in this section of the sermon on the mount not to do those things ostentatiously, not to do those things in order to be seen by others. They’re too s those things are too sacred to be corrupted by performative behavior or wanting others to see how good we are spiritually. So, we looked at secret giving last time and we’ll see what Jesus has to say about prayer this morning. And then uh there’s there’s this excursus that Jesus goes on between talking about secret praying and secret fasting. He gives us this choicest morsel in scripture and he teaches us uh in the tributary of the Lord’s prayer how how we can pray. And it’s an amazing uh portion of scripture. I can’t think of a better way to continue in January and begin a year together uh except by learning the outline of the Lord’s Prayer. Before we get there, Jesus does have a few things to say to us about faulty praying. Here’s what he says. He says, “And when you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites. They love to stand and pray in the synagogues at the street corners that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.” When you pray, go into your room, shut the door, pray to your father who’s in secret, and your father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you pray, don’t heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Don’t be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him. If you look at the life of Jesus in the New Testament, you see just how much he valued spending significant time alone in prayer. He had his own deep enjoyment of the practice of prayer and allows him to see clearly and to react strongly against people who are pretending to be more spiritual than they are when they pray. Now maybe that’s a little difficult for us to relate to. Maybe uh we all have our spiritual issues and our spiritual weaknesses, but being showy and ostentatious in prayer maybe isn’t really one of them. In fact, we might think if these people around me sitting next to me knew how little I pray at all, they’d know that I don’t have any problem at all with pretentious prayer. My problems with getting the engine started, not revving it up for everyone in the neighborhood to hear. Our prayer lives really can be a pretty good barometer of our overall spiritual health. A little self diagnosis periodically is very helpful. If we don’t have much of a prayer life at all, it can tell us that we’re very self-sufficient people. we’re pretty confident in our own abilities, our own resources, and for the most part, we depend on on ourselves and what we can already do well. Or maybe if we don’t have much of a prayer life, it’s because somewhere along the way, we became so discouraged and disappointed and disillusioned with God, so disenchanted in our relationship with him that we don’t really believe that prayer actually does much good or it’s very effective. Maybe our faith is at a low eb when it comes to God doing anything outside normal circumstances. Also tells us something about our prayer lives. If we end up praying a lot in public in uh but rarely in private, if most of our prayer, the bulk of our prayer occurs in church or in Bible studies or in small groups. And if we’re quite avid when we pray with others, but we’re really bored and distracted when praying on our own. Well, prayer lives like that are probably at the early stages of something that could become full-blown hypocrisy. Also tells us something about our spiritual condition. If when we do pray, all we do is just take a grocery list of uh of requests to God and there’s very little time given to praise or to worship or to thanksgiving, that tells us a lot about uh who we feel we’re talking to in prayer. So, no matter where we’re at this morning, and uh we all have a lot of growth to do in this area without any ounce of condemnation, Jesus is here to teach us to enjoy prayer more than we do. He wants to help us to pray more often and more fervently and more sincerely with greater understanding of the one we’re praying to and to have more fun doing it. So, let’s see what Jesus has to say to us this morning. Jews of Jesus day, they had set times for prayer. They would pray at 9:00 in the morning and noon and 3:00 in the afternoon. So, there were daily opportunities to make yourself a very visible man or woman of prayer. During the public fast, they would blow uh trumpets at the temple indicating the appropriate time. So, if you wanted to be noticed, you could just schedule maximum prayer exposure at those particular times. And public prayer could be used to try to convince people just how pious and righteous you really were. And Jesus calls that prayer to be seen by others. And there are various ways uh we can do that. It’s it’s not uncommon to use public prayer as an opportunity to show people how smart and how biblically educated we are. I had a fellow in my church and and good guy and uh I don’t think I wouldn’t call him a full-blown hypocrite or anything. He had just learned to pray quite horizontally when he prayed. So he would pray, “Oh God, you know that our sister Mabel uh has a sick aunt in Victoria. And we know that sometimes you say no to our prayers for recovery because your perfect will is to allow some people to suffer. And we know that all of us one day will meet our end. And we also know that sometimes you let people get well, but that doesn’t mean you’ll heal everybody or we should expect that to happen every time. You act miraculously from time to time and that’s why we call them miracles. So we bring Mabel before you.” And on and on he would go like that. It was like a theological lecture. sounded like it was all preamble. Very little actual prayer. The focus was on the people he was praying with, not the one he was praying to. And he had just gotten in the habit of that over the years. Remember how Jesus said that people who give to be seen by others have already received their reward. In the same way, the person who is praying in order to impress others, they also receive the reward of people thinking they’re a little more righteous than they really are. But momentary human attention, that’s very hollow kind of reward. If we’re always looking sideways at the people around us when we pray, it’s toxic to our prayer lives. Luke 18, Jesus tells the story of two men praying in the temple, tax collector and the Pharisee and the miserable tax collector. He has so much to confess to God. He’s done so much wrong in his life. He’s a broken man. He won’t even lift up his eyes to heaven. With a stammering tongue, he can only frame the simplest of prayers. God have mercy on me, a sinner. And he probably felt like he didn’t have much of a prayer life at all. But God heard him and when he went home that day, a forgiven mane next to him, if you asked him how his prayer life was, he’d probably spend the next hour telling you how great it was for him and how committed and how disciplined. And his prayer was, “God, I thank you that I’m not like other men, like robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week. I give a tenth of all I get. Imagine praying that prayer to God. Pharisee was already getting his full reward. He enjoyed the self-righteousness and the looks of other people. And like all Pharisees, he was just praying to the big Pharisee in the sky. He imagined God was just like him and that they were on the best of terms. And his love to be seen by others resulted in him going home unforgiven that day. thought any blessing from God. He probably felt it had been a rewarding time of prayer, but it wasn’t God’s reward that he left with. Prayer isn’t much of anything if it’s not sincere. Jesus says when you pray, just go into your room, get alone, pray to your father who is unseen. Then your father who sees in secret will reward you. So praying to be noticed by others, that’s one thing. But Jesus goes on to identify a second prayer pathology. He says, “Where we babble like Gentiles or pagans, thinking that we’ll be heard because of our many words.” Very familiar story in First Kings 18. Elijah takes on the prophets who serve the false god Baal. And the question is, whose God is going to answer prayer and set fire to the sacrifices this day? And Elijah gives the prophets of Baal the first go. And from morning to noon for about 6 hours they call out, “Oh Baal, answer us.” Over and over again, louder and louder, they slash themselves with their swords and their spears. They try to get attention of their God. Elijah seems greatly amused by this. I I just picture him sitting back against a tree, leaning back, maybe smoking a cigarette, and uh after a while, he starts taunting them. He says, “Uh, maybe your God’s gone on a journey. Maybe your God’s sleeping. Maybe your God is using the bathroom right now. He says all those things to them. And the prayers of the prophets of Baal tells us what they thought of their God. They they weren’t confident in their standing with God. They thought if they worked hard enough, they could manipulate God to act on their behalf. And they thought if they just said the right words over and over with greater volume, a little more intensity. It’s like playing a slot machine. If they just keep putting nickels in and pulling the arm, eventually they’ll win the prayer jackpot. Such an inadequate view of prayer because they’re not praying like sons and daughters. They’re praying like like orphans and like beggars. And we can all fall into that posture of praying like that. We’re unsure about our relationship with God. And we might pray very desperately with intensity if we’re facing sickness or an exam or uh our finances are in poor order. and many words pour out, but we really haven’t developed a lot of relationship with the one we’re praying to. And we’re not quite sure or convinced of God’s love and care for us. Prophets of Baal thought their God had to have his arm twisted, had to be convinced or manipulated into helping them. And so, their prayer was all technique, full of cliches. It was complicated. It was the prayer of a beggar. And after the prophets of Baal babbled on for about six hours, Elijah stepped up. He kind of ground out his cigarette and he offered up the simplest of prayers, 60 short words, but these are the words of a son, not the words of an orphan. Elijah knew his God. His prayer was not at all complicated. And then the fire fell. When Jesus says, “Don’t keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they’ll be heard because of their many words.” That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t persist in prayer. Luke 18 teaches us to keep praying and not give up. And it doesn’t mean that Jesus doesn’t want us to pray for a long time. He himself would often go up and pray all night. But it does mean that we’re not to treat prayer like a formula where we approach God with our lips. Our hearts aren’t very engaged and we don’t really know him as our friend and our father. What kind of God would it be if he measured our prayers with a stopwatch or granted requests according to a word count? if mechanical prayer stats like that seem more important to him than the heart cry of one of his children. If so, that would be a God that we could easily manipulate. And that’s just pagan. Jesus says, “Do not be like them. Don’t babble on. Your father knows what you need before you ask him. Before we ever pray a word, God knows our every need, every hope, every disappointment, every dream. We don’t have to ever waste time informing him or persuading him in prayer. He just wants us to relate to him. He knows what we need before we ask him. Helen Roseir from Northern Ireland. She passed away about six years ago. She was 91 years old. She uh became a Christian as a medical student 1945 in Cambridge, England. And she joined the Christian organization. And after graduating, she went out to serve as a medical missionary in central Africa for many years. One night, she was helping a mother deliver her baby. But despite her efforts, the mother died, leaving behind a tiny little premature baby and a crying 2-year-old. Dr. Roseir knew they’d have great difficulty keeping the baby alive. They had no incubator. They didn’t have any electricity to run an incubator. And even though they lived on the equator, nights were chilly. The drafts were treacherous. So, she sent a student midwife to fill a hot water bottle. But apparently, rubber doesn’t do well in the tropics. And the bottle burst. It was her last one. Dr. Roseir said, “Put the baby as near to the fire as you dare as you safely can. Sleep between the baby and the door to keep it free from drafts. Your job is to keep the baby warm.” At noon the following day, Helen Roseir went to pray as she would always do with the orphans who would gather around her, and she suggested that they pray for this little tiny baby. And she mentioned the ruined water bottle, and she mentioned the uh the baby’s 2-year-old sister who was crying because she lost her mother. And during the prayer time, one little 10-year-old girl named Ruth, she just prayed that kind of blunt, unrealistic prayer that kids sometimes pray. And she said, “God, please send us a water bottle. It’ll be no good tomorrow, God. Baby will be dead. Send it this afternoon. And while you’re about it, send a dolly for that little girl so she’ll know you really love her.” Well, Dr. Roseir, she didn’t know how to say amen to that audacious prayer. And she didn’t believe God would do it. She had lived in Africa now for four years, never had received a parcel from home. Even if she did, who would ever think of sending a water bottle to the equator? And you can see where this story is going, can’t you? You’ve all heard these stories before. Maybe you’ve experienced some of these God stories before. Maybe not as recently as you’d like, but God does these things. And halfway through the afternoon, she was teaching at the nurse’s training school. Message arrived that a car had pulled up. She went, the car had gone by the time she got there, and there was a 22 pound parcel on the veranda, and she called all the orphans, 30 or 40 pairs of eyes, focused on that cardboard box, and she brought out some brightly colored knitted jerseys that she gave to the kids, and they were delighted by that. And next, she pulled out some bandages for the leprosy patients, and the kids looked bored. Then they got a box of raisins, put her hand in again, pulled out a brand new hot water bottle. She cried. She hadn’t asked God to send it. She hadn’t even believed that he could. But Ruth had Ruth said, “If God sent that bottle, must have sent the dolly, too.” She reached in, pulled out the doll, took it to the 2-year-old. Helen Roseir says that the parcel had been packed by her former Sunday school class in Ireland, had been in transit for 5 months. Five months earlier, people in her home church felt prompted to send various items, including a doll and hot water bottle, to the equator, never knowing it’d be the answer to a 10-year-old’s prayer. Jesus says, “Our father knows what we need before we ask him.” Which means that what God calls us to in prayer, it’s just relationship with him. He doesn’t need any information about what we need. He wants us to ask for things, but he wants relationship with us first and for our prayers to come from our hearts. So, we don’t need to make any display. We don’t need to babble on. We don’t need to try to convince God to help us or manipulate him. And Jesus is willing to teach us how to pray. If you imagine what it was like for Jesus’ disciples to be around him, to observe his prayer life. Sometimes they’d all be sleeping long before John. Jesus would get up. He’d go up a mountain to pray. Other times, the disciples would be just getting into their sleeping bags around the campfire. Jesus was nowhere to be found. He’d pray all night. They’d see him again in the morning. And the prayers that we see Jesus praying in public in the Gospels, they’re forged out of many, many hours of private prayer. And I wonder what his disciples thought. I wonder if they ever asked each other, “Why why does he go up the mountain all night? What does he say? What does he talk about? Does he take a list? Does his mind wander like mine wanders when I pray? Does he get tired of it? We know from Luke 11 that one day after Jesus had finished one of his extended times of prayer, one of his curious disciples said to him, “Lord, as John the Baptist taught his disciples, would you teach us how to pray?” And I think that was a request that just delighted Jesus. And Luke goes on to tell us how Jesus instructed them in the same pattern that we refer to as the Lord’s Prayer. And it’s that same basic pattern explained by Jesus to that whole crowd in front of him on the sermon on the mount. I think Jesus loved prayer and he loved to teach people about prayer. So we call it the Lord’s prayer. Jesus would never have prayed all of it. Jesus had no need to ask God forgive him of his sins. He was giving instructions to his followers to people like us about the kinds of things that we should pray about. It’s a little bit ironic that right after warning us against babbling against meaningless repetition, we have the Lord’s Prayer, which has probably been prayed more thoughtlessly repeated uh prayer in history. In fact, the term we use pitterpatter comes from the Latin words that begin the Lord’s Prayer because it was repeated so often that it became wrote and became rather meaningless. As he begins to teach us how to pray in Matthew 6:9, Jesus says, “This then is how you should pray.” He doesn’t say this is what you should pray. This is how you should pray. And I think that’s highly significant, very helpful for us because I see the Lord’s Prayer as a kind of scaffolding that gives us six headings or topics that represents the kinds of things God would like us to bring before him. It’s a coherent scaffolding that we can hang all of our many prayers on. So, we’ll talk about how that works in the next few weeks. But as Jesus begins to teach us how to pray, he says four words that would utterly have shocked, I think, his audience. Maybe it should shock us. Maybe we should hang on to our pews because he invites us to begin by saying these four words, our father in heaven. And they’re they’re shocking. Those four words really sum up almost all we really need to know about prayer. If we internalize those four words, we’ll probably all graduate from Jesus School of Prayer. incredible thing to stand in prayer and call God our father. In the Old Testament, the Israelites didn’t address God as their father. And Jesus spoke the sermon on the mount in an era like the Old Testament when Jewish prayers would normally begin with a fairly exalted title, sovereign lord or king of the universe. Most of the prayers recorded in the Old Testament are like that. God is only referred to 14 times as father in the Old Testament and quite impersonally as being the father of the nation, not of individuals. So from Genesis to Malachi, you won’t find one individual speaking of God as father. As far as we know, Abraham, Moses, Joseph, David, Daniel, they never fell to their knees and dared to address God that way, simply as father. Yet in the New Testament, God’s called father at least 275 times. And we’re told that is the way that we should address him. Only after Jesus was it customary for God’s people to address God simply as father. Jesus never used any term but father when he prayed some 66 times except one time. Only when he was on the cross and experiencing the cosmic desertion of God as punishment for our sin did Jesus cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” But then he reverted fairly soon after back with his final words to father. Into your hands I commit my spirit. So the word Jesus uses is abba. It’s best translated as dearest father. That’s a better translation for us than daddy because daddy sounds a little childish for a grown-up to say. And and uh this abba is not a word that grown Israelites would ever outgrow. It’s a word they would use to speak with affection for their fathers. It’s mature. It’s affectionate, expresses intimacy. We see this focus on the father throughout our passage today. Don’t miss all four references we have to father. When you pray, close door, pray to your father who’s unseen. Your father will reward you. Don’t be like them. Your father knows what you need before you ask him. Our father in heaven. So the Lord’s prayer begins with our dear or our dearest father in heaven. That’s a great privilege that God gives to his people. I mean, God is the father of mankind only in the loosest sense that he created everyone, but he’s not a personal father to all. First John 3:1 says, “How great is the love that the father has lavished on us that we should be called children of God, and that’s what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it didn’t know him.” John 1:12, “But to all who received, to those believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” John 14, Jesus says, “I’m the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the father except through me. If you really knew me, you would know my father as well.” So Jesus’ detractors uh among the Jewish religious leaders, they reacted strongly against uh Jesus calling God his father and referring to himself as the son of God. But the reason that they couldn’t call God their father yet was because they hadn’t come to know him through the son. So in John chapter 8, Jesus looked at people who were not accepting what he had to say, who were not receiving him as the son of God. And he said, “If God were your father, you’d love me. For I came from God and now I’m here. I’ve not come on my own, but he sent me. Why is my language not clear to you? Because you’re unable to hear what I say. You belong to your father, the devil. And you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there’s no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he’s a liar, and he’s the father of lies. So God’s not the personal father of all mankind. Ephesians 2:3 says that all of us at one time were by nature children of wrath, just like the rest of mankind. No one was clearer really about the distinction between the father of the believer and the father of those who hadn’t received him than Jesus himself. But when he took the penalty for our sin on his shoulders on the cross, he’s making it possible for you and I to be adopted into his family, be adopted children of the heavenly father, given the grace to repent of our sins, put our faith and trust in Jesus. And then this amazing transaction took place in our lives. We became adopted children. Romans 8, you didn’t receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear. You received the spirit of sunship. And by him we cry, Abba, father. The spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Galatians 4, because you are sons, God sent the spirit of his son into our hearts. The spirit who calls out Abba, father. So we’re given this spirit of adoption when we trust in Christ. And then we have this Holy Spirit that cries out, “Aba, Father.” We have a Holy Spirit heart cry, which is a tremendous, tremendous help to us in prayer. As we go without embarrassment before our father, we contemplate that great privilege, those two words, our father can revolutionize our praying. When we’re in our late teens, we all go through that incredibly awkward, uncomfortable phase with adults and teachers that you have known since you were a child. Your parents taught you to respect adults, so you referred to them as Mr. Cho and Mrs. Gilllet and Mr. McCollum. But then at some point, because it would be weird not to, you had to make the difficult transition to call them by their first names. No longer Mr. Cho, it was Tom. And it was no longer Mrs. Jill. It was Gloria. And it felt transgressive to do that at first. It felt so awkward. It wasn’t easy. It seemed presumptuous. Think of those little timid, struggling disciples the first time they went to follow Jesus’ pattern in prayer. And they shuffled their feet and they looked down at their Birkenstocks and with great hesitancy in their throat, they croked out for the first time ever in prayer, “Father.” But as soon as they said it, power of prayer began to open up in front of them like they’d never experienced before. What a privilege it is for us to come before the creator of the universe with such a familiar and intimate term. For God to allow us to call him that cost him a great deal. Cost him the life of his beloved son Jesus. But it opens up for us the most tender and intimate relationship with the most generous and kind and loving father we could ever imagine. Prayer no longer becomes for us what one person has called it worrying out loud. It becomes this personal relationship with a caring father. In his book, Knowing God, Ji Packer comments on this aspect of the fatherhood of God. He says, “If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, having God as his father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers, his whole outlook on life, it means he doesn’t understand Christianity very well at all. For everything that Christ taught, everything that makes the New Testament new and better than the old, everything that’s distinctively Christian as opposed to merely Jewish is summed up in the knowledge of the fatherhood of God. Father is the Christian name for God. So, our father in heaven, the last two words, they carry some weight as well. When we say our father in heaven, it’s not just identifying God’s postal code. It’s signifying his authority on our behalf. The fact that our father’s in heaven means that he has all the resources needed to respond to us and help us in our time of need. He’s not just a sympathetic earthly father with limited resources, but he’s a heavenly father. knows what we need before we even ask him and he has all the power to move heaven and earth to answer those prayers. Also helps us I think maybe differentiate a bit between our earthly father and our father in heaven because many of us probably had great earthly fathers. But what if your father was or is abusive or or are always angry or or drunk or never around? Then the idea of praying to a father that might not be particularly comforting maybe just reminds you of anger and desertion and harshness and disinterest. If your earthly father has been loving and interested in you and has time for you and blesses your life, you have a leg up in naturally and easily coming to God as father. But if you’re in that first category, you have a whole book in the Bible that teaches you that your heavenly father is different than your earthly one. And you gain history with that father as you walk with him through life. And he’s always consistent and he always loves you. And you have this Holy Spirit inside you that keeps crying out, “Abba, father.” So even a very shattered, fractured sense of fatherhood, a distorted sense of fatherhood, it can be mightily healed as we look to our father who art in heaven and pray to him. So the point of our passage very simple today is to stop orienting ourselves to the people around us as we pray. Never think that through prayer we need to say so many words so we can manipulate God into giving us what he wants. Point is just to orient ourselves to our father as beloved children and trust him and seek his face. And God invites us to have that kind of relationship with him. The late preacher and teacher Haden Robinson talks about when his kids were small he’d play a game with him. He’d take a few coins and he’d show them to him and he’d close his hands. And he says, “My youngsters would crawl up into my lap and they’d try to pry my fingers open one at a time. Once they captured the coins, they would scream with delight. They jump down to treasure their prize. What I enjoyed about that game was having my son and daughter sit in my lap and feel close to them. The pennies really didn’t mean much to me, but in another way, they mean to everything to me. Because during that penny play, my children laughed and talked with me while I expressed with hugs my deep love for them. When we pray, we often concentrate on the gifts in God’s hand and ignore the hand of God himself. We pray fervently for new jobs or the return of health. When we gain the prizes, we’re delighted and then we have little more to do with God. If we’re only after the coins, then God’s hand just serves to make the house payment and buy clothes for the children, pay for the groceries. After the needs been met, the hand itself means little to us. Although God in his grace does give good gifts to his children, he offers us more than that. He offers us himself. Those who are satisfied with the trinkets in the father’s hand will miss the best reward of prayer, the reward of communicating and communing with the God of the universe. So the truest rewards of prayer never God’s gifts. The reward of prayer is God himself, our father who is in heaven. So that’s it. Now I think maybe we we’re ready to go to prayer together. And we’re going to do things a little bit differently this morning. I’m I’m not going to ask you to put up your hand and get a mic and share a request and then I compile them and I act as mediator. We’ll do that again next week, but just not today. There’s nothing wrong with that. Today I would ask you as we go to prayer to lift up your hand as usual and a microphone will come your way and instead of sharing your praise item or your word of thanksgiving or your word from scripture or your prayer request simply pray it out and we’ll be praying with you. The only thing I ask and this is important too is that when you receive the mic and when you go to pray preface your prayer with those four words, our father in heaven. Let’s just take time to pray as a church together and uh enjoy the cry of our hearts that calls out abba father.