Sermon on the Mount

Sermon on the Mount

the second half of the Lord’s prayer and fasting

I don’t imagine I will ever have the chance, but if I ever was invited to Buckingham palace to talk with the King, the very first concern I would have would be to get hold of someone who could tell me how to behave and what to say. Someone who was accustomed to meeting him and who would tell me when to say ‘Your Majesty’ and when to say ‘sire’ and all the rest of it. And how to come in into his presence and how you talk to him. And if there is something I would like to ask him to do, how I would set about asking. 

I guess the best person to help me would be Prince William or Harry. And one of them might say, ‘all right, I’m used to my father, I’ll tell you how to come into his presence and what to say.’ Then I would be very grateful to him. My meeting with the king would be much more effective and easier, because I’ve been told how to approach him.

I just want to remind you that whenever you pray, you are coming to the throne of the universe, to the king of kings. 

It would be very wrong if we rushed into God’s presence without bothering to ask- how do you come to God? What do you say when you meet him?

The amazing thing is that his own Son has taught us how to address almighty God, how to present our petition to him when we come into his royal presence. The Lord ’s Prayer is nothing less than the very prince of Peace, telling us how to approach his Father. 

Now the first rule of etiquette when you approach the throne of heaven is to talk about what God wants before you talk about what you want. Yet in so many of our prayers, we rush in with our shopping list before we even begin to think, what would He want me to pray about?

So the Lord’s Prayer tells us to pray for three things for God before we bring our own needs to him. We are to pray that his name may be honoured and hallowed, to pray that his kingdom will come and to pray that his will be done. So the first half of the Lord’s prayer are three requests for God’s glory.

Having said that it is then our great privilege to bring our own needs to God. I need food. I need forgiveness. And I need protection from evil. I need forgiveness for my past sins and I need protection so I don’t get led into sin in the future The Lord mentions these three needs as things we should ask for.

The Lord’s prayer is a model prayer, an example of a good way to pray which the Lord has given us. 

So as we look at the Lord’s prayer again today, think about how you could change the way you pray in your times with the Lord based upon Jesus’ model. It’s the only model he has given us. Nowhere else does Jesus explicitly give us words to use in prayer, so we should take it seriously, because if we do, we will be more effective in prayer.

Now some Christians will be surprised when they reflect on how in the Lord’s prayer there is this request for forgiveness of our sins. Because they were taught that when they put their faith in Jesus all their past and all their future sins were covered by the blood.  

Well yes, when we put our faith in Jesus we do become clean in God’s sight. But as we walk through life, we pick up a bit of dirt. We are basically clean, but in a manner of speaking our feet get a bit dirty. We do commit sins which damage our fellowship with God. And so we need to keep asking for forgiveness. And when we do, Jesus stoops down and washes off the blemish, cleans away the stain of sin. And that will happen through the rest of our lives. But we must keep asking.

But there is a condition God will not forgive us our sins if we don’t forgive others. 

When Robert Louis Stevenson lived in the South Sea Islands, he used always to conduct worship in the mornings for his household. It always concluded with the Lord’s prayer. One morning in the middle of the Lord’s prayer, he rose from his knees and left the room. His health was always a bit shaky so his wife followed him thinking that he was ill. She asked ‘Is there anything wrong?’ Only this said Stevenson ‘I am not fit to pray the Lord’s Prayer today.’ 

No one is fit to pray the Lord’s Prayer, so long as the unforgiving spirit holds sway within his heart. If a man has not put things right with his fellow human beings, he cannot put things right with God. 

Forgiveness will be easier for us when we understand better the person we are needing to forgive. There is always a reason why a person does something. If he is hard and impolite and bad tempered, maybe he or she is worried or in pain. If he or she treats us with suspicion and dislike, maybe he has misunderstood or has been misinformed about something we have said or done. Maybe his personality is such that life is difficult and human relationships are a problem for him. Forgiveness would be much easier for us , if we tried to understand before we allowed ourselves to condemn.

We really need to have our sins forgiven. So we really must keep on forgiving. And forgiving means forgetting. 

So long as we keep on going back and remembering an offence or an injury, there is no hope that we will forgive. We so often say ‘I can’t forget what so and so did to me.’ Or ‘I will never forget how I was treated by such and such a person or in such and such a place.’ 

These are dangerous sayings because we can in the end make it humanly impossible for us to forget. We can print the memory indelibly upon our minds. 

There was a famous Scottish poet, novelist and critic called Andrew Lang and he wrote a very kind hearted review of a book by a young man. The young man repaid him with a bitter and insulting attack. About three years later, Andrew Lang was staying with Robert Bridges, a fellow poet. Bridges saw Lang reading a certain book and said ‘Why that’s another book by the ungrateful young cub who behaved so shamefully to you.’ To his astonishment, he found that Andrew Lang’s mind was a blank about the whole affair. He had completely forgotten the bitter and insulting attack. To forgive said Bridges was the sign of a great man, but to forget was sublime. The cleansing power of Christ’s blood can cleanse us from all unrighteousness, even our memories.

By the way God has an amazing control of his memory. For in the Bible He says I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.

The final request in the Lord’s prayer is ‘lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, or deliver us from the evil one.’

That is very simply a prayer for protection against temptation. Don’t allow us to be tempted Father. And if we are facing temptation deliver us from evil. It’s a prayer for protection against future sins. 

Sin is our big enemy and we so easily get tempted to do something we think will be pleasurable or beneficial but we know its wrong. We so easily can be tempted to rebel against our Father and this always ends in tears. And so our great need is forgiveness for past sins and protection against future sins. Its as important to us as getting our daily bread, having food on our table every day. Its that important. 

We are vulnerable to sin and so we need to keep praying for deliverance. 

And so talking about food. 

There are times when we probably should skip a meal or two.

Why?

Because when you skip eating some food and combine it with prayer, when you combine in other words fasting with prayer, you will get some major benefits to your spiritual life- and very possibly will feel healthier in your body too!

So Jesus moves from the Lord’s Prayer to talking about fasting from food. And he says do it privately, don’t let anyone see that you are doing, its not a way of showing off. But he does say ‘when you fast’ so he assumed his disciples would fast. 

Jesus didn’t command us to fast. The New Testament doesn’t command us to fast. Fasting is optional. But Jesus did assume that his disciples would fast. Later in Matthew’s gospel Jesus says ‘ The days will come , when the bridegroom is taken away from them and then they will fast.’ 

Jesus himself is the bridegroom. We are his disciples. And during the present age, he has been taken away from us until the day he returns. So Jesus is saying, during this period while we have him away from us in heaven, we his disciples will fast. 

What is the purpose of fasting?

1. Fasting increases our sense of humility and dependence on the Lord. This is because our hunger and physical weakness continually remind us how we are not really strong in our selves but need the Lord. 

The priest Ezra was leading a large group of Jews on a journey from Babylon to the city of Jerusalem. They were taking a lot of gold and silver It was a long and dangerous journey and there were bandits around.

Now Ezra could have asked the king of Babylon to send an armed escort of soldiers and horsemen to protect them. But he was embarrassed to ask, because Ezra had told the king that God’s hand of blessing was on them. So instead 

Ezra says ‘There by the Ahava Canal, I proclaimed a fast, so that we might humble ourselves before our God and ask him for a safe journey for us and our children with all our possessions.’ 

Pride is one of the most deadly of sins. Thinking too highly of yourself. Looking down on other people. Arrogance, pride. 

How do we get rid of pride?

Fasting will help. 

Ezra and the Jews humbled themselves before God by fasting and they prayed.

In Deuteronomy 8 we learn that God led the children of Israel through the desert where they were hungry, to humble them. A bit of hunger can bring humility. 

If we have lots to eat and all that we need, we can get prideful. Fasting breaks that.

1. Fasting helps our prayer lives. Fasting should be combined with prayer. When you fast, pray. And fasting allows us to give more attention to prayer because we are not spending time on eating. We don’t need to worry about cooking and eating and doing the washing up. When we skip a meal or several, it frees us time to pray. 

Fasting adds strength to our prayers. Isaiah the prophet tells off the people of Israel for fasting with a wrong attitude. He says in verse 4 of chapter 58, ‘Fasting like yours this day will not make your voice to be heard on high. The way Isaiah puts it, fasting when done right is clearly something that should make our voice be heard on high.

Fasting is designed as Arthur Wallis puts it ‘to give an edge to man’s intercessions and power to his petitions.’ 

When a person is willing to set aside the legitimate appetites of the body to focus on the work of praying, he is demonstrating that he means business. That he is seeking God with all his heart, and will not let God go until he answers. 

Prayer is more complex that just simply asking a loving heavenly father to supply his children’s needs. Prayer is warfare. Prayer is wrestling. There are opposing forces. There are spiritual cross currents.

Think of Daniel Daniel 10. He got a vision but didn’t understand it. So he fasted for 21 days, not a full fast, it seems that he ate some food, but not very much. . And only after 21 days of this fasting did an angel appear to him to tell him the meaning of the vision. 

And the angel said that he was held up 21 days from being able to get through to Daniel with the answer to his prayer by a demon called the prince of Persia. I’ve mentioned this passage before. And it was only when another angel called Michael came along and helped him, that this messager angel could break through and appear to Daniel.

This tells us that sometimes our prayers are opposed. God wants to answer, but satan is opposing. We need to persevere and sometimes we need to fast in order to get a breakthrough. 

Fasting is powerful.

Have you prayed for something, are you praying for something and not seeing a breakthrough- for someone you love, for yourself, for health, for a job for something. Have you tried fasting? Prayer and fasting shows God you are really serious. It results in breakthrough.

Arthur Wallis in his book on fasting writes ‘In giving us the privilege of fasting as well as praying, God has added a powerful weapon to our spiritual armoury. We the church have largely overlooked it. She has thrown the weapon of fasting into some dark corner to rust. And there it has been mostly forgotten for centuries.’

We wonder why the church is struggling in this land. 

1. Fasting is a good exercise in self – discipline, for as we refrain from eating food, which we would ordinarily desire, it also strengthens our ability to refrain from sin, to which we might otherwise be tempted to yield. If we train ourselves to accept the small sufferings of fasting willingly, we will be better able to accept other suffering for the sake of righteousness.
2. Fasting also heightens spiritual and mental alertness and a sense of God’s presence as we focus less on the material things of the world (such as food) and as the energies of our body are freed from digesting and processing food. This enables us to focus on eternal spiritual realities that are much more important. 

If you want to hear God speaking to you, for guidance or anything. Start fasting and praying. It was when the folks in the church in Antioch were fasting and worshipping God that the Holy Spirit told them that he was wanting Paul and Barnabas to be set aside to be missionaries. 

1. Fasting strengthens you spiritually.

In Mark 9:29 when the disciples asked why they could not drive out a certain demon, Jesus replied, ‘This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.’ Many early and quite reliable Greek manuscripts and several early manuscripts say ‘by prayer and fasting’.

The disciples hadn’t spent enough time in prayer and fasting in their personal lives. And so their spiritual strength was weak and so they couldn’t command the demon to leave, like Jesus did. 

 Fasting increases someone’s spiritual strength and power. 

Sometimes God will lead us to fast. But we can fast even when God isn’t guiding us to do it. A regular fast is a good thing. We don’t have to ask God each Sunday, do I go to church today? No weekly church going is a healthy habit, which the Bible encourages. Fasting is a heathy habit the Bible encourages, so we don’t need a voice from Heaven telling us to do it. 

Although having said that, its good to ask God for wisdom regarding how best to fast. Asking God for wisdom in any given decision is a helpful thing to do. 

So I would suggest that you try skipping a meal and instead have an extra time of prayer. Start that way. Remember to drink plenty of water, because when you are not eating you need plenty of fluid. 

But don’t worry about the hunger pangs. 

The human body can go for about 40 days without food before starvation comes in. 

We say after we miss a meal, I’m starving! Actually you’re not. It’s just that your body is used to eating every day and your tummy grumbles a bit when it doesn’t get what it is used to. 

Actually after several days of fasting, the hunger pangs in your stomach die down and you can go for fasting for days without a problem.

 Fasting is good for the body, it clears out the toxins that build up. People might tell you that what you are doing is bad for your health. Actually the opposite is true, fasting normally does us a lot of good physically.

So if you want to improve your prayer life, hear from God and become a more disciplined person combine fasting with prayer. And if you want to improve your prayer life, change the way you pray to line up more with the Lord’s prayer. Start with Gods needs before your own. Use it as a model.