Walking with the Lord in prayer, wk 2-Abbie Sawzak.

We are week two of our sermon series, Walking Through the Lord's Prayer. Last week, Nedley talked about our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, and talked about how we approach prayer.

I love so much of the beginning of the Lord's Prayer, how it is centering our hearts and our minds in a way, reminding ourselves who we're praying to and how powerful he truly is, how worthy he truly is. The second part that we're going to be looking at today is talking about our needs. We see kind of the Lord's Prayer broken up in a few different sections: talking about our Father and our God, talking about our needs, and then talking about his kingdom.

Jesus was teaching them not how to pray necessarily, because at that time they would have been praying to God. The people that he was talking to, these disciples, they were religious. They would have been praying to God. They would have grown up in that culture. He was teaching them a different way to pray. For us today, maybe you are familiar with this. Maybe not. But I believe for each of us that there's something that God wants us to hear about how we are to pray.

Our daily bread

Our big kind of so what from today is that God wants to give us food. God wants us to experience forgiveness and protection and that we just have to ask. So that's what we're looking at today. If you're taking notes, it's simple and that's it.

We're going to start by talking about our need for food. Our Father, our heart in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, it will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. We're talking about bread. Now, there is so much bread in the Bible. Old Testament, New Testament. The people love to eat. The people love their carbs, their bread. I'm with them. I still do today.

For us today, if we're thinking, give us today our daily bread, now for most of us it's probably safe to say that we're not in a place where we physically cannot find food. Even if you're not able to afford food, even in our country today, there are so many places that you can get food. Whether that's different organizations or food shelves or different things like that. So it's hard for us to kind of relate to what does this mean for us to truly rely on God for our daily bread.

For us here in America, we have this reality of having access to a lot of food. But it's safe to say if you were to research that at least half the world went to bed hungry last night. Our country is one of the few that has that where we do have access to food. But famine is still a real thing today in other parts of the world. That's something that has been a thing for a very long time.

So we're going to go back all the way to Genesis for a minute here. Bear with me as we walk through this story of Adam and Eve when we see her eat the apple and sin enter the world. We see this idea of bread come into play. You have Adam, you have Eve. They're living in the Garden of Eden. They have the freedom to eat whatever they want. Except, as the story goes, there was one tree that God said, don't eat of this tree. And the serpent comes in. The serpent says, well, did God really tell you that? It goes on and on. You can read that in Genesis 3. The story where she ends up eating of the apple, the one thing the Lord said, just not this tree. And Adam eats of it as well. Next thing we know, sin, the separation from God, comes into place.

I want to look at this for a couple different angles today. One thing that we see here is that a lot of times we see this story and we see this when sin comes in, the separation from God. There's a story of Eve breaking the rules or Adam breaking the rules. But really it's this brokenness of trust. Because what the serpent came in and did was broke their trust in God. All of a sudden they weren't listening to the God that they knew, but they were believing the serpent and the God that he was telling them about.

There's a whole lot of discernment right there of how we base our decisions on the God we know or the God people tell us about. Which is why it's so important for us to constantly be in our words. Constantly be in spaces like this with community where we are discerning corporately what God is speaking to us. What God is saying. Because otherwise it's so easy for us to get in that spot when we start basing our decisions and our life on the God that other people are telling us about, and not the God that we know, the God that is true.

So they broke this trust of saying, well, surely God is keeping something from us. Surely God has something that he doesn't want us to experience. So they started to feed themselves. They weren't relying on the food that God had already given them. We see in Genesis 3:19, this verse comes in, and it says:

In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread.

Genesis 3:19

That's a very taken out of context verse here. From that point on, Adam and Eve had to work for their food. Now, I don't know if anybody else got on the bread-making train that came during quarantine. Where all of a sudden, everybody's making this sourdough bread. Some people from church actually brought me some, which was amazing. So I didn't even have to make it.

But I did, however, as many of you know, grow up in a homeschool family where it was very common for us to make our own bread all the time. We would go to a co-op, we'd get these big five-gallon buckets of whole grain flour. I remember as a child I was like, I don't want that stuff. I want the Wonder Bread. Give me the Wonder Bread. Now as my daughter I was like, Mom, that was so kind of you to not give us the Wonder Bread. But we would make the bread ourselves. It is a process to make your own bread. Even to this day, even though we have these Wonder Bread, bread is still a process to make. First, you have to grow the wheat. You have to dig. You have to plant seeds. You have to do all that. And then it goes on and on and on, the process of making bread.

Before Adam and Eve lost their trust and the trust was broken in who God was and sin entered the world, he was literally feeding them and nourishing them with everything that they needed. But then they started to feed themselves and not rely on God for their daily bread. Still to this day we see the work that goes in for us to feed ourselves.

The first thing I want us to talk about today is saying daily bread. Meaning God wants us to rely on him daily for something fresh every single day. What I love about this too is it reminds us that God cares about our simple needs. He cares about what's happening not just in the past, not just in the future, but in the here, in the now. He cares about our daily needs. It says daily bread, which again points us to why us coming to church on a Sunday is never going to be enough for us to truly grow into the likeness of Christ. We need to daily seek him. Daily read our Bibles. Daily hear his voice.

The next is nourishment. We see that Jesus, even in John 6:35, he refers to himself as the bread of life. He says:

I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.

John 6:35

We sing such powerful songs about that today. I'm saying, Lord, we need you, right? We need you, Lord. We recognize that we need you to nourish us, to make us whole. That nothing else that we try to feed ourselves is ever going to satisfy.

Why? Because we were created in the image of God to become like his son Jesus here on earth. I also love just this simplicity that's talking about daily bread. Right, it's not like a daily cake or a daily cookie or something like that, but it's a necessity. It's what we need. Which is even why we are practicing fasting. If you haven't yet, I invite you to join us on Tuesdays. We've been not eating until dinner time. That's to continue to train our bodies. To remind our flesh that every time we hunger, that's a reminder that we need to hunger and thirst for the Lord and let him satisfy us.

We see that in the Old Testament there's the story of Jesus providing the daily manna for the Israelites. He physically did it. Manna fell from the sky and he continued to feed them every single day. We also see that the bread is fuel. It's this fuel for overcoming temptation, which comes later in the Lord's Prayer to talk about. We see this in Jesus' temptation in Matthew chapter 4 and John. Satan tempted Jesus, and not only did Jesus respond to the devil's attempt to persuade Jesus to turn stones into bread, but he quoted Deuteronomy 8:3, which states:

Man does not live on bread alone, but on the word that comes from God.

Deuteronomy 8:3

Jesus proceeded to use scripture to overcome this temptation. For us, when we read scriptures and we fill ourselves with the word of God, we can then use it as fuel to remind ourselves how to overcome temptation.

The next thing I want to look at is that it says our daily bread. All of our daily bread. I love this so much in the Lord's Prayer because I think far too often we get caught. We recognize that yes, the gospel is personal. Jesus came to die on the cross and even if it was only you, he would do it again. But he did it for the entire world. If we get stuck and say, okay, Jesus, you died for me, that's awesome. All right, Jesus, you want to give me my daily bread? Thanks, I'm full now. And we just live our lives. We are not truly fulfilling the great commission that he gave us to go and to make disciples of all nations.

The Lord's Prayer was never meant to just be about us personally, but about us to say, how are we not praying and seeking God for just our need personally, but our corporate needs? How are we looking out for the people around us who maybe don't even know how to get food themselves? How are we feeding them? Some of the things that I love seeing in Jesus when he interacts with his disciples is the story of when he meets the five thousand. The disciples come in and say, we're hungry, we're tired. Give us something to eat. He then has them pass out food to five thousand people.

If I'm hungry and I'm going to my leader and I'm like, yes, you know, I'm serving you. I'm willing to do whatever you want. And then he's like, I'm hungry. Can you give me a little snack? I would be mad. But if he said five thousand people, like you have to watch five thousand people eat before you get to eat. And they did it. Because he was even then showing them, we have to think about our needs, about feeding each other in this kind of way.

Another interaction is when Jesus is talking to Peter, one of his disciples, after his resurrection. He's saying, Peter, do you love me? And he's like, yes. He's like, Peter, do you love me? Yes. And then he tells him, then feed my sheep. He was constantly training his disciples to not only look out for their own nourishment and their own needs, but for others.

For us here in the time that we're living in, the way of Jesus, the way of becoming like him is not just seeking my daily bread, but the way of Jesus is seeking our daily bread. Praying those bold prayers of saying, give us this day our daily bread. So bread is daily. It's nourishment. It's fuel. And it also can be an invitation.

This really just stuck out to me this morning as I was praying over these scriptures again. I started to think about what happens when we sit down and we share a meal with people, when we share that bread. It invites us to slow down. It invites us to sit still. It invites us to engage in conversation. Bread can be such an invitation to the people around us.

When you smell fresh bread in the oven and it's fresh, it's not like old moldy Wonder Bread that's been stuck in the cabinet for over a year and probably still looks the same. But when it's fresh, there's something different about it. That aroma that draws you in. That's the bread that Jesus wants us to experience. He wants it to nourish us. He wants it to fuel us. And he wants us to use it as an invitation and to see it as an invitation to be with him, to sit with him every single day. Be drawn into his presence.

Forgiveness

The next thing though that we're going to talk about that we see in the Lord's Prayer is forgive us our trespasses. Or in other translations, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. I want to talk about both receiving forgiveness and giving forgiveness. They're talking about this corporate thing, which I think is really special to think through. But I think there's two different things that we have to look at when it comes to us and the Lord wanting us to know to come to him, to confess our sins, to repent, to turn to him, and to receive forgiveness.

When we ask Jesus in our hearts to be our Lord and Savior of our life and we submit to following him for all of our days, he comes and he forgives us of our sins. But every single day we are going to have days of our life where we fall short. I want to ask you today, do you have rhythms and times in your life where you pause and you say, God, will you show me today? Where did I mess up? Where was I not looking like you, talking like you, acting like you? Were there things in my life that separated me from you? Will you show me them so that I can ask you to forgive me for that and turn back to you?

Every time we do that, he welcomes us with open arms. But I think sometimes we just get in these habits and we don't even realize what we're doing until it's way too late. That's where the enemy wants to get us, where he wants us to think, well, it wasn't that big of a deal. So you probably don't even need to talk to the Lord about it. Like, it's fine, you're fine. Did you see what that person did last week?

But the Lord wants us to acknowledge even the smallest things in our hearts, the smallest desires that are separating us and turning us from him, so we can acknowledge it, ask for forgiveness, repent, and turn towards him instead. Sin, if it's anything that separates us from God, we have to constantly be reflecting on that. I say, God, what is separating me from you right now? And how can you help me to acknowledge that and get rid of it and turn it towards you again? That comes through the practice of confession. We're just confessing those things to him.

The next thing is then giving forgiveness to other people. Now, this can be sometimes one of the hardest things that we can do, because there's so much that comes from forgiveness. But forgiveness can be one of the hardest traps. Forgiveness is hard, but having a bitter heart is way harder. If you've ever been in a situation where someone's wronged you and you've hung on to it for a long, long time, you know how stuck you can get, the anger that can come, the bitterness that can come.

If you don't let it go right away and learn the practice of forgiveness in your life, it is going to take way longer and be a way more painful journey. But sometimes we struggle with this because we want to hold on to control. We want to hold on to justice.

Forgiveness and us forgiving people that have wronged us leads us to freedom. It leads us to true freedom. A couple of disclaimers whenever we talk about forgiveness, especially when it comes to relationships, which is usually in relationships that we hurt each other and we wrong each other, is to know that not every relationship where you experience hurt and pain is going to be safe to go back to. But you can still forgive them. Not every relationship in your life is going to be necessary to go back to. But you can still forgive them.

I think even in scripture, we read stories of at different times, Paul being on journeys with people, missionary journeys, and then they kind of part ways. There's even a bit of conflict. It's not until like years later where they mention each other again. Even in the Bible, they have conflict with each other. It's going to happen. But realizing that unforgiveness steals our unity. It steals our relationships. And it stops the growth of the greater church. Because if the world is looking at us and they're saying, well, they can't forgive each other, what's the difference?

Everything we do to become like Jesus gives us opportunity to show people what it looks like to live a different type of way. So here are some reasons why we don't forgive. We don't forgive because we don't want to give. We're afraid that if we forgive them, that it's giving them permission to do it again. We think that if we forgive them, it makes it okay what they did.

But I want to walk through some tips for forgiveness. When you're looking at a situation, take a minute and pause. Ask the Lord to show you how he sees that person. How does he see that person? Because when you can truly start to see them the way that God sees them, it's going to totally change your heart towards that person.

Hurt people hurt people. But healed people heal people. That's something that's said a lot, but it's so true. We have to realize that we are all walking around a little bit wounded, right? We are all walking around with different stuff that we carry. Especially as brothers and sisters in Christ, we have to show endless grace to each other. I hope that I can have those relationships where it's a safe place to mess up. It's a safe place for someone to say, hey, that really hurt me, and I can acknowledge my humanness and receive that grace and forgiveness.

Then ask the Lord to show you why did it hurt so much. If someone wronged you, why did it hurt so much? Was it really what they said or what they did, or is there something else going on in my heart, in my spirit? Then ask the Lord to show you how to respond. How do you respond to this? Is it a conversation? Is it just letting it go? What are those things that you need to do?

Protection

The next thing that we see in the Lord's Prayer here is this idea of praying for protection. The Lord talks about this, right? That we're going to have temptations. That there's going to be things. And you see it again in the garden in Genesis 3, where all of a sudden, even though God was like rid of freedom, have all this stuff, the serpent still comes in and lies and tries to take us away from the Lord. That still happens today. We are still being lied to all the time and we have to continue to ask the Lord to protect us from that. To guard our hearts. To pray for that protection.

There's so many scriptures in the Old Testament, especially in Psalms, where we see that. Psalm 32 says:

You're my hiding place. You will protect me from trouble. You surround me with songs of deliverance.

Psalm 32

Psalm 57:1 says:

Have mercy on me, O God. Have mercy, for in you my soul takes refuge. I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the danger has passed.

Psalm 57:1

Here's one thing I would say. Whenever it comes to prayer, if you don't have the language yet to pray and talking to God's new to you, just steal it from someone in the Bible. There's so many prayers. I mean, you think about everything we do, right? The things we say, like, it's usually because we took it from somebody else. We heard it said. We all learned to talk from someone. So don't feel guilt or shame if you're like, I don't know how to talk to the Lord. Go read Psalms. You'll see. Pray those prayers. You can say it word for word. Lord, you're my hiding place. Protect me from trouble. Protect me from whatever it is that you have in your life. Be specific with him. You can take those words right from scripture there.

But there's this idea of protecting us from what's outside of us, but also what's inside of us. The things that are in our hearts that aren't good, that are ugly. Praying that the Lord would protect that from coming out and would help us to realize it so that we can turn from it and turn back towards God.

Closing

More than anything, when we're talking about this section of the Lord's Prayer, starting with saying our Father and acknowledging who he is and who we are and how great he is and fixing our eyes on that, and then coming before him and acknowledging our needs. Our needs for him to daily feed us, daily nourish us. Our needs for him to forgive us of the ways that we have wronged him, the way that we have sinned and not looked like him. Our needs to forgive other people so that we can continue to live in that freedom. And our needs for him to protect us. Our needs for him to go before us and deliver us from evil.

But here's the good news with all of that. God cares about your daily needs. He does. He forgave you and he can forgive others. When you ask for forgiveness from him, you receive that fully and that freedom. So then you can go and give that to other people and forgive them and live in that freedom of not holding on to it anymore. The good news is that he wants to protect us. Jesus is telling his disciples, hey, when you pray, pray for protection, because our God wants to protect you.

Then going on to just continue to remember how great and big he truly is. I'm going to invite you to take time to think through what do you or someone you know need from God? Like right here, right now. If you're like, God, if you could just do this one thing. Maybe it is for you, but remember we're talking about our daily bread. So maybe it's someone you know. I'm going to invite you to take time to pray and to go write it on our prayer wall of whatever that is.

We've been praying over this whole time we've been fasting. Knowing that it's public, of course, feel free to make things vague. Not to expose anything private. But we want to continue to pray over those things. So I'm going to invite you to go over there and just write down what is something that you need or someone in your life needs from God right here, right now, in this moment.

What is that daily bread, that daily thing that you need? Maybe it is just saying, like, God, I just want to go close to you again. That's what I need. God, I want to be able to recognize your voice. That's what I need. Maybe there's someone in your life that needs healing and it's saying, God, I need this person to heal. I need a miracle in this situation.

Then coming back and reflecting personally for a minute. Do you need to receive forgiveness? Is there something in your life that you've been walking through that you know is separating you from God? You need to come before him and ask him to forgive you and turn towards him? Or is there someone in your life that you need to start the process of forgiveness with? Is there someone that you need to sit with? Show me, is there someone that I've been harboring bitterness towards, anger, unforgiveness, that I need to forgive? And then where in your life can you pray for protection? Where can you pray for protection?

This week, this is good news for us. God cares. He cares enough to feed us. He cares enough to set us free through forgiveness. And he wants to protect you.