There are a few questions that I'm just afraid to ask you. I should ask them. If I would ask them, we could quit beating around the bush and we could start talking about important things a whole lot quicker. If I would ask them, I would learn more about you from that one question than I would from the 20 that I ask instead. But I'm afraid, I feel like I haven't been invited to go into these sacred territories, and so I dance around them. You know the questions I'm talking about. I don't ever ask you about your sex life. Probably should. Honestly, it would tell me a lot about your marriage. It would tell me a lot about your level of intimacy and how you trust each other and love each other, but I'm not invited there and I don't plow in. I don't ask you about your giving. I don't ask you if you tithe. I don't ask you about how you disperse your finances. I should. It would tell me a lot about your faith, about whether you believe of God as a concrete, real thing who loves you and who provides for you, but it just feels like I'm intruding. I don't ask if you're ready to die. I should. It's probably more than anything else what my calling is all about. It's preparing you for death, and I just don't feel good about that. I'd rather ask you who your favorite football team is. It just seems awkward and too sacred. And I don't ask very often about your prayer life. It's just a little bit too much of an evangelical question. It's a guilt question. It's a, are you a good boy, good girl type question. I don't like asking those kinds of questions. I don't want you to get ready for me to guilt you and tell you that you're not being committed enough. But I should. Your prayer life is a place where you're intimate with God. And if you would tell me more about what your prayer life is like, then I would understand what you are like when you are alone with God and what you believe about Him and whether or not you believe that He cares for you and whether you are convincing yourself at your deepest level that He is either a God to be appeased or He is your Father in Heaven to whom you have this free access and He's delighted with you. And today we're gonna talk about prayer. This was y'all's most liked topic on Facebook. In June, we started a poll on Facebook. What do you want me to preach on? And one of you asked, I want you to preach on prayer, and that one had the most likes, and so that's the one I picked. And so this is your topic, you asked for this. And what I want you to see today, more than anything else, is that in prayer, God reminds us that we are His beloved children. In prayer, God reminds us that He is taking care of us. And in prayer, God is molding us. He's changing us to look more like Him. To look more like Him. In order to find out all those things, we're gonna go to the expert. Do y'all trust experts? Most Americans don't. You know that, right? We go to restaurants. The waiter comes out and he says, the special tonight is the fish. And what's going on there? That's the chef, the person who understands the kitchen, is coming out and saying, the best thing we have tonight is the fish. And we say, ah, we'll have the chicken. Now, we know more than you. We've never been in this restaurant before, but we know more than you do about what's good here. We want the chicken. You know, our doctor says, take this prescription, take it every day. Take the whole thing, and we say, ah, we'll take two or three days till we feel better. I know more than you about my body. So I just, you know, the cold medicine says, don't operate heavy machinery after taking this. We drink a bottle and get behind the wheel of the car and take off. We don't trust experts. But I think, I'm pretty sure everybody in this room would agree that Jesus knows more about prayer than we do. Probably. So we're going to listen to what he has to say about it. Please stand as we read from Matthew chapter 6 what Jesus has to say about practicing prayer. And when you pray you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners that they may be seen by others. Truly I say to you, they've 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 have also 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 you your trespasses. as far as the reading of God's Word. All men are like grass, and all of our glory is like the flowers of the field. The grass withers and the flowers fall, but not God's Word. God's Word stands forever. You may be seated. In secret prayer, God reveals Himself to us and molds us to be like Him. In secret prayer, God reveals Himself to us and molds us to be like Him. The first thing we learn in this text is where we should pray. That's interesting. That's not what you wanted to hear, is it? We're the experts, not Jesus. We know more about it. Jesus says, very specifically, and even oddly for his context, don't pray out in public for people to see you. If the only reason you're praying is so that people can see you, well, then you get your reward. They saw you. Congratulations. Hope that helps. But if you really want to pray, go into secret. Now, go into your room, he says, which is pretty funny because their houses didn't have rooms. Their houses would have been four walls. That's pretty much it, with maybe a closet and possibly a bathroom. But he's making a stress here, right? Go somewhere where you're alone. Oh, but I pray when I'm in the car. Go into your room. I like to pray when I'm out walking. Go into your room. You know, I just find that I pray best. Let the expert tell you how to do this. Why does he want you to go off in secret? Because your father is in secret. Now that's a fascinating thing for him to say. It's a little strange. Your father in secret. Now there's a chip load of information in that one verse that I would love to just unpack with you for a couple of hours. The idea that our father is in secret. He's a secretive God. It's interesting, isn't it? He's not the God we kind of want. We wish he would just write his name in letters of fire across the sky every night. That's not how he does it. He's secretive. He's quiet. it's also our father in secret and one of the things Jesus is saying here is he's revealing something to us that no other religion before this had ever thought of or talked about that Judaism kind of sort of in the Old Testament hinted at but not really that God, the Lord of the universe, the creator and sustainer of all that is, the one who decides that the sky is blue and decides where the clouds come, the one who sustains your existence in every breath, He is your Father. That's a secret. And Jesus is revealing it here. And it's a secret that you need to know. It's a secret that you learn in the hidden place. It's a secret that you learn as you pray. Your Father who is in secret. That's why we go into the secret place. So that God can reveal Himself to us as our Father. And you say, we say, I say, I know that God is my Father. I've grown up in the church. I've heard that a bazillion times. But it hasn't gotten down into my soul, into my body. I need to get it into my body. Think about that. I'm using that phrase very purposefully. Think about this with me. You know things, and yet you act as if they weren't true. There's things that you know are true, but you act as if they're not. This is as good a time as any to tell you. Last week ago, last Friday, I had a little piece of skin taken off my cheek right here. None of you even asked me about it. I was prepared for you to ask, and not a single one of you asked why I had stitches last Friday. I guess the doctor did a great job of sewing it up small. And it was nothing. It was nothing. You know, the dermatologist thought he needed to take it off and send it to the lab, but it was nothing. And Tuesday morning I got a call that it was melanoma. But we got it early. We got it early. And that's all that matters is getting it early. And it hadn't spread. It hadn't gone deep. There's no danger here. I know that up here mentally. But I was still up till 2 in the morning worrying about it. Because I didn't know it at my body level. literally, I mean that literally, my knowledge that it was nothing did not penetrate me to the level of my pulse rate. Did not penetrate me to the level of my blood pressure. And Jesus is saying, sure, maybe you know God as a father, but if we're going to get that knowledge down to you, to the level that it penetrates your pulse rate, that it regulates your breathing, that you are calm, that you are poised, That you are secure in His love. The way you do that is through secret prayer. Through practicing prayer. That's where He reveals to you that He's your Father. I don't live like somebody who knows that God's my Father. It hasn't penetrated me. I know it, but I don't live like a son of God. I live like a Ricky. How does a Ricky live? A Ricky lives with a fear, a terrifying fear of disapproval. And so I'm constantly scanning people's faces to see what they think about me. And I'm bending over backwards for my children, not because I want them to be good men who love the Lord and are good citizens, but because I just don't want them to think bad thoughts about me. And Ricky seeks meaning in accomplishments. And so I'm always kind of seeing what I've done and looking over what's been accomplished by me in my life. And Ricky craves praise. Ricky prays compliments, craves compliments. And Ricky checks on the internet every day to see how many times his sermons have been downloaded because that makes him a valuable human. Ricky feels inadequate and strives every moment of every day to cover that inadequacy with an obsession over his appearance. So he goes to the gym six times a week, not because he's worried about his heart, cardio, health, but because he wants to look the part. Ricky draws identity from relationships. So I want to be friends with the right people, and the powerful people, and the important people. But at the exact same time that I'm getting my identity from these relationships, I can't be intimate with someone because I'm afraid that they're going to know me. That's how I live. Completely separate from what I know. And the cure for all of this is to define myself radically, to define myself as one who is beloved by God. To let God's love for me and His choice of me constitute my being so that I accept it as the most important thing in my life. How do I do that? How do I get that from just a knowledge, just from a statement in the Bible to something that regulates my breathing and action? Jesus says you do that through secret prayer. You go off by yourself and you speak to your Father and your Father who is in secret will reward you. That's where we go. That's why we do it. That's why we do it there. That's an odd phrase, Jesus. Come on. Don't be so superficial. We don't pray for rewards. You'll reward us? What do you mean? What's the reward there? If we pray for it in secret, we get whatever we want? Is that the reward? What's the reward? The reward is This is so mind-blowing. I need you to pay attention. This is crazy. You're not going to believe me. The reward is seeing how delighted your Father in Heaven is to be with you. You get to make Him happy. Isn't that crazy? You know what he chose? The call to worship this morning is true every day. Our God, the Lord of the universe, wants to be with me. He stands at the door and knocks, and if anybody will open the door, He comes in. It delights Him to be with us. It makes Him happy. And seeing God happy changes us. I got to spend dinner, had dinner Friday night with some friends of mine who are grandparents. And they got to take their grandson on a vacation not too long ago. We were talking about kind of our summers and they were telling us about their vacation. And I said, well, what's in this? You've gotten used to this question for me. It's really just kind of my way of cutting through the conversation. I said, what's your favorite part? What's the best thing about it? Every night, our grandson came and got into bed with us. And he sat between us and he watched television with us. He wanted to be with us. He wanted to be with us. And as they talked about that, their faces lit up. I was like, wow. That's from the Lord. This idea that God is initiating prayer because He wants to be with us. Our Father in secret wants to be in secret with us. And it delights Him. That's our reward. That's why we listen to Him and we pray the way He says to pray. First, by going to the place He tells us to go. Go alone. Go to your room. Go to the secret place. And then when you're there, you pray like this. He says, don't pray with a lot of words trying to impress God or don't pray like the unbelievers, the Gentiles, the pagans of that day do by heaping up phrases. They think if they say things just right, they'll appease God and He'll stop being mad at them. If they pray their prayers the right number of times in the right way, then God will stop being mad at them and start being pleased with them. We don't pray that way. We pray knowing. We pray starting out with the words, Our Father, He is delighted with me. I'm in Christ. We pray with confidence that He loves us, our Father. We don't pray to earn God's approval, we pray to celebrate that He approves. Our first words, our saying these words out loud, as we say these words out loud and we're convincing ourselves and we're celebrating that we are right with God. How do we pray? We pray our Father in heaven. This bridge to the intimacy. We have intimacy with the eternal and the almighty. We pray celebrating our sonship. And I want you to pray this way. This is crazy, I know. Don't get too thrown off by this crazy advice. Pray using the words Jesus taught us to pray. That sounds radical. I'm not saying these are the only words you should say, but you should say them. And you should let them be your guide. You ask me how to pray? All right, this is how you pray. Go off to the secret place, say these words. Our Father. And then you can pause there. Our Father in heaven. Celebrate that. You can pray that you'd believe that. You can pray that you would enjoy that. That you would enjoy His pleasure in you. And then the first prayer request He tells us to pray is, you're praying for God. You think about that very often? God asks you to pray for Him. Hallowed be your name. May people respect you. May people love you. May people worship you. You're praying for an end to people using His name unjustly to baptize their selfish or self-righteous desires. You're praying that all people would know God as Abba, Father. You're praying that He would receive the love that He deserves and the glory that He deserves. You pray for God first, and then secondly, you pray for the world. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. That is the most all-encompassing prayer you can possibly pray. May God's kingdom come, may His will be done on earth as it is in heaven. How does He describe that? He describes that as the kingdom of righteousness, the kingdom of justice, the kingdom where there is no oppression, where there is no war, where there is no bloodshed. Don't you want that? Ten people were killed in Tulsa in one month this year, in the month of May. Don't you want records like that to stop being broken? Don't you want an end to that? There are children in this city who go to bed afraid. Don't you want an end to that? There are children in this world who are being trafficked by their own parents. Don't you want an end to that? Then pray for God's kingdom to come. When no one will harm or destroy in all His holy mountain. How is that day going to come? Through the preaching of the gospel. When the knowledge of the gospel of the Lord covers the world the way the waters cover the sea. Pray that His kingdom would come. We pray for God, for His name to be glorified. We pray for the world, that God's kingdom would come. We go from the bigger to the smaller. Then we pray for ourselves. What do we pray for, for ourselves? Everything. Everything. God, give us today our daily bread. Give us what I need today. Give me the bread and food I need today. Give me the water I need today. Give me the money I need today. Give me the friends I need today. Give me the clothing I need today. We pray for our children. We pray for our families. We pray for parking spots. We pray for everything. Do you pray for parking spots? How do you think you're gonna get one if you don't pray for it? Actually, seriously, this is more for me than it is for y'all. I used to be kind of uptight. Y'all know that? Still am. And I just thought it was so belittling, embarrassing, humiliating that anybody would pray for a parking spot or anything small. God's great and glorious. We should be praying for His name and His kingdom. And if God doesn't want us to have a parking spot, then He won't give us a parking spot and it's stupid to pray for it. And I read this book about prayer, and the author was talking about that idea, that concept that we shouldn't bother God or we should be bothered ourselves with such trivia. We should pray for great things and for His kingdom to come. And he went to his mom and he said, Mom, this book I'm reading says we should not pray for parking spots. And his mother said, Well then how would I ever get one? God owns every parking spot. If He doesn't give me one, who will? That knowledge, that faith, If the Lord who knows and has all things loves me and He cares about me. Forgive us this day our daily bread, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Lord, forgive me my debts for the things that I didn't do that I should have done. Forgive me for not loving the way I should have, for not listening the way I should have, Not caring the way I should have. Forgive me for the things I did do that I shouldn't have done. My trespasses. Forgive me. And the more time we spend here actually naming our sins, the more freedom we feel from them, the more joy we have of being forgiven. Lead us not into temptation. What's that? Lord, you know me. Don't let my pride get tripped up today. You know how weak I am. Will you please protect me from me? Would you protect the world from me? Would you just not allow me to go to places where I'm going to be tempted? Pray, lead me not into temptation, deliver us from evil. Father, I know Satan is real, and he hates you, and he hates me, and he wants to destroy me. And Lord, I can't handle him today or any day. Will you please protect me? Will you please protect me? That's the words we pray. That's how we pray. in the secret place, praying his words for everything from God down to ourselves. And then what's the heart of prayer? The heart of prayer is that we are being molded to be like God's children. We're being molded through prayer to look like Him. And Jesus shows us that with this terribly annoying final two verses. I mean, really. 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. Well, that's just unfair and uncool. I mean, come on. He could have come up with anything better than that, right? I mean, don't you wish he just said, don't you pray with beer on your breath? I could have done that one. Don't you wish you'd prayed, said, and when you pray, you make sure your clothes don't smell like cigarettes. No problem. Got it. If you forgive others are trespasses. What? Why? What? What? Well, this kind of, I didn't choose the text well. I'm sorry about that. This section closes the larger section in the Sermon on the Mount. It kind of does this parentheses. And it begins in chapter 5. If you'll look at the very end of Matthew chapter 5 when you get home, you'll see that Jesus is talking to us about being compassionate. And he says, if you only do good to the people who do good to you, congratulations, everybody does that. But forgive your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. Pray for those who hurt you. Because when you do that, you're being like your Father in heaven who sends rain on the just and the unjust. You're being like your Father in heaven. You see, what Jesus is saying here is that God puts His DNA in us, and the more we grow, the more we look like Him. And how will we know when we look like Him? We know that we look like Him when we forgive others their trespasses. You see, that's what God's children are like. They're so secure in themselves. They're so constituted by who they are in Christ, by their identity as God's children, that instead of seeing others as real threats to them, they see others as weak children in need of forgiveness. We see others as weaklings who need our love, who need our help. But that's not something you can drum up in yourself. That's the genius of this, right? If Jesus had given us something external, like don't drink or whatever, then we could have done that. But by doing something so internal, he's calling on us to do something that you can't do on your own. You can't do this in your own strength. You can't forgive other people in your own strength. I know, I've tried. And the only way it comes is through meditating on Christ, on letting the crucifixion of Christ get into your soul by going into that secret place of prayer. And seeing Him, by meditating Him on that hill, seeing Him spit upon and whipped and scorned and beaten And seeing the nails in His hands. And seeing Him fighting for every breath as He is hung up by His hands. And see Him using one of those precious breaths to say, Father, forgive them. And as I meditate on that, and I let this truth get into my soul, that Jesus paid more to forgive me, that my sins hurt Jesus more than any sin would ever hurt me, then I find myself able to let go. I find myself able to let go. We begin to look like His children. We begin to look like Him. His children are compassionate and gracious. That's what His real children look like. I'm reading a book called Abba's Child by Brennan Manning. I just cannot recommend it highly enough. Just absolutely love it. In it, he's describing this, what it means to really be God's children instead of being religious. And he talks about a trip to New Orleans. He was at the French Quarter getting breakfast with his wife. And a little girl comes up to her, a teenage girl, comes up to them trying to sell them a flower and he says, you're selling a flower. I assume that you're a follower of Warren Moon, or not Warren Moon, that was a quarterback. Sorry, Mooney, part of the cult, the Moonies. And she goes, yeah, that's right. And he looked at this girl and just saw a child. who had been taken in by a powerful personality. He felt so compassionate for her. And he asked if he could pray for her, and his wife hugged her. And at the end of the prayer, she looked at him and she said, are you Christians? And he said, yes, we were followers of Jesus. God's our Father. And she said, that's strange. Christians are usually so mean to me. They yell at me. They call me evil. I had a woman yesterday hit me with her Bible. That's not what God's sons are like. Spending time with the Lord changes us. So that we begin to have compassion and grace. That's why we pray. That's how we pray. And that's where we pray. Please pray with me. Most times when I try to pray, I'm unable to convey the emotions deep inside that are complex. I always feel that God truly understands what I'm feeling and trying to ask for when I just quiet my mind. Is it still praying when we are silent and allow God to hear the cries of our heart in silence? And how do we convey our prayers aloud? That's, yes, I think that is definitely prayer. And he says in this text that God knows our hearts before we pray them. He knows the needs of our hearts before we pray them. That really, that particular desire is best, uh, encapsulated in Romans 8, when Paul tells us that, um, the Holy Spirit, like, we don't know the will of God. What makes prayer hard for us is we don't know the will of God, but, but the Holy Spirit knows our hearts and He knows the mind of God, and He's translating between the two of us. He's taking our groans to God and groaning for us as we groan inwardly, and that's exactly what you're talking about there. As we groan, you know, when you're just in deep times of emotional—it's complexity, right? Praying for someone who's sick unto death and you don't know what to pray for them, and you just spend a lot of time groaning. Yeah, so I think you've answered your question well, just groaning with the Lord and letting Him, just bringing that before Him there, like that. Next. Is there anything wrong with having something that you find yourself praying for over and over more than anything else? No, I don't think there's anything wrong with it. I think that's one of the places where you need the Lord's Prayer to guide you, because anything can become First of all, no. It's okay to have something that you want, right? Let's stop there for a moment. That's what you ask. There's not necessarily anything wrong with it. Can that thing become an idol to you that means too much? And you begin to think, if I just have this and I'll be complete as a human, sure. And that can be anything, right? football, national championship, to a spouse, to a baby, to a job, anything. And so you need the Lord's prayer there to help you not become enslaved to this thing that you want. To remind you that that thing that you don't have is not what defines you. Not having it is not what defines you now. When you have it, it won't define you then. What defines you is your relationship with God the Father, that you're His child, beloved and chosen by Him. And so, sure, I mean, maybe the Lord's put that on your heart to pray for, that's great, but you don't want it to become the only thing you pray for. And as you pray the Lord's Prayer, I think the Lord will either give it to you or will reveal to you that He's doing something different. That's a big question. I try to be honest. There you go. Next. Does God ever get to a point where He won't listen to someone's prayer? I think, um, I'm trying to think. It seems like the Bible would answer this. Listen, well, I think Jesus answers it. No, I mean the answer is no. God's all gracious and merciful. So I'm assuming that you're asking this for you. And the answer to that's no. He's cool with you. You're here. You're trying. You haven't sinned, the sin against the Holy Spirit. I know that because you're in this room. So you're fine. There's a lot of things that people call prayers that are not. Jesus talks about those, right? He says, for those who just love to pray on the street corners, I tell you, they've got their reward. So if the purpose of this prayer was to impress somebody, they're impressed. You got it. Congratulations. You got what you're hoping for. That's all you wanted for that prayer, and that's all you got. So technically, there are things that God kind of looks at you and goes, I know what you really want. I know what you're trying to do here. That's not working. But as far as, like, if you're asking for yourself, like, have I sinned too much? Have I been too whatevered? I mean, because some of you have really tender consciences. I had a really tender conscience as a kid. I was, not as a kid, as a college student, terrified that I'd, you know, sinned beyond repentance. And that's just not true, and I don't want you to think that for a second. The Lord knows you. He understands your struggles. He's right there with you, so. Let's go to the next one. That one looks interesting. Can you briefly touch on the idea of a private prayer language in Scripture and what that means today? I think the most biblical understanding of that would be Romans 8 that we talked about. I don't. If you're talking about what most people consider to be praying in tongues, There's different interpretations of what that means in the Bible, and that's really a pretty big topic. I preached on that a few years ago. You can find it. I can't remember the name of that sermon right now. If you text me, I'll send it to you. But I think as far as praying your groans of your heart, those deep things that you don't understand, the Holy Spirit understands those and is taking those prayers to God. I think as far as praying your desires, you're better led by the Holy Spirit. If you pray the Lord's Prayer, that's how Jesus told you to pray. Again, it's very easy for us to go kind of discount Jesus, like, oh, he didn't really know how to pray. If I really want to pray, I need to be praying in tongues. No, Jesus said pray like this, so I think we should pray like that. I think he's the expert. And so my kind of final word on that today is going to be, you're not going to do better than praying the way Jesus told you to pray. And that's not from Ricky, that's from him. Yeah, I think that's the best I can do in this short. I shouldn't have called on that one because it's an inadequate answer. Last one, next. In terms of actual prayer technique, is it better to attempt to repent of individual sins? I repent of this and I repent of that. Or cover it with a blanket statement? I repent of everything. No, I think the more individual you can be, the better. I think you also need to invite the Lord to examine your heart. The only problem with repenting of individual sins is you tend to stay on the surface. And so this summer, for instance, we used the seven deadly sins as a way to really examine our hearts. So to ask ourselves, what motivated that? Okay, I said something that I shouldn't have said. Why? Is it because of my pride? Is it because of my vanity? Someone made me look bad? Is it out of my fear? So I think it's good to definitely should repent, confess your sins, but also be praying about what's under the surface. Why did I do that? And praying that the Lord will change that. Does that make sense? So both. The answer is always both. And you know Job talked about praying for his son's sins, his children's sins they committed in ignorance. I confess those sins. Forgive me for the sins I didn't even know I committed. And help me to not live in ignorance. Show me what those are to make me better than that.