Teach Us To Pray (Andrew Meher)

Andrew Meher: We are beginning a new series this summer as we as we enter into this season of learning about the beauty of Jesus. We are going to start and spend all the way through October learning how to pray like Jesus. It's a great place to start. And as you'll see this morning, and as you'll see through this series, I want you to understand that we all pray, but some of us, or maybe all of us, I should say, pray poorly. We all pray, but maybe we don't all pray to the God we think we're praying to. And I want to explain more about that this morning. So let's read Luke chapter 11. Verses 1 through 13, and we'll see why this is important to understand. Says this one day Jesus was praying in a certain place. And when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray, just 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. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us, and lead us not into temptation. And then he said, Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him. Then the one inside answers, Don't bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can't get up and give you anything. I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man's boldness, he will get up and give him as much as he needs. So I say to you, Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives. He who seeks finds, and to him who knocks, the door will be opened. Which of you, fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, we'll give him a scorpion. If you then, though you are evil, know how to good give good gifts to your children, how much more Will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? Let's pray. Lord Jesus, teach us to pray. The Spirit, open our eyes to see, our ears to hear, and our minds to know, and our hearts to receive and understand how to pray like Jesus. And Father, help us to know that you are a good Father who gives good gifts and that you want to freely give to each of us. In your name, Lord Jesus, we pray. Amen. there are several everyday items, household items, common items you see out in the world, that you have probably been using wrong your whole life and you didn't know it. Some of you are probably enlightened and you've figured it out by now. but but many of you, it wouldn't surprise me if you don't know how to use these items correctly. Let me show you what I mean. Here's the first one. How many of you love when there's a classic glass Heinz ketchup bottle in the diner and you flip it upside down and you're banging on the bottom for like years? My parents would just take a knife. They didn't, they just gave up. They took a knife, reach inside, and they'd spread it on my burger or whatever, and it was just like you're there. And you know you do it for forever and then you fling it and it just shoots out, right? It's terrible. Well, some of you may know this already, but did you know that little 57 label just below the cap? If you tilt the bottle and you just tap gently on that 57, 57 label, the ketchup will just flow right out. That one's for free. Go try it at the diner this afternoon or something. But isn't that crazy? You have been using this item you're so familiar with for so many years. You've been using it all wrong and you didn't even know it. How about this one? This one blew my mind. A plunger. Did you know there are two kinds of plungers? I did not know that there was a difference between a toilet plunger and a sink plunger. Or maybe, you know, Big Plunger just engineered this so we'd buy more plungers. I don't know. But this is what I learned. There's the the toilet plunger, which has that little extra flange on the bottom so it can seal to the inside of the toilet and plunge easier. And then the sink plunger, obviously, it's got the flat bottom, it fits at the bottom of your sink, and you plunge like it makes sense, but I didn't know there was a difference, and I thought I was using the sink plunger the right way all that time. Well now you know how to use it. You were so familiar with it you didn't even know. How about this next one? Did you know you've been opening a banana wrong? Some some of you know this. Some of you know this. I see some nods. But I always, you know, you take the banana and you'd rip it from the stem, right? But the problem is if the banana's not perfectly ripe. You're just gonna you start ripping at it and the thing's not coming, and then that end of the banana gets all mushy when you're like it's not work right and then you give up and try a new banana and or you just cut it off with a knife. That's what I do sometimes. But if you go to the other end of the banana, this is actually how monkeys open it. And you peel it from that end, not only does it open nice and easy, did you know? that when you peel it, you're peeling with the grain and you don't get any of those stringy little peels on it. You're so glad you came to church today. And not for the reasons you thought you were. Isn't that incredible? One more that actu absolutely blew my mind when I found this out. You know when you got tin foil and you're trying to pull it out and the roll just keeps popping out of the box? Well, there's two little perforations on the side, and if you punch those in, it forms this nice little holder for your tube of aluminum foil, and you just unroll it. Or you just go buy the giant one at Costco and then it doesn't matter. It's got like a wheel built into it and stuff, because everything's bigger at Costco. But but this foil thing is amazing. When I learned, I think I learned this during COVID, it blew my mind. It was like the coolest thing, it was like the most exciting thing that happened when you're Lockdown in your home during COVID, right? But all of these everyday items, you're so used to being around them, you're so familiar with them, you just assume that you know how they work. Until someone does something with them that blows your mind. And this, friends, is what happened when Jesus' followers began to notice how Jesus prayed compared to how they had learned to pray. Jesus' disciples had grown up in a tradition that paid very close attention to prayer. There were set times of prayer each day on the Sabbath in the synagogues and in the temple in Jerusalem. They were surrounded by Pharisees and teachers of the law and priests who prayed and showed them how to pray all the time. They were praying the Psalms that we have in the Old Testament. They were praying and singing them daily. If any people were familiar with praying faithfully, it was the Jewish people of the first century. They thought that they had been praying faithfully, and they may have assumed that this is just what prayer is. Yet when they met Jesus, they saw a life of prayer that they did not know was possible. Just like these everyday objects are. To be used in ways that we didn't imagine possible. Jesus shows us how to pray in a way that is so different from what many of us are used to. Instead of prayer being this stressful obligation or something we do only when we need something, prayer, like Jesus teaches us, brings us into the fullness of the life of God in ways we couldn't have imagined. So profound was Jesus' life of prayer, so incredible was the fruit of his prayer life, the way people were set free, the way people were healed, all of these things that in Luke 11, his disciples finally came to him while he was praying, nonetheless, and said, Lord, can you teach us to pray? Because we're not doing the same thing. And we're going to be learning, along with the first followers of Jesus, how to pray like Jesus, using the prayer that Jesus himself taught us to pray. And we'll be using the version that you might be familiar with here in Luke, that begins our Father, as well as we'll be using the translation in Matthew chapter six, which is the longer version of the prayer, and and which is probably the one you're more familiar with. That's the one that's historically been prayed by the church, and we'll be praying that prayer together each week. And along with the Lord's Prayer, Jesus provided in and around both versions of the prayer. He provides Teaching to help us understand how to use and pray the Lord's Prayer and what the point of prayer is in the first place. And the reason we're spending significant time this fall on prayer is because of this significant shift that's upon us as a church that we just spoke about. As we begin to step into this new season as being a fully accredited church in the near future. Friends, we have a mission to follow Jesus for the sake of the Highlands. That is not something you and I can do in our own physical natural power. We will not be able to do the spiritual task of being a witness to for Jesus effectively if we do not become a church that prays. And we don't want to just be a church that prays any kind of prayer. Not prayer necessarily in the familiar ways we grew up with, not in the ways that we assume or think prayer to be or imagine it to be. But when I say we need to become a church that prays if we're going to be effective, we need to be a church that learns how to pray like Jesus. But how do we know how to pray like Jesus? Well, before we can answer that, we should probably back up and ask, how do we not pray like Jesus? What does praying like Jesus not include? What are the ways that you and I have mistakenly been praying and thought we were praying like Jesus taught us to pray? Well, in Matthew chapter 6, where the other version of the Lord's Prayer is, Jesus describes two kinds of people who are praying in ways that you and I should not imitate. He describes them as the hypocrites. And the pagans. Hypocrites were people within the Jewish religious community who were very aware that they were praying. You know people who are very aware of their praying and their prayers. I know some of you are chuckling. They wanted to be noticed, hypocrites. They were thinking about how they were standing, the way they'd position their bodies and raise their hands, making sure they had the right words all the time. They were ones making sure that their words were going to be heard properly by God. They wanted to sound spiritually mature to the people around them. It was pretentious prayer. Don't be fooled, by the way, when you hear prayer that sounds really good. It may just be nice sounding prayer. It doesn't necessarily mean that that person is praying like Jesus. The pagans were the other group that Jesus described that we should not imitate in prayer. And the pagans, that word pagan, is also translated as Gentile. And here's what this means: it's very simple. It just means anyone who is outside of the Jewish people and the Jewish religious community of that time. They didn't know or pray to the one true God. They had a very different idea of what praying to God was like and who the God was they were praying to. So if we think. of The hypocrites and and the pagans and the way they prayed, we we have a pretty good idea of how we should not pray and and what it looks like that we should not imitate. And we may see some of these things at work in our lives. Like the hypocrites, I said, were praying in ways to be noticed. The pagans were always trying to convince the gods to do something for them. They were constantly trying to convince them to do something. So if we think about these two. Two ways of not to pray. Praying like Jesus does not include things like this that we might be familiar with. It's not praying prayers based on our anxiety, on our fear, and on our worry. When we're praying like Jesus, it does not look like praying out of our anxiousness, out of our fear, and out of our worry. Now, don't get me wrong, there's going to be moments where there are urgent things you need to bring to the Lord. But we are not bringing them to them out of anxiety, out of fear, out of worry, and wondering if God if this caught God off guard. God is not caught off guard. With the things that happen in our lives. So we do not pray like Jesus by coming with our anxiety, our fear, and our worry. Name the anxiety and the fear and the worry if it's there before him. And lay it before him and say, Lord, I'm just gonna have to wait here because I feel all these things, but I am not going to pray to you out of these things. Praying like Jesus also does not include focusing on making sure you have the right words. Many of us might be like, I don't want to pray because I don't want say the wrong thing. Just pray. Praying like Jesus also does not include wondering what others think of our prayers. Do you think they liked how I prayed? Was that a good prayer? I know this sounds silly, but we all do this in our minds. Do I did I did I sound like a good prayer? It's not for them. Here's another one. Praying like Jesus does not include being overly focused on our material needs. This is a big one for our society. If we think about the way we pray, if we're honest, quite often our prayers are about God, I need a better job. God, I need more money. God, I need a better school for my kids. God, I need a better house. God, I'd like to go on that vacation. God, I hope my car starts this morning. God, I hope this is you hear what I'm saying. And most of our prayers become these like, God, I need this, I need this. I need this, I mean this. Hear me, there is space, as we will learn in a few weeks, to ask for what we need. But we're going to notice that it's a very small amount of space in the context of the entire prayer. So we need to remember that praying like Jesus does not look like being overly focused on our material need, because we have a Father who knows what we need before we ask him. Praying like Jesus also does not include saying too much. Some of us might come from church traditions where we believe we are heard because we had an intensity and a long time praying, and therefore that's going to bring breakthrough, and God is going to answer my prayer. Sometimes the outpour of our hearts goes on for a long time and it is intense. But praying long and saying a lot of words is not in itself praying like Jesus. Another thing that doesn't look like praying like Jesus is only praying publicly. If the only time we pray for people is when we're here in this room, like we did this morning, and we only have a public prayer life, then that's not a prayer life. That's just kind of doing what everyone else is doing. Now, don't get me wrong, you should pray here, and you should pray publicly, but you also, as Jesus will teach us, go into the secret place and speak to your father who's in secret. Praying like Jesus also does not include, and this is another big one, looking for a quid pro quo from God. God, listen, if you get me this job promotion, I promise I'll start reading my Bible regularly. God, I prom- I know you really want me to pray more, God, and I'll do that if you keep me from getting my kids' flu so I can go to work. The quid pro quo. the the exchange thing with God. All of these are examples of of this final one here. Praying like Jesus, to sum it up, does not include a focus on praying our will, our wants, and our desires. The New Testament scholar Scott McKnight summarizes false prayer this way. He says the theology of the pagans, and we could include the hypocrites in that, involves, he said, a God who can be manipulated. A God that we have to convince to be on our side. But McKnight says that against this view, Jesus teaches that the God we pray to is one who already knows. And can be trusted. And so rather than praying in that way, praying like Jesus does look like trusting God as our Father, who gives us good gifts. It includes recognizing his holiness and his beauty, being in awe of his glory and his wonder and his mystery. Praying like Jesus does include desiring God's rule and God's reign and God's righteousness and God's justice to be done on the earth, just like it is in heaven. Praying like Jesus does include asking for today's needs. Not what we need in six years from now, what we need today. Praying like Jesus also includes asking for forgiveness of sins. And extending forgiveness of sins to others. And finally, praying like Jesus does include asking God for spiritual protection. Do you notice the difference? Do you see the difference between the self-focus and the God focus in these two ways of praying? You can think of praying like the hypocrites and the pagans almost as being like you're looking into a mirror. And you're looking into the mirror, and we think we're reaching out to God with our prayers, but in reality, we are praying to a poor reflection of God's image in us. And we're only praying and mimicking our own wants and desires back at ourselves. That's what praying like the hypocrites and the pagans is like. So if you feel like your prayers aren't getting very far, that might be what's going on. But praying in the way that Jesus will teach us through the Lord's Prayer is looking out of a window. instead of a mirror. And it's like you're looking out of a window at the most beautiful view that you have ever seen in your life. Mountains, lakes, streams, rivers, the ocean, the beach, whatever it might be. And you you know that feeling when you're looking at a scene like that, that you that that land kind of landscape that you love, and you just kinda Yeah, you just kind of come down a little bit because it just looks so beautiful. And you start to relax. That is what praying like Jesus is like. In beholding the beauty of God, like looking out that window, we begin to change before we have even started to ask for anything. And so see, we gotta see that praying like Jesus changes not just what we pray, it changes how we pray. It shapes our desires, it transforms us and our behavior as much as anything else. Because at the core of all prayer is simply this learning to be with the God who we call Father. That's it. It's not more complicated than that. And when we are with our Father in heaven, we're changed. When we're with our Father in heaven, we see things differently. We get our eyes fixed firmly on his name and his holiness. We get our gaze set on his righteousness and his justice and how the Father desires for his kingdom and his will to be at work on earth rather than human kingdoms and desires and agendas. When we're with the Father, it gives us a renewed sense of understanding just how good He is, and that He will never fail to provide for us. When we're with the Father, we begin to gaze on the beauty of our Father in prayer, and as we do so, it helps us to begin to confess our sins and to ask for and receive forgiveness because we've been softened by His presence. And as we also are softened, we're able to extend forgiveness to others who have offended us, even to our enemies. And in this kind of prayer, we learn to trust that our Father will protect us from the powers of darkness that will be trying to destroy us whenever we try to remain faithful to Jesus. As we behold God's beauty and glory like this, we are transformed. When we pray like Jesus, we are beginning an entirely new life in God. So Jesus' teaching on prayer here in Luke, of this bold man asking his neighbor for bread. It shows us how prayer begins to shape us, and it shows us exactly what we receive when we pray like Jesus. This man received what he asked for, not because he had some kind of special status. He didn't even come out because he was his friend. He didn't get what he asked for because he knew the magic word to use, the phrase to get what he wanted. He received what he asked for simply because he was bold. Asking boldly, seeking boldly, knocking boldly, Jesus tells us, is possible because the Father desires to give you and I good gifts, more than any earthly parent could ever dream of doing for their children. Now I love surprising my children, especially with Bellevue Creamery ice cream, which is the best ice cream on the planet. You all know it. And especially my wife and I love to do this randomly in the summertime where we go, should we take them to Belleville tonight? And so we'll we'll kind of plan it ahead of time, but we won't say anything. We'll kind of push dinner a little earlier. They don't really notice the difference, but it you know, we'll be able to get there and back for bedtime and stuff and and and and we have this plan and we know how it's gonna go and and we wrap up dinner and as the girls usually do, because they forget we're good parents and they try to manipulate us. they they say, Can we have a suite? That's how they ask. Can we have something sweet? Just like that. They're trying to be as cute as possible. It's annoying because it works sometimes. and we say, sorry. We we don't really have anything around the house for sweets. And they're like, Come on. So we should probably just go to Belleville, huh? We'll say, and they lose their minds. They lose their minds. And it's so much fun and the joy and the surprise. And we talk about what flavors we're gonna get, and we get the ice cream and we look at the beautiful view. We have the bite best ice cream on the planet. And Jesus is saying that even that surprise gift from a father and mother to their children pales in comparison to the good gifts our Heavenly Father wants to give us. So what are those good gifts? Jesus says, if you're broken, you messed up humans. Evil, he says, if you all know how to good give good give good gifts to your children. He says, how much more, listen closely, will your father in heaven make you comfortable? No, he doesn't say that. How much more will your father in heaven make sure you have enough money? You loved by your father, how much more will your father in heaven give you a better moral life? He doesn't say any of those things, does he? I'm poking because these are the things we imagine that we're supposed to get in prayer. He says, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? I want you to notice that the asking and the seeking and the knocking that we will practice in this pattern of prayer together does not result in material blessing. Of course, the Father is going to provide for your needs. It's not even a question. But my brothers and sisters, praying like Jesus isn't about having a slightly more comfortable or tolerable or moral life. Praying like Jesus is about accessing the very life of God in the person of the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ given by the Father. This is what praying like Jesus does to us. We are filled with the very life of God. We are live in the desires of God. We have the hopes of God. We are given the dreams of God. This is what is happening in the life of Jesus that the disciples saw. His way of living, his priorities, his thinking was entirely different, and they recognized that it was his prayer life, his shared life with God. Jesus' access to the spirit that made him different and effective and they wanted in. Highlands Community Church, do you want in? Do you want in to a life with God? Do you want to see all the pieces of prayer scattered about your life that you thought you knew how to use properly transformed into something that you never knew was possible? Lord, teach us to pray. Not Andrew teach us to pray. Not really an experienced person I know who had a good devotional book come out, teach us to pray. Lord, teach us to pray. And this is where Jesus graciously responds. When you pray, say this. And through the prayer that Jesus gave us, we will learn how to pray like Jesus. Just to help you understand where we're going for the next few weeks, Joel Green explains that Jesus' followers pray in this way because this is a distinctive practice of Jesus' followers. When Jesus says, pray and say this, literally the word is there: when you pray, recite this. Copy this. Don't do something different, don't come up with your own idea. Do this. And we learn how to be distinctively Jesus-shaped prayers by praying like Jesus showed us to pray. We want to pray this prayer so that we can be identified as God's people and as people who are filled with the life of God, just like Jesus. So we're gonna learn over the next several weeks. And consider each line of the prayer that Jesus gave us. Particularly, we'll be looking a lot at the longer version in Matthew and the traditional ending that's not found in either Luke or Matthew, the part that says, Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. And we'll pray that whole prayer together in just a minute here. And we're going to pray that prayer together every week. And we're also going to pray that prayer together in our life groups. So that we can learn to pray like Jesus in the specific way that brings us into the very life of God. And what I mean by this is we're going to learn how to pray this prayer in two ways. First, as I've already described, we're going to learn to pray. This is a recited prayer. Prayers have been written throughout church history, and this one was literally given to us by Jesus. So if Jesus says, pray this, it's probably a good idea to pray it. We're going to join with the exact words that have been prayed by Christians for 2,000 years. And we're going to pray it, and it's going to change us and shape us. But this prayer is also meant as a model for all of our personal prayers to imitate. And so not only are we going to learn how to recite the prayer, but we're going to learn how to understand the meanings behind the words so that our own personal prayers become saturated in the praying the way that Jesus prayed. Again, Joel Green puts it this way: the habit of prayer along the lines counseled by Jesus will serve as an ongoing catalyst for community formation. So not only is this prayer gonna shape our personal prayers, not only is this going to bring us personally into the life of God. Folks, if we pray like this, it will change our church. It will change what we do, it'll change how we live in the world, it'll change how we love our neighbors, it'll change how we care for each other. Are you ready for that? Some of you are ready? I don't know if I'm ready for that. Because when God gets involved, things get uncomfortable and it's not convenient for me. I just want to put that out there. But I know like the disciples, I want to learn how to pray like Jesus. So, as we journey through this series, here's what I want to challenge you with, and then we're going to pray. I want to challenge you to do something each day. Take time to pray this prayer. Pray it when you wake up. Pray it before you go to bed. Not because it's magic words, but because we're being formed by the way that Jesus taught us to pray. Take time to pray it with your life group, maybe around your dinner table at home or when you put your children to bed at night. Teach them the prayer. Pray it with us each week here on Sundays. And allow it to begin to form the basis for your personal prayers too. Maybe each day you take one of the lines of the Lord's Prayer and you just begin to pray it and put personal words to it. What might it mean for you to pray, our Father? What does it mean to have God as your Father and just pray that? What does it mean to say, your will be done, as opposed to my will? What does it mean to say, give me what I need for today? What does it mean to forgive others or be forgiven? And just pray and use this prayer to begin to shape your personal prayers. And here's why I want you to do it, because I want you to watch. What changes in your life as a result of praying this prayer? Not because necessarily you feel more peaceful or more comfortable, maybe that happens, maybe it doesn't. Not because you think you're making better decisions, but I want you to notice that you are being transformed into sharing the very life of God as you pray this prayer. Because when we pray like Jesus, it brings us in to the very life of God. Would you stand with me? And I want everyone to join me in praying this prayer together, just as Jesus taught us to pray, saying, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts. As we also have forgiven our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever. Amen. Would you remain standing? We're going to prepare to take communion together, and we're going to take some time to respond to the Lord right now.

Luke 11 · chapter mention Matthew 6 · chapter mention