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CS Lewis on the Lord's Prayer

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CS Lewis on the Lord's Prayer C.S. Lewis on the Lord’s Prayer: The Fountainhead of Mission Philip Miller, Senior Pastor, The Moody Church March 6, 2021 God intends us for mission. • Matthew 28:18-20 “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” o Commission for all of us… Co-Mission. For the average person… this will not mean preaching or tribal bible-translation or any other official Christian vocation… • It happens in the ordinary stuff of life. o Neighboring o Vocation o Family o Recreation o School I’m convinced the Way of Jesus is more caught than taught. • We see a life animated by the love of God, and we’re drawn in. o Awakens a longing for real life. § The Spirit draws us in. o Think in your own life… wasn’t there someone (or many) whose embodiment of the life and love of God… drew you in? Question: How do we become people like this? • Overflowing with the irresistible life and love of God? o Mission flows from our Being. o Our Being flows from being with God. o Being with God flows from a life of prayer. § Mission is the overflow of life with God. § Prayer is the inflow of life of God. • So prayer is the fountainhead of mission. Now we come to a problem: I am ill equipped to guide you here. • But we share two guides in common: Jesus and C.S. Lewis. o Read his letters some years back. “Keeping you in my prayers.” § Prayerfulness was one of the keys to his effectiveness. The Lord’s Prayer – Matthew 6:9-13 (Luke 11:2-4) • Skeleton by Jesus, fleshed out by C.S. Lewis. o PRAY – Teach us to pray Matthew 6:9-13 “Pray then like this: ‘Our Father 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 lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. [For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen.]’” “Pray then like this…” • Not like Pharisees with words rehearsed to impress. • Not like Gentiles with manipulative emotional fervor. o But like a Child in earnest simplicity: “Our Father…” § The Pharisees and Gentles pray to get things from God. • A child prays to be with his Father. • Insight… A Grief Observed (from chapter 4) “I know perfectly well that He [God] can’t be used as a road. If you’re approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you’re not really approaching Him at all.” § God will not be used as a means to our ends. He himself is the end. • In Essence… The World’s Last Night (from the Efficacy of Prayer) – “Prayer is… personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person. (Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.) In it God shows Himself to us.” o Prayer is, at its essence, communion with God. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” • “Our Father” o Father is Jesus’ favorite title of address: 165 times § Greek “pater” // Aramaic “abba” • dada – intimacy o Because of Christ. o “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are.” – 1 John 3:1 o “For you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, “Abba! Father!”” – Romans 8:15 § Our father – Christ’s, and now ours in Him. • Intimacy. Closeness. Abiding. • Mere Christianity “An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God—that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying—the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on—the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers. The man is being caught up into the higher kinds of life—what I called Zoe or spiritual life: he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself.” • “In the heavens” – plural o Atmospheric, Cosmic, Spiritual – All three § Enthroned in the heavens § Everywhere and all around § loser than the air we breathe • Anytime, anywhere… Letters to Malcolm (from chapter 15) “This situation itself is, at every moment, a possible theophany. Here is the holy ground; the Bush is burning now.” • “Hallowed be your name” o To sanctify, set apart. § Which God already is! o But that we might treat God as he deserves… see Him as He really is. § We are, in fact, praying for ourselves. • He would smash our little ideas of Him with his Holiness. o God is an iconoclast (image/idol breakers): • A Grief Observed (from chapter 4) “My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?” • Letters to Malcolm (from chapter 15) “He must constantly work as the iconoclast. Every idea of Him we form, He must in mercy shatter. The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking ‘But I never knew before. I never dreamed...’” • A Grief Observed (from chapter 4) “Not my idea of God, but God.” “I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.” • The Business of Heaven “The prayer preceding all prayers is 'May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.’” o There are two sides of the equation here… § To encounter God as He really is… Hallowed… • And to approach Him as we really are… Honest… o But here we have a problem… for we do not know ourselves truly. § 76% of people consider themselves above average drivers. • We do not see ourselves rightly. • Letters to Malcolm (from chapter 15) “Only God Himself can let the bucket down to the depths in us.” • Letters to Malcolm (from chapter 4) “We are always completely, and therefore equally known to God. That is our destiny whether we like it or not. But though this knowledge never varies, the quality of our being known can.” “We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.” • Lewis calls this the “real nakedness of the soul in prayer” in The Screwtape Letters (Chapter 3): “Once… the man trusts himself to the completely real, external, invisible Presence, there with him in the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it—why, then it is that the incalculable may occur.” • Letters to Malcolm (from chapter 4) “We have unveiled. Not that any veil could have baffled His sight. The change is in us. The passive changes to the active. Instead of merely being known, we show, we tell, we offer ourselves to view.” “To put ourselves thus on a personal footing with God could, in itself and without warrant, be nothing but presumption and illusion. But we are taught that it is not; that it is God who gives us that footing. For it is by the Holy Spirit that we cry “Father”. By unveiling, by confessing our sins and “making known” our requests, we assume the high rank of persons before Him. And He, descending, becomes a Person to us.” • Reflections on the Psalms (from chapter 5, “The Fair Beauty of the Lord”) In the Psalmists’ prayers… “I find an experience fully God-centered, asking of God no gift more urgently than His presence, the gift of Himself, joyous to the highest degree, and unmistakably real.” “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” • The Kingdom of God is the “reign of God” o Psalm 103:19 “The Lord has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all.” § Range of his effective will. What he has “say” over. • We’re praying that the range of God’s effective will would extend and envelope the here and now. o There’s cause and effect here: § May your kingdom come, with the result that your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. • This world, hijacked by sin, Satan and death, so full of pain, suffering, injustice and tears… would be put to rights.
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