Good morning and Happy New Year to everyone. It is kind of exciting to be up here always. I really enjoy it and I enjoy what I get to see. If I think of late last winter, starting to meet as a few families Sunday evenings here for catechism evenings and a bit of singing and snacks to what this has become, it is truly remarkable and I am very thankful for what God's doing here and thankful for all you people We're continuing on in our Matthew series, so if you wanna turn to Matthew 6, we're gonna look at the first 15 verses here this morning. So turn to your Bible, Matthew 6, one through 15, and once you're there, then I'd ask you to stand in reverence for God's word. And these are the perfect words of God. Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them. For then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have 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 you in secret will reward you. And when you pray, you must not be like the Pharisees, or pardon me, like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret. And your father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day 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. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. And may God bless the reading of his word. If you're willing to travel back in time with me to the early 16th century in Europe, There was a barber by the name of Peter, and he was giving his haircuts and his beard trims, and in walks a man, and the bell tinkles at the door, and it's Europe's most wanted man in for a shave. And there is a heavy price on this man's head. Well, what do I do? And this man sits down, asks for his shave, and Peter the barber gets his sharpest scalpel, and he's holding it at this man's throat, and this could be worth a lot of money. But it was his friend Martin Luther, and of course he couldn't do anything to harm him. But he stood amazed at Luther and his ability to just go about his affairs when he was, in some senses, standing against the world. And curious what the source of Luther's ability and his courage was, he asked him, how do you pray? How do I pray so that I can have boldness, so that I can have peace with God like you seem to enjoy? And Luther took that seriously and he went home and he wrote a book. He wrote a little booklet called A Simple Way to Pray. And he sent it to his friend Peter. And much of it is based on the text that we've looked at this morning, on the Lord's Prayer. How do we pray? What is part of a balanced prayer life? And that's what we wanna look at today. Before we run into the Lord's Prayer, there is a warning about how we give to the needy and of showiness. And so in verse one through four, it says, beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them. For then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have 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 in secret, will reward you. So before Jesus gets to teaching his disciples how to pray, he's obviously concerned about clearing away the debris and the hypocrisy that gets in the way of a healthy walk with the Lord. And this makes sense, right? Before you plant a field, you need to clear the brush off of it. Before you rental your kitchen, you need to get rid of the stuff that doesn't belong there, that you don't want there. And so in our case, in our spiritual lives, for our walk with God to be genuine and strong, we have to rid ourselves of any pretense of our own self-sufficiency or our own self-righteousness. And that's where Jesus starts. Many of Jesus' confrontations in the Bible are against hypocritical and self-righteous people. And these people, these hypocrites, these self-righteous ones, tend to see themselves as both the source and the end goal of the Christian walk of religious life. These are the people who think they can pull themselves up by the bootstraps and maybe just power through with self-determination. They can get themselves ready for heaven. And these are the people when confronted with God's law, who are like the illustration I love to use of a foreign businessman at the karaoke bar who's singing a popular song, and he gets the tempo right, he gets every lyric, he gets everything exactly right, and he knows everything about that song except for what it means. That's hypocrites. They know everything about the Bible except for what it actually means. What does God's law mean? And so although the particular expression of hypocrisy and self-righteousness changes, it's always with us. Some people probably remember the, maybe in the 1950s, you know, kind of the fundamentalist era. Self-righteousness, or could take an unhealthy term, would be, you know, don't drink, don't smoke. You know, we don't drink, we don't chew, and we don't run with boys who do. That kind of thing, right? It was kind of angry, negative law. But let's not think that just because that's not so popular today that we still don't have it with us. We absolutely do. Today, it's more happy, clappy, smiley. but it's still self-righteous. Today it often comes in the form of various social causes or social justice types of things where people will want to emphasize living but without the content of the Christian faith, just morality. And so we often hear an expression like this, deeds not creeds. Think about that for a minute. Deeds not creeds. That's another way of saying law not gospel. Don't give me any good news, just heap on me a burden. That's what deeds, not creeds, really means. It's a misunderstanding of God's law and what it's designed to do. And so just like a speed limit sign, when we're driving, can show us what the standard is, what we need to be driving, what the speed limit is, but that sign has no power over your car. You can see that it says 100, but that sign has no power whatsoever to make your car drive 100. So the law can show us the way, but it can't power obedience. Only the Holy Spirit can do that. And so Jesus makes application of how hypocrisy works in the area of giving to the needy. And the word hypocrite, we're familiar with it, but it comes from plays, from actors who would wear a mask when they were pretending to be someone that they weren't. And he applies that to those who follow the law outwardly and not for the glory of God. These are the people who want to look like top-tier citizens. They want to look like good people for everyone to see. And Jesus says that when they make a show of their giving, Their public praise that they receive is all the reward that they get. And think of it, what a petty reward that is to be respected by people who probably don't even really care about you versus treasure in heaven. Think of what a poor trade-off that is. Over the years, I've done business with a number of people and know other people who have done business with other people. And I always, there's part of me that always a guard goes up when I'm doing business with, let's say, a Christian businessman, and he lets me know how his business is all about kingdom building. There's part of me that just, it seems showy to me. when people brag about what they all do. And I know of one case in our family where someone had offered a relative of mine a very, very, very lopsided business deal. And this relative didn't take it, but he was a bit offended by how lopsided this arrangement was. And the other party just said, well, I just see it as kingdom building. The more money I can make, the more the kingdom of God flourishes. And I find that so distasteful. When I come across that kind of stuff, honestly, there's part of me that would just far rather do business with an unbeliever than with a showy believer. Why not leave some of the money in my pocket so I can also do some of that kingdom work? Why does it all have to be on your side of the ledger? And I think that's exactly what Jesus is warning about, is bragging about how good we are, how useful we are to God's purposes. And of course, we don't know the disposition of another's heart. And there's certainly nothing wrong with being profitable and growing wealth or growing a business. It's good even, we could say. And it's also good to use those resources in the service of God's kingdom. But we need to be careful about the warning here and not to be too quick to talk about how valuable we are in God's kingdom or how much we're doing. Jesus would say we should rather have that be in secret. We should be investing in the kingdom and we should be generous with those in need. But if we want an eternal reward, it needs to be done with humility. If we want everlasting rewards. Jesus turns and applies this principle to prayer in verse five through eight. He says, and when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret. And your father who sees this will reward you. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him." And so the application here shifts from giving to prayer, but the same basic principles apply. Are we doing this to be showy, to show off to others what a good person we are, or are we doing this in genuine service for the glory of God? When we make ourselves the star of our own show, the star of our own spiritual life, it's not that we're shooting too high. The problem with making ourselves the center of our lives is actually that we settle for far too little. Far too little. The span, the impact, and the reach of our little 60 or 80 or maybe 90 or 100 years is far too limited and far too small to become the main event of history. If we want the maximum impact, and ironically to receive the most intense and lasting glory. We have to set down our little plays. The drama of Matt Platt has to come to an end and we need to be swept up into the drama of what God is doing. That's what it means to pray and to give and to live for the glory of God. Jesus is not my co-pilot. I need to put that play down because it's boring. and it's gonna come to an end. It's not particularly interesting. The story of what God is doing in history, that's an interesting story, and we need to get swept up into that drama if we want a lasting impact. But again, just because people are abusing how to give and how to pray doesn't necessarily mean we abandon the whole project. The abuse of something doesn't mean we have to do away with it altogether. Giving to the needy was obviously being abused, but Jesus shows how to do it correctly. He assumes it still needs to happen. Because in verse two, he says, when you give to the needy. And likewise, when it comes to prayer, he doesn't say, well, because some people are showy with their prayers, you guys need to quit praying. No, no. He says, when you pray, assuming that this still needs to happen. He says that in verse five, six, and again in seven. And in verse seven and eight, it's clear that our prayers are not a negotiation that we enter into with God. We're not trying to bend his will. And he's clearly not impressed by our many words. We're not bringing him new information that will help him to make a better decision, to correct his course. That's not what's happening. Verse eight says that he already knows what we need even before we ask. So then the question will naturally arise, well if God already knows and I can't bend his will because he knows everything, why pray? And it's a question many people have. We also know that persistence in prayer is not necessarily a bad thing. In the story of the persistent widow in Luke 18, one through eight, we see that her persistence is a good thing. So again, prayer is not for us, the widow's persistence isn't her teaching God something. It's not providing him with information so he makes an improvement in his plan. It's not to change God's will. That cannot happen. It's impossible for anything to change God's will, but prayer does change our will. As we pray, we are acknowledging our own insufficiency and God's total sufficiency. Why else pray to him? We pray because we know clearly something is beyond our ability to manage it. And the king of heaven and earth is free to do as he pleases in the situation. So prayer changes our wills. It's the divine means by which God brings our wills into alignment with his. Sometimes quickly, sometimes very slowly. But here's the other thing. Prayer also changes the situation. Prayer does change things. It doesn't change God's plan, but it does change things. So how does this fit with the fact that prayer doesn't change God's counsel? Well, here's how, I think. God does not, in his decree, in his wisdom, he doesn't just decree outcomes, he also decrees how we get to that outcome. So he's not just decided to do X, he's decided to do it through the prayers of his people. So your prayers, our prayers, are just as much a part of God being glorified as the end result in itself. So if he's determined to move in a certain way in a certain situation, he is equally determined to do it through our prayers. This is the instrument by which he moves things. Prayer brings us on board as we bring our cares to him, and it brings him glory as his people learn to depend more and more on him. So prayer changes things. It makes us more holy and it brings God more glory. And this is why we pray. This is why we share prayer requests with each other. Because the more people are praying for something, then when God moves, however he does, whether it's the way we're asking him to or whether it's a different way, God always answers somehow. But the more people are praying, the more people see, the bigger his audience is for his glory when he acts in this situation. So prayer ultimately is about bringing glory to God. See how he works. And this is why praying specifically and persistently are in fact good things. Persistence is not to be understood in the name it and claim it way. Probably many of us have a friend who was promised a Maserati by God or something like that, right? We all know that guy. Oh, I know God promised this to me. Well, he probably didn't. But some people understand it that way. Here's this car and that's what I'm thinking about. God promised it to me. That's not what persistence means. Persistence, rather, is showing a long-lasting trust that God is at work and that he is free to work in this situation no matter how unlikely it looks. For instance, to make it applicable to us, we have been praying for some time for a very specific building that we could acquire as a church. And we've been praying that prayer for a while. Now, God has not given us that building at this point, and he may never. He has not promised it to us. That's not why we're praying specifically. But we're praying specifically enough that we're showing trust that God can act in a very specific way if he so pleases. And if he answers us differently than what we're asking for, then clearly that is the better path and we hold our requests loosely and trust that God's will will be done. But our persistence and our specific request is a sign that we are trusting God. And for the most part, I do think that we as Christians could probably be more specific in our prayers than what we tend to be. We tend to pray that God would bless mom and dad and God bless all the people in the missionaries, amen. And that's good, there's nothing wrong with a generic prayer like that. But praying specifically, I think, also has its place. Yes, we need to hold our requests with an open hand. Yes, God can, and frequently does answer in surprising ways. There is no such thing as unanswered prayer. Sometimes we get what we ask, and sometimes we get what we would ask for if we knew everything that God knows. That's unanswered prayer. If we knew what God knew, we would pray for exactly what we end up getting. Okay, the reason our requests aren't always in line with what we get is because we don't know what God knows. So generic prayer is good, but it makes it more difficult to see how God acts in the specifics when we're praying for specifics. Moving on here, Jesus doesn't warn against the fact of repetition, he warns against vain repetition. And I'm actually one of those strange people who does make an argument in favor of repetition. I do think repetition is a powerful learning tool. And throughout almost all of church history, repetition, learning through catechisms, learning through creeds, learning through confessions is how the church has almost always taught her young people. And it's a fairly new novelty that this has gone by the wayside. Dawn isn't that much older than me. I've never grown up with catechesis, never. It was gone by the time I showed up. Don is only a few years older than me and he has his little catechism book that he grew up with. So this is a new thing that we have decided that it's not worth learning by repetition. I think repetition is a powerful teacher. Here's an example of what I mean. Everyone in this room could probably say their alphabet, right? Why? Because you're saying it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and now it's inside you. Repetition, memorization is a powerful teacher, and that's how catechisms are meant to be used too. And that's why we're intentional about making catechesis a part of our morning worship services. It's not just to be one and done, but this is to be done at home, over breakfast, with devotions. Use these questions and answers to teach your kids. And as they internalize it, it will start to grow on us. So when it comes to prayer, and specifically the Lord's Prayer, many of us can recite it because five days a week for 13 years we said it every morning at school. And it's in us now. And I'm sure if you're like me, many times you said it, you weren't thinking about it, you were just going through the motions. That's vain repetition. But here's the cool thing about once it's inside you. Now when we start thinking about prayer and what does balanced prayer look like, what does a healthy prayer life look like, the data bits of the Lord's Prayer are all inside of me for me to think about. It's powerful to memorize things so that later we can reflect on the meaning of what we've taught. So just saying the words without thinking about them is not the goal. But if we know the prayer, we have all the information that we're able to see how the parts make up the whole kind of prayer that Jesus teaches us to pray. And so in the little book written for Peter the barber, when Luther looked at the Lord's prayer as well as some of the other prayers in the Bible, he came up with the acronym. Maybe some of you have heard of the ACTS acronym for prayer. Has anyone heard of that? ACTS, A-C-T-S, four components of a prayer. One is adoration. to bring God praise and glory for who he is. The C is for confession, confessing our sin, keeping short accounts with God and with others. T is for thanksgiving, thanking God for the way he's acted in the past. And then finally, the S is supplication or asking God for those things which we need. So let's look at the Lord's Prayer here a little bit more in detail. Verse nine, it says, pray then like this, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be your name. I have to confess, a few years back, I was part of a Lord's Prayer series, and we did several weeks just on the Lord's Prayer, and now we're gonna try to condense it here, and we will try to condense it. But the first petition of the Lord's Prayer could be a sermon on itself, perhaps several sermons, to think about praying to the Father in heaven. Jesus teaches us to pray to the Father. So in one sense, prayer is Trinitarian and I wouldn't be a perfectionist if a little kid prays to Jesus or to the Holy Spirit. I don't think that that prayer somehow doesn't get heard by God. Prayer is Trinitarian. But we are instructed to pray to the Father because the Son has brought us into his throne room and the Spirit takes our imperfect words and carries them perfectly to God. There's that passage about when we can't pray that the Spirit intercedes with groans that are too deep. The Spirit cleans up our prayers and translates it perfectly to the throne of God. And the reason we even have access to God in the first place is because the Son has ushered us into the throne room. The Son has adopted us as His little brothers and sisters, and so on His basis, we can even approach the Father, we can approach the Sovereign. And so this is what's meant when we talk about we pray to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. All three persons of the Trinity are involved, but it's ultimately the Father to whom we're praying because of Jesus and through the Holy Spirit. And one of the wonderful things about the Spirit cleaning up our requests is that God hears them even when we pray imperfectly. I've maybe shared with you some of my own experience when I've been struggling with depression. There was one particular time where I just couldn't pray. I just simply couldn't. And as much as I could get up was, God, please make sure Grandma's awake praying for me. That's it, that's all I could do. Make sure grandma's praying for me. And you know what? God hears that prayer, however imperfect it is. And then what does it mean that we pray to God who's in heaven? Some people think of heaven in spatial terms. It's geographic or it's outer space. But the biblical way of seeing the cosmos, I think, involves several uses of the word heavens, and the word heaven is used several ways in scripture. So we've got the first heavens, or what scripture sometimes calls the firmament heavens, and that in the biblical conception is the dome that surrounds the earth, what we would today call the atmosphere. So in this sense, the first heaven is where clouds and birds are, and where planes fly, is the first heavens. Then we have the second heavens, or the heavens beyond the firmament, on the other side of the ozone layer, to use modern language. And so the second heaven, this is where stars and satellites are, and planets. and most likely misunderstanding the nature of God and the nature of the heavens, the atheist cosmonaut from the former Soviet Union, Yuri Gagarin, on his return from space, he says, you know what, I was out in space. I was there and I didn't see God. Atheism is validated. He was in space and he didn't see God. And I would say he saw plenty of evidence for God that he refused to submit to, but he also understood where he was. He misunderstood the heavens. And the third heaven, or the highest heaven, is the place where God dwells. And this heaven isn't so much geographical as it is dimensional. It's a reality that encompasses all reality. It's everywhere in one sense. God is all in all. It's everywhere. And so it's like the unseen world. It's all around us, yet because of sin, because we have a veil over our eyes, we do not see it as we ought. I'm not a science fiction guy at all, but one show that I did get interested in for probably its 80s nostalgia and growing up as a kid in that time is Stranger Things. And I think the storytelling is pretty good. I think it's pretty compelling. And if you've watched it, you see that there's this dimension right beside people. Right, they're looking for their friend, Will, and he's right there, but no one can see him. And if they focus very closely, they can hear his voice. He's right there, but no one can see him. He's existing in a different dimension. And I think that's a crass illustration for how this works, God's presence around us. We often correctly say that God is both transcendent, he's out there, and he's imminent, he's right here. And this is what is meant. God exists on a different plane than us. So at the same time, he is commanding the movement of every molecule and every planet and every gas way farther than the Hubble telescope could ever see. And he's here with us this morning being praised. That's where God is. That's our father who art in heaven. He's moving asteroids and organizing electrons. He is beyond and at the microscopic scale. He is over all and yet he is here with us. And because God is in heaven and his name must be hallowed, it must be made holy in the way that we think and talk about him. Jesus calls him a father here. And the word father conveys both authority and warmth. I had one friend who, when praying, started her prayer, good morning, daddy. And I almost had a Saint Nicholas moment because I felt that that sounded very disrespectful. I think to translate Abba into daddy probably could border, depending on the intention, I think it could border on irreverence. But to say, sir, is far too cold and distant and impersonal. So the language that we are given is the word Father. It's warm and it's authoritative. Then it goes on, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. So again, just like God's dwelling place in heaven is multidimensional, so is his kingdom, so is his presence among his people. And in one sense, well, what is a kingdom? Well, it's anything under the rule of a sovereign. So in one sense, we could say the entire cosmos is God's kingdom, and that wouldn't be wrong. But the language seems more specific than that. Because so many are blind to the reality of God's glory all around them, they don't see his kingdom. And as a result, some see the kingdom as strictly spiritual. It's just our attitude. It's just our mind, as though it never really breaks in to the real world with significance. And coming through Christmas, we've seen the significance of the incarnation. Jesus does break into the real world. That's what Christmas is all about. And so we see multiple aspects of the kingdom as we go through the gospel of Matthew. We've already seen that with the incarnation of Jesus, the kingdom has broken into the world, past tense. In Matthew 3.2 and 4.17, it talks about the kingdom of God is at hand. It's right here. Jesus talks about the nearness of the kingdom in Luke 10. And in Luke 11, he says that if he's casting out demons, that's proof that the kingdom has arrived. And yet here, Jesus is looking at the future element of the kingdom. He's praying for God's kingdom to come. It's a future reality. And so we have this overlapping stage where it's here and yet clearly not. We see the light breaking through. The song we sang this morning, I think, is a beautiful picture of how this works. The Dirksen family is all too aware that this world is still groaning. It's broken. People die. Marriages struggle. People get cancer. Relationships are harmed. Bad things happen. We're groaning as we await for the future consummation, perfection of the kingdom. But what do we do in this overlapping period of time? The overlap of history means that we work in glad anticipation of the way things are going, in anticipation of the new world, of the return of the Lion of Judah, even as we continue to struggle in the difficulty and the pain and the groaning of the old world that's dying. And so the way we ready ourselves to do God's will, well, the way we ready ourselves is to do God's will on earth as it is in heaven. We must live out the real world application of belonging to God. And as we do, his kingdom becomes more and more sharply into focus. So as we anticipate the return of the king, the coming of the bridegroom, we are busy making ourselves and our surroundings suitable for him as possible. And so this is what we do when we pray for God's will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We are looking forward to that wedding day when every tear is wiped dry, when everything is made perfect. And when we do God's will on earth as it is in heaven, we are showing the visibility in real world terms, toppling idols, bringing down every vain philosophy, bringing his kingdom into ever and ever sharper focus. Then we have a request here, to give us this day our daily bread. And again, this is a multifaceted truth. God's normal way of giving us bread involves us going to work. How does God get bread into your hand? Well, mostly through hard work, mostly through your alarm going before you'd really like it to go, mostly by putting in the time. But it's God that's working. And I think it was in Sunday school not many weeks ago, we talked about how does God care for his creation? How does his providence work? How does this bread come to us? Well, think of the ways this bread comes to us. Someone's cultivating land, someone's putting seed in the ground, Someone's fertilizing it, someone's harvesting it, and then it gets trucked off to the processor, and then it gets shipped somewhere, and then some student is working in retail, selling it to you, and there's people involved in mining phosphorus in Saskatchewan, so the farmer can get that fertilizer on his field, and someone is mining steel for the tractors, and someone is doing something with that steel to make the tractor, and everyone in this whole chain is willing and able to carry out their role, whether it's the farmer, the trucker, or the girl at the checkout counter, and we have a job that pays for that bread. And yet here we are asking God for our daily bread. Is that inconsistent? And I'd say no, not at all. All of it is happening under the providence and care of God. And without him, not one of these steps would work. The reason it works is because God is overseeing and superintending the whole process. And I think the phrase daily bread is also significant. It always reminds me, remember the Israelites receiving manna? One day at a time. There was bread for one day. And what happened if the people tried to not trust God and they started storing up for an extra day, what happened? It was polluted with worms and maggots in the morning. God is teaching them to trust in daily bread. Always enough, always at just the right time. Never late, but often not far ahead. And so like the Israelites that had to keep trusting day after day that God would provide just in time and just the right amount, so we too need to pray for daily bread. And he asks us to forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors. And forgiveness has two senses. There is, of course, the one-time act of justification at our conversion when we repent of our sin and put our faith in Jesus Christ and we are justified. We go from being sons and daughters of Adam to sons and daughters of Christ. So this is one time justification. But if you're like me, you've noticed even after you're saved, even after you're justified, you still struggle with sin. And you still have the occasional bump with people. And forgiveness needs to be an ongoing thing. So there's also the ongoing forgiveness of grace that happens that we commit even as Christians. And so Jesus here, I don't think, is teaching that justification happens as a result of us forgiving other people. So in other words, you're not saved by your act of forgiving other people. That would contradict the clear teaching of scripture that we're justified by faith alone. But this is showing a very intimate relationship between God forgiving us and then us forgiving others. And the one who has been justified by faith and forgiven respond by forgiving others. So to put it negatively, if you are hard and you are unwilling to forgive other people, it could be the case that you don't know what forgiveness is. It could be the case that you are not justified, that you are not at peace with God. Your unwillingness to forgive could be a sign that you yourself need to be forgiven by God. But even apart from initial justification, forgiveness is not a one-time thing. It's the constant duty of Christians to keep short accounts with God and with each other. And so if we want to enjoy fellowship, if we want to enjoy closeness and intimacy with God's fellow people, we need to keep short accounts. We need to keep forgiving and asking forgiveness. It's both sides here. We need to be willing to forgive and we need to be quick to ask forgiveness where we have wronged another. Moving on to verse 13. And lead us not in temptation, but deliver us from evil. And so this petition is further evidence that we are to trust God and not ourselves. If we were trustworthy, we could go into a season of testing and temptation with confidence in our ability to manage our way out of it, to deliver ourselves. But here we're asking God to keep us from a situation which would otherwise drown us. It's been said that if we could lose our salvation, we would. We really would. And it wouldn't take long either. If you could, you would. But mercifully, we're not the two-year-old hanging desperately onto dad's hand as we cross the road. Dad is a caring father. God is a caring father who makes sure your hand doesn't slip out of his. Okay? He will see us all the way across. and we're not trustworthy with ourselves. And this is why we ask God to keep us from temptation, to deliver us from evil. We also know that God does not directly tempt people with evil in the sense of planting evil desires into them. And so the temptation here should be seen more as a period of testing and training, but with the assurance that we will not be tempted beyond what he gives us grace for. Who's heard the phrase that God won't give you more than you can handle? It's almost true. Everything is more than we can handle. God won't give us more than he gives us grace to handle, okay? It still is dependent on his grace. In James 1, 12 and 13, it says, blessed is the man who remains steadfast under trial, for when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life, which God has promised to those who love him. Let no one say when he is tempted, I am being tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. And in 1 Corinthians 10, 13, no temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation, he will also provide the way of escape that you may be able to endure it. So even in our endurance, even in our ability to counter temptation, to be successful in these trials, it's God who is empowering it. It is God who sees us all the way home. We can overcome temptation and be delivered from evil, but it's not because we can, it's because he can. And the word translated evil here can also be understood in the personal sense, as in the evil one, and it works in both senses. In either case, it's God who's able to deliver us, either from the schemes of the devil or from the more mundane evil and corruption that comes from the world and the flesh in ourselves. And we all learn to finish this prayer differently than what some translations have here. Most of us learn to close this prayer with, for thine is the power, the kingdom, and the glory. And we're all familiar with this saying as part of the Lord's Prayer. As the work of discovering manuscripts and manuscript criticism and all that goes on, it has come into question whether that is original to the original text or whether that has been misunderstood as someone's personal notes and then made it into further translations from there. I don't have a clear answer for it. Some of the earliest texts have it and some don't. But what I can say this, it is entirely fitting for the prayer to close on a note of reverence of God's power, his rule, and his glory. So in that sense, I do think it belongs. In many languages, there exist formal pronouns, whereas in English, we only have informal ones like you. But if I was talking to someone older than me in low German, I wouldn't say do, I would say ye. It's a sign of respect, right? And the older English captures some of that when we use words like thine. And so even though I'm supportive of modern English translations, the majestic use of the word thine does give a formal sense that is fitting for us to use to God. To close the prayer with a recognition that all things are from God, through God, and to God is entirely fitting. God has all power and authority on heaven and earth, and he rules as the sovereign king of both asteroids and atoms, and to him belongs all glory. And God's glory is the end point to which all our thoughts, theology, and practice must end. Christian life isn't primarily about us going to heaven when we die. As true as that is, it is for God to be glorified, for God to be made much of. And this is exactly what the Reformation sought to recover, was God's glory is the controlling theme of everything. I was reading in a biography not long ago that in the 1940s to 1960s, maybe some of you have heard of the Welsh preacher who was in London, Martin Lloyd-Jones. And at the time, in this time, mostly in the 50s, London was blessed with multiple world-class preachers, and one man had traveled to go sit under these preachers for a period of time, and reporting on what he saw, he said this, the one preacher did a very capable job of preaching the ethics of Jesus. One of the other preachers was very compelling in the way he preached love. But Martin Lloyd-Jones preached God, okay? And may that be said of us. May we preach God. Yes, these other things are true, but it's all in the service of God and of his glory. And by God's grace, that is our goal as this church, is that God would be praised in all things. May we preach God and not man. Moving on in 14 and 15. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. And so here again, Jesus is repeating how important this must be. We've already seen this in the prayer, the importance of forgiveness. And our willingness to forgive others is an important part of the disposition of our hearts being right. If God has forgiven us so much in both our justification and then further in our ongoing Christian life, how ready, how quick do we need to be to forgive others? There seems to be a direct connection here. And this shows us much more important how it is, or that much more how important it is to keep our accounts short. So what have we seen here? Well, we see that Christ strips away our sense of showiness, self-sufficiency, and self-righteousness. And then He takes us more deeply into the care and the all-sufficiency of the Father, as we bring our adoration, our confession, our thanksgiving, and our supplications to Him. Prayer takes us both farther up and farther in in our Christian walk. And the model that Christ gives us for prayer can be prayed as is. There's nothing wrong with praying this prayer exactly as is. Or it can serve as a kind of template for us to personalize it, now knowing what the elements of a balanced prayer life are. Why don't we close in prayer right there? Father God, we want to thank you for sending your son. We thank you again that he showed us what it is to live as a righteous man, to follow your laws and your statutes perfectly, to earn the righteousness that we have failed to attain. Lord, and I pray that by grace we would all know the sweetness of being adopted into your family, of having access to you through prayer. Lord, what a privilege that we can talk to the ruler of heaven and earth. And we can do so because your son has invited us into your presence. Lord, and I want to also pray for those who are struggling. I want to think especially of the Dirksen family this morning as they've lost a dad and a brother and a cousin and an uncle and a husband. Lord, I pray that you would intercede for them. I pray that where their groans are too deep, that your spirit would intercede and that you would bring them comfort as they say goodbye to someone that they loved. Lord, and for all of us, given the unique things that we're carrying about with us, Lord, I pray that we can know the joy of having access to you through the Son and by the Spirit. Help us, Lord, to be a people of prayer. Pray this all in the strong name of Jesus, amen. We're celebrating communion this morning, and our practice here, as many of you know, is to practice a somewhat open communion. You don't have to be a member here to partake. If you are baptized in a gospel-believing church and you are not currently under church discipline, you are welcome to partake of communion with us. We don't do this lightly. We want to heed Scripture's warnings that we have short accounts, and it's perhaps fitting with what we've just seen about forgiveness. If we have something against our neighbor, and if we do not have peace with God, then I want to give an opportunity to clean that up. And there's nothing wrong with passing the elements by if you don't have that peace. But if you do, then we also don't want this to turn into some kind of morbid introspection. The warnings of Scripture are real, but communion is something to be glad about. Communion is the way God feeds us and strengthens us and puts something into our hands to taste and see that the Lord is good. And so I'll leave a minute of silent prayer as we clean things up before God and prepare our hearts to do this. Lord, thank you again for what you've taught us. Thank you for showing us the obligation, the duty, and also the gift of forgiveness. I pray that each one here can enjoy that with you first and foremost, but then that we would spread that grace horizontally as well, as we live at peace and in love with one another. Lord, prepare our hearts, and I pray that you would feed us, strengthen us, through this visible reminder of what it is that you have come to earth for us. And I welcome you all now to the Lord Jesus Christ. When our Lord Jesus had given thanks, he took the bread and broke it, and we'll distribute the bread. you you For I received from the Lord that which I also deliver to you that the Lord Jesus Christ on the same night in which he was betrayed took bread and when he had given thanks he broke it and said take eat this is my body which is broken for you and do this in remembrance of me you can take the bread And we'll distribute the wine. And a reminder that it's wine on the outside, and for those who prefer grape juice, we have grape juice in the middle. so so so so So, you In the same manner, he also took the cup after supper, saying, this cup is the new covenant in my blood. This do as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes. You can take the wine. Please stand for the closing song. My fears to quell, my hopes to raise. But what I need, your word has said, is ever only Jesus. If you reign, you plea There's love in all your words and deeds This weary heart finds all it needs ♪ King of my soul ♪ I'll trade my treasure ♪ And all my rewards ♪ Jesus will know you ♪ And all around ♪ Oh, some should curse me for your name I have no fear, I have no shame You stand with me for all ♪ Like all other sand on the shore ♪ ♪ Your beauty and glory are endless ♪ ♪ Oh Jesus, I must know you more ♪ ♪ As we walk the ways of the ocean ♪ ♪ Like all other sand on the shore ♪ Oh, Jesus, I adore you I want to call you Jesus, my Lord King of heaven King of my soul I'm afraid, I'm afraid So the charge is this. The distracting and empty busyness of our world often keeps us from prayer and deeper devotion. To make things worse, we live in a culture where vanity and narcissism are seen as virtues to be copied instead of as sins to be killed. This makes Christ's teaching against vanity, self-promotion, and unhealthy self-love even more jarring and important. Whether in our generosity or in our prayer life, we demonstrate faith in ourselves when we make a show of ourselves, and faith in God when we go about serving Him in humble obedience. Apart from what we pray, let's remember that the act of prayer itself is an admission that God is sovereign and we are not. His name alone is to be made holy. He alone brings His kingdom to earth. He alone governs the universe in such a way as to give us our daily bread. He alone can forgive, and He alone can keep us from sin and evil. Prayer keeps us faithful, it brings glory to God, and it is God's appointed means of moving us forward. This week, as we head into a new year, let us resolve to be a people of prayer. And I'll leave you with the benediction from Romans 11, 33 to 36. Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways. For who has known the mind of the Lord or who has been his counselor? Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever and amen. Just a reminder, young men, we will need to stack the chairs today. Okay.