What is the most important thing you can say? If a person speaks twenty thousand words every day for eighty years, at the end of life he or she will have spoken 584 million words! We all know people who speak far less, and we all know people who surely speak over a billion words in their lifetime. Maybe you are married to one of those people, who knows? Or maybe one of those people owns a cell phone that you pay for, who knows? At any rate, it is a vital question. Out of all the words we say and the words we think and the words that are said to us, what are the most important words you can say?

Last week we began a quest that will take us this entire program year, a quest to learn from the example and teaching of Jesus just what it means to be a disciple, to be a person who is shaped according to the design that God desires for each of us. And we began with another question, the question of what is the most important question to ask. We learned from a question that was asked of Jesus, the question about what is the most important commandment. We learned the answer from Jesus, that the most important word from God, in a sense, the most important thing that God has to say to us is this: “Hear O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. And, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” We learned that our challenge is to keep this dual-sided word from God always uppermost in our minds and hearts as it forms the basis for our entire lives. This is what God has said to us. Now, what can we say back to God?

Surely, the words we say to God are the most important words that we can ever say, and for the major religions of the world, the things that we say to God have been formalized and propagated in the words of prayer. The Judaism into which Jesus was born and which formed the fertile soil from out of which his life and teaching grew, was a faith that very much believed in the power and importance of speaking the right words to God. The great rabbis of the Jewish tradition taught that prayer was “greater than all good works.” They had a saying that, “He who prays within his house surrounds it with a wall that is stronger than iron.” The prayers of Judaism had become highly formalized, with observant Jews being required to say the Shema, the “Hear O Israel” every morning when they rose and every evening when they retired. Additionally, they daily had to repeat the Shemoneh ‘esreh, which means “The Eighteen,” a series of eighteen prayers that were the heart of the synagogue service. There were also prayers written and used for all sorts of daily events, such as for before and after meals, for receiving good news, for marking the times of day and the seasons, even for the occasion of entering and leaving a city. And there were special times for prayer, as well, and eventually, special places, especially the synagogue. Prayer life for a good Jew of Jesus’ time was a highly developed exercise.ⁱ

Prayer—what they said to God—was very important to the Jews. And that is as it should be. But there were problems. As he preached to the disciples and taught them a new way of understanding God and living their lives in God’s present reality, he taught them about the corruption that is all-too-human in this business of prayer. Because there were prescribed times and prescribed types of prayer, some of the Jews made it a point to be in very public places at the required times, so they could be seen and heard practicing their devotion before God. And some of them, including some Gentile practitioners of other faiths, also made it a point to say as many words as they could in their prayers, in the belief that the more you said the more God paid attention. The disciples were aware of these problems, of the false piety, of the emptiness of words that for many people had lost their meaning. They were aware, as you and I are aware, of the problem of talking to God.

Yesterday morning, your elders and pastors were praying. We were on an overnight retreat at the Presbyterian Church down in Coronado. When we gathered for morning prayer in the sanctuary, we had a hard time concentrating. As soon as we started praying, the gardeners outside started up their lawn trimmers. After a while they stopped, and we had a few moments of silence in which to pray. And then the gardeners started up the lawnmowers! After a while the mowers stopped, and again we had silence. But then, someone’s cell phone went off! The worst thing of all: it was my cell phone. What we say to God, how we say it, when we say it, and most especially, the attitude with which we say it, all present huge problems to us. And Jesus knew about those problems. So, just as he had revealed to the Scribe what are the most important words from God to us, he revealed to the disciples—the ones back then and the ones right now, you and me—the essential words we need to say to God.

You have heard those words and you have said those words many times before. And just like the ancient Jews of Jesus’ day sometimes said their words with no feeling, no sense of meaning, and for no reason other than to complete a religious duty or to make someone think they were holy, you and I sometimes say the words that Jesus taught us to say with those same things present in our minds, because we have said the words so often.

Thomas Carlyle said, “Prayer is and remains always a native and deepest impulse of the soul of man.” Ralph Waldo Emerson said prayer is, “The contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view.” Israel Bettan said prayer is, “A direct approach to the throbbing heart of the universe. Thomas Fuller said prayer is, “The key of the day and the lock of the night.” And they are all right of course, but the best thing we can say about prayer is simply to learn the prayer that God’s Son told us was the way to pray. We call it The Lord’s Prayer but really it is our prayer, because he gave it to us, because we need to pray it, and we need to arrange all of our prayers around it.

Scot McKnight, in his book The Jesus Creed, which is serving as a rough outline and inspiration for our time together this year, says that The Lord’s Prayer is the prayerful expression of the great commandment, or the Jesus Creed. Jesus said that the most important word from God was that we are to love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves. The prayer that Jesus taught us is another form of expressing that same essential thought of loving God and loving each other. McKnight is not the first to point out that The Lord’s Prayer is the model prayer. Christians have known that from the beginning. But every generation needs to learn that fact all over again. So do you and I.

Look closely at the prayer itself. It’s in your Bibles, and it is printed twice in your bulletin. It begins with “Our Father in heaven.” That is the basis of the prayer because it is the basis of your life and mine. We have a loving Father in the eternal spiritual realm. We are privileged to be able to talk to him. That is a huge statement of faith right there: There is a God, this God loves us, and we can address him in our speech anytime we want.

When we start to pray, Jesus says that we simply say, “Hi, Dad. It’s me. Let’s talk!” And then we begin to talk. The first things we say are not about us though, they’re about him. The essential word we hear from God starts with a confession about God: Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with every fiber of your being. It is all about God. “Hallowed be your name.” God, you are the holy one, the one who is different from everyone else. “Your kingdom come.” God, your kingdom is what is most important to us, and we want it to prevail in our lives and in the whole world. “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” God, as much as we try to run the world ourselves, what we really want is for the world—and for our lives—to be run according to your plan.” When we talk about loving God, one way we can express that love is to honor God as God, to get over our stubborn pride and self-will, and submit to God’s will. That is love of God with heart, mind, soul, and strength.

But loving God is only part of the word we have from God. Loving neighbor as ourselves is part of it, too. So the prayer that Jesus taught is about our neighbors and ourselves. “Give us this day our daily bread.” God, we need you in our lives today, to give us what we need in order to live. We need it, and our neighbor needs it. “And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.” God, we need you to heal our lives from yesterday and we want to be part of that healing for our neighbor too. Yesterday, or maybe just ten minutes ago, we failed you and we failed someone we love, and maybe we failed someone we don’t even know. Please, forgive us. “And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.” God, we need you to heal the past, and we need you to provide for us in the present, and we also need you to guard and guide us in the future. There is evil in the world that would destroy us. We need you to fight it for us. Barclay points out that these last three parts of the prayer are not only about past, present, and future, but also about the Trinity. It is God the Father who provides daily sustenance, God the Son whose sacrifice makes possible our forgiveness from sin, and God the Spirit who provides the power to be delivered from the power of Satan.

We are spending an entire year here at the Village Church in focused attention on the single question of how it is that you and I are spiritually transformed, remade by God into the kind of people that God wanted us from the very beginning to be. What can be more important than finding and becoming what you were meant to be? The foundation of this spiritual formation is the love of God and the love of neighbor. That is what God said to us. And when we talk back to God, Jesus said that we are to talk about those very same topics: loving God and loving God’s people, including, by the way, ourselves. My neighbor needs God’s forgiveness, God’s provision, and God’s protection, and so do I. The prayer that Jesus taught us is not the only prayer, but it is the model prayer, the essential outline of every prayer, that you and I should pray to God. It is the standard by which all our subsequent prayers are to be judged. McKnight calls the Prayer a “gift of liturgy,” in other words, it is a sample from God that comes to us through Jesus and helps make sure that we are talking to God about the right things.

How many of you have ever gone to see your doctor and then forgotten to ask him something that you had been meaning to ask? Or how many of you have picked up the phone to make a long-distance call and then forgotten to relay the important news that was really the purpose of your call in the first place? And how many of you, when a conversation is long since over, all of a sudden think of what you wished you had said? We use thousands of words a day, and still we have a hard time communicating with each other. But friends, when we communicate with God, we want to make sure that we do the best job possible. We don’t want to leave anything out! And so God has reminded us what is important to him and to us.

I came across this little story last week. “The sign said honk if you love Jesus; so I honked, and a policeman arrested me for disturbing the peace in a quiet hospital zone. The sign said smile if you love Jesus; so I smiled all day long, and people thought I was a staff worker for Jimmy Carter. The sign said wave if you love Jesus; so I waved with both hands; and lost control of my car, and crashed into the back of a Baptist bus. Oh God—if I cannot honk or smile or wave, how will Jesus know that I love him?”ⁱⁱ If we truly want to love God and love our neighbor as ourselves, then we want to be able to show that love. One way we show it is by talking with God about that love, talking in a way that shows we know what we’re talking about! Honking and waving and smiling may be fine, but Jesus said, “Pray in this way.”

Someone once said that prayer is “thinking God’s thoughts after him.” I take that to mean that prayer isn’t so much our informing God about what needs to be done. God already knows. But when we pray, we are placing ourselves into God’s will and God’s power so that perhaps he can use us to do what he needs done. Frank Laubach once wrote that The Lord’s Prayer is the, “most used and least understood. People think they are asking God for something. They are not—they are offering God something. The Lord’s Prayer is not a prayer to God to do something we want done. It is more nearly God’s prayer to us, to help Him do what He wants done. He wanted that entire prayer answered before we prayed it. The Lord’s Prayer is not intercession. It is enlistment.”ⁱⁱⁱ

Last week I laid a challenge before you, a challenge to take your discipleship to Christ a step deeper by remembering and repeating at least once a day and preferably many times a day the most important word from God: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. And you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Today, I am going to add to that challenge. I am going to call you to go deeper still. Whether you have been praying this prayer all your life or you have just started to use it once again after many years of neglecting it or you are starting to pray it for the first time, I am going to challenge you to shape your prayers according to the form of Jesus’ prayer. I am going to challenge you to pray with heart, with soul, with mind, with strength, not like those who pray in order to impress others, not like those who pray with many words but little meaning, not like those who pray only when their backs are against a wall, not like those who pray without even hearing their own words. I am going to challenge you to pray as if you are speaking to the Founder of the Universe, to the Savior of your Soul, to the Power that energizes all things…because friends, that is who you are speaking to. Jesus has taught you the essential words you need to say. Say them often. Say them well.

Amen.

ⁱ See Barclay’s Commentary on Matthew, p. 191-8.
ⁱⁱ In John Maxwell, Communicator’s Commentary on Matthew, Word Publishing, Waco, Texas, p. 126.
ⁱⁱⁱ As quoted by Scot McKnight, The Jesus Creed.