The Disciples Prayer  --  Matthew 6:9-14

Sermon by Pastor Dennis Gleason,  February 23, 2003

Two men were talking together. The first challenged the other, "If you are so religious, let's hear you quote the Lord's Prayer. I bet you $10.00 you can't." The second responded, "Now I lay my down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. And If I die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." The first pulled out his wallet and fished out a ten dollar bill, muttering, "I didn't think you could do it!"

This illustration of the lack of understanding about prayer is somewhat humorous. However, it does say something to us about our need to understand how God thinks we ought to pray. After all, what God thinks about our prayer is what really matters. I remember reading somewhere about a time when Bill Moyers, a special assistant to the President, was invited to the White House for dinner one day. Bill was known to be a devout believer and he was asked by President Lyndon Johnson to say grace before the meal. Bill quietly began praying. The President not being able to hear him said, "Speak up, Bill! Speak up!" Moyers, without looking up responded, "I wasn’t addressing you Mr. President."

While He was speaking to His disciples in what we call the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught them how to pray. We find his instruction in Matthew 6 and His specific teaching on how to pray is found in verses 9 through 14. This is what He said:

⁹Pray like this:

¹⁴"If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. ¹⁵But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins.

We need to be taught two things when it comes to prayer:

1. How to pray
2. What to pray

This prayer given us by Jesus is a pattern prayer. He says "after this manner pray ye" (King James Version); "Pray, then, in this way:" (New American Standard Version). I think that we should recognize that this is the way Jesus prayed. He prayed often. He would spend whole nights in prayer. He would arise early in the morning to go off by Himself and pray. He would pray for hours at a time. Prayer was an essential element in His relationship with His Heavenly Father. It is out of this rich, experience and tradition of prayer that Jesus speaks to His disciples and to us as well.

Jesus’ implies that we will pray. He essentially says: "When you come to pray to God, this is how you should do it. This is the method I use. This is how I pray myself." I don’t think that this is being unfair or outside the intent of what Jesus is saying here.

A simple definition of prayer is this: Prayer is speaking to God. It involves the forgetting of ourselves, and the realization of His presence with us as we pray.

This prayer by Jesus has two parts to it: The first is adoration, worship. You can look in Daniel 9; John 17; and Philippians 4:6 and find that in these examples of prayer worship or adoration precedes requests for what these people needed. The second part is the making of our own requests to God.

Who can pray in this manner? Only those who believe in Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior can say with confidence "Our Father…" John 1:12 tells us that "…as many as received Him, to them He gave the right to become the children of God, even to those who believe in His name…" These are the people who can call God "Father". The Bible draws a clear distinction between those who know God and those who don’t. If you know Him, you can call him Father. The obvious question for us is this: Do we know the Father, personally through faith in Jesus Christ? Is God truly my God? If He is, then I can pray this prayer.

When we pray, we should remember:

1. The love of God that wants the best for us.
2. The wisdom of God that knows what is best for us.
3. The power of God that can accomplish it.

Jesus begins this prayer: "Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name."

What kind of Father do we have in Heaven?

He is a Father of love, mercy, grace, majesty, greatness, power, holiness, justice and of righteousness. And these qualities of God’s character do not for one moment exhaust who God is and what God is like.

The word hallowed or holy is one that means: "different, separate."

When something is holy, it is set apart from all other things with a different purpose in mind. Therefore, Jesus is speaking here about letting God’s name be treated differently than all other names. An example of how we do that is this: We treat a church as holy…it is a building that is separated from all other buildings by its design and purpose. It becomes a special place where we meet God in worship and celebration and where we learn more about Him, as His Word is proclaimed. Therefore, it is a holy place.

Jesus’ statement here revolves around the fact that God is holy.

In Hebrew, the word for "name" did not simply mean the name by which a person is called. It meant much more than that. It also meant the nature, the character or the personality of the person in so far as the person was known or revealed to us. The Psalmist speaks to this in Psalms 9:10 where he concludes that those who know what God is like, those who know the nature and character of God will put their trust in Him. In Psalm 20:7, he concludes that believers will put their trust not in human aid or defenses.

The pattern given us by Jesus here for our prayer means this: "Enable us to give you the unique place which your nature and character deserve and demand."

Jesus then moves on with the expression: "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

What is the Kingdom of God? Jesus told the people of his day that the Kingdom of God had come upon them. To be part of the Kingdom of God is to obey the will of God. It is to accept Jesus Christ as the King of our lives, as our Savior and Lord.

What is involved in the Kingdom of God? It is the submission of my will, my heart and my life. That is when the Kingdom of God comes to us. Simply put the Kingdom of God is the reign or rule of God in our lives. It is when the will of God is being done in our lives. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is both a present reality and a future hope.

It is not until we have both the worship and adoration and have settled the issues of the submission of our hearts, will and lives that we come to the section of this prayer in which we submit our requests to God.

In the first section of this prayer the focus was on God and now the focus shifts to us…Give us…forgive us…do not lead us…deliver us.

Jesus’ first suggestion about us comes in his words, "Give us this day our daily bread."

Essentially, He is telling us to pray that God will give us what we need to eat for the coming day. Sometime before Jesus’ day, a woman used the same words used here for "daily bread" on a piece of papyrus as part of her shopping list. It was a note to remind her to buy supplies of a certain food for the coming day.

This simply makes this part of the prayer to say this: Help me get the things I need for today.

It is a reminder that God cares about our needs every day. Our asking becomes a simple act of faith each and every day as we trust God to provide for us.

We might illustrate the reality of God’s provision for our daily needs with this: Dr. Helen Roseveare, a missionary to Zaire, told the following story. "A mother at our mission station died after giving birth to a premature baby. We tried to improvise an incubator to keep the infant alive, but the only hot water bottle we had was beyond repair. So we asked the children to pray for the baby and for her sister. One of the girls responded. 'Dear God, please send a hot water bottle today. Tomorrow will be too late because by then the baby will be dead. And dear Lord, send a doll for the sister so she won't feel so lonely.' That afternoon a large package arrived from England. The children watched eagerly as we opened it. Much to their surprise, under some clothing was a hot water bottle! Immediately the girl who had prayed so earnestly started to dig deeper, exclaiming, 'If God sent that, I'm sure He also sent a doll!' And she was right! The heavenly Father knew in advance of that child's sincere requests, and 5 months earlier He had led a ladies' group to include both of those specific articles."

The next phrase for our consideration here is "And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors."

Forgiveness is at the heart of the relationship of God with His people. In 1 John 1:9, we are reminded that if we will confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. This phrase of our prayer is both a reminder that we are sinners in need of forgiveness and that there are times when we have it in us to emulate this quality of the character of God…in the forgiving of others.

The request here is to be forgiven our debts.

You might be interested to know that there are five words used in our Bible for the word sin:

The first is hamartia which means " a missing of the mark, or target; to fail to hit the target." Sin as viewed by this word then is a failure to be what we might have been or could have been…a missing of the mark set for us by God.

The second word used for sin is parabasis.

It means "a stepping across" and we should see sin of this type as a stepping across the line which has been drawn between right and wrong.

The third word for sin in the Bible is paraptoma.

Where the previous word was a stepping across or a deliberate crossing of the line between right and wrong, this word means "a slipping across" such as when a man is on a slippery or icy road. It happens but is not as deliberate as the previous word.

The fourth word for sin is anomia.

This word means "a lawlessness". This is the sin of a man who knows the right and yet who does wrong. It is a deliberate flaunting or kicking over of the traces and going into sin with the eyes wide open.

The fifth and last word used for sin in the Bible is the word opheiluma.

It is "a failure of duty, a debt"; a failure to pay that which is due. This becomes the very essence of grace when God applies it to us. And so we ask God to forgive us; not to give us what is due us because of our sin. What is due us is death and separation from God forever because of our sin. But Jesus’ death on the cross paid the penalty for our sin. When we accept his death on the cross as the payment or the ransom for our sin, we receive forgiveness and eternal life.

There is an interesting addition to this request for forgiveness…and it is found in the statement "as we also have forgiven our debtors".

This statement literally means "forgive us in proportion as we forgive those who have failed to pay us what is our due. Put another way, it asks God to forgive us in the same manner in which we are forgiving of others. Would we really like for God to forgive us just like we forgive others?

And then Jesus ends this Disciples Prayer with the request "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

Temptation is usually considered to be "to seek to seduce to evil". Our thought is to avoid temptation at any cost. However, the Bible uses this word a little differently than we normally think. It is used here and in many other places in the sense of the word "testing". It means to test a person’s strength, loyalty or ability to serve.

For example, in Genesis 22:1 God tests Abraham. His faith and loyalty to God are on trial and the vehicle to lead him to the proper result is the test of his willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac.

In Matthew 4:1, we find Jesus being led out into the Wilderness by the Holy Spirit to be "tempted" by the devil. This word cannot mean to seek to seduce to evil here because that would make the Holy Spirit a partner in the attempt to compel Jesus to sin. Therefore, it must be used in this passage in the sense of a test…Jesus had to be tested in His loyalty and obedience to God. And tested and tried in every manner such as are we; He was sinless and could bear our sin on the cross of Calvary as the ransom payment for our sin.

We might wonder why God allows us to be tempted.

Well, it is for the same reasons as was true regarding Jesus. He allows temptation it will test us and will allow us to pass the test of faith, loyalty and obedience to God’s Word and Will. As it is allowed by God, its purpose is not to make us fall but to make us good, stronger as followers of Jesus Christ.

The word "deliver us" means "to rescue or to deliver us from a hostile power that seeks to enslave us."

That hostile power is Satan. He is our adversary, i.e., one who will plead a case against us. It was in that role that he had access to the throne of God to plead a case against Job. When he goes to plead a case against us who believe in Jesus Christ, what he finds is that God looks at us and all He sees is the Blood of Jesus Christ shed for us. He sees us through the blood and sees nothing charged against us. He sees us as if we are righteous before Him. And the result is there is nothing Satan can charge us with that will stick. However, Satan has another role or character about him. He is also the Devil…the one who takes up a case against someone…seeking to destroy them…seeking their ruin. He is diablos, the slanderer out to ruin mankind and to thwart the purposes of God; standing for everything that is anti-man and anti-God. It is from that ruining power that Jesus teaches us to pray here.

In closing, how then should we see prayer? If we are to pray, how should we pray? Let me illustrate these questions in this way:

Prayer is surrender--surrender to the will of God and cooperation with that will. If I throw out a boathook from the boat and catch hold of the shore and pull, do I pull the shore to me, or do I pull myself to the shore? Prayer is not pulling God to my will, but the aligning of my will to the will of God.

When Martin Luther's puppy happened to be at the table, he looked for a morsel from his master, and watched with open mouth and motionless eyes. Martin Luther said, 'Oh, if I could only pray the way this dog watches the meat! All his thoughts are concentrated on the piece of meat. Otherwise he has no thought, wish or hope."

When we rely upon organization, we get what organization can do; when we rely upon education, we get what education can do; when we rely upon eloquence, we get what eloquence can do, and so on. Nor am I disposed to undervalue any of these things in their proper place, but when we rely upon prayer, we get what God can do.

When you pray…and the implication of Jesus’ teaching is that we will pray…pray like this.

Let’s see what God can do!

---Dennis Gleason