AM Matthew 6 The Lord's Prayer 1

[0:00] The passage I mentioned to the children, Matthew chapter 6. We're going to start at verse 1 and we'll read the whole chapter. So this is Christ speaking.

[0:24] Verse 1.

[0:54] But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

[1:07] And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others.

[1:18] Truly I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret.

[1:30] And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words.

[1:41] Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

[1:54] Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

[2:09] And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

[2:20] But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others.

[2:38] Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face that your fasting may not be seen by others, but by your Father who is in secret.

[2:52] And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.

[3:04] But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

[3:17] The eye is the lamp of the body. So if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.

[3:29] If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness! No one can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.

[3:43] You cannot serve God and money. Therefore, I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on.

[3:59] Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow, nor reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.

[4:14] Are you not of more value than they? And which of you, by being anxious, can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing?

[4:26] Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, they neither toil nor spin. Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

[4:38] But if God so clothes the grasses of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?

[4:51] Therefore do not be anxious, saying, What shall we eat? Or what shall we drink? Or what shall we wear? For the Gentiles seek after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows you need them all.

[5:04] But seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself.

[5:20] Sufficient for the day is its own trouble. Amen. So reads God's word. So turn with me then this morning to the passage that we read earlier on in Matthew 6, and we're going to spend our time this morning looking at the section of that chapter that we often refer to as the Lord's Prayer.

[5:44] I'm sure it will be familiar words to many of us, words that we probably learned while we were still very young. Maybe words that, like myself, in my senior school we had assembly every morning, and we used to regularly recite the Lord's Prayer.

[6:03] And in many church circles, although perhaps a little bit less common these days than it was in days gone by, it was often treated as a congregational prayer. What I want to do this morning is to start off by looking at the context of this passage here in Matthew 6.

[6:23] I want to look at some general remarks about the Lord's Prayer, and then I want to move on then to look at one particular statement of the Lord's Prayer, which is, Hallowed be your name.

[6:36] So first of all, then, a little bit of context. What is the context of Matthew 6? Matthew 6 here. If you look at Matthew's Gospel in overview, what we find is that there is a pattern, there's a literary pattern, and we have blocks of narrative about the life of Christ.

[6:56] Those blocks of narrative are then interspersed with blocks of teaching, teaching by Christ, and we have recorded for us sermons or discourses of Christ's teachings.

[7:09] There are five major discourses that are recorded for us in Matthew, and the first, and perhaps the best known, is what we often refer to as the Sermon on the Mount, and it's chapters 5 through to chapter 7 of the Gospel of Matthew.

[7:26] And so, you're very smart people, I'm sure, you'll know chapter 6 is right in the middle of that discourse. It runs from 5 to 7, so 6 is in the middle. So, right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, we have this section of Christ's teaching.

[7:44] How could we summarize the Sermon on the Mount? Well, one way to look at it would be to say, this is Christ teaching us, and teaching his disciples, about how to live Christ as a Christian, how to live life as a Christian in a fallen world.

[8:01] In many ways, it sets out the moral ethic of Christian behavior. It sets expectations, it sets standards of Christian behavior.

[8:13] So, if we asked ourselves questions such as, what is Christian character? Or, does the law of God have any place in the life of a Christian? Or, is discipline important?

[8:26] Or, maybe, can we be free from anxiety in a world that is riddled with anxiety? Is a judgmental spirit wrong?

[8:36] We could ask ourselves. We could ask, why do we need spiritual discernment? And we could ask, are Christians really different from other people? And these questions are all very necessary questions that we should ask in our lives.

[8:52] But they're all matters that are addressed by the Lord Jesus Christ in this Sermon on the Mount. And, right in the middle of addressing all this wide range, this range of questions, we get this passage that comes in chapter 6.

[9:12] And, in the middle of chapter 6, we read this bit about prayer. prayer, prayer, you see, is an integral part of the Christian life.

[9:25] And a passage appearing on prayer in this discourse of Christ clearly shows us how important prayer is. But, you see, Christ tells us some things about prayer.

[9:38] He tells us that there's a right way and a wrong way to pray. He tells us there's a right way and a wrong way to give to the needy. There's a right way and a wrong way to deal with our neighbours as well.

[9:50] There are right ways and wrong ways of living life. And, in this passage here, which is Christ corrective in many ways to how we should live.

[10:03] Christ telling us how we shouldn't do things, things like when we're giving, we should do it in silence and in quiet and in secret. All those sorts of things that we read.

[10:14] Right in the middle of this, we've got Christ saying, and by the way, let's talk about prayer. Because he says there's a right way and a wrong way to pray. There's a pattern, he says, to prayer.

[10:27] Now, chapter 6, it marks the start of a new section in Christ's sermon, in the Sermon on the Mount. And it's really a section versus, the first 18 verses or so of chapter 6 that we read, it's really a section there dealing with motives.

[10:45] motives. And it's introduced, verse 1, by beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them.

[10:56] And Christ goes on from that initial statement to give some examples. He says, there are some examples here of giving, of praying, and fasting. Look how some people do it.

[11:09] That's not the way you should do it. And verse 1, you see, you're setting out the principle of motives. In other words, it's not just what we do that's important, it's the reason that we're doing it.

[11:22] And the way we do it, it's vitally important, the way we do it. The motive for doing something is vitally important, not just the thing itself. It's all about motives.

[11:36] And we have there, we've got the donor who's trumpeting out their donation to the poor, so everyone thinks well of them in their giving. We've got the hypocrites praying in the synagogue or on the street corners.

[11:50] And why are they doing it? Well, they're doing it so they appear to be holy to others, so everybody else knows these people are praying people. We've got the hypocrites showing out by their demeanor that they're fasting and denying themselves.

[12:06] It's almost a comical passage that actually when you read it, verse 16, when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. That's almost amusing, isn't it?

[12:17] These people are demonstrating their fasting by deliberately looking gloomy and miserable. And Christ says, don't be like that. You see, all these things these people were doing, it was being done for the wrong motive.

[12:32] It was being done to show themselves as somehow holy before men. So as men and women looked on, it was done to elevate themselves.

[12:45] What it wasn't done for was to glorify God. What it wasn't done for was as part of the worship of God. It was done for their own glory, not for the glory of God.

[12:57] You see, the motives of these people that Christ is talking about are all wrong. And that obviously leads us to a question, doesn't it? And the question is, what about our motives?

[13:08] Do we ever examine our motives? Because you see, it's all too easy to slip into this hypocrisy of the Pharisees. Do we have maybe a subtle desire to have a good reputation amongst others?

[13:26] Do we just maybe accidentally let it slip out in conversation that, well, last week we did some good deed for somebody or we gave some amount of money to the latest charity appeal that has come up?

[13:39] Or maybe in the prayer meeting, do we pray because we want to be seen by others as prayerful, holy people? It's right to do good deeds.

[13:54] And if we're able, it's good to be able to contribute financially where we can to good causes and to the care of others. It's right that we should be praying Christians too, isn't it?

[14:06] But you see, we need to make sure that the motives for our actions, the motive for what we do is to glorify God.

[14:17] It's not to bring honour to ourselves, it's not to bring glory to ourselves, but it should be as a response to his love towards us. It should be in a response to his mercy towards us.

[14:31] And it should be to glorify God. But there's a problem here sometimes, I think, and that is how do we ensure that our motives are correct?

[14:44] I don't know if you noticed this, but in the first 1 to 18 verses of that chapter that we read, there is a constant use of one word, and it's the word Father.

[14:55] In fact, there's 10 instances of the use of the word Father in those first 18 verses. So why might that be significant? And I would suggest to you that the answer to that is that Jesus is saying that the problem these hypocrites have is they don't have a relationship with God as their Father.

[15:16] That's the basic problem. The Pharisees, you see, they reduced their religion to a set of rules and regulations, and they thought that in some way they would gain favor with the Almighty God by following their rules and regulations.

[15:31] They enslaved themselves indeed to these rules and regulations. And in doing that they turned God himself into a slave driver. They, you see, had no concept of the grace of God.

[15:45] They had no concept of the forgiveness of God. They had no concept of the fatherhood of God. They had no Heavenly Father. But you see, that's the condition of natural man, isn't it?

[15:58] That's the condition of men and women who don't know God. That's the condition of men and women who have not come to see Christ as the one who can save them and put their trust in Christ as their Savior and Lord.

[16:13] You see, to them, God is what? Well, God is a tyrant. God is the purveyor to them of rules and regulations. There's no father-son relationship that exists.

[16:27] But you see, for the Christian, well, that's different, isn't it? Because we can know God as our Father. We do know God as our Father. We have a security in his presence.

[16:37] We can have fellowship with him, with the Almighty God. And you see, in these first 18 verses there of chapter 6, time and again, Christ is reminding us of that relationship, that father-child relationship that exists.

[16:54] Reminds us that if we're in a correct relationship with God, then the things that we do, we are able to have correct motives. Not that we necessarily do, but we are able to have correct motives for the things that we do.

[17:13] Jim Packer, a name that many of you may know, wrote a, probably the most well-known of the many books he wrote, was a book called Knowing God, and in that he writes this, he says, if you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God's child, and knowing God as his Father.

[17:34] If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means he does not understand Christianity very well at all.

[17:46] So what about you? What about me? Do we know God as our Father? That's the question, isn't it? And does then our knowledge of God as our Father prompt our worship of him?

[18:00] What controls our outlook on life? Is it the knowledge of God as our Father? Is that what controls our outlook on life and the things that we do? Does the knowledge of God as our Father inform our motives and drive our motives for doing anything?

[18:18] Or are we just no different to the Pharisees? We're ignorant of God. You see, how we think of God is the most important, the single most important influence on our lives.

[18:36] The way we live, the motivations for any of our actions, they should be driven by our knowledge of God as our Father. But again, there can be a conflict, can't there, in our minds about this?

[18:53] I wonder how many of you had the experience that I had as a child and there were occasions where I knew I was in trouble because my mum said, you wait till your father comes home.

[19:06] And I knew at that point I was for it. I wasn't always a good child. It happened to me. But at the same time that I was in fear of my dad coming through the door because I knew what was in store, I was going to get told off, I was going to get punished, my mum had a wooden jam spoon that she used, my dad just used his hand.

[19:29] But at the same time that I feared my father coming home, I never once doubted that my father loved me. Yes, he loved me. Of course he did.

[19:40] And I loved him. But I knew I'd done something wrong and I was for it when he got home. But you see, my dad was just my dad, wasn't he? Imagine your father as the almighty God, the creator and the sustainer of the universe, the all-knowing one, the holy one, the king over all.

[20:03] Imagine having to come before that God who is your father as a sinner and knowing that you've done wrong.

[20:15] What did Adam and Eve do? First knowledge of sin in the world. They hid, didn't they? They hid from God. And that's surely our first inclination, isn't it?

[20:26] As sinners, when we see the sinfulness of our sin as we come towards our father in the light of his holiness, we feel unworthy, don't we? But you see, because of his grace towards us, we can come to him.

[20:44] On the one hand, yes, we come in fear and rightfully so. But on the other hand, we come in wonderful joy and thankfulness.

[20:57] And as this conflict in a sense of fear and grace that will continue in our lives as Christians until we die, until we go to heaven, until we're made perfect in the righteousness of Christ in heaven.

[21:13] In the early church, there was a liturgy that was done by Chris Austin, one of the early church fathers, and in it he included the Lord's Prayer, but he prefaced it and he prefaced it like this.

[21:25] He said, grant that we may dare to call on thee as Father and to say, our Father who art in heaven. And you see, what he was recognizing was this sort of paradox of the fear of coming to God as sinners and yet the joy of being able to approach God as our Father through his forgiveness and his graciousness to others through the work of Christ.

[21:51] So the context then of the Lord's Prayer, it's the Sermon on the Mount, it's in the immediate context in chapter 6, it's an examination of motives and deeds of righteousness, it's within this teaching of the need to know God as our Father and then we get the Lord's Prayer.

[22:09] And as we move on now and look a bit more at the Lord's Prayer itself, we're going to see Jesus deliver some additional teaching about prayer. And not only is he saying don't pray like the Pharisees, don't pray for the wrong motives, but he's also going to be saying there's a right and a wrong pattern.

[22:26] I've already mentioned this as a right and a wrong pattern in prayer. And so we then get the little section between verses 9 and 13 where he sets out for us the pattern that we should use when we are praying.

[22:41] In some ways it's almost an aside to the main thrust of the chapter. It's almost an incongruous aside to the main thrust of the chapter.

[22:52] But you see it's a very necessary aside. It's a very important part of this whole chapter of teaching that Christ is giving.

[23:03] It's one of only two places indeed where Christ deals with the matter of prayer. We're going to be looking at the other one tonight. So the second heading then this morning the Lord's Prayer in general.

[23:14] And as we come to that then there's a question I want to ask. And the first question is is this a prayer to be recited? Or is it a pattern? A framework to which we put our own words?

[23:26] And I think the simple answer to that is it's both. I think there are benefits to reciting the Lord's Prayer in public. It expresses in a very compact array a number of things.

[23:39] It expresses the elements of corporate prayer. And it can be helpful I think in unison as congregations to do that. It's very compact but it goes through worshipping God.

[23:51] It goes through God's provision for us and so on and we're going to see that in a few minutes. But it's not a mantra. It's not something we should see as a formula for getting God to act and to listen.

[24:06] It's not something to be repeated mindlessly because that's not how we are called to pray. But as a guide a framework for our prayers it sets out how we should approach God and I think it helpfully does that.

[24:21] It sets proper limits and boundaries on our prayers. So first thing to notice then that there is a structure to what Christ gives.

[24:32] It's not just a loosely connected or random set of thoughts. There is a structure to this prayer. Different commentators have different views of the structures and most of them are helpful views but perhaps one of the most helpful is Calvin and his commentaries because he divides it.

[24:53] He recognizes six petitions which there are but it divides it into two groups of three. The first three and the benefit I think of Calvin's division is that it gives us the nature of the divisions in the prayer.

[25:07] The first three praying that God's name should be honoured, praying for the arrival of his kingdom, praying for God's will to be done on earth. They're all related to the glory of God. They're focused on him.

[25:19] There is no reference in those first three petitions at all to us. It's all to do with God. Then after the first part comes the second part.

[25:30] Again a further three petitions which this time do deal with us. Daily provision, forgiveness of sins, deliverance from evil. It's a pattern and it's a pattern of God first and man second.

[25:46] It's a pattern of God's glory primarily and then man's needs secondary. And this is a basic tool fold structure of how we should pray.

[25:58] Our primary concern in everything we do, the way we live our lives, but in prayer should be the glory of God. And then once we've established that, then we can lay before him our needs.

[26:12] Calvin makes another interesting point. He points out that this of course mirrors the Ten Commandments, doesn't it? We've exactly the same structure there as well. Ten Commandments I'm sure you know were divided into two tables of the law.

[26:24] And the first deals with our relationship with God. And then the second our relationships with others. So there's a kind of a mirror to the Lord's prayer itself.

[26:36] The glory of God followed by the needs of men. The relationship of us to God followed by the relationship of us to other men. I think, you know, when we pray sometimes we're too quick to rush into our needs.

[26:52] We forget the glory of God. And our prayers can become a shopping list. And that's as much as they are. A list of demands almost. And you see, that's not the pattern that Christ gives us here.

[27:05] That's not what teaches us to pray. We should begin with God's interests. We should begin with His glory. We should begin with His kingdom.

[27:16] We should begin with His will and His purposes here on earth. And not until we've done that should we dare to present our petitions to God. Now we don't have time to consider all the different petitions in the prayer this morning.

[27:32] But I'd like to start by picking up one of those petitions. And it's the very first part of the question. And it's the very first part of the prayer.

[27:42] And it's hallowed be your name. And I guess the first question that we have to ask is what does the word hallow mean? It's not the most commonly used word in society today.

[27:54] So what does the word hallow mean? Well if you look at it in the dictionary, the dictionary would tell you that it means to be holy, to be concentrated, to be sacred, or revered.

[28:05] In other words, what we're saying is we want to ascribe to the name of God holiness. We want to recognize his name as something that should be revered, as something that should be worshipped.

[28:20] We're recognizing his name as something to be set apart from common and careless usage. It's something that we should hold up before the world has been sacred, and being above all and over all.

[28:36] Now we can admire people, can't we? We can admire the name of people. So for instance, we can hold the king in high regard and we can admire him unless we're a republican. We can admire the person's position and the greatness in our land or in the company that we work for.

[29:01] We can admire the managing director because he is the one who's the boss. But that's not what hallowed means. You see, when we say hallowed be your name in the Lord's prayer, we're setting the name of God above every name that there is.

[29:18] We're worshipping him in his holiness. We're recognizing his separation from the sin in the world because he is holy and above all. and we're also recognizing his kingship over us.

[29:32] We're recognizing that we are the unworthy subjects of his kingdom. This is what we're doing. So if that's the meaning of hallowed, the second question is, well, when we say hallowed be your name, what is God's name?

[29:52] Now you might say, well, God of course, that's a silly question. It's God. Well, actually, that's not so much a name, is it, as a property of God.

[30:04] You and I are humans. That's our property. God is God. There's a sense in which that's his property. We have names. I'm called John, and there's all sorts of names here.

[30:17] But we don't really have a single name in the scripture, do we, for God? There's various names that God is known as in the scripture, as answer to Moses at the burning bush was, I am.

[30:29] And if we had time to explore that this morning, we find that that's a remarkable, all-encompassing name. We've got other names, the Lord Most High, the Lord Our Provider, the Lord Our Righteousness, the Lord Our Shepherd, and various other names given to God in the scriptures.

[30:47] And God, you see, encompasses all of these names. His name is anything by which he is known and displays his attributes of wisdom, power, holiness, righteousness, goodness, graciousness, and so on.

[31:07] But there's another way in which we understand the word name, isn't it? Isn't there? We can talk about somebody's good name. We're talking there about their reputation, aren't we?

[31:21] So, we could talk about the good name of so-and-so in the society they live in, in the town, or whatever. It's their reputation. And so too with God, you see, to hallow his name is to hallow his reputation.

[31:35] It's to treat his reputation as wholly above any other reputation of anybody else, or anything else. God's name or reputation, you see, is to be high above all others.

[31:49] You see, we acknowledge him as the Lord of all. The one who, because of his mercy and his love towards us, graciously provided a way of salvation.

[32:00] A way whereby we can become his children. Call him as father, be adopted into his family as children. So, how do we hallow God's name?

[32:15] Now, there's many ways I think we should hallow God's name, and we can't cover all of them this morning, but I'd like to suggest five ways in which we can hallow God's name. And firstly, and negatively, it's by not breaking the third commandment.

[32:30] I'll remind you, what does the third commandment say? It says, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. It seems to me, everywhere in our society today, it is acceptable to take the name of God in vain.

[32:51] It's almost impossible to listen to the radio, to look at a newspaper article, to watch a program on the TV, and to find people not taking the name of God in vain.

[33:03] It's like, it's almost as if it's the instant response, something good perhaps happens, a person wins a prize, and the words that come out of their mouths almost immediate trigger are words that are taking God's name in vain.

[33:23] How does that make you feel? Because that's the question, isn't it? Does it make you cringe? What if it was your name that was being used as an expletive?

[33:37] Because that's basically what is happening. What if it was your name being used there? How do you feel about that? So, when the name of your creator, your sustainer, your savior, your father is taken in vain, how does that make you feel?

[34:01] I think it's one of the diseases, as I say, of modern society. And you see, as we pray hallowed be your name, we should be praying for a restraining influence on society. Praying for a return to the days when to use God's name in vain was considered to be a bad thing, unacceptable, rather than just the thing you do.

[34:24] But secondly, how do we hallow God's name? We hallow his name when we profess his name, when we bear witness to his love, his justice, when we bear witness to his truth, and when we worship him as he's commanded, so gathering together as we have this morning as a church, it's a body of God's people, isn't it, here today?

[34:44] What are we doing? We're professing his name, and when we do that, we're hallowing his name. But we need to be careful, because we need to offer acceptable worship, reverent worship, spirit-filled worship.

[35:02] You can't hallow God's name with irreverence. You can't hallow God's name with empty ritual. The outward form could be reverent and orderly in our services, but if we're not worshipping with the devotion of our hearts, worshipping him in spirit, and worshipping him in truth, worshipping him with a love and a devotion that he deserves, don't forget that, he deserves our love and our devotion, because it's a response for what he's done for us, if that's not what drives our worship, we're not hallowing his name.

[35:41] And two, as we profess his name, we proclaim his truth, don't we? We proclaim the truths that are taught in the scriptures, and to deny the truths of scriptures is not to hallow his name.

[35:54] We hallow his name, you see, when we gather together, when we proclaim the whole counsel of God, when that is set forth, that is hallowing his name. But thirdly, we hallow his name by being obedient, by being obedient to his commands.

[36:10] I wonder, Psalmist writes in Psalm 40 verse 8, I delight to do your will, oh my God, your law is written within my heart. Can you say that? Can I say that?

[36:21] Is that you? Is that me? Or maybe with those that begrudge the commands of God, because, well, there's things there that we don't really want to do.

[36:33] We'd like to do something else. You see, if that's us, then we're dishonouring his name. You see, if we're the children of God, we should delight to do the will of God.

[36:45] And when we do that, we hallow his name. But fourthly, we hallow his name by believing in him, by trusting him, and his promises.

[36:57] John 5, 10, whoever does not believe God has made him a liar, because he's not believed in the testimony that God has borne concerning his son. Do you believe in God? Do you trust in him?

[37:09] If you're a Christian here today, then I hope you're answering yes to that. Because that's the point of being a Christian, isn't it? But there's a bit more to it.

[37:21] Do you also believe the promises that he's made? Or do you have any doubt about the promises? Do you have any doubt about the faithfulness of God that he will fulfill those promises he's made?

[37:33] Because you see, if you have doubts about that, you're making God a liar, you're dishonoring God, you're not hallowing his name. You see, believing in God and trusting in God hallows his name.

[37:48] Fifthly, we hallow God's name when we ascribe to him the honour in all things. God's love. If you remember the story of Herod in Acts 12, we don't really have time to read it this morning, but perhaps when you go home you can read the story of Herod in Acts 12.

[38:04] He didn't give God the glory when he gave a great oration. And what happened? He took the glory to himself and God dealt with him. God struck him down.

[38:16] Herod took the praise to himself. He allowed himself to be seen as a God because of his great words. didn't give God the glory. And God dealt with him.

[38:28] God struck him down. What about us? What if somebody looks at our lives and says what a faithful servant of Christ you've been.

[38:42] What do you say? What's your response to that? Do we say well thank you very much? That's very kind of you to say so. Sounds a good response doesn't it?

[38:52] It's polite. Or do we say well so far has the Lord helped me. So far has the Lord helped me. Paul 1 Corinthians 15 10.

[39:04] By the grace of God I am what I am. It was not I but the grace of God that is with me. Is that us? Do we take the honour from ourselves and give it to God?

[39:18] Because that's what we should be doing. The honour belongs to God. Ascribe to the Lord the glory Jesus name the psalmist says in Psalm 96. You see when we do this we're hallowing his name.

[39:34] So in closing then do you know God as your father? That's the big question this morning. Can you come to him in prayer and can you address him as your father?

[39:47] And if the answer to that is no then that's something you need to deal with. Even this morning you need to come before God. You have to ask him to forgive you for your sins. You have to ask him for forgiveness for not hallowing his name.

[40:02] You have to ask him to forgive your unbelief. You have to ask him to give you a gift of faith. That gift of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as your saviour and your Lord. You have to pray that in his mercy and his love he would look upon you and deal with your sin.

[40:21] That he would draw you to himself. Adopt you into his family. But if you're a Christian here do you have a true view of God as your father?

[40:34] Does the thought of being a child of God, does that prompt your worship? Does that direct your worship? Does it prompt your prayers? Does it direct your prayers? does the knowledge of being a child of God direct your whole outlook on life?

[40:52] Everything you do as you live day by day. Because you see if you can't answer yes to those questions then you need to think on these things more I think.

[41:03] You need to ask God to show you afresh what it means to be a child. Ask God to give you the assurance that you need to be able to approach him as your father. To ask God to help you to hallow his name.

[41:19] And we need God's help don't we? We need to ask God to help us so that we're not those who bring dishonour to take his name in vain. So that we're not those who do things that we know to be wrong.

[41:36] But we are those who profess his name in worship. Who bear witness to his love, to his justice. to his truth. And we need to ask God to help us so that we're given strength to be ever more obedient to his commands.

[41:54] Delighting in obeying him. And you know that can be difficult for us, can't it? We need help. We need to pray to God to give us help. To fill us with his spirit.

[42:06] To give us help in these things. So that we then have an increasing faith in what? Well in his promises. A deeper understanding of what it means to trust God fully in our lives.

[42:21] So when things happen to us, when things take place, we lean on God. We lean on him for our strength to deal with things, to trust him fully in our lives.

[42:33] And we need to ask God to make us humble, don't we? We need to ask God to help us so that when people say things to us, when people have written about us, or whatever it might be, we divert the honour from ourselves.

[42:47] And we divert and ascribe all honour to him. Ascribe honour to God for what he has done in us. We need to pray to God and ask him and not just declare as in the Lord's prayer, may your name be hallowed, but ask him to help us to be those who indeed hallow his name.

[43:14] Amen.