Sermon Tone Analysis

Pre-Introduction:

At this time, we invite any children who desire to join my dear wife for a children’s service to follow her where you can hear a wonderful bible lesson and sing some uplifting songs about Jesus.

For those joining us online, you’re listening to the Services of the Broomfield Baptist Church.

This is the Pastor bringing the Sunday Morning message entitled "Therefore Pray Ye: Christ’s Pattern for Effective Prayer.”

We invite you to follow along with us in your Bible in the Book of Matthew, chapter six, and verses 9-15.

At the end of our time in the Bible, I’m going to ask that each of us have a time of prayer together.

Introduction:

[Start Low]

A. Get Attention- It’s amazing to even think that we can access the presence of God...

     Striking Statement-

IF you ask me why God should love us, I cannot tell.

I suppose it is because He is a true Father.

It is His nature to love; just as it is the nature of the sun to shine.

[D.

L. Moody, The D. L. Moody Year Book: A Living Daily Message from the Words of D. L. Moody, ed.

Emma Moody Fitt (East Northfield, MA: The Bookstore, 1900), 91.]

B. Raise Need- to make a difference by being different, if we never ask in faith, we will never see the hand of God moving in the affairs of our day.

Illustration-

The single greatest countercultural act Christians perform is to worship together and proclaim that Jesus is Lord.

To cease from the constant round of commerce and consumption, to resist the manipulation of media that insists that working and possessing [define] worth, and to proclaim with the body language of communal gathering that Jesus, not any other power, is Lord is to enact the politics of God’s kingdom and to embody the prayer “your kingdom come.”[4

Johnson, Prophetic Jesus, 124.] [Jeannine K. Brown, Matthew, ed.

Mark L. Strauss and John H. Walton, Teach the Text Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2015), 68.]

C. State Purpose- to teach our church to be a praying church, together

D. Orient Theme- staying with the pattern, so we protect the integrity of the product of our prayers

Main Thought:

Jesus’ instruction to His disciples provided a pattern for corporate prayer helps us maintain a proper course for effective communication with God.

Prayer ought to produce change, foremost in us.

Sub-introduction:

Context - Alms, Private Prayer, now Corporate Prayer

Body:

I. Addressing Our Father (Matt.

6:9-10)

[Go Slow]

   A.

The Pattern for Our Praying (Matt.

6:9a)

     Jesus said to pray “after this manner” not “according to this formula”

Illustration:

Food: Some flavors are unmistakable, defining entire kinds of food.

For instance, tomato, basil, and garlic might make you think of your favorite Italian restaurant.

Cilantro, onion, tomato, and jalapeño are essential for a great salsa.

And the smell of white rice, ginger, and tuna makes any true sushi lover’s mouth water.

Our prayer life, Jesus teaches, should be defined by a longing for and focus on the kingdom’s arrival.

It is the essential ingredient of the church’s life of prayer.

[Jeannine K. Brown, Matthew, ed.

Mark L. Strauss and John H. Walton, Teach the Text Commentary Series (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 2015), 69.]

   B.

The Person to Whom We Pray (Matt.

6:9b)

Application:

Our Father.

There is one thing more pitiable, almost worse than even cold, black, miserable atheism.

To kneel down and say, “Our Father,” and then to get up and live an orphaned life.

To stand and say, “I believe in God the Father Almighty,” and then to go fretting and fearing, saying with a thousand tongues, “I believe in the love of God!—but it is only in heaven.

I believe in the power of God!—but it stoppeth short at the stars.

I believe in the providence of God!—but it is limited to the saints in Scripture.

I believe that ‘the Lord reigneth’—only with reference to some far-off time with which we have nothing to do.”

That is more insulting to our heavenly Father, more harmful to the world, more cheating to ourselves, than to have no God at all.

~mark guy pearse.

[D.

L. Moody, One Thousand and One Thoughts from My Library (New York; Chicago; Toronto: Fleming H. Revell, 1898), 170–171.]

1. God’s Transcendence

Explanation:

The addition of “in heaven” tells of God’s transcendence and sovereign power (it is found twenty times in Matthew with “Father” and only in Mark 11:25 elsewhere in the Synoptics), so “Father in heaven” means that Almighty God, the omnipotent One, who dwells in heavenly splendor and power, cares deeply for our needs.

[Grant R. Osborne, Matthew, vol. 1, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 228.]

2. God’s Holiness

Explanation:

The first God-oriented petition is that the sacredness of God’s name be magnified in every area of life.

In the ancient world a person’s name bespoke the very essence of the person (see on 1:21), so God’s name tells who he is at the core of his being.

Since holiness is at the heart of the divine character, that must be made evident in everything the disciple does.

[Grant R. Osborne, Matthew, vol. 1, Zondervan Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 228.]

Illustration:

There is an old Roman story which tells how a Roman emperor was enjoying a triumph.

He had the privilege, which Rome gave to her great victors, of marching his troops through the streets of Rome, with all his captured trophies and his prisoners in his train.

So the emperor was on the march with his troops.

The streets were lined with cheering people.

The tall legionaries lined the streets’ edges to keep the people in their places.

At one point on the triumphal route, there was a little platform where the empress and her family were sitting to watch the emperor go by in all the pride of his triumph.

On the platform with his mother, there was the emperor’s youngest son, a little boy.

As the emperor came near, the little boy jumped off the platform, burrowed through the crowd and tried to dodge between the legs of a legionary and to run out on to the road to meet his father’s chariot.

The legionary stooped down and stopped him.

He swung him up in his arms: ‘You can’t do that, boy,’ he said.

‘Don’t you know who that is in the chariot?

That’s the emperor.

You can’t run out to his chariot.’

And the little boy laughed down.

‘He may be your emperor,’ he said, ‘but he’s my father.’

That is exactly the way the Christian feels towards God.

The might, and the majesty, and the power are the might, and the majesty, and the power of one whom Jesus taught us to call Our Father.

...He can be sure of the love of God.

We do not believe in a mocking and a capricious God, or in a blind and iron determinism.

Thomas Hardy finishes his novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles with the grim words: ‘The President of the Immortals had ended his sport with Tess.’

We believe in a God whose name is love.

As J. G. Whittier’s hymn has it:

I know not where His islands lift

Their fronded palms in air.

I only know I cannot drift

Beyond His love and care.

As Robert Browning triumphantly declared his faith in lines from ‘Paracelsus’:

God, Thou art love!

I build my faith on that …