Embracing Intimacy with God Through Prayer

Welcome to Box Church! My name is Justin, and I'm the lead pastor. I'm glad that you're here, whether you're new or joining us from one of our other locations.

Today is a special day for so many reasons, one of which is that we are opening our brand new Springfield location. We are so excited for what God is going to do in that new permanent space. Last Sunday night, we had our first ever gatherings in New Britain and Clinton, and those two churches will be having weekly services in October. I encourage you to be a part of those launch teams.

Today we are starting a new teaching series on prayer. We will be looking at what it means to pray consistently and develop a habit of prayer. Our goal is to grow. Matthew chapter 6 is where we will be today. Jesus says in verse 5, "When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full."

Jesus then gives us a model prayer to follow. He says, "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we have forgiven our debtors. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one."

Let us prepare our hearts and pray like this. God has a word for us today. In prayer, Jesus teaches us that it is a universal phenomenon. A recent study found that 85% of Americans say they pray regularly. The Bible gives great honor to the habit of prayer, with over 650 prayers recorded and countless instances of God hearing and responding to prayer. God promises to deliver us when we call upon Him in the day of trouble (Psalm 50). He also promises to be near all who call on Him in truth (Psalm 145). Jeremiah 29 tells us that we will find Him when we seek Him with all our hearts. James 4 reminds us that we do not have because we do not ask. We can imagine the things we might have if we had simply asked God for them.

We come from different backgrounds, different circumstances, and different situations. Somebody here is 22, somebody here is 82, somebody here is 16, and somebody here is 45. But we can all come together in prayer. We thank God that His word is living and active, and we pray that He would speak to us, meet us, and inspire a passion and fervency for prayer like never before.

Prayer can be a struggle for a lot of us. We don't feel like we know how to do it, we don't feel like we know what to say, and so sometimes we don't know what to say. A recent survey said only two percent of Christians would say that they are very satisfied with their prayer lives. We're so distracted in our day and age to pray to an invisible God that we often don't feel and that we often don't recognize as active in our lives. Jesus said it like this: "Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you." All across the Bible, we see God commanding people to pray, inviting people to pray.

Years ago, I heard a story about a man named Walter Zamasco. Walter died in his home in Nevada from complications with his heart at age 69. He had no close family and only about 200 in his bank account when he passed away. Government officials had to come in and clean out his house, and when they did, they found shoe boxes on a shelf in his garage. Walter was an avid coin collector, and the coins in the shoe boxes were worth over seven million dollars. Walter didn't know it was worth that much because he was living on the edge of poverty.

Prayer is like that shoe box. What if prayer is like that treasure, and so often we don't exactly know what it is or what to do with it, and so it just sits there somewhat forgotten, kind of pushed to the side? It's not that we throw it away; it's just that we never really utilize the opportunity that sits in that garage, and the treasure is wasted.

My prayer for you is that the Holy Spirit would come upon you even as I'm preaching and begin to stir inside of you a new fervency, a new desire, a new hunger to pray. That God would stir you up today, stir your soul to become a person of prayer.

Now, what is prayer in its simplest form? Prayer is just talking to God. Just talking to God looks different than talking to your brother or to your friend. And according to Jesus in the Bible, how you pray is just as important as if you pray. So just talking is not enough, and Jesus begins in Matthew 6 giving us a framework for prayer. But the first thing he does is tell us what not to do. Did you notice that he says when you pray, first he says don't be like the hypocrites?

So what is hypocrite prayer? Hypocrite prayer is basically public declarations without any private devotion. I can say the right thing in a crowd, I can use my words to sound spiritual, but I don't actually have a secret life with God; I don't have a life of substance.

Throughout history, rain has been seen as a blessing, a sign of God's favor, a sign of life coming to them. So, let it rain, let it rain. Maybe you've grown up in church and you kind of know the lingo, but when you're alone with God, do you still have that same fervor?

Prayer is an important part of the Christian faith, and Jesus had a lot to say about it. According to Jesus, hypocrite prayer is characterized by a lack of personal prayer life with God. This means that we can pray in public, but if there is no intimacy between us and God, then it is not genuine. Jesus also warned against pagan prayer, which is characterized by an emphasis on technique. We may think that repeating the right words or performing certain rituals will earn us an answer, but Jesus said this is a waste of time. Instead, we should focus on having an intimate relationship with God and surrendering to His lordship.

Jesus gives us the most beautiful, most powerful, and most comprehensive prayer ever recorded - what's known today as the Lord's Prayer. I thought it was appropriate to begin our four-week series thinking about being people of prayer and developing a habit of prayer with the Lord's Prayer. The breadth of the Lord's Prayer is amazing - it begins with the cosmic and the amazing in heaven, holy is your name, your kingdom, your will. Then it moves to the small, everyday details of life - asking for bread, forgiving those who wrong us. One theologian called it the combination of the fantastic and the familiar, the exotic and the everyday. Jesus combines these two seemingly opposing realities of God's greatness and of the small, little dirty details of life and puts it all in one amazing prayer.

God is with us in the sunset, as the dew on the grass is shimmering all across the light, and in the most disgusting places on Earth. This reveals to us the heart of God, who lives forever and whose name is holy. He lives in a high and holy place, but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit.

The Lord's Prayer is not intended to simply be a mantra that we repeat. Jesus was giving us the Lord's Prayer as an outline. If you had an outline for a presentation, you wouldn't just read the outline - there are things in between the outline that have to be filled in. The Lord's Prayer is an outline for us to fill in with our own prayers. God is teaching us a philosophy of prayer through the Lord's Prayer.

It has two parts: part one has three petitions, and part two has three petitions. Part one focuses on the Majesty of God, and the three petitions are: may your name be hallowed, may your kingdom come, and may your will be done above mine. Part two focuses on dependence on God, and the three petitions are: help me, heal me, keep me; give me my daily bread; forgive my sins as I forgive; lead me not into temptation but deliver me from evil.

The first petition of part one is asking God to make His name supremely valuable in our hearts and in the world. It is an expression of praise for all the names God has given Himself. The second petition of part one is asking God to be the lead role in our lives and for us to be the supporting cast. The third petition of part one is asking for God's will to be done in our lives.

Part two is asking for help, healing, and protection; daily bread; forgiveness; and protection from temptation and evil. The Lord's Prayer is teaching us to put God first in our lives and to depend on Him for all our needs.

In part one of this prayer, the Majesty of God is teaching us to lift our eyes beyond ourselves and to center our lives on Him. This is really important because if we don't do this, something is distorted in our relationship with God. Often, when I try to pray, I immediately go to part two - asking God to help me, heal me, bless me, keep me, change me, etc. - and I skip part one. But when we skip part one, we end up plugging ourselves into the equation without realizing it. We pray for our name to be known, our kingdom to come, and our will to be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. We think that making ourselves first will satisfy us, but history and experience prove that it leaves us empty.

Part one has nothing to do with what we want; it has everything to do with what God wants. But when we live for what God wants, we discover that He is what we want all along. To have Him is to have life; to have Him is more important than anything we could put a price tag on. To simply have God with us, to have God on our side walking along with us - that's the biggest prayer.

Part two teaches us radical dependence on God. We begin to bring things to God when we start to depend on Him. Jesus taught us to ask for practical things, like bread. C.S. Lewis said there is no use trying to be more spiritual than God, as He uses material things like bread and wine to put new life into us. We should ask God for what we need, and not be afraid to do so. Jesus said to ask for our daily bread, as tomorrow will take care of itself. We should be present in the moment and ask God for what we need.

As we pray, we should also ask God to sanctify His name in our hearts and make it above every other name. We should also ask for His will to be done, not our own. Finally, we should ask for forgiveness of our sins, and to forgive those who have sinned against us.

It can be arranged as follows: The Lord's Prayer is a prayer that helps us reframe our perspective around God and make life about Him, not about us. It trains us to be dependent on God and to say that He is above all else and we need Him. It starts with the physical and then goes to the mental, asking us what mental gymnastics are going on in our head because of an offense or because we have offended. It then goes to moral needs, asking us to lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one.

We need to pray for God to keep us because even though we know what is right, it doesn't mean we are doing what is right. We need God to protect us because without Him, we will self-destruct. Praying the Lord's Prayer is not easy, as it seems. It is difficult to really mean it from the heart, as there is something inside of us that is hesitant to surrender all and wants to be the center of the story.

I want to challenge you to begin to pray the Lord's Prayer and make it the first words out of your mouth in the morning, to set your heart and focus on God for the day.

This whole idea of being dependent on God can be a little uncomfortable. We think we can do it all ourselves. We go to college, build a career, make a name for ourselves, build up a bank account, and plan for retirement. We think we don't need daily bread, that we can figure it out ourselves. We pray against cancer and car accidents, but not for the daily stuff. This idea of God's lordship and intimacy are not comfortable concepts for our hearts. Something inside of us resists.

We do the hypocrite prayer thing, where we can all pray in a circle but not alone. We do the pagan prayer thing, where we just crank out some words and hope we can manipulate God enough to get what we need. We rarely do the Lord's Prayer thing. Why is this prayer so hard for our hearts? Why is this prayer so difficult for us to really pray honestly? It's because there is a deeper problem going on inside. Something inside of us is out of joint, flawed, has a defect, or a blind spot. This keeps us from being able to pray this prayer fully. It's why we struggle to trust God and why we sometimes find ourselves resisting surrender and submission.

Jesus deeply understood this mysterious problem and gave us the key that unlocks the power of prayer. He said, "This then is how you should pray: 'Our Father.'" When those two words are deeply understood and become personal, everything about our prayer life and our whole life changes. Theologian J.I. Packer said, "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 having God as his father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all."

The revelation of the Father must become the be-all and end-all of our faith, prayer life, and whole life. This is how Christianity works and how breakthrough comes.

Sigmund Freud once said, "Nothing destroys someone's faith in God like a bad relationship with their dad." Now, I don't agree with Sigmund Freud on very many things, but on this one, I'm actually in line with him. And Sigmund Freud knew it firsthand because his dad had actually been sexually abusive. They had never had a healthy relationship.

In fact, if you go through history, what you'll discover is that many, or dare I say even most, of the famous atheists that you find, underneath the surface they had significant wounds either from losing their dad or from having a terrible relationship with their dad. John Paul started, his dad died when he was just 15 months old. Frederick Nietzsche, his dad died when he was four. Voltaire hated his father so much that he changed his name because of it, and the list goes on and on and on and on.

Which makes you wonder, some of these famous atheists throughout history, were they actually driven by their reason or by their science or by their wound because something on the inside isn't right?

When you can't see God as father, Jesus mentioned the father over 180 times in the New Testament. It was the central defining element of all of his teaching. So he begins by saying, "Pray this way." And notice he doesn't say, "My father that you get to pray to." He says, "Check it out, our father." He says, "Our father," he includes you in the family.

Theologians call this the doctrine of adoption, and I want to dig into it for a moment because it is the key that unlocks prayer that we might pray the petitions of the Lord's Prayer with a whole heart.

The doctrine of adoption is fundamental to understanding the gospel. Now, before you get to the doctrine of adoption, you have to understand the doctrine of justification. The doctrine of justification deals with your sin. It deals with your guilt. It teaches that on the cross, Jesus Christ atoned for your sin through his blood. So God legally decreed that you are no longer guilty for your sin through Christ. He paid your debt before a holy God. The wrath of God emptied on Christ, the guilt of sin poured out on Christ, that you might be fully, forever forgiven. It is a decree of not guilty over a guilty sinner because of Christ, just as if I'd never sinned. That's justified. Okay, so that's the doctrine of justification, and it's pretty amazing.

But if the doctrine of justification deals with our guilt, the doctrine of adoption deals with our aloneness. It deals with that thing inside of you that says, "I don't really belong." It deals with that thing inside of you that feels isolated, that thing inside of you that feels disqualified, that thing inside of you that feels like God is far.

Paul explains the doctrine of adoption in Romans 8. Look at it with you. He says, "The Spirit...check this out...the Lord wants to meet you right now. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves so that you live in fear again. Rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. The Spirit he's given us cries out, 'Abba Father!' So you are no longer a slave, but God's child, an heir through him."

You received notice about your adoption to sonship. It's not like you have to earn it by doing enough good deeds. He says it's done, and by him we cry "Abba." That's the ancient word for "Father" or "Daddy." It's an endearing word, "Abba Father."

So what does this mean, and how does this affect our prayer lives? Well, when you place your faith in Christ, God sees your sin as forgiven, and then according to Paul, he sends forth his Spirit, and his Spirit brings a legal change in status. So previously you were a slave to sin; maybe you were a slave to addiction, maybe you were a slave to approval, maybe you were a slave to prescription drugs, maybe you were a slave to shame or to drivenness or to accomplishment or to pleasure, but something owned you. That's what Paul says, something became your master, became your lord.

An orphan heart doesn't trust anyone, keeps their guard up, looks out for themselves, and learns to view life as transactional. Transactional means that either I owe you or you owe me, but we're always in a transactional dynamic because everybody has an angle, everybody's grasping for power. This is the orphan heart, and you may begin to see it in yourself.

The gospel is fundamentally an announcement; it's an announcement over your life that through Christ God has ended your status as an orphan and sent his Spirit into your heart that you might be legally adopted as a son into his family. You receive his life and his status, and so he dismantles through the doctrine of adoption this transactional paradigm and he replaces it with a family paradigm. You're not accepted on the basis of your performance; rather, you are accepted on the basis of your position as a child of God, and through Christ he has positioned you as his beloved Son.

Through the gospel, God delights in us just as much as he delights in his son. Jesus communicated this in his great prayer in John 17, where he said, "You have loved them even as you have loved me." These two little words mean that through the gospel, we are radically and eternally accepted by trusting in Christ. This changes how we see ourselves and how we see God, and it transforms our prayers. We no longer have to perform to be accepted, and we can come from a place of dependence, knowing that the transactional paradigm has been replaced with a family paradigm.

Last week, I was preaching at several churches and had to drive all around for seven hours. In the middle of this, my son called me, and I was worried something was wrong. He asked if he could go to his friend's house after church, and my first thought was that he was asking for my permission. However, I realized that he was asking me to trust him, and that he was coming from a place of sonship. This reminded me of the power of the good news and the doctrine of adoption, and how it changes how we see ourselves and God.

If you're asking me this right now, I'm kind of busy. At first, I didn't say anything because I had a second thought. My second thought was that it's my son, and he can interrupt me anytime because he's my boy. Even if you call me on Sunday morning, if he calls me, God always picks up the phone for you. This is because of faith in Christ, which makes intimacy with God possible and lordship with God desirable because he's my Father.

The Lord's Prayer is written in the plural, which implies that we learn the habit of prayer best when we learn it together. To help with this, I want to encourage you to take a 15-minute prayer card and spend 15 minutes or more alone in prayer every day. Don't do this while driving, checking social media, or watching TV. Instead, set aside focused, devoted prayer.

If we can begin to pray more alone, something explosive will happen when we gather together. Prayer is a lot like nuclear energy, where a lot of tiny explosions become a massive explosion when brought together in one place. When prayer gets in our hearts, not just some rote routine, but focused, attentive, and desiring of Jesus, something powerful will happen.

We start to gather, and then we start to worship. All of a sudden, everybody's singing and everyone's hands are up. All of a sudden, people are weeping, and miracles are happening. The sick are being healed, and the lost are being saved, and something's changing because the people of God began to pray.

Would you stand with me? Every one of our locations, we're going to sing and dedicate ourselves to the Lord today. As you stand, let me ask this question of you: What's your prayer life like? Come on, take a moment and think about it honestly. This is you and God. What would it look like for you right now to make a commitment to say, "God, for the next four weeks I'm going to spend 15 minutes every day taking this card, using it as a frame or as an outline and beginning to develop the muscle of prayer, the habit of prayer to a degree that I never have before"?

Whatever that looks like for you, that next step, at least 15 minutes, maybe more time where you say, "I'm going to just dedicate this time." It's going to be times of distraction sometimes; it's going to be a little wandery sometimes, that's okay. I'm gonna dedicate this to you right now.

Would you close your eyes and center your attention on God because I believe today he has a breakthrough for you, and I want to pray that right now the doctrine of adoption would break through, that you would see that through Christ by faith God is not far and that all of the walls would begin to fall down and that a new passion to pray will take hold of our hearts.

Come on, Father, in the name of Jesus, I pray that you would move by your spirit in our midst today in Brantford, Springfield, North Haven, Stamford, Worcester, Hartford, Middletown, Greater Bridgeport, all across our church, every one of our locations, that the spirit of the Living God would begin to minister even now. O God, ignite our hearts, refocus our minds. I pray that right now the truth of adoption would take root, that the orphan mentality would crumble and fall in Jesus' name.