Sermons Christ Community Church: Daytona Beach, FL

In the Lord's Prayer Jesus tells us that we are to pray like this,

In the Lord's Prayer, Christ also deals with our need for forgiveness. The issue of forgiveness isn't just about the judgment of God after this life, it's about your relationship with God in this life. For that reason Jesus tells us that forgiveness is absolutely essential.

Whatever God is calling you to do in life, you can't do it without certain necessities. If you look at Jesus' life you see plenty of evidence that he knows about the little necessities of life and cares about them. Christ knows that we have groceries to buy, clothing, housing, school bills and health care and he wants us to bring all these needs to him in prayer.

In the Christian life we must fight to keep a relationship with God based on the merits of Christ, not our own. We can often substitute God's grace for moralism, or religious performance. In this sermon Saul Seibert reminds us that as Christians, we've been redeemed from the debt that sin incurred through Christ’s work on the cross. Therefore we must resist the lure of legalism by continually re-orientating ourselves to the gospel.

Dr. Coffield would like to suggest that a more fitting title for the story of the prodigal son would be "The Prodigal God". The word prodigal means lavish, extravagant and "over the top". The person who appears to take over the story with their lavish and extravagant behavior is not the son, but the father. This story, in the midst of that culture would have broken many social norms, but the father's love went beyond that.

Sometimes there is a difference between what we most want to learn and what we most need to learn. We want to learn how to get things from God, but what Jesus shows us is that what we need the most is to get our will and wants into harmony with God. Jesus says we should say to God,

People come to prayer with their hearts brittle from the burdens and busyness of life. Jesus says to remember to pray about the most important things. Order the priorities of your inner life, so that God can meet you at the level of your greatest needs. When you pray for God's kingdom to come, you are praying that this God who is good and gracious would rule and reign on the earth and in the hearts of men.

Perhaps we have forgotten that pain is a part of life, that we live in a fallen world, that daily annoyances are no surprise to God and should not be a surprise to us as Christians. Maybe you're fighting to recover some joy in your life. But choosing joy isn't simply slapping a silly grin on your face. True joy goes much deeper that any facial expression. It's a deep river that runs through our hearts.

Part of what is so interesting in this prayer that Jesus gives us to teach us how to pray is that he leads us in a completely different, counter-intuitive and uniquely Christian direction. He tells us that when we start to pray we should begin, not with our needs but with God's name.

In a culture in which is so easy to lose your soul, to throw it away, what Jesus gives us in the Lord's prayer is not only a way to pray but a way to find our souls, to find life and to live it. Now, before Jesus teaches us this prayer it seems there is at least one thing he wants us to get straight first. Before we pray we have to understand the heartbeat of prayer is the Fatherhood of God.