Hey, welcome back. I think we're on our 20th week together, right, for this lesson today. And I'm really excited to get in deeper on the subject of prayer. We talked about the importance of that to feed your spirit, the importance of developing a lifestyle of prayer. And we've said a few things along the way, but today I want to dig in a little bit deeper on how to pray. And if you've ever asked, well, I don't know how to pray. How do I pray? You're in good company. The disciples also asked that question, and they asked it because they saw Jesus' prayer life.
They recognized that whenever Jesus spoke, he spoke with authority. He spoke with confidence. He spoke as if he knew God's heart, and he understood exactly what God's intentions were. And I have great news for you. You and I have that same thing living inside of us. And so we also can know exactly what's on the Father's mind and heart if we develop a lifestyle of prayer. So here's what Jesus said in his life. He said to some Jews that were asking him questions in John 5, starting in verse 19, Jesus answered and was saying to them, Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of himself unless it's something he sees the Father doing.
For whatever the Father does, these things the Son also does in like manner. For the Father loves the Son and shows him all things that he himself is doing. And the Father will show him greater works than these so that you will marvel. I've got great news. The Father loves you too. He loves me too. And his desire is to show us all kinds of things about our life. Sometimes we tend to view prayer as like this is the last ditch effort now. It's all falling apart. Now we've got to pray.
What if we learned how to make prayer the first thing of our day, the first and most important thing of our life, that we connect with the Father in heaven through prayer so that we learn and grow in this unbroken communion, which is what Jesus had with the Father. Does it amaze you that Jesus himself said, The Son can do nothing of himself, only what he sees the Father doing. Jesus lived that way because he was always seeking God's face. So he lived in perfect submission to the Father and he lived in perfect communion with the Father. And that's how he was able to do all of what he did.
So let's dig in on the answer to this question. The apostles came to him having seen him pray and said, Jesus, teach us how to pray. And the first time we're introduced to what we call the Lord's Prayer, it was in response to that question. It's also found in the Sermon on the Mount, which we'll look at that account of the prayer. So that's in Matthew chapter 6. Why don't you open your Bible and look at that for a minute? And you may have this prayer memorized. You might have gone to Sunday school when you were little or some tradition where you had to memorize it.
I sure did. I knew the Lord's Prayer when I was six years old, but I didn't really know how to pray the Lord's Prayer until I really became a Christian and gave my life over to the Lord. So let's look at how Jesus taught us to pray. This is the most basic beginning model. If you've never really had a prayer life before, you can begin to pray this prayer, but not in the vain rote repetition like I used to do when I was a kid. Savor every line like you're eating a gourmet meal and meditate on it. Some days as you really dig in and meditate in this prayer and pray this prayer, you might only go one or two or three lines.
And you're kind of soaking in that truth and soaking in that connection you're having with God and really asking God, I urge you to take each line and ask God, make this reality for me, not just a belief, but make me a participant, a willing co-laborer with you in what I'm praying right now so I could be just like Jesus. I don't want to do anything that the Father is not doing. Let that be our heart's cry as we dig in on this prayer. So, pray then in this way. Our Father who is in heaven. Right out of the gate. Our Father.
Just those two words we could do a whole lesson on, but I'll keep this brief. Jesus saying, Our Father, as an invitation to you and me to connect with the Father in heaven the same way that He does. In other words, we're one. Jesus and the Father were one. He's inviting us into the family of God where we're woven together with the Father who is in heaven. Now, we've talked a little bit and we've looked over the weeks at what God is like as a Father. And I hope that that understanding and revelation just gets deeper and richer as you really get to know His heart and walk with Him for the rest of your life.
But for Jesus to say, Our Father, He's saying we're family. This is not an individual prayer. You're doing your own thing over there with God. This is you joining together with the rest of the family of God from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name. That's in Ephesians. That we're all one. And this prayer connects us one to another. Just know this. For 2,000 years now, saints from every tribe, tongue, and nation have known this prayer and they've been praying this prayer. Can you imagine billions upon billions of times that this is being offered up to heaven like incense?
Everything that we're about to look at. Can you imagine what it's going to be like when the full response to this prayer takes effect and we have paradise restored in the earth? That's what we're partnering with. And so it begins with an acknowledgement. I'm your son. I'm praying to our Father right now. I'm coming to you as a son, as an intimate knower and lover of the one who manages this house and in whose house and at whose table I'm privileged to live and sit. That's what our Father, which art in heaven, we're acknowledging He's not just here in the earth.
He's not just earthbound. Our Father lives in another realm. Heaven's not a place that you travel off to one day. It's not like if you could hop in a spaceship and keep traveling past space and time. Heaven's a whole other realm that actually is all around us all the time and yet completely separated from our normal everyday reality. When we pray, our Father, which art in heaven, we're aiming to bring the two of them back together. In reality, they're not separated anyway. Heaven and earth are one. They always have been.
It's just that since we brought sin into the picture, it's like a veil over our eyes and over our spiritual senses where we don't even recognize the fact Heaven's all around us all the time. And so when we pray, our Father, who is in heaven, we're saying you're near and yet you occupy another realm that I want to enter into along with you. So we're praying as it were before the throne of God in heaven. We have entered into heavenly places with Him as we pray all of the following things. The truth is, as we saw, you're seated in heavenly places in Christ Jesus. That's the reality. It's not visible to these eyes and sometimes not even perceptible to our senses, but it's real.
It's as real as the air that you're breathing, which is also invisible, but its effects are tremendous on our bodies. And so our Father, which is in heaven, near and intimate, and yet occupying a realm that exceeds, that's more abundant, that has authority over the realm that I live in right now, we're appealing to an authority that supersedes everything that exists in the natural realm. Our Father who is in heaven, holy, or hallowed be your name. Hallowed simply is a fancy word for holy. Holy means separated from. It means apart from. It means above and beyond something.
So the Creator is not a part of His creation. He's over and above and beyond it. And every limitation of this creation is not a limitation for God. So we're limited by time and space and gravity and, you know, the weakness of flesh. We have all these limitations. Everything created has a limit to it. But we're praying to a God who's beyond those limits, beyond the limits of sin. You know, holy does mean sin free. Sin is simply a consequence of living in a flesh bound body. Anything that we do that's unholy, unrighteous, simply means that we're occupying a realm where all of that's a possibility.
God's heaven, where He lives, that realm has no such thing as sin, no such thing as weakness, no crying, no mourning, no weakness or limitations of any sort. And so when we say holy is your name, holy simply means you're above and beyond it all. I'm not praying to a God that I made up in my mind like the pagans do. I'm praying to a God who is way above and beyond it all, who is incomprehensible and yet accessible all at the same time, who is unknowable in the sense of the limitations of the human mind and yet desires to be known and reveals Himself to us. That's all of what it means in holy. He's perfect in all of His ways and His holiness is beautiful. It's beauty personified in the one living God.
Holy is your name. God's name is not just a label that's attached to Him. We tend to think of names as, you know, if you'd say, hi, Steve, that's a label that's attached to me and in some respect, it's my identity because people call me Steve. But when it comes to God's name and what God means by the term name, it's not just a label. It reflects your entire identity. Everything about who you are is wrapped up in the name that we ascribe to you or that you've, in God's case, what He's revealed to us. So His name is holy.
His name is above and beyond. He can't be anything but loving and forgiving and merciful and full of compassion and righteous and just and all of the things that makes God God. It's His identity. So He can't lie. He can't do anything that's outside of His nature. You know, there's these goofy questions atheists ask. Well, can God, you know, can God lie? Well, no. Well, see, He's not all powerful because He can't do whatever He wants to do. Well, there's no want to. God cannot do anything outside of His nature and His nature is perfect and holy.
So we're keeping all of that in mind. That's our opening for this prayer. Our Father, who is in heaven, holy or hallowed is your name. That's the God that we're praying to. So now that we've set that all straight, Holy God, intimate Father, I'm coming before you and here's some prayers I've got. The first thing is, your kingdom come. You notice how we're not diving right into, hey God, I need this and I need this and I need you to take care of that and I'm sorry that I did this and all of this.
We're not starting with all of that. We've already set our gaze in the reality of heaven that's already existing inside of us and now we're going to keep our gaze at say, let's call it a 30,000 foot view to start with. That we're joining together with God and His mission in the earth. Your kingdom come. And actually, in the original language of the scriptures, it's more forceful than that. Like another way of translating that would be, kingdom of God come. Will of God be. That's the next two lines of this prayer.
It's almost like issuing a command, not on our own authority, but joining together with God's authority and saying, kingdom of God, I am speaking right now what heaven has already decreed, that this world will be ruled by the king of all kings and the lord of all lords. Kingdom simply means the king's dominion. Wherever the king of peace reigns, that's where the kingdom of heaven has now come. Now, this prayer is powerful and important and we may need to just get an understanding. We're not saying let's conquer the world with some heaven's armies and have, you know, Christians for presidents and kings around the world. That's not what this prayer is about. Spiritual authority always is above and over all civil authority.
We're praying that the whole world will come under the reign of Jesus. The same way that we've given our lives over to the Lord. The kingdom of heaven has now come. The kingdom of heaven is now inside of us and we're praying that the kingdom of God will now first be on the inside of every living human on the planet. When that's accomplished, well, the whole world's going to be filled with righteousness and peace and joy. Sorrow and mourning will flee away because the redeemed of the Lord have come with singing unto Zion. When the whole world has submitted itself of its free will to the Lord the same way we did in our salvation, now the kingdom of heaven has come.
And it's not always visible. Many times the kingdom of heaven is developing in places and you can't see any evidence of it. You don't yet see the culture changed. You don't yet see the governments changing and education and so on changing. But you do know that life upon life, first in the tens, then the hundreds, then thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions, and then billions have given their lives over to the Lord Jesus Christ and are living life like Jesus lives it. That's the kingdom of heaven. So when we say kingdom of heaven be on earth, your kingdom come and then it goes on and then what will happen is your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
We want the whole world to bend its knee to the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Again, because he's not a lord and master, taskmaster, slave owner. He's the father of the most amazing family. He's got the most incredible house. He has the most incredible world to offer us if we live life his way. And we're saying your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. When heaven exists in the earth, what we have then is what Adam and Eve had before they introduced sin to the picture. We have paradise.
We have nothing but perfection, nothing but life without death, nothing but joy without anything to ruin that joy, nothing but peace without any threat or danger. This is when you've heard the term and the lion and the lamb shall lie down together. The lamb can lie next to the lion because the lion is not a threat any longer. There's no reason to fear anything. That's the world that we will create. That's the world that heaven creates when it's allowed into the world again. In Eden, heaven and earth were one. In Eden, it wasn't God living off in some far away or other dimensional realm.
Adam and Eve walked with God in the cool of the day. They had communion with Him just like Jesus had with the Father when He walked the earth. That's what when we say your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Heaven's will is revealed in the scriptures. Heaven's will is revealed by the Holy Spirit living in our hearts and as more and more lives submit themselves to the Lord Jesus Christ, we begin to live this way. Then hell has no place. The kingdom of darkness has no place to occupy because the saints of God have occupied the earth and we have paradise restored.
That's what we're praying. Now we can bring it down from the 30,000 foot view to I still have to live this life. I've still got to go about my daily business. I still have to provide. I still have to do all the things that make for life. And so I'm going to pray some things. The first one, give us this day our daily bread. Now I know I'm in large part speaking to an American audience and this is, you know, I'm here in Millersburg, Pennsylvania and we Americans really don't for almost the entirety of our nation know what it means to be scraping for daily bread.
There are enough ministries and government programs even where daily bread is not a concern. There are people that are hungry but starving to death really is a rare thing in the United States of America because we're so abundantly blessed overall. But in Jesus' time when he prayed this and taught them to pray this there was a real threat of starvation from deep poverty which most of the world lived under at that time. So he was saying let's be real. Ask your father for daily bread. Ask your God to supply all of your needs according to his riches and glory. Pray to him.
Don't take for granted that every day he's just going to care for you. Connect with him in this and let him prosper you. Let him bring you to a place of total peace so that you have no thought or take no concern like Jesus said for what you will eat or what you will wear because God takes care of the birds of the air and he takes care of the lilies of the field and he'll take care of you in the same way. It's a statement of dependency on God. So for us who do have jobs and good paying jobs at that it's a statement that still needs to be made. It's a statement acknowledging that you gave me the capacity to create wealth.
You gave me the ability to earn money and if that would be taken away for any reason whether through sickness or through some disaster happening or through a you know like the Great Depression level you know dust bowl economy if that would happen I acknowledge I'm dependent on you and I don't take for granted that it's because of God providing for me that I have all of what I have so even if you have means we pray this prayer as a reminder of our dependency on God and it's a statement of gratitude it's a statement of I'm not going to take for granted you instead I'm going to give you thanks and remember that I have all of this because you've abundantly blessed my life so when we say give us this day our daily bread it's a statement of knowing where it came from in the first place and acknowledging that we really need him for all of those things then comes a line which some people would prefer to skip over if they're offended with somebody it's a line we looked at way back I think somewhere around less than 10 or 11 in this series about forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors this is if this prayer is offered up every day it means a daily wiping of the slate first of all for us remember we forgive because we've been forgiven that's the context for our forgiveness he who's been forgiven much loves much and therefore extends forgiveness much and so it's a reminder every day Lord forgive us our debts and this might be a moment where you may want to say you know I did this and I did that and I'm asking you to forgive me for doing that so I could delight in your will and walk in your ways again wipe the slate clean Jeremiah in the book of Lamentations worded it like this he said the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases his mercies never come to an end they are new every morning we rely on that we rely on as the sun comes up every day to drive away the darkness of night so does his mercy rise up every morning to wipe away the darkness of our own hearts and praying this pray forgive us our debts is saying I acknowledge that darkness at any time apart from you darkness could overtake me at any time and I could be right back in the pit where you found me out of that revelation then I forgive those who are indebted to me I won't hold somebody responsible to pay me back for my sin while asking you to relieve me and release me from my debt for free and that's a statement of forgiveness so it may mean if you're struggling to forgive somebody name them at this point in the prayer say God I release I forgive Susie for her sin against me and Lord I ask you to create in me a clean heart help me to come to a place of love and understanding and even compassion for her because she sinned against me I release her from debt because I want to be released from my debts too and then he goes on and teaches lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil so let me just clarify one thing about this line in the prayer God doesn't lead us into sin and he can't tempt us to sin God would never do that he cannot do that it's outside of his nature therefore he cannot do it but what we're asking from this point of the prayer is God can you lead me in such a way that I don't go into a temptation that's going to overcome me and lead me into evil deliver me from that evil instead because look as we follow the Lord's leading in our lives the reality is we will walk through the valley of the shadow of death like Psalm 23 puts it we don't fear it because he's with us and his rod and staff comfort us but he'll lead us into places where the enemy is trying to lead us away from him seeking to devour us in other words seeking to take us away from the Lord so what we're praying is God can you order my steps according to your word in such a way that if I'm dead smack in the center of your will it means I'm walking with you you're close to me in this place and if the devil comes and tries to tempt me into sin or into anything that might separate my heart from yours at least I know you're with me and you won't allow me to fall into that temptation instead you'll deliver me from evil again according to the line in Psalm 23 you'll set a table before me in the presence of my enemies as I walk with you lead me on good shepherd I'm going to stay right next to you so it's really a call on the Lord to be so present in our lives and to lead us to be like what Jesus said about himself I can do nothing except I see the Father doing it it's kind of a reset in our heart Lord as I go about my day today or as I go about tomorrow's day would you help me to walk closely with you don't lead me in a place where I don't let me go in a direction where I can be led into evil but lead me together in your paths everlasting and then finally is like a worshipful closing to this prayer and it does end in worship and I encourage you at this point to spend a few moments in worship sing a song that you've learned at church for thine is the kingdom yours is the kingdom the power and the glory forever amen yours is the kingdom we're acknowledging it all belongs to you this whole thing this life this earth this world that I live in it all really belongs to you you've given it to me as a gift make me a good steward of it I acknowledge it's all yours and you've given it to me as a gift and so that's yours the kingdom's yours the power is yours the glory is yours and we're worshiping now at this point we're ending our prayer not in a okay now here's all the things I need from you but it's I got my eyes fixed on you who's the good father who will give me everything that I need you know what I need before I even ask and I'm just keeping my eyes on you and I'm going to walk my day out in worship and that's how we end this prayer so that's a rough outline of the Lord's prayer it's his answer to the question how do I pray what should I pray and he said when you pray say this so let's follow what Jesus said and really master the Lord's prayer so I encourage you to make this a daily practice now make it a discipline in your life to start with your prayer life will grow and blossom and develop as you walk with God over the years you'll be praying certain scriptures that you read and put to memory and there are many other things I mean what the apostles discovered from praying this prayer and then walking it out there's some beautiful prayers throughout the New Testament of submission to the Lord and love for the Lord and worship toward the Lord you'll grow in your capacity to pray but for now make this your daily bread and your daily prayer and now that you have a little bit more understanding pray it with understanding and I pray you have an awesome glorious time as you wake up every morning or go to bed every night with this prayer in your heart and in your spirit I love you I'll see you again next time