Matthew 6:9-15
Let’s give our attention now
to God’s word, Matthew six, beginning at verse nine. Pray then like
this, 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
forgiven our debtors. and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil. For if you forgive others their
trespasses, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others
their trespasses, neither will your father forgive your trespasses. Amen. The word of the living
God. There’s a little parenting proverb
that gets around The families in the church, it went around
the families in my church down in the Charlotte area when we
were all having kids as young adults. I went to a friend’s
house a couple weeks ago for a Saturday night dinner. These
are friends that our kids go to school with and they’re plastered
on the refrigerator was this very proverb I’m about to mention
to you. And it’s the saying that’s good
for parents to say to their children, obedience, it’s right away, it’s
all the way and it’s in a happy way. And I think you heard a
bit of that from the Heidelberg Catechism. We’re to put away
our wills for the will of God. We’re to put away our desire
for our own things. We’re to put away our rebellious
spirit and we’re to obey. And I think, Maybe a little parenting
101 also parallels with a little following God or doing his will
101. If we can learn to obey our parents,
we can then learn to obey God. And I think there’s a little
picture there in the home where parents are don’t get a big complex,
but parents are God-like to their children. You’re over them, you
rule over them, you made them, they’re bare your image, and
so they have to follow after your standards, your rules, and
it’s the same for us big kids, isn’t it? When we get big, we
have to obey God. And just as little ones should
obey God right away, all the way in a happy way, we also,
as big kids, as spiritual kids, should obey God. You know, we
live in a culture that has gotten so rotten and it’s rotten because
of the low ebb in morality. It’s low or rotten because of
the low ebb in ethics and standards and truth and all these sorts
of things. But I think one of the big sicknesses
of our society is we now have several generations of children
who never learned to obey mom and dad. And so they don’t know
how to obey God and they also don’t know how to obey anyone
who is over them in life. We see it when a NFL player throws
a tantrum, when the referee doesn’t call the game his way. We see
it in the criminal justice system when repeat offenders keep showing
back up in court. We see it especially in our society
in the last year or so, a couple of years, where If you’re angry
about something, it’s legitimate, at least you think, to burn and
to destroy and to vandalize and to steal and to do all those
things just so your voice is heard. It’s as if ethics go out
the door, standards and morals go out the door, because your
voice needs to be heard. And on and on we could go. And
I would suggest this is probably the result of, well, permissive
parenting or no parenting at all. And we could stop there
and we could talk about the ills of society because of the broken
home, the broken family. Kids are raised in a two-parent,
one-parent, or no-parent home, or as a funny little saying,
kids are raised by wolves these days and they have no chance.
But there’s a far worse problem. And it’s a sin problem. And it’s
a problem that goes back to the beginning of the world. And so
as we think about the kingdom prayer, as we think about the
prayer of our Lord Jesus, thy will be done, on earth as it
is in heaven, we have to consider why it’s so difficult for us
to do the will of God. And we have to think about our
sin nature. We have to think about the rebellion that is in
us, the desire to self-rule, to be autonomous, the strength
of the flesh, the deception and temptations of the devil, and
also the pool and the tug of the world. We remember that God
made the world and everything in it. He formed and fashioned
what was formless and void. He took what was formless and
void and he formed and he filled it. We sang that in our hymn
just a moment ago, I’ll God our help in ages past. It talks about
before the earth had received her frame. So we think about
the world and everything in it God made. He made Adam and Eve
and he put them in the garden. He gave them one command, don’t,
eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It was in their
power to do good. It was also within their ability
to choose evil. And if they had done what is
good and righteous, we believe because of God’s probation, he
put them under that in time, if they had obeyed God perfectly
in time, he would have let them live forever in that perfect
righteousness. But we know that sin entered
the world because Satan who destroyed his own calling in the heavenlies. He wanted to come to earth and
destroy the calling of Adam and Eve. And so he tempted them.
You want to be God-like, don’t you? God’s holding back on you. And so he tempted them and they
ate the forbidden fruit. Their eyes were open. They saw
good and evil. They were naked. They were ashamed.
They knew it. They covered themselves and they hid from God. And so from our first parents
comes the great sickness of society, the great sickness of humanity
and its original sin, its original unrighteousness. And it’s passed
down from our parents. It’s passed down Every child
is born, not sweet and innocent, but dead in sin and trespasses
with a sin nature. And from that sin nature proceeds
actual sins. And, you know, you hear people
say things like, oh, my child was born innocent. My child was
born cute and innocent. My child was born perfect. And
they have, what do they call it? The blank slate. And they refute the doctrine
of original sin until they have about a 16 month old. And that
16 month old throws their first tantrum. And then they go through
the terrible twos. And they all of a sudden believe
in original sin. They also all of a sudden believe
in total depravity and radical corruption. Well, that’s what’s
wrong with the world. It’s sin. And our sin gets in
the way of our obedience to the will of Almighty God. Our sin
gets in the way of our obedience to his commandments. Culture
is not solely the result of permissive parents. I mean, that is a problem,
that is a symptom, but it’s the result of the fall. And the result
of the fall has led to the result of all kinds of things, and yes,
to the rottenness of our culture and our society. Every societal
ill that we face is due to original sin. I did a quick scan of the
local news, certain website I look at shows triad news, you know,
Greensboro, High Point, Winston, Salem, and surrounding areas,
and we’re a surrounding area, so I was flipping through looking
at a couple things, and I saw where a police officer over in
the High Point area was shot and killed by three guys who
robbed about 80 bucks in beer. And he was trying to do the right
thing and stop them. And they took his life. Um, where, where
were their parents? These were teenagers. What, what
kind of, what kind of child, an 18 year old these days is
still a child. What kind of young person cares nothing of life? We see on the news recently,
six, eight months ago maybe, these young fellas just running
down a man, a retired man. He was out for a jog or something
like that. And they’re tick-tocking it or whatever. And they’re laughing.
And one of them’s cheering on the driver, hit him, hit him,
hit him. What kind of world do we live in where those things
happen? But I think we should be more appalled than at the
news at the fact that people don’t obey the will of God. People
don’t know God. We’ve looked at, hallowed be
thy name. We know people don’t reverence
his name. We’ve looked at, thy kingdom come. We know that people
are living in atheism. People are living in agnosticism.
People are living in cults. They’re living in false practices
and other false religions. They’re living for themselves,
and they don’t acknowledge God or His kingdom. And certainly,
they don’t acknowledge His will. You know, just in the last, oh,
25, 30 years, I suppose, we’ve seen the battle for the Ten Commandments,
the courthouse in Alabama. We’ve just been through the big
battle for abortion. Is it a human right? Is it a
woman’s reproductive right or is the sanctity of life, a standard
of God built into natural law where every human life ought
to be protected? Even if it’s a life we don’t
see because it’s inside the womb, we live in a really wacky world
that doesn’t acknowledge God, doesn’t reverence God, and certainly
doesn’t do his will. And so we see God’s holy will
being denied. We see people living in continued
disobedience. I think we heard some prayers
tonight for the hope of salvation for people that know not God.
And one of our prayers, one of our desires would be that everyone
on the face of the earth would obey God right away. all the
way and in a happy way. And that comes through faith
in Jesus. That comes through having a new
heart, a new spirit being worked in us. It comes from the new
birth. It comes from being a new creation
in Christ. It doesn’t come from making a
new year’s to-do list. It doesn’t come from starting
out at least the first three days of the year saying, I’m
gonna read the Bible through. And y’all know how those Bible reading
plans go. You get behind and you’re just dead, right? Especially
a month in or so you’re like, well, I got a week to catch up
on. That’s like 65 chapters of the
Bible. Um, it can be rather daunting. No, it comes out of a new spirit. It comes out of a right heart
made new by almighty God. The only way to get up to snuff
or to measure up to God’s standard is to be found in Jesus Christ. and it’s to know his revealed
will and out of gratitude for what he’s done to live it. We think of Psalm 119, that A
to Z Psalm, where David basically says, A to Z, I love the Bible.
A to Z, I want to do the Bible. A to Z, I want the Bible to shape
my life. A to Z, I want the Bible to inform
me on how to think and live in this world. Or think back to
the books of Ezra and Nehemiah that we studied back in the fall.
and how Ezra the scribe was a gift to the people in that post-exilic
Jerusalem. Ezra was a scribe, he was a priest,
and it was his delight to study the law and to do the law and
to teach the law. And he was a man with a new heart
that God had blessed by his spirit to be a gift to his church. So you wanna glorify God in the
new year. You wanna glorify God in your
daily living You want to please the Heavenly Father. Thy will
be done on earth as it is in heaven, as the angels do, as
the created beings do the will of God. We want the will of God
to be done on earth. But there’s a couple of things
that we ought to think through. And I’ve got three little theological
points for us to think about. The first is conversion. We need
to be converted to do the will of God. I think about all those
days of Noah that Peter mentions. And if you look at the history
of Noah, for about a hundred years, he was gathering lumber. He was cutting lumber. He was
hammering and nailing and pegging and building a boat. And what were the people around
him doing? They were eating and they were drinking. and they
were being merry and they were mocking him. They were reviling
him, but with every stroke of the hammer, with every push and
pull and tug of the saw, Noah was keeping the will of God.
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And I think
our big challenge as Christians in this particular era is we’re
gonna be like Noah while everyone around us is drunk. While everyone
around us is living the ways of this world and the ways of
Satan and his kingdom, we may be the happy few. We may be the
little remnant, the little bright spot in a dark world that keeps
the faith. But we gotta remember theologically,
an unconverted person can’t do the will of God. They won’t do
the will of God. Natural man does not understand
the things of the spirit. And so when we see all around
us unrighteousness and ungodliness and darkness. We need to be burdened
in our hearts for the conversion of souls, for the conversion
of sinners, that they would no longer be natural men and women
who do not know God or understand his ways, but to have their eyes
opened. to have their hearts tenderized,
to have their hands pried off their idols and open. You think
of every time in the scripture where Jesus met with somebody,
maybe they were blind, maybe they had a palsy or they had
a sickness, they were bleeding their whole lives, those sorts
of things, lame. In general, when Jesus healed somebody, we
think, oh, he fixed their lame legs. But those lame legs were
then able to run and jump and dance and leap. and praise God. They were able to glorify God
and enjoy him forever because he worked a mighty salvation,
I think, in many of their lives. And so conversion, the grace
of God, renouncing ungodliness and worldly passions and being
redeemed from lawlessness is what is needed, is what is necessary. And I think it’s good for us
to reflect just a moment as Paul does to Titus in that little
letter, that little pastoral letter, where Paul says, remember
that we too once were foolish. We too once were led astray.
We too once were passing our time in ungodliness and unrighteousness. But when the goodness of God
in Christ Jesus came to us, he saved us. And that’s the key
thing for us to remember. You have to be saved in order
to do the will of God on earth as it is in heaven. But it’s
also a struggle for us as Christians, as believers, isn’t it? And so
not only do you have to be converted to do the will of God, for those
of us who are believers, it’s a matter of sanctification as
well. When we become Christian, God
declares us to be holy. God makes us progressively holy
by his word and by his spirit. And so as believers who are called
by God, who are regenerated by the spirit, who’ve been granted
new hearts, new spirits, we live in a painful and necessary lifelong
process called sanctification. Or if you wanted to say, sanctification
is being made holy. You live in a lifelong process
of being holified, right? We don’t have a English word
that’s a cognate for becoming holy, so we’ll just make one
up. Your lifelong process is becoming holified. Your lifelong
process is to be renewed in the whole of man after the image
of Christ. We think of what happened in
the garden with Adam and Eve, and I think of it like a Coke
can sometimes. You ever take a aluminum Coke
can and you crinkle it up? And then maybe you blow into
it and you try to put it back into its shape. Or maybe if you’re
really high tech, you get your air compressor out and you pump
some air into it. Well, you can get it back pretty
good, can’t you? But the paint’s cracked, the
dents and the bends and the creases are still there. And we think
about how, because of the fall and because of sin, we’re not
pristine and beautiful and wonderful and whole and complete. like
Adam and Eve were in the garden. We’re bent and we’re broken and
we’re bruised. But our calling in this life
is by God’s word and spirit, by his grace and power, is to
become more and more after the image of the Lord Jesus. And
we’re still gonna go to our graves with the crinkles and the cracks
in our paint and the indentations and the creases and the brokenness. It’s not till we’re glorified
when our spirits are raised up in glory and our bodies are raised
up in glory and made new, that that will be undone completely. But in this life, in this lifelong
process of sanctification, we are, by God’s grace, able and
encouraged, and we have the want to, to be conformed to the image
of the Lord Jesus Christ. And yes, we struggle with remaining
sin. Paul calls it the flesh. You
Sunday school folks sitting under, is it Guy Waters and the life
and theology of Paul, you’re understanding that word Paul
uses often in the scripture, the flesh, the original sin or
the remaining corruption. It’s a little sin factory. And as our confession of faith
says so well, The life of the Christian is a continual and
irreconcilable war. The spirit warring with the flesh
and the flesh warring with the spirit. And then you throw in
a little Satan and then you throw in a little worldly influence
and we live and fight daily, a battle to live and serve for
God. And so it’s hard for us to do the will of God. What is
the book of James say? Well, remember he’s writing to
Christians and James says, what causes fights? What causes quarrels
among you? You do not have because you do
not ask. And, and we, we know we ought
to pray, but we just don’t. We flip the TV on. We know we
ought to get in the church, but we say, well, I can just watch
Charles Stanley on TV. Now we know that we ought to
read our Bibles. Well, I got this one minute sanctification
little book and I’m just gonna read that. And so we do things
like this over time and we realize how much of our lives we’ve spent,
yes, as Christians, living for our own desires, our own goals,
our own glory. And so it’s even hard for us
as Christians to do the will of God because we still have
a lot of self-will in us. Think of Paul in Romans 7. He
says, I delight in the law of God. He says, I’m held captive
by sin. I know the thing I ought to do,
and that’s the thing I don’t do. I know the thing I ought
not do, and that is the very thing I do. Oh, wretched man
that I am, who will deliver me from this body of death, but
thanks be to God for Jesus Christ. I’ve already mentioned the third
thing I wanted to say. It’s the word glorification.
So if we’re gonna pray that kingdom come, if we’re gonna desire to
do the kingdom of God, the will of God, we need conversions,
we need sanctification. But you think about the little
phrase, on earth as it is in heaven, and there will be a day,
there will be a day when our spirits are made perfect, when
we are raised up into the heavenly places. There will be a day when
we no longer confess sin. There’ll be a day when we no
longer confess weakness. There’ll be a day when we no
longer say with Paul, I know the thing I ought to do and I
don’t do it. There’ll be a day where we will perfectly do the
will of God. Think of Adam and Eve and how
they were banished from the garden. They were banished from the presence
of God. They were banished from his sanctuary, from his mountain.
They were banished from fellowship with him. They were exiled because
of their sin. but they were also banished from
the tree of life. It was a mercy of God to put
them away from the tree of life and to put the cherubim and the
flaming swords there so they couldn’t go back in their state
of sin and misery and eat of the tree of life and live forever
in sin and misery. God was leaving the door open
for the coming of the Lord Jesus. He was leaving the door open
for their being renewed in the whole of man after the image
of Christ. He was leaving the door open
for their redemption so that one day when they would take
the tree of life and live forever, it would be in righteousness.
It would be in holiness. And so when we are brought into
the heavenly city, brought into the great presence of Almighty
God, we’ll do His will perfectly and for eternity. And that’s
a good thing. That ought to encourage us. I don’t know to your ears,
this may sound a little strange, and some of you may at first
think this is a little heretical. Don’t worry. Isn’t it interesting that God,
y’all are listening, aren’t you? Isn’t it interesting in this
life that God leaves remnant sin? Isn’t it interesting that
God in this life leaves us struggling with the flesh? Isn’t it interesting
in this life, when we come to faith in Jesus and say, I’ve
decided to follow Jesus, no turning back, And then we get a hundred
feet away from the altar at church. And what do we do? We think about
turning, right? We wake up in the morning and
say, Lord, this is going to be a great day. I’m going to live for you.
I’m not going to be, uh, overcome by the flesh. I’m not going to
be overcome by the world. And I’m not going to let Satan deceive
me or tempt me or lie to me. And then about five minutes later,
what is it we do? Well, we say a cross word or we have a, uh,
impure thought or, or, or whatever. Uh, we need to remember it’s
God’s design. for us in this life to live with
the limp of sin. Yes, it’s pardoned. Yes, it’s
forgiven. And yes, God sees us with the
obedience and righteousness of Christ, but he leaves sin in
our lives. for all kinds of reasons. One
is so we’ll know the power of sin. Another is so we’ll know
the power of Christ. Another is so we’ll see our weakness
and praise God. And there’s all kinds of reasons
like that. It’s the way it is. And so if
you leave here tonight and you say, okay, 2024, I’m going to
lose weight. 2024, I’m gonna get me a treadmill. 2024, I’m gonna get me a date
book, and I’m gonna not miss an appointment. 2024, I’m gonna
watch less TV, I’m gonna eat better, I’m gonna do better.
And then about two weeks from now, the treadmill’s on Craigslist,
right? For sale, like new, hardly used,
right? And it’s the same with our spiritual
life, and it can be very discouraging. And I want you to be careful
not to listen to the voice of Satan who says, see, you failed.
See, you can’t do this. See, you can’t obey God and you’re
doomed forever. And what we need to say back
to Satan is I’m a child of God. I’m a son, I’m a daughter of
Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my
sins. His blood, his life made satisfaction
for my sins, but he’s also given me his righteousness. And you
can’t take that from me. The judicial gavel of almighty
God has already been pounded on that great desk of judgment. And we know because the scripture
tells us the Holy Spirit confirms it to us that when we are children
of God, he accepts us. in the beloved, not in our own
strength. And that ought to encourage us
as we go into the new year. Yes, set goals. Yes, desire to
do the will of God. Yes, stretch yourself and try
to reach onwards and upwards. But remember, you rest and you
remain righteous in God’s sight because of what Christ has done.
Let’s go to him now in prayer. Lord, we thank you for a chance
to think for a few moments about your will, your ways, and the
reasons that we can’t do it, the reasons the world doesn’t
do it. And so we pray for conversions. We pray for our sanctification.
And we pray most of all tonight that we would long more and more
for our glorified state where we will live before your great
face living in your presence, obeying you perfectly. Bless
us now as we think on these things in Christ’s name, amen.