Essentials
for the Journey: Prayer, Part 2
Homiletical Idea: To show how the
structure of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew
6 is a skeleton upon which we are to model our prayer life. Christ intended to show us a model that would
give us the richest prayer life possible.
By following this structure we can enhance our connection with our
Father God through Jesus Christ and know better His will for our lives.
Tying in the Past
Most of you may recall the last time
we were together just two weeks ago.
During that time we talked about how we, as inhabitants of the earth,
are on a journey together. That journey
is going to take us through a terrible time of trouble according to Daniel 12:1 and the only
way that we can make it through that time is to have the essentials that we
need. Prayer is the primary tool that we
must have to stay connected with our Heavenly Father through our relationship
with Jesus. In essence, we must learn to
journey with prayer.
We also talked briefly about what it
means to journey with prayer. We said that to journey with prayer is to master the art of praying by adapting our
prayer life around the model of prayer that Jesus gave us in Matthew 6:5-13. When you study that passage in depth you will
discover 8 principles to guide us in
our prayer lives. We looked at 4 of those principles last time we were
together. Beginning in verse 5 of Matthew 6 we saw how Jesus does
not want us to be like the Pharisees in that we would say long, lavish prayers
in an attempt to impress others.
Principle #1 Short and Sweet in Public
So
our first principle of powerful prayer that allows us to journey with prayer is to be humble and direct when we pray in
public. If we have a deep spiritual walk
with the Lord then it will come much easier to be able to say a lot with a few
words. We find this outlined by Jesus in
Matthew 6:5. Yes, He was speaking of the Pharisees when
this was spoken, but it is just as applicable today for us.
Principle #2 Pray in Secret
Our
second principle of powerful prayer that allows us to journey with prayer is to make sure that we have a deep, active
prayer life that we engage in when it is just us and God. This is the time to spend as long in prayer
as possible. We should become so
accustomed to prayer that we feel lost if we don’t spend time alone with
God. This is Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 6:6. Christ was known to go out early and
spend time alone with the Father in prayer (Mark 1:35). As Jesus walked this earth on His journey, He
surely journeyed with prayer. Jesus knew that in order to face the trials
of life He needed to be connected with the Father through the power of the Holy
Spirit and through a powerful prayer life.
Principle #3 Vain Repetitions and Informing God?
You
may recall from last time also that we looked at Matthew 6:7, 8. It is there that Jesus tells us not use vain
repetition like the Gentiles. They were
known for saying certain words or phrases over and over in the hope that they
could weary their gods and perhaps force them to hear their pleas. God does need us to say things over and over
to try and wear Him down. We are told
that He knows our needs before we even speak.
When we journey with prayer
friends we are the ones who need to be informed. When we spend time in prayer we come more and
more in tune with the heart of God by the working of the Holy Spirit in our
lives. Prayer changes us, it does not
inform God. So Jesus warns us to not be
like the Pagans and heathens who use vain repetition. In our modern context we can understand this
to say that we should vary what we say when we speak to God. We are going to look at the framework for the
Lord’s Prayer more deeply in just a few minutes. We should take that framework or skeleton if
you will, and model our prayer life after it.
As we journey with prayer we
need to converse with God. Speak what is
on our hearts and then take time to listen as well.
Principle #4 Address the Father
Lastly,
by way of review, we will recall how we looked at the first line of what we
call the Lord’s Prayer. In the first
line, found in Matthew 6:9, we find
that Jesus wants us to address our heavenly Father when we begin our
prayers. Many people miss this and begin
their prayers addressed to Christ. Last
time together we saw that although Jesus is fully divine, He serves a different
role than the Father. The book of Hebrews
teaches us that Jesus is our High Priest and that He ministers on our behalf in
the heavenly sanctuary pleading His blood for us before the Father.
There
are some in this world who believe that we do not need Jesus to get to the
Father, but this is not Biblical friends.
Jesus Himself clearly tells us in John 14:6 that He is
the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and no one comes to Father except through
Him. So friends let us understand that
as we offer up our prayers addressed to the Father they are given by the Holy
Spirit to Jesus who then mingles our weak prayers with His mighty prayers
before Our Father God. Friends, let us
be clear today that we must have a relationship with Jesus in order to have any
hope of being saved. When we journey with prayer the way that Christ
intended, we will find success in our prayer life.
New Ground
Now that we have reviewed what we
covered last time we were together I would like for us to move forward and see
the other 4 principles of powerful
prayer.
Principle #5
Our
fifth principle comes in the very next line of the model prayer. Matthew 6:10 speaks of
God’s kingdom coming and His will being done on earth as it is in heaven. This begs the question as to what constitutes
the
In Luke 17:21 Jesus calls
Himself the
As
we journey with prayer we must pray
that Christ will establish His kingdom within each of our hearts. Once He has dominion in the heart of each
believer we will be fit to live with Him forever in His holy city; the New
Jerusalem. Paul reminds us in Romans 14:17 that the
Transition in the Structure
I want us to take notice of a
transition that occurs in this next verse.
In verses 5 through 10 we have discussed principles that involve our
relationship with God. Notice that we
must first be surrendered to God before we are to bear up our needs or wants to
Him.
If
we begin our prayers with only our desires in mind and we forget to nurture our
relationship with God then we truly have the horse before the cart. We are attempting to build a house without a
foundation. If we do that then our
prayers will fall flat as they bounce off the ceiling. Sure, God has winked at the times of
ignorance, but now He calls men and women everywhere to repentance (Acts 17:30). After, today you can no longer say that that
you do not know how to pray. When you
leave here today you will be better equipped to dialogue with your Father God.
Principle #6 Bread of Life
Let us now look at Matthew 6:11. It is here that we can now ask God to provide
for our physical needs. In Matthew 6:33 Jesus tells
us to seek first the
But the verse bares another meaning
that goes beyond our mere physical sustenance.
I think this verse also points out that we should ask for the Bread of
Life that gives us hope beyond a single meal.
The Bread of Life is the Word of God and Jesus Christ. If we feast upon Jesus through the inspired
Word of God then He will feed us when all other breads fail us. Let us also think for a moment on what
happens to bread when we consume it.
Once it is taken into the body it is digested and broken down so that
the nutrients can be sent throughout the body to do their work of sustaining
physical life.
The
Word of God is the same in a spiritual sense.
If we spend time in the Bible reading and meditating upon the wonderful
truths that it contains, we will find nourishment for our souls! When the Word of God is taken in and mentally
digested then we find nourishment that will transform us into the image of
Christ’s character that He longs to stamp upon each of us. When we consume the Bread of Life daily we
will find that we are then better equipped to journey with prayer because our thoughts will be centered on the
will of God for our lives. We cannot
expect to endure the time of Jacob’s trouble if our minds are not transformed
by the life-giving lessons found in God’s Holy Word. Let this pilgrimage here on earth be filled
with the very breath of heaven brought on by deep seasons of prayer and
feasting on the Bread of Life.
Principle #7 Forgiveness and Forgiving
As
we move along we come to the awareness once again that we are sinners. Without Christ each of us stands before God
as a debtor. We have no hope of having
our debt cleared unless we have Christ.
There is nothing that we can do to clear ourselves. We must have Christ’s shed blood applied to
our account. We are told in Hebrews 9:22 that there is no forgiveness of sins
without the shedding of blood. In the
Old Testament it was the blood of animals that were types of Christ. In the New Testament we have the antitype in
the Lamb of God that takes away the sins of the world if we accept Jesus as our
Savior (John 1:29).
It
is only in Christ that we find forgiveness of our sins friends, and we need to
pray daily and ask God to forgive us of our sins because we sin daily. The only day that you and I don’t sin is the
die that we are not alive. Once we have
received forgiveness for our sin-debt against God, we should then pray and ask
the Lord to give us that same spirit of forgiveness to those who may have
wronged us. If we harbor bitterness and
hatred in our hearts then we cannot hope to be connected with the God of
heaven. Jesus gave us the parable of the
servant who received forgiveness for a tremendous debt from his master, and
then went down the street and had his fellow servant thrown into jail over a
pittance that was owed to him. When his
master learned that the wicked servant had not forgiven his fellow servant he
had the wicked servant tortured until he had worked off his own debt (Matthew 18:34).
Christ
closes this parable by saying that God will do the same to us if we do not
forgive our brothers and sisters in Christ (vs. 35). Bitterness is a poison. We have to surrender it to God and allow our
pride and arrogance to be swept away by the flood of Christ-like love that
Jesus longs to place within our hearts.
When we live a forgiven life and grant forgiveness to those that may
wrong us, we will be more fully equipped to journey with prayer through this life of toil. If we let anger fester within us we will be
eaten up on the inside and slowly rot away until life losses its joy and sense
of duty that each Christian should have.
Principle #8 Safeguard from Temptation
As the structure of the Lord’s
Prayer is wrapped up, Jesus teaches us to ask God to keep us from falling back
into sin. Matthew 6:13 says that we
should ask God to keep us from falling back into sin. We should ask God to direct our paths in such
a way as to walk further and further away from sin. Notice that we need God to deliver us from
evil. The implication here is quite
clear: we can’t avoid sin on our own. We
have to depend fully on God to keep us from falling back into our old
ways. Paul tells us that any man that is
in Christ is a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). The only way that we stay new, friends, is to
journey with prayer and by adapting
the frame of mind that fully depends on Christ to sustain us. It is God and God alone that can keep us from
evil. A man’s heart is desperately sick
and deceitful (Jeremiah 17:9). How can we do it on our own? We cannot, we need God to help us.
Even the mighty apostle Paul
struggled with this. He tells us in Romans 7:19 that he does
the things he does not want to do because his flesh is sinful. He goes on to say in the rest of the chapter
that is in the mind where victory is found.
That is, a mind that is under the Lordship of Jesus (Romans 7:25). We too will find our own victory over sin in
this body only when we pray and ask God to keep us free from the evil of this
world. We too will find success in our
journey if we journey with prayer
following this principle and the others that we have covered today.
Wrap-up and Appeal
Today, we have gone through this
material rather quickly I know. But it
is my sincere prayer today that each of us will adapt these principles of
powerful prayer to our own prayer life.
I want to challenge each of you today to consider the framework that
Jesus has given us in the Lord’s Prayer.
I hope you see that the short lines of this prayer are packed with deep
meaning that is intended to give us a connection with our Father God like none
we have ever had before.
I
have a handout that I want each of you to have today. It will be passed out as you leave the
sanctuary. That handout will contain the
8 principles that we have covered over our last two Sabbath sermons together
along with the Scripture references that I have shared with you. I implore you to go study these things out
for yourselves.
I
fully believe that if we adopt these powerful principles of prayer in our lives
that we will experience an awakening in this church that the Lord longs to
bring about. I fully believe that the
Lord desires to give us His Spirit in a much fuller measure. Jesus longs for us to be in one accord just
as the early church was as Pentecost.
But that unity will not come if we are not each connected to the throne
of grace through prayer.
As
we journey through this life we must journey
with prayer and our prayers must have the substance that Jesus’ prayers had
and have. The time of trouble is coming quickly
and our only hope is the same as the only hope that Jacob had: prayer.
Please
do not ever forget this quote. I read it
to you last time and it bears repeating today:
“…Jacob’s
company, unarmed and defenseless, seemed about to fall helpless victims of
violence and slaughter. And to the burden of anxiety and fear was added the
crushing weight of self-reproach, for it was his own sin that had brought this
danger. His only hope was in the mercy of God; his only defense must be
prayer.” Great Controversy pg. 616
We too only have one hope and
defense. Just like Jacob we must rely on
the mercy of God and depend on the defense of prayer to carry us through each
trial we face both now and in the future.
Appeal
How many of you want to raise your
hand toward heaven and ask the God of heaven to take charge of your prayer life
and by His grace transform us more and more into the people that he longs for
us to be? By His grace may we fully
learn to journey with prayer. Let us pray together.