Intro/Outro: Welcome to Garden Church Podcast. We're in a series called Walk with Jesus. This series is about learning to cultivate a passionate love with God. Joy.
Darren Rouanzoin: Good morning. Good morning. I just wanna say Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there. Well done. You've done it.
Some of you did it well, some of you haven't. That's okay. I'm just being real. I have regrets already. I'm still figuring out how to do it well.
It's it's a hard job. And I I had the first service I was very tender because Father's Day is always a mixed bag. Is it like that for a lot of you? Like, so fun celebrating dads but also like man, the massive wounds some of us carry, I carry from the absence you know, of my dad or the reminder of like the spiritual fathers that are no longer here in my life. It's just a tender day where it's like Like in general with life, you have this joy and grief living together.
They're part, you know, they coexist and and I think the best way to like navigate life is to recognize both of those emotions. Like I can be so grateful and I'm a dad, some people have longed to be a dad and they they weren't able to be biological fathers. So I can celebrate all that and I also have an earthly father that you know, I don't have the best relationship with in all of the life years that I've had. And I have father figures who have passed away that I can't talk to anymore. And, I was texting in between services, Dawn's wife, my my spiritual father who passed a couple years ago, and, just sharing what I experienced.
And and she says, you know, it's nice to know that other people feel the same way in her loneliness. But anyways, I I share that because I feel like if there was a day I could just not show up for work today was that day. But then I have to show up and preach. And I'm grateful for that for a few reasons. 1, to communicate to this community that this is not an event.
And I think it's so hard in our culture of church consumerism or like Christian, this other Christian thing where we just consume podcasts and teaching from different communities or show up to a worship night on Monday or a thing on Wednesday or Sunday and not recognize that we're designed to be incarnate. We're designed to be a a gathering of the Lord's people where we gather in and out of season when we feel like it and when we don't feel like it. And we submit ourselves to the the weekly rhythm of gathering on the Lord's day. Sunday is the Lord's day. Yeah.
So we show up when we don't feel like it. And just like you, when you have your job, you have to show up when you don't feel like it. I'm excited to be here. Alright. So don't feel that, but you know there are moments where it's harder.
I was thinking about all the people I know that have a legacy from their earthly fathers of positive traits, you know. And I think about ways that my generational sin has been passed down and so much work for some of us. Not some of you, some of us to live it well. And, and and it's it's this kind of topic that pulls out the the areas of struggle which you'll hear about in a little bit. So I know it's a very vague and maybe even ominous intro to a sermon.
So welcome to Garden Church. If you're visiting, so glad you're here. We're gonna continue our series. It's called Walk With Jesus and I wrote this for one person in our community who's new to faith. So this whole series is really for her and you guys are all byproducts.
You are bystanders, excuse me, of what I'm, what I'm trying to give to a friend of mine who's new to the faith and it's to help her find a way to live with Jesus. And I know that you'll benefit from it, but we are walking with Jesus and we're figuring out how to integrate our faith in real life, not just to think theoretically but to live this out as we go. And a few weeks ago, I talked about this form that if you want a life with God, you need to construct some intentional rhythms in your life and build a quiet time, a space to meet with God so that requires intentionality, time and space, silence and solitude. And that the doorway into life with God is your attention. And that attention fuels desire and desire shapes your behavior.
So if you wanna follow Jesus, you're gonna have to bring Him your attention. And the doorway into life with God is your attention and there's three things we do every day as followers of Jesus with our attention. We worship, we read scripture, and we pray. So last week we talked about scripture and today and next week we're gonna talk about prayer. Does that sound good?
So let me pray since we're talking about it. For this time, would you open your hands and open your heart? Open your mind. Lord Jesus Christ, thank you for your revelation. Holy Father, would you bring to us a fresh encounter through your word to commune with you, to engage with you, and walk with you in a new way.
I pray that your life and revelation of how to exist with you would, be not just something we know, but something we experience. In the name of Jesus, we pray. Amen. Brennan Manning tells a story about when he was a priest in New Orleans. A woman comes and knocks on his door and asks him if he's Brenda Manning.
He said, Yes. She said, Hey, my father's ill and I would, was wondering if you would come to pray for him. I don't know how much time he has left. I've gone to our local priest and asked him to come, but he gets busy with church administration and he forgets to come and pray. He said, I'll be there in 10 minutes.
So he he goes to the man's house and he sees an empty chair waiting next to the bed and he says, Oh, you must be expecting me to the old man. And the man replies, No, who are you? Brennan said, I assume because the chair was here, you were waiting for me. And the old man said to him, Well, hey, you're a priest. Tell me something about this chair.
A few years ago, I wanted to learn to pray. So I went to my priest and asked him if you would give me a book, asked me to I asked him if you would teach me how to pray and he handed me a book by a Swiss theologian on the subject. The priest said to him, that this was the best contemporary book on prayer. After 3 pages, I had to look up 11 words. I gave the book back to the priest and I said, Thank you for nothing under my breath.
Later my friend said to me, Prayer is easy. Pull up an empty chair and imagine in your heart that Jesus is there in your midst, because he says in Scripture, I will be with you always to the ends of the age. Talk to him like you're having a conversation with a friend. The man said to Brandon, Here's the thing. I've been doing it every day ever since.
Sometimes for 2 hours. The man asked, Since you're a priest, tell me. Is this prayer? Brennan said, That is simple, profound and indeed prayer. It delights the heart of Jesus.
Brennan prayed for the man and then left. A few days later, the woman came back to Brennan's apartment to tell him that his her father had passed away. He asked if she'd he died in peace. And she said, yes. But the weirdest thing happened.
My dad called me in before I left to store around 2 o'clock. He kissed me on the head and told me a silly joke. When I came back, I found him dead. Right before he passed, he pulled himself out of bed and placed his head on the empty chair next to the bed. Simple, profound, indeed prayer.
It delights the heart of Jesus. I love this story because it's a story about a kind of intimacy that all of us need to have. It's a kind of story about what prayer really is. And my hope is that one day when I pass, if I'm lucky to die of old age, that I would stretch out myself and lay my head to rest on his lap. And I wonder if when we think of prayer, we think of it like that.
And if you were to look at the teaching of Jesus on prayer, most of us don't experience that kind of intimacy, that kind of invitation of surrender and life with God. Simple, profound and indeed prayer. Today I wanna teach you a very simple message. I wanna show you how to begin your life with God in prayer from the text. So I'm gonna anchor in Matthew, but can we just read a couple of passages, talk about what prayer is, talk about 3 aspects of a very famous passage of scripture that I wanna invite you into and land with an invitation.
Does that sound good on this Father's Day? 17 of us. Okay, Luke chapter, Can you go to Luke chapter 5? If you have a Bible, hold it up. I wanna see your Bibles.
Luke 5. Well done church. So we're getting there. I can't wait till everyone has one. One day if you need one, we have free Bibles in the back.
Luke chapter 5 verse 15. I'm just gonna show you how the author of Luke describes the life of Jesus. Pay attention to the details of the life of Jesus. They're there intentionally, and we need to pay attention to what the author say about his life because if we're framing our discipleship based on his life, then we should practice things he practice and do the things he did just by way of imitation. Now, Luke 5:15 says, yet the news about Jesus spread all the more so that crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sickness.
But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed. As Jesus became more and more famous during his lifetime, you would see this rhythm of public engagement and quiet solitude and silence or withdrawal from the public, community in order to be alone and pray with the Father. Luke chapter 6 verse 12, another verse. It's a chapter later. One of those days, Jesus went out to the mountain side to pray and spent the night praying to Sorry.
Verse 12, chapter Yeah. I got it right. Sorry. And, spent the night praying to God. So one night Jesus goes alone and spends all night praying.
Isn't that interesting? Chapter 9 verse 18, same gospel. It says, once when Jesus was praying in a private pull in private and his disciples were with him. He asked them, who do the crowd say I am? So again, Jesus is praying alone and then he's with his disciples and he engages.
Luke chapter 11 verse 1. One more verse from Luke. Just wanna make this point because, I I feel like we we should carry some healthy assumptions about our life as disciples. And forgive me if you already know this, I don't mean to be simple or reduce this, but if there are overwhelming themes to Jesus' life and what produces the life he had, it might make sense for us as this as disciples to mimic that behavior. Would you agree?
Like if Jesus uses scripture to combat temptation, we might wanna use scripture to combat temptation. If Jesus memorized scripture, submitted the Scripture, we might want to memorize and submit the Scripture. Is that a a fair assumption to make? I don't wanna assume that you believe that, but I wanna make that case as a pastor. My goal isn't to give you great information.
My goal is your transformation into Christ likeness. One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples. And then he goes on to teach them to pray in Luke's gospel, a version of the Lord's prayer which will anchor in Matthew chapter 6 in just a second. My point in these texts is just to show you how frequently both in Matthew, Mark, Luke, John's Gospels, Jesus goes to pray with the father.
Now in this one, it's unique because Jesus, we know heals the sick, he cast out demons, he preaches the gospel, he raises the dead, he cleanses lepers, but the disciples never asked them to teach them how to do those things. The only thing recorded in the gospels that he The disciples asked Jesus to teach them is how to pray. Something of Jesus' prayer life was so overwhelming and significant that the disciples want access. They want to know how to pray like him. They weren't asking for technique to cast out the devils and demons, they're asking for technique for prayer.
Think about that in your life, what you go to God for in instruction and what the disciples witnessed in the life. Why? Because something in the text makes it abundantly clear. Prayer was the center point of life with God for Jesus. Prayer was woven into the fabric of his routine.
Every morning, if he didn't have time in the morning, he would stay up late at night. He would not go to bed when he was exhausted from ministry to be alone with God. When he had to make an important decision like who will be the 12 apostles. He stayed up all night with the father discerning in prayer. How to make that decision in his life?
He made time, he carved out time to be alone with the father in prayer. You see, I believe prayer was essential for life on Earth for Jesus. Therefore, it should be essential for life on Earth for his disciples. Would you agree with this? I believe prayer was exciting for Jesus.
It was something that he looked forward to. It wasn't about getting things done or checking off the to do list or having a quiet time. It was about the source of creation for him. It was about the source of life. And in one of those prayer moments, it's recorded.
He was transfigured into, on the mount, on the mountain, he had a transfiguration moment where his glory was revealed to a couple of his disciples. A cloud come came, he was standing with Moses and and Elijah discussing things and it was it was from an encounter in his alone time in prayer. But for most of us, that's not our experience in prayer. For most of us, and forgive me for over generalizing, it's a chore. It's hard.
Let me just say this point number 1, this isn't a point on the notes. Prayer is hard. Would you agree? It's probably harder now than it's ever been because we live in an attention economy where we wanna we wanna pray to God, but it's easy to get on our phone and scroll on Instagram. Or it's easy when we go into prayer to get distracted by the shopping list and we just need to add to our Amazon cart real quick.
And then we get notified of an email and our prayer life turns into back to work. And I talked about this a couple weeks ago, be careful what you let into your quiet time, it will be the end of you. Like your greatest threat to life with Jesus is not Satan hiding behind every rock or every car or every advertisement. It's living in your pocket, and it's a subtle way of pulling you away from the source of life. We know this, it's attention, but at the end of the day, why when we approach prayer, is it not the center of life for most of us?
One reason I think has to do with how we've created a religion in Christianity that was never designed to be there in the first place. Right? Like prayer, we we begin to open our lives to God and rather than opening our authentic self, we approach it like it's a performance. Right? So I say prayer and you start thinking of all the good things you need to do or all the lists of things you want to happen to make your life happy.
You start putting those things down. And prayer has been taught various ways for many of us as a way of performing and proving ourselves to the divine. Like I had this conversation I was leaving the gym, headphones in, in a hurry to get back home, and this this lady who's from our church who I've never met before is like hollering and I had, you know, Kendrick full blast clean version on a Saturday doing leg day, and she was in tears. And she just starts telling me about her life, what she's struggling with, and why she hasn't been here on Sundays, but why it had to do with shame and guilt and how she started her journey with God and it was good, but then life happened. Reality sets in like the the things you overcame no longer now now have a hold of you again.
And it puts you in a mindset of guilt and shame. So how could you show up here when you had victory but now you're back you're backsliding in these old habits. Well, you don't show up here because you think it's a place of performance. Rather than this is where everyone that struggles recognizes that we're just beggars that were handed bread. And we're just grateful for the morsel God gave us on the cross and will never be more than beggars who receive grace upon grace upon grace upon grace.
That's the church. Anything else is religion. We are in a place of religion that performs our way to God, that is conditioned for response or is loved conditionally. That's not how this works. Yeah, but that's how we pray.
Think about it. We come to Jesus with a performance rather than where we are in life. You see, Jesus is gonna teach us how to pray and it it shuts down all forms of religion if you watch it, if you see it and understand. Can we go there? Matthew chapter 6, the famous Lord's prayer.
Actually let me go back before I go to Matthew 6. I'm already ahead of my notes. The anointing took over. Or my hunger, 1 or the other. I can't really determine that right now.
I can, I'm just kidding. Prayer is hard. So we gotta figure this out if prayer is essential for following Jesus. So what is prayer at the basic level? I'm again, this is a simple message.
Prayer is talking to God. I was talking to Jesus. I I really at the end of the day, prayer is just talking to God. I love what Dallas Willard said. This is a paraphrase of his definition.
Prayer is an intentional conversation with God about mutual concerns. It's intentional meaning it's thoughtful, it's engaged. It's a two way interaction of listening to God and speaking to God. And it's mutually sharing one's life. So it's it's opening yourself up to God's heart as you open yourself up your heart to God.
You both you you prayer is this mutual journey of conversation. Matthew chapter 6. Let's let's look at this. It says this in verse 9. You would why don't we read this all together?
This is then how you should prayer verse verse 9. Our father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. Oh, I love this.
I love when we recite this. Because some of you are like, trespasses. It's supposed to be trespasses. Come on. You're like, this is the wrong version.
We know this prayer. We know this prayer. When Jesus is asked to teach us to pray, Luke records a variation of this, but Matthew, when Jesus teaches the Sermon on the Mount, he gives us not a liturgy, not something to recite over and over. Although you should have it memorized, you should recite this, but this is an outline, a framework of what life in prayer will expand as you add your prayers in this. But there's there is structure to this that I need you to see.
And I'm gonna do part 1 this week and we'll do part 2 next week. Part 1 is this first verse, our father in heaven, hallowed be your name. I need you to see this because this opens the doorway to your life with God. And right now there are lots of obstacles for you having a prayer life where one day you will rest your head on the empty chair. That's what I'm after.
How do we get there? I'm not gonna give you a bunch of strategies for effective intercession right now. I wanna open the door of your heart to union with the father. It starts with our father. Now there are a lot of names for God that Jesus could have used.
He could have said quite a few names. Yahweh, Elohim, Adonai, Jehovah, Jireh, Raphel Shaddai, the list goes on and on and on, but he chooses the word father. In the Greek it's the formal word, and most scholars would argue that in fact, of the 148 times Jesus says the word father in the formal sense in the gospels, he actually would speak Abba which is Aramaic for daddy. But it was so controversial that even the gospel writers made it the formal version of father. But this is perhaps one of the most revolutionary things that Jesus reveals when he teaches us to pray.
He says, when you approach God, you don't approach him with formality. You don't come him come to him in as an Orthodox Jew not wanting to misspeak the name of God because if you do, you get stoned. You come to him like a toddler grabbing the pen of his dada. When you pray, you think of God as father. This is where we enter into the life of God.
This is the this is how we step into a conversation with God. It's not a conversation of performance and formality. It's a conversation of directed intimacy with the creator of the universe and you call him daddy. Now, that's hard. Would you agree?
It's hard for me. I've I've I've loved this idea of God as father as a cool idea, but I've struggled with it. I love praying to Lord Jesus, it's really easy to pray to a king. It is for me. I think it's hard to pray to father, for lots of reasons.
Can I make a case real quick? Are you with me on this? One reason is society. Because when was the last time you saw a sitcom or a show where the father was emotionally healthy, intentionally engaged, physically healthy as a family man who wasn't obsessed with work or dumb. Bluey.
It's a it takes a blue healer. We have we have a society that is permissible gives permission to be an absentee dad. Not just that we live in a fatherless generation society. We have a we can we can see the impact of those incarcerated. 91% of incarcerated people have no fathers in the home.
We're talking about addiction, homelessness, the statistics of crime, all connected to the lack of fathering that's take place in our society. So for a lot of people, the idea of God as a father is an obstacle to overcome, not just that personal experiences. It's hard to engage a relationship with God when he's revealed as a father if your personal relationship to your personal earthly father has been damaged. Maybe you were abused by your dad. Maybe you your dad left your family and you witnessed the the worst things possible as a young boy or girl.
And when you come to faith, Jesus is saying pray to the father and you're like, that's the last thing I wanna do. But that's what Jesus teaches. And there are lots of obstacles to entering prayer, but prayer, obviously, the performance side, obviously, we feel guilt and shame, so we don't wanna engage in an honest conversation, But also society has said fathers are absent, distant, angry, all sorts of other things, and then we have these personal experiences, and that's what it was for me. I don't I don't know how to do this without being vulnerable, so I'm not trying to over expose my journey, but I struggled to relate to God as father because of my relationship with my dad. Like I'm I'm gonna be 40 this year, and I still want my dad's validation and affirmation.
I'm sitting here in the first service thinking of all the father figures the Lord has put into my life that have spoken validation and affirmation over my identity, and I'm grateful for that. And I know so many of you have never had that. So how do you come vulnerability to God in heaven? You can come to a king, but to enter in as a daddy, No. Don't be praying daddy God over here.
Now listen, this is such a big deal. Okay. It's not a small thing that what I'm describing to you is that I have an inaccurate view of God because of my relationship to my earthly dad. And that plagues my life in the church, in leadership with my kids, with my wife because of those unprocessed wounds. How many of you know unprocessed wounds are your greatest threat to life in ministry?
Let that soak in for a little bit. It's a threat. Listen to what Dallas Willard said. He says, the secret to a good life is rooted in the knowledge of God. When the know when that knowledge is absent from our minds, everything goes to pieces because of the fundamental fact that your primary contact with God is through your mind.
And what you do with your mind is the most important choice you have to make. Listen to what he says, this is pretty intense. Wherever your mind goes, the rest of your life goes with it. All the things that we know about God that are false destroy our lives, poison us, throw our lives out of kilter and throw our bodies out of inappropriate relationship to reality. Wrong ideas about God make it impossible for us to function in relationship to one another.
We are not able to love one another because we do not have our minds filled with an accurate vision of God. So when Jesus says, you pray our father, he's saying prayer begins with God as your father an accurate view of God. You can't pray to an angry God. That's not the God of the Bible. You can't pray to a judgmental god, to a cosmic traffic cop, to a vending machine god.
That's not the God of the bible. Jesus says, when you engage this life we call spirituality, it starts with an appropriate accurate vision of the God in heaven. He's not like your earthly fathers who have failed or will fail. He is the perfect and good, loving, benevolent God who has expressed himself towards you as father, the good one, who's given everything to be with you, to have loving relationship. Prayer begins with that accurate vision.
And if you don't have that vision, it will mess up your life. Like, what do you mean? I came back to faith at 19, and I was out of the the Christian world for like a year and a half. And when I came back, I came back to a vision of God that was I have to prove my worth and value to him. I did all these wrong things.
And so now that I accepted the grace, I have to go and evangelize to everyone. I have to perform my way with holiness and prove that I was worth it on the cross. So at 19, I'm serving at Rock Harbor Church where I was going, I was doing youth ministry, I was doing homeless ministry at Skid Row and in MacArthur Park in LA. I was volunteering at a church, I was going to school and I was working and then I I get I I graduate school and I feel called the ministry and I started church at 22 years old. My wife and I started the Long Beach Project when we were 22 and 23, and we began to do ministry.
And back then, you know, there weren't there weren't organizations like there are now to support church planners. It was like you just parachute in and good luck. And it was horrible for my identity because I worshiped a God that I had to prove my value to. So as the church grew, I got sicker and sicker because I ran faster and faster. Why?
Because that's what it means to be a good Christian. So there I was at 29 years old burnt out of ministry and bleeding inside being treated for colon cancer except after this very intrusive treatment or scope, they found no evidence of colon cancer, and they finally said, it's not colon cancer that's causing the bleeding. It's not polyps. You're stressed. What do you do for work?
I worship a father who's disapproved of me. And the way I feel affection and love is by performance. And so when I was 29, it wasn't a health problem. It was a God, an accurate vision of God problem. It was an idol made in the image of my earthly dad.
And I had to stop worshiping a distorted image of God even though everything in inside my body told me that that's what love looks like. Everything in my heart told me this is how you receive love. Everything in my history, past that's been stored up for all these years taught me that this is what love is. I had to submit my feelings. I had to submit my thoughts.
I had to submit my body to an accurate vision of God. I had to learn that I was his beloved without condition. I was his boy without performance. I was loved for no good reason at all. And that's the beginning of life in the kingdom of God.
That until you surrender your emotions, until you surrender your ideas, your body will be out of kilter with reality. Do you see why Jesus says, when you pray, pray to daddy. And so many of you have never had that experience because you're so caught up in what you think and what you feel in your history and your trauma, and you haven't submitted to scripture. You haven't submitted to humbling yourself and going, I want that Abba encounter. Imagine what it would be like for me as a dad if I said to Ezra and Amos, You have to perform your way to being my sons.
Didn't do your chores, you don't get to sleep in your room tonight. Sorry, you thought you were gonna have a meal. Sorry, you didn't do what I asked. You don't get to have a meal. That's for my right son.
Imagine how crazy it would be if what was freely given that he was born in he didn't get to choose who his dad was. I made him perform his identity. Man, we have this conversation all the time. I'll say, I love you, Ezra. I love you, Amos.
And he'll go, I love you more. And I go, you can't love me more. He's like, yeah, I can. I'm like, nope. One day you'll have a son or a daughter and you'll know why I'm right.
It's experiential knowledge. Right? Like I didn't learn that I had this distorted view until I experienced life crashing, and I didn't think my way into surrender. You know what happened? I encountered God.
And I know this is hard because some of us like we're like, but in the word, I wanna say experiential knowledge is clearly biblical. Acts chapter 2, some kind of experience happened where there were tongues of fire, winds happening, earthquake, they're all speaking in different language. That's an experience written down. Does that make sense? Some of you need an Abba experience, and you're not gonna get it by willing or practicing or working your way to it.
You have to surrender everything. Alright, let's keep moving. I got 2 more points. This is going. Off.
Let's post second service. This is good. Just self actually put that in my head. I this is one of the problems I have in general. If you don't know already, my wife and I when we communicate, let's just say she communicates very clearly but there's a lot of noise in my head, right?
This might speak to prayer. Right? Let me just speak to this like, you can't have an honest conversation with God if you don't have the right version of God in your head. Right? So like, I'm asking you to open yourself up to God the father.
God revealed himself in scripture, that version of God who is a father who likes you, who loves you, who's good, he's in a good mood, he's kind, he's compassionate, he's generous, he wants the best for you. Sometimes the no to your request is the best for you. You gotta learn that right? Like I tell my kids all the time, my my desires for your best and that's why there are limitations to your requests, right? But you can't have an honest conversation with God until you know who he is.
That's why we gotta read about who he is and we gotta submit our thoughts about him to the real version of himself. Otherwise, we get the wrong message. Not that he's speaking, but we hear it wrong. Like when I talk to Alex, he just says, hey, did you remember to take out the trash? I hear you're not doing enough.
Anyone else? She's like, why are you defensive? I'm not defensive. Did did you take out the trash? I did this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this.
Why don't you love me? Did she communicate anything wrong? No, she's a solid self that communicates her desires intentionally. She is a healthy human being. I'm the messed up one that doesn't hear what she says.
I hear all the other things. So many of us when we're trying to conversate with God, We don't hear what he's saying. We hear all the other distorted versions of him. Right? So may I submit to you that some of you need to surrender your ideas about God to the biblical version shown by Jesus is revelation.
And if you're wondering, well, what is He like? The greatest revelation ever given in history of what God is like is Jesus on the cross. Every other image of God must surrender. The father has given his son and his self love is the ultimate window into glory in heaven. That is the father who's waiting.
And as soon as he sees you he takes off running. Before you can give him the excuses or the apology, he wraps his arms around you and says, My boy, my daughter is home. You see that's the image that we have to submit to. Does that make sense? 2nd, it says, Our Father in heaven.
Now I'm gonna go through these quick because heaven is interesting because it it communicates the transcendence of God. God is father and we're intimate, but also in heaven over or emphasizing God's omnipotence and sovereign rule over the universe. And it reminds us that God has the ultimate authority, so we should revere him. But also let me say this, the translation for heaven is tricky because we as Westerners think that heaven is a cloud city and outer space that we go to when we die, which is not the idea of heaven from the biblical perspective. The word heaven is plural heavens, and it means air or sky.
And so when Jesus says our father who art in heaven, he's saying our our father who's always present and always near like the air we breathe. He is close to us, like the skin is on our body. He is that present, so God is near. God is up close and personal. Most of us, we don't realize that because we think God is far off and distant because of an inner inaccurate view of God, but when Jesus teaches us to pray, he's saying he's close and intimate like a father, like Abba, but he's also sovereign and transcendent but near, and he can't be away from you.
In fact, one argument would be God doesn't know how to be absent. God doesn't know how to be absent. God doesn't abandon us. His promise is that he will be with us till the ends of the age. He doesn't shame us or leave us on our own.
He doesn't hurt us. He doesn't desire the pain or the suffering, but he uses it for his good, and he's with you and he's near you. And if you recognize this, then you can have a conversation all the time because he's always present. So he's with you when you're driving to work. He's with you at work, when you leave work, when you get home, when right before you go to bed, while you go to bed, he's always present.
He's with you when you're sinning. Yes. We need to break this bad theology that he's like absent from sin. He is present to sin. He was in the garden walking near Adam as Adam after he sinned hid from God.
He His presence wasn't expelled because of sin. He runs right towards it. If that's true, Jesus wouldn't have walked around on earth if he couldn't be around sin. Would you agree? Do you see how how we think he's somewhere gone when we're No.
Invite him in to the thing that held you, hold you in bondage. Invite him into the lust while you lust. Invite him into the anger while you're raging. Invite him into the consumerism, the greed, the envy, and be honest. You can God can't meet with you as a false self.
He can only meet with you as a true self, which is a beloved, saint, holy, power washed from the inside out. How we doing church? Do you understand what prayer is? Is it a list of things that you need to get done? Is it about your happiness?
No. It's about communion. It's about settling into who you really are because you know who he is. It's about delighting. It's about engaging.
It's about conversation after conversation. It's about listening. It's about so much life. It's a shared life with God. Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
That word hallowed means to make holy to sanctified in the it's connected to the Hebrew word for glorify or glory, which means is translated to kavod, which is weighty or heavy or significant or important. Frederick Del Bruner says, oh God, in this prayer he says, make yourself even heavier in the eyes of the world. Tim Keller puts it this way, this is such a beautiful way to look at this one part of the prayer. He says, to hallow God's name is to have a heart of grateful joy toward God. And even more, a wonder a sense of his beauty.
Consider how different this is from the normal way we use prayer to get things. We may believe in God, but our deepest hopes and happiness resides in things as in how successful we are in our social relationships. We therefore pray mainly when our career or finances are in trouble or when some relationship or social status is in jeopardy. When life is going smoothly and our truest heart treasures seem safe, it does not occur to us to pray. Seldom or never do we spend sustained time adoring and praising God.
We know God is there, but we tend to see him as a means through which we get things to make us happy. For most of us, he has not become our happiness. With hallowed be thy name, Jesus is saying, father, you are the source of my emotional well-being. You are the source of my emotional well-being. The first and primary goal of prayer, the first and primary petition in prayer is grateful worship and enjoyment of the Father's company.
The first and primary goal of prayer is simply to enjoy God. This is what Jesus teaches us to pray. Hallowed be thy name. Make your name sanctified, set apart. Let the world experience you as God, the God that you are.
Nothing in the world will become right until they experience your greatness and goodness as the source. Do you see what he's getting at? The main point of prayer is simply to be with God and to know him as he is. The main point of prayer is to know God and to be with God and to know Him as He is. It's to enjoy His presence and from that we experience what ought to be true joy.
This is why Jesus runs to prayer. This is why Jesus runs after a busy day and he's exhausted to the source of all creation to be alone with that source who's not an energy, not a good vibe, not in everything pantheism, but the creator of everything who is a person, who is a relational being, who desires to be in relationship with you as you really are. So I have a couple of invitations as we close. Number 1, I want you to acknowledge the relationship you currently have with God. I think for so many of us, we just need to acknowledge that we are per potentially worshiping the wrong version of God.
An idol made in the image, handed to us in bad theology when we were young at a different church or in this like not here. Definitely not here. I do you have any idea what's happening kids and youth in our church? They're they have a better accurate they have a better version of Jesus than I got as a child. Because I told you my mission is to build a church my kids don't have to heal from, and you're all you're all getting that for better or worse.
That good and bad because that limits what we do because I want my kids to love Jesus and love the church as they grow up as PKs. And all of your kids, we're gonna create that, but we really do have bad theology. We've been shaped whether it's been fed to us from, you know, a previous church that some books that you've read or some TikTok influencer. I don't know. You might have that whether it's your experience growing up, those things need to be submitted and surrendered.
I think this is the invitation, right? That we have men and women here who have been followers of Jesus for so long, and you've never known God as your father. Abba, you've never been ambushed by the love of God. Before I started the church, a couple months before, I went to Northern Ireland. My brother was serving there and I went to this Presbyterian church that was like a 125 years old.
And there were only 4 or 5 pastors of this church in its lifetime. And the pastor there heard I was planning a church. Alex and I were there together. We were really young and he said, I'd love to pray for you. And this is when prayer and the power of words of knowledge and prophecy were new to me.
So he takes us into his office and he sits on the floor at our feet and he has a sit down and he just begins to pray. And this is a Presbyterian, old Presbyterian Church. And he's whispering in tongues and I'm like, wow, this is breaking all my boxes of theology right now. I don't know what's going on. And as he's praying, he has these glasses on and he's just this quite humble man and he says to me, I have an image in my head for you Darren.
Doesn't know me at all. He says, I and he had this thick Irish, Northern Irish accent, which would be amazing if I could repeat, but I can't just make it sound like Lucky Charms commercial or something like that. He says, I see you as a little boy. He says, I see you as a wee little lad. That's what he said.
Sitting on your father's lap and the father's enjoying your presence, and you're enjoying his presence. And, you have worked your whole life for your father's approval, and you've always had it. And I sat there and wept for 45 minutes uncontrollably Because it was like the thing, the deepest ache of my heart was revealed to this Presbyterian pastor who's charismatic and in Northern Ireland. Like I was like, How does this work? As I wept and he held me for 45 minutes and prayed that Abba experience over my life.
And it did change. And then I got back into it, and I kept running, worshiping the wrong God. And I'll tell you, you wanna know when my encounter with the father really happened for me? When I became a dad. I had to fight so hard to release all of the wounds that I carried, misconceptions of God because of what I experienced.
I thought, how? How on earth could you not fall in love with this creature? And and then I read, you know, the father having giving his son. And I'm like, how? And there's dimensions to that revelation that you can experience.
And I have experienced it. And I guess what I wanna say for all of you is I don't know how you get there, but I hope that one day when you pass, that you would boldly stretch out of the bed and lay your head down on Jesus' lap, and embrace the Father's love. And I pray that it starts now with a God encounter.
Intro/Outro: Thanks for listening. For more information, please visit garden.church.