This is Robert Jeffress. In response to the horrific attack on Israel, I've written a brand new book called Are We Litting in the End Times?
Go to ptv.org to order your copy. Jesus taught us that prayer has to be a priority in our life. But then Jesus gave us the pattern for how to pray, beginning in Matthew chapter 6. Beginning in verse 9, Jesus said, When you pray, pray in this way. Welcome to Pathway to Victory with author and pastor, Dr. Robert Jeffress. Many of us remember memorizing the Lord's Prayer in Sunday School. But the Lord's Prayer is not just a poem to simply learn by rote.
It's God's instruction manual for powerful and effective prayer. Today on Pathway to Victory, Dr. Robert Jeffress gives us an overview of the model Jesus provided for laying our requests before God's throne. Now, here's our Bible teacher to introduce today's message.
Dr. Jeffress? Thanks, David, and welcome again to Pathway to Victory. All this month, our subject is prayers that really work. And I have to tell you, my family has always believed that prayers truly work.
We've seen God provide for us in astounding ways. Gratefully, my daughter, Julia Jeffress-Sattler, has chronicled her personal journey as an adult in a manner that speaks to us all. Her bestselling book is called Pray Big Things.
The surprising life God has for you when you're bold enough to ask. Julia has spent her life praying for big things. And my wife and I have learned more about prayer from our daughter than from any writer, theologian, or pastor.
And I want you to benefit from her insight as well. A copy of Pray Big Things is yours when you give a generous gift to support the ministry of Pathway to Victory. Now, you might already have a copy of this book, but there's a new one from Julia I'm certain you don't own yet. It's a brand new, fully illustrated book for children called You Can Pray Big Things. At their youngest season in life, kids want to engage God in prayer, and Julia's brand new creative book will help them put words to their expressions. When you give a generous gift today, I'm going to send a copy to your home of You Can Pray Big Things, along with Julia's book for adults called Pray Big Things. Perhaps the best thing about Julia's original book is that it has a picture of my triplet grandchildren on it.
I'll say more about Julia's two books and other resources when I'm finished with today's study. But right now, let's give our attention to Matthew chapter 6. I titled today's message God's Pattern for Prayer. A few years ago, the security service chief of Gaza was in a motorcade when suddenly Israeli troops opened up fire on the motorcade. The panicked security chief reached for the phone in his car, and he immediately called the then president of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yasser Arafat, and asked Arafat if he could be of some assistance that he was under fire. Yasser Arafat, upon receiving the call, picked up the telephone call, and he called the U.S. Ambassador to Israel and pleaded for intervention. The ambassador in Israel picked up the phone and called U.S. Secretary of State, at that time, Colin Powell, and asked for assistance. When Colin Powell heard about the ambush, he picked up the phone, and he called the prime minister in Israel, Ariel Sharon, and asked for assistance.
Sharon said yes and ordered a ceasefire. That security chief's life was saved literally because he had the right connections. He knew whom to call. You know, you and I, if we're Christians, we have a connection available to us to someone infinitely more powerful than the Secretary of State. Through prayer, we can be connected to the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.
We can call to Him for His help at any time. And yet, even though we possess that connection, it is a connection that most Christians use infrequently and ineffectively. How can you pray in such a way to catch the attention of God and cause Him to do things in your life He otherwise would not do? That's what we're talking about in this series, and the basis for this series is the most famous prayer of history. We call it the Lord's Prayer.
If you have your Bibles, turn to Matthew chapter 6, Matthew chapter 6. Remember last time we saw that Jesus taught us by His own example that prayer has to be a priority in our life, just as it was in Jesus' life. Even though He was the perfect Son of God, He carved out time in His schedule every day to spend long periods of time with God in prayer. You know, one reason more of us don't pray more often is we really don't feel like we have time to pray, do we? I found these words from Oswald Chambers that might be an encouragement to you whenever you think you're too busy to pray.
Chambers says, remember, no one has time to pray. We have to take time from other things that are valuable in order to understand how necessary prayer is. The things that act like thorns and stings in our personal lives will go away instantly when we pray.
We won't feel the hurt anymore because we have God's point of view about those problems. Jesus taught us that prayer has to be a priority in our life. But then Jesus gave us the pattern for how to pray, beginning in Matthew chapter 6. Remember Jesus said, when you pray, don't pray like the hypocrites.
That word hypocrites means an actor. Don't try to play a part. Don't try to look more spiritual than you are when you pray. Guard against hypocrisy. Secondly, he said guard against ritualism. Don't think prayer is some secret magical theological formula. If you can just get all the right words in the right order, somehow you're going to make God act. Don't think God is impressed by your vocabulary, by the length of your prayer, the loudness of your prayer.
Guard against ritualism. Instead, beginning in verse 9, Jesus said, when you pray, pray in this way. He never said pray this prayer. Nowhere did God mean for us to ever repeat the Lord's prayer, the model prayer, word for word. Nowhere in the New Testament did any apostle ever pray this prayer word for word. Instead, this is a pattern for how to pray.
Now before we look at the first phrase in this prayer, I want to give you an overview of this prayer. I remember hearing from time to time people teach about prayer and say, you know, the most immature way to pray is to pray for yourself. It's only baby Christians who ever pray for themselves. And when we grow as a Christian, we learn not to pray for ourselves. The second level of prayer is to pray for other people. But the final, the highest level of prayer is not praying for yourself or praying for other people. It's praying for the glory of God. Have you ever heard that before?
Nothing could be further from the truth. Yes, we are to pray for the glory of God. In fact, he says he focuses on God's glory in the beginning of the prayer, as we'll look at today. He ascribed praise to God, verse 9. He talked about the priorities of God, verse 10.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. But then the focus shifts in verse 11 to focus on our needs. There is nothing wrong with telling God about your needs.
He's very interested in your needs. Jesus taught us to pray for provision, verse 11. The basics of life, food and water, pardon for sins, verse 12, we're to pray for.
Protection from problems, verse 13. And then we come around back to closing our prayer with, again, focusing on God's glory. For thine is the kingdom. Now, we're going to look at this first phrase today. The phrase that tells us that we're to begin with praise. And the theme of the sermon is very simple today. We ought to always begin with praise to God. Our prayers should always begin with praise to God. Jesus modeled this when he began his prayer. Remember, he was teaching his disciples to pray. He said, pray in this way. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Now, in those two phrases are two very crucial concepts to remember when you pray. First of all, the first phrase reminds us of our relationship to God. Our Father, who art in heaven. You know, you'll never really appreciate these words because we've said them too often.
You'll never really fully appreciate them until you understand the culture in which Jesus lived and spoke these words. John MacArthur notes that the Greek and Romans had one understanding about the gods. The Stoics among them believed that the primary attribute of the gods was the characteristic of apathy. You know what apathy is, don't you? Do you know what apathy is?
Some of you are saying, well, who cares? That's exactly what apathy is, okay? The A in apathy, the alpha privative, means without. Pathos, feeling.
To be apathetic is to be without feeling. And the Stoics believed that was the highest attribute of the gods. They had no feeling because a feeling god was a vulnerable god. If the gods could feel love, then it means they could also feel hurt.
If they could feel joy, they could also feel sadness. Therefore, the gods had no feelings whatsoever. The Epicureans, who were among them, believed that the greatest characteristic of the gods was the characteristic of ataraxia.
Ataraxia means complete calm and serenity. That is, no matter what was happening on earth, the gods and heavens were unmoved. And that's why they stayed detached from the affairs of you and me.
Because if they get involved in our daily lives and we're upset, well, they're upset. And the gods have to remain calm. That was the Greek-Roman understanding of God. Now, the Jews came with a completely different understanding of God. It was an understanding that was shaped by the Old Testament. The greatest attribute of God, according to Deuteronomy 6, was God is one. Remember the great Shema of Israel, Deuteronomy 6. Here, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God. Nevertheless, that one God was a distant deity to the Jews.
He was separated from man. That and the most holy name for God, Yahweh. It was a name of God that no human ever dared to utter.
It's a name that whenever it was written down by the scribes when they copied the Old Testament, when a scribe would copy down the name Yahweh, he would then throw his pen away. Yahweh was a name too holy to ever utter. You saw the separateness, the holiness of God, illustrated in the design of the tabernacle and later of the temple. Remember the Holy of Holies in the temple? It was the place where God resided.
No man could ever go between the curtain and come into the Holy of Holies. Only the high priest could do that once a year to bring a blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of the people. That was the relationship, that was the distance between God and man. But Matthew 27 verse 51 tells us something earth-shaking happened one Friday afternoon. Remember on that good Friday afternoon when Jesus Christ died, remember what happened? The moment he died, the Bible says that that curtain in the temple that separated the Holy of Holies, the presence of God from everyone else, that that curtain was torn from top to bottom. You know what that meant? It simply meant the priests were out of a job.
Suddenly they had to go to the unemployment office because there was no need for them any longer. No longer did we need a go-between between God and us. We had the ability to come to God directly through Jesus Christ his Son. You see, Jesus Christ, the book of Hebrews tells us, was the perfect high priest who came not into the human temple but the heavenly temple. And he came not through the blood of animals but through his own blood, not to make multiple annual sacrifices but to make a one-time sacrifice for the sins of the people. See, the Old Testament patriarchs, they believed in the holiness of God. They believed that God was one God, the true God.
But it's interesting, the term Father is only used 14 times in the Old Testament and it's always in reference to God as the Father of the nation of Israel, never as their individual Father. But all of that changed the moment that Christ made the final payment for your sins and my sins. And to see how our relationship with God has changed. I want you to turn in your Bibles to Galatians chapter 4 to see what the death of Christ did to change your relationship with God. Look at verses 4 to 7. Paul said, But when the fullness of time came, God sent forth his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, so that he might redeem those who were under the law, that we might receive the...
I want you to circle this word in your Bible. That we might receive the adoption as sons. Because you are sons, God has sent forth the spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Therefore, you are no longer a slave, but a... circle that word, son. And if a son, you are then an heir, circle that word, heir, through God. Adoption, son, heir.
Now why are these words significant? The Bible uses two metaphors to describe how we become a part of God's family. Sometimes the Bible says we are born into God's family.
Remember in John chapter 3, Jesus said, To enter into the kingdom of God, you have to be what? Born again, that which is born of the flesh is flesh, that which is born of the spirit is spirit. That is, those of us who come into this world, and that's every one of us, spiritually dead, have to be made spiritually alive to become a part of God's family. And when you trust in Christ as your Savior, you are born into the family of God. That's one way we come into God's family, we are born. But there's another word that is used to describe our entrance into God's family, it's the word adoption. The Bible also says, in a sense, we have been adopted into God's family. Do you know what adoption is?
It's the process by which somebody is taken from one family, and is placed into someone else's family. Now it used to be, and it wasn't that long ago, that people thought of adoption as an inferior way for somebody to enter a family. You know, the best way is the old-fashioned way, to be biologically born into a family. But if that's not possible, then you adopt. It was kind of an inferior way to become a part of the family.
That was never in Paul's mind at all. You see, in Paul's day, in the Roman household, if a father had a biological son, and that son grew up to be a disappointment to the father, then the father would go out and he would choose another son, and adopt that son to become a part of his family. And that adopted son would actually receive a greater portion of the father's estate when he died, than the biological son.
Why is that? Because the biological son was a disappointment to his father. The adopted son was one who was chosen by the father. You know, when you think about it, in many ways, adopted children are more special than biological children. I mean, think about it, parents. We're kind of stuck with our biological children, aren't we? But when you adopt somebody, think about it. You're saying, of all of the millions and billions of people in the world, I am choosing you to be in my family.
Now that's what the Bible says God has done for us. He chose you to be a part of his family. And why did he choose you? Because you're better looking or more gifted than anybody else? Because you're holier than anyone else?
No. The Bible says God chose you for one reason. Because he loves you. Your adoption was all of grace. You didn't choose God. God chose you, the Bible says, to be a part of his family. And when you're adopted into the family, notice what Paul says here. You don't come in as a second-class member of the household.
You don't come in as a slave. You come as a son. That is, with all of the rights and privileges of a biological son. In God's family, you come into his family with all of the responsibilities and the rights that Jesus Christ himself, the first son of God, had.
You have been adopted into his family. And because of that, Paul says, you can come before him with your heart crying out, saying, Abba, Father. Now what does that mean, Abba? It's not a singing group, okay?
That came later, okay? Now the word Abba is an Aramaic term of endearment for a father. For a Palestinian boy or girl who was born into a family, the first word they learned was the word Emma, mommy, mama.
The second word they would learn was the word Abba. It means daddy, papa. Jesus said, when you come into the presence of God, if you're related to him through Christ Jesus, if you're a part of his family, you can come to him saying, Daddy, papa.
Now, honestly, some people have trouble with that. They have trouble thinking of God in such intimate terms, mainly because of the biological father they have. Some of you listening today, you have fathers that maybe were cold and distant and detached from your life, and it's hard for you to picture God as a loving, caring father. And if that's true for you, I want to encourage you, when you pray, don't think of the father you have. Think of the father you wish you had when you come before God.
And dads here today, remember this. Your child's attitude toward God is largely going to be shaped by their attitude toward you. If they see you as a cold, uncaring, distant person, they're going to view God in that same way too.
The most important thing you do is model the character of God to your children. Everett Fulham was a missionary to Nigeria. He tells about a young man, an African man who was converted, and he said there was one truth this African said captured his heart more than anything other. This man said, Behind the universe stands one God, not a great number of warring spirits as we had always believed, but one God, and that God loves me. That's what caused that African to come to Christ. There's one God?
Yes, but he is a God who loves me. When you come into the presence of God in prayer, remember you have a father who loves you, our daddy, our papa who is in heaven. He's a powerful monarch, but he is a loving father. One writer notes that during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, there's perhaps one picture that best captures his presidency, one that we remember more than maybe any other picture.
I bet you recall it. It's the picture of Kennedy at his desk in the Oval Office working, and beneath the desk in an open space, there is his young son John John playing away while the president's working. Why did that picture captivate people? Because it demonstrated the two unique roles President Kennedy had. Yes, he was the most powerful leader in the free world, but he was also a daddy, a papa. Now, I was a little boy when that picture was taken, and you know, John F. Kennedy was my president too, but I don't recall getting any invitation to come and play in the Oval Office back then.
In fact, I kind of resented that. Now, he was my president, but he wasn't my daddy. He wasn't my papa.
The only people that got to come into the Oval Office were those who had direct access to the president. It's the same way with us. God is the God of all of us, but only those who are related to him by faith in Jesus Christ had access or invited to come into his presence and experience that intimacy that would allow us to call him our daddy, our papa who is in heaven. Now, I know for some of you, maybe that just seems almost bordering on sacrilegious to think of God as your daddy or papa. I want you to notice in the second phrase how Jesus balances that truth when he talks about our reverence for God. He says, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. How many of you have ever prayed that prayer before? You've actually repeated those words, hallowed be thy name. How many of you would feel comfortable standing up and giving a precise definition of what that means? Isn't it funny we pray that prayer? Very few of us understand what that means. Hallowed be thy name.
What a privilege. We have a direct line to the highest office in the world, the King of Kings. And in the coming days, we'll follow this beautiful tutorial offered by Jesus, teaching us how to address our Heavenly Father. You see, the human heart longs to connect with God.
We are wired for relationship. And yet, strangely, sometimes we feel alienated from the God we love, disconnected. Well, I'm pleased to offer you a resource that explains how to pray with boldness. It's written by my daughter, Julia Jeffress Sadler. Here's the title of her book, Pray Big Things. The subtitle is, The Surprising Life God Has for You When You're Bold Enough to Ask. And if you're ready to ramp up your prayer life and begin seeing results, then be sure to get a copy of Julia's highly personal book.
It's yours when you give a generous gift to support the ministry of Pathway to Victory. But that's not all, because Julia has just completed a brand new children's book on this topic, designed for your child or grandchild. It's a fully illustrated book called, You Can Pray Big Things. Can you think of anything more important to teach your child than to pray big things to God? So, when you give your generous gift today, you're going to receive both books, the one for the child in your life and the one for you.
In Matthew chapter six, Jesus clearly taught us that prayer is not a nicety, it's a necessity. Both of Julia's books will help your family call upon God, the one who truly loves you the very most. And both books are yours when you give a generous gift to support the growing ministry of Pathway to Victory. Now, here's David to give you our contact information, and I look forward to hearing from you today.
David. Thanks, Dr. Jeffress. To request your own copy of the brand new children's book, You Can Pray Big Things by Julia Jeffress Sadler, simply contact Pathway to Victory today with your generous gift. Plus, we're going to include Julia's original best-selling book for adults, Pray Big Things. Request both resources when you call 866-999-2965 or go online to ptv.org. And when you give $75 or more, we'll also send you the complete unabridged prayers that really work teaching series on CD and DVD, containing much more content than we've had time to share on the broadcast. Again, call 866-999-2965 or go online to ptv.org. You could also write to us, here's that mailing address, P.O. Box 223609, Dallas, Texas, 75222.
Again, that's P.O. Box 223609, Dallas, Texas, 75222. I'm David J. Mullins, inviting you to join us again next time for the conclusion of this message called God's Pattern for Prayer. That's Friday, here on Pathway to Victory. Pathway to Victory with Dr. Robert Jeffress comes from the pulpit of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. Even though we don't know the date when Jesus will return, we need to have our finger on the pulse of what's happening today. So, in response to the war in Israel, Dr. Robert Jeffress has written a brand new book. It's called Are We Living in the End Times? In light of increasing chaos, division, and warfare in our world, this really is a fair question. Request your copy of Are We Living in the End Times? by going to ptv.org.
