So we plan to do a couple more weeks from the Gospel of Luke before we shift to a different book for a bit. But we're gonna focus on the Lord's Prayer this morning and Jesus teaching us how to pray or teaching us to pray. So I invite you to turn with me to Luke chapter 11, one through 13. And our focus is Luke 11, one through four. Luke chapter 11, verses one through 13. Now it came to pass, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, that one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples. So he said to them, when you pray, say, 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 sins, for we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. And he said to them, which of you shall have a friend, and go to him at midnight, and say to him, Friend, lend me three loaves, for a friend of mine has come to me on his journey, and I have nothing to set before him. And he will answer from within and say, Do not trouble me, the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I can't rise and give to you. I say to you, though he will not rise and give to him because he is his friend, yet because of his persistence, he will rise and give him as many as he needs. So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you'll find. Knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives, and he who knocks, or sorry, he who seeks, finds. And to him who knocks, it will be opened. If a son asks for bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish? If we ask for an egg, will we offer him a scorpion? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? So our focus this morning is verses one through four, a well-known prayer, we pray it from time to time, called the Lord's Prayer, or maybe better yet, called the Disciples' Prayer, because it's a prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. Notice the context here. Jesus is praying. And we know that sometimes he would pray for long seasons or a long time, sometimes for an entire night. And when he stops praying, obviously, one of the disciples noticed something very unique about Jesus' prayers. And that occasioned him to put forward a request, Lord, teach us to pray. He's not just talking about himself, but all the others around him, because he recognized that there's a need there to learn to pray. Maybe he felt a little bit uneasy, maybe a little bit bothered, maybe a little bit of shame. Perhaps he was affected by Jesus' regularity in prayer, and also his intensity in prayer. He would pray often, and he would pray for long, long times, and often, you know, in fervency. He would be fervent in his prayers. And you know what's interesting about the Lord Jesus? He enjoyed fellowship with his Heavenly Father in prayer, You know, I'm gonna bring my needs before you now. And certainly there's a great place. We are called to bring our needs before him. But he would also enjoy fellowship with his heavenly father. After all, he had fellowship with him from all eternity. He came down and prayer was a means where he can engage in that kind of fellowship, that relationship with his heavenly father. Take, for example, Luke. We'll just look at some examples on Luke. Luke 4, 42. After a very busy day, what does Jesus do? You think he might go to sleep, but he goes to a deserted place, a quiet place, to pray. He withdrew to the wilderness and prayed. When? Before this conflict with the religious leaders. He knew that was coming. What's the first thing he did? He prayed. He continued all night in prayer. At what time? At what occasion? Before he chose his 12 disciples. And then we can go on and on with many examples of Jesus praying and praying. Many more examples. And just the gospel of Luke. Luke really brings it out very strongly. Now, if Jesus, think of who he is. He's the divine son of God. And the one and only sinless man after Adam, if he prays and if he needs to pray, this disciple must be thinking, I need to learn. I need to grow in my prayer life. How much more do I need that? Some people say, and you'll hear that sometimes, well, prayer is as natural as breathing. Well, no, it's not. Because with breathing, you don't have to think about it. You don't have to learn how to breathe. A baby is born and the baby is breathing. But prayer takes work. Certainly, there's a sense where we can pray just spontaneously any time. But there's also a sense in which prayer takes work. It takes time to learn. There's lots of room for us to grow in our prayer life, isn't there? Like many other areas in the Christian life, it's also in this area of the Christian life there's opportunity for us to grow in Christlikeness in prayer. And why is that, that we need to grow? Well, the simple fact is we still have to deal with our sinful natures, even in our prayer life, don't we? We can sometimes be really selfish in our prayers. We only think about ourselves. We kind of treat God as the cosmic slot machine. You put something in, you get something out. Right? That's a very truncated view of prayer. We usually pray only when we need Him. Sometimes that happens too. We pray when we're in great crises. Sometimes, you know, the scope of our prayers is often so limited, so tiny, we miss out on what the Father is doing throughout the world, that we miss out on the joys, we miss out on the greatness and the glories of what our Heavenly Father is doing in this world. We miss out on the joys. And so, out of that context, yeah, we can say that too, right? Lord, Teach us to pray. Teach us to pray. Who better to ask than our perfect Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. And you know what he does now? He says, okay, I'm gonna enroll you now into a school. I'm enrolling you into the school of prayer. and we're gonna go through a three-part course on this. So we're gonna learn, Jesus is the great teacher, and he teaches us to pray, but you know what he puts first in our prayer life? Never ourselves, always God. God is first. So we're gonna learn about Jesus teaching us to pray, first of all, in relationship to God, our Father, and his concerns, and then only that, Do we relate our concerns as His children? If we only deal with our own concerns, apart from the Father, it easily becomes idolatry. We're idolizing ourselves. So Jesus is putting a perspective here. He's showing the pattern for prayer. God first, then us. God-centered prayers. So in relationship to God the Father, Jesus says, when you pray, say, very, very brief in his comments, say what? Well, Jesus intends more than that, we just simply repeat this prayer. Certainly there's nothing wrong with saying this prayer together as a congregation, but he intends more than just repeating it. This prayer, someone once put it this way and said this. He said, this prayer is kind of like a model house in a real estate office. You ever go into a real estate office and you see this house? You can't live in there. But what they're going to build is something like that. It's gonna be patterned after that little model that you see inside the real estate office. Likewise, Jesus, he offers a model prayer. Not that we have to stick so closely and strictly to those exact words, but we can fill it out. We can build our prayer life in the pattern that Jesus teaches us. And you'll notice how he begins. Some person just has the word father, but the new King James here is our father in heaven. You know, that's a very enduring way to come before God. And God has said, you call me Father. That is to believers, right? It's a believer's prayer. It's not a public prayer for anyone in the culture, but it's for believers, for any and every culture. It's the believer's prayer. And in this prayer, Jesus teaches believers to approach God intimately. Closely, He is our Father, our Father in heaven. And by His grace alone, what a privilege that we may come to know that God adopts us as His children by His grace, through faith in Jesus Christ. Through Jesus, it's only through Jesus, when we come to know Jesus, we come to know Him we come to know the true and living God as our Father. Praying is as simple as a child making known his or her requests before their own human fathers, right? Their own human parents. No need of eloquence. A parent won't say to a child, no, you didn't say that word right, or you may say that, but he understands the request of the child. No pretense, no pretensions. The child is just talking from the heart, talking with the parent. So likewise, we approach our God as our Heavenly Father. That means two things, of course, that we do so humbly, we do so dependently. Right, after all, he's our father in heaven, as verse two says. Our father in heaven, he's the almighty one, the almighty, true and living God. But we also approach him as one we can truly trust and have confidence in. He hears me because of Jesus. And that's how he sees us, because of Jesus, not because of all our sinfulness. but he sees me through Jesus. And Jesus, through his death on the cross, the Bible says the way is open. The way is wide open to come into his presence. They don't need to knock on his door first. They say, may I come in? He's always ready. and willing to receive the prayers of his children. There's free access. Hebrews 4.16 says, let us therefore come boldly, there's the sense of confidence, boldly to the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace for help in time of need. Our human father sometimes, you know, they might have the ability to do something, but they're not willing. Or sometimes our human fathers might have the willingness to do something, but they don't have the ability. That's not our Heavenly Father. He's both able and willing. What a great God, what a wonderful God we can come to, our Heavenly Father. This is so different from pagans, from people from other religions, always calling on their attention. Hey, are you listening? And they're crying out, they're begging their gods, they're bargaining with their gods, they're cajoling them to try to get their attention, try to get what they want. But here, Jesus says, it's simple, it's direct. You don't have to yell. You don't have to get these long-winded phrases and say how, you know, in order to cajole him to get him to do what you want, you simply say, Father. He's there. He's there because of what Jesus has done for us. He doesn't say, you're too bad of a person, I'm not gonna listen to you right now. No, he looks upon us in Christ and we have that full confidence to come to him directly. And you know, in Christ, our relationship with God is secure. We don't have to try to make it secure. If we look at ourselves, we feel very insecure, but we go to God in Christ. It's secure. Our father in heaven. You know, the other thing here is God has no favorite children. Let's not think that some people have a closer connection to God or that people have a, a special tract of God that others might not. All of God's children are equally his children. There's only one unique son, and that's Jesus, the son of God. He's the only beloved or begotten son of God. And the rest? are equally loved by God. Don't think that one is loved more than another. Sometimes that happens in families, right? One time, a child may be loved more than another, but with God, there is no such thing as one person God will hear more than another. We come by faith in Christ. He hears the prayers of every son, every daughter, anytime, at any place, with any concern. That's what we have to be really clear about. Our Father in heaven, so close. And He's the perfect Father. He's unlike any other Father on earth. We have a lot of good fathers, poor fathers, bad fathers, but He outshines them all. He is the most perfect Heavenly Father. With that in mind, Jesus says, okay, you approach Him. directly, simply, as father, and then he lays out the pattern for us. As we learn in Christ's school of prayer, we come to our next lesson that he teaches us, and Christ teaches us to put God first in our prayers. It's very revolutionary in a man-centered world, where I'm the center, right? The modern Trinity, me, myself, and I, rather than God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He teaches us to put God first, then ourselves. I think sometimes we tend in our natural sinful impulses, we put ourselves first, and we think of ourselves when we pray. But that's not the pattern. Christ taught us here. We put it very simply. A child is born into this world, and all he thinks, all the baby thinks about is himself. Isn't that true? He just thinks about himself or herself. Feed me, hold me, take care of me, look at me. Those are wonderful little things, but that's the baby. Everything is about himself, herself. It's his own little world. But you know that baby, he needs to kind of grow out. He needs to kind of grow out of that and see the bigger world of his mom and dad who brought him into his world and see how he fits into that. He sees the much bigger, glorious, the wider perspective. Likewise, God our Father is the center. He brings his children into a new world, a new creation. We see so much more, so much bigger, so much more glorious. So God wants us as children to pray for everything we need, for what, first of all, for everything we need, for what? To hallow his name. For his kingdom to come. and for his will to be done. That's where we go first. That's what Jesus is teaching us here. Hallowed be your name. What's Jesus saying here? When we pray, Lord, we desire, we want your name to be holy. Now, that's not saying God is not holy. He is perfectly holy, but Lord, We want you to be holy, and we want you to also work on our lives so that our lives will be holy to you, in our thinking, in our working, in our doing, in our speaking. May your name, Lord, be set apart as the Holy One in all the world, right? He's the maker of the world. We disobey, but Lord, this is our greatest need. that we wanna see your name set apart. We wanna see your name holy. It's only when God enables us to hallow his name, yeah, that we can do so. Remember in Psalm 119 verse 136, the Psalm says, rivers of water flow out of my eyes because people do not keep your law. How often do we think in those kinds of terms, right? A passion, a vision for God. and who he is, and all his holiness and glory. It's a desire above all else to see the honor and glory of God. Remember Jesus, he prayed this. He was going through the most difficult trial that anyone could ever go through, far weightier than anyone would ever go through. He was seeing his coming death just around the corner on the cross. And was he praying John 12? My soul is troubled. What shall I say? Father, save me from this hour. No, he said, for this purpose I came for this hour. Father, glorify your name. That was his prayer request. Father, may your name be hallowed. Father, glorify your name. Whatever your name, however it's glorified, Lord, we rest in that. Jesus rests in that. You know, sometimes I think about us praying for our nation. We pray for the nation of Canada. We ask for peace. We ask for God's blessing. But how often do you hear the church pray for the humbling of Canada, that the Lord humble Canada, that the Lord break Canada into repentance and turn to the Lord and honor him once again. What a difference it would make in the church and in the nation if all prayed this prayer from the heart. That would be amazing. May we learn to desire what is most dear to God, the honor of his name. Yeah, that requires conversion, doesn't it? I mean, we have to battle with the sinful self. We always do, but it's a good reminder. Jesus is teaching us, yeah, but just don't forget that. I know that's your tendency, but he's showing us the bigger picture, the bigger world. It's about God. We're here for God. That's the first thing. And then he says, may your kingdom come. That's what he teaches next. For his name to be hallowed, for God's name to be set apart as holy, what do we pray? We pray for our neighbors, for our family. We pray for others, that they may be brought out of Satan's kingdom and brought into Christ's kingdom. Oh yeah, we pray for good things for them, but that's, We pray that God may bring them out of Satan's kingdom and into Christ's kingdom. Your kingdom come. Jesus' ministry is all about that. He came to do what? To make a blind see, to make the deaf hear, to bring the life to the dead, to bring forgiveness of sins, Remember he said, I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven? And exactly that's what he did. In his death, resurrection, and his crowning ascension, you see the overthrow of Satan. And therefore we can pray with that confidence. Lord, may your kingdom come. Even when things don't always look that way around us, God is at work. You'll notice that Christ, just a few verses before, he says to the church, to his disciples, pray the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest. Lord, we long for the reign of the evil one to be overthrown. We long for Satan to be totally overthrown. And so we pray, rule us Lord by your word and spirit. so that we may more and more submit to you. Destroy the devil's work so completely so that you may be all in all." Wow, what a God-centered prayer. That's our need, to pray, to see God's name being hallowed, to see his kingdom advance in our world, that his kingdom may continue to grow. And finally, Jesus says, your will be done on earth as in heaven. You know, at times, we ask God to do something for us, or we ask for something, but we want God to be our servant, and we want Him to carry out our wills, right? It's very natural to us. That's part of the sinful nature we have to struggle against. Remember Jonah, the pouting prophet? He didn't get his way, and he pouted. Oh, it's so easy to do that. We pout and pout until we get our way. But you know, when we rest in the Lord, we submit to him by faith, and then we come to realize, it's probably good that God didn't give me what I wanted right now, because it probably would harm me. It would probably be very dangerous for me. God knows best. Or you can say, Father knows best. Father always knows best. in the family situation too. Sometimes a father says to his child, no son, there's always a reason. There's always a good reason. Always, but we know with a heavenly father, there's always a good reason. Always. Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane prayed, knowing he must drink the cup, the full cup of God's judgment. for the sins of his people, whom he came to save. What did he pray? Father, see that? Father, if it is your will, Jesus struggled with that. He wanted, if it's your will, take this cup away from me. It was heavy. It was the sins of the whole world being put upon him. And yet he says, not my will, Lord, but your will be done. He received strength from his father to obey. And you know, the beautiful thing is he obeyed, and the beautiful result is our salvation. He was thinking about his father, first of all, and look who receives the blessing, all the others. And He put Himself as a servant of servants. He gave Himself up for that. You know, in His strength, we can also carry out the will of the Heavenly Father. May His will be done. And you know, when his will is done, what happens? His kingdom comes. And when his kingdom comes, what happens? His name is hallowed. You can almost work those petitions backwards and you see, wow, that's paradise. That's the way it was in the garden when men walked and talked in fellowship with God, talking and walking with him. That's what we pray for in all its glory. But now Jesus says, okay, let's talk about you now. we're gonna talk about what you can pray for. And you can pray for everything. These petitions here, four, five, and six, they cover everything. Can you think of a petition here in your life that's not covered by this, right? Everything is covered and it's divided into three. He teaches us to pray now concerning ourselves. But notice this, he teaches us to pray concerning ourselves so that his name may be hallowed. that his kingdom may come, that his will may be done. It's not divorced from those three. It serves, anything we pray for for ourselves ought to serve that greater purpose. Because where do we find our joy? It's in God. Where do we find life? It's in God. To live apart from God is death. And so if we wish to live the fullest of life, We pray that we may, in all our daily needs, use it for the service of God and His kingdom. So he teaches us to pray for daily bread, forgiveness of sins, and deliverance from Satan and temptations. Notice the first one here. Give us this day our daily bread. Jesus wants us to pray for all the things we need to make it through the day. And you feel free, we may feel totally free. Anything, everything that we need for the day. Food, clothing, shelter. There's nothing where God says, you know, don't ask that, unless it's something that's totally against scripture, but we have the word of God to guide us on how we should pray. But we can ask for anything in the confines of God's word. And so we depend on him for our daily needs. Sometimes we want things, but God knows we don't need them. Remember Jesus again? Here you see his example. With every petition, you see Christ showing his own example. Remember the feeding of the 5,000? He shows his dependence on the Father, and he recognizes that it's from the hand of the Father that bread comes. What does he do? He takes those five loaves, and the first thing he does is he gives thanks. Well, that's a good practice for families and for us as persons when we eat our meals. What a good example. It reminds us that we're dependent on the Lord and we give thanks before we eat that first spoonful or that first bite, giving thanks to the Lord. After he gave thanks, then he distributed the bread to the disciples for them to distribute. But you notice here, the fact that Jesus multiplies the bread shows that he is able to provide for all our needs. He multiplied it, and so he can supply for all our daily needs. Jesus says, don't worry about your life, what you'll eat, what you will drink, what you will wear, or what you will put on. Jesus teach us to pray for what we need, but notice, in order to serve him and his kingdom, that his name may be hallowed, his kingdom may come, that his will may be done. Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us as Jesus. What's that mean? How do we belong to Jesus? We belong to Jesus' body and soul. Notice how Jesus teaches us to pray? He teaches us to pray for our physical needs, our body, and now he teaches us to pray for our spiritual needs. Souls. As the disciples, we learn to forgive others. Why? Can you imagine? God has forgiven you. All that sin, that insurmountable debt that you have with God, that I have with God, he's forgiven all of that. It's a mountain, as high as Mount Everest. Wow, knowing that, God will open the heart so that we can learn to forgive one another. It takes learning. That's what Jesus teaches us here. Sometimes it takes a long time to forgive. We learn, we pray, God is so patient, but yet nonetheless, we learn to forgive. One writer put it this way. He says, a person who forgives Okay, it's like an outstretched hand by which we grasp God's forgiveness, right? A forgiving spirit, say that again. Forgiving spirit is an outstretched hand by which we grasp God's forgiveness. When we have his forgiveness, we're grasping it, it's open. It shows that it's gonna be open, at least in learning to forgive one another. He shows the opposite. When the hand is closed tightly into a fist, we have no room to receive God's forgiveness. When our fist towards another brother or sister in Christ, our hearts are not open to receive God's forgiveness. And so the Lord here is a good teacher. He teaches us to pray. And notice Christ himself, when he prayed on the cross, the sinless, innocent one, and what did he do? He prayed for his mockers, the people who spit on him, hit him, scourged him with whips. What did he pray from the cross? Father, forgive them. Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. These petitions for bread, and forgiveness are so wonderful because when we practice them, it opens the future for us. We're not living in the past, right? Jesus does not want us weighed down by anxiety about bread for tomorrow. He doesn't want us to be weighed down by unforgiven burdens from the past. He wants us to see the future open before us because it's a glorious future. It's a new creation for God's people. to be for believers in Jesus Christ. You know, to be forgiven by God in Christ for all your sins sets you free, sets you free to serve in his kingdom. And finally, Jesus teaches, and do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. It's a final petition. Boy, I'm set free to serve, but boy, there's gonna be a lot of temptations in the way, and I have to fight daily against my sinful nature. And Jesus teaches us to pray that we may be kept from temptation. Lord, keep us away from temptation. Why? Because I'm so strong? No, because I'm so weak. Because I can easily be captivated by those temptations and fall into it. We're dealing with Satan here. So Lord, spare us. And should we enter temptation, we pray that you would provide for us a way of escape, right? 1 Corinthians 12, 13, or 10, 13. Lord, deliver us, deliver us from the evil one. If there's one man who we might think had no need of prayer against temptation, it would be Jesus, right? The divine son of God, the one sinless man since Adam's fall. Yet he prayed, and he prayed vehemently. Hebrews 2 says he prayed with tears, with great tears, And he cried out that the Lord might remove that cup from him. And yet, he says, your will be done. The devil tempted him, and yet through prayer, he overcame the evil one. Clearly, plainly, our Lord did not fail in his testing. because he did not fail in his praying, because he did not want to fail in saving us, his people, God's people. In temptation, we pray in the strength of Christ. Too weak we are, too sinful to stand on our own. We need to pray and depend upon God's word, upon his spirit, moment by moment by moment, that the Lord may give us the strength to overcome those things that challenge us to do the wrong things, we need his grace to overcome, to spare us from those things. Well, may we be blessed in Jesus' teaching on prayer. And you know what Jesus wants from us? He wants us to believe that these words are really true. He wants us to take it to heart. And the beautiful thing is he gives the grace to take these things to heart. And God is so patient because he knows maybe we're only this far in the beginning of our obedience. We got this far to go, but nonetheless, there's that beginning. Lord, help me to stop thinking only about myself. Sorry for my selfishness. Help me to think about you, that's why you made me, to think about you and your glory. Yeah, you know, God gives us grace in Christ to put all these things into practice. Jesus teaches us prayer as an outline for us so that we may fill it out with our own words. Simple, brief, comprehensive, it covers everything, every need relating to God, not saying God has needs, but in terms of our need of God having his name hallowed, his kingdom to come, his will to be done. The blessings are many. I'll give four, three. Beautiful thing is when we take this prayer to heart, we grow and we mature in the Christian life, in our prayer life. As a matter of fact, we grow in the likeness of Christ. That's number one. Two, the amazing thing is when we pray this way, we also grow in our stability, right? Anxiety over time lessens. We grow in confidence. We grow in trust because we may come to know Father always knows best. He always knows best, especially when we pray in the light of the first three petitions that he taught us to pray. He knows best. The other thing is, we grow in our stability, we grow in confidence when we pray for others. When we pray for others, you begin to see, wow, God does answer prayers. When it's just ourselves, it's just a very tiny little world. We start praying for other people, and we see God answering their prayers, saying, wow, this is a prayer answering God. And that stirs up our confidence. We grow in confidence. We grow in our trust in the Lord. Everything's okay. Everything's good. Father always knows best. And finally, this is a, you talk about a mission-minded prayer. This is it. People talk about having mission-minded prayers. This is one of the greatest missionary-minded prayers ever charted or recorded in scripture, the Lord's Prayer. And you know, the beautiful thing is we can chart the adventures of the kingdom, the growth of the church in the world globally. We talk about when God is in the center, we can talk about being truly global. Not the global stuff that you hear about in the world. That's very man-centered. But with God in the center, we are globally minded. We are mission minded. By the way, did you know that the church in China continues to grow by leaps and bounds, even as people are being tortured and being thrown into prison? That's something. We become Christian news minded. We come to see what God is doing throughout the world. Christians of all people are interested in the most, really, what God is doing in the world through the gospel, through the word of God. True prayer, you could say, begins with a vision of God. He's the center. And in the midst of that, we ask him to supply our needs so that his vision can continue, the vision of God and his kingdom may continue in our world. The beautiful thing is, in Christ, we, come out of babyhood, right? Hold me, touch me, look at me. We grow out of that. We grow. And now we see a new creation. We participate in a new creation and see a way bigger world. God is good. God is great. As scripture says, If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. All things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new. Amen.