Let's open our Bibles now in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 7. We will read verses 7 through 11. The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 7. Beginning the reading in verse 7. The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 7, verse 7. This is the word of the living God and he speaks to his church by saying, ask. and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and the one who knocks, it will be opened. Or each one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone, or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him?" Let's pray. Close your eyes. Thank you for the scripture that you gave to your church. Thank you for the words of God who came through the apostles to guide the congregation of the saints. Thank you for the inspiration of these words. And now, God, once we read your word, we ask you that you guide us in our meditation to the Scriptures. Help us to understand and to change our hearts, loving you more than we love this word, and changing everything we need to please you with our lives. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. We also will deal with the Lord's Day 45 in our Heidelberg Catechism. You can find the questions and answers in page 252 in our Forms and Prayers book. This section is a bigger one than what we have been seeing in the last weeks. We have four questions. I'll read the question and invite you to read the answers. Question 116, why do Christians need to pray? Prayer is the most important part of the thankfulness God requires of us, and also because God will give His grace and Holy Spirit only to those who continually and with heartfelt longing ask God for the gifts and thank Him for them. Question 117, how does God want us to pray so that He will listen to us? Answer, first we must pray from the heart to know other than the true God who has revealed Himself to us in His Word. asking for everything He has commanded us to ask of Him. Second, we must fully recognize our need and misery, so that we humble ourselves in God's majestic presence. Third, we must rest on this unshakable foundation. Even though we do not deserve it, God will surely listen to our prayer, because of Christ our Lord, as He has promised us in His Word. Question 118, what has God commanded us to ask of Him? Everything we need, spiritual and physically, as embraced in the prayer Christ our Lord Himself taught us. Question 119, what is this prayer? Answer, Our Father who is 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 forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen. I mean, this is the prayer that this section of Heidelberg Catechism will start to study. In the next weeks, we will deal with the Father's prayer, the Lord's prayer, and we will deal with all these guidance that Jesus Christ is giving to the disciples and teaching them how they're supposed to pray. But Lord's Day 45, not only introducing this prayer, it is speaking about the need of prayer and how we should approach ourselves to God when we come to prayer. And of course, the text of Matthew 7, it's the one who will guide us while we are looking into the doctrine that Heidelberg is giving to the church. But Matthew will speak about necessity of God's help. And here, in the first verse of Matthew 7, verse 7, we will see three specific verbs that will help us to understand how much we're supposed to pray. Ask, seek, and knock. Ask, and it will be given to you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened to you. There are a lot of debate in this verse through the scholars, especially the Greek scholars. Because some of them, they will look to this text and looking to these three verbs, ask, seek, and knock, they will believe that there is an intensity growing, sings the first verb through the last one. Ask first, and then seek with more power, and knock. It seems they are doing more, so they believe, some of them believe, that there are intensity in this verse, and Matthew wanted us to understand that. But I don't think this is the real purpose of these words. I really believe that what Matthew is trying to teach us is to persevere persistently in our prayers. And how can we understand this? Not through the book of Matthew, but if you go later, it's the same text, but with a different approach. In Luke chapter 11, we will see the same verses there, but they will have a different introduction. In Luke chapter 11, we will see Jesus Christ speaking about the Lord's Prayer but he will bring first a parable to speak more deeply about the necessity of prayer. And it's very interesting there, and this is exactly in the same way that Heidelberg question 116 is telling about, because there in Luke 11, we will see the disciples coming to Christ and they are asking something specifical to him. They are not asking him, for example, for power. They are not saying, God, Jesus, we want to do the same miracles that you are doing. No, they are not asking for this. They are not asking for more strength or healing or prosperity or anything like this. They come to Christ and they say, Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us to pray because it seems we are not doing this correctly. We are not doing this properly. We need guidance. And it's very interesting because there in Luke 11, in the first verse, we will see that Jesus Christ was praying and after his praying, his prayers, they come to him and said, please God, teach us to pray. And then Luke give us a short version of the Lord's Prayer in verses 2 through 4. And then he brings a parable about someone who was in his house sleeping and a friend comes to his house and ask for help. He ask for three loaves to offer to those who are visiting him during the night. And through that parable, Jesus Christ teaches that the friend will never deny the loaves. He will say, okay, since you are my friend and since I want to sleep, I will give you the loaves. And the idea there is he was persevering, like, I need food to offer to the visitors, so I need someone to help. So he was knocking the door, he was claiming for help, and then this man helped them. And then Jesus Christ offering verses 9 through 11. the same version that we find in Matthew 7, verses 7 through 11. So the idea of this parable and the idea that we find here, it's that we must endure in our prayers. And this is why Heidelberg introduces this questioning why Christians need to pray. Why do we need to pray? Why is it important for us to pray? And the idea is, first, because we are completely lost without the grace and the power of God in our lives. Look to the people of God, especially in the Old Testament, and remember how did they make without God's guidance in their lives. This is impressive in the Old Testament. They stopped to follow God and they went to terrible ways in this world. They became slaves, they lost their possessions, they lost wars, they endure oppressions, and all of this because they decide to not be in God's presence. They decide to worship other gods. They decide to go in different directions besides the direction that God gave for them. And Heidelberg now is saying, look to Christ, look to God, and recognize that you need Him completely. You need to be first thankful for everything He's given to you, especially salvation, and you need Him to deal with every other subject in your life. You need him to guide your house. You need him to deal with your marriage. You need him to deal with your family, with your children, with your work. You need him all the time. So, if you need him, we call back to Matthew and he will say, ask, seek, knock, and you will see that he will answer your prayers. It's interesting because Matthew is giving us the idea of this persistence in prayer to God in order to find His grace and His mercy. The example here is for everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and the one who knocks it will be opened. So what Matthew is saying is, he will answer your prayers. He will listen to your voice when you pray. And since God will listen your prayer, it doesn't make any sense for us to not pray. It doesn't matter the subject or how much important do you think this is, but we must bring all our prayers to the presence of God. But how should we bring our prayers to God? Should we bring, like, bringing sinful prayers to His presence? Of course not. That's what we will see, especially in question 117. We are called to bring godly prayer to God. I remember in one situation a Brazilian pastor, he was pastoring a church in the United States, and it's funny, but that's not funny at all, actually, because someone from his church came to him and said, pastor, please pray for my cousin. OK, what is happening with your cousin? Well, he's trying to come to United States. OK. How is he trying to do that? Well, he went to Mexico. He's trying to find some coyotes there who are trying to bring him illegally to United States. He has everything planned. Everything's good. Can you pray for him? No, what are you asking me to do? Do you understand what you are asking for? Do you believe, do you really believe I can come to the presence of a holy God and say, please God, bless someone to make something illegal? No, this is not a prayer that we should pray. This is not a prayer that it will never pass by your mind to make a prayer like this. Because we already know that we are doing something evil. And that's the reason why not only the Bible, the Scripture will guide us through this, but also Heidelberg will try to guide us through this, because we need to understand that we must pray only for godly things being guided by Him. James chapter 4 verses 2 and 3 will speak a little bit about that when he says, you do not have because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions. The idea is sometimes God is not answering your prayers. because we are not praying, thinking wisely in our prayers. We are praying to fulfill our passions and to love more this world than we love God. It's very simple to understand this. Make a list of your prayers and start to ask yourself, why do you need God's help to attend all your prayers? Suddenly, you can realize that many of your prayers, they are not prayers who will guide you to Him, and they should never be made sometimes. For example, sometimes the person loves money much more than they love God. And they start to pray for prosperity. And they pray and pray, and they make a long time praying, and God is not answering, and God is not helping them, and God is saying no in many different ways. And then they say, okay, God is not listening to me. Maybe I should pray loudly? Or should I scream? Or should I do something to God? Trying to buy His grace? No, of course not. God is seeing your heart. And if he's seeing that you're greedy, that you love money more than him, that you love this world more than him, he will say no, of course, because he doesn't want to be guided into the direction of your idol. God wants you to be in his presence, and he will do whatever he needs to make that happen. So sometimes God is denying your prayers because if He give us what we are asking for, we will lose ourselves in our way. Then, we need to understand what then we must pray. Well, first of all, we must understand that this prayer, the Lord's Prayer, is a perfectly guidance to pray to our God. We will see this deeper every week from next week, and we will understand how deep is this prayer, how Jesus Christ is guiding the people of God to look to Him, to glorify His name, to find His grace, to find His mercy, to find His wisdom, and to live in this world shining the light of Jesus Christ. It's a lot of things in just one prayer. But before going to this, because we will not go in all of this today, we need to understand how we must approach to this God. And this is what Heidelberg is saying in question 117 in a simple way. First, pray from the heart. Pray knowing that something is coming from your heart. Open your heart to God because we are not in the presence of a stranger. You are not in a presence of someone who doesn't know you, someone who doesn't care about you. Actually, God is the one, it's the only one who can help you in every need that you have. So pray from your heart. Second, pray recognizing that you are in misery and you really need His presence and His work in your life. This is something that sometimes we forgot. We forgot that we are just We are just people. We are just humans. We don't have power. We don't have strength by ourselves. We cannot even know if we will be here tomorrow. Something can happen and can change the course of our lives, the course of our families. We don't know what to do without His grace. And it doesn't matter our age, it doesn't matter if you are a child or if you are an old person, full of experience. All of us, we need His majestic presence. We need to recognize that we are in the presence of this holy God, this wonderful God. But we must, thirdly, pray believing. Believing that He is the one who can change completely our situation. It's interesting to see how people today go to many different directions before going to the presence of God. when we receive something new that shakes our hearts and makes our minds become lost We call to friends, to good friends. We call to people from our family. We speak with the pastor, with the elders. We talk to a lot of people. And after talking with everyone that we know, we come to the presence of God and we say, please God, help us. Like, why did you go through all these people before going to him? If the wisdom comes from him and if the answer comes from him. Of course, there is need and it's very good to be guided from the people around us, especially if they are mature, if they have wisdom, it's very good to do that. But first, we must to go to God's presence. We must to close our eyes and it doesn't matter for how long we need, We need to bring everything to His presence. We need to ask for His care. We need to ask for His help. We need to ask for His guidance. And then we can try to be guided for everything else that we can find in this world. But first God, because He is the one who should guide our lives. That's why we have the Word of God in our hands. And that's why we can pray to Him all the time. And in every situation, we don't need to ask anyone to pray to God. We just need to close our eyes and pray, and He will be there speaking with us and taking care of us. And then Matthew shows us why we must do all of this first. And he speaks about this using the example of a father with his son. If a son asks for bread, a father will not give him stones. If a son asks for fish, a human father will not give him a serpent, This is something that we can recognize from ourselves in our relationship with our own children. We know sometimes they ask things that they didn't supposed to ask, of course, but we'll never give them something bad because we love them and we want to take care of them. But Jesus by itself show us saying, if you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask Him? This is why, many times, people don't come to God in prayer. Because they don't know that this is the best thing to do. Because they don't recognize themselves as the children of God. They don't understand the meaning of this. They don't act like God is their father. They don't understand that their father is the owner of everything that exists. And they don't understand that their father is the one who will take care of them, and love them, and work for them, and do everything they need spiritually and physically in this world. We must understand that we are in a different situation once we are Christians, once we belong to the Kingdom of God. There are many texts in the Scripture who speak about this. And all of them will try to make us understand that we now belong to Him, to the family of God. John 1, verses 12 and 13, they will say, for example, but to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born not of blood, nor of the will, or the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. The idea of John is you now are adopted in his family. You belong to his family. You have a father in heaven. You have someone who says to the whole universe that you are his children. And not only because you are now in the presence of God, but because he paid the price of your life with the blood of his son. You belong to Him. Can you understand? We belong to God. He is our Father. And we are not coming to the presence of this Father to ask for help. We are doing many things before coming to Him. We are relating with this Word, not seeing Him as our Father. Romans 8 verse 15 says, for you did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of adoption as sons by whom we cry, Abba, Father. Pay attention what Paul is talking here in Romans, we are Now, in his family, like adopted children who can cry, father, like a small child, screams for their parents when they are in need of something. They just start to scream because they know help will come. They are not in doubt of that. They are just waiting for the perfect time when their parents will appear. coming like heroes to save them from almost nothing, because they cry for many reasons that they don't need real or help. But they scream anyway. And we are looking to God and we are saying, OK, I will pray for something very specific, but not for my headache. not because I'm feeling pain in my legs, not because I'm feeling uncomfortable in the presence of someone in church, not because I am struggling in my devotionals, I'm not praying correctly, I'm not interested to read the Scripture. I will not pray for those things. I will pray for real things, like I need a job, I need... I need you to heal someone who is very sick. Let's use our praise for big stuff. That's why most of us pray today. But what Matthew and Heidelberg are claiming here is that we should pray for everything. The presence of God, the presence of our Father, it's supposed to be the best place for us. His presence should bring joy to our hearts. His presence should bring relief to our anxieties. His presence should take every problem completely out of our minds because we are in the presence of the One who can take care of us in every way. Our Father, it's like coming to the Father's hands, receiving a hug and bringing everything we have to His presence. That's where we find joy and relief and peace. Because we know that the Father will take care of all our needs. Abba Father. Paul says the same thing in Galatians 4. And because you are sons, God has sent the spirit of his son into our hearts, crying, Abba, Father. So you are no longer a slave, but a son. And if a son, then an heir through God." Can you understand the meaning of these words? He's going even deeper in this relationship between father and children. He's the owner of the universe. Everything that exists were created by him and they belong to him. And here Paul is saying, well, we are his heirs. Everything will belong to us. Because we are His children. We are the people of God. And then we go back to our prayers. We go back to this relationship between Father and children. And we understand then that it's not the size of our problem, but it's just when God wants to give us the answers we need. But the only thing we can have sure is we must pray with persistence, enduring the battles while we are waiting for the answers, but we are not allowed to stop to pray. I remember a family from my church in Brazil. They had three children and two of them, they leave the church when they become teenagers. They stop to attend. And beginning that day, the couple start to pray every day to ask God for the salvation of their children. They knew they were lost without the presence of God. And a lot of people looking to them, praying, they were concerned with them because they were becoming weaker every year. They prayed for 17 years before their daughter, she was the first one, go back to Christ. 17 years of prayer, and they prayed every day during 17 years. But every time that we talked to them, they professed their faith in their father. They never had doubt that God would answer their prayer. They said, our children, they belong to God. They belong to the Lord of the Lords. They are not ours. They grow in the presence of the Lord. We brought them to church. We teach them the gospel. We know that one day He will bring them back. 17 years for the first fruit and 24 years for the second fruit. a lot of persistence, a lot of crying, a lot of shame in many situations when they ask the people of the church to pray for their children. But by the end, a glorious and a triumphant end because God answered their prayers. God listened not only to their last prayer, but God listened to all their prayers during these 24 years. And in the right time, He answered them, bringing their children to God. But you know, they can say, we ask, we seek, and we knock. Every day we didn't stop to come to our Father asking for His help. The question from this content is how are we dealing with our prayers? How are we relating to our Father? If you can grade your prayer life, how much would you give to yourself tonight from, I would say, 0 to 10? Because maybe some of us, we need to say, well, my grade is 0. I'm not even praying. But we need to look to ourselves And we need to listen to what Jesus Christ is telling to His people. And we need to listen to the doctrine of Heidelberg. And understand that praying is not an option for a believer. If until today you don't recognize the importance of this to your life, this is the day to change your life and to start to pray every day, not only once a day, but all the time, as Jesus Christ said, pray all the time to Him. Because we have this Father and we don't need to visit Him to talk to Him. You can talk to Him in your work. You can talk to Him in church. You can talk to Him while you are driving. You can talk to Him while you are in your bed, sleeping even. You can talk to Him. We have access to our Father, the only one. that we must blame if we don't have a fruitful life of prayer. It's ourselves. It's amazing, and I will finish with this, how the Puritans deal with prayer during their lives. If sometimes we think that our congregational prayer is big, the Puritans usually prayed for more than an hour during service. It was usually 20 minutes before the preaching and sometimes 40 to 50 minutes after the preaching, and this only during the service. Their daily life with prayer is something that should bring us to shame. They never start a day without praying. They prayed for maybe 30 to 40 minutes when they woke up, bringing everything they need to do during that day to the presence of God. And they prayed for many more times during the day because they knew that in every situation they need the help of their father. So they stopped many times during their work to pray, to ask for God's help. And once they went back home, everyone in the family should involve themselves in prayer. And they should pray not just short prayers, but they should bring everything that was in their hearts to the presence of God. So a devotional, a short time of family, sometimes took two hours. Sometimes we complain when we have 15 minutes to read a psalm and sing a song and have a short prayer. Can you imagine two hours every day? But then we look to the fruits of the Puritans and we see them changing a country, a nation, and spreading the gospel in so many countries, that until today, we have many places that have churches because Puritans send their children to preach the gospel to different people. The fruits are amazing. The same thing during the Reformation. I don't know if you know about that, but Calvin wrote the Institute's huge books, but the biggest chapter, it's not the predestination chapter, but it's the one who speaks about prayer. And He gives Himself to pray for so long every day. And the fruits? Well, we are fruit of the Reformation. What to do then? What we will do after realizing that Jesus is calling us to pray, that our doctrine says that we must endure in prayer, And after recognizing that to relate to our Father, we need to pray. The answer is only one. We must seek, knock, and ask. We must be in His presence. praying every day in our lives, talking to our Father, and knowing that He will answer our prayers. So let's pray to our Heavenly Father. Our God, thank You for the teaching of the Scripture and also for the doctrine of Heidelberg. Thank you for showing us the importance of prayer. And we ask you, Lord, that your Holy Spirit can work on us once again today, helping us, God, to love to be in your presence in prayer. We know, God, that the world today and all the things around us already convince many of us that staying in your presence sometimes seems a loss of time. And this is the sin who still abides in our hearts. But we ask you, Lord, that you destroy these beliefs in our hearts, helping us to love to be in your presence every day, helping us to seek for your presence during all the time, and helping us to find relief and grace and mercy while we are praying to you. Help us to understand our relationship with our Father, with You. Help us to change our minds and help us to see that we are Your children and we must seek You to find peace and grace in this world. Oh God, many of us already made this prayer many times, and we are still struggling with this subject. But we ask you, God, that maybe today we will stop to avoid prayer. It will be the first day where we will love to pray more than many other things and we will guide our family in prayer and we will come to your presence in every situation we need first to you and then to everyone else who can help us. Please God, help us to pray like we should. We pray all of this