The following was preached at Veedersburg and Hillsboro UMC on Sunday, July 25, 2010. The text for this week's message is Luke 11:1-4.
We are in our third and final week of the Essentials series. During this series, we have been looking at a few things that are essential for us as followers of Jesus Christ. Without these things in our life, we have to seriously examine ourselves and determine if we are truly living out our call as Christians. If we aren’t doing these things, it is entirely possible that we are living a good life, but that doesn’t mean that we are following Christ.
I think it is also important to point out that this series is not about developing a list of “do’s and do not’s.” Like the lawyer in the story of the Good Samaritan, we often want to know what it is that we can get away with and still consider ourselves followers of Christ. He knew that to inherit the kingdom of heaven, one must love God and love neighbor, but he wanted to further define neighbor so that he could know, by extension, not only who he was to love, but who he didn’t have to love. That desire to create a list of “do’s and do not’s” is better known as legalism.
There is a difference between knowing what we should do in response to the work of Christ in our lives and wanting to know where the boundaries are. In some sense, legalism isn’t a bad thing because it helps us respond appropriately to the grace of God in our lives. We have some guidelines to follow because being a follower Christ is not something that comes naturally in our fallen state. But when those guidelines control us and we use them to set up limitations in our life of faith, then we have crossed a line.
It boils down to a matter of the heart. Are our hearts in the right place? Do we want to know these essentials so that we know the boundaries, so that we know what outward actions we should take? Or do we want to know these essentials so that we can response to the grace of God in appropriate ways?
Do we love our neighbor because it is what we “should” do, or do we love our neighbor as a response to the love that God has shown us? Do we prioritize Jesus because that’s what we are “supposed” to do, or do we prioritize Jesus because of the difference that he has made in our lives? The truth is, we can fake our love of neighbor. We can act like Jesus is our priority in life. But, eventually, we cannot hold up the ruse any longer. We may be able to fool every single person in our lives, but in the end, we cannot fool God.
I think one of the dangers that we face is that so much of our faith becomes routine. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. If you make it part of your routine to come to worship, or if you make it part of your routine to spend time in Scripture every day, or if you make it part of your routine to pray, that’s not necessarily bad. In fact, I would encourage it, but I would also encourage you to examine your heart from time to time so that you know it’s not just something you do, but it is something that shapes your life.
It’s easy to go through the motions; it’s not easy to have a meaningful routine that helps you in your walk with Christ. Perhaps this is seen most in the Scripture that we are talking about today – the Lord’s Prayer. When we come to familiar passages, I always want to warn you to avoid going on autopilot because when something is familiar, we don’t pay attention to it as much. And, perhaps, there is nothing quite as familiar for people who attend worship regularly than the Lord’s Prayer.
We sing different songs each week. Our Psalm reading is different each week. The Scripture and the sermon are different each week, but the Lord’s Prayer is the same week after week after week. If you’ve come to worship every week this year, you’ve said the Lord’s Prayer thirty times already this year. If that’s not routine, I’m not sure what is. But do we think about the prayer as we are praying it, or do we just go through the motions? I think if we are being perfectly honest, it’s a little bit of both throughout the year.
Our third and final essential in this series is prayer, and to approach the subject of prayer, I want to do it through the lens of the Lord’s Prayer. To do this, I want to use what we read in Luke, but I’m also going to be referring to Matthew quite a bit, for reasons that will become clear as we go through it. The Lord’s Prayer will serve as a framework for how we can pray. Prayer is essential for our lives as followers of Jesus Christ. Prayer serves not only as a way for us to communicate with God, but also as a way to invite God into our lives so that we may be forever changed.
The passage starts off simply enough. Jesus is praying in a certain place. Not only are we taught prayer, but we see it in action before we even begin learning about it. Let this be our first lesson. If we want to pass on the importance of prayer in our lives, then we need to set an example for those who may be watching us. Your first step to learning how to pray – do it. As Nike used to say, “Just do it.” We see Jesus praying throughout the Gospels. The disciples saw it too. They probably saw it a whole lot more than we read about. Through Jesus’ example of continually praying, the disciples become more and more interested in prayer.
The disciples come to Jesus with a very simple request, “Lord, teach us to pray.” The disciples, waiting until Jesus was done praying, want to know how they should pray. It’s not like they’ve never prayed before. Prayer was certainly part of their worship in the synagogue and at the Temple. But there was something different about the way that Jesus prayed that piqued their interest, and they asked him to teach them how to pray.
Matthew and Luke are a little different in how they approach the Lord’s Prayer. Luke begins simply with address, “Father,” and goes from there. Matthew is more specific and begins the Lord’s Prayer by saying, “Our Father.” By saying, “Our Father” Matthew is reminding us of the communal nature of our faith. God is the Father of all. God is not “My Father”; God is not “Your Father”; God is not “His or Her Father.” God is “Our Father”. We think of our faith as a personal thing, and on some level, it is, but on a much broader level, faith is not just about the individual. We must love God and love our neighbor. It’s not just about me. When we pray to “Our Father,” we remember that.
By referring to God as Father, we aren’t making some kind of statement about the gender of God. A lot of people get caught up in the gender issue. God is neither male nor female. When we refer to God as Father, we are emphasizing the personal relationship. While our faith is not just about the individual, it is personal. Just as we can’t overemphasize our personal relationship, we can overemphasize our communal one as well. You don’t have eternal life through Jesus Christ by riding on the coattails of somebody else.
Husbands, you can’t say, “Well, my wife goes to church, so I’m covered.” Wives, you can’t say, “Well, my husband is a pretty strong man of God, so I’m covered.” No one can say, “Well, I grew up in the church, so I’m covered.” The only thing that covers you as far as eternal life is concerned is the blood of Jesus, and that certainly is a personal decision. It’s personal because you are entering into a relationship with the Father through the Son by the Holy Spirit. Nobody can do it for you. “Our Father.” It’s both communal and personal.
“In heaven” is another phrase that we see in Matthew, but not in Luke. It reminds us that while our relationship with God is personal, it is unlike any relationship that we have here on earth. God is in heaven. We have to remember that. God transcends anything that we can possibly imagine. God is above and beyond the things of this world. We have to remember that when we approach God in prayer, we are not asking our buddy for a favor. We are speaking to the transcendent Creator of the universe. That should give us some perspective.
The next phrase is “hallowed be your name.” What in the world does “hallowed” mean? Does anybody here use that word in their daily life? Does anybody have a clue as to what that means in the first place? Personally, when I first studied the Lord’s Prayer, I had no idea what “hallowed” meant. So, I did what any reasonable person would do. I looked it up in the original Greek, which is so much easier than opening a dictionary.
The Greek word is hagiazo, which means “hallowed.” Okay, I’m just kidding. It means “to sanctify,” or “to be holy.” In other words, when we pray, “hallowed be your name,” we are saying that we want God’s name to be holy. Old Testament law prohibited the wrongful use of the name of God. Because there is something so special about the name of God that it is holy. It is separate from the things of this world. And it’s important for us to remember that as children of the Father, it is possible for us to detract from the holiness of God.
We aren’t praying that God’s name be holy because it is not. We are praying that God’s name be holy because we are not. If we remember that God is holy, we should also remember that we need to be holy in how we conduct our lives. Because for some people, we are the only representation of God that they will ever see. When we pray that God’s name be holy, it should serve as a reminder to us about the type of life we should be living. As we learn from Leviticus 11, we are to be holy because God is holy.
Perhaps the next phrase is one of the most radical things that we could pray, and we don’t even realize it. Luke stops simply with “your kingdom come,” but Matthew continues, “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” God’s kingdom is the place where God has total reign. What we are praying for here is that God’s will be done. Do we really want that? Do we really want God to reign fully in our lives? We say we do because we have some kind of romantic idea that God’s will fully lines up with our will, but the truth is that our will does not always line up with God’s will. Do you see the difference?
When we line up our lives with God’s will, there may be some things that we need to change about our lives. I’m not going to go into the details on that. You know what areas of your life don’t match up with God’s will, and you know that some of those areas you don’t really want God to touch. Because God doesn’t leave us in our sins. And we like some of our sin. God changes us from within, and the things in our lives that separate us from God need to be removed, even if we don’t really want them to be.
If we want God’s will to line up with our lives, we are going to be sorely mistaken about what is going to happen when God’s kingdom comes and His will is done. And for those who think I’ve gone from preaching to meddling at this point, you know that there’s something in your life that needs to be changed. We all need to stop and examine our lives to make sure that we are in the center of God’s will. This petition in the prayer should remind us to do some self-reflection from time to time.
At this point in the prayer, we recognize our need to rely on God each and every day. “Give us this day our daily bread” is not just about making sure we have enough to eat. For the people of Jesus’ day bread was a staple food. It wasn’t just something else on the dinner table. For some people, it was all they had. This phrase would have brought to mind the reliance that the people of Israel had to have on God’s provision while they were in the wilderness after the exodus from Egypt.
Every morning, the Israelites would wake up and there would be enough manna on the ground to feed the entire nation, but they only got it one day at a time. The only exception to that rule was the day before the Sabbath when they would get a two-day supply. Anything beyond what they could eat for the allotted time would be ruined the next morning. They had to rely on God’s provision to get them from one day to the next.
When we pray, “give us this day our daily bread,” we are praying that God would provide for us for another day. Additionally, we need to realize that this petition is not a way of convincing God to give us what we need. It’s a way to remind us that all we have is from God. Our society teaches us to have a sense of entitlement. We have certain rights; we have things that we deserve. But that’s not how it works with God. We are not entitled to anything that God would give us. All that we have from God is from His grace. When we pray for our daily bread, we need to remember our position before God.
The next phrase is somewhat challenging if we stop to think about it. “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who are indebted against us.” There are a few different ways to say this petition. Some use debts; some use trespasses; essentially, we are praying that God would forgive us of our sins. But it doesn’t stop there. We are praying that our sins would be forgiven in the same way that we forgive those who have sinned against us.
How forgiving are we? Do we hold grudges over time? Are we willing to forgive those who have sinned against us? If we take the Lord’s Prayer at its word, we need to be willing to forgive others because if we are not willing to forgive others, we will find that there is no forgiveness for us. We cannot learn and embody God’s forgiveness in our own lives, if we aren’t willing to forgive others. That falls under the category of “easier said than done,” doesn’t it? Yet when we do forgive those who have sinned against us, we are modeling God’s forgiveness for them. That is a powerful example to set.
The final petition of the Lord’s prayer is a plea to not lead us into temptation, or to not bring us to a time of trial. When you consider the life of Jesus, this is a very interesting plea. Jesus’ ministry began with his temptation in the wilderness. Jesus faced many trials and persecutions throughout his ministry. Trials and temptation will be a part of the Christian life, so why would we bother praying that they not?
By praying against trials and temptations in our lives, we become more aware of them. We begin to see situations and discern that maybe those aren’t the right places for us to be. This is a petition that increases our awareness of the things that we should avoid in life. We aren’t going to be able to avoid all temptations, but there are certainly a lot that we could miss out on if we simply make good decisions. Good decisions come from good information, and good information comes from awareness.
There really is a whole lot more that we can learn from the Lord’s Prayer, but we simply don’t have time this morning to go into it all. It’s amazing how something so simple that we take for granted on a weekly basis can speak to us in so many ways that we never could have imagined. The next time we say the Lord’s Prayer together, remember that it is not just a ritual that we do every Sunday, but it is a meaningful, even radical, commentary on what our faith should look like. Pray it with the expectation that you will be changed, and it won’t take long for God to work in your life in some pretty powerful ways.
0 comments:
Post a Comment