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Okay, I want you to get to Luke chapter 11. So get there in your Bibles or get there in your Bible apps. And as you're turning there, I I want to ask you a question to start today. And I want you to think about this question. Like seriously think what your answer would be. If you could ask Jesus, if you could ask Jesus to teach you just one thing, not three things, not five things, but if you could ask Jesus to teach you just one thing, what would it be? Now you think about all the things that Jesus did. I mean, Jesus did an incredible job teaching. It says when he taught, that the people said, Man, he's one who teaches with power, and this says that they were amazed. Man, I would love to ask Jesus, how do you teach like that? Right? You might be like, Jesus, teach me how to forgive. You talked about forgiving. You talked about turning the other cheek. You also did some pretty incredible miracles. Some of you are probably like, Teach me to walk on water. That would be pretty cool. Right? He healed people. He did all of all the things that you see that Jesus did. If you could ask for him to teach you one thing, what would it be? Well, interesting enough, the disciples were with him for three years. And the disciples had that opportunity and they took that opportunity. And remember, the disciples were with him in all of his ministry, so they were able to see everything when he fed the 5,000, when he healed the sick, when he raised those who had passed away, when he healed the blind and the lame. All the things Jesus did, you know that they only asked him to teach them one thing. You know what it was? They asked him to teach them to pray. Of all the things that they could have asked, they only asked him to teach them one thing, and that was to pray. And why? Well, because when they watched Jesus and they observed his ministry, prayer was not something that Jesus did in an emergency situation. And then when the emergency passed, like he stopped praying. Sound familiar? It was not plan B, it was not the backup plan, it was not. Prayer was like oxygen to his soul. Even Jesus, who was God, who was fully man and fully God, still needed to pray. The disciples observed that before every big decision, before every big miracle, before every big moment that mattered that directed his ministry, what did he do? He got away and he prayed. Now, what's interesting is every single one of us have the natural inclination to pray. Like you know that when you get in a bind, what do you do first? Before you call family, before you probably shoot up a prayer and say, God, you gotta help me in this. Like we have this natural inclination to turn to pray. Everybody prays. Think about it, Christians pray, Muslims pray, Hindus pray, Buddhists pray, Mormons pray, even studies say that atheists and agnostics admit to praying often. Like everybody prays. So why is it when we have such a natural inclination to pray, why do we also struggle with it? About four years ago, I was standing in my kitchen, and my 16-year-old now, who was 12-year-old, 12-year-old then, we were standing there in our kitchen, it was July 4th. We had about 20 people in the kitchen. We were done with the barbecue, we were ready to eat, and somebody turned as we were all gathered around, and they looked at my 12-year-old and they said, Hey, would you like to pray? Jake looked back at them with like this look of horror in his eyes of like, this 20 people feels like 2,000 people, and you're asking me to pray. You felt that feeling before. And then for some reason, Jake just bowed his head. He said, Okay, he bowed his head, and literally in two lines and less than eight seconds, he was done. Like two lines, less than eight seconds, he was done. He said, Amen, and he looked up and he immediately turned his gaze to me and he looked at me, and I didn't think that I gave him like anything, like just not like, hey, that was short. I didn't think I gave him any look, but he looked at me and he goes, What? And I was like, uh, now I'm nervous. I was like, what, what? And uh, and he immediately responds and he says, Well, last week Matt in his sermon said to keep it short, so I kept it short. In Matthew chapter 6, verse 7, Matt, our campus pastor, who was teaching that day at another church that I was in, he said this. It said, Jesus said, And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like the pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. So Jake kept it short. Now here's the thing the reality is he probably didn't keep it short because Scripture said so, or Matt said so. He probably kept it short because while the inclination to pray is natural, knowing what to say when we pray is not always natural. You ever struggled with that? Well, today, Luke chapter 11, Jesus is gonna teach us. We're gonna let him teach us what we do and what we say when we pray. But before we get there, let me answer two questions. What is prayer? Brother Lawrence, 17th century monk, a lot of writing, said in one of his books, he said, prayer is simply keeping company with God. If you want to connect your heart with God's heart, Shane talked about the Bible. The Bible shares God's plan with us. The Bible is God's love letter to us, helps us understand who He is and what His plan and His purpose is for our life. But you take the Bible and you must connect it with the Holy Spirit and you must connect it with prayer. Prayer is keeping company with God, it is the thing that connects our heart in relationship with God's heart. Now, why pray? Well, it is a connection with God, but it's also, as Mark Batterson said, and the disciples observed. Mark Batterson said this prayer is the difference between what you can do and what God can do. You see, what the disciples observed is when you, when they looked at Jesus, you want to find peace. They're looking and saying, Man, he's finding peace and he's finding power, and there are some results from this. Prayer is the difference between what you can do and what God can do. And if the guys who followed Jesus the closest felt like prayer was the oxygen to Jesus' ministry, then it should it not be the same for our lives? Luke chapter 11 and Matthew chapter six. They contain the same thing. In Matthew chapter six, it contains what's called the Lord's Prayer. And actually, it's contained within the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is teaching a crowd to pray, and he says, When you pray, say this. And this is the Lord's Prayer. And in Matthew chapter six, it's the extended version that if you've ever memorized the Lord's Prayer, it's probably what you memorized. Luke chapter 11 is a little different. Luke chapter 11 is when the disciples sat down with Jesus and said, Jesus, teach us to pray. Teach us to pray. And what Jesus gives them is the cliff notes version of the Matthew chapter 6 Lord's Prayer. Let me read for you. Luke chapter 11, starting in verse 1, here's what it says. It says, One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. So the disciples were observing him praying as he always did. For every big decision, every big miracle, every big moment that mattered, Jesus got away and he prayed. It happens so often in Scripture, and they're observing again Jesus' praying. When he finished, one of the disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples, meaning John the Baptist and his disciples. He said to them, When you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, give us each day your daily bread, our daily bread, forgive us our sins as we forgive everyone who sins against us, and lead us not into temptation. Now, what's really interesting about this version of that prayer is as you read it, you get this feeling of this is not something that Jesus is saying, hey, memorize this and recite this every time you pray. What Jesus is saying is this this is a framework. These are the five ideas that Jesus says when you pray, these are the five ideas that will help you know what to say when you pray to your heavenly father. So let's go through the five ideas and let's let Jesus teach us. Here's what he says: he says, start off with your father. Start with your father, which what Jesus is saying in this moment is he's saying, Hey, you know what would be a good idea if you would actually remind yourself who you're talking to, which I think is really important because we don't always remind ourselves of how big and how amazing this God is. This this might out me a little bit, my my taste in comedy, but if you've ever seen Will Farrell's movie Talladega Nights, you know what I'm talking about. There's the moment where they're sitting at the table and he's getting ready to say grace. His wife's sitting on the other end, and you're talking redneck NASCAR family, and and they're sitting there and he says, Okay, bow your heads, we're gonna say grace. And he says, Dear infant baby Jesus. And his wife looks at him and she's like, He's not an infant anymore. He's like, I like the infant version of Jesus. And then he says, What? Dear eight pound, eight pound, six-ounce infant baby Jesus. And Jesus is like, No. Could you just start off by reminding yourself, this is your father? And you know who your father is? He is the one who hung a hundred billion galaxies in the sky. He's the one who placed billions of stars in every single one of those galaxies, and he's the one who knows every name of every star he created, and he knows how many hairs are on your head. Your head, not my head. And he calls you his child. That's your father. Do you know before Jesus nobody prayed that way to God? Like the Jewish people in that day, the Israelites, they they didn't pray that way. What they did is they saw him as the father of their nation. Right? Which he was. But nobody prayed to him personally and called them their father. Yet Jesus, every single time Jesus prayed, every single time Jesus prayed in Scripture, he refers to God as you, as his father. Why? Because God wasn't some dissent judge, some dissent authority figure. What Jesus was recognizing was that he was a good father, that he was the good father that created all of this, that created you, created all that we see, the a hundred billion galaxies with all the stars and everything, so that we would believe that there is something out there that created us. Start with that, our father. And then he says, say, hallowed be thy name. Do you say hallowed be thy name? That would be a little weird. No, holy. That word means holy is your name. What Jesus is saying is we remind ourselves who God is. We start with our Father. It's personal, it's connection between him and between us. And then we praise him. We start with praise. Not not praise reminding God who he is. It's not not for God doesn't need to be reminded. We need to be reminded who he is. And I'll be a little vulnerable and honest. I remember even just early on and being younger and even not just younger, but it seems like the one place that I struggle more often than any other in prayer is praise. And if you think about it, like for you and for me, I would, I think we're pretty natural at telling God what we want. You know? We're pretty natural at even praying for somebody else and what they need. But when it comes to praising God for who he is and reminding ourselves who he is, it's not quite as natural, which is really weird because I praise my family all the time. I tell my wife and my kids who they are and what they've done. I praise them by saying, Here's who you are and here's what you've done, and I'm so grateful for that. My coworkers, my friends, my who that's natural to me. And God's saying what scripture says and what Jesus is saying, it's that simple. Like what do we say when we praise God? We simply start off and we say, Father, you are. Fill in the blank. You're a good father, a merciful father, a gracious father. You are, as the Psalms say, you are our rock. You are our redeemer. One of the best things that has helped me understand how to praise God is praying and reading through the Psalms. Reading the Psalms and praying what David prayed in the Psalms because that's what it is. It's praise, it's song, it's praise to God our Father. What do we say? We say, Father, you are, and then we say, Father, you did. Fill in the blank. Father, you forgave. Father, you showed up in that situation this last week. I was praying for wisdom and you showed up, and I something happened there that I just couldn't have made happen myself. Father, you are my good father, and Father, you have done. And you fill in that blank, and we just praise God for who he is and what he's done in our life. And here's what begins to happen. When you begin to praise God and remind yourself that he is a good father that has the power to put a hundred million galaxies out there with all those stars, it changes the way you pray. And when you realize, as Jesus is saying, is not only is he that powerful of a father, but he's a good father that is good to you. And as Jesus says, he is always with you, man, that changes things. You see, we start with our father. And when we start with our father, then what it does is it begins to realign our heart to be wrapped around the next portion of a prayer. We start with our father, and then we align ourselves with his agenda. We align with his agenda because a lot of us misunderstand prayer, and what we think about prayer is we think it's this idea of getting God aligned with our agenda. No, it's getting us aligned with God's agenda. Our Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Whose kingdom? Not our kingdom, but his kingdom. And that idea is getting us in line with his agenda. Did you know in scripture that there are actually four different prayers that are mentioned that God will always answer if you pray them? That would be good to know, right? Because there's a lot of things, one of the biggest things we struggle with in prayer is unanswered prayer. If there are four prayers in scripture that God says, Hey, I will answer these if you pray them, then what are they? I'll give them to you. God says, I will always answer the prayer for wisdom if you ask it. James chapter one. He says, I will always give you a way out of temptation. Says it multiple times in the New Testament, if you ask for it. He says that I will always give you more opportunities to impact people and share your faith if you ask for it. And probably the most important one, he says, I will give you more of the Holy Spirit, meaning God's Spirit, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, God's Spirit that dwells within us when we place our faith in Jesus. Ask him to be the forgiver and leader of our life. God gives his Holy Spirit that dwells in us. Our heart becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit, the Bible says. He says he will always answer that prayer and give you more of the Holy Spirit if you will ask it. And if you just look back over your prayers over the last week or month, whose agenda are you praying for? John chapter 14, verse 14, Jesus promises and he says, I will give you everything you need to accomplish everything I want you to do. And he says it this way He says, if you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. What does in my name mean? In line with my agenda. Now we should start praying prayers like that. 2007, I was in Kenya. I was with a guy named Kip Lines. Kip Lines is the leader and director of CMF, Christian Missionary Fellowship. And at that time, he was a missionary in the northwest corner of Kenya. It's up in the bush, it's barren, it's desert. And in that time frame, um, the year before, there had been a massive drought. Like they got to the monsoon season and there was no rain. Like there's no rain, and it was, and they knew if there was no rain in the monsoon season, meant animals were gonna die, people were gonna die, it was gonna be terrible. The chief of the village that was next to where he lived had a relationship with them, they were working with them, brought the elders of the village, came to Kip and said, We've been praying to your God, and he's not providing rain. So here's what we're going to do we're going to go to the witch doctors. Your God's not providing, he's not powerful enough to give us rain right now. So we are going to leave it, and we are going to the witch doctors, and here's what had been happening with the witch doctors. The witch doctors hated that Kip and Katie were there. Hated that they were bringing the gospel of these people. And so what they would do is at night, when they were sleeping, they would climb over the walls of their compound, and Kip would wake up, and Katie would wake up, they would go out on the porch, and there would be trinkets hanging from their porch. That not freak you out? From their trees and all that, and what they were is they were sneaking into their compound and they were praying and placing, placing curses over them and their family. So Kip looks at them. He begs these guys, do not go to the witch doctors. And they just finally said, the chief looked at him and said, No, your God's not working. We're going to the witch doctors. And the Holy Spirit, Kip said, I felt the Holy Spirit saying to me, Tell them to give you 24 hours. So he grabs, reaches out, and he grabs the elbow of the chief and he said, Just give me 24 hours and I'll pray. If rain does not come, you can go to the witch doctors. Kip said he gathered his family, they left, he gathered his family, they got on their knees, they began to pray, and he said, We prayed this prayer. We prayed that God would send rain so that they would know that he was the all-powerful God. And he said, We prayed for a few hours, and then all of a sudden clouds started forming, and he said, Sean, it flooded. It didn't rain, it flooded. And they came back the next day, and it was the chief, and it was the elders, and it was all 80 people, the village. And he said, We've baptized 80 people in the flood waters of that rain. Guys, there's no limit to the power that God will give if you pray in line with his agenda. Do not hear me wrong. Sometimes there are moments when we want to pray and we think, God, your agenda, it's gotta be in line with mine. And sometimes we pray some hard, deep prayers about healing. And we're like, why is this not being answered? Because this has to be. God, you're the healer. This has, man, there are some difficult prayers that do not get answered. And I don't even know if I've got a great answer for that. But what I do know is we have a good God that promises to be with us in the worst of situations and still be good to us, even if we can't understand why He does not always answer the way that we want him to answer. But I would say this if you want more answers to your prayers, dads, just talk to the guys for a second. Dads, men, husbands, you want more answers to your prayers. Why don't you shift your prayers? We should shift our prayers from being what we want to praying God's agenda over our family. God, would you give me more wisdom to raise my boys? God, would you give me the the ability to resist temptation and to stand up and to remind me to get on that phone or to send that text to tell my friend or my accountability partner, if you don't have one of those, you should get in a group and do that. And say, Man, I'm I'm struggling right now. Would you pray for me? God, would you give me more opportunity with my family who does not know Jesus to actually share with them, would you help me know what to say and how to say it and the heart in which to say it to them? You see, what Jesus says is he says, I will answer prayers if you pray in line with my agenda. He says, start with your father and then align with his agenda, and then he says, Then you're ready to start asking for your needs. Jesus says, Trust me for your needs. Mark Moore says this. He says, pray for your daily bread. Now they didn't have like Costco back then where you load it up and put stuff in the freezer and all that. No, they bought their daily bread every single day. He says, What you're talking about here is not about wants, it's talking about needs. And he's saying, when we pray for what we want, we're talking about too small of prayers because it's self-focused. When we start praying about what we need, that's when God's ears perk up. He says, in God's eyes, focusing on your prayers on what you want is asking too little because it's self-focused. And we got a whole lot of self-focused prayers, don't we? God give me the promotion so I get the raise, so I can get the bigger house, so I can get the bigger garage to put the new car in. And while you're at it, it'd be great if you gave my husband six pack of abs, because that'd be fun to look at, right? Jesus is shifting the perspective. He's saying, Wrong prayer. Here's what I want. Right prayer. God, give me what I need to follow you well. James 4, verse 3 says, When you ask, you do not receive because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures. So instead of praying, God, give me more, what if we started praying? Mark Moore says, what if we started praying this prayer? God, give me what I need to honor you in this situation. As a leader, as a spouse, as a parent, in my finances, in my relationship, God will always provide what you need to do what he's called you to actually do. We start with our Father, we align with his agenda, then we trust him with our needs. And then here's where prayer gets hard. Let me just be honest with you. The next topic that Jesus gives, this is where some of us we just shrink back because what he talks about here is removing relational barriers. What Jesus says is he says, say, forgive us as we forgive others. And some of you are like, I was all good till now. Forgiveness is one of the hardest things. But what God says, what Jesus is saying is lack of forgiveness doesn't just create distance and barrier between you and another person. What it does is it creates a distance and barrier between you and God. He even says that if you come to the altar or you come to the Lord's Supper, or you come to worship and you have something against someone else, go settle that. Go deal with that and come back so you can worship your Heavenly Father. And some of you sit there today and say, You don't know what that person did. I don't. But I know story after story of people who have been so hurt by people so unfairly. What you need to know is you have a good God that wants to answer the prayer. God, help me forgive them. And the reason he wants to answer that prayer, as hard as it might be to pray, is because he doesn't want to free them. Lack of forgiveness is the one that puts us in a prison of our own bitterness. And what Jesus says is, what you say here, what you say here is just simple. What we do is we say, Father, I forgive, place a name, and then you say, you name it what they did. I forgive them for. Now some of you are sitting there today saying, I can't say that prayer. I get it. That's a reality. And I don't blame you. But if you want to be free, you've got to get to that prayer. And so if you cannot pray that prayer, what you pray is you say, Father, help me want to forgive. Help me want to forgive. And if you don't want to forgive, then here's what you pray. You say, Father, thank you for forgiving me. You remind yourself that the reason that Jesus hung on a cross, was crucified and nailed to a cross that bled out his blood, the reason he bled out was that so his blood could be the penalty, pay the penalty for your sin, so that like the Old Testament says, your sins could be washed whiter than what? Snow. What we pray is, Father, thank you for forgiving me. Holy Spirit, change my heart and help me be able to forgive. And you have a good God who wants to forgive you. And he also wants to help you forgive other people. We start with our Father. We align with his agenda. We trust him with our needs. We remove the relational barriers. And this one's a little bit easier. We remove spiritual barriers. Just like lack of forgiveness creates a distance between us and God, so does sin. Our own personal sin. It creates distance, and we know that. And it's not because God looks at us and is ashamed and says and walks away. No, he's a good father. Some of you say, I don't even like talking about God as my father. You just imagine him as the father that you always needed and wanted. He's the upgrade from what you had. And what he looks at is he's always open-armed trying to pull you back. But just as we, just as when we do something wrong, sometimes we're ashamed to look at other people that we sinned against. What we have this tendency to do is we sin against God, and what we do is we're embarrassed and we're we're guilty and we feel that guilt and we turn and we begin to walk away. When you're in the middle of habitual sin, you don't have this urge to pray. Until life blows up, and then you're like, God, would you please forgive me? You see, what Jesus is saying in this moment, he's saying, if you want to get rid of the distance between you and God, then what you do is you ask for forgiveness of your own sin. And what God wants to do, that's that's why he sent Jesus, because while there's a barrier between us and God because of our sin, Jesus is the barrier breaker. And as I said, he went to the cross to pay for our sins. 2 Corinthians 5.21 says God who made, God made him, Jesus, who had no sin, lived a perfect life to become sin for us, to take on our sin. Do you know on the cross he took on all the sin, everyone in this room, every campus we have, every person listening to this, every person in the world, he took on the sin of everyone and died for it once and for all. And if you grew up in a denomination or a church background that says, man, you better make sure every single day that you pray for forgiveness for every single sin, you miss it. Jesus doesn't have to die over and over and over again. He died once. And Hebrews says he is the mediator between God and man and paid for it once and for all. And when we ask, our sins are forgiven. Now, should we ask for forgiveness when we know we've sinned? Yes, we should. Because our sin weighs us down, and the act of cleansing, God cleansing us and us naming it, it lifts the weight of sin off of us, knowing we have a good Father who loves us, who wants to bring us back. You see, what we do with prayer in asking forgiveness, we just simply name it. We say, God, here's we name the habits or or the decisions or the attitudes that we've had. We name them for God, before God. We acknowledge Jesus and that he died for those, and then we just ask for simply for him, we thank him for covering our sins and we ask forgiveness. And Jesus says he freely, that's part of a repentance, and repentance comes with a promise of forgiveness. If you've never asked for Jesus to forgive your sins and be the leader of your life, you should do that today. It's simply just praying and saying, Jesus, I believe in you, I believe that you died and rose again, I believe you are God and you're the forgive. I want you to be the forgiver of my sins. Would you forgive and cleanse me? It's as simple as that. And then what you do, people who prayed and asked for forgiveness and placed their faith in Jesus were baptized into the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, baptized as Romans 6 says, into death, just as Jesus was. The picture of the death, the burial, and the resurrection into new life, clean and forgiven of sin. You see, prayer. Why pray? Prayer is simply communion with God. Prayer is the difference between what you can do, you can't get rid of your sin, and between what God can do, cleanse you and set you on purpose into this world for a greater purpose in life. That's why we pray. And if the disciples who followed Jesus around for three years asked him to teach them only one thing, man, maybe we should ask him to teach us that thing too.