Andrew Meher: If you have a Bible with you, would you open up to Matthew chapter six, please? we're gonna start in verse five and we're gonna read through verse thirteen. Matthew chapter 6, starting in verse 5. We're going to read through verse 13 in just in just a moment. If you remember, last week we started our fall series, Praying Like Jesus. And what we want to take time to do is to learn how to pray from the prayer that Jesus gave us, the Lord's Prayer. How many of you grew up in a tradition that thought like, well, you don't really pray the Lord's Prayer, that's just like an idea. Yeah, a couple people like how many of you grew up in a tradition where you prayed the Lord's Prayer every single Sunday, every single gathering that you were at? Yeah, a lot more of you, right? And and so different church traditions have treated the Lord's Prayer in different ways. Some have looked at it as a model for how we can pray. Some have looked at it as like, well, we just like don't really pray it. It's a suggestion. and we just pray our own prayers because we want our prayers to be authentic. Everyone heard that? Heard that before? Or we only pray the recited prayer and it read the prayer, and maybe for some of us it felt like it was getting wrote or it was it was getting kind of ritualistic and it didn't mean anything. Any those experiences you all have had with the Lord's Prayer? Yeah. And so the way I want to invite you to think about the Lord's Prayer. If you remember from last week, is that when Jesus said, When you pray, say this. Literally in the Greek, he's saying, When you pray, recite these words. So Jesus is saying, pray exactly these words. But what Jesus is also doing through the prayer and through all of the teaching that he gives about prayer is he's showing us how this is to inform the way we pray with our personal prayers as well. And as we we mentioned last week, most of the prayer, and as we're gonna start to get into the each line of the prayer this week, most of the prayer has nothing to do with our wants or our needs or what's going on urgently in our lives. Does that mean that those things don't matter to our prayer? No, not at all. Of course they matter. But what Jesus is trying to do is get us to not pray what we talked about last week as Gentile prayers. Where we just kind of go on and on and on and on and ask and ask and ask, and hopefully we can manipulate God into giving us what we want. And Jesus is trying to show us you already have a good father who already knows everything you need. And so prayer becomes less about trying to get what we need so we can have a more comfortable life. And prayer now, praying in the way that Jesus is teaching us to pray, is about learning how to join the life of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. As Jesus is instructing us. Because there's something different about the way Jesus prays. So let's let's revisit a section here. We looked at the Luke version of the prayer, and now we're gonna read Jesus' instructions on the Lord's Prayer from Matthew chapter six, verse starting in verse five down to verse thirteen. Jesus says this: And 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 men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your father who is unseen. Then your father who sees what is done in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him. This then is how you should pray. 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, forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. As we pray together today, would you mind standing with me for a moment? And Don, could you go back to the beginning of that Lord's Prayer part? And I'd love for us to just pray this together as we begin today. Can we pray this together? 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. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. Amen. You can be seated. what do the book by Mary Shelley called Frankenstein and a volcano in Indonesia have in common? They both explode. Yeah, this isn't the setup to a bad joke, I promise you. They actually have something in common. Believe it or not. Any guesses? Did someone say something about minerals? No, nothing to do with minerals. What was that? I thought someone said something else. Any guesses? People are afraid of it. I mean, yeah, that's a pretty good guess, but there's something else they have in common. there there's a volcano in Indonesia called Mount Tambora. And in 1815, it erupted and is the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history. Largest in recorded history. Let me tell you how big this volcanic eruption is. It began in April of that year and it continued spewing ash and having subsequent eruptions all the way straight through for six months. So much ash got shot up into the atmosphere that it caused what would be known the next year as the year without summer. There was a global cooling because the sun was blocked by a cloud of ash the size of Australia in the stratosphere. This caused massive temperature drops. There are anywhere between two degrees and seven degrees Fahrenheit, the average temperature dropped. this caused massive crop failures and famines, particularly in the northern hemisphere. And the first economic depression in the newly formed United States of America happened as a result of all of these crop failures in about 1816. this massive cover of ash that was blocking out the sun meant that there was snow in Quebec City all the way into June. And this area of the country here had lakes frozen into July. Can you imagine? Skipping summer. No, we don't want to do that, do we? It also, and here's the the connection to Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley in in in where she lived in in in England, she was basically not going outside for a year, as most people were, because they it was so sooty in the air and everything was so dark, and it was so grim and gloomy, the skies, that it actually inspired the setting for her novel Frankenstein. So there's the connection. massive moments in one part of the world caused global change. Something significant happening in one moment, one place on the globe changed everything. And and as we are learning how to pray like Jesus this morning, I want us to think about this moment that we just read, Jesus teaching how to pray as a seismic moment that changed everything about humanity and their ability to approach God. This changed everything. Because the first line of the Lord's Prayer, like this volcanic eruption, changed how we are invited to see who God is. God, who became human in Jesus, had already obviously revealed Himself before Jesus to the people of Israel. He had led them out of captivity in Egypt. He'd established their nation and their laws. They'd been following this God or failing to follow this God for centuries. Beforehand, they knew who this God was, but things changed dramatically when God came to earth in Jesus and invited us to begin addressing God in prayer as our Father. Wesley Hill points out that God is described only 15 times as Father in the Old Testament. Now, I want to be clear, sometimes people get confused and think maybe the God of the Old Testament's a different God. It's not a different God. Just the way they understood to address God was very different. So he's only addressed his father some 15 times in the Old Testament. But Wesley Hill says that something massively significant happens when Jesus comes on the scene. And we see this from the New Testament because the moment Jesus starts talking about God, he starts talking about his Father and our Father. Some hundred and seventy times in the four Gospels alone, Jesus describes God as Father. So we go from 15 in most of the Bible, the whole Old Testament, which is most of the scriptures, 15 times in that whole thing, to in the first four books of the New Testament, 170 times we're going to hear God described or referred to as Jesus' Father or our Father. This is a seismic shift, a massive change. Jesus, God the Son, Has this intimate relationship with God the Father. If you remember back to our series in the spring on the Apostles' Creed, and we talked about how there is only one God, but God has revealed who God is as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so God the Son has this intimate relationship with God the Father. God has community within Himself as God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It doesn't totally make sense to us. So we just kind of, that's the best language we have for it. But in this beautiful relationship where the three persons of the Godhead, the Trinity, are in this intimate relationship. They're all tied in together in this loving, caring, Mutuality, this is who God is in God's being. Then God the Son, who is loving God the Father and loving the Holy Spirit, God the Son becomes human. Think about how significant this is. And then God the Son starts just talking about the Father. Father. And then starts going, and your Father. And your Father. You hear the invitation into the life of the triune God. Right off the bat. Jesus is like, this is for you too, right away. There is this massive change that is happening in Jesus, revealing to us the heart of God as his Father and our Father. God wants us to share in calling the first person of the Trinity Father. We could simply just call him Creator. or maker or all powerful Yahweh or something like that that would be appropriate and true and fitting about his glory and his power and his splendor, but instead you and I are taught to call God and pray to God as Father. This changes everything. If we think about the people that we described last week, the religious people and the pagans, right? Religious people always feel like they have to prove that they're enough for God and that God should listen to them. They're looking for credibility and they want to be noticed by everyone. They want everyone to think they're spiritually mature, right? And then we have this other group of people, the pagans, the Gentiles, people who were outside of the believing community. And they were just going on and on and on, hoping that God would hear them because of their many words. If I'm just intense enough, God will hear me. And here, Jesus wants to dismiss either of these extremes and says, you simply just begin to pray and address God as Father. You're already in, in other words. Don't try and prove anything, because there's really nothing you can prove. Just come to this God who I've revealed to you, Jesus says, as Father. To put it simply, to understand prayer today as we think about this first line, our Father in heaven. Because of Jesus, we have an invitation to pray from a new identity. In a place of deep intimacy and with God's authority. That's the good news of what Jesus is teaching us in this new way of praying. Because of what Jesus has done in coming to earth, in revealing who God is to us, because of Jesus, we have this open invitation to pray from a new identity in a place of deep intimacy and with God's authority. And I just want to briefly reflect on each of those truths. To help us become a praying church that addresses and knows that this loving God is our Father. First, we pray from a new identity. We pray from a new identity. I love this. Jesus just says, when you pray, say, Our Father. Our Father in heaven. We pray from a place of a new identity. Now many of us have earthly fathers. I say many of us, all of us. I don't think we have lab grown people yet. But but but we all have an earthly father. We all have an earthly identity. Yeah, I'm part of so and so's family. Your last name, in a sense, that functions to some level as an identity marker for you. But we also have jobs, right? Where's like, I'm a I'm an electrician, I'm a teacher, I'm a parent, I'm a musician, I whatever it is that you kind of mark yourself by. I I'm really good at what I do for work. We we take on these earthly identities and and all. Often we try, as people did in Jesus' day, try to approach God as showing, look at how good my identity is. Look at how good of a teacher I am, how much I care for students. Please keep caring for students, teachers. We love you. But look how good of a parent I am. I'm trying my best. Look, look at how much money I've earned and I've given away to people. All of these can be identities we try and stand on when we come to God in prayer. Look at how I do help helping my community. Look at how I am taking care of my family. Look at how I am doing this and that and the other. And we try and stand on these identities. But the problem is, is all of these identities are too small to stand before God on. They're not bad things to do, and they could even be callings and vocations from God. But God in Jesus teaches us to address and pray to God out of a new identity. An identity Where we see ourselves not as children of our earthly parents, but as children of a heavenly father. We're not children of the world that we live in, or the products of the business culture, or the education system, or all of these things we might be very proud of. We are not children of any of those things. We are taught to pray to as children of our Heavenly Father. And so we have a new identity that motivates who we think we really are. We are sons and daughters of God. In Jesus, we we get to pray from this new identity of our Father. It's profoundly powerful because I find myself often coming to prayer sometimes, thinking, have I done a good enough job recently for God to hear my prayer and think my prayer is authentic today? You know what I'm talking about? We we kind of have these like, man, I haven't prayed in a little while. Like, if I come today, is God gonna be like, Where have you been? Now, those might be the voices of our earthly fathers and mothers that would say things like that to us. Lord knows I have to repent of saying things like that to my children. They make a mistake, and the first thing I go is, Why were you doing this in the first place? Instead of helping them clean it up. I am very guilty of that on many occasions. But we do not have a father in heaven who does that. When we come, even if we have been far away in our prayer life, when we come back to God, there is nothing that is separating us from the love of God. In Jesus, because of who Jesus is, we come from a place of a new identity. And so we are just immediately able to come before God, not because of anything you and I have done, but because of what Jesus has done. And we get to simply start, our Father. And we don't have to wait and like flinch. For the where have you been? Why are you just praying now? You expect me to answer your prayers now? I need to see a good track record first. God doesn't do that with us. He says, My daughter, my son. Like the father with the prodigal son that comes home. Let's throw a feast, let's throw a party. And so we have this new identity. There's something else, though, that's really profound about this new identity about belonging to God. It's that notice that we're not called to pray to Jesus' Father. We're not called to pray to my Father. We're called to pray to our Father. There is something about praying our Father that reminds us that our prayers are all, in a sense, equal at the foot of the cross. That there's nothing, none of us has like an upper hand spiritually in terms of a priority in God hearing our prayers. Do you hear me? Me being a pastor of a church does not give me some kind of leg up on God listening to what I'm praying any more than you do, because he is our Father. There is nothing, there's nothing that you and I can do to get a leg up on our brothers and sisters. We simply all are siblings praying to our Father. The other thing that's important about this is it means that our prayers are not individualistic. Often I find that people pray and their prayer focus is so much for them and their self. I can get really focused on me and my needs in prayer. And to pray, our father invites us to open up to see. That we are all praying for each other, and we are invited to pray with each other, whether we are alone or we're together in a room with others. See Clifton Black puts it this way: It is not I who am praying for me, it is we who are praying for us. One prays alongside one's sister and brother Christians, even when one is alone, even when that sibling is exceedingly hard to love. We cannot earn our status as brothers and sisters. And the people that we really think are not doing it right also can do nothing to earn their status as being brothers and sisters. And all of us together are invited to pray for each other, with each other, on behalf of each other, to our Father. It shifts our identity. We pray from this new identity because we can just start from a place of we are totally accepted, we are totally belonging to God, and there's absolutely nothing we can do to change that. And so we can pray from A new identity. I I want to just as I hit each of these reflections, I want to provide something very practical to help you understand what this could look like. the the first part of this being silence. Have you ever thought of prayer as silence? A huge part of prayer I want to you to consider is actually silence. For those of you who've taken our emotionally healthy discipleship courses that we do, you'll spend a lot of time learning about silence and just being with God in silence. And people who don't understand that they are praying from a new identity often have a hard time praying in silence. Because what tends to happen is they think, well, I've got to do something. I've got to say something. I I've got to prove why I can be here. And quite often, what Jesus is is encouraging us to do when we pray to our Father is simply sit in silence and be with our Father. Your Father doesn't need anything from you. You don't necessarily need anything from him, just to be with him. And I think we miss that often in our prayer life. We get too focused on the transactional, we get too focused on what might be needed in my life. And there are things we need in our life, don't get me wrong, but we miss the relationship of simply learning to be with our Father. And when we pray from a new identity, one of the first things that we often are needing to learn is how to sit in silence with God and learn how to simply be with God. And I'll talk more about how we can practically do that at the end when we wrap this up. So silence is a practice we can use to learn how to pray from a new identity. Second, I said that we learn how to pray from a new identity in a place of deep intimacy. Jesus says in this teaching on prayer, he says, pray to your Father who is in secret. The one who sees everything. Not only do you not have to prove anything to God. Because you're in this new identity. But you also get to practice a sense of deep intimacy, of knowing God deeply, of being completely known by God, of drawing closer, of becoming familiar with the Father's presence, with the Father's voice, with the life of God, and just growing into it. Now, how many of you sound like that just sounds like way too much? And I don't have time for that. I'm gonna have to be praying like eight hours a day if I'm gonna have that kind of life, right? Anyone ever think that about prayer? Like, I'm not doing enough of it, that it's not if this is gonna work. How am I supposed to do this? How am I supposed to grow in this like life of intimacy with God and knowing God's heart for me and being known by God? I I totally hear that. And and you know what's frustrating is when you read a lot of the the prayer traditions from a lot of of a lot of folks, especially coming out of the the Middle Ages where there was so much written on the contemplative life of prayer. So much was written of it was written to monks Monks who did basically worked and then just stopped to pray a lot. That doesn't really feel very helpful. I don't know if that feels helpful to you, but I don't know a lot of us who are just kind of tending to a garden and picking their fruit and then just stopping whenever they want to pray. Right? There's like a lot of things on sedu lists and schedules and workplaces, and people need to get places. But here's why I love the work of one archbishop in the Middle Ages named St. Francis de Sales. He had a heart to teach prayer, not to monks and those who were seeking A life of constant prayer. His heart was to teach people in the everyday towns and villages who had a lot of work to do, whose bosses had expectations of them, who had mouths to feed and children to raise, all these things. He had a heart to teach them how they could have a deep life of prayer and intimacy with the Father. And he described prayer. As an ongoing daily conversation. And he put it this way: He said he encouraged people in their prayers to stretch out your hands to be led by him as a little child to its father. And the way he said to do this was just periodically, constantly throughout the day, intentionally, just pause, even for five seconds, 30 seconds, and just pay attention to your father. Pray the Lord's Prayer briefly. Maybe there's a small recitation of scripture, but it's for a moment, and then you continue. And then maybe a little while later you reach your hand out in a sense to God and pause and make space for prayer again. And then a little while later you do the same. And DeSelles was trying to teach that the real life of intimacy was not about intensity, but about intentionality. There are moments where you will intensely cry out to God, but those moments are actually built out of a life of intentionality, where we regularly intend to pause for a moment or two, or whatever our lives and calendars allow for, and intentionally make space to just be present to our Father. And we by doing so we grow in a life of deep intimacy. I want to just differentiate briefly between intimacy and deep. And identity. Intimacy and identity are different things. Identity is you totally are a child of God. You completely belong to the Father. Nothing is going to get in the way of that. You can come running to the Father in prayer at any time and cry out, our Father, God, help. This is what's going on. It doesn't matter if you've prayed a lot or a little. This is because of what Jesus has done. Intimacy is different though. Intimacy requires your intentionality to make space to live in the identity that is yours. Does that make sense to you? And so to practice a life of deep intimacy requires intentionality. And another way of putting this is through a practice we call the daily office. The daily office is a really ancient way of describing having regular intentional times of day through times throughout the day to pray. And and that can be as simple as what DeSales was saying. Just pausing for a minute and praying. It could be like brother brother Lawrence, who was a monk who wasn't a very important monk. He was a cook, and he cooked for the whole monastery, and his way of praying was he would just pray and talk to God just conversationally while he peeled potatoes all day. Too many of us have podcasts going and we're watching TV while we're doing all these other things. And and often I wonder what it might look like to pause that thing we're listening to or watching while we're getting chores done. And we pray while we fold laundry, or vacuum the house, or drop the kids off at an activity, or when I'm taking this errand that I need to run from this place to that place, or in between classrooms or something, whatever our calendars look like, is there a pause there that instead of filling that with some other kind of noise, I could fill that space intentionally with God. It might look like the first thing you wake up in the morning and you take 30 seconds to be still before God. You take 15 minutes at your lunch break to read a short portion of scripture and sit in silence for a minute with God. It might look like having a small devotional book that you read right before you go to bed instead of making the last thing that you do watch TV or something else like that. Making these little moments to reach out to take your Father's hand helps you grow in a place of deep intuition. Intimacy through intentionality. And so when we are praying from a new identity and we're in a place of deep intimacy, our prayer begins to happen with God's authority. I love this. Jesus says, Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. So this implies two things. Jesus is saying, still ask him. You're gonna ask. Ask. But you're kind of like at an advantage because you already know what God has to give you, and how God is gonna provide for you, and what you're trying to learn from God or gain from growing in God, whatever it might be. And the advantage Jesus is telling you is He already knows and He's gonna give it to you. And so we can come to God. From a place of authority, from a place of permission to pray. We don't have to come up and be like, I don't know, is this okay? Your father already knows what you need before you ask him. In the first century, families operated under this idea of kinship authority. And what that meant was you had to use the family name or the father who was the head of the household in order to kind of get things done in your town or in your community. So say you went to the market and you didn't have any cash on hand and and you were going to do something and you had to get something done for your household or something like that, you could just give them your father's name, and you would get what you need, and it would be taken care of by the father's account. This is for such and such a household. This is part of what Jesus is doing because Jesus is inviting us into this new household, this new family of God. And so Jesus is here saying, use my dad's name. You know, like name dropping? If you like name drop, you know, I know so-and-so, and you can get in the VIP entrance. That's what Jesus is doing here. The ultimate VIP access. He's saying, use my dad's name. Use my dad's name. He already knows what you need before you even ask, but use his name. There is authority that you are being invited to pray with, permission you're invited to walk in prayer with, that you can't get by being like the pagans are, like Jesus said, going on and on and on, hoping you're heard. You don't have to keep babbling and keep trying and keep doing that. You just need to ask. Sometimes we go on and on like that because we're afraid that we don't actually have the authority for what we need. Sometimes I get in a place of prayer where I'm really anxious. Like we talked about last week, that my anxiety is actually what's fueling my prayer. And when anxiety is fueling my prayer, I am not praying in the authority that I have as a son of God. I am praying like the pagans, where I'm just hoping that if I'm anxious enough here and I'm just gonna keep going on, that God's gonna like feel sorry for me and help me out. But Jesus is saying don't pray like that. Your father already knows what you need before you ask him. What are the things you have been afraid to ask God for? Or you have only ever known how to pray out of anxiety, and you're frustrated that you don't see answers. What might Jesus be inviting you to do? To pray differently, to pray from a place of authority. Now I want to just differentiate one more thing when I talk about authority versus what we sometimes think of power. Praying with power is not the same as praying with authority. if you go into New York City and especially during rush hour and stuff, and you're driving through Manhattan, there's a certain time of day where a lot of times people aren't paying attention to the traffic signals and the traffic lights. There's someone with a reflector vest on standing in the middle of the intersection, and everyone's paying attention to that one person. No matter what that traffic light says, if that person with the reflector vest on says, Come on, you go. Now, why do you do that? Why do you let that traffic cop tell you what to do? Is the traffic cop holding the other directions at gunpoint saying, don't you dare move? No, he doesn't need to do that. That's that's that's like power. I need something to force these people to stay there. Now, in theory, someone could stand there that doesn't have the authority to stand there. And they could use all kinds of power to try and stop cars from moving, right? They could put up barricades, maybe they are holding people at gunpoint. They could do something crazy, right? But the traffic cop doesn't need to do that, do they? Why? Their badge has a name on it. City of New York. And that badge carries with it the weight and authority over that jurisdiction. Now, if that traffic cop showed up here in West Milford, would it work? Maybe for a second, and then people would be like, You don't have jurisdiction here. But where you and I have been given authority in the same way, God says, do not pray, babbling on like the hypocrites do and like the pagans do. Pray in authority. Your father already knows what you need before you ask him. You are wearing a name tag, if you will, a badge with your father's name on it. And Jesus says, ask for what you need. Because of Jesus, hear me, that's so crucial. Because of Jesus, we've been invited to pray from a new identity, in a place of deep intimacy with God's authority. What does praying with God's authority look like, practically? Well, maybe ask for what you need for today. How many of us, when we are weary, I know some of us have little children that are keeping us up in the middle of the night? Some of us are experiencing the economic crunch. Some of us are experiencing health issues or we have family members experiencing health is issues. There are physical, emotional, material things that are weighing us down. How many of us are starting our day praying in authority, saying, Lord, I need strength for today? I need emotional resilience for today? How many of us are asking, Lord, I need money to pay this bill today? Not what I need for five years from now, but what do I need now? How many of us are praying in authority and asking for our daily needs like that today? practice is to ask for what you need for today. Ask for what you need to accomplish what God has given you to accomplish. So if we're going to pray like Jesus It's going to be from a new identity in a place of deep intimacy with God's authority. So as a way of response, I just want to give you this this three part practice that we just talked about all up on the screen. If you could put that that slide up there. Silence. Sitting in a posture of prayer where we already belong to the Father and we don't have to prove anything. What I've been doing in preparation for this series through the summer is I would just take moments, some mornings, where I would just breathe in and say, Our Father, and breathe out in heaven. And I would just breathe, like just pray that under my breath as I would breathe in and out and sit in silence for five minutes. Our Father in heaven. And every time I'd get distracted, I would just pr notice I was distracted, and I would just bring my attention back to the Father. And you know what would happen almost every single time I would do that? Absolutely nothing. But I have noticed over the years that I've been practicing silence, that there has been a growing inner peace. There has been a growing clarity. There has been a growing strength in being able to hear the Father speak. And it comes through having a practice of silence where I know I don't have to do anything to prove to God anything. I can just be here with Him. So, silence. Second part of that practice is that daily office. Having set intentional times throughout the day where we, as DeSelles said, take our father's hand. What might it look for you to have a moment when you wake up in the morning? Some of you, you've got busy schedules, you might have to commit to waking up five to fifteen minutes earlier, 30 minutes earlier. Some of you, it's going to be intentional about your your lunch break and taking 10 minutes on that break to say, I'm going to make space to be with my father right now. Some of you, it's going to be when you're getting things done around your house or things that just you need to take care of on errands. And instead of listening to another thing or being distracted by another kind of media, you might say, I'll get I'll listen to that in a little bit, but first, I'm just gonna take five minutes to be with my father. So we practice that daily office, that intentional time throughout the day of taking our Father's hand to practice cultivating intimacy. And then finally, when we consider praying in God's authority, here's the practice. Ask for what you need. Jesus said it when we looked at it last week. Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. And then he says, keep asking, keep seeking, keep knocking. Someone in our pre-service prayer time brought up the text, the scripture, where it says that the prayer of a righteous person does much. In the old King James, I think it says availeth much. It does basically a person who is serious about like living in the identity that Jesus has given them, their prayers do a lot, is what that's saying. But it also says, keep praying, be persistent in our prayers. So we ask and we seek and we knock. Be bold about keep asking and keep seeking and keep knocking. Because it will shape you and it will shape how you continue to ask for things. So practicing silence, the daily office, asking for what you need. We can do this because Jesus has given us permission. Jesus has invited us to pray from a new identity in a place of deep intimacy with God's authority. Would you stand with me and I'd love for us to pray the Lord's Prayer one more time? If you wouldn't mind putting the scripture text back on the screen. For the beginning of the Lord's Prayer. And can we pray this prayer with a sense of authority? Like that we actually have permission from God to pray this and pray it boldly. Are you ready? Are you willing to pray it like that with me? Let's pray it together. 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. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.