How to Connect with God

Sermon Transcript

When I first became a Christian in 2008, the “new atheists” were hot: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris were the big names. There was a sense, and even an explicit prediction from some, that as America and Western civilization in general continued to make scientific advances, belief in God or some spiritual realm would decline. People would become more and more “disenchanted,” the thinking went. However, now almost 20 years later, theologian Daniel Strange noticed that the West is not becoming dis-enchanted; it’s becoming diff-enchanted. We aren’t seeing massive declines in religious belief or massive increases in those who subscribe to dogmatic atheism; Pew research still suggests only 5% of Americans are self-professed atheists. What has declined is traditional religious affiliation, though even that has leveled off in recent years. The category that continues to increase is the “spiritual but not religious.”

 

In other words, people still can’t seem to shake a sense of the divine, and a desire to connect with it or him or whatever it is. But how do we connect with God, really? Maybe even as a Christian you’re wondering this–you believe the right things, you aren’t committing any heinous sins, you come to church here and there, but God still feels distant. How can you connect with him? In the section of Luke on which we focused last week, and on which we will focus today, Jesus is answering that question. The first nine chapters of Luke built up to the revelation of who Jesus is, and when God spoke from heaven to announce that Jesus was his son, his chosen one, he said this: “Listen to him.” So the basic way we connect to God is through Jesus Christ, especially as we listen to his words. The passage before this one, which we looked at last week, gave us a living example of that in Mary, who sat at Jesus’ feet and listened to his words. And as in any personal relationship, to connect with him, we not only listen; we also speak back to him. We listen to him first, but then we speak back to him, and today, after Jesus taught us about listening to him, he’s going to teach us how to speak to God. We learn from this passage to pray boldly for the things Jesus taught us to pray for. So we’ll look first at the things Jesus taught us to pray for, and then we’ll talk about praying boldly.

 

The things Jesus taught us to pray for

 

Our passage today begins, as so many have in Luke, with Jesus praying. This time, though, when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” This disciple here is acting like Mary, the ideal disciple we saw last week, who sits at Jesus’ feet and listens to his teaching. He wants to hear more of Jesus’ teaching. Notice that the disciple doesn’t ask Jesus whether they should pray; he assumes that. He simply asks Jesus to teach them how to pray. Prayer was a basic part of Jewish religion, and all Jesus’ disciples were Jewish. But more broadly, we could even say that prayer is a natural instinct in humans, because we have been made in the image of God. No one has to teach children to cry out to their mothers when they are hungry; it’s a natural instinct, because children are in fact born from their mothers. But, of course, the problem at first for children is that they don’t know how to conceptualize or even communicate what they need. They must learn to talk.

 

So also, prayer comes naturally to humans because we are in fact God’s creatures; we were made in relationship with him. It’s why even in a culture in which traditional religious affiliation has declined, some form of spirituality dies hard, and it’s why we find spirituality in essentially every human culture in the world today and throughout history except for those whose governments actively work to eradicate it, and even then it usually still springs up from the ground. Some sense that we ought to cry out to God comes naturally to us, but we too must learn to talk. And we have an added problem that a child born to a mother doesn’t have: We have sinned against God, and our sin has created a separation between us and him, such that though we still have this inchoate sense of God that compels us to pray, we don’t know how to, and we can’t kind of learn it naturally like a child naturally learns to speak from just being around other humans. We’re more like a child who was somehow isolated from all other humans at birth–how would such a child ever learn to speak? And how could humans who have been isolated from God by our sin ever learn to speak?

 

Well God is so loving, so merciful, that God has come to us in the person of Jesus Christ. If we are to learn to pray, then, he must teach us, and so this disciple asks on behalf of all disciples, including you and me, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And, in response, Jesus graciously does so. He says in verse 2, “When you pray, say…” He doesn’t treat prayer as a time for you to just express whatever you feel to God. He teaches us what to say. That doesn’t mean that the only way to pray to God is to parrot the exact words of this prayer. You may be familiar with this prayer, commonly called the Lord’s Prayer, or the “Our Father” if you grew up Roman Catholic, because it is often taught as something we simply recite. But Jesus taught this prayer on at least two different occasions, and in the two times he did, he used different words each time; you can find the other time and wording in Matthew 6. Where we do have recorded prayers of Jesus in scripture, he doesn’t pray these words, and where we have recorded prayers of his apostles in scripture, they don’t use these words. In teaching us this prayer, then, Jesus wasn’t intending to give us the exact words we must use to pray; he was intending to do something more like what a piano teacher does when he teaches his student to play the scales. Scales have notes in a certain order; but the hope is that as you learn that basic disciplines of how notes work together, you will then enjoy the greater freedom of writing beautiful music of your own.

 

So also what the Lord’s Prayer gives us is example language for prayer, and a sense of priorities, content, and rhythm in prayer. It makes a lot of sense, then, that we would pray using these actual words regularly–we pray the Lord’s prayer together at every one of our evening prayer services, for example. As we do that, we will cultivate the discipline necessary to pray more freely in ways that facilitate further connection with God. Let’s get into, then, how Jesus taught us to pray.

 

First, he taught us to address God as “father”, and you can see that right there in the first word of the prayer: Father, hallowed be your name. There’s a sense in which God is the Father of all humans because God is the creator of all humans, and every human was made by God. But there’s a special sense in which God is the Father of Jesus Christ, a sense that Luke has pointed out many times thus far in his Gospel. When the angel told Mary she would give birth to Jesus, he said that the child would be called the son of God (Luke 1:32, 35). At Jesus’ baptism, the voice from heaven said, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22). On the mount of transfiguration, when Jesus’ glory was revealed, the voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, my chosen one; listen to him” (Luke 9:35). 

 

Jesus is the son of God because he is eternally begotten of the Father, the one who is the very radiance of God’s glory eternally, who was with him in the beginning, and through whom all things were made. We are not that, and yet here, Jesus teaches his disciples to address God as Father, because through our union with Christ, we are adopted as God’s children, and it is this that gives us unique access to him. John 1:12 puts it like this – “But to all who did receive [Jesus], who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.” Though every human is God’s creation, the disciples of Jesus are God’s children in a unique way. To adapt an illustration from Tim Keller, you might think of it like this: In a kingdom, every citizen of the kingdom is a subject of the king, including his own children. But which of the subjects in all the kingdoms could wake the king up in the middle of the night to ask for a cup of water? Only his children. By faith in Christ, we become God’s children like that, and so he teaches us to pray first by addressing God as Father, either by using that very word, or more importantly, by approaching him in a spirit of confidence that through Jesus, we have the kind of access to God that a child has to his Father.

 

And yet, he doesn’t tell us to address him as “buddy,” though we also have access to our buddies, which may help us understand the first two petitions he teaches us to pray: Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. For our heavenly Father, and only for him, are these petitions appropriate. Our sinful hearts naturally say, “Hallowed be my name; my kingdom come.” It’s why we get so angry when things don’t go as we planned, or when others stand in the way of our plans. It’s why we get so anxious when we can’t see how we’ll be able to make our lives work. It’s why we get so depressed when we feel there’s no hope of making our lives work. But here Jesus invites us out of the petty, small world of our name and kingdom, into a world in which the hallowing of God’s name, and the coming of his kingdom, begins to rule our hearts.

 

Why do we pray, after all? Why did God make this the way we connect to him? It’s not as though he needs new information from us, like we’re providing him intel to which he doesn’t otherwise have access that will help him decide how best to govern the universe. It’s not as though he doesn’t already know what we need. So why this? It’s hard to say exactly, but it seems at least part of the reason is because as we pray, prayer not only expresses what we already desire; it shapes our desires. That’s why just praying for whatever you feel is so limited; if you only pray for what you already feel, you will tend to reinforce the desires you already have, even those that are actually killing you, like a desire for the greatness of your name, and for the coming of your kingdom. So instead, Jesus teaches us to discipline ourselves to pray first for the hallowing of God’s name, and for the coming of God’s kingdom.

 

“Hallowed” is not a word we use much today, but it basically means to treat something as holy, to set it apart as utterly unique and worthy of an utterly unique honor. So when Jesus teaches us to pray that God’s name would be hallowed, he’s teaching us to pray that God’s name would be uniquely honored above all others. This prayer harkens back to the third commandment of the ten commandments, in which we are commanded not to take the Lord’s name in vain–this is the opposite, what we want to see: That rather than his name being tarnished by sin, treated flippantly, or being forgotten entirely, that his name would be honored and adored. What’s in a name, though? Well, in the Bible God’s name is what distinguishes him from all other spiritual beings and so-called “gods”. Yahweh is the distinctive name of the God of Israel, the God who made all things, the God and father of our Lord Jesus Christ. So when we pray for his name to be hallowed, rather than praying for a general increase of spirituality or religion, we are praying that people would consciously know this God, and so give all their worship to him. We’re praying for our own hearts to increasingly be freed from the other things we hallow, to love and worship him alone, as the poet William Cowper put it in one of his hymns, “The dearest idol I have known, whate’er that idol be, help me to tear it from thy throne, and worship only thee.”

 

It is right and good that we’d pray for that, because he is the one being worthy of worship. His distinctive name, “Yahweh,” means “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14). He is the one being who simply is, and who is therefore the cause of all other being. Whatever is good, whatever is beautiful, whatever is praiseworthy, is so only because he made it. Truth, goodness, beauty, love, justice–these are not things that exist outside of God, to which he conforms. Rather, they are different ways of describing his one simple being. He is love, he is truth, he is goodness, and so forth. Scripture tells us that the sorrows of those who run after another god shall multiply (Psalm 16:4); when we put the weight of god-hood on things he made, they can’t bear it. But when his name is hallowed, our joy will be full. 

 

And related to that, if we want to see his name hallowed, we’ll also want to see his kingdom come. Jesus already said in Luke’s Gospel that he was sent to proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God, and he’s given us a taste of what it looks like for God’s kingdom to come: People believe the good news he proclaims, unclean spirits are cast out, sins are forgiven, diseases are healed, and the dead are even raised. So when we pray for his kingdom to come, we’re praying for things like power from God to put to death the sin that remains in us, so that we might walk in greater submission to his loving authority, we’re praying for more Christians to have boldness to speak his word without fear, for God to supply his church with more pastors and missionaries to preach the word, we’re praying for the conversion of neighbors in our city, and for the conversion of people from the unreached language groups of the world. We’re praying for the holiness, love, peace, and purity of existing churches, including many churches besides our own, and for the successful establishment of new churches. And, ultimately, we’re praying for the return of Jesus, who will raise the dead, execute perfect justice, heal all disease, and wipe away every tear. 

 

Having begun with prayer for the hallowing of God’s name and for the coming of his kingdom, it is then safe for us to pray for our daily bread. When our name and kingdom is still central in our hearts, our prayers tend to revolve around material concerns, and they also tend to go beyond daily bread to riches, promotions, and so forth. But here with God’s name and kingdom central in our hearts, we do recognize that we have needs if we are to do fruitful labor for God’s name and kingdom in this world, and in this petition, Jesus teaches us to ask our father in heaven to meet those needs. And, honestly, the list of needs in the Bible isn’t very long. In the next chapter Jesus tells us not to be anxious about what we will eat, or about what we will put on, because our heavenly Father knows that we need such things (Luke 12:22-31). Food and clothing, clothing being a kind of shelter–that’s about it. So later the apostle Paul could say, “If we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. 9 But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction” (1 Tim 6:8-9). And so we also find a prayer similar to this one earlier in the Bible: “Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that is needful for me, 9 lest I be full and deny you and say, “Who is the Lord?” or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God” (Prov 30:8-9). 

 

So Jesus does teach us to pray for our material needs, but he teaches us to pray for our material needs, even merely for daily bread. In the world before refrigeration and grocery stores, you often would not have a lot of food stored up. Each day you felt your dependence on God for the food that was needful for you to sustain your bodily life. Today many in the world feel the same dependence. The United Nations reports that hundreds of thousands of people in Sudan, the Gaza strip, and Haiti face what they call phase 5 hunger–catastrophic or famine-like conditions, in which you don’t know where your next meal will come from. We don’t quite have that in Philadelphia, though about 10 percent of our residents live in what our government classifies as deep poverty. Here at least you can get food stamps if you’re poor, and even if your food stamps fail, there are rescue missions like Philly House down the street where you can get a free meal three times per day. 

 

And yet, we are just as dependent on God for our daily bread. Like, if God doesn’t provide today’s food, we won’t eat. We are dependent on God to keep the grocery stores running, to keep the animals alive on the farms who we will eventually eat, to make the plants grow on the farms that we will eventually eat, to keep the farmers alive who run the farms, to oversee the safe transportation of the food from the farms to our stores, to keep our stores in operation, to keep the employees alive who run them, to provide the money we need to be able to buy the groceries, to keep the refrigerators in which we store the food running, to keep us alive long enough to go eat the food, and more I haven’t even thought of. This petition is all the more important for us to pray, because we are so prone to forget that we depend on God even for our daily bread. And because we are so prone to forget that we depend on God for our daily bread, we are also prone to eat bread and meat and salad and chips every day, with almost no thanksgiving to God that we have such easy access to so much food. Praying for our daily bread teaches us to depend on God for our daily bread, and it teaches us to be content and thankful any day we have bread to eat. And in the use of the word “us,” give us this day our daily bread, it teaches us to pray for God’s material provision for those who lack daily bread, and to consider how our abundance might supply their lack.

 

There is, then, another daily need for which Jesus teaches us to pray: Forgive us our sins. From God’s glory to our material needs, Jesus now teaches us to pray for our spiritual needs, first of which is the forgiveness of our sins. To teach us to pray such a prayer alongside a prayer for daily bread suggests that we stand in daily need of the forgiveness of our sins. And remember here, this is not how Jesus teaches unbelievers to pray. It was one of Jesus’ disciples who said, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Disciples of Jesus, who have God as their Father, who desire the hallowing of his name, and the coming of his kingdom, should expect in this life to have a daily need for the forgiveness of their sins. And that’s not because the forgiveness God gave them yesterday for yesterday’s sins expired; it’s because every day they commit new sins! 

 

I find I often forget this. I go through seasons in my Christian life where I subtly start to hope that with enough effort, I really ought to be able to just eliminate the few remaining sins from my life. But this prayer disabuses us of that false hope. We should desire the eradication of all sin from our lives; we should hate the sin that remains in us, and yet we should never set our hopes on being free from all of it in this life. We never get beyond dependence on God, not only for daily bread, but for daily forgiveness of sin. We never reach a point at which we no longer need God’s grace. Growth is possible for disciples of Jesus; growth is even promised to disciples of Jesus. Especially the more heinous and outward the sin, the less likely it is for a Christian to continue committing it. Peter infamously denied Jesus publicly three times when Jesus went to the cross, but after Jesus rose from the dead and restored Peter, we have no record of Peter ever doing so again. There are sins the Bible does not expect Christians to repeatedly commit: murder, adultery, drunkenness, theft, slander, lying (cf. 1 Cor 5:11, 6:9-11). But God’s law demands much more of us than just that we avoid these heinous sins. It demands a heart fully devoted to him. It demands that we not even be unjustly angry with another, that we not even look on another with lustful intent, that we not even desire that which belongs to someone else, that we care more about what he thinks of us than what others think of us, that we desire the hallowing of his name above our own.

 

And so every day, even the most mature Christian will find reason to pray, “Forgive us our sins.” Our only hope to escape God’s condemnation and be received into his favor is not to eliminate all sin from our lives–it’s rather that he would forgive us our sins, even though we still have sin in our lives. And yet, we should only feel confident to pray such a prayer to God if we can honestly say what Jesus teaches us to pray next: For we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. Here sin is presented as accruing a debt, which makes sense if you think about it. When someone sins against you, damage is done, something is lost, that makes you feel that something ought to be done about it. Say someone lies to you–that always has a consequence. Even the smallest of lies take something from you: They take from you an accurate perception of reality. So let’s say I lie to you because I want you to think better of me, which is usually why we lie, and I tell you I’ve travelled to 10 different foreign countries in my life, when actually I’ve only travelled to 8. That’s a pretty harmless lie by all accounts, but still, if you found out I intentionally deceived you about it, you’d be right to feel some kind of way about it. You’d instinctively feel like I now owe you something, like I ought to make that up to you in some small way, because in reality I did some damage: I damaged our relationship, and I did something contrary to justice. But, here’s the choice you have: You can either try to make me pay for it by punishing me in some way, or you can forgive me. What Jesus is saying here is that if we choose the punishing option, we shouldn’t then turn and ask God to give us the forgiveness option, while on the other hand, if we have the testimony in ourselves that we from the heart forgive others their offences, it should embolden us to ask God to forgive us our offenses.

 

And, finally, when it comes to our spiritual needs, we ask not only for the forgiveness of our sins; we ask for the power to fight sin going forward. So the next prayer Jesus teaches us to pray is that God would lead us not into temptation. Of course, this is not to imply that God himself ever tempts us to sin; he doesn’t. But it is asking God to deliver us from tempting situations, and it is asking God, when temptation arises, to provide the way of escape, so that we may be able to endure it (1 Cor 10:13). Tempting situations come for both internal and external reasons. We are tempted first because we are lured and enticed by our own desires (James 1:14), and so we pray here for God to give us strength to put to death the passions of our flesh. But we can also be tempted because of difficult situations–recall that’s why we have the prayer in scripture that God give us the food needful for us, so that we may not be poor, and tempted to steal (Prov 30:9). So we ask God to protect us from situations in which we’d be tempted to sin beyond our ability, and we ask him in every situation to provide a way of escape.

 

Notice the concern in this prayer, then, for what we might call spiritual priorities. Yes the prayer for daily bread is in there, but it’s only one petition of the five, and it’s a modest prayer: Just give me the basic food I need for today. It comes after a prayer for the hallowing of God’s name, and the coming of his kingdom, and it’s followed by a prayer for the forgiveness of past sins, and protection from future sins. The glory of God, our standing with God, our obedience to God–these are the concerns that frame the prayer, and it explains why when we see Jesus praying in John 17 for example, or when we read any of the prayers of the New Testament, material concerns fade so far into the background that we can hardly detect them at all. How does that compare to your own prayer life? Here are a few simple tweaks you might make to your prayer life to bring it into greater conformity with this prayer Jesus taught us to pray.

 

First and most obviously, pray this prayer. Say the words, and then use the words as a springboard to pray for other things. Pick an attribute of God each day to praise him for. Pick a day of the week to pray for your church, then pick another day to pray for another church in Philly, then pick another day to pray for a specific missionary or a specific unreached language group in the world. Identify a way in which you’d like to grow in greater conformity to Christ, and make it a regular part of your prayers to pray for that. When others ask how they can pray for you, or you have an opportunity to share a prayer request, ask for prayer for that. “Would you pray God would grow me in contentment?” for example. Another way you might grow in prayer is by praying with others. The “us” in the prayer, give “us” this day our daily bread, also suggests that Jesus expected us to pray with others. Matthew’s version of this prayer even begins with the words “our Father.” We do a pre-service prayer meeting downstairs each week at 9:00 am that is modeled on the Lord’s Prayer, and we resume our evening prayer services this coming Sunday.

 

We’ve now covered the sorts of things for which Jesus taught us to pray. But in teaching us to pray, he doesn’t just teach us what to pray for. He also teaches us with what attitude we should pray. So let’s talk next about praying boldly.

 

Praying boldly

 

In the rest of the passage we get two different illustrations from Jesus, along with his explanations of them. The first is of a man who goes to a friend in the middle of the night to ask for three loaves of bread because someone has arrived at his house in the middle of the night, and he has nothing to give him. Much as Jesus depended on people like Martha in the last story to receive him into her home as he traveled, travelers at the time depended on the hospitality of others to give them shelter during their journey. Extreme heat also meant that travelers would sometimes opt to travel at night, and hence this man arrives at his friend’s house in the middle of the night. Today we sometimes go to bed at midnight, but the lives of ancient people were much more patterned by the rising and setting of the sun. Midnight to them was much more like the middle of the night, when everyone who wasn’t travelling would usually be sleeping. But the duty of hospitality called on this man, and he had no food to provide his guest.

 

So he knocks on his friend’s door in the middle of the night. Houses at the time also were not usually big. The fact that this man says that the door is now shut, suggesting he only had one door, and that his children were with him in bed, suggests that he had a one-room house, a common type of house at the time. So this isn’t like you’re in your third floor bedroom and hear a knock downstairs–the knock is feet away from you when you’re in the middle of sleep along with your family. If you’ve ever had kids you’ve had a hard time putting to bed, you can imagine how frustrating it would be for someone to be banging on your door while you’re all asleep. 

 

What’s the man inside going to do in such a situation? Well, at first he’s probably going to say something like, “Go away; it’s the middle of the night,” which is basically what Jesus has him saying here in verse 7. But then Jesus says even though this guy won’t help the guy knocking because he is his friend, yet because of the knocker’s impudence he will rise and give him whatever he needs. That word impudence there could also be translated audacity, or boldness, as I’ve put it here. The knocker didn’t think to himself–”Well now, my friend is sleeping, and so are his kids, so I better not bother him.” Instead, in the middle of the night, he has the audacity to go over there, wake up his friend and his kids, and ask for bread. The implication is that even when the friend says, “I cannot get up and give you whatever he needs,” the knocker persists, and in persisting, gets what he came for. 

 

Are you tempted to think that God has bigger things to attend to than your little prayers? Maybe you shouldn’t bother him with your requests? Or are you tempted to give up praying? The now deceased pastor J.C. Ryle, commenting on this passage, notes that “It is far [easier] to begin a habit of prayer than to keep it up.” But Jesus commends to us the impudence of this man, not so much as an attitude we should adopt toward our friends (I don’t recommend waking them up at midnight generally), but as an attitude we should adopt toward God in prayer! He never sleeps, so you don’t have to worry about waking him up! If you want his name to be hallowed, if you want his kingdom to come, if you want your daily bread, if you want your sins to be forgiven, and if you want protection from temptation, ask him boldly! And don’t stop until you have an answer. How many times have Christians prayed this prayer in the last 2000 years, and yet the kingdom of God has still not come in all its fullness? And yet, how many times have Christians prayed this prayer in the last 2000 years, and people have been converted, churches have been established, missionaries have been sent, new language groups have been reached, daily bread has been provided, sins have been forgiven, and temptation has been escaped?

 

So Jesus says the lesson we are to learn from this man is that we should ask, seek, and knock at God’s door, and trust that he will answer, for everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, it will be opened. 

 

And as if that one illustration weren’t enough, he supports this assurance of answers to our prayers with another one starting in verse 11: What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent, or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? We have a few dads in the room today–even on your laziest days, when your son asks you for breakfast, would you dream of giving him poison instead? When your son has a birthday rolling around, or Christmas is coming up, doesn’t it excite you to think about how to get him something he’ll really enjoy? In most cases, even the worst dads show up on birthdays and give a gift. Now Jesus’ point is this, verse 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! 

 

Notice Jesus’ theological assumption: If you then, who are evil. Speaking even to an audience of his disciples, Jesus assumes everyone he’s talking to is evil. That’s why as long as we’re in this life, we’ll have to keep praying for the forgiveness of our sins. Since the first sin, all humans have been born in sin. Humans are not naturally good; we are naturally evil, so Jesus can look at all of humanity and call it “you who are evil.” And his point is, even though you all are evil, you still know how to give good gifts to your children. If that’s the case, how much more will the heavenly Father, who is just as much a Father to his children as you are to yours, but who is not evil in any way, shape, or form, how much more will he give good gifts to his children? If you know what it’s like to love anyone, if you know what it’s like to want to give anyone a good gift who asks you for it, how dare you think that God doesn’t also give good gifts to his children? To doubt God’s willingness to answer our prayers is to believe that we are better than God–that though we are often willing to give to others what they ask of us, and even delight to do so, he won’t. That’s not true.

 

But did you notice at the end of our passage, there, that what the heavenly Father intends to give us is not just good gifts generally speaking, but the Holy Spirit in particular? Why is that? Why, when Jesus just taught us to pray for the hallowing of God’s name, the coming of his kingdom, our daily bread, the forgiveness of our sins, and protection from temptation, would God answer by giving us the Holy Spirit? Because it is the Holy Spirit who gives us new hearts that hallow God’s name above everything else. Because it is the Holy Spirit who empowers the preaching of the word, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the preaching of that word effective for the advance of God’s kingdom. It is the Holy Spirit who assures us of the forgiveness of our sins, and it is the Holy Spirit who delivers us from temptation. He is God in us, the ultimate blessing, the greatest gift that the heavenly Father could give us.

 

And we can receive him not only because Christ taught us to pray for the forgiveness of our sins, but because Christ died for our sins. Galatians 3:13-14 says, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us⁠—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree”⁠— 14 so that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.” Think about this: Jesus teaches us to pray for the forgiveness of our sins in this passage, which obviously implies that we’re sinners. Later in the passage he calls us all evil. And yet he teaches us to pray for various blessings from God: daily bread, forgiveness, leading not into temptation, and ultimately the Holy Spirit himself. But sinners don’t deserve blessings; sinners deserve curses. Remember, sin incurs a debt–so how can he teach us, as sinners, while still sinners, to pray for blessings? Because he himself redeemed us from the curse of the law by bearing it in our place. He bore the curse so we could receive the blessing of the promised Spirit by faith. We can pray boldly for the forgiveness of our sins because Christ already suffered the curse for our sins. We can pray boldly to God as our Father, and not merely as our judge, because Christ suffered the judgment we deserved, and rose again, so that now in living union with him, we too have been adopted as God’s children.

 

So if you are here today and you are not a Christian, the first way you must connect with God is through faith in Jesus Christ. Apart from union with him, you cannot call God Father, or approach him with any kind of real boldness. You may try, and many do try, but deep down you won’t be able to shake the sense that something is still separating you from him, that you’re still hiding something. The only way to shake that, the only way to the kind of boldness in prayer with which Jesus teaches us to pray here, the only way to a true and deep connection with God, is through union with Christ. So trust him, and pray boldly for the things he taught us to pray for.