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Jun 02, 2024

Start with the End

Start with the End

Passage: Matthew 6:9

Speaker: Andrew Kerhoulas

Series: Practice the Presence - Prayer

Keywords: father, seek, ask, knock, good things, opened, good gifts

From how not to pray—masquerading as someone else before God and others—Jesus shifts gears: “Pray then like this,” he says, “Our Father in heaven…” These potent first four words will be supplemented with his teaching later in his sermon about a Father who gives good gifts to those who ask.

Readings & Scripture

PRE SERVICE TEXT: Matthew 7:11
If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

PREPARATION: 2 Corinthians 1:3-4, 20-22
LEADER: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God…

All: For all the promises of God find their Yes in him. That is why it is through him that we utter our Amen to God for his glory. 21 And it is God who establishes us with you in Christ, and has anointed us, 22 and who has also put his seal on us and given us his Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH/CREEDAL STATEMENT/SCRIPTURE READING:

LEADER: Let’s pray in the way Jesus taught us to pray together.

ALL: Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on 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.

CENTRAL TEXT:
Matthew 6:9a;

9 Pray then like this:
“Our Father in heaven…”

Luke 11:5-13

5 And he said to them, “Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves, 6 for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him’; 7 and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything’? 8 I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his impudence[c] he will rise and give him whatever he needs. 9 And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. 11 What father among you, if his son asks for[d] a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; 12 or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? 13 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH/CREEDAL STATEMENT: Westminster Larger Catechism Q & A 74

LEADER: What is adoption?

ALL: Adoption is an act of the free grace of God, in and for His only Son Jesus Christ, whereby all those that are justified are received into the number of His children, have His name put upon them, the Spirit of His Son given to them, are under His fatherly care and dispensations, admitted to all the liberties and privileges of the sons of God, made heirs of all the promises, and fellow-heirs with Christ in glory.

BENEDICTION: 1 Corinthians 13:14
LEADER: May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.

ALL: Amen

POST SERVICE: Matthew 7:11
If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

RELATED SCRIPTURES:

  • Deuteronomy 14:1-2
  • Psalm 103:13
  • Isaiah 63:16-17; 64:8-9
  • Jeremiah 31:20
  • Luke 11:1-13; 18:1-8; 23:34, 46
  • John 8:33-35; 10:30; 14:9; 17:1-26; 20:17
  • Romans 8:15
  • Galatians 4:6
  • Ephesians 1:5

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS:

  1.  Read Exodus 4:22-23. What did God communicate to slaves and to their master? How does Jesus continue to provide slaves with freedom from tyranny (see John 8:33-35)? 
  2. What happens in your mind when you imagine your heavenly Father? Father wounds can keep us from seeing God rightly. How can John 14:8-10 reform your view of your heavenly Father? 
  3. Reflect on and discuss the quality of relationship Jesus enjoys with the Father. Then read Romans 8:15 and Ephesians 1:5 and consider what God has done to welcome us into his family. 
  4. What’s the best thing a Father can give his children? Then read Luke 11:11-13 and discuss the gift—the favor—we have been given by our Father. 
  5. Getting practical: What’s the typical “end” of your prayers? Is it your list or your Father? Be honest and then simply enjoy time with your Father and his other children.
  6. Finally, if sin and suffering make us act and feel like orphans respectively, what can you do this week to help a sibling to remember their adoption? 

ILLUSTRATIONS:  

 

 

QUOTES:  

 

  • Saying ‘our father’ isn’t just the boldness, the sheer cheek, of walking into the presence of the living and almighty God and saying ‘Hi, Dad.’ It is the boldness, the sheer total risk, of saying quietly ‘Please may I, too, be considered an apprentice son.’ It means signing on for the Kingdom of God. N. T. Wright
  • The first three petitions make us participants in the being and action of God. The pronouns tell the story—your name, your kingdom, your will. Your, your, your. The three concluding prepositions invite God to return the favor—to get his heavenly reality into us while our feet remain planted here on the ground…Prayer involves us deeply and responsibly in all the operations of God. Prayer also involves God deeply and transformatively in all the details of our lives. Eugene Peterson
  • All those that are justified, God vouchsafeth [or graciously grants], in and for His only Son Jesus Christ, to make partakers of the grace of adoption:  by which they are taken into the number, and enjoy the liberties and privileges of the children of God; have His name put upon them, receive the Spirit of adoption; have access to the throne of grace with boldness; are enabled to cry, Abba, Father; are pitied, protected, provided for,  and chastened by Him as by a Father; yet never cast off, but sealed to the day of redemption, and inherit the promises, as heirs of everlasting salvation. Westminster Confession of Faith (Chapter XII.1)
  • When it's over, I want to say: 
    all my life I was a bride married to amazement. 
    I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
    When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
    Mary Oliver
  • What happens in a secular culture where belief in the objectivity of God and of moral law recedes? Then, as Allan Bloom has argued powerfully in The Closing of the American Mind, everything goes into flux…and we witness a closing of the (American) mind, with a resultant collapse into narcissism, a preoccupation with the self—my rights, my life, my liberty, my pursuit of happiness. Religion then becomes a means toward self-realization. All the interest is in self-esteem, self-fulfillment, self-identity, the human potential movement and possibility thinking, leading either ot the nihilism of post-modernism, or to the neo-gnosticism of the New Age movement which identifies the self with God. Know yourself. Realize your own identity. Then you will know God in the depths of your own spirituality. Hence the cry for new images of God to express our own self-understanding and sexuality. James B. Torrance
  • If two neighbors know that they may seriously disagree, but that either of them, given even a small change of circumstances, may desperately need the other, should they not keep between them a sort of pre-paid forgiveness? They ought to keep it ready to hand, like a fire extinguisher. Wendell Berry
  • If you want to be with God, don’t look up and away to some destination far beyond the blue. Look down and around, because that is where God is at work and where God wants to be. God does not ever flee from his creatures. Norman Wirzba

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