Prayer reminds us of our absolute dependence upon the provision, pardon, and protection of God. Today, R.C. Sproul explains how the Lord’s Prayer teaches us to rely on the Lord, forgive others, and resist temptation. Get R.C. Sproul’s teaching series Prayer on DVD, plus lifetime digital access to the messages and study guide, for your donation of any amount: https://gift.renewingyourmind.org/3535/prayer Meet Today’s Teacher: R.C. Sproul (1939–2017) was known for his ability to winsomely and clearly communicate deep, practical truths from God’s Word. He was founder of Ligonier Ministries, first minister of preaching and teaching at Saint Andrew’s Chapel, first president of Reformation Bible College, and executive editor of Tabletalk magazine. Meet the Host: Nathan W. Bingham is vice president of ministry engagement for Ligonier Ministries, executive producer and host of Renewing Your Mind, host of the Ask Ligonier podcast, and a graduate of Presbyterian Theological College in Melbourne, Australia. Nathan joined Ligonier in 2012 and lives in Central Florida with his wife and four children. Renewing Your Mind is a donor-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. Explore all of our podcasts: https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts
There are two things that you must always remember when you pray. You have to remember who God is, and you have to remember who you are. You are addressing the one who is absolutely sovereign, who is the king over all things, whose almighty power governs every iota of the universe. And you need to realize that he is the God of absolute glory who will share his glory with no man.
Prayer is an act of humility as we acknowledge our dependence upon God, that He is the Creator and we are the creature, that God is, as R.C. Sproul just reminded us, the one who is absolutely sovereign, king over all things. And we'll continue our study of prayer today as Dr. Sproul concludes our time in the Lord's Prayer. Hi, and welcome to the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind.
I'm your host, Nathan W. Bingham. Prayer is part of the Christian life. We're called to pray without ceasing, yet it is an area where we all have room to grow. R.C. Sproul has taught us a simple acrostic, A-C-T-S, Acts, to aid us in our prayers, and he's now in the middle of unpacking what Jesus taught us in the Lord's Prayer.
But before we get to that message, don't forget that you can own this entire series on DVD and digitally when you give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on the second half of the Lord's Prayer.
As we continue now with our study of prayer, we look again to the Lord's Prayer, which we began in the last session. And you will recall that the Lord's Prayer was given by Jesus to the disciples in response to their request when they came to Him and said, "'Lord, teach us how to pray.'" And so when Jesus answered that request, He said, when you pray, pray like this.
And I remind you that Jesus did not give this prayer simply as something to be recited over and over and over again by His people, although there's nothing wrong with praying the Lord's Prayer. He didn't say, when you pray, pray this prayer. He said, rather, when you pray, pray like this. And so now we're examining the elements of the Lord's Prayer
to see what instructive value it has for us to guide us in our broader prayer life. Now, when I was a seminary student, we had a rather cynical New Testament professor who, when he came to this text in the New Testament, said that it only takes 28 or so seconds to recite the Lord's Prayer.
And so part of what Jesus was telling us is that when you pray, be brief and to the point and don't spend more than a half a minute or so in your prayer life, which created quite a controversy in the classroom that day as we reminded the professor that Jesus set an example for spending hours at a time in prayer in His own life and that
Obviously, what our Lord was communicating here in His response to His disciples was not the length of such a prayer, but rather the elements that are to be included in a normal prayer. response. And so let's continue with looking at what we see in the prayer. We saw that the beginning part of the prayer, the opening petitions, were petitions concerning the advancement of the kingdom of Christ.
And then we read in verse 11 of Matthew's version of chapter 6 of Matthew of the Lord's Prayer, the first petition regarding our own needs. And this one is the petition, give us this day our daily bread. Now again, if we see the prayer as a paradigm to instruct us, Jesus is not saying that the only need that we have that we should pray for is bread.
But the use of bread here in the prayer indicates that we have a daily dependence on God's providence to supply the needs that we have that are basic and fundamental to our lives. He could have said, give us this day our daily water or our daily rest or whatever else we need to survive as human beings.
But He uses the reference to bread to symbolize, I believe, or to indicate this broader consideration that Jesus is saying, you come before the Father and you ask Him Him to provide your needs. Now Jesus had in the Sermon on the Mount given an expanded teaching on our dependence upon God's providence for our daily necessities. And so that's incorporated here as part of our Lord's Prayer.
And let me suggest again the importance of the word here, daily. It's not that we're to come before God once a year and say, Dear Lord, please take care of us for the coming year. Or once a month, give us this month our monthly needs. Or give us this week our weekly needs. But Jesus calls attention to our daily. moment-by-moment dependence upon the goodness of God's providence for our well-being.
And we'll talk a little bit more about that providence as it relates to prayer later, but just let me remind you that the word providence comes from the same root in the English language as the word provision. God's providence has to do with how God provides for the needs of His people. And so what Jesus is saying is that we need to be aware
on a day-to-day basis, that we live and move and have our being by His mercy, by His grace, and by His provision, and not fall into the trap of thinking that we are self-made people and that we are able to meet all of our own needs by ourselves. Then Jesus goes on to say, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Now, I find this to be the most scary part of the Lord's Prayer.
Indeed, I find it downright terrifying because here we have an inclusion of the element of confession that we've already examined in our acrostic acts today. that the confession should be part of our normal prayer experience. But you notice the way it's cast here in the Lord's Prayer by Jesus when He says, when you ask God to forgive you your sins, what do you say?
Forgive us our sins or our trespasses or our indebtedness as we forgive our debtors. Now, what's so scary about that? Well, let's turn this around a little bit and say, God, please be as gracious to me as I am to those who have offended and violated me. Or, dear God, please give the same proportionate amount of mercy to me that I give to my enemies.
He said, no, wait a minute, that's pushing the envelope a little bit there because we're not actually enemies of God, are we? Well, by nature, we are enemies of God. And when we sin against God, we create hostile acts against His character and against His lordship. And then we come to Him and we ask Him to forgive us. But Jesus said, ask the Father to forgive you
in the like manner as you forgive those who trespass against you." What's so scary about that? Well, again, in the final analysis, if God's grace is as limited to the forgiving of my sins as my forgiveness is of forgiving those who have offended me, I'm afraid I'm going to be in deep trouble.
Again, if we think of this teaching, we are being instructed not only of our dependence upon God's forgiveness, but our responsibility as forgiven people to manifest the grace of God in our dealings with other people who are offending us. Now, there's an inference that is drawn from this text by many people that I frankly disagree with and I have to make note of.
I don't hear Jesus saying here that the Christian is obligated to give unilateral forgiveness to every person that violates the Christian. If somebody sins against you, What you are called to do is to stand ready to forgive that person the moment that person repents. But that's not the same thing as saying you must forgive them whether they repent or not.
I find nowhere in the Scripture that requires of the Christian to forgive somebody unilaterally, although we do see the example of Jesus, where when He was wronged, and even from the cross, He cries out, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. They were anything but repentant.
And while they were involved in this destructive act against him, Jesus prayed for their forgiveness because he loved his enemies, he prayed for his enemies, and we are called to pray for our enemies, and we are called to pray for the well-being of our enemies.
But at the same time, God in both the Old Testament and in the New Testament established all kinds of procedures where wronged people in this world can go to the church courts and even to the civil courts at times to seek redress for wrongs suffered by somebody else's hands. And so, we need to understand that we're not required to just cloak everybody with forgiveness if they remain impenitent.
However, if they do repent, then we have no option but to forgive. I remember an experience I had with this many, many years ago in the very beginning of my ministry. I had said something that offended a person. And when that person told me that they were offended, I felt very badly about it, and I said, oh, I should never have said that to that person.
And so I went to that person, and I apologized for what I had said. And the person refused to accept my apology, refused to speak to me. And so I went a second time. And again, I confessed that I had wronged that person and I asked for the person's forgiveness and so on with tears. and still the person refused to accept my apology.
So this happened in the context of a church I was dealing with as a student in seminary, and the moderator of our session was an 85-year-old retired missionary who was a saint. He had spent five years in a prison camp in China during World War II, separated from his wife, and so on. And I had just enormous admiration for this man's spiritual work. wisdom and grace.
And I went to him and I told him what I had done and I said, I hate to tell you this, but I said such and such to this lady and it really offended her. And so I went to her and I asked for her forgiveness and so on. I told him the story. And he said, well, you made two mistakes. And I said, what's that? He said, well, the first mistake you obviously understand.
You should never have said what you said to the one in the first place. I said, yes, sir, you're right. He said, the second mistake was going twice. He said, when you repented and apologized and she refused to forgive you, you had done your duty, and from that moment thereon and thereafter, the coals of fire were on her head for her refusal to grant forgiveness.
And I never forgot what he told me there. We are to stand ready to forgive. And when we say we forgive people, we can't do it glibly. It has to be earnest. And it's sometimes very difficult to do that.
That's why I think we need to understand that Jesus here ties together our vertical relationship with the Father and our horizontal relationship with the people that we are involved with in our daily lives. Well, then he goes on beyond confession, and he says, and do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us. from evil.
Now this is one of the, again, most misunderstood parts of the Lord's Prayer because of the phrase, deliver us from evil. The idea here first in the first part of the statement, lead us not into temptation, may suggest to some people that God is in the business of enticing us to sin, but
But James, of course, warns against that conclusion in his epistle when he says, let no one say when he is tempted that he is tempted of the Lord, because temptation in that sense comes from within when we have these lusts that are fanned into flames from our internal predilections. And the point is that God never entices people into sin. So why would we say, God, lead us not into temptation?
Well, there's two ways. in which this term is used in the New Testament, and one of them is to test.
Now do you remember that when Jesus was baptized in the Jordan River, as soon as the heavens had opened and the Spirit of God had descended upon Him and the voice from heaven said, this is my beloved Son in whom thou is well pleased, at the end of that episode we read in the New Testament that then the Spirit drove Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted of Satan for 40 days.
Now, it wasn't as if God was enticing Jesus to sin, and it was certainly not the Holy Spirit who was tempting Jesus, but this temptation that involved God's testing of Jesus, putting Jesus to the test. Now, we see that concept liberally throughout Scripture.
At the very beginning of creation, Adam and Eve are placed in the garden environment, and they are our representatives, and they are, as it were, on probation. And they are placed before the crossroads of the test that is brought there by the serpent. And if they pass this test, great benefit will come to them and to their progeny.
If they fail that test, then catastrophic consequences will befall them and all of their descendants. And that's exactly what happened. They failed their probation, and through their sin, the whole world is plunged into ruin. But it was God who designed that that test take place.
You remember also the story that's found in the book of Job, where you have this dialogue that takes place in heaven, where in his arrogance, Satan comes from walking to and fro upon the earth and begins to mock God, saying, look at your people down there. They're all in my pocket. They're all following me. Nobody's really obeying you. And God says to Satan, have you considered my servant Job?
And what's the response of Satan? He laughs. He said, your servant Job? Yes, he's real obedient. Why shouldn't he be? He's been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. You've put a hedge around him. You've given him wealth. You've given him happiness. You've given him everything that his heart could possibly desire. Does Job serve you for naught? You take away that hedge.
Tear down the physical protection that you have. Let me at him, and we'll see how long he's faithful to you. And so now the whole drama of the book of Job has to do with the question of whether Job will maintain his integrity, whether he will maintain his loyalty to God in the midst of this test. And of course, the supreme test is the one we've already mentioned,
where Jesus Himself is sent into the wilderness to be tested. Now what is our Lord saying here when He said, lead us not into temptation? He's not saying that you should ask God not to test you or entice you to sin, but you say to Him, God, please don't put me to the test. Lord, don't put me in that place where I am left totally exposed to the assaults of the world, the flesh, and the devil.
Don't remove from me the support system of your grace that you give me. A person, for example, who is under discipline in the church, who's threatened with excommunication, should be praying that prayer every minute, saying, oh Lord, please don't let me be cut off from the benefits of the covenant community where your grace is so heavily concentrated. Don't send me out into the outer darkness.
Don't deliver me into the hands of Satan where I am defenseless against him. Remember when Peter was told by Jesus that he would deny Christ, and Peter was adamant that he would never do such a thing, and Jesus said to him, Simon, Simon, Satan would have you and sift you like wheat. You're a piece of cake in his hands. But I have prayed for you so that when you turn, strengthen the brothers.
What is he saying here? In this prayer, he's saying, don't ever overestimate your spiritual strength against the forces of evil. And you pray, you say, oh Lord, please don't ever put me in that situation where I'm exposed, unprotected to the assault of Satan.
And that he's talking about Satan here makes it very clear because in the second part of this stanza, lead us not in temptation, the old translation read, but deliver us from evil. Now that's really a mistranslation because the term that is used here in the Greek is the word poneros, which is used in the masculine singular form of the noun.
Evil is the Greek word poneron, which is the neuter form of the same noun. Now when you have it in the masculine form, The proper translation is not evil in the abstract, but it is the evil one, which is a title in biblical times for Satan. So what Jesus says is, lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. Deliver us from Satan.
Again, asking that he put a hedge around us that we might be protected from the wiles of the enemy. And that should be a part of our prayer, because an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure. So again, we ask for forgiveness. but we also ask for strengthening and protection from further temptation to sin.
Finally, the ending of the prayer as we find it in Matthew is with this expression, for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. In one sense, this may be the most important part of the prayer. Remember I said in simple terms there are two things that you must always remember when you pray. The first is who it is to whom you are speaking.
And the second is who it is who's doing the speaking. You have to remember who God is, and you have to remember who you are. And at the end of the prayer, there is a thinly veiled recitation again of adoration and of humility, a posture of humility with which all prayer should be accompanied before Almighty God. With the final remembrance and reminder that Jesus gives is this.
When you're done praying, you acknowledge that the kingdom does not belong to you. You're not the king. This is not your kingdom. You don't reign here. The power is not your power, and the glory does not belong to you. But as you pray and you're remembering who it is you're addressing,
you remember that you are addressing the One who is absolutely sovereign, who is the King over all things, whose almighty power governs every iota of the universe. And you need to realize that He is the God of absolute glory who will share His glory with no man.
One of my favorite Christmas carols is the carol, Angels We Have Heard on High, that ends with the chorus that is repeated, the Gloria in Excelsis Deo. which is a refrain borrowed from the Christmas narrative of Luke 2 when the heavenly hosts appear to the shepherds outside of Bethlehem singing what? Glory to God in the highest. That's what Jesus is saying.
When you finish your prayer, you finish glorifying God. It's his kingdom. It's his power. It's his glory.
That was R.C. Sproul on the Lord's Prayer. You're listening to Renewing Your Mind, a listener-supported outreach of Ligonier Ministries. We're featuring this series on Saturdays to help you in your prayer life, and that's also why we're making the entire series and the study guide available to you for your donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org.
In addition to helping fuel the spread of truth through Renewing Your Mind, you'll receive this series on prayer on DVD, and you'll have lifetime digital access to all of the messages and study guide. This offer ends at midnight tonight, so give your gift today at renewingyourmind.org or by clicking the link in the podcast show notes. Thank you.
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