GREATEST OF ALL TIME | Week 4 | Sermon

So studying the Lord's prayer this week was kind of an interesting thing for me. It brought up a lot of these like childhood things because again, I was raised Catholic and if you were raised Catholic, you'll know what I'm talking about. But if you've never been to confession,

let me just tell you, you didn't miss anything, number one. But bro, it was a wild experience as a kid. Okay? You have to first understand that the Catholic church has some differences from us as Protestants. K. We're part of the larger Protestant denomination. We believe in what's called Sola Scripture,

which is Latin for scripture and scripture alone. Our ultimate authority is the Bible. The Catholic church does not teach Sola Scripture. They believe that it's the scripture

plus sacraments and traditions. So that's why the sacrament of the Eucharist or communion is such a big deal because they believe in what's called transubstantiation.

So when a priest stands up and he consecrates or blesses the cracker and the juice and the wine, They believe that it literally turns into Jesus' body and blood that we eat and we drink to commune with our father. We obviously don't believe that. They also believe in a doctrine called confession,

which means that for you and I to receive forgiveness, absolution is the word that they would use. For us to receive absolution, you have to go to a priest and that priest has to give you some penance, which is something to do, but the only way to really get forgiveness is by going through confession.

Now they used to do these things when I was a kid where again we would do like confession nights at church.

If we do worship nights here, this place packs out. But I promise you, we're like look Thursday is confession night. You're like I'm busy that day. We're like we haven't even announced the date yet. You're like, yeah, but I'm busy that day. Right? Like, doesn't matter what it is. I'm not coming to confession night. But it was something we had to do regularly as a kid, especially after the internet was invented and I was 13 or 14. Right? Like AOL opened up a whole new world to us teenagers. Right? And all of a sudden, every time I got caught doing anything, my mom would drag us to church and we had to go through confession.

Now the part that's interesting with confession is you would have to walk into a room where a priest is sitting there. Again, this guy in a robe is literally sitting there and you have to make a decision which of the two kneelers you're going to kneel on to do your confession.

One of them is a kneeler where like you just are face to face with him and make eye contact the whole time or the other one is you sit in between this like veil thing to where you don't see him. I'm like, I'm always choosing the veil one. I do not wanna make eye contact with you while I'm doing confession.

The other part that was always hard as a kid is I'm like, there's no way I'm walking into some random dude's office and just telling him all of like my deepest, darkest secret. Right? Like that's not gonna happen, but my mom is watching how long I'm in here for. So me and my siblings would just like make up stuff to tell the priest about our sins. Right? So you're like, here's my fake sins that I'm gonna present as my real sins so that I can be forgiven of them. It was a mess. But you go in there, you're like, yeah, sorry, father. It's been six months since my last confession.

Here's the deepest things I've struggled with. Well, last week, my mom asked me to take the trash out and I just I totally forgot to put a trash liner back in the can and it was traumatic for everybody. Know, like

me and my sister got in a fight and I called her a name and I need to ask for forgiveness. You're like, there was one time I put the toilet paper on the roll and I did it with like the bottom out and everybody knows it's supposed to be a waterfall. Like, that's on me, you know?

And so you're like making up sins and then literally at the end of it, because you're gonna take communion at some point, but you can't take communion while you have sin in you, so you have to then go do your penance. And the penance to get absolution from those sins

typically was the priest would say, okay, go back into the church and do 10 Hail Marys and six Our Fathers. Or if your sins were really bad, it was like twenty and thirty, right? So then you go back into the church as a kid and you're trying to like count, you're like, our father, full of Mary, know, you're counting them always like, was that nine or was that 10? Does it not count if I stop one short? You know, like it's a confusing thing but after you do it all,

now you're ready to take communion because you don't have sin in you. So you get back in line, you get ready to go take communion. Well, the hard part was often I would then look over and see like the girl from high school that I liked and I was like, dang it, I just sinned again like in church. Like do I have to start the whole process over again? You know, like I'm not saying nothing, I'm just taking the communion.

And that was my faith experience, right? And so as soon as I could walk away from it, was like, man, what was all that? And then I become Christian. And I came across how Jesus would talk about what I'd learned as this prayer that I had to pray repetitiously

to get forgiveness from my sin. And I go, that's not what Jesus was talking about at all. See our father who art in heaven is a great prayer to use sometimes but it wasn't something that Jesus said, here's a prayer that you need to memorize. He says this is a model that will show you how to pray

but the purpose of prayer is not punitive. It's not something that you have to do. Prayer is something that we get to do as the followers of Jesus. And here's what's really amazing to me. When you look at the life of Jesus, there is one thing that he was committed to more than almost anything else, and it was prayer.

Jesus' model Jesus' life in his ministry was modeled by prayer. This was a guy that spent tremendous amounts of time in prayer showing you and I what I believe is possible as flawed humans

who are connected to our heavenly father. Jesus was showing us what's possible when we truly understand this power that's available to us in

prayer. Here's the big idea of what I wanna try to convince you of over the next couple minutes that we have together. I believe that what Jesus is going to show us is that prayer, prayer is not about getting more from God, it's about getting more of God.

The purpose of prayer, how you can walk away from prayer knowing that you did it correctly, is when you walk away, do you feel more of God's peace? Do you feel more of God's presence? Is your life beginning to produce

more of what the bible says is supposed to be the fruit of the holy spirit that lives in you? Are you more patient? Are you more kind? Are you more gentle? Do you have more self control? Because what prayer is, it is a pathway to getting more of God.

It is not something we do because God forces us to do it. It is something that we get to do as the followers of Jesus.

If there's one thing that Jesus was convinced of, it's that prayer is how we change this world. There are multiple examples that I could show you in scripture where Jesus would start to get a following, where he would go and heal somebody in a town and word would get out that he was there to heal people and hundreds, if not thousands of people would come and the disciples would go to look for Jesus and they couldn't find him because he would slip away and he would spend an entire night praying,

understanding that he didn't come primarily just to heal physical ailment, that he came to heal the human soul and to forgive sin. And if he got distracted and just healed people, he would have missed his ultimate purpose. And what Jesus would do often is spend all night in prayer. Almost every single time before Jesus will do a miracle in the Bible, he will pray to the father in heaven,

again, showing you and I what's possible when we understand the power available to us in prayer. But oftentimes, the reason that you and I don't pray is because we're just really busy. And the truth is, is I think if there was anybody that could have justified being too busy to pray, it would have been Jesus.

This guy had three years to change the world and he had 12 knuckleheads to do it with. Yet Jesus understood

that without prayer, I can't do any of this. There's a multiplying effect to prayer. There is a let me take my five loaves and two pieces of fish and bring it to God in prayer and watch what he will do with it. Jesus understood that with God in prayer, all things are possible. Martin Luther, the famous reformer has a quote that I wanna share with you. He would say often talking about how much he spent how much time he spent in prayer. He said, I have so much to do that I shall spend the first three hours in prayer.

See, when you really understand what prayer is and what it is not, it is something that we look forward to. It is not something that we feel like we are compelled to do. Often when we talk about prayer inside of church, we talk about prayer as a discipline. And prayer can be and it could start as a discipline,

but I think God's heart for us is to move from it being a discipline to a desire. Where we become people who desire to pray, we don't just try to discipline ourselves to it. Because if it's just a discipline, it'll never actually be something that is long standing. You will get too busy and you will get too distracted.

But my hope is is that we we begin to see that prayer is how we get more of God. And when we get more of God, it begins to change everything around us. Prayer is something we get to do. It's not what we have to do. Here's how Jesus starts in Matthew chapter six

verse five.

He says, when you pray, okay? His assumption is that you're gonna pray. It's not if you pray, it's when you pray. 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's all the reward that you 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. Verse seven says, when you pray, don't babble on as the Gentiles do. They think their prayers are answered merely by repeating their words again and again.

Don't be like them. Here's the key for your father knows exactly what you need even before you ask him. Jesus, before he introduces the Lord's prayer that a lot of us know, he gives us some here's what not to do, here's some kind of caveats.

Again, you gotta remember Jesus' audience. He's addressing cultural Jews. He's addressing a group of people who are devoted to prayer. These are people who pray more than any other group of religious people that we've ever seen. Remember when they went to trap Daniel? We're like, hey, we've gotta find this guy disobeying the king's orders. How did they do it? They knew that as a Jew, he would pray three times a day in the same place. See, Jesus isn't correcting people who don't pray. He's addressing people who pray a lot, but they've missed the heart of God in the process of their praying a lot. He says, when you pray, again the assumption being that you do pray. He says, if you're here trying to follow me thinking I can do something for you, that probably means that you're a person of prayer. Jesus starts with an assumption that you and I pray. So he goes, when you pray, don't be like the hypocrites.

A hypocrite was essentially an acting term. He's addressing people who were playing parts in theater, right? They would go out as one character, come back, change scenes with a different mask on and be a completely different person. He's saying you and I, our natural tendency

is to just put on what we think we need to put on for the environment that we're in. And you will be tempted to when you go to Life Group to be somebody that you're not on Monday morning in the office. You will be tempted to be somebody that you're not on Sunday mornings compared to who you are on Friday evenings. Don't be a hypocrite. Be the same. Be one person. Have uniformity in who you are. Understanding

that God's not sitting there hoping that you can pray some eloquent words that will impress him. He's not impressed by our prayers. And what he's addressing is these Jews who would stand in front of the temple and talk all these eloquent words to get people to be impressed with their spirituality.

And Jesus in this section on the Sermon on the Mount, he will say the exact same thing about prayer that he will with giving and with fasting.

He will say, if you do it for public approval, you do it to show people how awesome you are, that is the only reward that you will get. You will have a moment where people go, oh, look at how amazing that person is.

Look at how incredibly generous they are because they all saw the money that you gave. But he will say, do it in private. Do it by yourself. Do it not for the approval of man, but for the approval of God who sees all things.

He says, when you pray, go into a private place, close the door and just be alone with the father. Something that Jesus again did often. He would go to an isolated place. He would be by himself

because in that private moment, there's connection with God. It's almost this insinuation that you and I should have some place in our life that we go to to pray. We go with the intention of growing in our relationship with God. We go to spend time with our father who's in heaven. It can be your office. It can be a specific chair in your room. It can be a park bench on a walk that you go to, but all of us should have a place that we go to where this is where I spend time with God.

The early church in Africa used to be known for being people who prayed so intently that would go out as villages and spend time alone but for them to get to their places of prayer, they would often have to go through really thick brush and they would have to over weeks forge a path through this thick brush. What began to happen is there was this way that they could hold the village accountable to them going to their private prayer places because if somebody would miss the prayer moments for a couple weeks, the brush would begin to grow back over their path and they would go, hey Bob, you didn't pray last week, bro.

It was almost this beautiful accountability that was built into this idea that you and I should be people who pray. And there should be some areas of our life where we go and we pray in private understanding, again, what Jesus gives us as the ultimate caveat before he shows us the Lord's prayer. Remember,

your father in heaven knows everything that you need. He knows everything that you're dealing with. Don't feel like you have to go to him to convince him to do something you think you need him to do. He knows exactly what you need.

And sometimes I think when we read that, we can almost be tempted to go, well then why even pray? If God already knows everything, what's the purpose of prayer? And I think that's where we begin to see the beautiful invitation of what prayer is supposed to be.

Is that again, I don't have time to go into all of it, but prayer does move the heart of God. There are multiple times where God relents because people pray. There are multiple times where God moves because humans pray and move his heart, but that's not the primary reason that we pray.

We don't go to prayer because we're trying to manipulate God to do something.

We go to prayer because we understand that he's a good God in heaven who invites us to begin to hear his heart and to teach us what it is that he's doing in the season. It's a place that we can go to have fellowship with our father. And so Jesus, again, beginning to correct a bunch of Jews who pray a lot but miss his heart in the process. He says, when you pray, go to a private place a private place and remember,

your father knows everything that you need. Now, here's where he's going to introduce the Lord's prayer. The other time we see the Lord's prayer introduced is in Luke chapter 11.

The part that's really interesting with the disciples is they watched Jesus do some amazing stuff. They watched him take dead people and bring them back to life. They watched him take blind people and help them see again. Jesus healed a ton of people. He preached amazing sermons,

but the disciples never asked Jesus, can you teach us to heal like you heal? They never asked him, can you teach us to preach like you preach? But you know what they did ask him? They understood that Jesus' unique qualifier, his power source, if you will, was how he prayed.

And the disciples started to learn if we're gonna do anything like you do, you need to teach us to pray like you pray.

There's a time where they're trying to heal this little boy and they can't do it. But Jesus had told them, you have all authority. You can do even greater things than I've done. Yet they can't heal this boy. They go back to Jesus and say, why can't we do this? And he said, because this type of healing only happens through

prayer. Jesus, when asked, how do we pray? Teach us to pray like you. He will read and recite the exact same thing we're about to see here in Matthew chapter six, the Lord's prayer. Again, it's not something to just memorize and repeat religiously,

though you can use it as a prayer to guide you. It is something that is a template. It shows us how to pray more than it is what to pray. Here's how it begins in verse

nine. Jesus says, pray like this. Okay? Like this, not this exactly. He says, our father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. I'm just gonna kinda chunk through this verse by verse but again, speaking to a bunch of cultural Jews, he starts and says, this is how you engage in prayer. He says, our father in heaven.

What Jesus says is if we're going to pray effectively, we need to start by praying clearly. We need to have a clear picture of who it is that we're praying to.

I don't know if you've ever been in a group chat where you've got friends that aren't Christian and they don't wanna say that I'm praying for you, so they'll say something to the effect of I'm sending you good intentions and good vibes.

I'm always like, what like, do you do that? Like, what is that? What does that mean? You know what I mean? Where it's just like, alright,

man. I sent them. You know? Like, how do you send good vibes and good energy? Like, I understand the premise and I'm not trying to to vilify it. But I think sometimes we say things that we don't really know what it means. Like our intention is to do something and I think truthfully sometimes our prayer life seems as silly as that. Where it's like we could pray to a tree but the tree is not gonna do much. The tree is not going to transform us and Jesus speaking to cultural Jews says if you're gonna pray and you're gonna really understand who it is that you're communing with, you've gotta start by understanding who you're speaking to. And Jesus says something that I know you and I have heard a 100 times ago. Yeah, it starts with our father who's in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Like it's just the beginning part of a prayer, but it wasn't. It was Jesus introducing

an entirely new way to relate to God. It's him telling a bunch of cultural Jews who are under who've always understood God to be this completely other than set apart holy God who is so distant, who is so unlike us, who is so far away from us that I can't even say his name. Literally,

Jews could not say, they couldn't speak, they couldn't write the name of Yahweh so they would come up with names like Adonai because it was a nickname for God that they could use that they didn't feel like would wipe them off the face of the planet because God was so set apart in other than.

Most of the time in the Old Testament when God would show up or an angel of the Lord would show up on the scene, it was a terrifying moment for humans because God was so holy and so different and so set apart. They could only commune with him twice a year after they would go through some sacrificial

religious or ceremonies. They could then enter the presence of God, but if they had any sin in them, they would ultimately die. And for Jesus to show up and say, here's now how you can relate to God in heaven. He wants to be your father.

This is something that would have been paradigm shifting for a cultural Jew because not one time in the old testament will God be referred to as the father of an individual person. They understood that he was the father of nations. Sure. But the concept that the God of the universe,

the God who in all things has hold all things together, that that same God is inviting me to approach him like a father is crazy. Yet a 195 times in the New Testament, Jesus, the primary word that he will use to address God is father.

There's actually only one time in scripture that we see Jesus refer to God as anything other than father.

There's one moment when Jesus is hanging on the cross at the final end of his life where he feels the severing of the relationship between him and his father, where he feels the weight of all of the sin and all of the burden of humanity. In that moment in anguish, he cries out and he says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Because in that moment, the relational bridge that was there was severed and he felt the weight of what it felt like to be disconnected for the first time from his father in heaven who loves him. And his invitation is one that is so simple, you'll be tempted to miss it.

He says, here's how God wants to relate to you. He wants you to come to him like a good dad. He wants you and I to relate to him as a father who loves you. And often Jesus will use the illustration though it's a flawed one, yes and amen.

He will use the illustration of our relationship with our earthly fathers and with our kids as dads. He goes, look at that relationship. And I know sometimes for us, it's a difficult one because we didn't have the greatest father. And sometimes we will be tempted to reject God as a father because of our earthly example.

And yet what Jesus is inviting us into is to allow our heavenly father to redeem and restore what our earthly father should have been. But for a lot of us who had decent dads and for people who have kids in the room, he invites you to explore that relationship to begin to understand sometimes the simplicity

of how God wants to relate to us. Again, it's funny to watch my friends right now that still have little kids. It brings me back to when my kids are little. It's graduation season right now. Like I remember when we got an invite to go to my daughter's pre K graduation ceremony. I'm like, you mean she's going from pre kindergarten to kindergarten and there's like a graduation ceremony with robes and caps. Like I'm four. Like I love that. Let's do this. Right? And so 40 parents show up with eight kids and you watch them walk across, you get teary eyed like my kid graduated pre K, you know, it was just like, I think anybody does as long as they can color, right? But like your heart wells up with pride and you're like, this is amazing. I wanna sing from the rooftop that my daughter graduated pre K. Come on somebody. Like you just get excited because it's like that's your kid.

And like, man, I just, I love them. I don't know why. Like they came out of the womb ugly and covered in boogers and I just was like, man, I love this thing, right? Like I'm just obsessed with it.

There was this time I think I was doing something in my office and my son was running around still like in the diaper stage and he was eating chicken nuggets and french fries and for whatever reason he was super stoked to share with me his French fry. So he comes busting in my office, doesn't say a word and just holds his French fry up smiling from ear to ear. Like I still remember the memory and I'm just like, dude, sweet French fry, man. Like that's incredible. And he just turns around proud and goes back to the dinner table, right? Like he was just excited to share with his dad something that he was excited about. And I know it's really silly,

but I think sometimes that's the simplicity of what God wants us to do with him. To share with him the things that we're excited about as silly as it can be.

And I think sometimes because of our upbringing, because of what we've heard culturally, we think God's up in heaven just waiting to throw lightning bolts at us yet Jesus says, here's how you can relate to God. He wants you to come to him as a father who loves you.

Just like you with your kids, you would do anything you could for them. You would give them anything that they would ask for you because that's what you do as a parent. You try your best to balance out making them work for things, but like you just wanna bless them because you love them. Jesus will say later in Matthew seven, you do that as a sinful person. How much more? Lewis says Matthew seven eleven.

He says, so if you sinful people know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly father give good gifts to those who ask him? He says sometimes we just need to remember that God wants to relate to us simply as a father who loves us, who's not asking us to be presentable,

who knows everything you need, who's inviting you to have a relationship with him. But the same time, the second thing he says is remember to keep his name holy, hallowed be thy name. It's this tension that Jesus is introducing between familiarity and supremacy.

It's this beautiful balance between knowing God as father, but understanding him as completely other than and holy and set apart. And in there, there's this beautiful tension that we're invited into of I can know him as father, yet he's not just my homeboy and just my friend. He's completely different.

He's completely set apart. And I have to balance the supremacy of God with the familiarity of God in my prayer life that I'm invited into. Because here's what happens when you begin to see God differently. You pray differently.

See, we often don't understand the deep implications between our theology of God, our our belief of God, our understanding of God. Your theology of God will shape everything you do in life. But one of the primary things that it will shape is how you pray to God.

How you see God will drastically impact how you pray to him. If you see him as just this angry guy that's up in heaven, you will come to him with trepidation. You will come to him anxiously.

You will come to him thinking you have to have all the right words. You have to have your life correct. But when you begin to see him as a loving father that knows all things, that sees all things, that wants to help you, that wants to spend time with you, it begins to free you to just spend time with him and begin to pray prayers like Jesus is gonna say here. Here's how he continues in verse 10.

He says, May your kingdom come soon. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. See, think here's what Jesus is introducing is this idea that when you begin to pray with a familiarity, when you begin to pray clearly and know who it is you're praying to, it will allow you to pray with expectation, to pray

expectantly. What he says is that you and I can approach the throne room of grace with boldness. We can go to God and begin to realize because of his dominion, because of his authority,

we can begin to call heaven down to earth. We have the ability through our prayers to change things here. We have the ability to go, God, in your kingdom, there is no sickness. In your kingdom, there is no sadness. There is no pain. And so we are asking for your will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. God, would your rule and reign be here? And we get the opportunity

to be adopted into the family of God. See, this is the gospel. The gospel is that you and I used to be enemies of God. We were hostile to God. But because of Jesus on the cross, he satisfied the wrath of the holy God and now the invitation is that we get to be a part of the family of God led by our father in heaven who has authority, who has power and has the ability to change some things. And when you know who you are and you know your identity in Christ and we are now hidden in Christ, God no longer sees my sin but he sees the completed work of the cross in and through me. I'm telling you, man, you begin to pray differently. You begin to pray with expectation going, God, I know you can make a difference. God, I know you can show up. But what that doesn't mean is that everything I declare and decree

must take place because the prayer is that God, it's your will not mine. God, teach me to understand that your plan is better than my plan. And yes, I pray with expectation, but I simultaneously am praying a prayer of surrender. It's a prayer that says your will not mine. Your plans not mine.

And I really truly actually believe that God, you are good. You know all things and you are working together all things for my good and I trust you. So that frees me to just go your will, not mine.

But I think if we're honest, the truth is we don't really believe that God's plan for our life is better than our plan for our life. Maybe in some aspects, but the truth is if we really look at the way that we live, the way that we live proves that we don't really believe that God has a better plan than we do.

Because if we did, we wouldn't take such control of our sex life and our marriages and our finances

and what to do with our free time and what we do with the extra time that God has given us. We would really truly take God at his word. You remember times Jesus would look at the people that were there in a crowd and say, why do you call me Lord? But you don't do what I say to do.

You don't understand that I actually have a plan for your life that is better than your plan for your life. But until you're convinced of that, you will continue to try to be your own God. And what you do in doing that is by proxy, you relegate God to just being a genie in heaven that you go to when you need something that you can't do on your own.

And truthfully, I think that's how most of us treat God. We don't see him as the omnipotent, all knowing God who's in control of all things, who's sovereign, who we are constantly trying to get to bend our will to his. We constantly go to God and we just go, God, I need you to show up here.

God, I need you to do this. Produce a spouse for me. Produce a better job. Give me better kids. Give me better things. And what happens is when we trust God with those things for a little bit and he doesn't do what we think he's supposed to do, all of a sudden we take them back and we go, I'll do this better. God just doesn't really understand how to run finances today. It's way different in today's world than it was two thousand years ago.

There's no way that God could actually mean that you and I are supposed to not have sex with our partner before we get married. That just seems too antiquated. God, I'll let you handle some things, but I've got my sex life. And we take back things that God says, trust me with them.

Remember when COVID I mean, COVID made everything weird, right? But one of things that it did is it took baseball cards that were like nobody was trading baseball cards. And then all of a sudden everybody was trading baseball cards. A Mickey Mantle card that had sold for like $1,000,000 the year before sold for almost $11,000,000

at the height of COVID because everybody was trading baseball cards. But my son and I started trading baseball cards. Again, I've always kind of done it here and there, but we started to do it during COVID. I remember I bought some baseball cards that I was like, hey man, these are for you. And I was teaching them like how to open them and how to go through them and look for like the cool cards and how to look up the values. And then all of a sudden I gave him one pack to open and he started to open the pack and I'm like, what are you doing, bro? Like you're gonna rip the cards in half? Like why are you licking them? You know what I mean? Like I was like, what are you doing, man? So immediately I took them back. I took back the cars I bought for him. I was like, I'll open these. Right? I'll put them in the protectors and then you can enjoy what I bought for you. Right?

But why? Because I didn't trust that he would do the same thing with it that I would do. I just was convinced that I could control these better than he could. And I think it's a perfect picture of how often you and I relate to God. And here's what I think the invitation that Jesus is presenting to you and I,

as broken, flawed humans to be invited into with our heavenly father who knows all things and is working together all things for the good of those who love him. It's an invitation to really begin to see God differently. Imagine for a moment if God could show you what the next ten years of your life looked like.

Everything. All the detours, all the ups, all the downs, all the disappointments, all the heartaches, all the deaths, all the hardships, all the moments of victory. Imagine if God could show you all of it. What I think Jesus is showing us is that there's a potential to get to a point where we would see all of it

and our prayer would be, God, I don't wanna change this thing. Because I believe that you know what you're doing. And I trust that even when I don't see it, there will be a day where it all makes sense to me. But until then, your will be done, not mine. Your kingdom come, not mine. It's a prayer of expectation

and submission simultaneously. Here's how he continues in this next couple verses. He says in verse 11, give us today

the food that we need that I'll come back to here in just a second. And then he says, and forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who sin against us. And don't let us yield a temptation, but rescue us from the evil one.

If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your father will not forgive your sins. Talk about a throat punch. Jesus says you and I will have to learn to pray humbly.

Here's what it's going to require you and I to do to truly get the father's heart and to get more of God in our time of prayer. We're going to have to learn to pray with a lot of humility. To go to him and address the sin in our life that we need to be forgiven from.

And we need to ask God for the courage to forgive the people in our life that have hurt us. Oftentimes, the thing that is the barrier between us and our relationship with God is the sin that's in our life that we don't want to acknowledge.

The sin that takes a lot of humility to bring to God and address in front of him. Again, God doesn't ask us to do this so that we can so that he can see the sin. He does it so that we can address it. Right? The the bible tells us that God is just and faithful to forgive. That when we ask for forgiveness, he casts our sin as far as the east is from the West. He he literally doesn't remember it anymore because of what Jesus did on the cross. So why then would he ask us in prayer to confess our sins to him? Because he knows if we don't,

holding on to those sins, leaving them inside of our heart, holding on to unforgiveness, it literally is like trying to start a fire underwater. It will be a nonstarter every single time. Trying to pray to God, have a relationship with him, to hear his voice, to spend time with your heavenly father while simultaneously

dealing with sin that nobody knows about except you, it will be the constant barrier between you and God. But the beauty is, is if you can be humble enough to bring it before God, God can deal with it. God can address it. And then Jesus introduces this whole idea that when you've been forgiven,

the byproduct of that should be you become a forgiving person. When you understand how much God has forgiven you, how constantly I offend God, how I continue to even though I know the magnitude of his goodness, I choose things other than his will, which is the definition of sin.

I know that his will is better than mine, yet I constantly choose to circumvent his plan to be my own God. I constantly choose sin.

Even though I do that, he still loves me. He still wants to spend time with me. He's still not waiting to throw lightning bolts at me, but he's just going, come back to me. Let's talk about these things. Let me heal you from them. And then what it will do is it will give you the power and the courage to extend that forgiveness to other people.

And sometimes, again, we've been talking about this for the last few weeks. Sometimes the greatest barrier in our vertical relationship is the severing of what has happened horizontally in the relationships with people around us. And Jesus is saying, you're going to truly get more of God in your prayer time, you have to be a forgiver.

You have to be a forgiven person who understands how much you've been forgiven. And then you have to begin to extend forgiveness to other people understanding what forgiveness is not. It is not saying I'm letting you off the hook. It is not justifying their actions. It is not continuing to stay in unhealthy relationships.

But it's me going, I am letting go of the outcome of this. I am releasing the burden of carrying this anymore. And I'm trusting that God will deal with this. I'm not letting you off the hook, but I'm refusing to hold on to this anymore.

When you seek forgiveness, understand that God will forgive you. But he says, but if you don't forgive, God won't forgive you. Like there's an entire other sermon in there that I just don't have time to get into today. But he says, forgiving people is a really big

deal for people who accept the free gift of faith through Jesus on the cross. We're supposed to be people who forgive. And then the last thing that he kinda weaves in there a couple different times is he says, we need to be people who pray with dependency.

We pray with a dependency on our heavenly father. Remember he says in verse 11, give us today our daily bread. It's this idea that we would come to God every day with so much desperation that we don't even know where our next meal is coming from without him. But that becomes really hard for you and I in the culture that we live in. Why? Because I've got a half a cow in my deep freezer in my garage right now. Like I could feed this whole room for the next week. Right? And most of you could do the same. The truth is most of us I know we've probably gone through some financial hardships at points in our life, but most of us have never literally

and figuratively wondered where our next meal was gonna come from. Jesus is speaking to a group of nomads walking around saying, literally, I don't know where my next meal is going to come from. But when you understand who your father in heaven is and that he is the one that is your provider, he is your provision,

you can come to him with dependency knowing that my God is going to show up. We're gonna talk about how he goes into this in the next couple weeks. But he says, come to God dependently. At the end of the day, here's where God is most glorified,

is when you and I are most satisfied in him. When we truly begin to understand that even with all the stuff that we have, the houses, the four zero one k's, the bank accounts, the college funds, the cars, all of it are things that have been given to us that we have nothing without God.

Then again, it truly forces us to begin to treat our finances the way that God says to treat them. You know all throughout scripture when it talks tithing, it's never, hey, give your tithes to God. It's always a picture of bring back the tithes to the storehouse.

Bring back the tithes to the church. It's this idea that we return back to God the first 10% of what he's given to us. We're not giving to God. We're returning what God has given to us. And why do we do it? We do it to remind ourselves that I am not my own provider.

I am not my own God. I only have today's bread because God has given it to me. And Lord, I'm trusting that you will meet my needs tomorrow

as well. We give, we tithe not because of something that we get, but we do it as a reminder to ourselves that I am not my own God. But I have a good father in heaven who loves me, who will meet all of my needs according to the riches of the kingdom of God.

Again, I think I said at the beginning of this message, I wasn't gonna give you anything new today.

But here's what I am hoping, is I'm hoping through the power of the Holy Spirit that it would stir something in us. That we would begin to be people who begin to explore again what a real prayer life looks like. There's all kinds of studies out there and I don't know how accurate they are because again, people lie. But the data is pretty conclusive that we as cultural Western Christians,

we pray less than almost any other culture that's out there. And I think often it's because we don't have a ton of need. So we treat God like just the genie in heaven. We go to him when we are asking for specific things, but other than that, we don't just go to God to spend time with him. And I wonder what would happen if we began to return to God and go back to just the simplicity of I have a father in heaven that wants to know me, that wants me to be known by him. And there's a simplicity in there. There's a relationship

that's in there. It reminds me a lot of when I was a kid. My dad was like, he just loved being outside. He loved doing chores. He loved doing yard work and planting flowers.

And it was like almost every Saturday morning. I'd be inside eating cereal, watching Saturday morning cartoons, which was just a glorious thing back in the day.

And my dad without fail would walk in and just go, hey, do you wanna go with me to Home Depot to get some flowers and go do some yard work? And I'm like, that's the last thing I wanna do right now, right? But he would drag me and again, my dad was like in an office nine to five and so on the weekends, he dressed like he was homeless and I'm like, dad, you're embarrassing. You've had those shorts since like 1980.

They've got holes in them and I'm in public with him and just like, what are you doing? And then we go outside and he's like excited about planting flowers and I'm like, it's a million degrees out here, right in San Diego.

Like I just would use any excuse to get out of it. I was like, I'm gonna go get a glass of water and I would disappear for an hour and go play video games. If you have to come and get me and be like, come on, man, do this with me. See, what I didn't understand is that what my dad was primarily trying to do was just spend time with me. But he was just doing an activity that he liked to do. But all I saw was the chore. All I saw was the activity.

And now here's what's amazing with some time and with some experience and with some wisdom,

as a guy who's my dad is still one of my closest friends and I live in another state from him, I would have loved if yesterday morning my dad had called me and said, hey man, you wanna go do some yard work with me? Like, would love today to just spend some time driving around and listening to the same stories that I've heard 10,000 times.

Why? Because I've learned that it has nothing to do with the activity, but it has everything to do with just spending time with my father, getting to know who he is. And here's the beauty is as I get to know him, I understand myself more and I understand where I come from and I understand our family lineage.

And all of a sudden it goes, I can look forward to these things because the activity, that's man, just something that we get to do together. But the goal is spending time with our father in heaven. I think that's the simplicity of prayer as well. Has nothing to do with the words that we say, the motion that we go through.

The goal of prayer is to just get more of God's heart. So here's what we have to do. We have to commit to just go, God, as uncomfortable as this may be,

as different as this may be to my natural rhythm, I'm committed to figuring this out because it's not if we pray, but it's when we pray. And maybe, just maybe, the way that you and I begin to drastically change the culture around us is by committing to being people of prayer again. Amen? Let me pray for you. Father,

God, I'm so thankful for a group of people who would today fight to get to church, to come here with all the chaos of our lives, with other things that we could be doing this morning. And father, I I pray against the enemy that would try to condemn us saying, you just don't pray enough and try to convict us for things that that you're not saying right now. That God, when we walk out of here encouraged and challenged

to spend more time with you, to really learn what it means to commune with our father, to pray without ceasing,

to enjoy you and to allow you to enjoy us. And so, father, give us some places this week that we can go and spend time alone in prayer and get to know what your voice sounds like so that we can be and function as your children and as your family.

God, I just ask that this week would be one where we would have powerful times of prayer with you. It is in the mighty name of Jesus all God's people said, amen.

Thanks for joining us online this weekend. Let us know if we can help you in any way. Yeah. And make sure to follow us on social media and connect with us on the We Are Rock Point app for prayer and everything happening here at Rock Point.