The Prayer That Reshapes Your Heart

Audio Transcript

We’re continuing now in our study “Through the Bible” study. We come today to Matthew chapter 6. We’ll be in verses 1-13 today, focusing really on 9-13, but Matthew 6:1-13.

Before we begin, I want to correct something from last Sunday. I had mentioned to you that God had originally given the Ten Commandments to His people and how over time man had added hundreds of additional strict rules and regulations to that. And that’s true, except the 613 that I mentioned were originally part of what’s called the Mosaic Law that you find in, well, let’s see, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

But in addition to that, there were in fact hundreds, and I keep saying hundreds. It’s actually thousands, several thousands if you add them all up, of ridiculous man-made laws that have been piled on top of God’s law. I believe they were put in place with good intentions at the start. However, they became so laborious that it destroyed the relationship with God and turned it into this rigid, burdensome routine. And this is what Jesus repeatedly addressed when He scolded the Pharisees for all their man-made rules. Now, those were the ones I was thinking of and referring to. And when I mentioned the number 613, I think it threw some people off. And so, I wanted to take a moment to correct that.

You know, if you stand up here seven or eight hundred times or whatever it’s been over the years, you’re bound to get a few things backwards and sideways. And when we do that, which we do sometimes, we want to try to be very quick to correct that. All we teach from here is God’s Word. That’s all we teach from. We don’t venture into other publications or ideas or doctrines. We teach from God’s Word. And we want to make sure that when we do, we hold ourselves accountable to it. And we teach it in absolute truth as much as we flawed humans are capable of doing so.

This morning, we come to Matthew chapter 6. Some of these verses are among the most well-known verses in the entire Bible. And as always, I hope we can see them in a fresh way. We’re going to pick up the first eight verses in this chapter in just a moment. But for now, I want us to read, “…our daily bread. And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Literally rendered, “deliver us from the evil one.” Thank you. You may be seated.

Prayer is the great battlefield of the Christian life.

Have you ever noticed how you can sit and watch a 2-hour movie without ever being distracted? But you go to your room to pray, and the moment you begin to pray, you suddenly think, “Oh, I needed to get the oil changed.” And so you make a note: “Change oil.” “All right, Lord. I’m back.” You begin to pray. “Boy, I’ve got a taste for some chocolate chip ice cream right now. What? What in the world?” And you start again.

What is going on? Why can we watch hours of TV shows or sit for three hours in freezing weather at a sports game and never get distracted and never lose the focus on what we’re doing? But you come to pray, and it’s a battlefield.

I don’t know anyone who would say that they have mastered prayer or that they have it all figured out. I admit, with great shame, that there are only, it seems, a few rare occasions in my life when I have truly broken through in prayer. But there are times when a prayer is uttered with such power that it seems the whole world goes quiet, and you recognize very quickly that you’ve just been ushered onto holy ground.

There was a man some of us knew years ago who went home to be with the Lord a year ago. He was not a pastor. He was not a theologian. He used to own a very successful bar in Greenville, and he met Christ and was saved and transformed. When this man prayed, time stood still. You almost had to remind yourself to breathe. Rex and Linda, you know who I’m talking about. Say his name. Sonny Edwards. This man somehow understood what it meant to call upon God and enter the throne room.

Multiply that by a trillion or something, and maybe we’re getting close to the prayers of our Lord Jesus. Can you imagine having been alive to hear the Lord Jesus pray to His Father? His disciples heard Him pray many times. And they were so riveted, so stirred by His prayers that Luke tells us that once when Jesus finished praying, the disciples went to Him and said, “Lord, teach us to pray.”

The odd thing is they knew how to pray. They prayed their whole life as good Jews, but they recognized something lacking in them. Their formality in prayer, their rigid, rehearsed routines in prayer fell far short of the prayers they saw and heard Jesus pray. And if you and I were to come to God’s Word this morning and make the same request, “Lord, teach us to pray,” the passage we would turn to would be right here in Matthew chapter 6.

But I think it’s interesting that before Jesus teaches us how to pray, He teaches us how not to pray. Time won’t allow me to linger here, but I want to read these first eight verses quickly to set the tone because it is a very important foundation.

Follow with me, if you would, these first eight verses. Matthew chapter 6, starting in verse one. Jesus said, “Be careful not to perform your righteous acts before men to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in heaven. So when you give to the needy, don’t announce it with trumpets as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets to be honored by men. Truly I tell you, they have already received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.”

Verse five. And now He switches to prayer. “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. Truly, I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is unseen.” (Or it can be rendered “who is in secret” or “in the secret place.”) “And your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like the pagans or repeating empty phrases or vain repetitions, for they think they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.”

Jesus gives this warning upfront because the people who were listening to Him lived in a time when the religious elite of the day did these very things. And there was a tendency for the non-religious elite to look at these people, saying these loud, eloquent prayers on the street corners, and assume that’s what a godly person looks like. Jesus came, and He wrecked that entire system and said, “No, don’t be like them. This is how you should pray.”

And the first thing He says is when we come to God in prayer, we are to call Him our Father. I wish I had a mechanism by which to let us feel and sense and understand how crazy that sounded to those people. We call God our Father all the time. It’s almost lost its meaning to us. God was called Father, our Father, only a few times in the Old Testament, and never, as far as I can find, in an individual, personal, intimate sense. It was only used in terms of Israel’s national identity. God is our Father, the Father of Israel. But here Jesus takes it from a distant, corporate term, and He makes it surprisingly personal. This was unheard of for the people in that day.

When you come to God in prayer, the fiery God of the Old Testament, the fearsome God of the Old Testament, call Him our Father.

Now, I must point out, despite common belief, not everyone can call God their Father. There’s this false teaching of the universality, the universal fatherhood of God. Yet Jesus said to those who rejected Him, “You are of your father, the devil.” John 1:12 tells us the good news. “But to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.”

What an astonishing privilege we have been given through Christ to approach God not as some unknown, distant deity, but as our Father. Jesus says, “When you come to pray, speak to God as your Father.”

And notice that this prayer begins with our attention focused not on us, but entirely upon God, upon His holiness, His kingdom, and His will. Look at verse nine again. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

I believe I’ve seen in my own life and in the lives of others that if you and I could learn to live with the holiness of God ever before us, and to live to advance His kingdom, not our own, and to desire for His will to be done above all else. If we could live with those three focuses ever before us, many of life’s issues and struggles and questions and problems will simply fall into their proper place. The vast majority of our unnecessary struggles and problems in this life come from the fact that we are out of alignment with who God is.

First, while the word Father signifies closeness to God, the word hallowed reminds us of the holiness of God. “Hallowed be Your name.” And although God has made Himself personal and accessible to us through Christ, He is still God. And we dare not try to whittle Him down to size. We dare not speak of God casually.

I told you once before, many years ago, I saw a bumper sticker that said, “God is my homeboy.” No, He’s not. No, He is not. God’s not your pal. He’s not your buddy. He’s not your homeboy. God is God, with eyes of flaming fire, from whose presence heaven and earth flee. We must never forget who we’re talking to in prayer. And we must never fail to appreciate the gulf that has been spanned between us, sinful, wicked human beings, and this holy God, who because of Christ we can now approach, and not only approach but call our Father.

Not only is He holy, He is to be hallowed, to be held in the highest esteem. We must remember His holiness, and then we must remember His kingdom. “Your kingdom come.” Jesus says human beings live and die, and during the span in between they strive to make something of themselves, to leave a legacy, perhaps even to build a kingdom. But all their striving one day comes to an end.

And if you want to get a good dose of reality in that regard, read the little book of Ecclesiastes. The richest, most revered, most powerful man who ever lived wrote the book of Ecclesiastes when his life came to an end. And I want to tell you, it is quite a book. He says, “All of man’s pursuits are chasing after the wind.” The psalmist put it this way in Psalm 103, “As for man, his days are like grass. He flourishes like the flower of the field. The wind blows over it and it is gone, and its place remembers it no more.”

And listen, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t pursue the dreams and the desires that God puts into our hearts, for whatever that is, for whatever career that may be, or anything else in life. God puts these things into our hearts to pursue. We should pursue them. But above all else, we must be people who pray for and long for and live for God’s kingdom to come, not our own. And by the way, it’s not just speaking of the eternal kingdom, which will one day come, but that His kingdom would advance and have an impact here and now through us as we live for Him each day.

And then Jesus said, “We are to pray, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This may just be the most challenging statement of this entire prayer. It does not come naturally for us to surrender our will. But Jesus is teaching us to pray for God’s agenda to advance even when it conflicts with our own, even when it costs us something.

The night before Jesus was arrested and falsely accused and beaten and hung on a cross, He knelt in prayer and agonized over what was about to happen. He began by praying, “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup from Me.” The cup is a picture of this terrible thing that was about to happen. He had to drink of that cup, that bitter cup. He began by saying, “Father, if it is Your will, take this cup from Me.” But He ended His prayer by saying, “Nevertheless, not My will but Your will be done.”

There are times in life when we find ourselves in situations where the only prayer that comes to our lips is, “Father, take this from me.” There’s nothing else we can bring ourselves to say. “Lord, take this problem away. Take this fear away. Take this burden away.” But the more miles we walk with Him, the more we learn to trust Him, the more we find ourselves saying, “Nevertheless, not my will, but Your will be done.” Oh, that we could live in this mode always, that our will would always be secondary to His will.

Well, after Jesus focuses His prayer on the Father, He now moves the focus to our needs. Verse 11. “Give us this day our daily bread.” Daily bread. What a phrase that is. Daily bread. It speaks of our most basic need for survival. In our culture, where we have pantries and freezers full of food, where we have restaurants everywhere you turn, where you can literally get food delivered to your door within minutes, it’s hard to take this seriously. But in that culture to which Jesus was speaking, and still in many parts of the world today, there are millions of people who don’t know where their next meal is coming from.

Notice, for those of you like me who are planners, who like to plan ahead six months, a year, five years ahead because it gives you a little sense of security that you are in control, notice Jesus didn’t say, “Give us this year our yearly bread.” He didn’t say, “Give us this month our monthly bread.” He said, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Now, there must be proper balance here. Joseph in the Old Testament saw the famine coming and stored up food for seven years during plenty to help the nations survive during the famine. That’s wise. Proverbs commends the ant for storing up food for the winter. But there’s a difference between wise stewardship and the illusion of self-sufficiency.

I must tell you, I’ve struggled with this because I am a planner. I was sharing with a sweet couple just the other night that Sandy and I were talking with from our church here. And I said to them, “You know, prior to all this stuff that’s come into my life the last few years, I thought I knew how to trust God, but I don’t think I did at all.” Now that some of the things in my life that I took for granted and saw as security—”They’ll always be there”—when those were taken away, I suddenly realized: “Boy, I actually have to depend on Him to get out of bed today, to make it through the day without collapsing.” I’ve never been in that position before. I realized that I was so good at planning, that I was so subconsciously intent on securing my life and my future, I didn’t trust in God at all. Shame on me.

You see, it’s not until our own self-sufficiency, our own security is ripped from us that we really recognize the power of what Jesus is saying here. “Boy, I’ve got to trust God for things I never thought I would have to trust anybody for.” See, it’s easy to say we depend on God when we have plenty of food, when we have plenty of money, when we have plenty of health. It’s not until the rug gets pulled out from under us that we realize we’re actually not in control at all. Jesus tells us to live each day with a vivid awareness that we are desperately dependent upon God.

What does this do for us? It keeps us humble. It saves us from the foolish notion of self-reliance. But more than that, it keeps us close to God. It’s not so much about the dependence as it is about the relationship. Would I be going too far to say that if we had all our needs met for the next six months, we may not talk to God at all for the next six months?

God fed the Israelites in the wilderness with manna, bread from heaven. But He gave them clear instructions. They were only allowed to gather enough for one day. If they tried to hoard it, it would rot. God was teaching them the same lesson Jesus teaches here: “Trust Me for today. That’s how close I want you to stay to Me.”

And by the way, this is true not just for actual bread, but for everything that we need to sustain life, spiritually and emotionally and physically. It’s a reminder that our daily survival literally comes from God, right down to our next breath, our next heartbeat, our next meal. Hey, you got it all planned out. What’s it going to take for God to bring you to the place of this kind of moment-by-moment, day-by-day reliance upon Him and closeness to Him?

And then Jesus says in verse 12, “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Debts here can also be rendered sins. This is a shocking request when it actually dawns on us what we’re being asked to pray. I want you to really lean in right now. What we’re being asked to pray here is, “Father, deal with me as I have dealt with others.” “Lord, that person hurt me real bad. Show me forgiveness in the same way that I showed forgiveness to them, or withhold forgiveness from me just like I withheld forgiveness from them.”

This really puts us in our place when we pray, “Forgive us our sins.” Do we not hear the words? We’re admitting our lowly condition. We’re admitting that we’re sinners, that we’re no better than anyone else. And that ought to bring us to our senses.

You know, some people say, “I talk about the gospel a lot,” or, you know, “I’m always pointing to the cross.” Yeah. I mean, if you want to hear Oprah Winfrey’s latest book, go somewhere else. This is all I got. The reason I do this is because we tend to drift. We tend to drift from the basic principles of our faith that remind us of the depths of the meaning of all this that we talk about. The fact is, if we truly grasp what it means to be forgiven by God, if we’ve stood at the foot of the cross, if we’ve seen what our sin did to Jesus, it should quickly remind us that we can’t help but extend forgiveness to others. Forgiven people should be forgiving people.

I don’t have time to get into this. I’ll recommend this to you for your own study. Look into the parable sometime of the unforgiving servant. A man who was forgiven of a great debt that would take him a lifetime to pay. And on the way home, he passed a man who owed him a very small sum. And he began to choke him and say, “Pay me what you owe me.” Oh my boy. Oh boy. And we read that parable and we kind of smirk and think, “What a loser.” Until the Spirit convicts us and we go, “Yeah, I’ve done the same thing.”

Now, I want to say, forgiveness doesn’t mean that the wound wasn’t real. It doesn’t mean we pretend that things didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean that you don’t still carry pain and scars from whatever that person did to you. This is not about pretending it didn’t happen. It’s simply about releasing the other person from our clutches and leaving the justice to God.

And by the way, I’ve met some people who were living in grief because the person that they never forgave from 20 or 30 or 40 years ago is now dead, and they think they’ve missed their chance. No, you haven’t. The person doesn’t have to be alive anymore for you to forgive them. Forgiveness is not about them. It’s about you.

And finally, Jesus says in verse 13, “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil or from the evil one.” This is a very misunderstood passage. It’s sometimes thought that this is saying if we don’t pray for God not to lead us into temptation, He will lead us into temptation. That’s not what this is saying at all. James 1:13 reminds us that it says, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I’m being tempted by God.’ For God cannot be tempted with evil, nor does He tempt anyone.”

When Jesus said, “Lead us not into temptation,” He’s using a technique, a language technique, and I can’t remember the name of it right now. Some of you language experts can. He is using a technique whereby you state something negative to emphasize something positive. This is used commonly in secular literature. It’s used throughout the Bible. For instance, God is not unjust, meaning God is perfectly just. The Lord will not abandon His people, meaning the Lord will always keep and protect His people. Or your labor in the Lord is not in vain, meaning that your work for God has eternal significance and reward.

Jesus is not implying here that God might drag His children into temptation. When we pray, “Lord, lead us not into temptation,” we’re saying, “Lord, only You have the power to take us past the traps that Satan puts in our way. So, I’m looking to You for guidance and protection. Lead me around those.” It’s a confession that without God’s power, we don’t stand a chance against the enemy because we recognize that behind the temptation there is a tempter. Behind the lie there is a liar. Behind the deceit there is a deceiver. He is the enemy of our soul who wants to separate us from God and destroy us. And so we readily admit that our only protection comes from God, and we look to Him to deliver us from the evil one.

Be very careful how you talk about the enemy. I’ve heard some things from pulpits that really make my blood run cold, where people make jokes about Satan and, you know, “I’m going to stomp on his tail, and I’m going to take his pitchfork and stick him with it.” And I’m telling you, don’t venture into that foolishness. Satan has no power over God, but he can crush you without God’s power. He can destroy your life. Don’t try to face him on your own. We are told repeatedly in Scripture that our victory comes through Christ.

And that’s simply what this is saying here. “Lead us not into temptation.” It’s a confession, and it’s an admission. “Lord, You are the only one who can lead us away from temptation.” It’s a prayer. “Lord, when I have the desire to sin, keep me from the opportunity. And when I have the opportunity to sin, Lord, keep me from the desire.” “Lead us not into temptation.”

There’s so much more that could be said here. I want to close by reminding us that the Lord’s Prayer is not a poem to recite. It’s a life to be lived. There’s nothing wrong with saying the Lord’s Prayer as a group. I’ve done it many times. There’s something very beautiful about it. Jesus never gave this prayer for us to repeat it word for word. He gave it as a template, as an example of the structure of prayer. And by the way, you don’t have to make this a rigid routine either, because if you do, Jesus didn’t follow His own advice all the way through His ministry. He prayed in many different ways. When Peter was sinking under the waves, he didn’t say, “Okay, what was it again? I have to start with God. I have to honor His name.” No, he said, “Lord, save me.”

You know, people have come up with all kinds of clever methods for prayer: ACTS, adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. That’s great. That’s basically following this. But don’t allow those helpful little hints to become an anchor around your neck that formalizes your simple conversation with your Father. Sometimes you just got to say, “Father, I need You right now. I don’t know what to say.”

And so this prayer that Jesus gives is not a request or a requirement to follow these words precisely. It’s just a simple outline to teach us that when we come to prayer, it’s a reminder of what it is that we’re doing.

Oh, and that this could become more than just a prayer for us. Imagine if all of us made it our desire and our goal to live this out, to say, “I’m going to live, Father, for Your holiness, Your kingdom, Your will. I’m going to depend on You for my daily needs every single day. I’m going to forgive as You have forgiven me. I’m going to look to You for deliverance from the enemy.” What a difference it would make if we took this from being a script we recite to being a life that we live.

“Our Father who art in heaven.”