Thank you for listening to this audio production of Willow Creek Presbyterian Church in Winter Springs, Florida. We exist to glorify God by declaring and demonstrating the power of the gospel, inviting people to discover and deepen their relationship with Jesus. Many of you know that it is lent. We don't have a particularly strong tradition of observing the Lenten season in what is called the reformed branch of the Christian family tree. We are a reformed church, and by that what we mean is we are descendants most broadly of the Protestant Reformation, and because some practices during the Lenten season have historically been rooted in superstition, and some advocacy for the Lenten season has been offered up in such a way that it was viewed as compulsory or binding a person's conscience, the Protestant reformers pushed back against many of these special seasons, and said that they are not mandated in Scripture, and therefore should not be mandated within the church and I fervently firmly believe that is true. However, at the same time, I will admit that special seasons of prayer if freely chosen, and not the products of superstition or works righteousness, can be very beneficial for the church. And so in this time as we look toward Passion Week and then our celebration of Jesus' resurrection at Easter, I think it can be very helpful for us to enter into a special season of prayer, in preparation. Of course, this begs the question, what is prayer? What is our motivation for prayer? What is our methodology of prayer? How would God want us as His children to pray? And so for that reason and all those many questions, we are going to undertake a new sermon series for these next several Sundays on the Lord's Prayer, and that is what we hope to embark upon today. So if you have the Lord's Prayer already memorized, and it is near and dear to your heart, praise the Lord. Let me encourage you, if you don't yet have the Lord's Prayer memorized, maybe make that a goal for these next several Sundays and parents, your younger children. These are the kinds of things that sadly are often times lost in the church, and we need to regain. Let me encourage you as parents to teach your children the Lord's Prayer, not that they would mindlessly recite it any more than you would, but instead that they would learn it as a model of prayer and maybe more importantly, an invitation from God to pray in a deeply intimate way. Many of you know this past Wednesday was Ash Wednesday, and it was on an Ash Wednesday that a young boy returned home from church in the car ride home. He asked his mother, is it true, Mommy, that we are made of dust? Now many of you will remember, it's on Ash Wednesday that the priest or the pastor will apply ashes to the forehead of the penitent and remind them that it is from dust that they have been taken and to dust they will return. The idea is to remember our mortality and our need of God's grace. The mother responded to the young boy's question and said, yes, darling, that is true. And she and that little boy responded, and do we go back to dust again when we die? And the mother responded, yes, yes, we do dear. The boy said, wow, when I sent my prayers last night and I looked under my bed, I found someone who's either coming or going. Now many Christians around the world did observe Ash Wednesday this past week and Ash Wednesday does mark the start of that 40-day season of prayer and preparation commonly known as Lent. It culminates in Holy Week and our celebration of Christ's resurrection. At Easter and during Lent, we oftentimes make resolutions to deepen our repentance, especially in times of prayer. So let me ask you this Lent and season, whether you observe it or not. Let me ask you, do you pray? Is your life characterized by prayer? And I don't ask you that question to shame you. I ask that question to diagnose you. That you would engage in some measure of self-analysis, self-diagnosis. Are you a person of prayer? You'll remember that the New Testament, we find a verse that invites us to ceaseless prayer. Is that characteristic of your life? As you pray, do you find that your prayers are balanced between the elements of praise and adoration, as well as thanksgiving, confession, or do you find them lopsided as I oftentimes find my own prayers, leaning toward heavy requests of God and very light on the praise and adoration and thankfulness, sometimes not even taking time to confess my sins and my need of the grace that I'm seeking. That's one of the reasons we at Willow Creek, every worship service, offer a prayer of confession. We want to create a rhythm within our own worship services, patterned after these kinds of prayers where we come to the Lord praising His name, confessing our need, thanking Him for His goodness and making known our requests as we hear from Him in His Word. So do you pray? If you do, you're far from alone, prayer is a human impulse. It seems woven into the fabric of our humanity to pray. It seems irrespective of culture, irrespective of time. Wherever you go in the world, you will find people praying. They'll pray differently, but they will be praying. You can find the Muslim praying, the Jew, the Buddhist in some form or another, meditating or praying, communing with a power beyond ourselves. When you see all of that around the world, you wonder, why did Jesus take time to teach His disciples to pray? Now maybe here in America that you don't see prayer as universal as it actually is because ours is increasingly secular culture. And Europe before us became increasingly secular over the past century. And so when we, Westerners, Europeans and Americans see prayer, we often times don't see it as the reality that it is for others around the world. Sometimes we assume that the rest of the world is increasingly secular, just like our culture here, but that would be a mistake. In fact, there was a National Geographic article written just a couple of years ago that noted this. I'm going to read this quote, just listen. It says, nuns, those without any religious affiliation, that's what they call them, not nuns in the Roman Catholic sense, and UNS, nuns as in no religious affiliation. Judges aren't inheriting the earth just yet, National Geographic noted. In many parts of the world, Sub-Saharan Africa in particular, religion, listen, is growing so fast that nuns share of the global population will actually shrink in 25 years. As the world turns into what one researcher described as the secularizing West and the rapidly growing rest. So prayer is a reality we see around the world, and yet Jesus felt very, very much inclined to teach us disciples that their prayers should be distinctively Christian prayers, distinctly Christian prayers. They should be prayers that are offered with different motivations and perhaps a different method. So this morning, let me ask you again, how do you pray? And specifically, as you consider how you pray, reflect upon this truth that your perspective on prayer, don't miss this, your perspective on prayer will determine your priorities and your practice in prayer. I'll confess that my prayer life is, as I said just moments ago, not often times what I know it should be or what it could be. Sometimes when I pray, I am flittering all over the place like an over-caffeinated squirrel. I'll move from one topic to the next topic only with the slightest most tenuous connection between them. I'm all over the place of my prayers. Sometimes my prayers are offered with white hot fervency and frequency. Other times I will go entire days, not remembering to pray. I admit that to my shame. Some nights I'll try to atone for another wise prayerless day by cramming in everything in the last hour of the day, only to wake up, you know, six, seven, eight hours later covered in blankets and shame because I fell asleep in the middle of it. I don't know if this resonates with any of you, but I imagine for many of us, that's all too often the reality. So this morning, looking to the words of Jesus, we want to see a new perspective on prayer that produces new priorities and new practices. And with that in mind, would you look back in your text to Matthew, chapter six, I want to back us up a little bit further to verse five because I want you to see that the Lord's prayer that Jesus taught His disciples to pray, He taught them in response to two other kinds of prayer, all too frequently offered in His day and in our own, verse five of Matthew, chapter six, just listen. And when you pray, Jesus said, you must not be like the hypocrites. Or they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by others. Truly I say to you, they've received a reward. What is Jesus describing? Let's stop there and just point out that Jesus is describing those who pray publicly and in the synagogues, He calls them hypocrites because these are religious people. And specifically, they share the religion of the Jewish people in and around the area to which Jesus ministered so many centuries ago. So Jesus is talking to the people that should have known better, the religious leadership who oftentimes pray publicly, drawing attention to themselves and Jesus sees through their charade and says that they're hypocrites. Outwardly, they're putting on a good show, but inwardly, it's not true of a deeper reality. That's the first form of prayer. Now go to verse six, but when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who's in secret, and the father who sees in secret will reward you. So Jesus is highlighting that there is another approach to prayer that would be more characteristic of those who truly know the Lord and who are truly known by Him. Verse seven, we see the second pattern of prayer. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases in some translations, you might see the word babbling. Do not 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 them. Be asked before you ask him, excuse me. This might bring to mind something in the Old Testament interestingly. You might remember there was a prophet, no. And he called false prophets, God named Bale. And as Bale gathered before, they offered their good and their God. And they often with many words, they worked themselves up into a frenzied fit, even to the point that they started to cut themselves in an appeal to their deities to respond through shed blood. Elijah, of course, made fun of them for their efforts, knowing that they were fruitless, that they would yield nothing. And so Jesus invites us to see that our prayers don't need to be offered in such a frantic and futile way as though God could only respond if through our efforts and our exertions. Rather, Jesus points us to a form of prayer that is calm, born of peace, not to earn favor, but instead to experience the favor that is already ours. And so he gives the counsel to begin that prayer our father in heaven. So there's just two things that I want to show you here first before we move on. The first is that Jesus says there are three ways to pray. The first is as the religious hypocrite, who is not so much concerned with God's approval, for if you read the Gospels, you know they already think they have it. But the approval of others around them, who pray as a matter of show, who pray to be thought of as pious to earn a good reputation, we might say horizontally. And then there are those who like the Gentiles or pagans pray to God with many words seeking to find God's favor, perhaps through their eloquence or their exertions. This is a pursuit after what we might call vertical favor. And so what is Jesus saying? He's saying despite the apparent diversity in these prayerful practices, one that is seeking horizontal favor and another that's seeking vertical favor, fundamentally they're the same thing. They're resting on someone's efforts as a means to gaining approval, whether of God or of those around us. What Jesus prayer does is shows us in the very words don't miss this, that we approach God already knowing we have his favor, otherwise we could never call him our father. But Jesus invites us to call him our father because that's what he has long before we ever utter a word of prayer. There are really two perspectives that you can have in your relationship with God. You can see yourself as a contractor we might say or as a child. This is something that a couple of authors have helped me to see as I've thought through my own prayer life. One is Tim Keller, another is Paul Miller, and if you have our free ministry app and you go to the resources or the media tab and then to the notes section you'll find that I've listed these couple of books that have been very helpful to me in there that you might maybe even consider enjoying them over lens. But these two perspectives of being a contractor or a child get at the core of how we approach God in prayer. So let me just tell you a little story. When I was a teenager I worked one summer at a restaurant down the street. It was an Italian restaurant owned by a great guy. A guy, a pillar of our community, a friend of our family, and I worked alongside two of his daughters. I worked all summer long and I enjoyed working there very much but every once in a while because we lived in a touristy town. Business was slow. If it was raining and people couldn't get out on the boat, not on the lake, then the business declined and what would normally be the case is the employees that came in would be invited to go home early because there was no point having them there to be fully staffed if the dining room was less than full. But this owner was such a kind and gracious guy. He knew that I wanted to earn some gas money. He would offer me the opportunity not to go to my home but to go to his home and do some jobs around there for extra money. So one summer I painted his picket fence. I worked in his basement cleaning things out. I did various odd jobs and sometimes as I worked with him. I worked alongside his two daughters, his own children. Now our motivations in working were completely different even though our tasks were the same. He had these two wonderful daughters who knew that they were family and that their performance as they worked for him would not in any way change the relationship. He would be their father at the end of the day, they would be his children at the end of the day no matter how well they performed or how poorly they performed. I did not have that privilege relationship. I knew that I was an employee and that if I didn't do what was right, well I could be given a pink slip, shown the door and sent on my way. Thankfully I never was but I hustled. I worked hard because I knew it was on the basis of my work and my work ethic that I was in that house and privileged to work. The children, the two daughters, they worked but they didn't work out of a sense of fear. They worked for the sense of joy and they also worked, this is kind of interesting, realizing that whatever they got paid, listen carefully, was in one sense already theirs. That while the father might give them something, he gave them something out of what really was already their shared family possession. Tim Keller uses an analogy like that that was very helpful to me in understanding prayer, saying that we have two basic approaches to prayer. One says, I come to the Lord with what I have for him. You might want to jot this down because this could change your prayer life. You can come to the Lord, number one saying, this is what I have for you. But Jesus invites you to come to the Father in prayer, listen, this is beautiful, this changes everything. Not with what I have for you but with what I am to you. That changes everything. If you come to the Lord with a perspective, this is what I have for you, but rather this is what I am to you, you will come with a completely different posture before God in prayer and I dare say a different eagerness in prayer because, listen, adoption means access. Jesus taught his disciples to view prayer through the lens of their adoption as God's children. And for Jesus adoption equals access when he taught his disciples how to pray. Listen, Jesus could have taught them to begin this prayer in any of a million different ways, right? He could have said, here's how you should pray, are creator, would that be any less true? No, he is our creator. He could have said, our Lord is that any less true. Of course not, he's our Lord. He could have even said, our friend, that would be true. Jesus says, I've made you my friends, but it's not on that basis that Jesus taught his disciples to pray, why? Because it doesn't get at the intimacy of your true identity. When we preached over the past few weeks, Pastor Drew and I on the four Greek words for love, we used one of those words philios to describe friendship love. Then we talked about store gay and even eros, romantic love. And what I said in the last message was, each of those three forms of love has a logic. It has a reason. You are friends with people because you've chosen to be friends with people and usually the basis of being friends is some preexisting kinship, something desirable in them that you like and you desire their fellowship. There's something in them that draws you to them and you make the decision to make them your friend. If Jesus had said, pray this way, our friend in heaven, what he subtly would have communicated is, there's something in you that gives you this status and you better keep it in you if you want to continue to enjoy this status. But when Jesus says, our father, he says, your family, you're not working for this position, you already have it. It's been given to you by grace. Jesus began his model prayer with the words, our father quite intentionally because you are no longer God's foe. You are not even just God's friend. You are his family. You are his son, you are his daughter, and by consequence, you are a prince or a princess in the royal house of God. You have all the privileges, all the rights as one that give you confidence before the throne of God. Let me give you three implications here in rapid fire succession. Three implications of this access to God, not based upon what I can do for you, God, but instead what I am to you by grace. The first one is, is that our father is an invitation to closeness. Now last week I shared how much I love my dog, Callie. I have a golden retriever. I love her so much. We adopted her as our dog a few years ago. We heard about her. We saw it after her. We paid every expense to fly her from California to Florida. Her name was Ross originally, but we changed her name to Callie after I paid for the flight coming from California. Change her name to Callie. She came to our house. We ultimately made her ours. Now in one sense, I dare say that Callie is entirely oblivious to all that was done to bring her from California to Florida to make her from somebody else's into ours. She's completely oblivious. My dog is very intelligent, don't let my wife deceive you. Molly doesn't think Callie is very intelligent, but it's because Molly is jealous of my affection for the other woman of our house, Callie. Callie is brilliant. She's absolutely brilliant. But even in her brilliance, she still does not know all that was involved in her adoption. It wasn't her choice, it wasn't her effort. She found her way into an identity she didn't really seek in the same as true view. You did not know all that your father was doing for thousands and thousands of years of redemptive history to make you his. And when he approached you and laid claim on your life, it wasn't your decision. It was his decision and so what does the Apostle John say is the rightful response to this? He says in 1 John 3, 1, our rightful response to that should be behold, behold, see what kind of love the father has given to us that we should be called children of God. And then in like a fit of ecstasy, he says, and that is what we are. There's a subtext to John's words that like, can you even believe this? You are now a child of God, not because of anything you've done, but because of what he's done. Sorry, I'm getting a little worked up, but this is good. Ephesians chapter two, no, I don't apologize. I am worked up. Ephesians 289, for it is by grace you've been saved your faith, this, not of yourself. It's a gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast. This is God's gift to you. God took somebody who was alienated from him and enemy, forgive them, not only calling you a friend, but now a member of his family. And I want you to listen, it's one thing to hear God, the father say this, but I want you to hear what Jesus Christ, his son, says about you. His high priestly prayer in John chapter 17, beginning in verse 22, listen in on Jesus praying to the father about you. He says the glory that you have given me, I've given to them, that they may be one as we are one. I want you to notice two things there. One is Jesus says the glory that you've given to me, I've given to them. It's already happened. It's not, it's not potentially going to happen. It's already happened. The glory that is Christ is now yours, irrevocably. And there's a second thing that Jesus says here, that is a process, that in view of that, he wants us to be one with one another, just as we are one with him, and the son is one with the father. So what is Jesus saying? He's saying that there are realities that are true, but you need to grow into understanding those realities and living in view of those realities, and that's a process. So verse 23, he continued, I and them, and you and me, that they may become perfectly one, listen so that the world may know that you sent me, listen carefully, and love them even as you loved me. What is Jesus saying? He's saying that you are loved in the very same way that he is loved by the father. Our father is an invitation, secondly, to comfort in God's presence. It's not only our closeness to God, to which God invites us. He invites us to comfort in his presence years ago, my mother remarried. I gained a stepdad and consequently a step-grandmother, a step-grandfather, step-and-step-uncle, step cousins. My family exploded in size overnight through one marriage ceremony, and this was especially gratifying to me because I never had grandparents the experience of grandparents. All my grandparents died before I was born. But in that moment I gained step-grandparents, they were dairy farmers, generous, hard-working, my grandfather still alive, my grandmother is with the Lord. They welcomed me into their family, and they gave me all the rights as a grandchild along with the others, but that didn't stop me from being very timid around them. For years, I would only refer to them as my step-grandparents, I refer to my grandmother as my step-grandmother, and I thought it would be dishonoring to her biological grandchildren for me to appropriate the same title with which they called her, and so I kept calling her step-grandmother. Step-grandmother, well, one day my step-grandmother had it. She pulled me aside. Sweetest lady you've ever said, amazing cook, gentle, quintessential grandmother. She pulled me aside, and she had some friendly fire in her eyes. She got down and she looked me in the eyes, and she said, that is going to be the last time you ever call me, your step-grandmother. I am your grandmother, and that's it. I never called her my step-grandmother after that, I was terrified. But I think part of me had a hard time believing she viewed me that way because it seemed too good to be true. And here's the thing, you might view what God says about you, it's just too good to be true. I can't really believe that. Well, don't view that as humility because it's not, it's arrogance. You are saying to your God and Father in heaven that you don't believe Him. But if you would acquaint yourself with what the Father and the Son and through the Spirit's inspiration, God has said over you, you would never call Him anything less than Father because that is what He is. That's it. On that redemption and our adoption by God, the Apostle Paul, he says that in Ephesians 3, we can have boldness and confidence to access God. It's not that you are tiptoeing into God's presence. It's not that you are coming in with your head down. It's that you are walking into the presence of your Father's throne room with the expectation that you will be warmly greeted, no matter who you are, no matter what you've done, no matter what you've failed to do because it's not on your performance, that you achieve this status, it's entirely on the performance of God for you. So thirdly, the petition, our Father, is an invitation to confidence. And it's not only the confidence of comfort, it's the confidence of knowing that when God answers your prayers, He does so as a loving Father, not as a righteous and angry judge. Now sometimes God doesn't answer the prayers, our prayers, the way that we would want in our limited wisdom. And sometimes God doesn't give the answers that we would want according to our schedule. Sometimes He appears to be silent. But if you begin prayer with the assumption that He is your loving Father, as Jesus has taught you to, then you will view His delays and His denials through a different lens. Now if you think you're a contractor and you're earning a position and you think you've done what's right, like the self-right just person out on the street praying so that everyone can see them, if that's your posture before God in prayer and He doesn't come through for you, it's like you worked and you're not getting a paycheck, you're going to be angry. Likewise, if you're a contractor and not a child, if you know that you haven't done the work and you come before God and He doesn't answer, you're going to think, well, I didn't do the right thing. Therefore it makes sense, God is withholding. You're going to either double up your efforts or you're going to just become sad and disengage. But when you come to the Lord, this is child knowing that it's not on your basis of performance, but on Christ's performance for you that you come, you're going to have confidence, some degree of confidence in whatever God says. It doesn't mean you're going to like it, doesn't mean you're going to understand it. But you're going to be able to say, even if there's a dark storm cloud as Spurgeon said, there's a loving providence in Son behind it. So even as the clouds come into your life of unanswered prayer, the clouds of prayer that doesn't get answered the way that we desire, there is a sunny providence behind all of it. God is working for you, not against you because He is your Father. Jesus is His Son and does not live in fear that God the Father has turned His back on Him. And you do not need to live in that fear either. Jesus suffered that wrath that you deserve already perfectly in your place. It will never come to you because it was poured out perfectly on Jesus in your place. And so Tim Keller has this wonderful quote. He says, the only person who dares wake up a king at 3 a.m. for a glass of water is a child. And we have that kind of access. That is your access. You are a prince or a princess in the household of God. And my encouragement to you is to exercise your privilege. Exercise your right, the power and privilege of prayer. And so this let us these in as we close and before I invite Pastor Leigh forward to lead us in the Lord's Supper. Let me encourage you. People like to give up things during Lent. Let me encourage you. Move beyond chocolate and beer. Give up these three things, okay? Maybe you should give up those two, but give up these along with it. Give up your former identity as an orphan. You're not an orphan. You're not a contractor trying to earn his or her keep. You are an adopted child of God. Your royalty. You need to teach yourself to remind yourself every day that that is who you are. Because nothing in this world is going to reinforce what God says to you. These are heavenly truths that do not find too many earthly verifications. You're going to have to listen to your father as he speaks to you in his word, pray to him and await his response to remember that that's who you are. So give up the fear that you're an orphan. Give up the fear that your father doesn't mean what he says. He does. You have all the rights, all the privileges of a child of God. Your model is your older brother Jesus. Raise your rights. Enjoy your privilege and know that God enjoys seeing you. Remember that. Resting in it. Rejoicing it. Sometimes I think we think that God is only happy when we're groveling. Grovel is not humility. But that's not true. What is humility? Humility is not thinking of yourself left. Humility is thinking rightly of yourself and what does God say is true to you. You're his kid. So lift up your head. Walk into his presence. Know that he receives you because he loves you. So thirdly and finally give up what I'm going to call the filter of unbelief regarding your prayers when they're delayed or seemingly denied. There's no such thing. There's no such thing as an unanswered prayer for a child of God. No such thing. God always answers the prayers of his children. The father would soon, sooner ignore you than the eternally but gotten son of God. Would no soon ignore you. Would no sooner ignore you than the eternally but gotten son of God because Jesus is your ground of access to deny you would be to deny his own son and he will never do it. His delays and denials are born of higher wisdom and the deepest love. So you're not an orphan. You're not a contractor earning his or her keep stop acting like it. You are an adopted child of God the father with an identity as secure and as unchanging as the one who gave it. Thank you for listening to this audio production of Willow Creek Presbyterian Church in Winter Springs, Florida. For worship times, directions or just to learn more about the ministry of Willow Creek, please visit us online at willowcreekchurch.org.