Well, good morning, brothers and sisters. Our reading this morning is from Matthew chapter six. So if you want to turn in your Bibles there, or you can see it on the screen behind me. Matthew chapter 6 says this, beginning in verse 9, 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." Let's pray together. Our Father, we do come before you this morning humbled by your mercy and your grace, humbled by what you have done for us through your Son, Jesus Christ. Lord, we are thankful to you that you love us with such great love that you were willing to send your own son to take our place. We thank you, our Father, that you, in your holiness, have seen fit to redeem us and to cleanse us by the blood of your own Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior. And so, Lord, as we pray this morning and look to your word, we pray that you would open our hearts to hear and to understand and to know and to grow and to become more and more like your Son, our Savior. Help us this morning as we look at these words and consider how we are to pray, Lord, that you would help us to bow our heads before you in humility, coming to you through the grace and the power and the salvation that comes only through Jesus and by the power and the work of your Holy Spirit. and by your good revelation to us through your word. And so as we take up this text this morning, pray for Ryan, that you give him clarity of mind and boldness in speech, that he would bring to us your word and teach us. Lord, help us all to understand and to know. Help us to forgive. Help us to love those around us. Help us to walk mindful of the forgiveness which we have received and to pour out that love then upon each other and upon the world and to show what it means to be forgiven of our sins. our great and immense sins. Lord, you have forgiven us, you have cleansed us, and you've made us whole, so we pray that you would help us and keep us from temptation. Lord, our hearts are indeed wicked and deceitful and desirous of things that bring shame to you and shame to us, and so we pray that you would work in our hearts and keep us from the temptations of this world and of our hearts and of our flesh, and that we would stand and honor and love and obey Jesus Christ, our Lord, in whose name we pray this morning. Amen. Thanks, Rocky. If you go into a lot of churches and that prayer was just read, a lot of people would start saying it. That's the tradition I grew up in. Whenever the Lord's prayer was said, it would be repeated. But obviously, that's not our tradition here. World Magazine ran an interview a couple of months ago with Pastor Tim Keller who pastored Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan for 28 years. And they asked him a series of questions just on his life and ministry and culture and stuff like that. But the very last question they asked him was if he could look back on his time in ministry, if he would have done anything different. And here was Keller's response. He said, absolutely. I would have prayed more, no question. I think Billy Graham was also asked at one point in his ministry if he could wind the clock back, if he would have done anything different. And he said essentially the same thing. If he'd go back, he would have preached less and prayed more. So I don't know if that's just the standard answer you get when you come to the end of your ministry. You say, I wish I would have prayed more. But honestly, if you could ask any of us, if we could do something different, our spiritual lives, a lot of us would say, yeah, I wish we could have prayed more. As we come to Jesus' teaching on prayer, he doesn't say you need to pray more. This isn't about challenging how much or how little we pray. Which, you know, Jesus is instructing his disciples and he doesn't say, hey guys, by the way, I pull some all-nighters in prayer and this is what I'm going to expect from you guys. But Jesus does show us how to pray. He's not talking about how long you should pray. He doesn't put an hour or minute. restriction on this, but he is teaching disciples how to pray. So as we approach this text today, it's not about necessarily praying more, or regret for not having prayed enough, but it is about praying for the right things. Or we can say the Lord's Prayer is about aiming at the right target in prayer. Now just out of curiosity, how many of you have grown up or grew up in a church tradition where part of the tradition was reciting the Lord's Prayer on a Sunday? So, wow, that's a real small minority. Catholic, Lutheran and some other traditions. I imagine those of you who raised your hand, you are catechized and learned the Lord's Prayer through this. That was my experience. I knew the Lord's Prayer from a young, young age. I could recite it. I could say it quickly. There was almost kind of a race to see how quick I could finish it. But it wasn't from the heart. And there are a lot of people who throughout church history have turned this prayer into a mechanical tradition that just gets repeated. And if you were here for Sunday school, Bob Stacey gave us a good church history lesson with Martin Luther. How Martin Luther who was relying on his good works and being a good monk. He would climb the stairs, 90 some stairs. On every stair, on every step of the, you would have to ask Bob for the details of the location and what the stairs are called. Trying to earn a little bit extra merit before the Lord. Some have really twisted this and said if I want to get prayer off my checklist, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to pray the Our Father. Or sometimes even athletes or in competition they'll pray kind of a good luck prayer and they'll recite this because this is the prayer they know. But that is so far from the Lord Jesus' intention of how this prayer is to be used. He doesn't give this prayer to his disciples so they can just mechanically repeat it, kind of go through the motions. Jesus does instruct his disciples on how to pray. Verse nine, pray then like this. There's a parallel passage in Luke chapter 11, if you want to look at that at some point. And there are different situations, but we know that part of Jesus' teaching as he was going from place to place, town to town, he probably would have taught people and his disciples, this is how you should pray. Use this framework. So we're going to look this morning at the framework that Jesus gives for praying. Last week we saw the foundation. And the foundation was essentially prayer can't be hypocritical. It's not a programmatic thing. It's not a pragmatic thing. It's communion with God the Father. If I could summarize the foundation of prayer, that's what it is. This week we're looking at the framework. And the framework essentially is God's fame and the disciples flourishing as we look at this prayer. Now whether we realize it or not, we all have a framework when we pray. And you might say, you know, when I pray, it's just me talking to God. There's no framework, there's no structure, but there really is, even if your prayers are very spontaneous and very from the heart extemporaneous, you do have a structure. And the structure is built on what is important to you. That's what structures our prayers. We pray, whether you use a list or whether it's just whatever comes to mind or however you feel, everybody has a framework for how they pray. And this brings us to a vital lesson in our discipleship. And that's this, what should drive our discipleship is not what's important to us, but what's important to the Lord Jesus. And that's why we should listen to him when he instructs us on how we should pray. Again, without turning this into a memorize this prayer and just say it mechanically, but what can we learn about the framework that Jesus, what can we learn about the importance of prayer from hearing how Jesus taught his disciples on how to pray? And so we're gonna look at his framework and it begins by our father. In verse nine, our father, And the interesting thing is, out of all of the titles that Jesus could have chosen to teach us how to pray, and there's a lot of titles for the Lord. I mean, you could go with the Lord, the covenant name, Yahweh, that every Jewish person would have known. This is how we relate to God by calling on His name. or sovereign Lord, or Lord of hosts, or most high. And actually a lot of Jewish prayers have these attributes built into them because they did have a very high view of God, his transcendence. But Jesus doesn't choose one of those words, doesn't choose one of those titles as he teaches us how to pray. Instead, he uses the simple Father. It's the way Jesus prayed, isn't it? We see him praying, Abba, Father. It opens up this whole prayer. As we open up the door, you picture you going into your closet. As you open up the door, the first thing that comes to mind is Jesus helps us to see God in his nearness and love. It helps us to see this, that Jesus isn't just teaching us a mere ritual and prayer, but how prayer is highly relational, highly personal. Just as you, Some of you who have a good relationship with your father are able to talk to your father knowing that he cares, knowing that he's gonna provide wisdom and direction. He's gonna, in one sense, shepherd you if he's a good father. That's how Jesus wants us to approach the Lord in prayer. Showing us that prayer, as we enter into it, it is very personal and God is highly approachable. So we draw near to God in prayer. Now when it comes to breaking this prayer down, we do enter into it by seeing God as Father. But how do we dice up the petitions? How do we sort it all out? Well, it could either be six or seven different petitions, depending on if you're Reformed or Catholic interpretation of how the prayer comes about. Catholic, they kind of divide over six or seven petitions. It really doesn't matter though. It's not going to change anything on how we actually pray. Broadly, we see these two themes emerge as we walk through this prayer. We are going to cover the whole prayer today. We're gonna see the theme of God's glory. That's the first thing we notice in this prayer. This prayer teaches us that it's very important to God that we pray with an eye on his glory. Secondly, we also see that prayer is praying for our good. And again, just look again at verse nine, it is prayer to our father. Although this prayer is often used individually, it's also a prayer for all of God's people, all who are children of God. In one sense, this is a corporate aspect of this prayer where, again, there's a danger in us all just reciting a prayer every week, but this is a shared prayer, a prayer that we know that our other brothers and sisters should be praying along these petitions so that there's kind of an essential unity in our prayer that we know as Christ's people, we are praying along the same lines. So again, these two broad themes of the framework, God's glory and our good, or His fame and our flourishing. So let's look first at his fame in verses 9 and 10. Now again, this may be shocking to us because life is usually all about us, and we would think that our needs come at the front door of this prayer, but Jesus says, no. The first petition of this prayer, and this humbles us, has nothing to do with us. has nothing to do with our needs being met here. It's all about God. Because we are at our best praying whenever our hearts are focused on his fame and his glory. Not just giving lip service to that, but that truly being the posture of our heart. Hallowed be your name. Now that is a very, hallowed is a very archaic term that is stuck because Christians, English speaking Christians for centuries have learned the prayer this way. So even the more modern contemporary Bible translations haven't wanted to deviate because it may sound like almost heretical, but it's probably not the best way to put it in English. I would encourage you, if you have the ESV, look down at the footnote. This petition means let your name be kept holy or let your name be treated with reverence. That's what Hallowed Be Your Name means. And so what does this look like? I think there's a couple of aspects. As God's people pray that His name would be regarded as holy, first of all, it means that we adore God's name in worship, in our heart. As we worship God, that our heart's orientation is really to honor His name. That's what happens on a Sunday morning, but worship isn't just restricted to the one hour on Sunday morning. It's having a heart that is Godward, that is always wanting to be a worshipful and kind of a worshipful state of mind. I think that's one way we reverence God's name 24-7. Secondly, it's protecting His name and honor in our conversations, in our words. When we speak about God, that we do so in a way that is reverent, that we make sure that our conversation has an aspect of honor to it because we are representatives, we are ambassadors for Christ. And so it's what happens in our heart, it also is what happens through our words, and also living faithfully so that the name of Christ will not be dishonored through our actions. I think this all falls under the idea of praying for God's name to be kept holy, his name to be treated with reverence because depending on how we live before him, shows whether we truly reverence the name of God, or if it's just in, we are one sense in Christians in name only, or if it's truly a matter of our heart. But next, Jesus tells us to focus, and these first three are overlapping in a sense. There's an overlap, they're kind of intertwined. The second is about God's kingdom. I'm going to keep going back unless I look down at my Bible. I'll keep going back to the thy kingdom come. I'll go back to the original King James or whatever more archaic translation I learned it in. There is a broad and narrow sense to this. Broadly this is a prayer for God's kingdom for his rule to be more manifest in the world. That his glory indeed fills the earth. Again if you were here for Sunday school, you would know this. You see that in Habakkuk, that even when God raises up one nation and pulls down another, when he does all this, he has a purpose, even though we can't see this purpose, but that God is somehow mysteriously, sometimes in our eyes, invisibly, he is doing things for the purpose of expanding his kingdom and expanding his glory. And so we as Christians pray that. As God works, as He shakes things up in the nations, that He is doing it for the sake of His kingdom advancing. And we just gotta trust Him whenever He's doing something, just like the Israelites had to trust Him when God was doing something that seemed very surprising. That's called faith. But narrowly, it's God's kingdom manifest in the church. As the church grows in stability and health and purity, And this is a way that we see God's kingdom, God's kingdom, his rule through his son, over his people. We see this, so we're praying it. Now, very practically, because sometimes when we speak in terms of God's kingdom, and it seems kind of general, I think practically, this means we're praying to see more people converted. We're praying That God does a work among the nations of saving peoples, some who their people group, their tribe isn't even calling on his name right now. So we're praying for the world in this sense that God's drawing worshipers from every tribe, tongue, and nation. And also that more and more believers are being conformed to the image of Christ. So conversion and conformity are two aspects of praying that God's kingdom will come. And the heart of this is repentance. Jesus said about his kingdom, his message, his preaching was centered on the kingdom. In Matthew 4.17... In other words when we're praying for repentance, for people to repent, for our own repentance, I think that comes under the umbrella of praying for God's kingdom. If you're praying, you may say, well, I don't pray for God's kingdom specifically. But if on your prayer list, you are praying for people to be saved, for people to be sanctified, including yourself, if you're praying for more deep repentance, in one sense, you are praying kingdom minded themes. So you don't have to do the exact wording, but to know what's in the heart of this prayer. And then thirdly, we see God's will as part of this, his fame, God's will on earth as it is in heaven, verse 10. Now, as we think of heaven, what comes to mind when you hear heaven? Is it just the clouds where the angels are playing on harps? Well, that's just a distorted view of heaven. Heaven is where God's perfect will is always done. That's heaven. Where there is no single act of rebellion. That's heaven. It's a world of, I'll steal the title of Jonathan Edwards sermon. It's a world of perfect love. That's heaven. There will be no besetting sins of anger in heaven. There's gonna be no unchecked lust in heaven. There's gonna be no lust in heaven. There's gonna be no acts of revenge in heaven. There's going to be no broken relationships in heaven. There's going to be no divorces in heaven. There's going to be no unforgiveness in heaven. How many of you want to go to heaven? Amen, we got some amens. Actually this is so sweet. A couple of Wednesday nights ago Pastor Dennis was up here and started to talk about heaven. And he's getting excited and doing the pulpit rock and Pastor Dennis does it. He's not here this morning so I can do this. And he starts talking about heaven and he called out somebody in the congregation. He said, you ready? And she responded back, let's go. And if we suffer enough and we see the darkness of our hearts enough, it is let's go. Let's go. Why? Because heaven is this place where God's perfect will is being done. But just again, I'm referencing our Sunday school this morning. It's not as if we just push the pause button on everything until we get to heaven. We are called on this earth to live out heaven's priorities. To live the character of what we are going to be someday right now. That's what the Sermon on the Mount is about. It's about getting as much of our eternal future into our hearts right now. So that we are truly demonstrating we are a new creation. That's what heaven is about. And so we know that God's will is, according to Romans 12, his good, pleasing, and perfect will. So when we pray about God's will, I can't count how many times somebody has asked me to pray that God's will would be done. And always happy to do this. And I've asked prayer for these things. But often it is, there's a major career decision. Or there is, do I buy this house and sell my house? Or is this the person I'm to marry? It's all these kind of life situation things that are limited to this space and time on this earth. Good things to pray for. I'm not negating any of that. But our praying for God's will to be done is far beyond just praying that God would give me the right career, the right person to marry, the right house to buy. I mean, those are very temporal things. They matter, but they're very temporal. In one sense, we are praying for God's will to be done. That the path that we walk every day is gonna be a path that is good, pleasing and perfect as we are being fit for heaven, as our hearts are being more conformed to Christ and wanting to be with Him for eternity. Now, as we sum up these three petitions that are centered on God's fame, it's interesting, I find it interesting that if you look at all of the New Testament prayers, let's take for example, all the prayers from Paul's letters, All of those prayers, there's not one time where Paul, the apostle, just verbatim, all of a sudden writes the Lord's Prayer out. You don't see it. You don't see this prayer just repeated in the New Testament. But that doesn't mean that they weren't praying along these lines. Matter of fact, if we look at one prayer from Ephesians 3, this is the end of a prayer. It's the final words. Paul was a wordy guy. So here's the end of Ephesians 3 as Paul is praying for the church at Ephesus. Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or think. According to the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations forever and ever. Amen. You see with the bull's eye, see the target of that prayer? God's glory. The prayer of Jesus, which some have called not the Lord's prayer, but the disciple's prayer, which I think is fitting. He starts it off with God's glory, his fame. Paul ends that prayer with God's glory and his fame. Paul begins Ephesians chapter one with a focus on God's glory. But here's the point, brothers and sisters, when it comes to prayer, what needs to be the bullseye, what needs to be the target that we're aiming at is God's glory, his fame. And we need to be taught this. because that's not often where our self-focused hearts go to first. But this is prayer. Let me just quote John Calvin for you, where he says, God's majesty deserves to come before all other considerations. If we truly believe that God is so majestic and holy as he truly is, then his glory, his majesty is deserving of first place in our prayers. So let's make sure it's not just a formality that we say, our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, or to him be the glory, but we truly mean it because we truly know how deserving he is. So that is how we start with his fame. Now we can move on to our flourishing, verses 11 to 15. Notice that the emphasis shifts. If you look at this prayer just grammatically, the first few petitions are all yours, yours, yours, speaking of God. The second part of this prayer, the petitions are us, us, us, our needs as disciples. And so the emphasis shifts to us, our flourishing or our good. And the fact that Jesus tells us to pray for things that are actually for our good means this, that Jesus wants us to flourish. Now that's not prosperity gospel. This isn't, hey, whatever you want, God, just pray it and God will give it to you. But there is an aspect of flourishing for the sake of his glory. We're going to see three essential needs. Notice these are essential needs. The first is a need of provision. Verse 11. Give us this day our daily bread. Or there's a nuance in the wording. It could be give us our bread for tomorrow. Either way it's not praying for the next six months. Not praying out for the next five years. This is pretty immediate provision. As much as I love learning from them, sometimes they were a little skeptical of things that were actually physical and present. They tend to be more ascetic and just didn't have, they didn't have an appreciation sometimes for the here and now. And so they thought there's no way this could be talking about your actual food and your bread. It has to be either the word of God or it has to be referring to communion. But I don't think that's how the average Galilean peasant who's listening to Jesus heard this. I think they understood. He's saying, pray to God for my physical needs. the food that I need. A lot of these men were day laborers, meaning they worked each day and got paid that day and fed their family that day. That's a world removed from where we live, but that's the reality. The reality is, friends, is that so much of church history, I mean, throughout church history and even throughout the world, so many Christians are really dirt poor. And we're the exception of how affluent, how much we have. All you have to do is just start traveling throughout the country, go to some third world places where there are Christians, you see they're dirt poor. And this isn't just limited to that. I mean, there are even some of you who you own a business and you count on, it's week by week or even day by day, business coming through. Sometimes we go through seasons where we're really stretched thin. Christians need to have a priority of being sacrificial and generous, meaning we give away a good chunk of our income through tithes, offerings, generosities, benevolence. That's gonna make our budget smaller. and may require more faith and more stretching. Lord, we really need you to come through because we're faithful in giving. For some, they have gotten rid of everything. They've sold all their earthly goods. My library, which isn't massive in my church study, a bunch of books are books that I bought from graduate school, seminary, college. But there was one time this pastor from my previous community I lived in, he went on the mission field and sold all of his books for a dollar. And so that's how I got like half of my library, because he was getting rid of all of the things that he could not take. And again, there are some who go without, they sell their possessions, they go on the mission field, they do faith raising support. So you can see how, I mean, this catches a lot of situations that Christians can find them in. But there's just a simplicity here and this aspect, this also challenges us because we're gonna see in lessons ahead, we're not supposed to borrow worry from tomorrow. We're supposed to live in one sense, day by day, just how God taught the Israelites to live. Exodus 16, there's maybe an allusion to God providing the manna. How did God provide the manna? He didn't just dump six months on the Israelites and say, hey, you guys will be good. Start praying to me five and a half months through that supply and boom, send it again. No, every day fresh manna came down. whenever it's a daily looking to the Lord. Now, I don't think this is restricted to just praying for your food. I mean, it involves a lot of things. It does involve stable employment, praying for that, praying for your housing, praying for transportation. I mean, there's a lot of things. Our world is more complex than the world that the audience listening to Jesus lived in, in the sense of there's more things that cost a lot. But you get the point that praying for our physical needs is something important and it causes us to flourish because then we can be generous, then we can actually help. So this isn't just a laid back, hey, I'm not gonna work, I'm just gonna pray for God to provide. This is praying for meaningful, skillful labor, ability to earn income, and trusting that God will provide. And we also need to be aware as we pray for this that this is a prayer for our needs, not our greeds. Again, living in America, even though things are getting a lot more expensive, we're still very affluent. We can buy a lot of stuff. This is a prayer for things that we need. We need to remember the vital lesson of contentment. 1 Timothy 6, 6-8. but godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world and we can take nothing out of the world. But if we have food and clothing with these, we will be content." Again, it's about praying that God comes through with food, clothing, employment, housing, transportation, and to be content when God brings those things into our lives. The second need, In order to flourish is a need of forgiveness. Now we can flourish physically with food on the table. We will die spiritually and eternally unless we have forgiveness. There are people throughout this world that are well fed. but they're not gonna flourish because they don't have forgiveness. And so note how Jesus defines sin here when he teaches us to pray about our sin and forgive us our debts. Debt, that's the metaphor that Jesus uses. If you compare this with the Luke passage, in Luke, he teaches it just as sin, but here in Matthew, it's labeled as debt. That helps to put sin in a right perspective, doesn't it? It makes sense. What do we owe God this morning? What does every single person alive owe God? Absolute love, heart, soul, mind, and strength, absolute obedience, and absolute worship. That's what we owe God. No exceptions. If you are breathing, you owe God absolute love, absolute obedience, and absolute worship. Whenever we fail at any of those, there is a massive withdrawal. Let's just take worship, let's just take one. Now you all, this is kind of like the preaching to the choir, but just to show how much of a debt humanity is in before a holy God. Humans owe God absolute worship. Now, Broad River Road and I-26 can get really jammed up a lot of days, a lot of times during the day. There's times, obviously rush hour, but on a Saturday or even in the evening after you could tell people are kind of transitioning from work to their place they go to eat. Those roads can get really jammed up. They're never jammed up on a Sunday morning. I've never gotten stuck in traffic on my way to church here on Sunday. It's a massive withdrawal. People who, and we need to pray. These are our neighbors. These are the people that we need to witness to, but there's just no absolute desire to worship God this morning. Tons of other things are on the list that are way more important than God. But how about obedience? Have we offered up to God absolute obedience in the last 24 hours? Is there any command that you broke? Absolute love. Can we say that we love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength? There's some massive withdrawals here that put us in debt. Now let's say you needed to borrow $5 from somebody, from me. It's not going to get you much, right. $5 isn't going to go a long way today. But I may lend it to you and more than likely I would totally forget. $5 isn't a whole lot. But let's say that your need was more pressing and bigger, and so you needed several thousand dollars, and you had a generous family member or friend who said, I'll loan you these couple thousand dollars for whatever the need was. Now, based off of that larger debt, that person's less likely to forget that debt. I might forget $5 debt, but I'm not gonna forget somebody who owes me a couple thousand dollars. So small debts can be easily forgotten, but large debts can't. They can only be forgiven. Let's say that you come to that person and say, I really would love to pay you back, but there's no way. I got this going on and there's no way that I can actually pay that back. And that generous person says, that's okay. I have extra money in my account. It'll cover it. Debt's forgiven. And there's a freedom that rolls off of you. A small debt can be forgotten. A large debt is not forgotten, but it can be forgiven. When we think of the debt that we owe before God for not giving him absolute love, absolute obedience, absolute worship, think not in terms of thousands of dollars. Think in terms of trillions of dollars. The current U.S. national debt, according to this morning, is $23.3 trillion. And we may say, that sounds reckless, which it is. To have that much debt, to be buried in that much debt. But before a holy God, our debt is really reckless. And we're not talking about thousands. We are talking about trillions of dollars. We actually can't put a number on it because God's holiness is infinite. So our debt to him is an infinite debt that we owe him. And there is no one at Three Rivers Baptist Church that I know of who could repay billions, let alone trillions of dollars. All we could do is cry out to God for mercy, for forgiveness. which if we kept reading on from the Sermon on the Mount through the Gospel of Matthew, we get to the high point in Matthew's Gospel. Matthew 26, verse 28, before Jesus goes to the cross, he does another lesson with his disciples to show him the true meaning of who he is and what he's about to do. And he takes the cup, he takes the Lord's Supper, the elements, the Passover elements, and he gives this new meaning, this symbolism, when he says, this is my blood of the covenant. which is poured out for many." For what? For the forgiveness of sins. In other words, that when the disciples would then see Jesus bleeding on the cross, when they would see him tortured, when they would see him go through the agony, when they would see him suffering, when they see the blood poured out, that's for my forgiveness. So again, going back to this whole idea of sin as a debt, how would you get out of debt if you owe trillions of dollars? Not by incremental payments. There's no way to have your debt cleared when you owe that much. So before a holy God, how do we get out of debt morally? Because there may be some here today, you are still crushed by your moral debt that you owe before God. And You need to come to grips with that. You need to understand the gravity of that. We live in a very church culture where people easily give lip service to the fact that they say they believe in Jesus, but to truly believe in what he has done for you, you first need to come to grips with how bad your debt really is before him. But there is hope. It's not about just being crushed and overwhelmed by your debt. It's about being set free. So if that's you today, you feel crushed by your debt that you owe to God, there is hope by looking to Jesus, by repenting, by believing, by receiving the forgiveness that comes through his precious blood, costly blood. But it's clear that just asking for forgiveness is not a one and done deal because it's woven into this prayer. Now Jesus has paid it in full. Those who are justified by his blood, God's wrath has been removed, but there is kind of a freshness every day to realizing how we are still sinners and we still need to keep looking back to the cross, back to his finished work. Some suggest that the sermon, that this prayer is at the heart of the sermon on the Mount structurally and forgiveness is really at the center of this prayer here. That's why Jesus goes on to add these two additional verses about the importance of forgiving others. So if that's true, we see that forgiveness is such at the center, you have to understand what Jesus has done in order to forgive us, and not just understand that, but to believe it, embrace it by faith, and have it to be at the core of our life. Now, as you do look at verses 14 and 15, these aren't a separate teaching. This isn't a follow-up to what Jesus is teaching in prayer here. There is a connection. It's a parentheses. It's just added at the end here, or you could say a footnote. And the point is, is that forgiven people forgive. There's a parable that illustrates this if we had time in Matthew 18. That the community of Jesus' disciples, they have to be a forgiving community. Again, maybe it helps us just to think what the Sermon on the Mount is doing. What it's teaching us, it's preparing us for heaven. And just think of heaven a million years from now. You won't be able to hold residence in God's kingdom. And still be hanging on to something that someone did to you in 2022. You know where you will be holding on to stuff that someone did for you in 2022, a million years from now? When you're suffering in agony separated from God and from his people. Forgiven people, they'll forgive, even though it can be sometimes painful, even though sometimes it's suffering massive amounts of wrong and injustice. But if we are gospel people, if we are forgiven people, if we are being fit for that eternal future, then forgiveness has to be a part of us. And finally, as we close out, there is a need of preservation in verse 13. The final petition is that God would preserve his people to the very end, keep them from harm. Of all the petitions, this one is the most difficult. It can almost sound, if you don't understand, if you're just reading it for the first time, that God might actually lead you into temptation sometimes and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil or the evil one. But clearly James 1.13 says, God doesn't tempt you. God doesn't want you to sin. So that can't be what this means. I think this falls under what I'll call traveling mercies. We pray for traveling mercies when we're going on a long road trip or a flight, or when you have teenage drivers in the home, you pray for their traveling mercies. And so this traveling mercy isn't getting on I-20 or 77 or from Atlanta to Chicago flight. This is from this world to the next. And I do think I favor the reading that would not just deliver us from evil, but the evil one, because it gives a great structure to the prayer, a balance. It begins by looking at the greatness of God, the Father, the comfort you find in that. But at the end, it also brings you to another reality. Beware that there is a pursuing enemy. There is a providing, protecting Father, but there's also a pursuing enemy who wants to bring you down. When I worked at this company that rhymes with UPS, I had a supervisor once who would threaten his subordinates by saying, if I go down, you are coming down with me. And I never felt real safe around him. I didn't feel like he had my back. That's the same M.O. that the devil has. He has been cast out. And guess what? He has one objective. That's to bring you all down with him. He wants to see you fall. He doesn't want you to share an eternal joy with the father. And so you do have a father who protects you and he will, he's the one we pray to. This isn't protecting ourselves. It's praying that God would protect us from the evil one. But it does highlight the importance of why we need to continue to pray. And not just occasionally, but daily. As we wrap it up, what we can appreciate with this framework is its simplicity. I love how Jesus teaches in such a simple and pure way. I've tried to memorize some of Paul's prayers before. They're scripture, they're inspired, I get that. They're tough. But you can memorize this. I love that Jesus hasn't added all these unattainable rules to prayer and regulations that would just crush us. No, but draws us in, shows us the simplicity, gives us these practical principles that hit the heart, gives us a framework. We get a simple framework that's meant to engage our hearts so that we can engage God more faithfully in prayer. And it comes from one who's not a silent stone. He's not a wooden thing. That's the idols that the Chaldeans look to, the Babylonians look to in Habakkuk. I pulled that out of the message this morning from Bob. Our Savior is not a silent stone. He's not a wooden thing. He's not dead. He's living and active. So this teaching guiding us in the framework of prayer comes from one. who from his own lips said, take my yoke upon you and learn from me. Learn how to pray for me. For I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls. How do we know if we're really embracing the teaching of Jesus in prayer? Because prayer won't turn into a mere ritual. We won't feel burdened by it, but as we learn how to pray, it'll be freeing and we will truly find rest for our souls. Let's pray. Thank you, Father, that you draw near to us and call us to draw near to you in prayer. I pray that over the last two weeks that in a group this large of various places and spiritual journeys, people's discipleship that you, indeed, by your spirit are working. You'll continue to work, Lord. You'll continue to grow us into the faithful disciples that we need to be. Help us to see the beauty, the privilege, the joy that we can have in prayer, and to be eager to commune with you more. Finding true rest for our souls as we keep on looking to Jesus and clinging to Him by faith. In His name we pray, amen. Yes, we are desperate for Him. He gives us all we need. I invite you to stand. Let's sing this simple chorus as our prayer. This is the air I breathe. This is the air I breathe, your holy presence living in me. This is my daily This is my daily bread Your very word Spoken to me And I I'm desperate for you And I I'm lost without you. Sing the chorus again. And I, I'm desperate for you. And I, I'm lost without you. We have all we need in you, Lord, and for that we bless your name. The Apostle Paul says, oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God, and how unsearchable are his judgments. His paths are beyond tracing out. For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor, or who has ever given to God