Praying through the Lord’s Prayer, Part 1

Folks who are here today are probably already bent towards prayer, but what I want to do in the brief hour that we have together is is open up the Lord's Prayer in such a way that we can not only understand how it's helpful to reorient and powerful to reorient our tendency to turn in on ourselves, but also train others to do the same and make disciples of prayer.

So let's pray really quickly. Our Father, renew our minds, open our eyes to the richness of kingdom life that You offer through this wonderful prayer. Amen.

Women of the Word, I am so glad that the Lord chose this session for you on praying the Lord's Prayer. We are going to get right to work and right to praying.

When you came in, there was a gift book waiting for you from the leaders at Revive Our Hearts. They've graciously made it available as a souvenir to take with you, to help us all pray kingdom prayers, and, as I mentioned before, teach others to do the same through prayer. So put that aside for now, but do take it with you. It's yours, and you're going to use it to continue as kingdom prayer trainers beyond our hour together.

Now also, when you came in, you got a handout. Let's take that up, and we're going to get started on this handout.

There are two circles that show two ways of living before God. One, the little one, shows our default. This just happens because we're flesh people. We're still stuck in these bodies, and we have a tendency, because of our parents in the garden, to default to curving our prayer in on ourselves.

The other one, the bigger, the bigger picture, shows Jesus' reorientation through the Lord's Prayer that opens our hearts upward to God and then outward toward our neighbor.

So I'm going to take a few minutes. Here's how the hour is going to go: I'm going to teach for a few minutes, then I'm going to break you up into some small groups to discuss what I'm talking about and apply it to your lives. And then you're going to spend more of the time praying. This may be one of those sessions where you actually spend more time praying than you do talking, but it's going to be good for us if we can get this many women moving in one direction.

Usually you have to put on some kind of pop song—everybody does all the moves together at the same time—to get everybody moving in the same direction. But the Spirit is going to do that for us, and we're going to start with the Lord's Prayer, with the big idea.

Jesus gave us this prayer. He says in Matthew 6, "Pray like this." And in Luke 11, He teaches it when the disciples ask Him, "Lord, teach us to pray." They've seen a difference in how their leaders pray and how they pray, and how this man named Jesus prays. There's a difference.

And at Lazarus’s tomb in John 11, we see Jesus openly thanking the Father for hearing Him. He says the Father always hears Him. What's different about the way this Jesus prays?

John says in his first letter that the way Jesus prays is our confidence: when we ask according to God's will, He hears and answers. In Luke 11, Jesus promises that when we ask, the Father gladly gives the Holy Spirit. So as we pray, God answers around us and enlarges our hearts within us.

But there is this curving in on ourselves that happens even in our prayer lives, and it comes from the tragedy of the garden in Genesis 3. Our hearts are bent toward self-rule, self-protection, self-promotion. By the time we get to the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, humanity's slogan is, "Let us make a name for ourselves."

So when we're left to ourselves without the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, even our prayers become self-referential: my reputation, my kingdom, my will, my bread, my grudges, my shortcuts, my shortcomings. Augustine called this the soul curved in on itself.

Even the best of us—prayer saints, prayer warriors—we fight against this tendency to bend in on ourselves. Jesus teaches us to pray in a way that straightens the spine of the soul upward to the Father and then outward to our neighbor.

So listen more than you write as we walk around this second wheel and feel the reorientation of our minds and our desires and will. And appreciate the Lord's Prayer as something that you may have learned by rote growing up as a kid, but it does so much more when we unpack it petition by petition.

Petition one: Our Father in heaven.

This reorients us from isolation to adoption and community. Hear the first word: our. Jesus refuses to let us begin with me. He placed me in a family of believers. Ephesians 2 says Christ has broken down the dividing wall and made one new humanity.

So it's not even just the people immediately around me who are the saints. It's not even the people around the world who are living today. I belong to a historical line of people that he is keeping for himself. Didn't brother DeYoung tell us last night the end of the story? He is going to do what He says He's going to do. He is still keeping a people for Himself, and we are a part of that.

He is our Father. Revelation 7 shows that family—tribe, every tongue—gathered in worship.

Then after our, he gives us Father. We don't knock on the door like strangers just showing up off the street. We run in as daughters. Paul says in Romans 8, and again in Galatians 4, that the Spirit of adoption teaches us to cry, “Abba, Father.”

So we reframe this. The prayer reframes it from: I must secure myself. I am by myself, therefore I must protect myself, and I must secure myself—to: I am securely held. From guarded individualism to joyful solidarity. And as we say, “Our Father,” the Spirit evaporates our hidden tribalism and our sometimes superiority and knits us to the whole church from Genesis to Revelation.

Ooh, Father, make us newly aware that we belong to you and to one another.

Second petition: Hallowed be your name.

We go from the world of self-branding to holy reverence. We saw this at the Tower of Babel. We tried to make a name for ourselves, and here Jesus trains our first desire to be God’s fame.

Through Ezekiel 36, God promises to vindicate the holiness of his great name among the nations. And Peter calls us in his first letter to be holy in all we do because the Holy One has called us. The psalmist in Psalm 115 speaks to our egos.

Oh, I got a big one: “Not to us, O LORD, but to your name be the glory” (Psalm 115:1 paraphrase).

And here's the reframing: from polishing my image to magnifying God’s character—His mercy, His justice, His faithfulness. In practice, our praying shifts from, God, make me look competent, to, Make your holiness visible in my home and my work and my church.

Hallow your name in us. God, start with our speech. Start with our screens. God, start with our schedules. Hallow your name.

Third petition: Your kingdom come.

We’re all tempted to whisper, My kingdom come, right? My plans, my platform, my comfort. Jesus directs our longing to the King’s saving rule. In Matthew 6, He sets this petition before us. In Acts 1, He points our eyes to the Spirit’s power and the gospel spread from our Jerusalem to the ends of the earth.

When Jesus speaks in Matthew 9 of the fields white with harvest, He urges us to pray for laborers—kingdom praying and mission praying. And He assures us in Luke 11 that the Father delights to give the Holy Spirit. Kingdom praying is Spirit-powered.

So here's the refrain: Make my life work to let your life work through me. And then we can start naming people and places and schools and streets and workplaces. Work through me today.

Fourth petition: Your will be done on earth as in heaven.

We go from demand to surrender. In heaven, God's will is done gladly. It's done promptly. It's done wholeheartedly.

On earth, I often want my will, and I want it now. I don't want to—oh, that whole message on waiting. Oh, I felt that in my shondo. It's hard to wait. I want it now. I don't want to wait.

In Gethsemane in Matthew 26, Jesus yields probably the most dangerous prayer any of us can ever pray: Not my will, but yours. I'm telling you, you pray that prayer, buckle your seatbelt, because as my sweet charismatic friends always say, anything could happen.

So here's the refrain: we go from treating God as a consultant to trusting Him as Lord. We begin to pray about our decisions like this: Okay, God, overrule my preferences. You know what I want, but You also know what I need. Give me a heart that wants what You want. Close the wrong doors, open the right ones, bring the right people, and keep the wrong ones away. Write obedience into my reflexes.

Petition five: Give us today our daily bread.

We move from anxious scarcity to contented dependence. Jesus turns us from self-sufficiency to childlike asking, and here again, it's a community—Give us, not give me.Give us. Our sisters’ needs stand beside our own.

Wisdom speaks in Proverbs 30: Give me neither poverty nor riches, lest plenty make me proud or lack make me faithless. James reminds us that every good gift comes from the Father of lights. Paul tells the Corinthians God makes grace abound in every good work, and tells the Philippians he's learned contentment in both plenty and want.

So he speaks to the stuff that’s tangible—our material desires. From hoarding and “hurry up” to open-handed trust. We ask for food, for shelter, for work, for health, and the wisdom and generosity to share.

Petition six: Forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors.

This one's hard. This is the one where we move from self-justifying to cross-shaped mercy.

The cross was hard. You know what? It's where we get the word excruciating.Ex–cru–ciating—from the cross. Next time you say something is excruciating, think, Is it really? The cross was hard, and here Jesus brings us to the cross every day with His grace and His mercy.

John says, if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive and cleanse. Then God performs a second miracle: He turns forgiven people into forgiving people. Paul urges us in Colossians 3 that we bear with one another and forgive as the Lord forgave us.

Jesus is really plain in Matthew 6 that an unforgiving spirit chokes our enjoyment of the Father's forgiveness. And in Matthew 18, he tells the story of the servant forgiven a fortune who throttled a neighbor over pennies. This is an urgent warning to our hearts.

So here's the reframe: we go from nursing grievances to practicing reconciliation. Some of us are still keeping invoices in our heart ledgers. The Lord's Prayer invites us to tear them up in Jesus' name. Forgiveness isn't pretending that the wound didn't happen. You can keep wise boundaries, but bitterness is what He wants to deliver us from.

The final one, seventh petition.

Petition seven: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

We move here from ignorance and naïveté to vigilance and victory.

Jesus knows our weakness. Jesus knows our every weakness. “Oh, take it to the Lord in prayer,” right? She said—yeah, you say, thank you. That’s interesting that that’s in that song, right? Jesus knows our weaknesses.

In Matthew 26, he told his friends, Watch and pray. Watch and pray so that you don't enter into temptation. He didn't just say watch, and he didn't just say pray. Watch and pray so that you will not enter into temptation.

James explains that God never tempts us to evil. The lure rises from our own desires. And in John 17—one of my favorite passages in the New Testament—Jesus prays that the Father would keep his people from the evil one. So he's already praying on our behalf.

Paul assures the Corinthians that with every temptation, God provides a way of escape. We stand not in bravado—not in “I'm too big to fail.” Wasn't there a movie about that? We don't stand in bravado, but we stand in the armor that God supplies. And Paul lays it out beautifully in Ephesians 6. Go read it when you have a chance.

And you can reframe with this prayer: from I can handle it, I can look at it, I can touch it, I can feel it, it can move in with me, now it's sitting next to me, it just gets closer and closer—so we move from I can handle it to Father, guard me.

We name the ambushes—cynicism, lust, despair, resentment, self-pity, prayerlessness—and ask for wisdom to spot the trap and the strength to take the exit. Deliver us from evil. Make us wise to the devil's schemes and steady in God's strength.

You know, if you look at what Satan does, he just repackages. We were just talking about this at the lunch table. He just repackages the same stuff over and over and over, age after age, millennia after millennia, and the stuff is the same stuff in the garden: almost true. “God did not surely say. . . . You will not surely die,” right? And then, you know, don’t turn it on yourself. Ask yourself what you need to do. He's been doing that same stuff. He's so uncreative—because God has limited him. Praise God. God has limited him, but he's really good at marketing. That's why we fall for it every age—nations, governments, all sorts of folks, cultures, cults—they fall for it every single time.

But if we're asking the Lord to help us be watchful and prayerful, we can smell the rat when he's in the room and call the greatest rat exterminator—or eradicator.

All right, so let's look beyond our wheel. Many of us close with the ancient doxology we love to sing: For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. And whether we say it out loud or whether we simply live it, that sentence is the atmosphere of Christian prayer.

Do you see the movement from a heart curled in on itself to a heart opened to God and neighbor? The Lord's Prayer reorients us in the most beautiful, most divine way possible. When we pray as Jesus taught, the Spirit enlarges our capacity for God and expands our love for others. And worship lifts us from the mundane. It's okay to ask Him about the mundane, everyday things, but what the Lord's Prayer does is it lifts us from the mundane to the eternal.

Intercession pulls us from self-concern to Christ’s mission. And we can take courage in seeing this way, in praying this way, because Jesus gave us this prayer, and it cannot fail. I love praying His Word back to Him because He can't say no. And the Father hears, and the Spirit helps, and God answers around us, and He is changing us within. Lord, teach us to pray. Now I see why the disciples asked Him. They needed their eyes lifted from the difficulty and the darkness and the despair of this world so they could look up, get the right mind, and then reengage. It's not about walking away from it. It's about engaging it with the right mind.

I woke up in my right mind this morning. Thank you, Jesus.

All right, so now we're going to practice together, and I'm going to give you guys a chance to talk with each other. I'm going to ask you to form three groups of three or four right where you are. You just turn around and make a little group and give some quick first names.

Wait a minute. I'm giving you the instructions. Wait, wait, wait. Stop loving each other. Please. Not yet, not yet.

All right, we're going to give you some quick—give yourselves your quick first names. And then you get a few minutes to talk about what we just heard. Here are your ground rules: sentences, not speeches. Ladies, we don't have that much time together. Okay, no counseling. More prayer. Remember confidentiality. Be careful in what you share, and be careful with what you hear. You can pray the backstory when we get to the prayer time rather than telling it. God already knows the details.

And my friend Carolee and I are going to wander around and join some of your discussions, drop in on you while you discuss, and prompt you along. But you can use these prompts to keep your conversation going: Where do you see your curved-in default? In particular—you’re going to pick one petition, one group; each group pick one—but one of the petitions. Agree on one. And what would kingdom reorientation look like for you this week?

All right, are we ready? Okay, now we can love each other. Go for it.

All right, let's bring that to a close. I see some folks still praying. Let them finish up. Oh, I didn't mean to cut it short. Well, I guess the Spirit just stopped moving. No, I'm joking.

This is beautiful to see all of us moving in the same direction around the Lord's Prayer. And my husband always says the Word of God does the heavy lifting, and it really does.

All right. Well, in your books—we're just about at the end of our time—but in the books that you're, that your souvenir books that you're taking home with you. This is a great book that you can use to disciple. Now you're all prayer trainers, okay? So, if you would like to walk someone else through the, you know, just the way that the Lord's Prayer is designed by God—divinely designed—to reorient us, you can do this study with somebody else.

That's our goal, right? With everything with the kingdom, the goal is multiplication. So we fully expect you guys to walk out and find somebody and pray, pray that person up. Say, “Hey, let's go through this book together,” and enjoy the writings of a man who was my pastor for several years. He runs a ministry called Prayer Current. They have lots of resources, but this is one of the ones that's just really friendly to both new believers and seekers, and to walk through and understand how the Lord's Prayer is such a wonderful gift to us.

It's not just a thing that happens by rote or that we memorize. It's great to memorize it, but it's so rich with meaning when you start to unpack it, and it's divided into the seven petitions for you to meditate on devotional style. There's questions in there that you can answer.

And I so thank you for choosing to spend this difficult hour after lunch—the coma hour, the food coma hour—to enjoy and praying with us and giving us a little bit of your time today.