Lenten Mid-week 2 - The Our Father Prayer

Second Mid-Week Service
The Our Father and the Sacrament
in the Passion of Christ
Matthew 6:5-14

Matthew 6:5-14 (ESV)

5 “And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. 6 But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. 7 “And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. 9 Pray then like this: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. 10 Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. 11 Give us this day our daily bread, 12 and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. 14 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you,

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Lenten Sermon Series:
The Our Father and the Sacrament
in the Passion of Christ (Matthew 6:1-15)

The recollection of Christ’s passion has begun.  From Ash Wednesday to Good Friday, it is Lent. Pray, for Christ has prayed to His Father for you.  Receive the Sacrament, for Jesus went to the cross as His father willed Him to do this, for you.  It is the time of Lent, Jesus Christ is sacrificed by Our Father, in remembrance of Christ Our Father would do this, for you. 

When thinking about Our Father the strongest context of these words are that we use them in prayer.  Fold your hands, bow your head, let us pray together, “Our Father.”  So we may well ask, ‘How’s your prayer life?’  Prayer is the heartbeat of a Christian. Prayer can be a measurement of our faith, that is to say, the more we pray reveals a stronger faith, and the less we pray reveals a weaker faith. And truth be told our prayer life is at best is probably inconsistent. I know there are times in my life that I pray more than other times. It is easy to neglect prayer. We get so busy, too busy. Perhaps we forget how dependent we are on God. Or we think we are too sinful. But prayer is an important part of our lives. Our Lord Jesus Christ prayed a lot. And He not only taught a lot about prayer but even gave His apostles and to us the model of prayer.  And so the prayer Jesus gave the church, “The Lord’s Prayer”, will be our focus for the next five weeks.  Jesus will teach us once again about prayer and so we begin with:

The first thing Jesus teaches us, is to pray to God as if He is our loving Father.  Why?  Because He is our loving Father. As our Father He is the one who has created us. He created the human race, the first man and the first woman, Adam and Eve. And He is still the one who creates people as He told that first couple to be fruitful and multiply. It was God who formed us in the womb of our mothers. But God is especially our Father in Jesus Christ. For only in Jesus Christ can we truly know God as "Our Father"; only in Jesus Christ can we know how much God truly loves us.

But even the very first people God created Adam and Eve turned from God and looked to their own reason and intellect in resistance to God’s Word and that is sin.  And that sin was much more than that of rebellious children acting out against their Father, it was pure evil sin before God.  Interestingly, before God in biblical terms would mean, ‘be before His face.’  They sinned right to the face of their loving Father.  But lest we point at those bad first people way back when, we do sin the same as they did, and every sin of ours is right before the face of our Father too.  Yet in the face of our sin, God still loves those whom acknowledge their sin and repent.

And how much does God love us? That’s answered by the cross. That’s how much God loves—He gave his own Son into death so that when we believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, His Father then becomes our Father who is in heaven.

But what does it mean that our Father is in heaven? What is heaven? It is the dwelling of God. Where is heaven? It is everywhere because God is everywhere….indeed, he dwells even beyond the edges of the universe. So with these words "who art in heaven" Jesus is teaching us that God is different from us, higher than us, greater than us and more powerful than us. That’s why we pray to Him. He helps us. For although we are bound to this earth, our Father is in heaven, and all things are possible with Him.

And so we call upon God whose Name is to be hallowed.  And how do we hallow Our Father?  Our Father’s Name is to be holy among us by correctly teaching His Word and not tolerating the distortion of His Word. As God’s children we are to be concerned about right doctrine and Godly teaching. We treat God’s Name as holy when we accurately pass His Word on to others. This does not reflect mean spiritedness in our insistence of the precise reference to His Word, rather is shows to all that His Word is precious to us, it means something.  To teach God’s word incorrectly is to dishonor our heavenly Father because we would be saying things that He doesn’t say. We would be misrepresenting and denying who our God is. To throw away what scripture says by calling it doctrine is to throw away the description of God’s will which He gives to us.  And that is exactly where Christian critics go when they want to make a farce of Christians, but hey, we set them up, they take us down.

Rather the importance of God’s Word cannot be understated.  For when Jesus came into the world the Father told him what to say and He said it exactly the way to say it as He says in John’s gospel: "these words are not my own; they belong to the Father who sent me." Not even Jesus changed the Word of the Father and His Word should not be changed among us either. So then when we pray "hallowed be thy Name" we are praying for the pure, correct, accurate word of the Father to be preached and taught in our midst.

How we live will show whether God’s Name is holy among us or not. For how we live will either bring honor to our father or dishonor. We bring shame to God’s Name by how we live and so we pray "hallowed be thy Name" --may your name be holy among us in how we live and by how we speak.

"Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy Name." Isn’t it amazing that we sinful human beings who are but specks in the universe, who are here on this earth for but a short time and then gone….can pray to the creator of the universe, the one who is in heaven as "our heavenly Father"? We should never think that such a wonderful privilege is due to our goodness or worthiness, we are just poor miserable sinners one and all. Thanks be to God that His Word, Jesus Christ taught us to pray returning thanks for all that He has done for us.  Thanks be to God that He gave us Jesus Christ to die for us, that we may eternally be in the hallowed presence of Our Father who art in heaven. Amen.

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