Transcript
In your Bibles you will turn once again to the Gospel of Luke chapter 11. Luke chapter 11. And we would like to begin reading at chapter 11 and verse 1.
Now it came to pass as He was praying in a certain place, when He ceased, that one of His disciples said to Him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples. So He said to them, When you pray, say, Our Father in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.
Or as we’re more familiar with it, but deliver us from evil.
It was exactly four weeks ago today when Greg Holsworth began a very scary adventure. Greg Holsworth is a twelve-year-old little boy who lives with his family in Ram, Massachusetts, which is about thirty miles south of Boston. Shortly before four p.m. on that particular Sunday, Greg decided to take a walk out in the woods which were near his family’s home.
It had been snowing almost all day, and this was the tail end of a winter storm that had dumped eight inches of snow on the ground. Over his T-shirt he was wearing a denim jacket with buttons missing. He was wearing cotton pants and a pair of gloves. With him was a Labrador retriever named Shadow who had joined the Holsworth family nine years before as a puppy.
Greg had originally intended to just take a short walk into the woods and return home, but after a while he had gone in deeper than he had originally planned to do. He stopped to build a fort out of brush and tree limbs, and then he heard the dog barking and followed the dog even deeper into the forest. After a while he realized that he was in trouble because the snow that continued to fall was covering up their tracks.
When he tried to find his way back home, everything looked the same to him, and it appeared to him that they were probably walking in circles. To make matters worse, he had walked through some puddles and gotten his trousers wet. The temperature had now fallen to ten degrees, and his trousers froze so that he couldn’t bend his legs as he walked.
After a while he was thoroughly disoriented. He was very cold, and he couldn’t really walk because of the frozen trousers, so he lay down. His dog Shadow lay down right next to him, and the dog put its head on his legs. Then the dog periodically licked his face.
Meanwhile Greg’s father Donald had begun to search for him. When Greg didn’t come back at six p.m., when he was still not back an hour later, his mother Donna called the police. After a while about a hundred people had gathered to search for Greg. The police and the firemen had megaphones and sirens, and they began to comb the forest.
The search took hours, but eventually the rescuers got to the point where Greg could hear them yelling in the woods. By this time Greg’s legs were extremely sore, and he couldn’t yell back because his voice was stopped by chapped lips and a throat. But Shadow could bark, and guided by the barking of the dog the rescuers were able to locate Greg Holsworth at about one a.m.
Naturally he was taken to a hospital where he was treated for exposure, and one of the police officers made the observation that it was probably the body heat of the dog Shadow that had assisted in keeping him alive. You can imagine that the Holsworth family was grateful to the dog, and the next day, Monday, they made Shadow king for a day. Shadow usually has to stay outside or down in the basement, but they allowed Shadow to stay inside the house for the entire day.
And to top it all off, Greg’s father served Shadow a steak. The headline on this story was kind of neat. It said, “Boy and his shadow survive night in cold.” Now I happen to be an old-timer, and I can remember back to the days years ago when there was a popular song that had the title “Just Me and My Shadow.” Just me and my shadow.
And that’s what I’d like to talk to you about this morning. I’d like to talk to you about you and your shadow. You and your shadow. Did you know that the Bible says that he that dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty?
And if you’re a born-again Christian this morning, if you’ve trusted Christ for the free gift of everlasting life, that is precisely the shadow where you want to live. And therefore the title of my message this morning is this, the shadow of Almighty God. The shadow of Almighty God.
Have you ever stopped to think how difficult it was for Jesus to find time to be by Himself? I mean nearly every day He was mobbed by crowds of people, people who wanted to be healed of their sicknesses and people who wanted to hear His teaching. And most of those days He was traveling on the road, and His disciples were traveling with Him.
And they not only walked along the road with Him, but when He stopped to eat they ate with Him, and wherever He slept they slept too. And it was very difficult for Jesus to make His way into the secret place of the Most High God. It was very hard for Jesus to find time to be alone, to have communion with His heavenly Father.
And that is why we read that on one occasion He got up a long time before it was light, and He went out into a solitary place to pray. And on another occasion we are told that He went to a mountain and that He spent all night engaged in prayer. And even though it was enormously difficult for Jesus to find time to get alone with God His Father and to pray, He managed to do it.
And He managed to do it often. Now I confess to you that I don’t know the exact circumstances which surrounded the incident that we read about a few moments ago, but it’s not hard to imagine what these circumstances might have been. I like to imagine that Jesus and His disciples had spent their night out on a hillside under the open sky.
They apparently did this often. And then I like to think that in the morning before it was light Jesus got up and He walked out of the group. And while His disciples were still sawing logs and while they were still snoring up a storm, Jesus went to one side of the group and He knelt down and He lifted up His face to God and He began to pray to His Father in heaven.
Then I like to imagine that perhaps as the first rays of dawn were spreading over that hillside, that one of the disciples woke up and he looked over in the direction of Jesus and saw Him on His knees, saw Him with His face uplifted, saw Him with His lips moving. And I have to believe that what He saw on that occasion was so impressive, that the communion that Jesus was having with His heavenly Father was so real, so obviously vital, so rich with meaning, that the thought crossed this disciple’s mind that he would like to be able to have an experience like that himself.
And so when Jesus was finished with His prayer, when Jesus had walked back into the group of disciples, this disciple said to Him, Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us to pray as John also taught His disciples to pray. Now of course I have to admit that the circumstances surrounding this incident could have been a whole lot different than that, or they might have been very much like that indeed.
But I want you to understand that in making this request of Jesus this disciple was making one of the most important requests that he could possibly make. In fact, when this disciple made this petition to Jesus Christ, God’s Son, there is a sense in which he was already praying. He was already praying. He was laying his need before the Son of God.
And it’s no wonder, is it, that the songwriter has taken this incident and has woven it into a very beautiful song which is in one of our books. “Teach me to pray, Lord, teach me to pray. This is my heart’s cry day by day. I need to know thy will and thy way. Teach me to pray, Lord, teach me to pray.”
And my friends, it was in response to this very simple but very necessary request that Jesus taught His disciples one of the most beautiful and certainly the most famous of all of the prayers that are recorded in the Bible. Sometimes we call it the Lord’s Prayer because it was the Lord who gave it. Sometimes we call it the disciples’ prayer because it was the disciples who were supposed to pray it.
But this morning I would like to call it God’s primer on prayer. God’s primer on prayer. For locked up in this simple, famous, and beautiful prayer are some of the most crucial, some of the most basic lessons that we need to learn about coming to God.
It is said that there was a little shepherd lad one time that was out tending to his sheep one Sunday morning, and the church bells were tolling to announce the church service. People were walking across the fields to go to church, and this little lad felt like he would like to say a prayer to God. But he never learned to pray, and he didn’t know a prayer to say.
And so he knelt down on one side of a hedge, and this is what he said. He said, “A B C D E F,” and so on. Well, it was a gentleman walking on the other side of the hedge, and he heard the kid saying that. And he parted the bushes of the hedge, and here was this little boy down on his knees with his hands folded and his eyes closed saying the alphabet.
And so the gentleman said to him, “What are you doing, my little man?” And the boy replied, “Please sir, I was praying.” And the gentleman said, “Why were you saying your letters?” And the little boy said, “I don’t know a prayer, but I thought that I would like to ask God to take care of me and help me to take care of the sheep. And I figured that if I said what I knew he could put it together and he could spell what I want.”
And the gentleman said, “Bless you, little man. He will. He will.” And yes, even if we don’t know a single thing about prayer and if we pray to God out of the simplicity and honesty of our heart, God will pay attention to that.
But if we are going to develop a mature and articulate prayer life, if we are going to make prayer the vital and indispensable thing it ought to be in our life and experience, then we’re going to have to know more than the ABCs of the English language. We’re going to have to know the ABCs of effective Christian prayer. The ABCs of effective Christian prayer.
And I want to suggest to you that in the very few minutes that remain to us we can learn about these ABCs from this marvelous primer on prayer that was given to us by Jesus Christ. Are you ready? Here we go with A.
Here is A. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.” Did you notice it? That in the very first sentence of this prayer we come face to face with the name of God. We come face to face with the name of God. A is this, we focus on the name of God.
Now please remember that in all of the ages of the Old Testament God made people like Abraham and David and Moses never began their prayers by saying “Our Father.” They didn’t know God by that name. They knew Him as the Almighty God. They knew Him as the Sovereign Lord.
But by His name of Father they did not approach Him. And it is one of the splendid revelations of the New Testament and of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself that the God whom we worship in heaven is also our Father in heaven.
I remember just a few years ago going to Parkland Hospital with my good friend Robert C. His second little girl, Tama, had just been born, and we went to the nursery in Parkland. And they allowed Robert to go inside, and I had to stand outside looking through the window.
As I recall it, Robert had to put on an apron, and they either handed Tama to him or he picked her up. I remember that he held her with one hand behind her head and neck and one behind her little bottom, and he sat down on a chair and he held her out in front of him like that.
And he just looked at her and he looked and he looked and he looked for what seemed to me to be a very long time. And I realized that as I was standing there I was watching a father who was touched by the wonderful and mysterious joy of fatherhood.
I realized that somehow or other my friend had sensed the marvel, the wonder, the joy, the satisfaction, realizing that that little bundle that he held in his hand was his own child. And I know that all of you who are fathers in my audience this morning could describe the feelings that you have had for your children.
And if you take those feelings and multiply them by one billion times, then maybe you can get to the outermost limits of the wonderful and infinite joy of an eternal God who looks down on every believer in Jesus Christ and recognizes that His own life, eternalized in that believer, and that believer is a child of His.
And can we be surprised a God like that wishes us to approach Him and call Him our Father in heaven? And can we be amazed that a God like that wants us to respect Him so much that one of our deepest desires and one of our prayers shall be that His name will be honored and revered and sanctified and powerful here in this world of sinful men?
And believe me, there are literally dozens and dozens and dozens of specific prayer requests that you can pray if you are motivated by desire to see the name of God glorified in the world. And every time you pray for the success of the Christian church, and every time that you pray for the success of the gospel, and every time that you pray for the success of God’s servants who are all over the world, you are praying a prayer that flows out of the opening words of God’s primer on prayer.
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed, sanctified, glorified be Your name.” Well, that’s A. Are you ready for B? A is we focus on the name of God. Now listen to B.
“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And may I suggest to you that the B of all effective Christian prayer is this, we submit to the purposes of God. We submit to the purposes of God.
Because you see, the person who prays this prayer is praying that God will bring His glorious kingdom into this world and that God will put an end to man’s rebellion so that God’s will shall be done on earth just as His will is also done in heaven. Years ago when I was still a student at the seminary I worked in the seminary dining room, and my very unglamorous job was a dishwasher.
Now back in those days the seminary was small, and it was mainly the single guys who went to the dining room. And so I and a partner of mine in a very, very old-fashioned dishwasher managed to get the dishes done three times a day after each meal. There I had another friend who worked in the dining hall whose name was Daryl. He was a janitor.
And about the time that we were finishing up at night Daryl would come in and he would start sweeping up the dining room and sweeping up the kitchen. And Daryl was a great guy, and I liked to talk to him. And there were many times that I hung around after my work was done to chew the fat with Daryl.
And like most seminary students we talked theology almost endlessly. I think we talked about some other things too, but that was the name they and the seminary guys in the audience will confirm that that’s a popular topic at a seminary. One evening as I was hanging around after my work was over and talking to Daryl, Daryl said something that really shocked me.
He said, “Zane, you know, if I were honest,” he said, “I’d have to admit that I don’t want the Lord to come right now.” He said, “I would like to graduate from seminary first, and I would like to get out into the ministry and do some work out in the ministry, and then I would be happy to see the Lord come.”
I was kind of stunned. I’d never heard anybody say anything like that. And I sort of thought to myself, “Wow, this guy is brutally honest.” How many Christians are there that feel that way that would never be called dead say? And it’s true, isn’t it?
Sometimes a Christian can get to the place where he really doesn’t want God’s kingdom to come in the world just yet. I mean we’ve got plans. We’re pursuing our career. We’re raising our family. Maybe we’re even out in a ministry and trying to make a successful ministry out of it.
And you see people like that would have to pray the prayer this way, “Thy kingdom come later on, and when my plans are fulfilled, when my job is done, then Your will will be done on earth as it is done in heaven.” And don’t you see, unless God’s plans and God’s purposes are first in our thinking, we can never engage in truly unselfish and effective prayer.
Years ago before the advent of modern navigation instruments, in fact way back in the days of sailing ships, there was a passenger who was crossing the Atlantic in a sailing ship. And he was very much surprised to notice that the sailing ship had two compasses. One was down on the deck where the steersman could see it, and one was up on one of the masts of the ship.
And periodically a seaman would climb up the mast and he would read the compass on the mast. And the passenger was very much confused by this. And so he went to the captain, and he said to the captain, “How is it that you have two compasses on this ship?”
And the captain replied, “This is an iron ship,” and he said, “the compass that is on deck is often affected by its surroundings and is not particularly accurate. But the compass on the mast is never affected by anything that’s going on down here on the deck of the ship, and we guide ourselves by the compass that is above.”
And sometimes, my friends, the compass of our own plans and purposes is affected by the world in which we live or by our wrong ambitions. And we cannot allow our prayer life to be guided by that compass. We must insist that the heavenly compass, the divinely revealed purposes of God, should control and guide our prayers.
I like the little prayer that was prayed by the Christian native in the Congo. He said, “Dear Lord, You be the needle and I’ll be the thread. Wherever You lead I’ll follow.” Great prayer. And if God’s purposes are the needle that guides the various threads of our prayer life, be sure that then our prayers will be moving in the right direction.
That’s A and B. Are you ready for C? A was we focus on the name of God. B, we submit to the purposes of God. Here’s C. C is a result of A and B. C, we live under the shadow of God. We live under the shadow of God.
You see, if our communion with God is good enough that His name is important to us and His plans and purposes guide our prayers, then but only then are we in a position to claim His fullest protection and provision in our personal life and experience. And it’s like a giant eagle that’s spreading its giant wings over its young to protect them.
And when we are living in close communion with God we can expect His wings to spread over our physical needs so that we can pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.” We can expect His wings to spread over our spiritual needs, “and forgive us our sins for we forgive those who are indebted to us.”
And we can expect His wings to spread over all of the uncertain pathway that lies ahead, all of the events that lie in our future, “and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” And we need to live in the shadow of His provision and protection.
David Brainerd was a very godly missionary to the Indians. And on one occasion when he had just moved into a village, a group of Indians were creeping toward his tent with tomahawks, and they were intending to kill him. And they lifted up the flap of his tent, and they saw something very unusual.
David Brainerd was down on his knees praying. And as they watched, a rattlesnake crawled across his feet, and it poised in a position to strike. But it didn’t strike. It simply crawled silently out of the tent.
And his would-be murderers decided that this man must be a messenger of the Great Spirit who was under the Great Spirit’s protection. And as a result of that that village received David Brainerd with attention and with respect.
And eternity alone will show us how many times as a result of prayer the snake has not struck, how many times we have been spared from the attack of Satan, how many times we have been spared from tragedy and trial and temptation and trouble.
But I can almost hear someone say, “Hold it. Nice illustration, but sometimes the serpent strikes. Sometimes there is tragedy. Sometimes there is trouble. Sometimes there is severe temptation. What about that?” Well, may I point out to you that when we pray, “lead us not into temptation,” we are not praying that God will give us a life free of trouble, because not even Jesus had that kind of a life.
We are asking that God will lead us not into those things that will cause us damage which will be bad for us. And the key to this request is the last part of the request, “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from what is evil, from what is bad, from what is truly, truly hurtful.”
Who can forget the story of Matthew Henry, the famous writer and scholar, who was once robbed of his purse? And he went home, and this is what he wrote in his diary. The thieves had accosted him and taken away his purse.
And Matthew Henry wrote this. He said, “Let me be thankful first that I was never robbed before, second that they took my purse and not my life, third that although they took all I had it wasn’t much, and fourth that it was I who was being robbed and not I who was doing the robbing.”
And no, God did not deliver Matthew Henry’s purse from the thieves, but did He deliver Matthew Henry from evil? Of course He did. For any experience that can produce thanksgiving, any experience that can make us better people, cannot be described as evil.
We can only describe it as good. And that is the kind of experience that is planned for you if indeed you live under the shadow of Almighty God. After one of the world wars, during the week before Christmas, a tired-looking woman went into a grocery store, and she said to the grocer, “I’ve come to get enough food to make Christmas dinner for my family.”
And the grocer said, “How much money do you have?” And the lady said, “My husband was killed in the war, and I don’t have any money. The only thing I have to offer is a prayer.” The grocer figured that he couldn’t run his grocery store like a bloodline, and very gruffly he said, “Write it on paper,” and turned away to take care of some business.
To his surprise she promptly pulled out a paper and she handed it to him across the counter, and she said, “I did write it last night while I was taking care of my sick baby.” The grocer took the prayer, but he was almost sorry that he did. What would he do with it now? What did he say to this?
And then a good thought occurred to him. Without even reading the prayer he went over to his scale, and he had one of these old-fashioned scales where you had a weight on one side and the food on the other. So he put this slip of paper down on the weight side of the scales, and he said to the woman very kindly, “We’ll see how much this is worth.”
Then he took out a piece of bread and put it on the other side. To his amazement the scale didn’t go down. And he put another piece of food on it, and the scale still didn’t go down. And by this time people in the store were watching him, and he kept grabbing food from here and there and putting it on the scale until the scales were full.
And then he turned to the woman. He said, “That’s all it will hold. Here’s a bag. You’ll have to put it in that bag yourself. I’m busy.” And then he turned away and tried not to look at her, but he glanced at her occasionally. He noticed that as she was filling the bag whenever she had a free hand she would wipe the tear from her eye with her arm.
And he also noticed that the bag that he had given her was kind of big, so he took a great big piece of cheese and tossed it down the counter to her without a word. And she put it in the bag and she went out. Then the grocer walked over to the scale still puzzled and scratching his head about what had happened here.
And to his amazement the answer was fairly simple. The scales were broken. Many years passed and he never saw that woman again, just as he had never seen her before. But he knew that her face would be familiar to him the rest of his life. He never forgot her because he knew that what had happened to his store was not an accident.
You see when she left the store he picked up that paper again and he read her prayer, and here was this woman’s prayer. She had prayed, “Please Lord, give us this day our daily bread.” So the letter has said it beautifully.
“Under His wing, oh what precious enjoyment. There will I hide till life’s trials are o’er. Sheltered, protected, no evil can harm me. Resting in Jesus I’m safe evermore. Under His wings, under His wings, who from His love can sever? Under His wings my soul shall abide, safely abide forever.”
He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
Shall we pray? Father, teach us, teach us from this portion of Your word to pray. We ask it in Christ’s name. Amen.