The Most Powerful Prayer

What a beautiful time of uh worship this morning.

You know, I we all during the week worship God, I think in our own ways, but there's something for me so special about when we're all together uh worshiping God.

Well, good morning.

If you're here for the first time, hope you can tell you can just uh relax and be yourself.

We're glad that you're here.

It's uh I'm glad to be back after uh being gone a few weeks.

I'm appreciative of Ken.

Uh you know, he's such a a great speaker.

He's uh speaking several more times this year, uh a couple times in April than uh again in June.

And it's it's nice for me to have a break, but I think it's good for us to hear a different style and and even uh a slightly different perspective.

And I do want to acknowledge what I'm sure is obvious uh to everyone, and that he's not near as funny as I am.

And so I know, especially if he's speaking three weeks in a row, that's quite a sacrifice.

And I appreciate that.

Um this Wednesday night, we've got groups uh again uh all through February and uh March.

It's a great time.

We've got just great groups, something literally for everyone, child care for uh the younger kids, and then live music uh in the coffee house from 8 to 9.

So even if you haven't come on Wednesday before, uh please come and join us uh this Wednesday.

I get to tell us about a uh kind of a cool opportunity that I think is perfect for us as a church.

And that's that we've agreed to be an emergency uh shelter for Cherokee County and the Red Cross.

Um we'll be one of uh one of two of what they call uh mega shelters in Cherokee County, and it's just such a great opportunity.

Thankfully, there's not many uh need for shelters.

I mean, it in the last five years, we've only had shelters opened up twice in this county.

One was uh during Katrina, and then the other was a couple years ago during the floods.

Um the floods here and then only a few people needed uh shelter.

But if there ever is a major need, how great will it be for us to be there and be able to help a bunch of people?

Our hope is actually that we'll we can get into a position over time where we can completely uh run the shelter and just provide uh that for everyone.

Um and this is uh an opportunity to to help with that.

Here's what it takes.

It's uh overall it takes a four-hour training course to be a volunteer and help with the shelter.

We could use a couple people that would like to run uh the shelter.

That's a two-day uh course, and and those courses will be here, and we'll announce those um in a few weeks.

But this week there's a chance to kind of check it out and see if it's something that you'd like to help with.

It's uh it's what will be an annual drill, and it'll be here this uh Saturday morning, and you could come and help in two ways.

One is you could come and role play being an evacuee.

And uh and they could use some people that have any kind of special needs, physical needs.

If you uh speak a language other than English, that would be helpful because they want to be prepared just for everyone and every situation and uh every need.

Another way is you can come and just jump in and and help out this uh this Saturday.

Uh it's important that you sign up because they're putting together a list as they uh as they prepare for Saturday morning.

So if that's something that would interest you, you know, it's something that uh we can get ready for.

We'll probably only have to jump in every uh couple of years, but what a great way to serve uh people and and really to serve our community uh too.

So if you'd like to help with that, please sign up.

There's a table in the lobby uh as we leave.

A couple weeks ago, before Ken spoke, I talked about us being a volunteer church and just all the different opportunities to help.

And so I want to make sure and say thank you for for how you responded.

I mean, we're just overwhelmed with people offering to help uh in in so many different ways, and you all helped so much um already.

And I thought I would quickly share what last week looked like at his hands.

This isn't to ask for more help, this is really just um to encourage each of us.

Okay, so last week, last Sunday, over a hundred people volunteered and helped in every area on Sunday morning.

Besides that, administrative volunteers were in the office all week helping us do everything.

Uh volunteers at home helping coordinate schedules and reminders for Lord's Supper Baking and setup and cleanup and coffee and different times of cleaning.

Two youth volunteers were working doing all this scheduling for his kids, junior high and high school.

Beth shops for grape juice and nursery stuff every week.

Christy goes to BJ's every week to buy milk and pastries for the coffee shop.

Uh Wednesday, Ben and Jim and Tom uh provided live music in the uh in the coffee shop.

Volunteers ran the coffee shop Wednesday.

Volunteers led and helped with all the groups and everything on Wednesday night.

On Thursday, there were volunteers cleaning.

Uh Alyssa was editing videos.

Our volunteer worship and technical team were practicing.

I know of at least three of them that were here till after one o'clock in the morning.

Um I know that because one of them was Susan.

I was starting to get scared, but it was cool.

Um Joy was on the lift changing light bulbs.

Friday morning, Roy and Tina were out in the parking lot uh digging to find a leak.

Jen was leading mom's rock.

Joanna and Sonny stayed and cleaned up.

So Stephanie calls a leak detection person, but David, who does her landscaping with his crew for free, had already alerted him.

The same landscaping crew put pine straw on the property for free this week.

Roof leaks were being detected and repaired for free by Juan and his company.

Um David was fixing drywall and paint in the nursery.

Leroy was doing all kinds of repairs along with Roy.

Bill was replacing the monitor in the kids' lobby.

Jeremy was doing the carpentry work involved.

Robin prays for someone who calls in.

It's a homeless woman with young kids, and a whole group mobilizes uh to help her.

Maureen prayed with a single mom on a Wednesday night and found out about some serious home repair needs.

And so this week the love squad responded.

Robert was at her house fixing stuff, Jack is doing her yard stuff, Gordon's going to pressure, wash her deck.

Um, that's all this week.

And that's just what I know about.

And I'm sure there's just as much that I don't even know about.

And it's just so exciting and encouraging to be part of a group of people like this.

We got a card in the mail a couple weeks ago.

And it says, Thank you for breakfast.

This is really about one of y'all or some of y'all.

It says, Dear His Hands Church, the most wonderful thing happened yesterday.

My aunt and I were having breakfast at IHOP after I'd taken my aunt to her doctor's checkup.

The server came over and said that our breakfast was paid for by someone who didn't want to give their names, but they left your card.

It's one of the cards that are in the back by the prayer and giving stations.

Since I can't thank the individual or individuals that paid for our breakfast, I wanted to thank your whole church.

To me, this generosity tells me that your church is very loving and caring.

I'm a member of Kennesaw United Methodists and attend every Sunday.

I sing in the choir, so you'll find me at church during the week too.

But I feel that God puts people in our paths for a reason.

My daughter's in church and needs direction.

I'm going to give the card to her.

She's been resistant to going to church, but I can't stop trying to help her to feel the love and peace that the Lord gives me.

Thank you so much for the caring people at your church.

And please thank everyone for the wonderful breakfast and the feeling of love that brought to my aunt and me.

See, you know, it's it's a small thing, but love is a powerful thing.

And I'm just so thankful that God's pouring his love not just into us, but through us, you know, into each other and into those around us.

Let's uh let's pray.

Father, thanks for being such a great God, and thank you for loving us, adopting us as your own kids.

Holy Spirit, thank you for being our teacher.

And please teach us this morning.

Please uh let it be that each one of us leaves with something they know was directly uh from you uh to each of us.

And Jesus, just thanks you for being our Savior and our friend, reuniting us with our Father.

We love you and we trust you.

It's your name we pray.

Amen.

Well, this morning we're gonna take a fresh look at one of the most famous things that Jesus ever taught.

In case you're wondering, we are gonna get back to Corinthians one of these days.

We started that in November, I mean in October, kind of got interrupted by the holidays, and then we started about kicking the year off uh right.

And the thing is, I I just don't like to go too long without talking specifically about Jesus.

Uh, you know, what he taught, what he said, what he did.

And so we're gonna do that through um Easter, and then sometime after Easter, uh, we'll finish up with what is a really cool letter that Paul wrote to that church.

But for the next few weeks, we're gonna look at something Jesus taught that we'll kind of continue this idea of growing and prospering and having a great year on the inside.

We're gonna look at what we call the Lord's Prayer.

Now, here's our goals is to take something that is so familiar and kind of reclaim or reinforce its power in our lives.

To me, it's similar to the Lord's Supper.

I grew up taking uh what we called communion or the Lord's Supper every Sunday, and it got to me, it was just a religious practice.

Um and now it has changed, so it's a meaningful part of every single one of my weeks.

It's also kind of like uh when we studied uh the 23rd Psalm together.

You know, it just uh uh created a new power and impact and beauty of that in my life.

And then the uh the second thing is just so that we can see that we can all, every one of us, uh, pray with confidence to God.

Jesus makes it so simple.

And the third is just to change our lives, change us from the inside and also change our outside.

Jesus says, pray like this, and then he teaches us, and we call it the Lord's Prayer.

Martin Luther, as you probably know, uh four or five hundred years ago was trying to get some of the religion and tradition from church.

He said this, for to this day I drink of the Lord's Prayer like a child.

I drink and eat like an old man.

I can never get enough of it.

To me, it is the best of all prayers.

I think that we're gonna feel exactly the same way.

The Lord's Prayer was found kind of in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount.

Sermon on the Mount was one of the most radical teachings the world has ever heard.

It really turned the whole system upside down.

It took place in the same place, the Capernaum, above Capernaum, where so many things that Jesus did uh took place.

It's a lush green hill uh sloping down to the Sea of Galilee.

There were three basic groups there.

There was Jesus' disciples, his closest followers, there were the Pharisees and the religious scholars of the day.

Then there was everybody, you know, just big groups of people that would come to hear Jesus talk.

And the whole thing was radical.

But the prayer, how to pray, as we'll see, was the most radical of all.

Before Jesus talks about how we can pray, he first needs to bust down some kind of religious walls and some traditions that they had gotten into.

It starts in Matthew 6, verse 5.

Matthew 6:5

When you pray, don't be like the hypocrites who love to pray publicly on street corners and in the synagogues where everybody can see them.

I tell you the truth, that is all the reward they will ever get.

But when you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you, and pray to your father in private.

Then your father who sees everything will reward you.

You know a freeing thing about a relationship with Jesus, following Jesus, is that we don't have to impress anyone with our spirituality.

We can relax, we can be real, we can be ourselves.

The point isn't that we have it all together.

The point is actually the opposite that we don't.

That we need God, that we need the Holy Spirit, that we need Jesus.

Jesus is obviously not saying don't pray in public, because he's going to go on and do that quite a bit.

But the point is our hearts.

You know, what's our heart is that we should never pray or feel like we have to impress other people.

This is real.

This is a real relationship with a real God who hears our prayers and answers them.

So he goes on.

When you pray, don't babble on and on, as people of other religions do.

They think their prayers are answered merely by repeating the words again and again.

Don't be like them, for your father knows exactly what you need even before you ask him.

This is one of my favorite teachings of all on prayer.

Because God likes short prayers.

Now, Jesus doesn't say this, but I know he's thinking it, especially before Mills.

No long prayers before mills.

That should have been the 11th commandment.

But Jesus also says, don't use meaningless phrases.

You know, sometimes we get in that trap.

I used to pray with a lot of kind of meaningless phrases.

Something like maybe we got a big pile of nachos, you know, in front of us, and we ask God to bless it to the nourishment of our bodies.

You know, we should be asking God, please don't let this kill me today.

One of my favorites, and this is, I apologize in advance for offending anyone, but it's it's when we pray asking for a hedge of protection.

You know, that's a phrase that's only used once in the whole Bible.

It's used by one of Job's lousy friends.

And we ask God for a hedge of protection.

I mean, how much protection is that?

I mean, a hedge.

Who wants a hedge for protection?

I mean, we want to pray for the barbed wire fence of protection, the giant electric wall of protection.

Besides getting caught up in meaningless phrases, there's actually a really encouraging thing there.

And that's that Jesus says, God already knows what you need.

See, we don't need to go into these long, detailed explanations.

Sometimes it's good to have long talks with God, but God knows what we need, so we can just simply pray to Him.

We can be ourselves.

Two basic points Jesus makes before he starts teaching us how to pray.

They are don't try and impress other people, and you don't need to try and impress God.

We can relax, we can be ourselves.

Prayer was a big deal in the Jewish culture.

A devout Jewish person would pray three times a day.

Pray at sunrise, pray at 3 p.m.

in the afternoon, and then pray again at sunset.

Each time they'd repeat the same prayer in Hebrew.

They would start with a verse from Deuteronomy.

It's verse uh Deuteronomy 6.4.

It says, Listen, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.

And that's how they would start.

And then they would stand and pray 18 specific prayers that were called the Amadah, because Amada was Hebrew for standing.

And these were always prayed standing.

It's the same form that's used in a lot of synagogues today.

And so that is this large crowd against, you know, they're they're together, gathered on the side of this hill.

And Jesus is about to teach them to pray.

Teach us to pray.

And that's what they're expecting.

What they've grown up with, what they what they've always known.

And Jesus says, pray like this.

And then with two words, he blows their minds.

He turns upside down their understanding of what a relationship with God is like, and he changes the way we talk with God forever.

He blows their minds in two ways, and with two words.

The first way is the language.

The words Jesus says are in Aramaic.

That's something we wouldn't even notice.

But Aramaic was the people's language.

It was kind of this conglomeration of Hebrew and slang.

It was a merchant's language or around the Sea of Galilee, but that's what the everyday people spoke was Aramaic.

But God's people were Hebrew.

And so the rabbis and the priests and the teachers all prayed in Hebrew.

Jesus was fluent in Hebrew, but in everyday interactions, he always spoke in Aramaic.

And it's significant that when he says, pray like this, that it's in Aramaic.

It would have infuriated the Pharisees, religious scholars, and it would have shocked everyday people.

John says, in the beginning the word already existed.

The word was with God and the word was God.

And Jesus is demonstrating that the word is for everyone.

There's no sacred language, there's no sacred culture.

A relationship with God is for everyone.

But that's not the only part that turned the world upside down.

It's the two words he said in Aramaic.

Jesus says our Abba.

We translated our Father in these verses.

The word Jesus used is Abba.

The closest English word is daddy.

Now this might surprise us, but not once in the entire Old Testament is God addressed as Father.

Not once.

In the entire Old Testament is God addressed as Father.

He's referred to as Father, like when David says he's a father to the fatherless.

Or in a simile where God's compared to a father, like in Psalms 103-13, it says, The Lord is like a father to his children, tender and compassionate to those who fear him.

He's never addressed directly as a father.

Or I could say Tim is my dad.

Or I could call Tim Daddy.

You see the difference?

There's a huge difference between saying God is like a father and addressing him father.

And so the people on this side of this hill would have never ever heard God address directly as Father.

But Jesus doesn't just say father.

He says our daddy.

Pray like this.

Our dad in heaven.

Imagine how this group of people felt.

They never heard him do God directly addressed directly as Father.

Now Jesus is praying in Aramaic and he calls him daddy.

Today in the Middle East, many people speak uh Arabic, but this Aramaic word has uh has persisted.

And so all over the Middle East, the first word that a lot of young children learn is Abba.

It means daddy.

Again, imagine how shocked they were.

You know, were you shocked the first time you heard God referred to as daddy?

It might have happened here.

I was.

I never even thought about that.

It seemed irreverent to me.

Um it still honestly feels a little awkward to think that the greater of all is our daddy.

We're his kids.

But thankfully, Jesus doesn't stop with our daddy.

He says our daddy in heaven.

That's important because it distinguishes God from our earthly fathers.

And some of us cringe.

When we hear God compared to our earthly fathers, because of the horrible experiences we've had with our own dads.

Some of us have had good experiences with our dads.

But no matter how good or a bad of a dad that we had here on earth or have here on earth, God is different.

He is nothing like that.

Jesus explains what the word Abba means when he tells the story of the prodigal son.

A dad that loves us, a dad that pursues us, will never give up on us, no matter what we've done or where we have gone.

We are his kids and he loves us.

Our Father in heaven also speaks just about the awesomeness of God, the one who breathed mankind into his existence, cares more about us than we could ever even comprehend.

During worship, just before the Lord's Supper, Susan read this.

It's adventurously expectant, greeting God with a childlike, what's next, Papa?

That word that Eugene Peterson translates Papa is Abba.

God's Spirit touches our spirits and confirms who we really are.

We know who He is, and we know who we are, father and children.

1 John 3 says, What marvelous love the Father has extended to us.

Just look at it.

We're called children of God.

That's who we really are.

That's just something we talk about a lot, but it would have been totally mind-blowing to this crowd listening to Jesus.

Again, it was mind-blowing to me.

I'd learned that God was mean.

Growing up, I learned that God was mean, that he was hard to please.

In a way, Jesus came to protect us from God.

And then Jesus comes and tells us the truth: that God is love, he is our Abba, and He loves you.

He says, our Father.

It describes not just our relationship with God, it describes our relationship with each other.

Our Father.

You know, it reflects our relationship with Jesus, our relate reflects our relationship as brothers and sisters with each other.

That's one of the reasons I wanted to share everything that went on this week.

Is just it's because we are acting like a family.

You know, we're brothers and sisters, we're trying to take care of each other, and we share the same Father, our Father.

The crowd listening to Jesus would have been expecting a long, flowery, very traditional prayer.

Instead, Jesus said, Pray like this.

Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy, may your kingdom come soon, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us today the food we need and forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who sin against us.

And don't let us yield to temptation, but rescue us from the evil one.

This morning, I hope, if nothing else, we can see the refreshing simplicity of God.

We don't have to speak Christianese.

We don't need to learn any special phrases.

We don't have to get all worked up.

We can just be ourselves talking to our dad in heaven.

In John 4, Jesus said, that's the kind of people the Father is out looking for.

Those who are simply and honestly themselves before Him in their worship.

Most important thing that ever happened in my personal prayer life was when God taught me to drop all of the religious jargon.

And it was hard because honestly, that's the only way I knew how to pray.

And it took a long time.

But I learned to simply talk to him, like I would anyone, about anything.

At least anyone I knew that loved me.

And that's one of the things that Jesus teaches us in the Lord's Prayer.

Our Abba in heaven.

Brian Skuris and our men's group on Wednesday nights challenged us this last two weeks to pray.

He said, It will change your life, I guarantee it.

And it's true.

It's true.

We can all do it.

Jesus is going to teach us how simple and powerful it is.

And so if the worship team will come up, we'll get ready to sing one last song together.

So what's the one thing you would ask from dad in heaven?

You know, I mean, we all have probably a lot of things that we need from God.

But what's the one thing right now?

It could be anything.

You know, it could be something you're going through.

It could be wanting to be closer to Him.

It could be a relationship.

It could be a child, it could be jobs, it could be anything.

What's the one thing that you would ask your daddy in heaven?

What I want to do is just take 30 seconds and let's just ask him.

He already knows what we need.

You know, it only takes a few sentences.

Daddy.

So let's do that now.

You know, it's pretty uh it's pretty simple to talk to God.

If uh if you'll stand, we'll get ready to sing this last uh song together.

You know, connecting with Jesus is just as simple.

It's kind of the same thing.

You know, there's no formula, there's no speech, there's nothing to sign, nothing to get notarized.

It's just in your own words, in your own way, talking to Jesus.

Tell him you trust him.

You know, whatever, whatever it is, really.

I need you.

Help me, save me, forgive me.

But if you can put your trust in him, he will change your life.

Your spirit inside will come alive, it'll connect with his spirit, and you'll get into a process where he'll change you from the inside out and change your whole life.

And you can do that this morning.

All right, let's pray.

Father, we love you.

Thank you for loving us.

Thank you for being such a good dad to us.

Thank you for wanting us to just not call you God, but to call you daddy.

We thank you for hearing every one of these prayers we just prayed and for answering them.

And Jesus, we thank you for teaching us how to pray.

And please stir us up and just give us the confidence to talk with you.

We ask you this and we trust you in your name.

Amen.