If we are honest, a simple reading of the book of Genesis shows that the Bible pulls no punches and glosses over nothing. These are not a bunch of pious stories; this is real life! Why be so honest and graphic? Mostly God tells us these stories because the real hero of Genesis is God!
There are lots of pivotal people who seem heroes on one day, goats the next. Sometimes good people do bad things and bad people do good things. It shows that God, the real hero, is working with real, flesh and blood people in a real, sin-filled world. If there is one moral of the story of the second half of Genesis, it is that: if God can be with them, God can be with us!
Scripture: Genesis 23-50

As we’ve been studying the Lord’s Prayer, we’ve learned that the context in which we pray is to our Father in heaven – God’s intimate relationship with us, tempered by the fact that he is the sovereign king. It means that God wants to listen and act on our behalf as Father, but he also has all the power to deliver what we need. Because of who he is, we pray committing ourselves to honor or sanctify his name by our thoughts, words and actions. Those actions, in particular, come out in the next two petitions of the Lord’s Prayer: "your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
Scripture: Matthew 6:10

We have seen how God created us to be in community with him, but we then broke community in our sin. Then came the tower of Babel incident. Has God now lost patience? Is his dream of community broken beyond repair? Genesis 12 tells us that God still has plans for his children, and it starts with one man: Abraham. God calls him into covenant, a binding relationship between two partners. Often in relationships comes a time when we define the relationship. We ask: What are we doing? Where is this going? Are we committed? Let’s look at Abraham’s life and the four dramatic encounters he had with God that kept defining the relationship.
Scripture: Genesis 12-22

The Lord’s Prayer is one in which Jesus stresses the most important things to pray, the essence of our communication with God. He teaches us is to pray to “Our Father,” a reminder of our intimate relationship with God, as well as his promise to care for us as children. Now we turn to a promise of our own: “hallowed be your name” Do we need to make God’s name holy? NO, it already is holy! Then what does Jesus mean by this phrase? What “promise” are we making?
Scripture: Matthew 6:9

Last week, we saw that God created the world as a place where he could be in community with us. But next we will look at Community Busters; we’ll survey four scenes in Genesis 3-11 that chart the downward spiral of sin and God’s response to it.
Scripture: Genesis 3-11

As we noted last week, the Disciples’ Prayer (aka Lord’s Prayer) is very Jewish. So to better understand how and what Jesus is teaching us to pray, we need to explore some of these Jewish aspects. It starts with the opening, which in Hebrew would be: Avinu shebashamayim (our Father in the heavens). The disciples ask: “Lord, teach us HOW to pray.” In the opening address, Jesus already is teaching how; but how we pray depends on to whom we are praying.
Scripture: Matthew 6:5-15; 7:7-11

Over the course of the new church year, we will spend our evenings in the Old Testament, the Bible Jesus read and quoted, and which points to him.  We begin with the first words spoken and written in the Bible: "In the beginning God" - a transcendent, all powerful, eternal, personal being - "created the heavens and the earth".  And the world has never been the same.  These words, the whole Bible, are God's great gift to us.  But they lead us to ask some basic questions: who is God?  Why creation?  What's His relation to us?

Scripture: Genesis 1-2

One day Jesus' disciples asked: "Lord, teach us to pray."  What are they asking?  How does Jesus answer?  We will explore this over the next several weeks in a series on the Lord's Prayer, focusing in particular on what we can learn from the Jewish background of this prayer.

Scripture: Luke 11:1-3; Matthew 6:5-15

Artist: Rev. George Vink