Approaching the Throne [A]

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Transcript:

We’re going to take an in-depth look at the Lord’s Prayer. Starting in verse 9, it says, After this manner, therefore, pray ye, Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever.

Amen. Let’s go to the Lord in prayer as we begin looking at this passage. Our gracious Heavenly Father, Lord, we pray that as we study this passage today and begin looking at the whole of the Lord’s Prayer, that we’ll take from it some of the lessons that you intended for your disciples.

Lord, that we’ll learn how to pray after this same manner. Lord, I pray that you would give us the understanding of how to pray and how to do it the right way and the way that you expect us to, the way the Bible teaches. And Lord, that you’d also give us the desire to pray without ceasing.

Lord, I pray that you would give us a heart to seek after your heart. Lord, we love you and we ask all of these things in Christ’s name. Amen.

Now he begins by telling them in verse 9, he says, After this manner, therefore, pray ye. And then he begins to talk about God. Begins to talk about God in these terms. And you can learn a lot as I read through this passage.

the first thought that struck me was you can learn a lot about a person by the names or titles that they are called. You can learn a lot about a person that way. Watching a BBC documentary the other day, they were talking about some history things, and several of the people that they were interviewing or talking about were called by titles of knighthood.

And they would refer to Sir Winston Churchill, Baroness Thatcher, Lord Kinnick, Lord Carrington, all these people, and they would refer to them by terms of knighthood. And you thought, okay, they carry this term of knighthood. That immediately tells me that they are somebody who has contributed something worthwhile to the United Kingdom.

Now, I’m still trying to figure out Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney myself, but at one point it told you this is somebody who has contributed significantly to the life of this country, to that country. Other titles. Somebody goes by the title doctor, and we immediately know something about them, especially if they’re a medical doctor.

They’ve attended so many years of school, they’re expected to demonstrate proficiency and knowledge in their field. We immediately know some things about that person. If they’re a PhD kind of doctor, we know that they’ve also gone to X number of years of school, and they’ve had to demonstrate proficiency in their field, we know something about that person.

We know something about the person by the names or titles that they’re called. When I was in seventh grade, there was a kid in my geography class who decided he wanted to sound tough, and so he told us, quit calling me by my name. From now on, call me the volcano. Folks, I quit calling him anything because I wasn’t going to do that.

When I was a substitute teacher, there was a kid who, he was kind of, he wasn’t as popular as some of the others. And he told me and told the rest of the class when I was taking role, I named off his name, I’d taught in this class before, and he wasn’t trying to be disrespectful, but he told me, you can call me Crash. I said, yeah, I’m not going to do that.

But you could tell by the name he wanted to be called or the title he wanted to apply what it was that was important to him. My sister, to this day, does not call me by my name. Some of you have been around her and have noticed and commented on this.

My sister does not call me by my name. She called me by my name one time when we were teenagers, and I told her, don’t you ever do that again. That doesn’t sound right.

My sister calls me brother. Ever since she’s been able to talk, she’s called me that, and I’m 27 now, and she’s 24, and she still calls me brother. And that tells you something about the closeness of the bond in our family.

When I came here, some of you wanted to call me Pastor Byrns. And I let some of you know real quickly, please don’t call me that. I mean, I’m not going to be mad at you if you do, but that just feels way too formal for me.

And some of you, it’s taken two years, and I’ve finally gotten you to call me just by my first name. And I appreciate the respect of calling me Pastor or Brother Byrns or Brother Jared, but I’m not that formal a person. See, I’d be taken on a title that, you know, if you called me Pastor Byrns just in normal conversation, that wouldn’t feel like the right title for me.

And you can learn something about a person by what names they allow to be applied to themselves, And we look at God, and it’s not by accident that as he starts out, as Jesus starts out the Lord’s Prayer, he refers to God in some ways that I think we can learn from about the character of who God is, as we look at these names. And this is not an in-depth study on all of the names of God from the Bible. I think that would be an interesting thing to do at some point.

But we’re looking just at this model prayer, and how he begins as they approach the throne of God, how they’re to call him and address him. And he says, after this manner pray ye, and therefore pray ye. And it’s important to note starting out that this was never meant to be a script for prayer.

Maybe a formula for topics of prayer, maybe a formula for attitudes in prayer, but it is not a script for prayer because he doesn’t say after these words, therefore pray ye. He says, after this manner, therefore pray ye. He doesn’t say this is the prayer you’re supposed to use.

He says, this is the way you’re supposed to pray. And we see that because in all the times that the disciples pray from here on out, we never see this prayer mentioned again. It’s mentioned in another gospel that records this teaching, but even then the wording is not exactly the same.

And all of that indicates to us this is not supposed to be vain repetition, like we talked about last week, where some people in the Eastern religions will chant the mantras over and over to try to attempt some sense of unification with God. And we’ll just repeat things like Aum or Hare Krishna. Or even our Catholic friends will pray the rosary and repeat over and over Hail Mary or Our Father.

And after a while, it just doesn’t mean anything anymore. So I’ve been in evangelical churches where they will recite the Lord’s Prayer every service, but it’s just something from rote memory, not from the heart, and it becomes vain repetition. It’s not the words that we’re supposed to repeat.

It’s the attitude. It’s the way of praying. It’s the subject matter.

He says, after this manner, therefore pray ye. And then he starts out by referring to God and says, our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Okay, we’ve already read the whole passage, the whole prayer.

This morning and tonight, we’re going to be focusing just on verse 9 as they approach the throne and begin to talk about who God is. The first thing he says is to call him our Father. Now, this doesn’t mean necessarily that you have to only refer to him as Father in prayer.

But it’s important to know that when we come to God in prayer, we’re approaching God as our Father. We’re approaching God as our Father. The Bible talks about the spirit of adoption by which we cry, Abba, Father.

And I’ve told you before that that word Abba in the Aramaic is not something you would use for just anybody. It’s not something you would use for just anybody. That word Abba means Daddy, is the closest English translation.

and it indicates an intimacy with God. Folks, I don’t let just anybody call me Daddy. That shouldn’t come as a shock to you.

I let Benjamin call me Daddy. I let Madeline, well, if she would say it more often, she kind of mutters Dada, but if she would say it more often, I’d let her call me Daddy. We were eating lunch yesterday, came into town to run some errands, and we were eating lunch, and the waiter walked by and said, Dad, how are we doing?

And I know people mean no harm, but it’s always creepy to me when an adult refers to me as Dad. Okay, that’s just a little, you took my order, we just met, that’s a little too much intimacy here for what we are to each other. But God allows us to call him Abba, Father.

You know, it is incomprehensible for people in most other religions to apply this term to their deity. There are said to be 99 names for Allah in the Quran, and if memory serves, not one of them his father. Because one of the main ideas of Islam is that Allah is so completely different from mankind that they can’t really know Allah, and the idea of him having a son is just, well, they say it’s the greatest sin in Islam is called shirk, and the idea of the Trinity and God having a son.

For them, their God has servants, their God has beings that are under him. He has creations, but has no children? And what sense would it make for some of the Eastern religions like Hinduism to call their deity father?

Well, first of all, which deity? Because they’ve got 300 million of them. That’s the real number, as some of y’all laughed.

That’s the real number. Which one is father? And on top of that, they hold to what I’ve told you before, a pantheistic worldview where everybody is part of God and God is part of everything, so we’d be part of God ourselves.

What sense does it make to call out to the universe as father. And yet the God of the Bible is not some mystical force out in the universe. The God of the Bible is not some unknowable force who created us and rules over us but really doesn’t reveal anything about himself to us.

The God of the universe is knowable to us and so knowable that he allows us to call him by this intimate term father. Folks, we get to call God Father. And it’s telling to me that the first thing Jesus said when he tells them how to pray is he says, our Father.

Now I’ve read some commentaries this week that talk about the difference between saying our Father and my Father and how that meant the prayer was given to the church and something about praying corporately. And folks, I’m all for praying corporately. I’m all for praying as the church.

But I think they missed the point. When Jesus said our Father instead of my Father, he wasn’t simply saying, the distinction there is Jesus wasn’t saying he was simply Jesus’ Father, but he was the Father of all of his children who believe in him. Folks, it would be no surprise if Jesus said, My Father, which is in heaven.

Jesus is the only begotten Son of God. Jesus is God the Son in human flesh. No surprise if Jesus had said, My Father, which art in heaven.

But Jesus said, our Father, because the Bible is very clear that those who have been born again by faith, those who have trusted in God’s mercy offered through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross for our sins, are born again and adopted into the family of God the Father. And we now are able to call out to Him as our Father. Some things that this father-child relationship indicate, if we can go on to the next thing, is that God loves us, first of all.

Now, some things we need to know about this ideal relationship between the Father and His children is that He loves us. Folks, a lot of people have problems with the idea of God as Father and what that means, and it’s because of what they’ve seen in earthly fathers. Men, I’m speaking to you in particular.

Ladies, you might learn something from this too, but men in particular, we have an awesome responsibility, this title Father. Do you realize that? Thank you.

Somebody realizes it. We have an awesome responsibility. I’m not talking about just the biology.

Anybody can biologically be a father just about. But folks, to be father to a child is an awesome responsibility because in a non-idolatrous way, I’m not talking about giving our kids the idea that we’re deities or anything like that. But in a way, we are the first to represent to our children what it means for God to be a father because their first idea of who a father is and what a father is comes from their relationship with us and looking at us and the men we are.

And for many people, their ideas about who God is as a father are shaped by their earthly father. It is an awesome responsibility and not one that we should take lightly. And God, as a good father should, God loves us.

God loves his children. This is important to all of this as we talk about God being a father is important to note because not every religion teaches this about their God. not every deity and by the way I believe there is only one deity when I say deity it’s kind of in quotation marks every other deity well they’re not real gods but none of these other deities in quotation marks allow their subjects allow their devotees to call them father it’s only our God who has that kind of relationship with us and he loves us and so many people unfortunately cannot wrap their minds around the idea of God being a loving father because unfortunately they’ve not had a loving father themselves as an example.

And a father should give a picture to his children of God’s kind of love. Folks, I could just save this part of the message for Father’s Day. It would preach then too.

We should give that kind of picture to our children. Because when the Bible tells us that God loves us as a father, that should not have to be confusing to people. And God’s love, folks, it’s still an imperfect picture no matter how good a father’s we are, because God’s love is perfect.

God’s love is unconditional of His children. God’s love is inseparable from His children. Romans chapter 8 tells us, or Paul writes to the church at Romans, says, For I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature.

That’s a lot of things, isn’t it? That none of these things shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Nothing can separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.

The love of God was most fully expressed through the cross. And even though the cross was an instrument of torture and death, it’s not improper to think of the cross as the fullest expression of God’s love. Because in that, He looked at us who were sinners who had turned our back on Him, who had rebelled against Him in every conceivable way, And he responded with love and mercy and allowed our sin to be punished in Jesus Christ when he didn’t have to do it.

I’ve said so many times that people are probably tired of hearing it, that God was under no obligation to save us. And if he had written us off and said, fine, you all just go spend eternity in hell if that’s the way you want it, he would have been completely justified in doing so. He didn’t owe us a thing, but out of his goodness he sent his son.

And folks, because of what his son did, because of what his son did for us, once we’re born again into God’s family, the Bible makes it clear that nothing, hear me on this, nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. You want to start naming things off? Everything’s covered in that passage.

God loves us with an indestructible love. Folks, there’s nothing we can do to make our Father love us any more or any less. I think he can be displeased with us.

I think he can be disappointed in us, but he doesn’t love us anymore or any less as his children. Now, why is that important in prayer? Because we go to God as a loving father, and it changes the approach.

It changes the approach. For so many people, even Christians, the idea of prayer is something cold and distant, where we talk to God, and maybe he’ll hear us, maybe he won’t, or we have to work out deals with God. You see people on TV all the time bargaining with God.

God, I’ll never do such and such again if you’ll just do this. Folks, for the Christian, we approach God as we would a loving father. We approach God as we would a loving father.

Second of all, as a father, we also need to keep in mind, though, that he disciplines us. Say, well, wait a minute, you just talked about how loving God is, yeah? And God loves us enough not to let us get away with stuff.

I’ve gotten some dirty looks in the past for talking in a harsh tone to my kids in public or even giving Benjamin a swat here and there. But you know what? I think it would be child abuse if I just let him do whatever he wanted to.

And a loving father disciplines and corrects, not because he likes it, not because he wants to hurt his child, but because he loves him too much to let him get by with things. And folks, sometimes God as our father will discipline us. Proverbs tells us, my son despise not the chastening of the Lord, neither be ye weary of his correction.

For whom the Lord loveth, he correcteth, even as the father, the son in whom he delighteth. And the Bible makes it clear that a father who loves his children, who delights in his children, will discipline them and correct them. I’m not talking about hurting them, but I’m talking about loving them too much to let them get away with it.

There’s one lady that I finally told, ma’am, when he doesn’t grow up to be a sociopath, you can come back and thank me. I love, folks, I love that little guy. I love Madeline too, but I don’t talk about her as much because she hasn’t developed so much of a person, such a big personality yet.

I love that little guy. I can be so mad at him sometimes, and he comes up to me and says, I want to hold you. By that, he means he wants me to hold him.

I want to hold you, and I just melt. Folks, I love that little boy, and I love Madeline too, but when they start throwing a fit, when he starts throwing a fit because he can’t have exactly what he wants, when he disobeys me and tries to run out in a parking lot at Chick-fil-A, when he starts doing things that are going to him in the short term, when he starts doing things that are going to turn him into the kind of person that I know he does not need to be if they’re left unchecked, ladies and gentlemen, I love him too much to let him get by with it. And God loves us with an incredible love, but God loves us enough not to let us get by with things.

And folks, just like we don’t come down on our kids every time they step out of line, sometimes we give them enough rope to hang themselves with, so to speak. Folks, God will at times, God will at times delay his chastening for whatever reason. And sometimes we’ll feel like, I got away with that.

Folks, God chastens whom he loves. Hear me on this. And like a child, we can say, well, God, why are you punishing me?

Why are you being so, you’re just mean, and go to our room and slam our door. Folks, he loves us too much to let us get by with things. And when we’re disciplined and when we’re corrected, that word correction, inherent in that word correction is the idea of taking us off of the wrong path and putting us on the right path.

Not just scolding us for being over here, but putting us over here headed where we need to be. And when God disciplines us, when God corrects us, it’s not a sign that God is mean, it is a sign that God loves us and cares about us as his child. And says what you’re doing is the wrong way.

What you’re doing is going to hurt you. What you’re doing is going to turn you into something other than what I know you want to be and what I want you to be. And so we’ve got to, again, why does this matter in prayer?

Because sometimes we go to God in prayer and ask things like, God, why are you doing this to me? God, why are you letting this happen to me? And I do not mean from this message to give you the idea that every time something bad happens to you, you’re being punished for something.

I have ample evidence to the contrary, that every time something bad happens, you’re not necessarily being punished. The Bible says he causes the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. But sometimes God chastens us and we go to him and say things like, God, why are you doing this to me? Why are you allowing this to happen to me?

God, don’t you love me? If you loved me, you wouldn’t make me go through this. And we might not say these exact words, but this is the feeling of our heart.

And we need to be reminded that whom the Lord loves, he chastens. And as a loving father, when we go to him as a father, he disciplines us because he loves us and he cares for us and wants to correct us and take us from where we’re going wrong to the path that he expects us to take. Third of all this morning, believe it or not, this is all still point one.

We’ll get to points two and three tonight. The third of all this morning, he as a father, he’s familiar to us. He’s familiar to us.

Now, I alluded to this a little bit in talking about the intimacy of the term Abba or being able to call God, Daddy. Now, I’m not suggesting you go and pray and say, Daddy, would you do this for me? I don’t know.

Maybe you can. That would feel strange for me. But when I call him Father, there’s an intimacy there.

There’s a familiarity there. When we pray, there should be a familiarity there. And many of you, I’m sure, have seen the sitcoms and the dramas, the things on TV where people will pray, and it just, you think, I feel awkward for them.

This is just awkward and clumsy. It’s because they don’t know God and the characters don’t generally know God. And to be honest, probably not the writers who wrote the scenes either.

Folks, we shouldn’t feel like we’re fumbling through our prayers because we’re talking to a stranger. If we’re fumbling through our prayers because we’re talking to a stranger and we know for a fact that we’re born again, it’s a good sign that we’re not praying with the regularity that we ought to. Folks, because God being distant is not his fault.

Let me say that again. God being distant is not his fault. My grandmother, after my grandfather died, she remarried a very nice man who passed away a few years ago as well.

But I remember they used to, after they got married, they used to come out to my parents’ house in his truck. It was always amusing to me to see her sitting in the middle of the seat next to him. And it always made me think of the story I heard from a preacher years ago who said that the couple was arguing because they didn’t sit close to each other anymore.

And the woman’s in her seat in the car and the man’s in his seat in the car and she says, you know, things just aren’t like they used to be. When we were dating, we sat next to each other in the car and he looked at her and said, I’m not the one who moved. Yeah, he’s been in the driver’s seat the whole time.

He’s not the one who moved. Folks, if God feels distant, he’s not the one who moved. God is the same as he always has been.

God doesn’t change. And God from the beginning has made himself knowable and accessible to mankind. God, from the earliest days of creation, had a relationship with Adam and Eve and would walk with them in the cool of the garden.

I don’t understand exactly what that means because God the Father doesn’t have a body of flesh and bone, and the idea of him physically walking through the garden, holding their hand, I just don’t understand exactly what that means. But it tells me they had a close relationship, that they walked together and talked together. even in societies that have not responded to God and his truth as Romans chapter 1 tells us and have ignored what they know about God God has still made himself knowable to mankind we know from looking at creation around us the Bible talks about the light of creation we know by looking at creation that there must be a creator and I know there are all sorts of intelligent people who would say I’m wrong but I respectfully disagree we know from creation that there must be a creator creator.

The Bible says we can look at nature and know there’s a God. Now, that’s not enough to be saved. The Bible talks about the light of conscience and God’s law being written on the hearts of men.

And folks, we know from our conscience that there’s a moral lawgiver. Still not enough to save us. But folks, God has gone to great lengths to make himself known to mankind.

For 4,000 years, he walked with the Jewish people through the wilderness and through occupation, through war, through disease, through captivity, through everything, and spoke to them through the prophets and priests and kings, and made himself known. Folks, he spoke to the early churches through the apostles and in prophecy and in tongues. And folks, today we still have his written word through which he still speaks to us today.

And God has gone to great lengths to make himself knowable. Folks, as a father, he should be known to us. Now this again is hard for a lot of people because unfortunately in our society, We seem to have an epidemic of absentee fathers.

For so many people, the idea of a father is an abstract concept because they’ve never had one who was there with them day in and day out and for them day in and day out. Folks, God is a father who is with us day in and day out and who is there for us day in and day out. And as such, we should know him.

We should have a close relationship with him. We should have a close walk with him. He has made himself knowable to us.

And as a father, he’s familiar to us. e John, em 1 John chapter 2 wrote, in explaining his reason for writing the first letter of John I write unto you fathers because you have known him that is fromthe beginning who’s the one who has known him? God I write unto you fathers because you have known him.

I write unto you young men because you have overcome the wicked one. I write unto you little children because you have known the father. I have written unto you fathers because you have known him that is from the beginning.

I have written unto you young men because you are strong and the word of God abideth in you and you have overcome the wicked one. At least three times in that passage he talks about them having known God the father. And God the Father, after the fall, could have closed up shop and never spoken to us again, and we would be completely in the dark.

And yet He has condescended. I know that word usually has a negative connotation, but God the Father has condescended. He has stooped down, not in a way that He gives up any of His power or glory, but folks, He has sort of crouched down to our level to make Himself known to us.

And I don’t want to give you a wrong impression, give anybody a wrong impression of what I’m talking about there. When I crouch down to get eye level with a little kid, sometimes my kids, when I’m saying, look at me when I’m talking to you, or some of the little kids who were here for the fall festival, saying, would you like candy or whatever. When I crouch down to get on eye level with a small child, I’m still who I am.

I’m still a full-grown adult, and I’m still everything I was before, but I’m getting on their level where they can see me and look in my eyes and hear me when I’m talking to them. Folks, when I say God condescended to us, That’s exactly what I mean. That God, I don’t mean God gave up any of his divine attributes, that he became less than he is.

I mean, he crouched down to our level so that we could have a glimpse of who he is. Folks, God has gone to great lengths to make himself known to us as a father. We have the opportunity.

When we pray, ladies and gentlemen, we have the awesome opportunity to speak one-on-one with our heavenly father. There are somewhere between six and seven billion, last I heard, people on this planet. Now, not all of them are his children.

I don’t buy into what. Is it Nelson Rockefeller who used to talk about the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God? Folks, the Bible doesn’t talk about God in terms of father for everyone.

Everyone is God’s creation, but we’re adopted into God’s family. It’s not just by default. Out of that six billion, I don’t know how many are actually his children.

I don’t know how many have actually been born again. But I know there are a lot of us. I know that there are more than I could listen to all simultaneously, and yet God can do it.

God somehow can have a one-on-one with each of us and give all of us his full attention. Do you understand what an awesome privilege it is that we are able to approach God not just as some distant deity off in the cosmos, but we have the ability to come to God as a Father who loves us, who chastens and disciplines us, and who’s familiar to us. We can know him and know his heart.

And prayer is an amazing expression of the relationship that we have with God the Father.