Sermon Transcript
The reality is, is that we live in a world that tells us that we should just live for our own desires.
We should just do whatever you think is right. You do it. You live your truth, right? And Jesus, though, invites us. He steps into that messy world where everyone just does what they want, and he grabs our hand and he walks us out of the mess of that right.
And that’s what Jesus does for us. He invites us to a deeper, more authentic faith, and he walks alongside us through it. So today we’re gonna explore through the Lord’s prayer, which is probably something you’re very familiar with, the idea that Jesus is inviting us to this life of transformation. He’s inviting us to live and to have more than just words behind our faith, to have actions, to share in the life of prayer and to align our lives to God’s will, just like Jesus did. That’s the invitation of the Lord’s prayer and central to Jesus life of prayer.
And this expression of, this expression of complete dependence on goddess, that’s what we’re going to look at a lot today, is we’re going to see how Jesus was fully reliant on God. And we are then called to emulate that life of Christ, that prayer life, that physical and verbal, the teachings of Jesus as well, the things that we learn from him, we are to put into practice. So let’s explore what that means to wholeheartedly seek God, to seek his will for our lives in prayer as a community of God’s children. From our father. If you notice the title of this series, our father, the Lord’s prayer is the center of the sermon on the mount that we’ve been diving through, we’ve been traveling through for the last six weeks now.
And we have a lot to learn from Jesus. So Jesus followers need a model for communal prayer. The Lord’s prayer then, is that invitation to have Jesus be our model to help us align our hearts with God’s will. And to share in Jesus life of prayer. Let’s dive in.
So Jesus says in Matthew, chapter six, verse nine, he says, this then is how you should pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Henry Leopold Ellison, Bible scholar, said, I am a member of a community. So I say, hour, I have been made a son. So I say, Father in heaven reminds me that there’s neither inability to give nor folly in giving meaning when God gives to us.
It was common in Jesus day for jewish people to address God, especially in prayer, as our heavenly Father, especially in the synagogues when they were together praying as a group, it makes sense to call God our father. He’s responsible for our creation and he’s responsible for taking care of us, just like our earthly fathers ought to do. And so Jesus calls his disciples to share in his relationship with the father by calling them to share in his inheritance of the kingdom. We then are adopted sons and daughters of God who share the same intimate relationship with God our father, as Jesus himself. So God is our father, and addressing God as our father emphasizes our intimate and our communal relationship with him.
Reality is that when we say our, instead of my God my father our father, when we’re saying our, we’re also including with us the community of all believers. And this relationship with God is unique to the gospel. It’s a unique relationship that we have with God and with one another, and it’s based in the intimacy of God’s creation, his love for us, his relationship with us. But it’s balanced also with proper reverence for who God is. And so from there, Jesus gives us, he models for us six petitions, in other words, six things that we can always ask of God our father that we don’t have.
We can ask freely of him. He will freely give to us, and we should seek from him on a regular basis. These are prayers that we can make a part of our own lives as we seek to balance our relationship and our reverence with God, to balance holiness with freedom in Christ. These are not inscriptions. They’re not incantations.
They’re not mantras. If you pray them so many times, nothing, it doesn’t work like that. That’s not how the Lord’s prayer works. Instead, these are a model. They’re patterns for us to follow in our own prayer lives, to follow after the prayer life of King Jesus, both personally and corporately, publicly, as the people of God, when we seek to share in the same relationship with God that Jesus had with the father.
So let’s dive into these petitions. The first petition. Hallowed be your name means to revere God as holy, to set apart his name above all others. Hallowed be your name means that God will be treated with the highest honor among all people and in all actions. It means, as Ellison says, I pray first that God may have his rightful place among all people.
And if it starts with us, then that should be our prayer, that God’s name has its proper place among all people, but it should start within our lives. As the children of God, we honor God’s name by treating him with the highest reverence and respect. The prophet Isaiah tells us that the Lord Almighty will be exalted by his justice, and the holy God will be proved holy by his righteous acts, the Lord himself. Later on, through the prophet Isaiah says that we keep his name holy when we acknowledge his holiness, when we stand in awe before the father. When was the last time you stood in awe before God?
How often do we stand in awe? Do we offer him the adoration that only God deserves? Speaking through Ezekiel, God said, he will prove himself holy through his people, before the eyes of all people, before all nations. He’ll show his greatness, and he’ll no longer allow his name to be profaned in Israel or among any of the nations, God says through Ezekiel. And so reverence for God isn’t only expected of the children of God, it’s expected of all people.
In the book of Revelation, the apostle John tells us of a great multitude, an uncountable multitude of people standing before the throne of God in white robes from every tribe and tongue and nation, praising God, praising the lamb. Jesus Prophet Zechariah writes, the Lord will be king over the whole earth on that day. There will be one Lord in his name, the only name. And so, by following Jesus teachings, the example of his life, we hold God’s name in reverence, we honor God’s name, and we make his holiness our holiness in our lives, as Jesus invites us to do. We’ve already learned about this.
We have examples of this from the sermon on the mount that we’ve already been talking through the last several weeks. For example, from the beatitudes, we learn that keeping God’s name holy means coming before him empty handed, empty of ourselves, seeking salvation from Christ and not bringing anything of our own to try to save us. We keep God’s name holy by mourning the destruction of sin, especially our own sin. When we humble ourselves before God, we keep his name holy. We hallow his name, and we strive for righteousness or show mercy or seek purity in the name of the Lord.
When we make peace with others, when we endure persecution, even when we live through life struggles and we still keep God’s name holy, he is honored just as Jesus did. This is the example we see from Christ. We learned from the 6th antithesis. You remember the teachings of Jesus, where Jesus says, you’ve heard that it was said so and so, but I tell you such and such, right? Jesus says that we practice and we teach God’s commandments, and that leads us to greatness in the kingdom of goddess, that we keep God’s name holy by putting his laws to work in our hearts.
But Jesus says our righteousness to go beyond words and outward appearances. It should be unlike the Pharisees and the teachers of the law. We should internalize God’s commandments and they should be the foundation for our living. And so we avoid attitudes and actions based in anger toward others that demean them. We avoid tearing down others who are created in the image of God in order to build ourselves up.
We seek reconciliation instead of retribution. We keep God’s name holy by remaining pure in our intimate relationships, by avoiding marital brokenness, through devotion to our spouses and the sanctity, devotion to the sanctity of marriage as God designed it. We remain faithful, truthful to our word, because God is always truthful and faithful to his. And finally, we forgive. We serve and we love unconditionally, just as God has done.
And in doing these things also, we keep God’s name holy. We honor God’s name by living in reverence and reflecting his holiness in our actions and in the most immediate context of what Jesus is teaching here with the Lord’s prayer, we know that through serving others, through our generosity, through prayer and through fasting, that we can honor God’s name. But we don’t do these acts of righteousness so that we are glorified. We do it so that God is glorified.
And those are just a few examples of how we can live our lives, how Jesus invites us into his life before the father of how Jesus invites us to live in a way that hallows the name of our father. By living rightly before God, we honor his name by living in reverence and reflecting his holiness in our lives, just as Jesus did. Let’s continue to look at the rest of the Lord’s prayer to see how we can live a life of prayer into which Jesus is inviting us. He says in verse ten, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The second petition, your kingdom come expresses a hope, and it proclaims a truth.
It expresses a hope that someday Christ will return and God’s kingdom will find its fullness in that return. What we’re praying for, da Carson says, is for the kingdom to come more completely until its full and final consummation. The coming of God’s kingdom is central in Jesus teaching in the gospels, and it brings the Lord’s rule and Israel’s salvation, the defeat of evil, to earth. And Israel had been awaiting a savior, and this is our hope in Christ. But it’s also proclaiming a truth, that the kingdom is already here, that wherever Christ is, there also is the kingdom of God.
And so Jesus disciples no longer anticipate the initiation of God’s kingdom, but it’s complete fulfillment where Jesus is there as well. The kingdom is at work in accomplishing God’s rule. The kingdom is both a present and a future reality. It’s already breaking in, and we are eagerly awaiting its completion. Jesus public proclamation and his private prayer life centered on this kingdom.
Prayer praying for God’s kingdom to come is a call for us to live under God’s rule in his reign, to be obedient to God’s will. And that brings us to Jesus third petition in the Lord’s prayer. If God’s kingdom has come, then it should be understood that his will is being done on earth as it is in heaven. Wherever the kingdom is present, God’s will is being experienced, and God reigns absolutely and supremely in heaven. Our prayer should be that the whole earth experiences that same rule of God through the full realization and the obedience to his perfect will.
But what is God’s will? God’s will is revealed to us in scripture. It’s not a mystery. It’s for us to follow his laws within our hearts, that despite our obedience to his rulings, God’s will is for us to be gathered to him, to be rescued by him through his mercy, through the grace of the cross. Jesus own act of obedience in his earthly ministry, his utmost act, was to submit himself to the cross, to submit his will to the father’s will.
By going to the cross for us. He prayed in the garden, my father, if it’s not possible for this cup to be taken away unless I drink it, may your will be done. And so God’s will for us, for the gospel, is that it reaches all of us, that it reaches all nations, that Jesus disciples carry out the father’s will and display the kingdom in their lives by remaining faithful to Jesus. Jesus said, whoever does the will of my father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother. And so God’s kingdom, and therefore his people, are experiencing his will right now on earth, as they will in heaven.
But the complete experience of God’s will on earth will only occur when the kingdom comes in its final form. When Christ returns. God’s will is for us to follow his laws, to spread the gospel, to align our lives with his purpose. By keeping God’s name holy, by longing for the fullness of his kingdom, and by doing his will in our lives and seeking his will among others, we accept that invitation of Jesus to be participants in his life, in his prayer life focused on the greatness of God. What we learn is that Jesus invites his disciples to join in prayer focused on the greatness of God’s name in his kingdom and his will.
In the first three petitions of the Lord’s prayer, Jesus calls his disciples to focus on the greatness of God. In the final three petitions, he guides us to petition for our personal needs, for our sustenance, our daily needs, physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, spiritually, to seek forgiveness of sin and to help in our spiritual and to seek help from him in our spiritual battles that we will inevitably meet in a community that’s committed to the goodness of God. So the first three things that we’re supposed to ask for, we’re focused on the greatness of God. The last three are focused on the goodness of God. Jesus prays, give us today our daily bread, referring to our daily needs, again, physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, spiritually.
Daily bread reminds us of manna in the wilderness that the Israelites had to rely on as they followed God. It teaches us to depend on God’s daily provision. And the emphasis on today suggests that we don’t need to worry about the future, because if God is going to meet our needs today and every day, then what do we have to worry about? The focus here is not telling us that we have no responsibility to care for our own needs or to care for the needs of those that we love. What Jesus is teaching us is that we don’t need to worry about the future because God will provide for us then, too.
Praying for bread also aligns us with the central symbol of Jesus ministry, Jesus modeled reliance on God our father. If you think about it, both Matthew and Luke, who record the Lord’s prayer, also record the temptations of Jesus. When Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days, suffering from the pain of hunger and Satan came to him and tempted him to meet his own needs. Apart from the will of the Father, Jesus, responded that man does not live on bread alone, but by the word of God. And so Jesus responded with his reliance on God’s very word in order to overcome that temptation.
Elsewhere in the gospels, all four gospels record Jesus miracle of feeding the crowds, that Jesus showed through that miracle, that our reliance, God’s provision is full in Christ, that it’s over abundance in Christ, that God has provided for all that we need and more through Jesus. And so we see how this symbol of bread is central to the message of the gospel. Ultimately, it comes to the Lord’s supper, where in the bread of the Lord’s supper, which we celebrate every week, we have the imagery of Christ’s broken body on the cross for the salvation of his children from their sins. And so this symbol, our daily bread, is more than just food. We rely on God for our daily needs.
We trust him to provide for us each and every day. And from our daily need for sustenance, Jesus then turns to our daily need for forgiveness of our sins. He says praise forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. We have a moral obligation before God because of our sin. There’s a principle behind the forgiveness of debts that’s required in the Old Testament that points us to, that illustrates for us our own debt, our own obligation before God, when we fall short, when we miss the mark, when we sin, when we fail to duly honor God, especially given the context of Jesus earlier petition in the Lord’s prayer, we are morally indebted to the Lord.
Our fellowship with God is hindered, our relationship is broken, especially if we fail to repent, if we fail to turn away from our sin and turn back to God, from our disobedience. And we owe God our obedience because he’s our heavenly Father.
And our sins create a debt we cannot repay. But Jesus sacrificed himself on the cross. He pays that price that we cannot pay in order to offer us forgiveness. Jesus forgiveness is integral to our salvation. It’s at the center of our salvation, his grace and his mercy.
But he also requires us to forgive others as well. It doesn’t mean that we control God’s forgiveness with our own, but instead, our ability to forgive others shows the fact that we ourselves have been forgiven. What Jesus means is that just as we have forgiven others, our sins will be forgiven. He assumes that when our sins are forgiveness, we will also forgive others. Once again, this is a charge.
It’s an invitation to participate in the grace of Jesus. Jesus disciples, the children of God, are those who have responded to that invitation first of all, through repentance, but secondly, by forgiving others of their sin against them. Forgiveness of others is proof that our sins are forgiven and that we are, in fact, saved. It begs the question, does that mean that God will not save us, that he will not forgive us if we don’t forgive others? We have to be careful here because it’s so easy for us to insert our own theological opinions into what Jesus is teaching.
But we can look at the words of Jesus and heed his warning. For example, in Matthew 18, Peter asked Jesus, Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother or sister when they sin against me? And Peter thinks he’s being magnanimous. He thinks he’s being benevolent when he suggests, oh, maybe I should forgive them seven times. In fact, that would have been more than twice what most jewish people would have said was proper to show that they were able to forgive other people.
Most jewish teachers would teach, well, you only need to forgive someone three times, and after that, they’re not truly repentant, and you’ve shown yourself to be a merciful person.
And so Peter thinks, well, I’m doubling that and then some, right? But Jesus responds astonishingly. He says, not seven times, but 77 times. Other versions have different math there, but the number is really not the point. What Jesus means is that our forgiveness should be limitless.
It should reflect the forgiveness of God for our sin, for the weight of our own sin, which is uncountable before God. Immeasurable is the offense of our sin before God. And yet God forgives us, and his mercy knows no bounds, and so neither should ours. Jesus tells, then, a story of a king settling accounts with a servant who owed an uncountable debt to his master. And so this servant comes before the king, and he begs for mercy for this debt, something that if you were to bring it into today’s terms, it would be multiple billions of dollars of debt that he would owe to this king.
And he falls down before the king, and the kingdom shows him mercy, illustrating God’s mercifulness toward us, toward the immeasurable amount of debt that we owe to God because of our sin.
God’s mercy and grace should transform us. It should change us into merciful people. But that servant went from there and found another servant who owed him a much, much smaller debt. By today’s terms, a couple thousand dollars compared to several billion dollars.
And he was merciless to that fellow servant. And so when the other servants saw this, they reported the incident to their master, and the master called the first servant to him. And he said, you, wicked servant. And he called them that for not showing mercy. And so the king is naturally angry because this wicked servant has brought disrepute upon his master, who showed him mercy.
He asked the wicked servant, shouldn’t you have had mercy on your fellow servant just as I had on you?
And then the master punishes him, illustrating the eternal consequences of not extending forgiveness that we receive to others. The scene ends in a grimace reality, that this wicked servant is imprisoned until he can repay a debt which he never can repay. And that shows us, it illustrates for us the harsh, it’s a harsh allusion to the eternal judgment that this man would never be released. And so Jesus concludes. In summary, this is how my heavenly father will treat each of you unless you forgive your brother or sister from your heart.
Now, again, we got to be careful here. Theologically, God is not saying. Jesus is not saying that he will not forgive us because his mercy knows no bounds. What Jesus is telling us, and I think the warning that we must heed here, is that when we are forgiven, we should see a transformation in our lives. We seek God’s forgiveness for our sins, and we’re called then to extend that forgiveness to others.
If we’re not willing to obey Jesus here, how are we going to be willing to obey him anywhere else? In his commandments, Jesus is teaching us about a transformation that should take place in our lives, that proves to us that we are, in fact saved, that our sins are in fact forgiveness. The final petition in the Lord’s prayer addresses our spiritual battles and the cause of our sin. Jesus prayed, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. The word translated here, temptation, can also mean testing, and we’ve talked about the difference before.
In temptation, God’s enemies, including our flesh, our own flesh, entices us to see if we’ll do what’s wrong. In testing, we’re tested by God. Testing is different because God tests us to see if we’ll do what is right. God will test us. He will test our faith to see if we’ll do the right thing before him in his eyes.
And it’s necessary for God to test us at times in order to reveal the reality of our faith. But God will never tempt us. Temptation is not from God. James says, God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone. And so Jesus invites us to pray, deliver us from the evil one.
Acknowledging that Satan is the tempter, he said later on to his disciples in the gospel of John that we will have trouble in this world. There will be trials. We see that even in the life of Jesus, that even Jesus was not spared from the troubles and the trials and the testing and the temptation of this world. So why should we expect it would be any different for us? But we can look to Jesus and we should pray for relief from testing, that it doesn’t become an occasion, an opportunity for us to be tempted and to give into sin.
We ask God to help us, to help us avoid sin, to deliver us from evil, that we might rely on his strength in our spiritual battles. Life is a spiritual battle, after all, do we realize that? And so what Jesus is inviting his disciples to is to seek through prayer God’s good provision in the midst of those battles and in the daily needs that we have physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, spiritually, for the forgiveness of sin and to help us to take our hand in the midst of those spiritual battles. Our greatest spiritual need in all of that is God’s forgiveness. Without it, we can’t enter the kingdom.
And Jesus emphasizes forgiving others as evidence of our own forgiveness. As we said earlier, he repeats that concept in verses 14 and 15, saying, for if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your father will not forgive your sins. This brings us back to that central principle of the kind of kingdom life that Jesus has inaugurated, the kind of transformation that he’s inviting his disciples to in the Lord’s prayer. When we truly experience the mercy and grace of God, we respond to the presence of his kingdom.
We’re transformed into Jesus disciples. And in that transformation we experience a transformed heart that then produces a changed life. We offer the same mercy and the same grace that we once received from God. Some people try to avoid the weight of what Jesus is warning here. They try to redefine it, reinterpret it, or to make it situational.
But remember Jesus parable. The principle that Jesus seems to be stating here is that those who show grace and mercy to others know how to accept it for themselves from the Lord. And such a transformation will be evident in your words and in your actions as a disciple of Jesus. So what does that kind of life look like? What kind of life is Jesus inviting his disciples to the kingdom?
Principle here is found throughout the gospels, especially in the parables of Jesus. Jesus disciples must flee from evil, stand up under temptation and trials because they have strength from the Lord. To fight their spiritual battles. They must be forgiving to others because they love the Lord and know his forgiveness, and they’ve received God’s mercy and grace. Jesus disciples rely fully on God for their daily needs, physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, spiritually.
They know and live obediently to God’s will. They long for the life that will come in the kingdom of God, and they submit themselves to his rule in his reign, both now and in eternity. And finally, they keep God’s name holy by honoring him with their lives. Throughout all this, we continually look to Jesus, his life, and his ministry as our example, as our model of who we should follow.
We have the same compassionate mercy and grace that’s demonstrated to us by Jesus, our savior. And so when our need for forgiveness is met by Jesus, we’re transformed and we’re invited to live as he lived. The same transformation will happen in our own lives as well. When it does, the mercy of God becomes the leading characteristic of the community of Jesus followers in the church. The Lord’s prayer transforms our character, our will, our values, as we seek God’s response in prayer.
Nt Wright wrote in the Lord’s prayer is a paradigm for christian prayer. The Lord’s prayer marks out Jesus’s followers as a distinct group, not simply because Jesus gave it to them, but because it encapsulates his own mission and vocation. And it does this in a form appropriate for his followers, which turns them into his coworkers and fellow laborers. In prayer for the kingdom, the Son is inviting his followers to share the intimacy of his own life with the father. What we learned from the Lord’s prayer and what you should take away if you take anything away from today’s message, it should be this that God’s children follow Jesus example of prayer and dependence on our father.
So how do we live that out? I’ve got some questions that we can reflect on daily as we enter prayer with the Lord. First of all, in our daily lives, how will I revere God’s name today? When I wake up every day, I should ask myself, how can I keep God’s name holy in my life? I should ask, how will I live expectantly for the coming of his kingdom?
How will I live obediently to his will? How will I depend on the goodness of his provision today? How will I show gratitude for his forgiveness? How will I extend that forgiveness to others? How will I turn away from my sin and reject evil in my own life?
When we begin our day in reverence toward God and proclaim his greatness, we set our hearts toward living under his kingdom rule and his kingdom reign. When we turn to him, turn our attention fully to relying on him for the provision of our daily needs, physically, mentally, emotionally, socially, spiritually, chief among those being our spiritual need for forgiveness. We offer that same forgiveness to others as we seek that forgiveness, we also ask for guidance to navigate the trials and troubles of this life that we will inevitably face in this world. And finally, we seek freedom from sin, from the grip of sin’s power in our lives through God’s mercy and grace that transforms us. Imagine a transformation that will take place in your life if you prayed this way daily.
If every day in our lives, we accept Jesus invitation to live as he lived and pray as he prayed, that invitation to a deeper and more authentic faith in Jesus would transform our lives. When we accept that invitation, God’s will is done in our lives on earth as it is in heaven.