So turn with me in your Bibles to Matthew chapter 6. And we'll read verses 5 through 15. Matthew 6, 5 through 15. Hear the Word of God. And when you pray, You shall not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray, standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your father who is in the secret place, and your father who sees in secret will reward you openly. And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Therefore, do not be like them, for your father knows the things that you have need of before you ask him. In this manner, therefore, pray, 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 forgive our debtors and do not lead us into temptation but deliver us from the evil one for yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever amen for if you forgive men their trespasses your heavenly father will also forgive you but if you do not forgive men their trespasses neither will your Father forgive your trespasses." Let's pray and ask the Lord to bless His Word to us. Heavenly Father, we do thank You for this portion of Your own Holy Word, inspired, inerrant, infallible. We pray that by Your Spirit, You would bless it to our understanding and apply it to our hearts for Your glory. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen. What matters? What really matters to you? Because that's what we pray for, isn't it? Things that matter. We don't usually pray for things that don't matter. We don't usually pray for things that we're not interested in, that we don't care about. unless it's some kind of formal setting in which we feel we must pray about those things. We pray about things that matter. And really, one of the ways to think about this passage is how it relates to our priorities. I want us to also see as we look at it something about how it relates to our worship in general, and some things he can teach us about worship. But I want to point out some things in general about the proper use of the Lord's Prayer. I didn't ask John if he's preached on this recently. I made the assumption that it's probably not too recently, or if so, that there's enough material in this that I won't be just repeating something that he said. But praying and praying with the Lord's prayer is not simply a matter of rote repetition. Verse 7 says, we're not to use vain repetitions as the heathen do. You can feel like you've worshiped and done something acceptable in worship when you pray some kind of memorized thing. There's something you can check off that you did in terms of worship. And in worship outside of our circles, the OPC, that kind of thing, you find basically two kinds of worship in terms of the extremes and everything, of course, in between. You've got one attitude and approach that is very loose, very flexible, nothing set, and it's just, you know, how you feel at the moment. And the other extreme is everything is set. Everything is very formal. And so, you know what to do, you participate, you do the things that you do. And, for instance, in the Roman Catholic Church, people can feel like they've done something very worshipful, there's a lot of order, there's a lot of formality, and they've gone through the motions, and they feel like they've done their duty in terms of worship. But that's, again, not the attitude towards prayer and towards worship in general that we read about here. In the words prior to the Lord's Prayer, Jesus is talking about how we are not to pray and how we are to pray. But even in what He says first about how we are to pray, it's to be not like the hypocrites. You know, there's that kind of prayer. There's a lot of that. There was prayer in his day on the street corners by the Pharisees where they wanted to be seen and to be observed, to be praying. They did the same thing with their charitable deeds. They did the same thing with their fasting, though not necessarily on the street corners for the fasting. But anyway, It was all for people. It was all to make an impression on people. And prayer is not for other people. Prayer is between us and God. We're told that we are to shut our door and go to our Father in the secret place rather than in a showy way, in a showy manner. Prayer is not like it's often conceived and the Lord's Prayer is not primarily rote repetition. How many times, so I think y'all probably regularly do the Lord's Prayer on Sunday mornings as we did today. How many times have you finished and said amen and realized that your brain never engaged. It wasn't in gear. But your mouth was doing fine, you were doing all the words and you had done it, but you hadn't really communed with God because you weren't thinking that way. That's so easy to have happen to us. We've all done that. And so, we need to recognize that's not the idea that Jesus is talking about. It is a pattern that's given to us for our praying. And certainly, if you go through the Shorter Catechism and its exposition of the Lord's Prayer, you see that. But we need to realize, too, it's not just an outline. It is true that you can take every prayer that you might want to pray and fit it into one of the six petitions somehow that the Lord's Prayer has as we've broken up in the Shorter Catechism. We can really conceive of all of our praying in terms of parts of the Lord's Prayer. But it's not just an outline structure. It's not just for that. As much as it may help us, it is not primarily simply that. It is a matter of going to the Holy God and addressing before Him our needs and concerns and priorities. The first time I went to a kid's summer camp as a minister, there was a fellow speaking on the Lord's Prayer. And I remember very well what he said the first part of it was. are the message of the first part. The first part is that it's called a prologue or a preface, our father who art in heaven. He says, basically what that should tell us is stop. We're communing with our heavenly father and we need to think about that before we just start rattling off our prayers. We need to be aware of who it is that we come before when we pray. And so he says, just stop right there. And if you look at the words, that very definitely is so, and there's a lot to learn just from those words, our Father which art in heaven. The first word in the Greek is not our, it's the word father, pater in Greek. We're to think, among other things, of what an amazing thing that it is that we are given permission and even invitation to address the eternal Creator as Father. To acknowledge Him as that. Yes, He's in heaven, and we'll come back to that. The idea that He is Father to us. That we're His children. That He wants us, invites us, tells us to call Him Father. Jesus told us to call His Father, Father. Just to recognize that. Start off with this in your thinking about your praying. It's relational. It's not just a formality that we do, it's relational. Our father is someone that we have a relationship with, a fatherly child relationship with. And so when we pray, we enter in to that relationship. We are aware of that. Now it's worthwhile to stop and note right now. that it is only the Christian who can pray that way, only the person who comes to the Father through Jesus Christ. But as we come through Him, He's our Father. He's not just a remote God. You know, if you go through the history of religions in the world, In many, and certainly in the Greek and Greco-Roman world that Jesus was addressing, there were many that thought of God as maybe being transcendent, maybe big, but He was remote. Others would think of God, and still do in many religions, think of Him as close by, maybe a part of everything that exists. And so they think of not the transcendence, but the eminence of God and His presence. But when we call Him Father in heaven, He's both. He is near to us. accessible to us, hearing us through Jesus Christ. And so, we speak to God as our Father, but it doesn't start off simply Father. And not my Father, but our Father. And we find this throughout. you find in verse 11, give us, not me this day, our, not my daily bread, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. This is the church's prayer. We are not I mean, we're Americans and so we're, you know, we believe in individualism and we have some accent on that. That's not inappropriate for most things and certainly for our national pride and things like that. But this prayer teaches us to pray with a consciousness of one another, with a consciousness of the Church of Jesus Christ. It is our Father who we address. It's not mine. It's not like, and you know, we don't have that, which was once my favorite hymn, that old hymn, I come to the garden alone. You know, the joy we share as we tarry there, the words go next, none other has ever known. No, that is not what Jesus is teaching. It is not just a personal thing. It's personal, yes, He is personally our Father, but the Father of all of us, not just me. And I'm not to think of myself as just coming in terms of my own needs before God. In fact, as we'll be seeing more and more as we go through, if this prayer has to do with our priorities, We probably need to make one another at a higher level of priority than most of us normally do. Our Father, which art in heaven. There's to be that consciousness that we address, indeed, the creator of the universe, infinite, eternal, unchangeable, all of this that we know about this God. We are to be aware that we address a God who is in this spiritual realm where we can't see. We are to be aware that we who live in the here and now have contact with the eternal and spiritual which is entirely out of our view. And so, again, as I was saying this morning, it's worldview-ish. It has to do with a worldview that is not limited to the here and now. It's not limited to material things. But God, who we address in our prayers, is in heaven. He resides there. Yes, God is everywhere, but his home, his residence, is what we call heaven. We don't know much about it. We just know it's not earth. We can't find it. Yes, when the first Russian cosmonaut went up and was in orbit around the earth, he didn't see God. He concluded that there wasn't one. He didn't understand what even all Americans, even the atheists in our country back in the 60s and 50s, that God is invisible. That God is a different kind of God. That was, you know, it was kind of pathetic in its ignorance when he came to that conclusion. But we know better. But are we aware that we are transcending the earth-heaven divide When we pray, we're authorized to do so. We can do so. It's a real thing that we do when we pray this way. And so, when you pray, and when you pray the Lord's Prayer, stop, get your mind set in a correct and biblical orientation to what you're doing, who you are addressing, how He wants to hear you as His child, how He has the infinite power to answer all of your prayers, how He wants you to think of yourself as not just you, but to be praying in terms of communion with all of His people. because there are priorities that we share that are developed, priorities we share with one another that are developed in the six petitions of the Lord's Prayer. Now, the first petition is, hallowed be thy name. A lot of people that don't have the short catechism think of that as being a statement of praise. as though it was, hallowed is your name, your name is hallowed, as though we were praising God. But it's a petition, it's a request. The Greek grammar has it in the form of a request. It is an imperative. It is saying basically to God, we pray that your name would be hallowed, would be reverenced, would be kept holy. Before I talk further about that one, that is the first of three petitions that are concerned with God. That His name be hallowed, that His kingdom come, and that His will be done. And that begins, that's there before we ever start making personal requests. And even those personal requests are, you know, me and the rest of your people, us and our, when we pray for our daily bread and forgiveness of our sins and being protected from temptation. So, in fact, the most visible, even in English translation, division and the Lord's Prayer is that division between the first three petitions that are related to God and the next three petitions that are related to us. And we're to be aware of those as we pray. And our priorities are taught here by Jesus to begin with God and His glory and His kingdom and His will. So we come back to hallowed be thy name And we recognize that this is just a request, basically, that the third commandment would be kept. That God's name would not be used in vain. That God's name instead would be honored. When we pray, Hallowed be thy name, we're asking God to ensure from His, or out of His heavenly power, from His heavenly place, that on this earth, as well as in all creation, that His own name would be reverenced. And just like it's the case in the third commandment, it is the case here that His name stands for Him. It's just a representation of God and who He is. So we're praying that God Himself would be honored and would be glorified. Do your prayers start that way? a priority for you as you pray, so much so that you want to put that first. Well, that's what Jesus is saying ought to be the way that we pray. That we would pray that the name of God and all by which He makes Himself known, which includes His attributes and His deeds and all of that, that all by which God is known would be recognized would be reverenced and that God Himself would be reverenced and adored. Do you know what this prayer is a prayer for, this first petition, ultimately? It's a prayer for revival. Our world doesn't reverence God in His name very much. Much of the church doesn't reverence God very much. But this is a prayer that even His name and anything by which He is made known would have such an impact on us and would be such a delight to us that we would want all the world to recognize all of the truth about this God, about this glorious God, and that even His name, even any mention of Him would be to bring to mind that there is this glorious, magnificent, wonderful God who governs our universe. It's a prayer for revival. If we have revival, then people will think about God that way. Without revival, you know, we can change a few people in the way they approach God in His name. But it's a prayer for revival, that the world would be a different place. And His name, instead of being made fun of and made light of, would be reverenced and would be treated as holy and significant. Then we're taught to pray that His kingdom would come. And that in several different dimensions. And if you go to the shorter catechism, you get some of that. If you go to the larger catechism, you get a larger expansion of that. But it's a prayer that the kingdom, where Christ is King, the kingdom which was set up at His first coming would reach His consummation, among other things, when He returns, that that kingdom would be visible to all men eventually. But it's a prayer that even right now, while we are awaiting His return, there would be more and more who would be intentionally under his kingship. So it's a prayer and all of these should be prayers about ourselves and our attitude toward God. We should be praying that we would hallow his name and that we would desire his kingdom and his kingship over us and his rule and lordship over us in every dimension of life. But we're praying that that would be so of all the world, that Satan's kingdom would be more and more overthrown, Christ's kingdom more and more manifest, visible in our world, and that finally Christ would come to set up His kingdom in its fullness at the consummation. Then we pray, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Do you remember Jesus praying before His crucifixion as He went away from the disciples? That that cup of facing the crucifixion would be removed from Him, and yet He says, nevertheless, not my will but thine be done." When we pray this in terms of ourselves, we should be praying that it's not my will nor our will that we want most that would be our highest priority, but rather that God's will. That in areas where we think we know what God's will ought to be, And we know what we want, that nevertheless, we ask that God's perfect will would be done. We know His will is right always. And so we're praying for that to be the case, that His will would be done. It is an act of submission. when we pray that, but it's an act also of wanting obedience to God to be our own, but also to be prevalent in this world. That God's will would be done because people would obey His revealed will as it is found in the Bible. all of His commandments, that those are God's will. He says that to us. That we would actually do that ourselves personally, that we in the church would do that, that the world would do that. That it would be done on earth just like as is the case in heaven. The angels are, yes, submissive to His will, preferring His will to their own, but also they obey His will. They do what He has commanded. And we pray that that would be the case on earth as well. Do you see how God-centered the first part of the Lord's prayer is? and teaches us that we should be in our own priorities. And then you come to the other three petitions. Give us this day our daily bread. That comes before forgiveness and protection from temptation. It does probably most theologians think because that's so necessary for us to be able to get on with our living the Christian lives. We have to have our daily bread. We have to have food and clothing and shelter so that we can actually think about the spiritual side of life. So this does not ignore that we live on earth, that we live in physical bodies. And it tells us that we can appropriately, should appropriately pray for our daily needs. It does say daily bread, doesn't it? We would really like to have You know, enough set aside that we don't have to concern ourselves with it on a daily basis. And yet Jesus intends us, teaches us to pray for daily bread. That's going to mean something like daily dependence. In this daily dependence, if you're praying for our bread every day, Do you think we only pray for that daily? You know, what about milk? What about water? You know, all these other things. The idea is that we daily pray for all of our needs, conscious that they're supplied by God. It's not like we've worked hard And we've laid up in our barns and such, in storehouses, and we can say, my soul can rest now. I don't have to worry about anything. I've got it all taken care of. It's real easy when things are going well for us financially to stop feeling dependent on God. It's all taken care of. Instead, this teaches daily dependence for our physical needs, but by the way, when we're praying this prayer, why don't we pray for all of this every day? In fact, our spiritual needs, our daily needs as well, and our higher priorities still of God and His glory and His kingdom and obedience to Him should be prayed for on a daily basis as well. Now it's easy to see that temptation may come daily. It's easy to recognize that we sin daily, and so we need to pray those every day. But all of it, we need to manifest a daily dependence on God in our praying. So if you're one of those, and I hope none of you are, but if you're one of those who prays the Lord's Prayer, every week at church on Sunday morning and doesn't pray the rest of the week at all, you're missing the whole idea. We come before the God who can supply all of our needs with an attitude of dependence on Him for all of our needs and all of our priorities. And so we come to the God that way. We ask in that kind of humility for forgiveness of our sins. We're reminded that we should do that in the same way that we forgive others their sins against us. And we're taught to pray that we be protected from temptation and delivered from evil and the evil one. You probably know more about what those things mean, and I'm not going to take the time to expand too much on those, except just to remind us that our spiritual needs are priorities too. They don't deal with this world so much. Every one of our sins, every one of our temptations has an eternal and a non-temporal and a non-this-world aspect to it. And so our prayers, you know, it's not about praying every day for the Cadillac. Well, Cadillacs are American cars or GM, Mercedes, whatever. I used to, you know, my you know, car that I really wanted to have was a green Jaguar four-door sedan with natural color leather seats. That's not what prayer's about, though. You can want something like that and not even make it a high priority. I really never did on that. Do we make the spiritual things really high priority? Do we make such daily needs as our health, all sorts of other things? Do we make daily needs of members of the body of Christ part of our priority? And do we especially make God our priority? When you pray like this, when you stop at the start of praying and pray, our Father who art in heaven, you enter into worship. Prayer is always that. It's not just how to get things. It is communing with the eternal God who is outside of your visibility, who means more to you than you do yourself. And that's the way to get your prayers answered is to start with that kind of priority. Some of you will have memorized Psalm 37-4 that goes something like this, delight yourself also in God and He will give you the desires of your heart. This is a prayer that starts with the lighting in God. If you want the desires of your heart, your priorities, then you start with the lighting in God and worshiping Him. More could be said. More has been written. I won't try to say it all tonight, and I'll stop here. But I encourage you to use the Lord's Prayer to structure your praying, but to structure your thinking about your praying as well. And so let's have a closing prayer. Let's pray. Our Father, You're in heaven. And yet you hear us, you delight to have us come before you, to have us come before you together and with concern for one another. And you invite us to pray for your glory and honor and your kingdom and obedience to you and submission to you, as well as for all of our mundane needs and our spiritual needs. We ask, Lord, that you would make all of those things be proper priorities for us, that we would have an attitude of full dependence on you for all of these things, knowing that they're not in our strength. Help us, Lord, to live in a world where we're aware of the existence and presence and sovereignty of our God and aware of your love for us in Jesus Christ. Be with us all, Lord. Bless us in the coming week. We pray together in Jesus' name. Amen.