I couldn’t come up with a catchy title for this message, so I just went with “Title Slide.”
More volume, please.
Okay. I’ll speak to you, Herb.
Actually, you know, the title really is the first six words of the Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father who is in heaven.”
Let’s start today with a word of prayer.
Our Father, we just come to You today and thank You, Lord, for the blessings of Your life—for us, Your life in us. And Father, thank You for the blessing of being able to have a relationship with You, pray to You, and communicate with You.
And Lord, as I speak today, Lord, I pray that it would be Your words only that are spoken. I just pray this in Jesus’ most holy name. Amen.
So, let’s start by reading the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:9-13. Now, this section came right after—or right during—the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is usually considered chapter 5, but this bleeds over directly into that.
And just before this, He was teaching how not to pray: don’t pray publicly, don’t do meaningless repetition, all those things. Then He steps into how to pray. He gave us a template for prayer.
So, let’s read this.
Pray then in this way:
Our Father, who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
Let’s get back a few verses. Let’s go back to where Christ was teaching about how not to pray, and that’s at chapter 6, verse 5.
Verse 5:
When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men.
Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.
But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition as the Gentiles do; for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words.
So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.
So, Brenda always asks me to talk about where this message came from. Well, this message came from my quiet time. I’ve been slowly reading through the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, and I got to this section, the Lord’s Prayer.
It was really tempting just to skip over those three verses because they’re so familiar and so well known. But I felt convicted to go back and really read them in the context of what the Lord was teaching there.
And when I really read it, it opened up a lot of layers that I had never seen before. And that’s what I want to share with you—hopefully communicate to you—today.
So, starting out with a ten-thousand-foot view—or actually, a hundred-thousand-foot view—of the Lord’s Prayer, it is a template on how to pray.
And a template is an empty form that somebody goes back and fills in with all the content. That template is just the shape of what goes in there.
This template has two major sections:
And this is a good template, a good pattern to follow, because it puts God’s concerns first. And as we pray, as we approach Him, His concerns always come first. Then we submit our petitions.
And in this particular translation, there is a second part where we follow up our petitions with a reaffirmation of God’s standing. That’s not in all the translations; the “kingdom and the power and the glory” part is not in every translation. But it’s in mine, so I want to talk about it.
General Christian theology digs a little deeper and says, “Okay, there are six petitions in the Lord’s Prayer.”
There is a petition that God’s name be sanctified, and that is, “Hallowed be Thy name.” Then there is “God’s kingdom come,” which is in the second verse.
There is a separate petition that God’s will be done. Now, those two are importantly separate, because we know that, in the end, when His kingdom does come, His will will not be completely done yet, because there will still be rebellion against Him on earth. So, these are two separate things.
Then we have our petition: “Give us today our daily bread.”
And also, “Forgive us”—in this case, to honestly forgive those who may have offended us—because we do not want to be lying to God. It says, “Forgive us as we have forgiven others.” We do not want to be lying to Him about that.
Then finally, “Lead us”—“Lead us not into temptation.”
So, this hundred-thousand-foot view is really a very simple, very beautiful, and very complete prayer. It is God’s concerns, man’s concerns, and then a reaffirmation of God’s standing.
And when you look at it, it can be very unchallenging, not convicting. It is really easy just to look at it, as Ed Miller says, “La, la, la,” and go on with things. And that is almost what I did.
But these sixty-eight very simple words have a lot of meaning packed into them, and we’ll talk about six of those words today.
One thing about this passage: it has really been culturally appropriated. The world knows this passage. It is one of the more famous ones in the Bible—almost as famous as “Do not judge,” almost as famous as the Twenty-Third Psalm.
It has kind of gotten baked into our culture, and it has become not a template but a script, where people take this and just apply meaningless repetition to it. They repeat those same words over and over again, as if that will build a relationship or as if that is what God wants to hear.
And when I was thinking about this—this meaningless repetition, of how it has become meaningless repetition—I thought, why does man do that? Why do we take something that the Lord has given us and turn it into something rote that we repeat over and over again?
I think one reason we do that is because it does not require the sacrifice of a relationship.
We can repeat those words, or repeat some other prayer, and it is very easy to do because we do not have to sacrifice anything to do that. We do not have to open ourselves and be vulnerable to God. It does not require the loss of self just to repeat things.
And also, in a way, it is treating God like the unjust judge. In the parable of the unjust judge, the widow has to go back repeatedly and ask over and over and over again for the judge to do what is right.
Mankind often sees God as an unjust judge who needs to be approached over and over again and nagged into doing what is right. But thankfully, our Father is not that way, and He does not like that. He does not want that meaningless repetition.
In fact, just before this, He talked about meaningless repetition. He said, “Do not use meaningless repetition,” but here is a template that you can use. Do not make it meaningless.
Again, a template is the shape of something that gets filled in later. These are not just words to be repeated.
So, when we look at this template, we should be looking at it with the question, “What do we fill it in with?” And we fill it in with our life and the life the Lord has given us.
These verses ahead of the Lord’s Prayer also call out the difference between performative and relational prayer.
Performative prayer is praying as a performance. Doing a performative prayer is actually pretty easy because all it requires is for you to memorize some words and to be a good actor.
It does not require any sacrifice or any loss. And the rewards of performative prayer come immediately because the people around you may appreciate the prayer, be blessed by the prayer, or have some emotional response to the prayer.
But relational prayer is much harder because it requires us to be in a relationship. Being in a relationship requires us to be vulnerable to one another—in this case, vulnerable to our God.
And there is a delayed reward for relational prayer. We may not see that reward in this life.
This relational prayer leads to death to self because, again, it requires vulnerability, opening ourselves, and being honest with Someone who is holy when we are not holy. That will lead to us losing ourselves and becoming more like Him.
It can be discouraging to look at this and think about how it has become just a mindless repetition or a meaningless mantra to a lot of people who pray it. But I want to hopefully peel back another layer and make it a little more meaningful to us.
So, let’s look at that first verse again:
Our Father, who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
Now, throughout this whole prayer—this whole section—there is always a presumption of belief. The Lord is not trying to convince people to believe. They already believe, and He is teaching them how to act on that belief, how to live in that belief.
So, some of the principles that come from that first verse are, again, about meeting God’s concerns first. We acknowledge that God is on the throne and that He is set apart.
And we can rejoice in those two facts because He is set apart, and He does want to hear from us, which is a great thing. Why us? Why does He want to hear from us? It is a wonderful thing.
And rejoicing in Him and setting Him in the right place sets the right tone before we dive into our own needs.
Now, this is a verse that Brenda quotes to me a lot because I get anxious about things a lot:
Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
Here, Paul is telling us to give thanks first. “With thanksgiving let your requests be made known.” And that brings peace. It removes the anxiousness.
So, maybe putting God’s needs first in our life is the key to peace—putting Him in that first place.
Again, Paul reinforces it in 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18:
Rejoice always;
pray without ceasing;
in everything give thanks;
for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.
In this case, we are to rejoice without ceasing because it says, “Rejoice always, pray always.” And prayer begins with rejoicing. It is almost like rejoicing and prayer are synonymous.
And when we pray, we can rejoice knowing that we are communicating, we are communing, with the God of heaven and earth.
You know, if prayer begins with praise, then we need to be praising without ceasing. Again, praising Him before we have made our petitions known—and even before our petitions are answered—takes faith.
It is an act of faith to say, “Okay, Lord, I am going to praise You for something that I am asking for, and You may not have granted it yet. You may not have answered yet.”
So, in this whole issue of praying without ceasing, I found that there are some things that keep me from praying without ceasing. I see one programmer smiling at what is up on the screen.
There are a couple of reasons why sometimes I set a threshold for prayer, saying, “Well, this really is not important enough to bother God with. It is a minor issue. He is busy. I am not going to bother Him with this thing.”
But God really cares about the detail. He is never too busy. He is omnipotent, after all. He is never too busy to deal with what we see as a small problem.
And also, sometimes I reserve topics for prayer: “This is something I can pray about. This is something I should not pray about because it is not spiritual.” But everything has a spiritual component to it.
One thing I learned, unfortunately not early in my career but kind of mid-career, was that Jesus is a much better software developer than I will ever be.
He knows everything there is to know about software.
And if I am having trouble at work, or trouble solving some technical problem, I should ask Him about it because He knows what the solution is.
It is wonderful how many times—even this week—I was confronted with a technical problem that did not seem to have a spiritual aspect. I prayed about it, and there was the answer.
And that code there is actually from the CTM site, if some of you may have recognized it from the CTM site. Anyway.
So, let’s take an even closer look at this verse. I said we were going to get into the first six words. I want to start getting into those words.
I tease Mac a lot about having too many words on his slides, so I am going to go in the opposite direction—maybe too far in the other direction. We’ll be the judge of that. We are going to go down to a single word: one word on the slide.
Let’s look at this first word: our.
And this is the word that really jumped out at me when I was reading it in my quiet time: “Our Father”—the “our.” Why did He use that word?
So, let’s jump back three verses, back into when He was teaching about prayer:
But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.
He tells us to pray alone—to close our door, to be quiet, to be alone, to be private, and pray to your Father.
But then, when He gives us the template, He starts it with, “Our Father.” I do not know if you are familiar with English, but you know that “your” is not “our.” They are two different words. “Your” is singular, and “our” is plural.
So, what is He saying here? What does it mean? Did He use the wrong pronouns when He started the template? Was He mistaken about what pronoun to use when He said, “Our Father who is in heaven”? I do not think He made a mistake.
In verse 6, He tells us to pray privately. In verse 9, He tells us to pray in the plural: “Our Father.”
So, what does it mean?
Well, when we are alone in our prayer closet, we are all by ourselves: “My Father.” It is just me. I am all alone. And there is nothing wrong with that. God is my Father, and He is your Father.
But Jesus prayed, “Our Father,” where our individual “my” becomes part of a larger group of “our” that is made up of a bunch of “mys.” A plural of “my” is “our.”
When we pray this prayer—“Our Father”—it makes us part of the “our” group. It is no longer a private “my” prayer, “my Father.” It is “our Father.”
And when you think about this, we are never just a “me” when we are acting in faith, acting in the church, or acting in our spiritual life. It is an “our”; it is an “us.”
Now, there is another name for this “our” group, and that is the church.
It is not the church as our little group here, our little assembly here. It is the universal church.
So, that “our” group of “mys,” that “our” group, is the church.
I do not know how this works. It is a spiritual thing. But when we are alone, we are part of a larger group, because we are told to pray alone, but we are told to pray as a group.
This is all part of what 1 Peter talks about: a house being made of living stones, of precious jewels, built into a house for His glory.
All these little stones are “my,” or “me,” individuals. But we are all put together into this house, into a greater group—a plural of stones, a plural of “mys.”
So, what is the application of all this? Well, the application is that we are never alone. Our actions—we can never act without impacting others in this spiritual group that we are in, this spiritual church that we are in.
It is like we are atoms all bonded together. And when one moves, it affects all those around it.
Again, this is a spiritual thing. It is a mystery. The church is a mystery of how we are all interconnected, but it is a spiritual thing where we are all connected.
So, if I obey Him, if I praise the Lord and obey Him, it affects those others in the church. It is not just me acting individually, not just me obeying, but that blessing, that benefit, goes to others in the church.
If I sin, it is not just me sinning, but it impacts the church as well. When I hurt, it is not just me hurting. It is our hurting—the group of “our,” this spiritually bonded-together group, hurting.
And what happens to me privately happens to us together. What I do privately is done to us together.
In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul talks about the body, and he says that when one member suffers, all suffer with it. When one member is honored, all members rejoice with it.
When you look at this, he did not say that when one member suffers and posts about it on Facebook, all members suffer. There is no evidence of a public requirement for that suffering to be made known publicly.
If you suffer, then all are suffering with you.
So, you are like one cell in the body, and what happens to you is happening to the body. What you do is done in the church.
For many years, ever since I was studying to be a doctor—which I never did become a doctor, thank goodness—I have appreciated seeing the church as a body. There are so many similarities, so the allegory fits so well.
When you think about something like cancer, it starts with one cell that deviates from the design and direction of the head. That one cell starts affecting all the other cells around it.
It makes copies of itself. It spreads. Then this part that is not by the design of the head spreads in the body and damages and weakens the body.
Likewise, healing starts with one cell that recognizes something outside of itself and starts to recover the body.
And that healing often requires sacrifice. Sacrifice is looking outside of itself and acting outside of itself for the good of the body.
A couple of principles from this word “our”:
Now, talking about this “our” and praying privately does not negate corporate prayer. We cannot say, “Well, I am going to pray alone at home, and because we are spiritually connected, that is corporate prayer.”
Corporate prayer is different. Corporate prayer, I think, magnifies and amplifies that connection, that spiritual connection we have with one another, when we are together physically.
So, when we think about being alone in our prayer closet, all by ourselves—or me, you by yourself—we are not really alone. We are part of the church.
We are connected in ways that we cannot see, ways that cannot be physicalized. When we praise, when we pray, when we celebrate, when we sin, or when we are hurt, we are not alone.
So, as we think about this simple word that starts the Lord’s Prayer, “our,” remember that it shows the glory of the church. It shows this interconnectivity of us all.
It shows that we are bound together, and we belong to one another. So, let’s not let it be meaningless repetition.
Okay, we are going to jump back up to the next phrase, “Our Father,” and look at the word Father.
The meaning of this word is a bit more obvious, but I think it is also very, very special.
So, what does it mean to pray to our Father? Well, when the Lord started this prayer, He could have used any number of titles for Himself.
He could have said, “Our God,” “Our King,” and all those would have been completely accurate titles and addresses for the God of the universe. But those titles do not reflect a relationship like “our Father” reflects our relationship.
And prayer is required for that relationship. If we want to have a relationship with our Father, we need to be praying to Him—and not in mindless repetition or meaningless repetition.
When you think about it, what relationships that we have would benefit from meaningless repetition?
You know, Brenda and I, we have pet names for each other. I sometimes say, “Hey, babe,” and, ooh, yeah, isn’t that exciting? Now, anyway, what if that is all I said to her? What if I walked around the house all day and said, “Hey, babe. Hey, babe. Hey, babe. Hey, babe”?
It would be nothing you can build a relationship on. It takes more than meaningless repetition to do that.
One of the things that I thought about and meditated on when thinking about this phrase, “Our Father,” was that there is a war on fatherhood.
And this war started back with Adam. When Adam fell, sin entered mankind, and it corrupted fatherhood. That corruption has continued.
I think we have all experienced corrupt fatherhood at some point. How many of you have had a perfect father? Noah? No? Okay. Definitely not Noah.
Then we had sin, and then the Industrial Revolution came along. You might say, “What does the Industrial Revolution have to do with this?”
Well, before the Industrial Revolution, fathers kind of worked at home. They were farmers. The kids would see and interact with their fathers all day long because their father was at home.
But then the Industrial Revolution came along. We had specialization of labor. Fathers were then leaving the house to go to the factory or go to the office to work there, and they were separated from their children.
They would only see their children in the evenings, when everybody was tired and worn out.
And then, in the sixties, we turned it up to eleven with the war on poverty, where we started paying people not to be fathers, and then with a sexual revolution, where we started encouraging sex without the responsibility of it.
All these things have led to a corrupt view of fatherhood that many have, and I would dare say that we have at times.
And it is really the work of the enemy to corrupt this view of the Father because God wants to be seen as a Father. If we do not know what a father is, then we cannot really see that aspect of His personality correctly.
So, what is the father’s relationship to a child? Well, a father loves his child.
A father will do anything to protect his child, to improve his child, to help his child grow up. A father will give his life for his child.
But that is not all that a father does. C. S. Lewis said that we often have an avuncular view of God the Father. Everybody know what avuncular means? Nope? All right.
Avuncular means like an uncle. Uncles give candy to their nieces and nephews. They give them presents all the time. Uncles do not discipline. Fathers discipline.
They truly love the child, and they discipline the child.
So, the father disciplines his child. Hebrews 12 talks about this: what father does not discipline his son?
Now, there is a reason why fathers discipline their children. They discipline their children so that children can be productive members of society.
If you do not discipline your children, they turn into little wild things, and they are nonproductive members of society. If you discipline them, there is a good chance they will be productive members of society.
And why does God discipline us? He disciplines us so that we can be productive members of His church and not be little wild things running around.
Fathers guide their children. And guiding is explicit instruction. It is hands-on instruction: “Okay, son, this is how you tie up the oxen. This is how you plow the field. This is how you change a tire.”
All these things are explicit guidance from the father. And from our earthly fathers, that guidance is not always correct, and it is not always done with good motives.
So, again, the corruption of fatherhood comes into that, where we have incorrect instruction—sometimes bad motives, sometimes just mistakes.
I remember when I was a freshman in college. I had entered college to be a doctor, and I came home for spring break and said, “Father, I am changing my major. I am not going to be a doctor. I am going to write software.”
And he was like, “Why are you doing that? That’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever said. There is no money in software. How can you support yourself writing software?”
And I said, “Well, something will work out.”
So, his view was corrupted. His advice, his guidance, was incorrect.
Our earthly fathers often give that, but thankfully, our heavenly Father does not give corrupt or incorrect guidance, or guidance with bad motives.
Fathers also model. And modeling is an implicit type of direction or instruction.
It is how children see the character of their fathers—all that nonverbal instruction, or nonverbal behavior of the father: what they do, how they treat other people.
This is how children really see the character of their fathers. Oftentimes, you see children who walk like their fathers, and that comes from the modeling of the father’s behavior.
And all this modeling is multiplied exponentially by the fact that we have an omnipotent, omnipresent, and thankfully omnipatient Father.
So, what is the child’s relationship to his father? Well, children really want to be like their father, even if their father is not a great model.
Children often want to be like them. Compliments from a father are always very special, and discipline from a father has more impact.
I remember sitting in my bedroom crying after the words, “Wait till your father gets home,” because I knew that there was going to be some extra-special discipline coming.
But children naturally want to be like their fathers.
Now, when Dana shared at the conference about seeing his father at work, that was really special. He got to see the big things that his father was doing.
His father was not just the guy with a bunch of keys. His father was helping hundreds of people and making an impact on hundreds of lives. And Dana saw his father much bigger than he had seen him before.
My father did not do big, important things for most of his life. My father sold cookies. In fact, he sold Little Debbie cookies for many years.
But I did get to go to work with him, and I saw how hard he worked to support the family. We were out the door at 4:30 in the morning to go load the truck and start driving all over western North Carolina selling Little Debbie snack cakes.
And that was a hard, hard job.
Then later, when I was in college, my father started a rescue mission, and I saw even bigger work coming from my father.
I remember one time I was visiting him on break. I was in his office, and he had a big handwritten sign on the wall that just said, “Never again.”
I thought, “That’s an interesting motivational poster there. You’ve got ‘Never again.’ What is this about? What are you never going to do again?”
He said, “Well, I doubted the Lord’s ability to provide for us.”
You know, missions—rescue missions—are always short on money, always need money. And theirs was no different. He was like, “We need money to do these things.”
So, he went to the United Way and worked with them to get money. Well, with their money came lots and lots of ungodly strings.
They were asking him—or actually forcing him—no longer to require devotions, no longer to require people to be in the devotional times.
And he learned from that, “Never again.” So, you doubt the ability of God to provide for what God has told you to do.
So, how does this view of God as our Father affect our prayers?
First, we can share our heart with Him. We can be vulnerable with Him because He loves us, and He is not going to reject us. He wants to be in a relationship with us.
He wants to talk to us, and He wants to guide us. Believe it or not, He wants to be with us.
He wants us to ask Him. In that verse right before the Lord’s Prayer, He says that He already knows what we need even before we ask.
And I have always thought, “Well, why do we even ask if He already knows?” Well, it is because He wants us to ask so that we can have that relationship with Him, and so that we can see Him respond in that relationship.
We can also pray with confidence. He is not going to reject us. He may discipline us. Nowhere in Scripture does it say that a father rejects his son, but a father disciplines his son.
And also, we need to listen when we pray. That is how He guides us.
Some of the people who are hardest to have a relationship with are those who are always talking. If a person is always talking, it is really, really difficult to communicate and have any kind of relationship with them because they do not stop and listen.
The relationship is a two-way street.
The Father wants us to know His work and see His work. So, when we are praying about His work, He wants to show it to us. He wants us to be a part of that.
He wants to show us the amazing things that He is doing.
And through this communion, through this relationship, is how He conforms us to His image. Through us listening, through us being disciplined, and through us seeing His work, we are conformed into His image.
So, wrapping up this part—the first two words, “our Father”—a couple of key points:
Okay, we are jumping back to the verse again: “Our Father, who is in heaven.”
Let’s talk about that next phrase, “who is in heaven.” So, what does this tell us about Jesus, about our Father, and about how we should pray?
Well, it told me three big things:
The first one: He is far above us. Being in heaven and not on earth is very separate from us.
Isaiah talks about His ways being above our ways. And He is so far above us that we definitely start without His mind.
In this life, I do not know that we will ever fully have His mind, but He is growing us, conforming us to have His mind.
And because He is so far above us, I am uncomfortable with the “bud” prayers that you hear sometimes, where somebody prays to God like He is somebody sitting next to them at the bar—very casual, very, “Let me put my arm around You.”
It is just very lax prayer. Those kinds of prayers have always bothered me because they do not acknowledge that separation, the difference there is between God the Father—the heavenly Father—and us.
He is not like our earthly father. He is unchanging.
Being in heaven lends an eternality to this concept of Father—an aspect of being eternal, an eternal Father.
He will always be our Father, and we will always be His children.
As you grow up with your earthly father, eventually, at some point in your life, you will exceed the capabilities of your father. Then you will start taking care of your father as if he were your child, which is tough.
But that will never happen with our heavenly Father. We will never grow to exceed Him.
I remember another story from college. I was working for a company, and over Christmas break they let me take a computer home to do some work.
That may not seem like a lot these days with laptops and stuff, but in those days it was a big, big deal to be able to take a computer home. It was a massive thing that I brought home.
And on Christmas Day, I was sitting down in the family room with the computer, writing code. You know, who does not like to write good code on Christmas Day?
I was sitting there typing away, and my father came and stood behind me. He stood there for several minutes as I was coding away. I think it was an accounting application.
After a few minutes, he said, “You have no idea what you’re doing.”
And I thought, “He must have seen a bug. I must be doing something completely wrong in the code.” I said, “What do you mean I don’t know what I’m doing? Am I making a mistake here?”
And he said, “Well, I am your father. You are my son. I don’t know what you’re doing. Therefore, you can’t know what you’re doing.”
So, thankfully, our heavenly Father will never be that way. We will never meet or exceed His capabilities. We will always be His children.
And He is in control. He knows what we need before we ask for it. He is not surprised about what we ask for.
He is not surprised by what we do, and He is not struggling to answer our prayers.
That always should be very comforting to us: He is not surprised, He is not struggling, and He is asking us to ask so that we can be in a relationship with Him.
So, how does this impact your prayer?
There needs to be a reverence, or an awe, as we approach our heavenly Father, who is far, far above us.
But there can be confidence because He knows what we need, and we are agreeing with Him that we need those things.
We can pray with confidence because He is in control. He is always there, and He will always respond in a way that is good.
So, we can have peace, knowing that He is good and He is in control.
So, as we wrap it up here, remember that we are all in this body together as an “our”—“our Father.” We are not alone.
When we pray, we are not alone. When we praise, we are not alone.
And when the Spirit leads us in the same direction—or when the Spirit leads us—He is leading us all in the same direction.
We are praying to Someone who wants to be in a relationship with us.
And we are praying to Someone who is far, far above us. He is the Creator of the universe. He is the God of the universe. He is there waiting to help, wanting to hear from us, wanting to have that relationship with us.
So, let’s pray. Let’s go to Him in prayer.
Our Father, we just thank You, Lord, for the blessings of Your Word and how much You want to be with us, how much You have sacrificed to be with us, Lord, to make that way open that we can pray to You.
And Father, I just pray that You would, as we pray, Lord, open our eyes to the magnificence and the impact and the wonder of what prayer really is.
And I just pray this in Your name. Amen.