stage and we are worshiping through music.

Which means if you are new or you are seeking or you are questioning, you can do what we do the entire time and just keep singing along with the band.

For the rest of you, we are gonna change the room up just a little bit.

We're gonna create space where you can move, you can sit, you can stand, you can kneel, you can come forward.

It's gonna be your time.

Let me give you one more qualifier.

I will never pretend, as the leader at MetaCurch, like we know something we don't know.

We don't really know how this is gonna work.

We have a plan for next Sunday, okay?

We do have a plan.

But we're not trying to prescribe how this works.

We are really trying to be led by the Holy Spirit.

So we're gonna try, we're gonna pay attention, we're gonna listen, we're gonna evaluate, we're gonna shift.

But I think that by the end of this year, we will have a new identity in our Sunday services as we grow in our confidence, approaching the throne room of God, and as we allow ourselves to be led by the Holy Spirit and make room for what he wants to do here.

Does that make sense?

So I want to go through the model prayer because we have to learn how, not what to say, how to approach God in prayer.

And what I've done is I've broken down the model prayer into four movements that I see, these four movements of how to approach God.

The first movement is all about relationship.

Who are you praying to?

Now I know we don't have landlines and like gyms, not even gonna understand this, and that's fine.

But when when we grew up, we had phones attached to the walls of our houses, all right?

And that phone would ring and you did not know who was calling you, right?

It was a mystery.

It was like a game you played five times a day.

And so when you answered the phone, the first thing you had to discover is who you are talking to.

They say, Lord, teach us how to pray.

The very first thing he gives us is our Father in heaven.

Center yourself, remind yourself, infuse yourself with the reality of who it is you are speaking to.

You're speaking to our Father.

Let me point out something quickly, because individual prayer matters, and God is your individual father if you're a believer in Jesus.

But what did Jesus give us in the model prayer?

He gave us corporate language, our father.

God holds a lot of roles, which means he holds a lot of titles.

And so Jesus could have said, when you pray, pray like this.

Our creator, our ruler, our king, all true, perfectly true.

But Jesus is saying that's not how you approach God in prayer.

You approach God as our father.

Now it's not lost on me that especially in our culture today, many people who are here at our venues, here with us online, did not grow up with a father in the home.

As a matter of fact, even as an adult, you might have a father wound that is still significant in your life.

There are others who who maybe even more unfortunately had a dad in the home, and you were actually jealous of those who did not because of how bad and abusive your dad was.

And so there are a lot of Christians, especially in the West, where we have an increasing number of single motherhood homes who have a block in their relationship to approach God as Father.

And so here's what I want to suggest.

I want to suggest that who God is as your father is actually understandable to you, not in the reality of your upbringing, but in the aspirations and even the dreams that you would have as a kid of who you wish that your father was.

Those desires you had of if I had a dad and if I had someone, all the ways you dreamed about, how they would love you and show up for you and care for you, that's who God is for you.

And so part of how we need to reframe this is not how you view your father.

Part of how you need to reframe this is how your heavenly father views you.

And so if you're a parent and you're striving to be a good, godly parent, you at least have some kind of comparison.

Uh, I like kids.

I do like kids.

Uh we have, you know, hundreds of kids that go to Metakids and Mediouth, and and I love you guys, I care about you deeply, I care about your souls, I care about your eternity.

But if you take a thousand kids and line them up in a room, and one of those kids is one of my kids, the difference between that one and the 999 others, I'm sorry guys, there's just there's no comparison.

Like my kid, I don't know how to put into words for you.

And and you feel this way too, you know how I know?

I know because you watch third grade basketball.

Oh.

Just double dribbles and freaking travels, and it's just the rest can't even ref because nobody does anything right.

Bro, if your kid was not on that team, we could not pay you to go watch third grade basketball.

But you're not gonna miss a game.

Not because of the team, because your kid.

999 other kids, I love them, I care about them deeply, I care about their souls, but my kid's in the room?

It's different.

And I'm very human, and I'm deeply flawed, and I made a lot of mistakes as a dad.

And God is infallible, He is perfect.

And so if you have a block because you can't really see a good father, you didn't have that represented for you in your life.

I want to suggest that you try to flip it.

Not how you see a father, but how your heavenly father might see you.

And he's not just our father, he is our father who's in heaven.

Deeply relational, he is our father, he's closer than close.

As a matter of fact, he desired so deeply to dwell with you that he has sent his own spirit to live in the life of every believer.

God is closer than close, and he is in heaven.

He's transcendent.

Closer than close and bigger than big.

And this matters.

And one of the things that it highlights is not just who we are to God, our Father who loves us, but who God is to us.

He is the one who holds the universe in order.

He is the one who can speak and create.

He is the one who can see your future.

He is the one who brings dead things back to life.

One of the things that this highlights for us is that our kids need more than us.

My kids need more than me.

Kids do deserve a good earthly father.

Godly, maturing, pursuing righteous things, kids deserve that.

Not every kid gets it, but kids deserve a good earthly father.

But even the best earthly father is simply not enough.

And so here's our role.

As parents, especially talking to the fathers today, our role is to model for them in a way that helps connect them ultimately, not just to you as earthly father, but to their heavenly father.

You see, uh, one of the ways that you do this is you make sure that your kids learn to obey.

And some kids are very compliant, they don't have a problem with this.

Other kids are, you know, me growing up, right?

It's like they want to obey maybe, they just don't.

Nobody else has kids like this.

I'm all by myself being honest at Metachurch today.

That's fine.

And so when disobedience happens, it's our job as parents to lovingly confront it, call it out, and give consequence for it.

And here's why.

Because right now, as parents, you cover your kids, but someday they will leave your house.

You do not cover them, and if our kids don't get a shot at learning how to obey their earthly father, they will not be ready to go out and submit to and obey their heavenly father when you are no longer covering them.

Our kids need more than us.

We are so critical and important, but our job is to help model and point them to their Heavenly Father.

You'll learn this when your kids become adults.

Uh, my oldest son Lane, he turned 21 last year.

He's a man, he's out doing his thing, he's building business, he's he's doing the whole nine.

Uh, when he got out of my house and out from under my covering, uh, the way that I would give advice changed.

When he was under my roof, under my covering, uh, I would give actual advice.

Here's what needs to happen, here's what you should do, here's the steps.

I'll never forget, it was his his first year out of the house.

He had a huge life decision to make.

We talked on the phone for a very long time, we probably talked for an hour, and I could tell he was waiting for the part where I tell him what to do next.

But this is his opportunity to step into his manhood to learn how to lean on his heavenly father.

And so my closing advice was you have a very big decision to make, you need to spend a lot of time in prayer.

And then there was a long silence on the phone.

And finally he said, So you're like not gonna tell me what to do.

It matters, he is our father.

And we have to center ourselves on the relationship.

Uh, we are not praying to our heavenly genie who is there to grant our wishes.

We are not praying to our heavenly therapist, who is there just to hear our problems without also giving us his will on how we should walk them out.

He is not our heavenly psychic who's just gonna tell us about the future.

He's not our heavenly hitman where we just pray damnation on others.

He's our heavenly father.

He is our father, closer than close, in heaven, bigger than big.

And when we center ourselves on the relationship, we are ready to move to the second movement, which is reverence.

Your name be honored as holy.

Now, if you grew up, especially in the Catholic Church, even in the Baptist church like me, you probably learned this line a little bit different.

It went like this Hallowid be thy name.

This is part of the reason no one thinks they know how to pray, because the word hallowed and nobody knows what that means, right?

Like the closest word I knew as a kid was like Halloween.

I was like, his name's scary?

Really know.

Hallelujah just means holy.

Holy just means set apart.

What you have to understand is in the ancient world, your name carried your identity.

Your name be honored as holy.

What this means is like who God is is completely and entirely unique.

This is another way of saying there is nobody like our God.

Amen?

There is no body like our God.

He is one of one.

There is no one else who is in his league.

He is perfect.

He's perfectly just.

This is what the kingdoms of this world teach us.

We are the kings and queens, we are the captains of our own ship, which means, in effect, it is our name that we are trying to build and advance, that we are trying to market and brand, that we are trying to capture and filter.

And Jesus says, if you want to know how to pray, you have to start by getting the attention off of yourself and onto God.

That as a matter of fact, your prayer life, and this is going to be new for most Christians in America, our prayer life is not about us.

We're gonna see that you know, most American Christians, our entire prayer life is just comprised of a laundry list of things that we want God to do.

The prayers are for us, they are about us, they are to promote us, they are to push us forward.

So Jesus is like if you want to pray the way that Jesus prays, if you want to pray in a way that moves heaven to action, if you want to pray in a way that unleashes your purpose, we have to start by realizing that everything is about glorifying God.

God wants your requests.

As a matter of fact, he says in his word, bring all of your petitions, all of your requests to him.

But Jesus is showing us we cannot correctly petition the Lord if we do not have correct perspective on who he is.

Your name, not mine.

This idea of whose name are we praying for and in and about, it is essential to move us into the next part of the prayer.

We have relationship, we have reverence, and the third movement is reign.

This is acknowledging who God is in his role as King.

We pray to him as Father, but our Heavenly Father is unique in the sense that he is also the creator and King of the universe.

The next part of the prayer, Jesus shows us to pray, Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

This is the heart of the prayer.

This is the collision between what God asks of us and what we in our sinful state naturally desire.

His will versus our will, his kingdom versus our kingdom and the kingdoms of this world.

Let me suggest to you, this is not just a temptation, one among many.

This is not just a temptation, this is the temptation.

As a matter of fact, it's the very temptation that goes all the way back to the beginning.

Where Adam and Eve are confronted in a garden in a perfect, sinless world.

And what is the actual temptation?

It's something like this.

You guys are working really hard for somebody else.

You know, Adam and Eve, it seems, I'm just observing, it seems like God calls all of the shots.

He sets all the rules.

You didn't even really get a say into what the rules were going to be.

That's not cool.

Adam, let me make uh uh an observation.

It feels like you are using all of your energy and all of your skill sets all day long to build somebody else's kingdom.

Don't you know that God is holding back on you?

If you just break this rule, you can be just like God.

It's not a temptation, it's the temptation.

And every day we are sitting in the tension and the collision between God's will and our will.

And so we live in a culture that has strayed extremely far from the truths of God.

If in fact we ever were a Christian nation, we have strayed so incredibly far from that that when people become believers in Jesus and get into God's word, they start finding expectations of God's will for our life that are so diametrically opposed to the culture, it is shocking to us.

God calls us to be selfless to the point of carrying our cross and giving our lives away, and we live in a culture that tells us to be selfish, as selfish as possible at every turn.

If you want to draw a sharp contrast to where our culture is, our culture that has hit the peak of the sexual revolution, and yet you look into the scriptures, and God's will for your life is an incredibly strict sexual ethic.

A sexual ethic that our culture outwardly expresses is archaic, it is backwards, no one would ever possibly live that way, and that is God's will for your life.

And so every day we have to choose.

God's will or our will.

And it's it's difficult when we do not live with the proper perspective.

It's difficult when we're living for our own name, it's difficult when we do not center ourselves on the fact that we have a father who is closer than close and bigger than big, and maybe, just maybe, he knows what's best for our lives.

I I work with a lot of couples, our pastors and staff members, we work with a lot of couples because marriage is very difficult.

And there's usually two outcomes.

Either people quickly advanced, even in very difficult circumstances, and they start moving into a season of health and happiness in their marriage that they couldn't possibly have imagined, or they limp along for a very long time with little to no progress, and oftentimes end up getting divorced.

And there are a million different factors to those two paths.

But I will tell you the one determining factor that is most at play.

Those who progress into the health and happiness that God desires for them are willing at every step to submit to God's will over their own.

God wants you to be selfless and you want to stay selfish, you will struggle.

God wants you to be generous and you want to be stingy, you will struggle.

God wants you to forgive them and you want to hold on to that root of bitterness and you will struggle.

Like we all know this in theory because we live out our own will throughout our culture.

And so it's like no one's gonna tell me what to do.

I make my own truth.

You know what?

I'm gonna eat whatever I want, whatever I want.

Obesity, epidemic.

You know what?

I'm gonna have as much casual sex as I desire to have.

Depression, loneliness, epidemic.

You know what?

I'm gonna spend all of my time on social media, I'm gonna scroll all day long, anxiety, suicide, epidemic.

You know this because you know a three-year-old, and a three-year-old does not know what's good for them.

They need a father to direct them when it comes to you and God, you are the three-year-old.

And your father, who sees it all, actually does know what is best for your life, and so you have to choose.

Live out my will and create hell on earth for myself or submit myself to God's will.

Even if it doesn't make sense in the moment, even if it clashes with the culture, even if I have to die to myself or die to sin.

This is the heart of the prayer.

See, what we do is we go right to making all of our laundry list of asks.

We just approach God.

This is Western Christianity, like in a snapshot.

Here's our prayer life.

Dear God, that's how we start, and then into what we want.

Dear God, I really need this.

I need this to change.

I want you to help me with this.

Give me less of this, give me more of this.

You know, God is our heavenly hitman.

We're like, God, you saw what happened to me today, and I wanted to snap next, and I didn't snap next.

So if you could just hit him with like Ebola virus or something, you know, like if you would have my back here, hepatitis A through C on their life, Jesus, in Jesus' name, you know.

Just lists.

And we skip the relationship and we skip the reverence and we skip the rain.

Who is reigning on the throne?

Some of you are being crushed by life and you don't know why.

And if you could see it from God's vantage point, it's because every day you wake up and you try to put on a God-sized crown and you cannot shoulder it.

You make a great child of God, you make a terrible God.

This right here, this movement, God, your will, not mine, your kingdom, not mine.

This is the moment that will unleash power in your life, and that will unleash power in this movement we call metachurch, like nothing else.

A thousand people coming together Sunday after Sunday, maybe more if God continues to grow us.

Getting on our knees in front of God and going, Look, uh, here are the ways I tried my will this week.

I submit it to you, God.

Search me and expose where I am trying to be king.

I give it to you, God.

God, you can see all the thrones I've tried to set up in this world, tear them down in Jesus' name.

When we start submitting ourselves to God's will and God's kingdom, no matter what, that is when God will unleash power in our lives and power in our movement like we cannot imagine.

We skip this and we skip the power.

This matters.

This is where movements start really moving.

This is where we go before God and we pray like Jesus, and we know this.

There's another time that we see Jesus pray.

It's in a different garden the night before his death.

He knows what's coming.

Not just the pain of the cross, but the unbearable suffering of all the sin of all the world placed upon his perfect life.

And Jesus, the Son, asks God the Father, if there's any other way.

And then he says, however, not my earthly will, but your will.

Jesus is following his own model of prayer.

Why don't we?

Are you living for the kingdom of God or are you living for the kingdom of culture?

I'll give you a very simple test.

You have decisions to make in the culture every moment of every day.

If you are a believer in Jesus and you're trying to live by the will of God in his word, you either approach culture one of two ways.

How many modern Western Christians approach the culture is we look at God's word and God's will through the lens of our culture.

The culture is the lens.

And so we look at what God requires of us in his will, but we see it through the year 2026.

And we go, God, I mean, I'm sure you wanted that 2,000 years ago, but it's it's 2026 now.

It's a little outdated.

That seems a little politically incorrect, God.

I don't know if you know, but we have some new standards in 2026.

You know, God, we don't really live like that anymore.

There's like modern conveniences.

Like so make, you know what?

I like a lot of it.

I like the Jesus thing.

I definitely like that, like he died for me.

That was nice of him.

But a lot of these rules, I just I'm just looking through culture.

If that's how you approach the will of God, then culture is your king.

What we are called to, as followers of Jesus Christ, is to take the culture and to filter it through the lens of God's word and God's will.

Even if it costs us, even if we have to sacrifice, even if we have to carry our cross, we submit to the kingdom of God, not the kingdom of culture.

I want to get to our last movement.

We have relationship, reverence, reign, and finally, requests.

Now there is a dichotomy here.

God wants your requests.

Even more than that, he already knows them.

God knows what's on your heart, he knows what's burdening you, he wants you to bring all of it to him.

However, when we petition God for it to be effective, we must petition with the appropriate perspective.

I'm gonna say that again.

Your requests, your petitions for them to be effective, we must petition God with the correct perspective.

What does the perspective come from?

Centering yourself on relationship, acknowledging God in reverence, and then having the great collision of who is reigning over who.

Now, after going through those movements, you are prepared to make your requests.

Give us today our daily bread.

That's your needs, your provision.

Forgive us as we have forgiven others.

This is relationship, reconciliation, restoration.

Do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

This is asking God to shield us and protect us and go before us in a life that is very difficult.

There is so much here.

I honestly don't have to spend a lot of time on requests because this is like 99% of a huge number of Christians' prayer lives.

It's all we do.

We don't pray often, we pray when we get in a pinch, we pray when life gets hard, we pray when we run out of options, and then when we pray, we just go, dear God, here's what I want.

We skip the relationship, we skip the reverence, and we skip the collision.

We don't get to the moment of surrender.

And so let me tell you what happens.

When we don't get to the moment of surrender, God's will and God's kingdom, when we just approach God with request, here's what we're actually doing: we are asking God to give us what we think we need to build our own kingdoms.

And so God gives us a model.

In the time of Christ, his Jewish audience was doing rote, memorized, structured prayers.

It was religion, not relationship.

In 2026, we don't pray hardly at all as the people of God.

And when we do, we generally just bring him our requests.

The model prayer works for both of us.

It reorients us, not on exactly what we are saying, but in how we are approaching our Father.

And when you understand how God sees you, it will build your confidence, just like you have confidence to come and approach a good father.

God wants to hear from us as his children, and he wants to hear from us as his church, but not just our requests.

Here's a final idea for you.

Prayer is not primarily about moving God to us, prayer is primarily about moving us to God.

We do not approach God in prayer to get him on our agenda, we go to prayer to get ourselves on God's agenda.

We do not pray to get God on our schedule, we pray to submit, surrender, and trust God in his timing.

We do not pray for God to build our kingdom.

We pray and petition to find out how we can build his.

And when we begin as a body of Christ to pray in this way, we will move closer and closer to God's purposes.

And I believe the closer we move to God's purposes, the more power he will unleash in our lives and in our movement.

I'm gonna give this to you for our uh note takers, getting some heavenly extra credit today.

Make sure you have it.

There's four movements relationship, reverence, reign, and requests.

As we get ready to start praying together in services, um I don't really know what to expect.

Uh I'll be honest because I'll always be honest.

It might be awkward.

You might feel awkward.

You might feel the Holy Spirit nudging you to sit when everyone else is standing, to kneel while others are sitting, to come forward, to actually move.

And you may fight that.

You may fight it for a week and do it the next week.

You might feel awkward.

You might not have much confidence right now.

And part of that is because the American church, we have allowed our prayer muscle to atrophy.

And the only way to fix it is to start exercising.

And so we will do that week in and week out, and I believe it will be the most important shift we have ever made in the history of MetaCurch.

And why don't we close service starting right now?

Let's pray together across our venues, online.

If you'd bow your head, close your eyes, create some space.

Here's what I'm gonna ask.

For those who know Jesus, you're already a believer, I'm gonna ask you right now to begin praying for anyone at our services who does not yet have a relationship with Jesus.

And that's who I really want to talk to to close service.

If you're here at one of our venues, you're with us online, and you've never had a moment in time where you have put your faith in Jesus, believing that he is who he says he is, God in human flesh, and that he has done what he claims to have done, lived a perfect life, died for your sins, and risen from the grave.

If you've never prayed that prayer, that's your first prayer that leads to all the others.

That is the prayer that moves you into relationship with your heavenly father.

Scripture uses the analogy that Jesus' death on the cross paid the price of our adoption into God's family.

You have a heavenly father, and if you do not have a relationship with him, you need one.

And my guess is if you've never put your faith in Jesus to start that relationship, the Holy Spirit right now is pressing in on you.

And I'm gonna encourage you right now to surrender your life to Jesus.

To not waste another day because tomorrow simply is not promised.

And so if you're here at one of our venues and you've never had a moment where you've put your faith in Jesus, and you are ready to do that for the first time today, with everyone's eyes closed, I want to ask you to simply raise your hand.

Raising your hand is symbolic, it is just communicating today I choose to put my faith in Jesus.

Amen.

Amen.

Amen.

For those who raised a hand, we can say with confidence, out of God's word, that he sees your faith and accepts it.

That right now in this moment, he has forgiven all of your sins, past, present, and even future sins, have been clothed by the righteousness of Jesus, and he has adopted you into an eternal relationship with himself.

And so, what I want to do for those who raised a hand, I want to help you acknowledge this moment through a simple prayer.

I'm gonna ask you to pray this with me, and I'm gonna ask all believers across our venues to pray this out loud as well.

Let's pray like this.

Jesus, today I choose to put my faith in you.

I believe you are God that you died for my sins and rose from the grave.

I thank you for loving me and forgiving my sins.

So glad you joined us for today's message.

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