Resting

Text: Luke 11:1-13

Focus: prayer

Function: to help people see the expression of Faith and trust the Lord’s prayer represents

11:¹He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” ²So he said to them, “When you pray, say:

Father, may your name be revered as holy.
    May your kingdom come.
³     Give us each day our daily bread.
⁴     And forgive us our sins,
        for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
    And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

⁵And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, ⁶for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ ⁷And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ ⁸I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything out of friendship, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

⁹“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. ¹⁰For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. ¹¹Is there anyone among you who, if your child asked for a fish, would give a snake instead of a fish? ¹²Or if the child asked for an egg, would give a scorpion? ¹³If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

This is a sermon about the Lord’s Prayer. The passage is given to us by Jesus in response to their request for Jesus to teach them the correct way to pray.

About the only religious practice that we repeat every week is when we pray together the Lord’s prayer.

I confess, that at times when we are praying, my mind is in automatic mode and I am merely repeating words instead of crying out with my heart to God.

I used to feel bad about that, except, it is important for us to remind ourselves on a daily basis the Spirit of the person behind the prayer that is being offered.

I titled the sermon “Resting” because several phrases in the prayer remind me of our dependence on God.

“Thy Kingdom come” gets to me because it reminds me that things on earth are subject to things in the heavenly or spiritual realm and we can rest that God knows what it happening.

At Annual Conference, we talked a lot about the decline of the Western Church and that we are not exempt from the decline that is happening across the West.

At the same time, we celebrated the planting of over 13 new churches, some of them are already grown into the hundreds, by the American Hispanic, and Haitian churches.

The Church is in decline in the West, but is growing in third world countries. We wondered why.

And when we pray that prayer, and we see that God is in control in heaven, we can rest in the fact that God is aware of the decline of the Church and for some reason or other is allowing it to happen.

It isn’t a mystery to me why it is happening. I believe that the Western Church has exchanged the good news of Jesus Christ for Christian Nationalism. It is a form of Christianity, but it abandons the whole concept of peace and Justice that Jesus was killed for proclaiming.

We have to remember that the Kingdoms of men killed the Lord of Glory. And when we pray that prayer, “Thy Kingdom come,” we acknowledge that we are members of a greater kingdom and our first allegiance belongs to God’s Kingdom.

Remember, Brother Paul said that we now belong to Jesus, we were bought with the price of His blood and our lives are no longer our own. We are servants of God in the kingdom of heaven as believers.

And although he tells us to reckon ourselves as enslaved to Jesus Christ, it does not come without benefits. Instead of explaining the importance of unconditional forgiveness for salvation as Jesus does after He gives us the prayer in the gospel of Matthew. Here, He tells us that now that we belong to God, we are reckoned not as slaves but as children and God will grant to us whatever we ask according to His will.

The promise is for us to live by faith resting in the care and protection of God.

Then we get to the part of the prayer when we ask God to give us today our daily bread.

Some translations, and older manuscript copies have record it as “give us bread for tomorrow.”

Either way, it is an indication that we trust God to provide for us.

We rest in God’s provision. I remember the Jewish people traveling through the desert and every day God rained down on them bread for heaven.

He brought down twice as much on Friday so that they could collect enough for Saturday, the Sabbath and not work that day.

And a few miracles surrounded it. If they collected too much for any other day but the Sabbath, it went bad. They could not hoard or be greedy. Every day they had to rest in God’s provision.

And there is a miracle in it around greed. It was a gift from God, given by God and some people got up early and tried to collect it all and then sell it to their neighbors at a profit. If they did, again, it went bad and the little bit the latecomers were able to collect somehow increased in size to be enough. God prohibited their profiteering off of God’s gift to them.

And it reminded them to love their neighbor, look out for them and not worry if we have enough because every day we are praying that God provides for us.

There was a lesson there, greed and hoarding are a sin. God wants us to live in community caring for each other as we would for ourselves.

Of course, that isn’t easy. And it is a hard thing to preach. It is an essential part of the teaching of Jesus and we have to remember, the powers that be, the powers that control the wealth had Jesus judicially murdered to try to silence Him from preaching about communal caring and living. And remember, the sin is hoarding with the fear that we will not have enough. We aren’t living by faith.

I believe that one of the reasons people hoard is because they have known hard times and do not want to experience them again. I get that. But the lesson that Jesus taught is for us to rest in Him.

One church I pastored sat right next to the Interstate exit. I mowed up to the ramp. The head deacon live across the street and never locked his house or his barn or his garage.

The keys to his cars were on the wall of his garage, and if you needed to borrow a car, a tool, or anything, the policy was just to help yourself and return it in the same condition you got it in. The only caveat was that you were responsible for breakage, which, of you borrowed the backhoe could get expensive!

They lived by faith and trust in God’s promise to provide for them. God blessed them and they were generous with God’s blessing back to everyone who was in need.

That is just one example of what Jesus is talking about here.

The Lord’s prayer reminds me that God has called us to live by faith and to rest in the fact that God provides for our daily need.