Preached · September 21, 2017
Housekeeping
Hopefully you subscribe to the weekly, which is our weekly email and newsletter, which also gets you other updates. But if you don't happen to, and if you don't follow us on Facebook, then you may not know yet the news about our lead pastor. So I'll go ahead and let you know. After a strongly affirming vote by our congregation, and then a unanimous vote by our leadership team, we have called Brandon Morrow to be the next lead pastor of Good News Community Church. Which is fantastic, because that means I get to go on a vacation.
We called him that night, put him on speakerphone with the leadership team, and he accepted the invitation. God's timing is an amazing thing. The Morrows, Brandon and his wife Erica, had sensed kind of the conclusion of their time at their current church at Gateway, and knew it was time to hand the reins over to some new leadership. It was a church plant that was being revitalized, and they knew that their time had come to a conclusion. So they've actually been in a period of abiding and resting for a little bit, and so we gave him the invitation to be our next lead pastor. He said yes. We said, when would you like to start? So next Sunday they will be here, and then next Monday he will be in the office.
And, you know, for those of you who ask good questions, one of the questions that the interview team and the staff asked him is, are you ending well? Are you closing well with your current congregation? Because we don't want some random church in Arkansas to hate Good News because we took their pastor from them in a week. And no, they finished well. They had a transition plan in place for a long time, and so it's a good, healthy ending for them and a good, healthy beginning for us. And we're just so excited to be able to bring him and his family here.
As for practical details, they're still getting figured out—the whole moving truck and when that's going to show up. They have found a place to rent. Somebody very graciously gave them a call from Good News and said, hey, we have a house that you can rent, and they took them up on that. So we will let you know what that date is, and then ask for a finite group of people—we don't need 400, but we may need 30—to help them move the stuff out of the truck into the home.
And then one thing that we would like to do is what Pastor Steve called a "pounding," which is not related to a knuckle sandwich. A pounding is when everybody helps fill their refrigerator and their pantry with a pound of something—a pound of flour, a pound of milk, a pound of eggs, or whatever. Maybe don't pour eight pounds of milk down the drain until a pound; you get the idea. But help them fill their pantry and their fridge so they don't have to worry about that initial grocery trip, which can sometimes be a nightmare if you've ever moved into a new place. So again, we'll let you know the exact details once it's nailed down, and we are excited to meet and greet and welcome them much sooner than we anticipated. So praise God for that.
Changing gears a little bit—sorry, I just have a bunch of housekeeping I have to take care of. We don't call this "announcements" because we know you'd all check out during announcements, so we just call it housekeeping. So we found a lead pastor, and you know that we were also looking for a worship director. So what's happening on the worship director front? Well, if you've talked to anybody who's been on the worship director hiring team, you know it's been a bit of a journey. We interviewed a bunch of people. Some were qualified. Some we figured out were not all that qualified. Some we thought we would be able to call, but then they told us no because they had found something else.
Well, now we're at the point where we have a lead pastor here, and we would like the lead pastor to be part of the hiring process for a worship director. That just makes sense, so that we're making sure there's good staff dynamics and that Pastor Brandon's vision for what worship and worship services at Good News look like—he can play a role in that search. So what we're doing is putting a soft pause on the search. The vacancy's still open, and so if anybody qualified does happen to come our way, we will happily interview them. But we're going to stop the hard push on the advertising until the beginning of 2018, so a few months. And then that allows Pastor Brandon to get his feet wet, get used to the culture of Good News, and then he can be part of the search for a worship director.
In the meantime, you still have a worship team that is longing and looking for some direction and guidance. And so I'm going to be taking off one interim hat and putting on another, and resuming some of the worship director responsibilities. So again, calm down. It's for a finite amount of time. And I'm going to be putting some boundaries on it, because I still have a day job called community formation—it says so on the screen. And so I still want to make sure that my main job, the thing that's on my business card of forming missional communities and a culture of discipleship at Good News, is still happening. So you will still be seeing Carrie Miller and John Miller doing a lot of the worship leading, but you'll also see me as well. And I'll be playing a part in the coaching and behind-the-scenes leading. And then our hope is that we would have a new full-time worship director here by April or May of 2018.
You know, a couple of us spent some time yesterday just talking about what Good News needs right now. And one of the things we talked about—a phrase that we came across—was a high bar of stability. Good News has been in this season of change and fluctuation and staff changes. And you all have done a fabulous, amazing job of still being the church, of still being invested, and still giving of your time and your money and your resources, and helping our children and our youth and our welcome ministry and the worship ministry and so much—all in the midst of all this fluctuation and change. And what we feel is needed now is just a high bar of stability. We're not hitting the pause button on growth. We're not saying that we're not going to try any new things—we love experiments at Good News—but we also want to have some equilibrium for a while. And so that's our goal for the next season as we bring Pastor Brandon in: a high bar of stability.
Invitation and challenge
Okay. Today you get two sermons for the price of one, because there is an issue that we've been talking about as a leadership and as a staff that I wanted to approach before we get into the bulk of what we're talking about today, which is back to the neighboring life.
The first thing has to do with the fact that we want to be a church that's made up of radical, reproducing apprentices of Jesus Christ. Radical—so we are wholly devoted and committed to the way of Jesus. Reproducing—so we believe that disciples of Jesus make more disciples of Jesus. And apprentices—we do what Jesus did, we say what Jesus said, we follow the rhythm of life that Jesus led. And what we don't want to be is mediocre or lukewarm, consuming admirers of Jesus. We don't want to be halfway, like, "Well, we kind of like Jesus, but we don't want to be too weird." Consumers that just consume and take in spiritual goods and services but never put anything back. And admirers who kind of like the way of Jesus but like to keep Jesus at arm's length.
And so if you want a church that makes radical, reproducing apprentices of Jesus, as opposed to mediocre, consuming admirers, you basically need two ingredients to create that culture of a church. The first ingredient is the concept of invitation.
Jesus was the most inviting person who ever lived. If you know anything about the story of Jesus of Nazareth, you know that when he embarked in his public ministry, thousands and thousands of people would just follow him around from town to town, because he taught with authority, because he healed the sick, he cast out demons. People loved to be around Jesus. This is the Jesus who, when a leper—a person with this kind of disgusting skin disease—comes to Jesus and says, "Heal me," Jesus doesn't just heal him but touches him. Jesus is the kind of person that when people would follow him around and forget their lunch for the day, and the disciples want to send them away, Jesus would feed them by the thousands. Jesus was this highly invitational person that people longed to be around.
And so that means at Good News, we want to be a church known for invitation. We want to serve, like Pastor Brandon talked about last week, really good food and really good drinks. And we want people to feel welcome and invited when they walk in the doors, when they come into our homes. We want people to feel like they belong here. We want to proclaim a gospel that proclaims that God loves you and accepts you just as you are.
But if we want to follow the way of Jesus, Jesus wasn't just invitational. He was also highly challenging. Jesus was a person who knew how to bring it, bring down the fire when it came to preaching. Jesus knew how to call out people's sin. He knew how to call out people's mistakes. He knew how to call people to a higher standard of living. And so the same Jesus who says to the woman who was put in this trap by these murderous men, the same Jesus who says, "I don't condemn you"—highly invitational—also says, "Now go and sin no more." Highly challenging stuff. The same Jesus who says to Peter, "On this rock I will build my church. I will give you the keys of heaven, and the gates of hell will not prevail against you," is the same Jesus who, a couple verses later, when Peter says that Jesus can't go to Jerusalem to be crucified, turns to Peter and says, "Get behind me, Satan; the devil has taken over your words. You want the things of man and not the things of God." Highly, highly challenging.
And so we want to be a church that's highly challenging. We want to be a church that says, "God accepts you just as you are, but he loves you enough not to leave you there." We want to be a church that people come to and feel welcome, feel invited in—not only into our church, but our homes and our lives. But we also want to challenge people to grow, to take charge of their spiritual life and go somewhere with it.
So you can imagine these two things, invitation and challenge, on a matrix of high invitation and low invitation, high challenge and low challenge. There are churches, places, organizations, cultures that are highly invitational but low challenge, and they're cozy. It's kind of like a chaplaincy where no one ever needs to feel uncomfortable. Nobody ever needs to feel like they're being preached at, because you're fine. We love you just as you are, and you can stay that way. It's absolutely fine. And everybody's cozy and happy, but nobody's ever challenged to grow.
You can imagine places and churches that are apathetic and bored because there's no invitation or challenge, where nobody really bothers to welcome you in and nobody really bothers to challenge you. And maybe you've been in places like that. You can imagine churches and places and organizations—maybe a family—that's high challenge and low invitation. It's all challenge all the time, and people are stressed out. And so this is where legalism happens, where you've got to do better and be better and achieve more and get more checked off of your spiritual to-do list, and we aren't going to welcome you in, and we aren't going to tell you about God's love, and we aren't going to tell you about God's forgiveness. And so this is a discouraging culture.
But where Good News wants to be, where any discipling culture, a place where we make radical, reproducing apprentices of Jesus needs to be, is both highly invitational and highly challenging. And so this is where discipleship happens. This is where you feel empowered by the grace and the love of God to grow up in Jesus.
So I give all of this background as a way to explain the next thing that I'm going to say and put on the screen. But I believe it's a Jesus-like thing to say. If you have been at Good News for over a year and haven't yet found a place to connect, serve, and grow, it's time to either jump in or find a better church for yourself. I'll say it again: if you've been at Good News for over a year and you have yet to find a place to connect or serve and grow, it's time to either jump in headfirst or to find a church that fits you better.
Since we believe that the church is the hope of the world, that the church is our best hope at growing up and maturing and becoming like Jesus, and since it's the world's best hope of experiencing God, we believe that you deserve to be part of a church that makes you want to jump in headfirst with being involved. And we at Good News, we're not crazy enough to believe that this church is the church for every single person ever. So if you're visiting, if you're coming off a bad church experience, maybe you're just trying to figure out this whole Jesus thing, then we are so glad you're here. We welcome you. We invite you in. We want to let you know how God loves you and accepts you precisely where you're at.
If you've been connecting and serving and growing with us, if you've accepted the challenge to get involved, to help other people grow, to learn and grow yourself, then thank you. Thank you for making this the kind of church that it is. But if you've been sitting on the sidelines for a while now, then it's time for us to up the challenge in this culture. It's time for us to be both a church of high invitation and challenge. We've got to, because we feel that that is the way of Jesus. This is not meant to be a cozy church. This is meant to be a church where you are empowered to do God's will in community with others for the sake of the world. And the expectation to be challenged is clear. We proclaim that God loves you precisely as you are, and he loves you enough not to leave you there. So if you want to be part of a church like that, then you're in the right place. And if you don't want to be part of a church like that, then it might be time to find a better church that fits you.
So over the next few weeks, you're going to be hearing about opportunities to plug in, to serve, to take charge of your spiritual growth. And you're going to be getting some letters and postcards from the staff, invitations to join along, and we urge you to respond.
The Neighboring Life: praying for our neighbors
Okay, I wasn't booed off the stage, so I can now do sermon number two.
We are in a series called The Neighboring Life. And The Neighboring Life basically says, if we believe what Jesus said to be the most important thing—loving God and loving our neighbors—then we need to actually put that into practice in our lives. And we have a couple of assumptions: that what Jesus says is the most important thing is the most important thing; that when Jesus says to love our neighbors, he means at least to love our literal neighbors; and that our measure for the love that we have for God is measured by the way that we love our neighbors.
And The Neighboring Life has four disciplines. So last week, Pastor Brandon introduced us to discipline number one, and that's the concept of stay—of being in our neighborhoods in an incarnational way, a way that shows Jesus to our neighbors. So getting to know them, and opening our garage doors and our front doors, and hosting block parties, and getting to know people's names and pets' names and their hopes and dreams and their pets' hopes and dreams. So this week, we're talking about discipline number two, or practice number two, and that's the idea of praying.
The trellis
Can anybody picture what a trellis is? A trellis is something that you lean up against a house or a wall or a fence, and it's something by which vines can grow.
My family, we had a really cool backyard that had a trampoline, but the trampoline was flush with the ground. We had dug a giant hole and had placed the trampoline in the hole, so you could just walk from the ground onto the trampoline. Well, after enough springs had broken and busted people's foreheads open and ankles and all that stuff, we decided it was time to take the trampoline out—which meant that once we took the trampoline out, we had a problem: a giant hole in the middle of the yard. And so my brother David and I got the wonderful privilege—thanks, Mom and Dad—of, by hand, shovel and wheelbarrow, filling in the giant hole. We had this other piece of property on our land where we could take a bunch of dirt and wheelbarrow it over and shove it into the giant hole. So after we did all that and laid some grass down, then it sunk in, and so the next summer we had to do it again and laid some grass down. Then we had this nice little corner wooden fence where we planted some vines, and we put up a trellis.
Now, vines can grow on their own. They can creep along the ground, and sometimes they can find the fence or the wall on their own and climb up. But what a trellis does is it gives vines direction by which to grow. And so instead of growing just horizontally, they can grow vertically as well.
And so I have long been a proponent of the importance of liturgy and litany. That's one of the things that I introduced as a worship director to this church, that sometimes pre-written prayers or psalms or scripture can help our worship not just grow horizontally, but upwards as well. Sometimes my own prayer life can get into a rut. I run out of things to say. I feel like I've prayed the same prayer over and over again. And so I appreciate picking up something like the Book of Common Prayer or the Celtic Prayer Book, that puts words to my lips that were inside my heart, but I didn't know how to get the two connected.
And so what if we all gave our prayer life a trellis, a means by which to not just grow horizontally but to grow vertically, a framework for which our prayers can lift upwards toward the sun? And I didn't come up with this idea. Jesus actually gave us a trellis for our prayer life, and we find it in two places, Luke chapter 11 and Matthew chapter 6—what we as Protestants call the Lord's Prayer, what our Catholic brothers and sisters call the Our Father. And what it is is a trellis, a framework for our prayer life. And so today, as we're talking about the practice of praying for our neighbors, I wanted to review the Lord's Prayer, because it's a good framework, a good trellis for our prayer lives by which to pray for our neighbors.
Lord, teach us to pray
So if you have your Bibles, I invite you to join me in Luke chapter 11. That's where we'll be camping out today. And if you're the imaginary, sensory kind of person, I want to set the scene for you. If you're a disciple of Jesus, you've been following around this rabbi, this teacher, for a while now. And the way discipleship worked is that you imitated everything that the rabbi did. If the rabbi put on a certain piece of clothing, you put on a certain piece of clothing. If the rabbi bought a certain brand of sandal, you bought a certain brand of sandal. If the rabbi washed his hands in this particular way before the meal, you washed your hands in this particular way before the meal. And so this includes the way that we pray.
Jesus would very often, after a busy, long ministry day of dealing with the crowds and healing and feeding and being highly inviting and highly challenging, wander away into a lonely place—is what the Scriptures would often say—or the wilderness. And so if you know anything about Israeli geography, it's dusty, it's sandy, it's a bit of desert and brush. And so you can imagine Jesus going to this dusty, lonely place away from the crowds, maybe by the Sea of Galilee, and the disciples are following him. And they watch Jesus, this remarkable teacher, pray to God who he keeps calling Father. And so Jesus comes down from this lonely place, and one of his disciples says to Jesus, "Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples." Some of the disciples of Jesus were actually previously disciples of John the Baptist. And so once John the Baptist had been put into prison, disciples of John then became disciples of Jesus. And so they said, "Well, we learned how John prayed. Jesus, how do you pray?"
Our Father: community
And so Jesus says this. He says, "Our Father." Now, our automatic assumption when we read something like this, "Our Father"—it's the idea of community, of neighboring. When we pray, we often pray in the singular first person: "Dear God, would you help me? Would you bless me? My Father, my God." But Jesus teaches his disciples to pray in a way that's plural, that assumes that you're in community and relationship with others. It's not just "my Father." It's not just "your Father." It's "our Father." And so the guy across the street, the guy behind your house, the guy next to your house—son of God. The girl across the street—daughter of the king.
And so we immediately see that the way Jesus introduces the prayer to his disciples is not one of privatized, individualized isolation. There's no such thing as private religion. Robert Mulholland, one of my professors at Asbury, wrote this. He said, "By saying 'our Father,' every person becomes one whom God loves and for whom God's grace is constantly outpoured. Others are those for whom we are to be the sister or brother, and whom God's love and grace touches. 'Our Father' instantly bonds us with God on the one hand and with others on the other."
And so every relationship we've ever had, with every rowdy neighbor, with every annoying co-worker—fortunately, I don't have any of those; I have to say that, they're in the room—for every person that's ever bugged us, every person in the checkout line that's ever been too slow or used a checkbook when they could just be using a credit card, for every one of those people, they are underneath the umbrella of "our Father," sons and daughters of the king. Now, they may not all realize that. They may not live in the reality of that. But it doesn't change the fact. And we get to know that. And so we get to look each person in the eye, each neighbor in the eye, and we can see their weird habits and their annoying music or whatever it is, and we remember: we share a creator.
Hallowed be your name: the Father's character
So Jesus continues. He says, "Our Father in heaven, let your name be made holy in me." Now, typically, when we pray the Lord's Prayer, we pray this as a statement of fact: "Hallowed be thy name. Let your name be holy." And it is a fact. God's name is holy. It is hallowed. It's something special. It's beyond us. It's transcendent. But then all three of the next lines of the Lord's Prayer are, in the Greek, what are called third-person imperatives. And third-person imperatives have this assumption that even though we're making a request, I have a responsibility to make sure that request is fulfilled. It essentially means that there is an implication for me if I'm making a request of you, or of the person I'm praying to.
And so this prayer, this "let your name be made holy in me," is a radical commitment to live our lives here on earth in such a manner that something of God's very presence and nature can become manifest in and through us. When we say, "Let your name be made holy in me, hallowed be your name," we're saying we want to be the kinds of people, the sort of people, that something about the very nature of God comes out in the way we live our lives. We get to be God's presence here on earth.
Now, what this has shown us so far is the Father's character. And so I'm going to teach you just a simple shape of what the Lord's Prayer is: six sentences about how we can pray, the trellis, the framework for our prayers. And so these first two lines of the Lord's Prayer, they show us the Father's character: that he's holy, that he's our Papa. Later on in this chapter, Jesus is going to talk more about the character of the Father, that if you ask Papa for a piece of bread, he's not going to give you a stone or a snake. He's going to give you something good. And so this is our Father's character.
Your kingdom come: the Father's kingdom
So Jesus goes on. He says, "Let your kingdom come"—again, through me, third-person imperative—"let your will be done by me on earth as it is in heaven." So "your kingdom come," it's not just a request that we make of God: "Hey, can you do this while I sit back and relax and watch it happen?" Let your kingdom come by my actions. Let your will be done through my life. And God's kingdom and God's will, it's that which we would say of heaven becoming true of what we call earth.
As we pray for our neighbors, we have a responsibility to become the answer to our neighbor's prayers. God wants to use us to answer the prayers that our neighbors are praying to God. And practically, that means maybe we need to know what our neighbors are praying for.
And this is another quote from Dr. Mulholland. He writes, "When we pray, 'Let your kingdom come,' we are making a radical commitment to live our life in the world, on earth, in such loving abandonment to God that the values and principles, the perspectives and dynamics of God's realm of life and wholeness become incarnate in and through our being and doing." When we pray, "Let your kingdom come," we want to abandon ourselves so much to what God says is true that we become the incarnate reality of God's kingdom in our neighborhoods.
And so our neighbors should know—even if they've never been to church, even if they will never darken the doorway of our halls, even if they never will attend Good News or any church—they should still know something about the character of God and the character of God's kingdom because they live next to us. And so we see the Father's character, that he's good, that he desires good things for his children and his children's neighbors. And we see God's kingdom, that he wants the earth to see what it would be like if he were in charge. And so God placed a bunch of ambassadors for his kingdom all over the suburbs and the neighborhoods and the gravel roads. And we're going to be pretty ineffective embassies and ambassadors if our doors are always shut, if we show no discernible difference to the world around us, and if we don't do a little kingdom espionage and try to get some people to join our cause.
Daily bread: the Father's provision
So we see God's character, we see God's kingdom, and Jesus continues. Jesus prays, "Give us each day our daily bread." It's a prayer of simplicity and of trust. Daily bread. Now, here Jesus is actually quoting Proverbs chapter 30. The writer of Proverbs writes:
Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise I may have too much and disown you and say, "Who is the Lord?" Or I may become poor and be led to steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.
Now, some of us—me included—I would get upset if God actually answered this prayer and only gave me my daily bread. But we see that God is a God of abundance, and God delights in giving abundance to his children, that he doesn't just give us daily bread, but he gives us far, far more abundantly than that. And so here we see the Father's provision, that God is merciful and kind, with abundant mercy and grace, that he delights in giving good gifts to his children. And the Scripture says that he wants to give us the desires of our hearts, that if we ask anything in his name, it will be granted for his name's sake.
And so again, remember what it says: it says our daily bread. We're not just asking for my daily bread, but for the bread of our neighbors, for the provision of our neighbors, our neighborhoods, our communities. This is a prayer for the sake of the community, the block, the cul-de-sac, the homesteads down the gravel road. Our Father, give us this day our daily bread.
Forgive our debts: the Father's forgiveness
And Jesus continues, "Forgive our debts, as we have also forgiven our debtors." And so here we see this kind of mysterious spiritual truth, that the extent by which we experience God's forgiveness is the extent to which we have forgiven others. Remember what we talked about two weeks ago: that our love for God is measured by our love for others. Well, there's an equally true maxim for our lives, and that's the fact that our experience of God's forgiveness is capped by how we have forgiven others.
Now, note that I've said experience God's forgiveness. God's forgiveness is in fact infinite and deep and wide and irreversible. God's love is not conditional. God's forgiveness is not conditional. But our experience of God's forgiveness can be. So if you want to experience the fullness of God's mercy, the fullness of God's love, the fullness of how God has forgiven us, then we need to become conduits of that mercy and grace and love and forgiveness. The more that we become conduits of forgiveness to our neighbors, the more we let them see what it looks like to wipe away debts, to forgive transgressions, to let bygones be bygones, then we get not only the reward of being a good neighbor, but we also grow in our capacity to experience the full richness and character of God's mercy.
Lead us not into testing: the Father's guidance
So we have seen God's character—he is our Father, he desires good gifts. We have seen the Father's kingdom, his will being done on earth as it is in heaven. The Father's provision, prayers for our daily bread, having faith and knowing, experiencing that God gives us far more than that. We see the Father's forgiveness. Jesus continues, "Lead us not into testing." Now, traditionally we pray this as "lead us not into temptation," but we know from the book of James that God never leads anybody into temptation. And so another way to translate this word is "testing." Lead us not into a time of testing.
Now, we know that God does allow us to come into times of trial and testing, times that will stretch us and grow us. And we believe, we proclaim, that times of testing and trial can actually be good for us. But we also see—thank goodness—that Jesus thinks it's perfectly fine to pray that God doesn't lead us into those times. We are told in James that we are to consider it pure joy when we enter into times of trial, that we are to rejoice when we suffer, that when we do suffer we're actually participating in the character of Jesus himself. But remember that Jesus is not just 100% God, he's also 100% human. And he shows us that we don't need to go around looking for times of trial and tribulation and testing. Even Jesus was the one who, in the Garden of Gethsemane, the eve of his crucifixion, prayed that he wouldn't have to suffer. And that's a delightfully human prayer from a fully human Jesus. And so it's okay to ask God to take hard times away. It's okay to pray that you don't have to suffer. But we also know that when we do, it's probably for a reason, to grow us.
Now, part of prayer is this idea, the implication that we're going to be eventually moving outside of the doors of our churches and our homes, outside the protection of our homes and out into the world. If we are going to be conduits of God's kingdom, that means we've got to get out there and do it. And we need the Father to lead our paths. And so here we are praying for the Father's guidance. Lead us not into testing. Guide our steps. Guide our paths. Make your word a light unto my feet, God. And sometimes it feels like God only lights one step at a time, but we pray for even more guidance.
Deliver us from the evil one: the Father's protection
And Jesus continues, "Deliver us from the evil one." We have an enemy who wants to see us fail. He is the one who wants us to not love our neighbor. The enemy wants us to let kingdom-come stuff be done by other folks, not us. And so every time that we neglect to love our neighbor, every time that we refuse to forgive, every time we want to selfishly accumulate beyond our daily bread, we're actually collaborating with the devil himself. And so we pray to God that we would be delivered from the evil one, the evil one that comes to kill and steal and destroy. When we pray for healing, he's working against us with the powers of disease and decay. When we pray for peace, he is working with the powers of war and violence. When we pray for reconciliation and opportunities to connect with our neighbor, he is the one working with the powers of safety, the idols of security and status quo, our fear of the awkward and our fear of rejection.
And God has every desire and intention to deliver us from those evil powers. In other words, we're praying for the Father's protection—God's power to keep the weakling powers of evil at bay. Because trust me, there is an evil power at work that wants us to fail at neighboring, that wants us to fail at spreading the good news to our neighbor, that wants us to fail at loving our neighbors, that wants us to fail at keeping the greatest commandment. And that evil power will use every tool it has in its arsenal to make sure that we fail. But greater is he who is within us than he who is in the world, because we are more than conquerors through Jesus Christ, who conquered sin and death and evil and Satan himself.
The hexagon
And so these six sentences are a framework by which we pray for ourselves and our neighbors. And if you like shapes, you can think of it as a simple hexagon: six ideas or concepts that can form all of our prayers. It can be a trellis by which our prayers can climb and play on.
So for an example, maybe you're praying and you don't want to use the exact words of the Lord's Prayer, but you want to use this trellis or framework. And so you could pray something like this: "Father, I know you are my caring, loving, heavenly Father"—it's the Father's character. "You rule over all and will watch over me today from your throne in heaven"—the Father's kingdom. "Let your glory be seen in all I do today. I want your rule and your will to be done in all my thoughts and actions today. Please provide for my needs today, spiritual and physical and financial"—the Father's provision.
Or maybe you're praying for a sick friend or neighbor: "Father, your reign in heaven extends down to our residence on earth, so let your glory be seen in the life of my friend. In your kingdom there's no sickness or pain. Let your kingdom come in my friend's life and body."
And so as we continue to think through how best to love our neighbors, let us not neglect to pray for them: to show them God's character and his kingdom, to extend to them God's provision and forgiveness, to ask for God's guidance and protection as we venture into obeying what Jesus says matters most—loving God and loving our neighbors.
Communion
So I'm going to invite our worship team and our communion servers and Mary to come on up right now as we move into the sacrament of communion. One of the ways in which the Lord's Prayer is answered by our Father is by this sacrament of communion—that when we ask for daily bread, we get far more than that. We get living bread. We get the bread of life. We get the bread that sustains our lives. And so as we move into that sacrament together, let's transition by saying the Lord's Prayer together. And we're going to use the newer wording. Don't worry, we're not going to do this permanently; I'm not forever changing the way that we've memorized the Lord's Prayer. But just for today, let's pray this together:
Our Father in heaven, let your name be made holy in me. Let your kingdom come through me. Let your will be done by me on earth as it is in heaven. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. Lead us not into testing, but deliver us from the evil one. Amen.
