All right, so tonight we are continuing our study of the Lord's Prayer. This is the third installment of our look at the Lord's Prayer, and tonight we're going to consider the third and the fourth petitions of the Lord's Prayer. So in preparation, go ahead and turn your Bibles to Matthew 6. We're going to be considering that gospel's version of the Lord's Prayer. And last time we considered the first two petitions, and now tonight we're going to look at third and fourth. So the lesson tonight is going to be under two headings, and the first one is this, praying for God's will. Very simply, praying for God's will. And we're going to look under this heading at question 111. So take your catechisms and look at question 111, and let's answer together, okay? Question 111. What do we pray for in the third petition? And we answer in the third petition, which is your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. We pray that God by his grace would make us able and willing to know, obey and submit to his will in all things as the angels do in heaven. So let's consider this third petition. You remember when you were young, maybe you ran across these books. Remember those choose your own adventure books? You guys ever read those books? Really fun. So basically, you'd be reading through a chapter, and when you get to the end of the chapter, if you wanted the hero to make this decision, you'd turn to page 79. If you wanted to make a different decision, you'd turn to page 112. And you'd go through each chapter, making decisions, and it would give you a particular ending. And what I would do is if I didn't like that ending, I'd go back to chapter three and make a different decision, and it would have a ripple all throughout the story, and I'd come to an alternative ending. Well, the idea was that the author was not in control. The reader was in control. And I think that that's how most people think they live their lives out as well. They think that they're in control and there's not a narrator or an author who's in control. And don't get me wrong. We have free will, um, in a very specific sense. Uh, we have free will in the sense that we can do whatever lies within our nature, but I can't do something that lies outside of my nature. But we do have free will and we do make decisions, there's no doubt about that. Free will only goes so far, right? Free will doesn't control the accidents that happen around you, the natural disasters, the stock market or illnesses. And furthermore, when you get to really thinking about free will and you like open the Bible to Romans chapter 7, you read how Paul talks about his will, what do you hear him say there? He says, the things I want to do, I what? Don't do. And the things I don't want to do, dagnabbit, I just keep doing them. And so even when we think about our will, which once again defined as doing that which lies within our nature, we don't often do the things that we want to do. Well, the Bible presents a very different narrative from the choose your own adventure model. It presents all of life, as we know, under the sovereign reign and rule of God. And because he is in control of all things, Not only what shall happen, but what should happen. Jesus instructs us in this third petition to pray in such a way. And this is very important that God make us able and willing to submit to that will, no matter what it is, no matter what it is. I want you to consider three things under this heading praying for God's will. The first one is this. We pray for obedience to his revealed will and submission to a secret will. We pray for obedience to his revealed will and submission to his secret will. Now, remember last time we visited this notion that God had if you could talk about two wills within the will of God or two wills within the providence of God. Does anybody remember what book, chapter and verse we went to to talk about that for bonus points? Jesus's favorite book, he quoted it more than any other book in the New Testament, huh? Deuteronomy 29.29 What does it say? The secret things of the Lord are His, but the things that He reveals are for us and our children. That is the proof text, if you will, for understanding that some things are part of God's secret will, and there are other things that are part of his revealed will. Another way to think about that is his revealed will is what should happen, okay? All the 10 commandments. His secret will is what is going to happen, right? So 9-11, God did not command that that should happen. In fact, what happened on 9-11 was a violation of God's revealed will. But was God in control of it? Absolutely. I know sometimes it's hard for people to conceive of that, but God was in control of everything that happened to Job. He was sovereignly in control. He's not the author of sin, but he sovereignly superintends all things that happen, and that is his secret will. So this petition is closely related to the previous petition that we just looked at, or last week, your kingdom come. God's kingdom would come is mirrored by your will be done. So we ask for his kingdom to come and his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. So the new heavens and the new earth is the kingdom of God and where God's revealed will permeates all of existence. So God's revealed will, how things ought to be is how the eschaton, the new heavens and the new earth, heaven is going to be. It's going to permeate every molecule of creation. But until his revealed will is, until then, his revealed will is the modus operandi of all people. We live in the penultimate age, that means the second to last age, where God is bringing about his secret will through providence, okay? This is to be contrasted, as I said, with his revealed will. So the question is, when Jesus teaches us to pray, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, Which will are we praying for? Are we praying that God's secret will be done? Are we praying that God's revealed will be done? What do you guys think? Both? That's a good answer. Anybody disagree with that? Okay, now let's descend down to those two, revealed and secret. Do we approach those in prayer in the same way? In other words, do I pray for his revealed will in the same way that I pray for a secret will? There you go. Sure, yeah, I mean, but even the prayer says, thy kingdom come, your will be done. We are praying that his will be done, right? So he's gonna bring the kingdom whether we like it or not, right? Of course, I hope we all like it, but yeah, you're right. But I like what both of you are saying is good. We do pray for, so our posture toward God's secret will on our knees is that God would help us to submit to it, right? And then I think it's also appropriate to say, Lord, I pray that your secret will is this. When you pray that your children be saved, you are praying in the direction of God's secret will, right? Because he has not revealed that to us, right? But we are in some sense wrestling with him, saying, Lord, may this be your secret will. Is there any other way in which we, what is our posture toward God's secret will? Yes. So when his secret will is revealed, we pray that it be X, is what you're saying. So give me an example. Yeah, did Jesus know that he needed to go to the cross? Did he pray not to go to the cross? Yeah, it's a hard one to deal with. So he knows God's secret will, but he said, if this cup can pass from me, but not my will, but your will be done. So you see this wrestling with the secret will of God, right? Yes, Phil. Yeah, absolutely. Right, right. Mm hmm. Yeah. Mm. You know, I think that's great, and it's right along the lines of what Erica was saying. You know, this came home to me powerfully the other night in our family devotions. We were reading in Genesis 23, and I'll get there in a second, but I found myself asking the question, could I live in a world where my children were not believers? And I had to painfully come to the conclusion, if that's the Lord's will, then that's the Lord's will. Because I live in a world where, as we heard, my children's life were taken prematurely. Again, gut-wrenching, very difficult. But if it's the Lord's will, may His will be done. But then I get to Genesis 23, and I read it to my family. And you know what's in Genesis 23? Abraham sacrificing Isaac. And not only did he have to think about a world in which his son Isaac was not saved, not only did have to think about a world in which Isaac would be taken early, but he had to think about a world in which he was the one that would plunge the knife into his chest. And when you think about that episode, what emerges is at the end of the day, God was testing Abraham to see if he loved Isaac more than God's will. And I think that that is a powerful example to us of what should be first and foremost in our mind. Lord, if this is what you get now, how that applies to today, I'm not even going to try to scratch the surface. But I think the principle is easy to grapple with, even if it's difficult, is that God's will must be preeminent if that's what he reveals to us will be the case. Yes. Even if I had faith that God was going to raise my child from the dead by to kill him, it still be incredibly difficult, right? Yeah, but yeah, you're right. Yeah, he knew. Yeah. Um, so good. So I think you're all right. We pray both. We pray for God's secret will and we pray for God's revealed will, but we do do it a little bit differently. And Christina has already mentioned Jesus with respect to the secret. Well, it wasn't actually really secret for him, but it's a good example. Father, if this, cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done." And then what does James tell us to do? James tells us to incorporate our understanding of God's secret will, not so much in our prayers, but how we talk, right? So he says, don't say next year we're going to go in such and such a town and start a business. He's all, you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. Instead say, if it be the Lord's will, if it be the Lord's will. And he goes on to say, that to speak any other way is boasting and accordingly is evil. James had a way of, you know, really bringing the hammer down, right? But it is evil because we choose our own adventure rather than submitting to the adventure that the Lord has planned for us, right? That's what we're doing. This is what's going to happen come hell or high water. Well, you don't know that and you ought not think or even speak that way. But now let's think about when we pray about the Lord's revealed will. We are speaking about His clearly revealed commandments, precepts and promises. Write that down or note it down. When we talk about His revealed will, when we're praying in that direction, we're talking about His revealed commandments, precepts and promises. So, you know, a lot of times if you don't know what to pray, just go to what the commandments are. Like, for example, Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4 3, it's God's will for your life, your sanctification, God, your sanctification is God's will for your life. Now, specifically in that text, he's talking about your sexual purity, which, by the way, especially as men in the room, that's something that we need to pray for every single day. Certainly some struggle with that temptation more than others, but sanctification of the whole life is something that we should pray for. And it's part of God's revealed will that we be sanctified. We acknowledge that the world, the flesh and the devil converge to keep us from doing God's revealed will. And so we ask that the Lord help us to overcome such temptations. and do what he has called us to do. So summing up, with respect to the secret will, we pray that the Lord would help us to submit to it, to accept it. I like what Phil said, to do so joyfully. And with respect to his revealed will, we know what it is. We still pray that he would enable us to follow it and delight in so doing. Now the catechism, and this is point number two under this head, the angels are our examples. The catechism gives us a very interesting motivation or example for our prayers. So why does the catechism exhort us to follow the pattern of the angels in heaven as they know, obey, and submit to God's will? Did you see that in the catechism question? There's two reasons, I think, that the catechism following the Bible puts before us the example of the angels and how they submit to God, how they obey God, and how they know His will. Two reasons. Number one, because the angels in heaven do it perfectly, right? The angels in heaven do not wrestle with sin. They are not corrupted with sin and the fall, and therefore they are fully willing and fully able to do God's will, okay? So one author put it this way, they have wings to fly quickly to the commands of God, and they have feet to run rapidly to his will. I kind of like that, but the whole idea is that they do it perfectly. So Psalm 103, 20 and 21, Bless the Lord, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word, obeying the voice of his word. Bless the Lord, all his hosts, his ministers who do his will. So the first reason. that the angels become an example for us of submitting to and obeying the will of God is because they do it perfectly, willingly, and they delight in so doing. But then secondly, and this is kind of an entailment of the first, but secondly, because they live out their existence quorum deo before the face of God. We see this in Isaiah six, right? You know, quite frankly, as for for for we humans, I think sometimes we tell ourselves, man, if God were standing right before me telling me to do X, Y, and Z, I would just do it. Yeah, well, he came before Israel quite a bit, and Jesus actually walked the earth, and he got nailed to a cross. But the angels are before the glory of God, and I will not say that they see God in all his glory, but they see God in the glory that he allows them to see, and that's more than what we see right now. But in that presence, I imagine it would be very easy to do whatever the Lord says, right? But the Lord calls us to live our lives quorum deo before the face of God, right? Every single day, every single moment, in the conversations that you have with your wife, in the conversations that you have with your children, in the conduct that you give at work when the boss isn't there, and you wanna play solitaire because you don't wanna do your work. In every moment, we are to live our life quorum deo before the face of God, okay? And then number three, number three under this heading, Our submission is not to fate, but to loving providence. So look at Matthew chapter six. Jesus in verses seven and eight says this. I'm in Matthew chapter six, verses seven and eight. This is right before Jesus launches into the Lord's prayer. He says, when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases that the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them. For your father knows what you need before you ask him. Your father knows what you need before you ask him. So some people have suggested that Jacob wasn't necessarily saying this, but he was alluding to it. You know, what are we doing praying for something if God's just going to bring it about anyway? And some people have said, well, this seems just like cold, hard, mechanical, mechanistic fate. Again, k-sarah-sarah, whatever will be will be, right? And they're concerned about that because if you're living a life within the realm of fate, which by the way, this is how Muslims think, if you are familiar at all with their theology, it is fatalistic to the core. But is our approach to prayer, and more specifically our approach to God, is it a fatalistic approach? Well, the answer, obviously, is no. Submitting to God is not submission to fate, but it's submitting to the providence of a loving, caring, interested, and merciful Father. Now, let me illustrate this for you, okay? There's a little Dutch boy. And I read this from B.B. Warfield, so I don't know why he chose a Dutch boy, but he did. Probably because he was steeped in the Dutch tradition of Reformed theology. But there's a little Dutch boy, and he used to love to play at the edge of a cliff, because at the edge of that cliff, there was this windmill, right? And I don't know, he was like, had this fascination with this windmill. And his father would tell him, he would say, look, son, don't play close to that windmill. That thing's going to swoop down, hit you, and knock you off the cliff, and you're going to die. Well, like most children do, he didn't listen to his father. And one day, he was playing close to that windmill, and he suddenly found himself picked up from the ground, hanging upside down, and a series of blows were being rained down upon him. What horror, he thought, caught into the machine. He was twisted through the air, his end had come. But then he opened his eyes and he discovered it was not the sail of the windmill that had taken him up, but his own father beating the tar out of him. And he was receiving the threatened punishment for his own obedience. And he wept, this boy wept, but they were not tears of fear, they were tears of relief and joy. How much better to fall into the hands of a loving father than the mechanisms of a windmill? Well, I think you can see then the difference between your posture toward God and your relationship with God. He's a loving, caring, tender Father. And even in His disciplines, what is driving them is love and His glory and your good, as opposed to being caught in a machine. It doesn't even care. It's just spinning His will. It's doing what it was made to do. No, we don't serve a fatalistic God. We serve a providential God. So then secondly, this is the second heading now, the second and last heading for tonight, we pray for God's provision. We pray for God's provision. And this is Catechism question 112. So let's answer this one tonight. What do we pray for in the fourth petition? And we answer, in the fourth petition, which is, give us this day our daily bread, we pray that of God's free gift, we may receive a competent portion of the good things of this life and enjoy his blessing with them. And what's interesting about this is that you have the first three petitions, our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be your name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. These are all highly, what, spiritual, spiritual, spiritual, spiritual. And then Jesus throws in a very mundane, very normal commandment, right? Give us this day our daily bread. No asceticism here. No monastic or nunnery fasting and emaciation here. What we see here is that the Lord takes very seriously your body, right? The Christian faith is not platonic. Plato believed that the body was the prison house of the what? The soul. And that your life was imprisoned because of materialism. Materialism by its very nature was wicked and evil, and the moment you broke free from that prison house of the soul, then you were free indeed. But Christianity comes along and says, no, no, we are a holistic philosophy and religion. The new heavens and the earth will be exactly that, the new heavens and the new earth, okay? Earthy, real, material, stuff that you could grab with your hands. And not only that, but what is the hope of the Christian life? Resurrection, new body, which many of us, the older we get, are looking more and more forward to. And so Jesus, as he's teaching us to pray, he's teaching us a very, very valuable lesson, and not only is it valuable, it's important. Your body is just as important as your soul. And guess what? I've said this time and time again. Oftentimes, you know, the psalmist asks the question, why are you down, Kasso, my soul? It's not always a spiritual answer. It's you need to go eat some protein, right? Because your body, when you don't get the sleep it needs, when you don't get the nutrition it needs, when you don't get the medicine it needs, it affects your soul. This week, I had to stay up working on some things. I stayed up till 4.30 in the morning. And I went to bed and got up at 9.30, so I got about five hours of sleep. And, you know, I usually get much more sleep than that. And I just noticed all day Saturday, I was just edgy. No matter how much I prayed, it seemed like it was just a challenge to get in the right place. Well, it wasn't really so much a spiritual matter, though it was that. But it was primarily a physical matter. I needed sleep. And the Lord knows that. He knows that we need bread. He knows that we need physical sustenance. But more importantly, he knows that we need to depend on him for it. So let's consider three things under this head, praying for God's provision. And here's the first one. We are to be grateful to God for what he provides and what he withholds. We are to be grateful to God for what he provides and what he withholds. So God's provision is sufficient. Give us this day our daily bread. Give us what is needful. This is not only a reminder in our prayers to be grateful for what God gives, but also that what he gives is sufficient, especially here in the first world country of America. We have much more than what we need. I mean, you go to any house on Thanksgiving and you see people who have just been gluttonous all day long and they like rejoice in it. We have more than we need. There's no doubt about that. God gave the Israelites manna in the wilderness and told them to collect only what they needed for the day. And those that took extra found that it spoiled the next day. So this prayer is a plea to God that we be dependent upon him to provide every need, even if he would do it in a way that does not accord with what we think we need. And let me say one more thing still under this heading. I heard this illustration. I thought it was helpful. God doesn't give us all of all the grace that he's ever going to give us in one lump sum, right? He gives us grace periodically and reminded me of the story. It's going to be hard to connect this illustration, but I'll try to do it. I actually read this story, true story of a billionaire, right? He dies and he, he wants to give his money to his children, but he also wants his children not to forget him. So do you know what he did? he put an ATM at the cemetery by his gravestone. And he told his kids, he programmed it so where they can only get so much each week. So they would come visit his gravestone and get out their money, but they'd have to do it every single week. Now God's not dead, so that's where the illustration is kind of wonky, but the idea is God does something similar. He has, as I've said, an ATM of grace, and he wants you to come to it frequently and often, and one of those ATMs of grace is prayer. So secondly, considering this, we are to be content with what God gives. We're to be content with what God gives. What we are praying for in this position is contentment. And the danger of money and possessions, as you know, are legion. Of course, there's nothing wrong with money, per se, or possessions, per se. And we must note that what is much to one man is not necessarily much to another. With bigger families and more money comes more responsibility. So we need balance here, and I think one of the greatest balances that I've seen is in Proverbs 30, verses 8 and 9. You don't need to turn there, but this is what it says. Proverbs 38 and 9 says, remove far from me falsehood and lying. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be fool and deny you and say, who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor and steal and profane the name of my God. And so you see the balance that wisdom cries out for here? Wisdom doesn't say go after riches with all you have. And certainly if you make a fortune, that's great. You need to be balanced with it. With it is going to come temptations. But I think the average man, the average woman just wants balance. Keep me in the middle, Lord. Don't keep me too poor. Don't keep me too rich, but provide for my needs. And Paul says in 1 Timothy 6 that godliness with contentment is great gain. Godliness with contentment is great gain. You meditate on that tonight. Godliness with great contentment. He goes on to say, for we brought nothing into the world and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing with these, we will be content. But those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. But as for you, oh man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, and gentleness. So one of the things that godliness teaches us is to live within our means. Live within our means. That's a hard thing in America, right, where you can get a line of credit just, you know, you could sneeze and get a line of credit. If you have a pulse, you can get a line of credit. The housing bubble burst that happened in the mid-2000s or the first decade, what was that? Banks were just giving out loans to anybody that wanted them. And the fact of the matter is, you know, it's kind of like when you sit down to eat, sometimes our eyes are bigger than our stomach. Isn't that the phrase, right? Our eyes are bigger than our stomach. We have to be reasonable and live within our means. And so this means, you know, we shouldn't have a lot of debt. Try to pay down as much debt as we have. It took me a long time to learn that. It took me a long time to learn that many of the things that I had, I just did not need. So if a man is not content with God and God alone, nothing on earth will ever fill his heart to the brim sufficiently, adequately, or efficaciously enough to bring true contentment and happiness. Thus, he will strive and strive and strive after the wind, always striving, never arriving and catching nothing. But then finally, and this is the most important under this head, contentment in God is ultimately contentment in Christ. Contentment in God is ultimately contentment in Christ. If we were made to glorify God, which I believe we were, then that means, as Augustine said, you know, Lord, give me fulfillment and satisfaction in you. I will not find that until I find myself in you. But we cannot come to God and find that fulfillment except through one person, and that person is Christ. And so to the degree that we find fulfillment in God, we must first find fulfillment in Christ. And that's why this petition that the Lord give us this day, our daily bread, we could take that term bread and remember that Jesus called himself what? The bread of life. And not only should we pursue the bread that feeds our physical bodies, but we must likewise pursue the bread that nourishes our spiritual bodies, and that is Jesus Christ our Lord. J.D. Rockefeller was once asked, how much money is enough? And he said, one dollar more. The desire for fame and money and possessions and the like is fueled by a vacuous hole that will never be filled. But when one realizes that God himself through Jesus Christ is the only one who can fill that hole, our journey for meaning ends and our victory walk of contentment begins. Peter counters Rockefeller's priorities when he says that the blood of Jesus Christ is more precious than silver or gold. So is that the tune of your heart tonight? Let's join our voices tonight if you're in Matthew 6 and let's just close out with the Lord's Prayer. Matthew 6, we're going to start in verse 9-13. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgotten our debtors. and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Father God, we thank you for this model of prayer that your Son has given us. I pray, Father, that as we would beseech you for the bread that fills the belly, that we would also beseech you for the bread that fills our souls. We thank you that you have rained down bread upon this earth as you sent your Son to be incarnated and to be nailed to a cross and to be buried and resurrected and ascended to your right hand. It's him together with you in the spirit that we worship tonight. We pray that you would receive it And that you would be glorified. We ask these things in your son's name. Amen. All right