God-centered Prayer

I would like to turn again, please, to Matthew chapter 6, Matthew chapter 6. I'm going to go right back to what we were talking about yesterday, and there's always advantages to continuing on. You can say all the things you missed, and you can balance out all the things that weren't very balanced and so on. I don't have time to do any of that today, but the one thing that is important is to understand that when we were looking at prayer yesterday, we barely just scratched the surface.

So I want to go a little bit further today in Matthew 6, and again, we're going to read at verse 7. But when you pray, Jesus, of course, is teaching, use not vain repetitions, empty words as the heathen do, for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them, for your Father knows what things you have need of before you ask him. 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. Today I want to get a little bit deeper into the substance of this prayer, and if yesterday we were looking at fervent prayer, today I want to look at a God-centered prayer.

What it means to pray with a God-centered mindset. It's so easy for any of us, and in all of this I want to make sure we understand something. Christian, pray.

And while we might get into the style of praying and so on, let's just leave that aside for a moment and just realize God wants to hear from His people. He wants to hear from His children. And sometimes it is so easy for us as humans to get into ruts.

I've watched this and experienced it, and there are a couple experiences that have come to mind just in thinking of this, at times when I realize just how easily we get into ruts. One of them was in 2008. I was in an area for some meetings at the time, and every night, of course, before the gospel meeting, we would go downstairs, a few of us, and we would pray.

And the same names, a lot of the same requests, nothing wrong with that. But one day everything changed. One of the men in that assembly got himself into a place of great distress, and that night after the meeting, after the gospel meeting, we gathered to pray.

It was very impromptu, and I want to tell you something. That basement of that hall was filled with people. And one by one, I heard men pray that I didn't hear pray at any other time, and they were getting up and they were crying out to God, literally crying out to God for the sake of their brother.

And I thought to myself, that's what prayer is supposed to be, isn't it? And last year in Chatham, tragedy struck in a tremendously deep way. And I still remember the night we heard the news of that particular tragedy, and it wasn't long before there was just a small group of Christians who gathered at the hall. It was just central to gather there, and we all gathered at the hall, hardly knowing what to say, and sat there together with a lot of tears, a lot of weeping, a lot of hugs.

And through that grief, we learned how to pray. And it is in those times you feel the closeness of God, and that is what our Father wants with His children. Today, I want to go just a little bit further and get into the beginning of this prayer that the Lord has taught, or this template of prayer, if we can call it that.

I find it very interesting that at the very beginning of this, in fact, the majority of this template of prayer is directed towards a God-focus. That's what I want to try and emphasize today. Now, I was amazed because Brother Dan this morning was telling us about worship.

It's not about us. We come together, it's not about us. And in fact, he went even further, and he used the example of Abraham, when Abraham said, God will provide for himself a lamb.

That was the answer to Isaac's problem. That was the answer to the whole situation. And sometimes we might think that, okay, so when we're in worship, it's all about God.

So when is it about me? When is it about me? Well, that must be when we come in prayer. And then we find out when we come in prayer, not exactly. No, it's not about us either in prayer.

In fact, it is still all about God. And this is what the Lord wants to teach us from this prayer. There is a God-centered focus.

We have this great temptation when we come in prayer to rush by all of the other things and get to our issues, get to our needs, get to our requests. And I love the way he says it in verse 8. He tells us, but your Father knows what things you have need of. He knows them already.

Don't rush to that. Spend some time just thinking about God. Don't worry.

He knows your requests. He's already well aware of what you're going to ask Him. He knows all of that.

Sometimes our rush to get to those urgent requests is maybe a sign that we don't know Him as well as we think. I just want to point out a couple of things before getting into the requests, the petitions that he makes, the first three petitions that he makes. But I want you to notice that we're addressing our Father directly.

You say, is that important? Yes, that's very important. And it's important that, it's interesting that the Lord was teaching His disciples to address their Father directly. And it wasn't until the, well, some people call it the upper room ministry, but He wasn't in the upper room at this point, the farewell discourse that He told them something most amazing.

He told them, in that day you will ask nothing of Me. Truly, I say to you, whatever you ask of the Father in My name, He will give it to you. Verse 26 of John 16, in that day you will ask in My name, and I do not say to you that I will ask the Father on your behalf, for the Father Himself loves you.

Do you know what the Lord Jesus has done for us? He's not just the, here's the illustration. You have a friend, and your friend has maybe a nice father, and your friend's father has a very nice car. And maybe you want to go on a date, and you want to impress whoever you're going on a date with, and you want to borrow your friend's father's car.

Who are you going to ask? Are you going to ask the Father Himself, or are you going to ask your friend? I think most of us would know that we'd have a better chance if we let our friend go and ask his father. We'd have a much better chance of getting whatever that car is, wouldn't we? You know what the Lord Jesus has done for us? He's actually brought us right into relationship, direct relationship with our Father now. His death, His victory on the cross, has brought us into the family.

And He says, you'll ask in My name, I won't give it to you, because the Father Himself loves you. And so here's the beauty of this language, Father! At any time, we can cry out to our Abba. And in Hebrew, that might not mean much to us, but the fact was, that was a child calling independence to their daddy.

Yeah, you might think that's irreverent. It's not irreverent. It is childlike trust.

It is dependence on the One with whom we have no doubt, Father, in heaven. And immediately I realized that it's not about what's going on in earth. It's about what's happening in heaven.

It's coming to our earthly things, our earthly circumstances, from a heavenly perspective. It's realizing that we are connected with eternity at every moment. That as we come to our Father, wherever it is, it could be in the middle of the day.

It's not just this detachment where I say my prayers in the morning, I walk out the door and leave God at home and go to the office and hope that He remembers what I asked for and hopefully He answers. No, it is a direct connection, all day long, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, waking up in the middle of the night, realizing I'm awake, I can't get back to sleep, I should pray. Whatever it is, like Nehemiah standing in front of a king, just that instant prayer, that instant connection with heaven at all times.

You see, when we go to die, it shouldn't be like leaving this country for a foreign land. It should be very, very close at hand, because we are men and women of prayer. Every time we pray, we are directly connected with the throne room of heaven, speaking directly to our Father.

And what are we saying? Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. This is the first desire of our hearts when we come in prayer, our desire for His name. What is our desire for His name? I want you to, hopefully you can follow with me through this, that His name be holy.

Now we've got to stop for a moment and just consider the word holy, because we all have ideas of what holy means. When I say to you, you need to live a holy life, there's a picture that instantly comes to our mind, isn't there? There's something that comes to our mind. Sometimes it's very terrifying.

Sometimes it can cause us guilt because of past unholiness. Sometimes it brings all kinds of definitions to our mind. What does it mean that God is holy? You see, God being holy should not make us run from Him.

It should make us hunger for Him. Holy. The idea of something being cut off, or cut and separated, all right? So like mom cutting the vegetables in the kitchen, and as she's cutting them, she separates the cut ones off from the rest, cut off from the rest, separated from the rest.

Now I want you to stop and think about what this means about God. He is not like anything or anyone else. God is like Himself.

God is defined by Himself. He is the center of everything. He is the origin of all that there is.

God is God. There is nothing else by which He can be compared, and there is nothing else that can fully communicate who He is apart from the Lord Jesus Christ. God is holy.

He is separate. He is high. He is unattainable.

He is unknowable to the capacity of His person. We cannot know Him fully. He is separate from all else.

And so Isaiah experienced that wonderful day when he recognized the holiness of God. And while King Uzziah was now dead, God is alive. And God has always been alive.

Christopher Hitchens might be dead. God is alive. And He is high, and He is lifted up.

And here are these beings, whatever kind of beings they were, seraphims in all of their glory, and as they cried out, the very foundations were shaking. And what were they saying? Holy! Three times over, just because there is no limits to His holiness, there is no limits to who He is. There is nothing higher, nothing more than this.

God is set apart. So we come to Isaiah 40. And again, Isaiah is telling us the words of God.

To whom will you liken me, says the Holy One. And do you want to know something today? This is the very foundation on which we must live our lives as Christians, is the fact that God, before anything else, before His devotion to us, His devotion, first of all, is to Himself and to His glory. Nothing gets in the way of that.

I cannot get this across to us enough. And when we come in prayer, this must be in our minds. The holiness of God, He will have His glory.

And so every trial we go through, every experience in life that we enter, every depth of the valleys that we enter, please, we cannot forget this. God will have His glory. He is holy.

If a man was like this, he would be an egotist, self-centered. God is divinely self-centered in all of its perfections. He told Moses the day that He explained to Moses or declared to Moses that He was standing on holy ground.

He told him, I am that I am. I am who I am. I need no one else in order to exist.

I need no one else in order to survive. No one created me. No one will destroy me.

I am who I am and I always will be who I am. There is no changing this. He does not grow old.

God is holy. Do we come this way when we pray? Do we come this way on whatever weeknight it is to pray? Do we come recognizing we are coming to a God who is devoted to His glory and He will have it in this world? Do we come with that kind of confidence in this God? And can we come with this imperative, our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Abraham's gradual growth was marked by the names of God.

I find it interesting that he doesn't say, our Father in heaven, hallowed be Thyself. Why not? Why does he say, hallowed be Thy name? I think we all understand that the purpose of a name is to communicate. That's how we know each other.

That's usually the first thing we know about each other. We know our names. We communicate that way.

And we always, in some respect, now I have a hard time. You know, going places a lot and meeting a lot of people, it's desperate. I feel like every time I go to a new place, I have to memorize the phone book all over again.

And it is very, very difficult to attach names to faces. But our names are there for a reason. They are part of who we are.

To change it is very difficult to do. Our name tells us something about ourselves. It communicates something about ourselves.

Abraham found the glory of God gradually. And as his gradual growth happened in life, it was through a process of God revealing Himself by names over and over. Now here's the thing.

God's holiness tells us that God Himself cannot be known. We cannot figure Him out. We cannot in any way understand Him.

But what we do know about God is merely what God has chosen to reveal to us about Himself. God has chosen to reveal His holiness to us. It's usually what it means between holiness and glory.

The glory is His majesty, His fame, what we see and know of God. His ways are not ours. His thoughts are so much higher than ours, as high as the heavens are above the earth.

How could we ever come to the Scriptures and think that we know all there is or that we have it down as to what God is saying? We can't know Him fully, but God has chosen to reveal Himself to us. And one of those ways and one of the pictures is through His name, His reputation. That name tells us of the character of this holy God.

And so what is our request? That what we see of God might in some way reveal to us more of His holiness. Are you hungry for this? We could talk all day long about living holy lives and separating from worldly things and so on and so on and so on. And it is needed.

And the honest rebuke is there. But if we stop there, we haven't gone far enough. Christians, we need to be hungry for holiness and for the infinite Holy One.

So as we come deep into prayer, what are we doing? We're hungering after Him. He will have His glory. I was already thinking about this and studying this and looking at this.

When this past week, I was going to say I picked up a book, but I didn't pick it up because e-books these days, you know, you can't use the terms we used to use. Language is evolving because of technology. But I began reading John Piper's book on...he's speaking, he's got a bird and he's trying to share with men who preach the gospel.

It's called Brothers, We Are Not Professionals. And in it, this is what he wrote. He was speaking about the fact that God is devoted to Himself, to His glory.

He said, do your people know these things? Do they stake the answer to their prayers on God's love for His own glory? Do they make their case before His throne on the grounds that God does everything for His own name's sake? He quotes a number of verses where this is true. And he said this, do our people really know that hallowed be thy name is a petition for God to glorify Himself as God. And as I petition God in this way, hallowed be thy name.

What does it mean to me? The door of hunger is open and I long for God's holiness to pour into me. That His name would be hallowed in my life, in my thinking, in my ways. And that His name would be hallowed through me to the world around me.

And that there might be others, my neighbors, my co-workers, my fellow students, whoever it is, that might realize this same hunger for a God that is above everything else. Hallowed be thy name. Reveal your holiness here on earth.

Reveal your holiness in me. Reveal your holiness through me. I think if we meditate on the holiness of God long enough, we'll realize His holiness is so great, there is no language that we could come to Him in prayer with that would ever be sufficient.

No language. He's holy. We long that His glory would be seen in our lives, no matter the sacrifice.

Secondly, our desire for His kingdom, not only our desire for His name, but your, thy kingdom come. Again, an imperative, again, we are urgent about this. Thy kingdom.

We are seeking. It's interesting, later on in Matthew 6, again, He tells us, seek first the kingdom of God. Now, this could be millennial, but don't you think prayer is just a little more imminent than just looking off into the future a number of years? Thy kingdom come.

What is God's kingdom? What does this mean? Well, it is not just a location or a place, but it is actually the act of reigning. That His reign would come, that it would increase on the earth, and the wonderful news is that while someday Jesus shall reign in the millennium, He will reign over all, and the lion will lay down with the lamb. We know that's true.

He is reigning today. He reigns now. First Corinthians 15, 25, I have this written down, I thought of it today as I was thinking about this.

Paul tells us, for He must reign, and the actual language of that is in the continuous sense. He must be reigning till He has put all enemies under His feet. He must be reigning right now.

Jesus is on the throne. He is Lord and King. He is King of Kings, Lord of Lords.

He is reigning now, and our longing and desire is that His reign would increase in this world. Don't ever forget when you go to the office that the Lord is reigning at the office. It might not look like it as men will insult His name and take it and rub it under their feet and stomp on it, but Jesus is reigning.

He is in the act of reigning now, and we are longing as a people, I trust we are, we are marked by a desire and a hunger that His reign would continue and that it would increase. You know, sometimes we say things that can be misleading, and to actually say that you need to give your life over and allow the Lord to reign in your life is not exactly a true or an accurate statement. He's already reigning.

What you and I need to do is wake up to reality and stop denying. He reigns, and bow to His reign in our lives, in the world. How is His kingdom increasing? Every time we preach the gospel of Jesus Christ.

What is it about? It's not just about souls being saved. That comes after. What comes first is this.

His glory is being known, and His kingdom is being advanced. And as we hear the gospel, as we proclaim the gospel, as we share the gospel, it is all about, first of all, before anything else, the glory must belong to Him. All that He might reign or have His rightful place, that we might accept or acknowledge finally the reality, He reigns in my life.

There are times when I try to fool myself into thinking that He isn't reigning in my life, and I do whatever I want to do. Believe me, it won't last for long if you're a child of God. I'm so thankful to know that the way His kingdom advances in this world, it's comforting, isn't it, to realize that it's not through aggression, it's not through human power, but He did say, He did tell Pilate, my kingdom is not of this world.

If it was, my disciples, they would follow, they would fight. This is a different kind of kingdom. And how did it come? How is He advancing His kingdom in the world? Through sacrifice and through suffering and through self-denial.

If I am totally focused in prayer on His holiness and the glory of that holiness coming out and His reign increasing in this world and being known in this world, it will come as I continually deny myself and sacrifice my own longings, my desires, and my interests so that others might see Jesus indeed reigns. Thirdly, our desire for His will. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, as in heaven, so also in earth.

His holiness is recognized, His authority is bowed to. There is an absolute surrender, an absolute surrender that He will have His way. And I notice that the Lord Jesus does not go any further until the Father has His way.

It's only then that we can pray for our daily bread. It's only then that our needs come into perspective. It is only then that we will pray with right motives and right desires.

James warns that at times we ask and we do not receive because we ask wrongly to spend it on our own passions, our own desires. We're not asking with God's glory in view. We're not asking with His kingdom in view.

We're not asking recognizing it is His desires that need to be spread in this world. And so this is a God-centered focus, a God-centered prayer. And I trust if prayer begins to be a 24-7 habit in my life, then this focus will be a 24-7 focus in my life.

God is holy and I'm hungry for Him. I want to know more of His person. Jesus reigns on a throne today.

And I long to see that kingdom proclaimed through the world. And may His desires, His will in my life, in the world around, as it is in heaven, may it be on this earth, whatever the cost, whatever the pain, whatever it takes, give us this day our daily bread so that we might bring more glory to Your name. Do we pray this way? I, coming to this, I have to tell you, the reason why primarily I've spent two times up here talking about this is because God has just been pressing it on me that what we need among us is deep, fervent, God-focused prayer that will not only unite us, but might just be the spark of the revival we desperately need.

God help us to pray.