Prayer: What Difference DoesIt Make?

The Practice of Prayer IIIMatthew 6:5-14

RECAP

• Lord’s Prayer Teaches Us:

– Private and God Centered– Intelligent– Not Mechanical but Thoughtful– God’s Glory; God’s Reign and God’s Will

Material Needs

• Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

– Some have spiritualized

– Luther: Includes everything necessary for the preservation of life

Material Needs

• Jesus is teaching conscious and prayerful dependence upon God for life’s daily necessities.

– He is wanting us to learn true, daily dependence

– He is wanting us to grow in intimacy with God.

Spiritual Needs

• v. 12– forgive us our “debts”

• Tetelestai– it is finished

• All of our sins are forgiven and the debt cleared at salvation

Spiritual Needs

• We must regularly confess sin

• We are constantly applying the gospel to our lives

• A person prays “that he himself may be constructed not that God may be instructed

Augustine

Spiritual Needs

• Jesus is talking about heart attitude, not a sequential process

• Matthew 18: 23-35

• The truly repentant forgives other sinners

Moral

• V. 13

• Why pray for this when God does not lead us into temptation?

• litotes (John 6:37)