One of the things Olivia said she is looking forward to the most is some good connection with the Lord during her ride. It can be many, many miles of just you, your horse, and the open space. There are no phones, no appointments to get to, no crowds of people, and no list of to-dos.
It is the same reason I like to fish and the same reason many of you crave time alone to do things that help center you and restore your sanity.
Deep down inside, we are all aware that a hurried, marginless life is an enemy to healthy minds and hearts.
From the confines of a hurried life, it is very difficult to cultivate a thriving relationship with Jesus.
When a young pastor John Ortberg asked the famous Christian philosopher Dallas Willard what he needed to do to stay spiritually healthy, Willard responded, “You must ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.”
Tyler Stanton, in his book Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools, writes about Michael Zigarelli of Messiah University. Zigarelli conducted a five-year study of twenty thousand Christians in the United States and identified “busyness” as the number one distraction from life with God.
He summarizes his own research with this great conclusion: It may be the case that
(1) Christians are assimilating to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload, which leads to
(2) God becoming more marginalized in Christians’ lives, which leads to
(3) a deteriorating relationship with God, which leads to
(4) Christians becoming even more vulnerable to adopting secular assumptions about how to live, which leads to
(5) more conformity to a culture of busyness, hurry and overload. And then the cycle begins again.
Carl Jung, the Swiss psychiatrist put it a little more succinctly:
“Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil.”
—Carl Jung
Hurry and busyness are the strategy of our enemy, the Devil, to keep us from knowing our Heavenly Father.
Our mission statement here at New Hope reads like this:
We exist to know God and glorify Him by making disciples of Jesus Christ.
Step one is to “Know God.” But the maddening pace of our lives often keeps us from step one. It’s not that we are doing things that are wrong, bad, or immoral. The things that keep us so busy are often “good things.”
The problem is that we are often sacrificing the best for the good. Those things that we fill our lives with, that can be good things, are the very things that are distracting us from the best thing, a deeper walk with Him. We do this because we believe the lie that these are the things that will bring us life and identity and purpose and wholeness. And we are dismayed and disillusioned when they don’t.
Nowhere does the problem of busyness show itself more obviously than in the practice of prayer. In the busyness of our marginless lives, we tend to give God a few cursory prayers here and there. But we don’t very often pour out our hearts; even less often do we stop, be still, and listen for His voice in response.
That is what we will be talking about over the next six weeks. How do we know God through prayer? How do we talk to Him like a Father who wants to give His children good gifts and how do we hear His voice amidst the busyness of our lives?
The series is called Daily Bread in part because we will look at the prayer from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus taught His disciples to pray. When it comes to prayer, Jesus is our example—not just His model prayer in Matthew 6 but also His practice of prayer.
Jesus often took time to be alone to pray. It was not unusual for the disciples to be asking one another, “Have you seen Jesus? Where did Jesus go?”
Lk 5:15-16 (CSB)—But the news about him spread even more, and large crowds would come together to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses. Yet he often withdrew to deserted places and prayed.
Jesus’ practice of prayer was notably different from that of the other religious leaders of the day. The disciples were Jewish and they grew up reciting all of the Jewish prayers. It’s not like they didn’t know how to pray. But there was something different about how Jesus prayed.
In Luke’s account of The Lord’s Prayer, it says that while Jesus was praying, one of His disciples came to Him and asked that He teach them how to pray. Teach us to pray like you pray, Jesus.
In Matthew’s account of The Lord’s Prayer, Jesus begins with this:
Matt 6:5-8 (CSB)—“Whenever you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, because they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by people. Truly I tell you, they have their reward. But when you pray, go into your private room, shut your door, and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. When you pray, don’t babble like the Gentiles, since they imagine they’ll be heard for their many words. Don’t be like them, because your Father knows the things you need before you ask him.
Your prayers are between you and your Heavenly Father. Pray out of sincerity. There is no right way to order your words; articulate prayers do not impress God. He is interested in hearing your heart.
Jesus says, Don’t babble, because God already knows what you need before you ask Him.
So, if God already knows what you need before you ask Him, why are we praying again?
Because we are not praying to get something out of God.
Next weekend, I’ll be officiating a wedding. I’ve officiated a lot of weddings and it is always a privilege. In our pre-marital counseling sessions, the book we go through is called Ready or Knot? Guess what the first chapter is about? What is the most critical piece to any good relationship? What is the foundation for a healthy marriage? Communication.
How do we express our needs and what’s important to us? Perhaps more importantly, how do I set myself up to hear my spouse’s needs and what’s important to them? It requires good communication.
Every chapter in our pre-marital study book builds on the first chapter. If you can’t communicate you can’t navigate conflict, you can’t effectively talk about sex and finances. Everything hinges on our ability to communicate.
Prayer is our communion and our communication with our Heavenly Father. We share our hearts with Him, and He shares His with us. God changes us through prayer. That is why we pray.
“Prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.”
― Timothy Keller
Jesus then begins to teach them, and us, how to pray.
Matt 6:9 (CSB)—Therefore, you should pray like this: Our Father in heaven, your name be honored as holy.
Jesus begins His prayer by addressing God as our Father.
He must have shocked those who were listening to Him when He said, “Our Father.” The Greek word for “Father” is “Abba.” It literally means “Papa.” Remember that in the Old Testament, God was addressed as Elohim, the Strong One; El Shaddai, the Mighty One; and Yahweh, the unspeakable word that meant, “I AM THAT I AM.”
Now, Jesus says when you address God, call Him Abba. Why did Jesus begin with Papa?
As He teaches us to pray, when He address God as our Father, Jesus says, Remember who God is.
Jesus said, “Remember who you are talking to.”
After nearly 40 years of church ministry, I will tell you that the most difficult Biblical truth for people to get their hearts around is that God loves them. We may acknowledge that truth in our heads, but somewhere deep down inside we often question whether it is really true. I know the thoughts, the things I’ve done in my past. I know how unloveable I feel. How could the all powerful God of the universe love me? Really care for me?
Because He is a Father.
Before Olivia left for Mongolia she posted this long thank you to Mom and Dad for all our help getting her to this point. The thing is, it was not a chore for me. It was not a burden for me to do everything in my power to help her fulfill her dream. I loved nearly every minute of it. It fills me up and brings me joy to know she is doing this. That’s because I am her father. I’m her papa.
God’s disposition towards you is that He wants to love you and bless you.
Eph 3:17-19 (CSB)—I pray that you, being rooted and firmly established in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the length and width, height and depth of God’s love, and to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
But Jesus, in addressing God as our Father, not only says,”Remember who God is”, He also says, ” Remember who you are.”
When we forget that God is our Father, we forget that we are His sons and daughters.
Did the God of the O.T. change from the Omnipotent, All-Powerful, Unspeakable God to a loving Father in the N.T.? No, God did not change but we did. We changed.
Jn 1:12-13 (CSB)—But to all who did receive him, he gave them the right to be children of God, to those who believe in his name, who were born, not of natural descent, or of the will of the flesh, or of the will of man, but of God.
We were adopted into His family. If you have received his free gift of love and forgiveness and have given your life to Him, then you truly are a child of God. He is still the Unspeakable One, the Almighty One, the Omnipotent One, but because you have been adopted into His family, to you He is also Abba, Papa, Father. We are His sons and His daughters.
Our identity has forever changed.
We are no longer paupers, contending for the scraps this world offers us. We are royalty because we are children of the King and we are seated at his banquet table and are recipients of all the good things He gives. Things like His love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and self-control.
He is our Father, we are His children.
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Jesus says, our Father in heaven, your name be honored as holy. Many of you know this phrase like it is written in the the King James and the ESV translations of the the Bible. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”
The Greek word for hallowed is ἁγιάζω, hagiazō, it is a verb and it means “make holy,” “sanctify,” “consecrate,” “dedicate,” “purify”.
The closest commonly used English word is probably honor. Jesus says, “your name be honored as holy.“
“Our Father” is a reminder of God’s intimacy; to “honor His name as holy” is a reminder of His separateness, His majesty, and incomprehensible greatness. There is no one like him. He always has been and He always will be.
Why do we honor God’s name as holy? Are we trying to butter Him up so He looks more favorably towards us when we ask for something? Like your kids do when they really want something. Kids are the sweetest when they are about to ask you for something.
Or, is God a narcissist that needs to hear how great He is? Does He really need people to tell Him what He already knows about himself?
No. Honoring God’s name as holy is not for God … it is for us.
When we honor God’s name as holy, when we are brought face to face with God’s holiness, with His separateness, with His incomprehensible greatness, we are reminded of the condition of our own hearts.
When we come to God in prayer, most of the time the things being honored in my life are the same things that are crowding out my ability to spend time with him. The things I tend to worship are things like accomplishment, success, productivity, approval from others, comfort, my own plans and my own desires and I need to be reminded of the holiness of my Father.
Tyler Staton puts it this way:
When we pray, we step out of the fundamental reality of the world and into the fundamental reality of God, so we must begin by inviting God to reorder our affections.
—Tyler Stanton
Father reminds us of the intimacy of our God. Honoring His name as holy moves our worship from ourselves and our own broken desires and to a holy God and invites Him to change us. We aspire to be like Him. Honoring God’s name as holy reminds me of Jesus’ words to His disciples in Matthew 16.
Matt 16:24-26 (CSB)—Then Jesus said to his disciples, “If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life because of me will find it. For what will it benefit someone if he gains the whole world yet loses his life? Or what will anyone give in exchange for his life?
This is not necessarily what comes naturally to us. Honoring God’s name as holy is a way for us to turn our back on the enemy and turn our face toward our Father.
Everything that follows honoring God’s name as holy, in the Lord’s Prayer, is the result of honoring his name. Seeking His kingdom and His will, looking to Him for our needs, forgiving others, all of that is what flows out of hallowing our Father’s name.
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So, how do we practice the first part of the Lord’s Prayer? Jesus’ intent was not that we simply repeat the words of this prayer, but that it be a model or blueprint for prayer. So, how do we pray to our Father in heaven, honoring His name as holy?
There are certainly a number of ways. Worship in music is a great one. Songs often express what we have difficulty expressing in our own words. Music is a gift and a powerful way to remember God’s affection for us and declare, with our mouths, His holiness.
Another great way to practice this part of Jesus’ prayer is through gratitude. When we thank God for everything we have, we acknowledge the Father who loves to give good gifts to His children. We also recognize that it is only by His almighty hand that we have breath in our lungs and every other good thing we enjoy.
Take time today, alone, away from your phone and to do list, and simply pray, finishing this sentence:
God, I thank you for __________.
*We will be borrowing heavily from Tyler Stanton’s book: Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools. The book goes much further into depth then we are able on Sunday morning. I highly reccomend it if you are wanting to learn more about connecting with your Heavenly Father.
Chris Hankel 
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