The Lord’s Prayer - Women’s Gathering (April 5)

A Model for Prayer

Sometimes Jesus’ disciples really botched it. Of all the questions they could have asked Jesus while he was on earth, they often settled on: which of us will be the greatest in your kingdom?

Sometimes though, they nailed it. In Luke 11, in one of their more spiritual moments—when they weren’t calling down lightning on their enemies—they asked, “Teach us to pray, Lord.” They had seen Jesus wander off alone to pray. They had seen him skip sleep and food in preference for a few moments of prayer while they themselves struggled to stay awake to pray. They knew they needed help, so they asked Jesus for it.

And help is exactly what he gave them. His help came in the form of a model prayer. That is what the Lord’s Prayer is. It is a model for how we should pray.

It is not a magical recitation. There is no power in these simple words, but there is great power in praying the kinds of requests Jesus teaches us to pray in his model prayer.

He composed his prayer of six general, unadorned petitions. He prayed them without sentimentality, superstition or excessive repetition. This is a humble prayer of faith, and we can have absolute confidence that God will answer this kind of prayer.

Think of the Lord’s Prayer as a skeleton. It’s a framework giving structure to the body of your prayers. It gives you the categories of things you ought to be asking. And as you make this prayer your own, you begin to fill out that skeleton. You add muscles and tissues and flesh to the bones, until it is a full-bodied conversation with God.

Let’s look at that pattern for our prayers. There are many acronyms out there for learning to organize your prayers, but I am going to humbly offer my own, based on the Lord’s prayer. I call it TRIPLE A. In our prayers, we first ADDRESS God. We then AGREE with God and his purposes for the world before we ASK God to meet our every need.

Consdier Matthew 6:9-13:

Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil.

The Triple A’s of Prayer

The ADDRESS:

The most shocking element of this prayer comes in the forgettable address to God: our Father in heaven. So accustomed we have become to addressing God in this familiar way that the amazing privilege of calling the God of Heaven Father is often lost on us. But it wasn’t always this way.

Before Jesus, access to God was severely limited. Only circumcised, law-conforming men and their families were allowed to be part of the people of God. And only whole, healthy, and ceremonially clean people were allowed in tightly regulated areas outside the tabernacle and later the temple. And only the high priest was allowed directly into God’s presence, and even then only once a year on the Day of Atonement. And he did not dare enter the presence of God without a bowl-full of blood.

Israel enjoyed limited access to God—nothing like the access we enjoy as his children. When Israel prayed, they would address God according to his exalted status—calling him holy and sovereign, mighty and most high. They might use his revealed name—Yahweh—which speaks of his character and covenant love for Israel, but they did not address him as their father.

In fact, Israel thought that such a privileged relationship with God was reserved for the promised Messiah whom God would call his Son. You can see that in messianic prophecies of Psalm 2 and in the promise to David in 2 Samuel 7.

But everything changed when Jesus came to earth. He came identifying himself as the Son of God. He prayed to God as his father and taught us to do the same.

“Father” is an intimate address usually reserved for exclusive relationships. It’s familiar and tender. It’s the word children would use for their dads.

Tim Keller describes the privilege we have as God’s children like this,

Not many people would dare to bother a king in the middle of the night. Only the king’s son or daughter would be so bold. But the children of the king feel free to call out for their dad to bring them a drink of water in the middle of the night.

That is the kind of access to God that we enjoy. In fact it’s better than that. (I certainly don’t encourage my children to wake me in the middle of the night. And certainly not for a cup of water.) This is unlimited, unrestrained access. It is always available. It is always encouraged. It is the same access Jesus had. Because in Jesus, we too have become the daughters of the God who rules from Heaven. In your familiarity with prayer, don’t lose sight of this reality.

Never forget, this privilege was purchased at great cost—with the bloody and savage murder of his son, our Savior. So address God in awe that he delights to be your dad. Express your praise and gratitude and awe and wonder for all he has done for you. And address him with confidence and boldness knowing that he could never turn you away.

AGREE

Agreeing with God is the business of the first three petitions found in The Lord’s Prayer.

Have you ever had a car mechanic tell you he needs to adjust your tire alignment? If all four tires aren't heading in the same direction, you’ll have problems: your car will list to one side or the other; your tires will wear unequally; you may eventually damage the internal structure of your car. (Or so I’m told!)

We want our hearts to pull in the same direction as our Father’s—without friction or disagreement. So once we address God as father, the next business of praying is to adjust our alignment—so that we agree with God and whole-heartedly embrace his purposes in this world.

Hallowed be Your Name

God’s purpose has always been to hallow his name. That word “hallow” means to set apart as holy. And his name won’t be hallowed as it should until all the whole earth is full of his glory.

God’s name is another way of referring to God’s character. As God revealed his names throughout the Old Testament, he showed people what he is like. Hagar testifies that he is the “God who sees me”— El Roi. He is the God who provides — Jehovah-Jireh. This is what he called himself when he provided the ram for sacrifice in place of Isaac. He is the God who saves — Yeshua. And his covenant name, Yahweh, identifies him as the loyal, covenant-keeping eternal God.

When God’s name is hallowed, He is honored for who he is. When we ask God to hallow his name, we are agreeing with God that his name is holy and that he deserves honor and glory in this world because of who he is.

We should ask ourselves, is this our priority as it is God’s? If the hallowing of God’s name is our priority, then it ought to have an effect not only on our prayers, but on our behavior. This desire to see God honored has implications for how we live, speak, react to other people, and spend our money and time. As you pray like Jesus, pray about how you might hallow God’s name in your daily life, so that when others see you, they begin to think of God as the holy, glorious, and gracious God that he is.

Your Kingdom Come

That first petition of hallow your name is followed up with, “your kingdom come.” This is how God is hallowing his name—with the advance of his kingdom in this world.

The disciples—more than anything—wanted God’s kingdom to come. They were desperate for Jesus to overthrow Israel’s enemies, take the throne by force, and establish his reign—with them at his side.

But God had a much bigger plan for his kingdom—he intends for his kingdom to encompass not just Israel, but all the nations of the earth and the heavens as well. And rather than assuming the throne through political revolution, Jesus established his rule through suffering and death. After his glorious resurrection, he ascended to his heavenly throne where he now sits and empowers us to continue his work of proclaiming the kingdom of heaven.

His kingdom is not yet complete, but it is on the move. What began two thousand years ago with about 120 people in a small room in Jerusalem has since advanced around the globe. It has marched up to the gates of Hell—where it has broken in and delivered many prisoners. And still it marches on. The advance of God’s kingdom will only stop when it has breached every stronghold of the devil, when men and women from every tribe and tongue and from every corner of the globe—including China, Palestine, Afghanistan, Israel and Russia—hallow God’s name.

If your heart were to beat in unison with God’s and his desire to see his kingdom spread, how would your life and your prayers change? This second petition puts meat on these bones by praying for the kingdom to advance generally and specifically. Pray for it to advance in your home, neighborhoods, city, country, and around the world.

Pray for God’s patience with the lost and for global missions. Pray for God to raise up missionaries to go. Pray that you can go. Pray for boldness in your witness and for revival. Fill out this skeleton with specific prayers.

Your will be done

The third petition continues a concern for God’s will and purposes in this world. When we pray “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we acknowledge God’s will is already being done in heaven. He has no rebellious subjects there. When the same can be said of earth, God’s will has been done, and his kingdom has come in full. But while we wait for all of earth to be folded into God’s kingdom, we pray for God’s will to be done in every situation.

What would your life look if this was your daily concern—that God’s will be done, right here in our daily lives? At the very least it would look like reading God’s word to better know his will. Everything you need to live a godly life is right here in this book(2 Peter 1:3).

Much of it is right on the surface—just a quick google of “will of God verses” and you’ll get dozens of texts to start with—clear and easy to understand commands from the Lord about how we should use (and not use) our bodies, tongues, minds, time and money. We can know his will for us in our work and rest, in how we interact with others and how we pray. Even how we eat. Do you want to do his will? Read and pray!

This petition calls us to know God’s will in his word and then pray for the help to do it. Pray for God’s will to be done in every individual circumstance. Commit all your ways to God in prayer—from considering a new job to the conversations around the dinner table. Pray for God’s will to be done in your church—from the pulpit to the elder meetings, in small group gatherings, and in every home. Pray for God’s will to be done in local government and in the White House.

Remember, this petition is like a bone. Add meat to those bones and fill it out with specific requests in your prayers.

Ask

Now that we’ve addressed God as our Father and we have agreed with him by aligning our hearts with his purposes, we then turn to our needs, asking boldly, fully expecting him to grant those requests.

Daily Bread

The first request is for God to meet our material needs: give us this day our daily bread.

Most of us probably don’t think to ask God each day to feed us. The abundance we enjoy here in the states tempts us to skip this petition. Most of us don’t feel the need to pray every day for God to provide dinner.

But remember, everything we have is a gift from God. We only eat because God made food. He created plants and trees. He sends the rain and sun to grow them. But too often without even thinking, we greedily devour what God generously gives like baby birds clamoring for the food their mom brings back to the nest.

This petition teaches us to pray daily for God’s continued provision. It teaches us to thank him for his faithfulness in the past and to pray for him to meet our needs today — all our material needs. Shelter, clothing, water, and medicine are all gifts of God. If he didn’t open his hand, we would have nothing. So pray. Ask for his provision.

Forgive our Debts

But we aren’t just bodies, we have spiritual needs as well. Our greatest need has always been to be at peace with God. Sin is what destroyed that peace in the first place, and even as God’s children, when we don’t deal with our sin, we hinder our relationship with our Father. So in this next petition we ask: forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Debt is a common metaphor for sin in the New Testament. Our sins have robbed God of his glory and we owe him what we’ve stolen. As Christians, we know that Jesus himself has paid our debts in full and because of him, we boldly request and expect God to continue forgiving our sins.

The follow-up statement, “as we also have forgiven our debtors,” seems to qualify the circumstances under which God forgives our sins. The point is not that God withholds forgiveness from his children, but rather God’s true children are in the practice of both repenting and forgiving.

God’s children continually deal with their own sins, because we know how destructive it is and how it damages our relationship with our Father. And in turn, because we are in the habit of repenting and receiving mercy, we can’t help but be merciful toward other repenters. This petition teaches us to habitually repent of our sins. And it teaches us to habitually forgive others their sins.

Many prayer acronyms place repentance and confession toward the beginning of prayer, but I think it’s rightly placed just past the center of our prayers. After we’ve spent time remembering who God is, what he has done for us in Jesus, his great purposes in the world, and recognized our dependence on him for everything, we are more sensitive to sin. We may realize how ungrateful we’ve been, not thanking God for all his past provisions. We might realize we’ve been more concerned about doing our will than God’s, about our reputation than his. Now we’re at a perfect place to say, “Forgive me, Father.” When our heart is sensitive to its own sin, we become tender to others who need the same forgiveness.

The world has long, bitter memories, and vengeance-taking impulses, but Christians—like their Father—are kind, tender-hearted and forgiving toward one another. That kind of character is formed through prayer, specifically prayers of confession and repentance.

Ask yourself, how often do I repent? How often do I forgive? There is a strong correlation between the two. They are directly proportional. If you tend to hold grudges and replay the injustices done to you over and over again in your mind, if you take a quiet delight when someone gets their comeuppance, it may be that you have stopped repenting.

I am convinced that the missing ingredient, the thing that robs many christians of their joy in the Lord, is this piece right here — confessing our sins to the Lord and freshly experiencing his cleansing and mercy.

If you have stopped repenting, it will show up in your life in many ways, but very often it comes out in bitter speech, rolled eyes, self-righteous snickers, and self-pity. The next time one of those reactions bubbles up from the heart, dig a little and see what lies beneath. It could be that you have stopped repenting of your sins and therefore stopped forgiving others their sins.

Deliver us!

The last ASK of the Lord’s Prayer is a perfect conclusion to all our prayers: lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

Evil robs God of his glory in this world. If the first cry of our hearts in prayer is for God to hallow his name, then our final breath must be for God to help us avoid anything that dishonors his name. After repenting of our failure to rightly hallow God’s name, it is fitting to close our prayer by asking for our Father’s help as we head back out into a world that still lies in the power of the evil one (I John 5:19).

The evil one has murderous designs on us all. He tempted Adam and Eve to eat to their deaths and ever since, murder has been on his mind. Through Jesus we have overcome the devil. He cannot touch us, but that doesn’t mean he won’t try. He still has power in this world to surround us with forbidden and poisonous fruits. We would be fools to forget that.

Not only are we up against evil forces from the outside, we have our own traitorous hearts on the inside. So we must pray and ask God to protect us from the many snares of the devil.

When you pray, tell your Father your specific temptations. Ask for strength to resist them. Ask for him to change your desires. Ask God for the faith to believe he is better than any of those other things you think you want. Ask for him to reveal the way of escape. And then pray all those same things for one another because every one of us is tempted every day.

Fill In the Pattern

The Lord’s Prayer is a pattern, the skeleton on which we hang the muscles, tissues, and flesh of our prayers.

Following the AAA’s of prayer, we first address the God of Heaven as our Father, fully aware of the privilege and the cost of doing so. We agree with the goodness of God’s purposes in this world, asking him to hallow his name, bring his kingdom, and do his will. Then, based on God’s will, we ask God to meet our every need, to continue forgiving our sins, and to grow in us a forgiving heart. Then we close by asking God to protect us from sin and the evil one.

We ask all these things with unwavering faith, knowing that God intends to grant them. This is how Jesus taught us to pray. But before we close, four very quick reflections on the Lord’s Prayer.

FOUR QUICK OBSERVATIONS:

First, did you notice the order of the Lord’s Prayer? How often do we launch into prayer by reminding God of something we need or want, and then tack on the obligatory, “if it’s your will.” We often upset the pattern and we end up with broken bones in our skeleton, so our prayers will never form a healthy body. To pray like Jesus, we need to flip the model upright and conform to God’s will first, so that when we begin to ask for our needs, our hearts are already in line with God’s will. And then we can pray like Jesus, “not my will, but yours be done.”

Second, did you notice what kinds of personal requests Jesus taught us to make? Did Jesus ask for a beautiful home or a nice vacation? Does he ask that his disciples stop fighting and being so annoying? One commentator points out that the Lord teaches us to pray for our needs, not so much our greeds—not that you can’t ask God for something you want, but that those requests shouldn’t fill up all your prayer time. Instead your prayers should focus on God and on aligning your heart with his and on asking for all things according to his will.

Third, did you notice that all of these petitions are for God to do the very things he has already promised to do and is actively doing? He is hallowing his name. His kingdom is on the march. More and more people are increasingly doing his will. He has promised to provide for us. He has promised to forgive our sins. He has promised not to tempt us and he has promised to provide an escape when we are tempted by our own evil desires. He has promised we will overcome the Evil One. So why do we need to pray for these things to happen?

Prayers are one of the many means he uses to achieve his ends. His kingdom is coming, but how will he get it here? Both through the preaching of his word, and through our prayers. God works when his people pray. In his mysterious but wise economy, God turns our prayers into the tools of his trade. So why wouldn’t we pray? Our prayers are as useful to God as our time, money, gifts, obedience, and charity.

We also pray because prayer restores order to our life.

Have you ever had the experience of waking up in the middle of the night completely disoriented? Without prayer, this disastrous disorientation will increasingly be your life’s experience. But that feeling of disorientation is a mercy from God because it drives you back to where you belong–into Heaven’s throne room at the feet of Jesus. In your feelings of disorientation PRAY. And if you don’t know how to pray, let Jesus help you. Through prayer, God lights up the darkness of your disorientation. Through prayer, God re-aligns your spinning internal compass with true North.

Finally: Prayer humbles us. It restores order to a chaotic world by reminding us what’s true. We can’t do anything apart from God. Our work is vain unless God redeems it. Prayer reminds us that we are small, we have little strength, our lives are short, and we are dependent on God for life, breath, and everything else. But this truth sets us free! Yes we are small, but the God of Heaven is our FATHER and he delights to give help to the helpless and strength to the weak, wisdom to the fool, and riches to the needy.

So prayer doesn’t just humble you, it exalts you.

It reminds you that you are the daughter of the God who reigns from heaven. You are his chosen child, whom he has ordained to do his good work in this world. Through you, his name will be hallowed, through you his kingdom will advance, through you his will will be accomplished on this earth. And in your smallness and neediness, he will provide for every material and spiritual need. You don’t need to fixate on those things like the world does, but instead you can seek first his kingdom. What won’t God do for you if you just pray?

Dear, dear Father. Hallow your name in our hearts and in our words. Cut through the fog of our lives and show us who you are, so that our hearts beat with yours in wanting to see your will done in this world. Forgive us our many sins–let us be free of them–and work in us a tender spirit of forgiveness toward everyone, but especially toward those living in our homes. Give us everything we need. We need you to open your hands to provide for our daily needs. We need clothes and food and shelter, and need to fix things like leaky roofs and sinks. We need wisdom in all our interactions. And we so desperately need you to deliver us from the temptations and the evil that even now crouches at our door. We ask for your help in all these things, fully believing you intend to do them. In Jesus’ name. Amen