A sermon by Sean C. Capparuccia
Preached at Trinity Global Methodist, Magnolia, NC on 27 July 2025
Genesis 18:20-32; Psalm 138; Colossians 2:6-15(19); Luke 11:1-13
Prayer. Let me start by saying that no subject makes me feel more like a hypocrite than the subject of prayer. I wish I could stand here and tell you that I’m up at dawn every morning and down on my knees in prayer thanking God for the sunrise. I’m a musician… I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen a sunrise. I wish I could stand here and tell you that I’m on my knees every evening talking to God about the day that has passed. I wish I could stand here and tell you that I pray with my dear wife daily praying over the grandkids and such. I do pray, but not nearly as much as I should. So, when I saw that the lectionary passage for today was “The Lord’s Prayer,” I was met with a few thoughts. One was, “Everyone knows the Lord’s Prayer; what’s so challenging about that?” It seems rather elementary, like singing “Jesus Loves Me.” The other was, “I’m not what you’d call a prayer warrior; what I can possibly say about prayer?” Another was, “When I do pray, nothing seems to happen, so even if I did talk about prayer there wouldn’t be anything exciting to say.” But then, after getting into the Word, the study, and the exposition, I find that the biggest challenge here is that there won’t be enough time to say all that could be said.
Lara and I are avid book collectors, I may have mentioned that at some point, and we have thousands of books. I primarily gather theological books, of course. I get things that may prove useful in preaching and writing, even if it may be sometime afar off. Anyway, at some point I got a book by E. M. Bounds on Prayer. It’s actually an omnibus, a collection, of six books that Rev. Bounds had written about prayer. Again, what can one possibly say about prayer to fill six books? You say, “Our Father, Who art in Heaven, here’s what I need you to do; here’s what I need You to help me to do… Please heal my aching joints and keep us all safe. Amen.” You pray your way, I pray mine. I don’t know, it’s kind of like food, it’s a personal thing, right? “You have it your way, I’ll have it mine.”
And yet, every great saint throughout history, at least the ones who have written books, all talk about prayer. Prayer, being committed to prayer, is one of the common denominators among all of the saints. You could preach a whole sermon just using quotes from those who had written about prayer. Prayer is vital to the Christian walk, and though there is no minimum amount of prayer required, prayer itself is required as a disciple of Jesus Christ.
The Prayer Jesus Taught
Jesus Himself spent quite a bit of time in prayer, so that alone should tell us something. And when the Disciples asked Jesus, “How should we pray?” He answered, “When you pray, pray something like this:
Our Father, Who art in Heaven,
Hallowed be Thy Name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy 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.[1]
Amen.
The disciples of John the Baptist had been taught a prayer, as we see in the text, although we don’t know the words to that prayer. And so, Jesus’ disciples want a prayer from the Master. And isn’t that just how we are a lot of the time? “Just give me the answer; tell me what to say and I’ll say it.”
Jesus wasn’t telling the Disciples, and all Christians since then, that this is the only prayer you need to pray, nor is it evident that we must use these exact words, especially since in the way Matthew recorded it in Matthew 9, the words are indeed slightly different. But Jesus was saying that this is a good formula for praying. And it begins with..
“Our Father, hallowed be Thy name…” Let us first note the very first word: Our. No Christian is a singularity. It is we, who are the Church; it is we who are His people; it is we who are His children.
The next word, Father, in itself, epitomizes the true nature of prayer. I John 3:1 says, “See, how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called children of God.” Not everyone can call God, Father; not everyone is a child of God. Everyone is a creation of God, but not a child, for only those who are adopted in God’s family through Christ can call Him Father. So, what a privilege it is to call on Him as Father. Our God is not a distant being who resides at the far ends of the universe absorbed in His own affairs. No, He is a personal being who very actively participates in the workings of His creation and, especially, in the affairs of His people.
We hallow His name, or call Him holy. He is infinitely holy and set apart from all else; He is above all things and all things exist in Him. When we say, “Hallowed be Thy name,” we are acknowledging His supreme deity and all of the other attributes which belong to Him.
We acknowledge His kingdom, that it will come in full; that all humanity will see His true Kingship and that all earthly kingdoms – all nations – will know Him as the Ruler of all, which will, in fact, happen at the end of the age when Christ comes again.
We acknowledge His perfect will, that the complete number of the elect will come to true faith in Christ and that “the iniquity of His people will be forgiven and that He will pardon their sin”; that all who come to Him in sickness of soul, despair, and faith, will be restored” (Psalm 85:2,4). That those on earth will serve Him with such gladness of heart as those who are in heaven.
So, then, with these words we acknowledge His perfect name which is above all, His perfect kingdom which rules all else, and His perfect will which cannot in any way be thwarted.
Next, we turn to our own needs and desires. The first, “Give us this day our daily bread,” deals with our earthly desires. We acknowledge our utter dependence on the Father for all that we need. “Bread,” of course, includes all of the things that sustain us. In Proverbs 30:8, Solomon says, “Give me neither poverty nor riches; [but] feed me with the food that is my portion.” Now I’m about as far from being a Socialist as anyone I know, but I think sometimes that we, being in such a relatively wealthy nation, by God’s immeasurable grace, tend to believe that we have a lot more rights than we actually do. We do have certain inalienable rights, of course, as citizens of America, as members of humanity. But in God’s economy we have no rights, other than to be called His children by virtue of our adoption in Jesus Christ. Technically, we own nothing; we deserve nothing; we merit nothing. All we have is by God’s grace. And in true Christian humility we must understand that it is only by God’s good pleasure that we enjoy even the air we breathe. And yet He knows our need. He knows our hunger. And not just our physical hunger but our spiritual hunger as well.
In keeping with that, we also acknowledge that we must heartily and daily ask for the Father’s forgiveness of our sins, or our debts, as Luke writes it. When we say, “Forgive us our debts (or sins, or trespasses)” we are admitting our guilt before Him. “In our thoughts and in our words, in the things we have done and the things we have failed to do,” we confess our fault, our most grievous faults and failings before our holy God. Our Father, as His word tells us, cannot abide sin. The more we read His word, then, the more acutely aware of our sinfulness we become.
My Lara is an impeccable grammarian. If she wasn’t a musician she would have had a promising career as an editor somewhere. Homeschooling our five children she wielded the red pen like a flaming sword. Now there are two ways a kid sees that red ink: one kid will look at it with contempt, begrudging every red mark and taking it as a slap against their whole character. The other kid will look at it and understand that it is a means by which to improve and strive to do better. When I was a kid, I belonged to the first example until I loathed school. I failed college freshman English three times. It wasn’t until I began to see the value in following the second example that I began to love learning. No good student says, “I know all there is to know,” but rather keeps learning. And that is what reading God’s word does: we hunger to learn from it, to know more and more of what God desires to teach us. Job 23:12 says, “I have not departed from the command of His lips; I have treasured the words of His mouth more than my necessary food.”
We discover not only our sinfulness in His word, but we find His forgiveness, too. And we profess that, in like manner, we, who are underserving of forgiveness yet receive it anyway, can forgive others who have sinned against us. Just as we need our daily bread, we need daily mercy. And just as we share our bread with the hungry, we share mercy with those in need.
“And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil” or “from the evil one.” James tells us, “Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you encounter various trials (or temptations), knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance” (Jm 1:2-3). Without at all implying that God is the author of evil, we cannot but understand that God does, in His providence, allow us to be tempted, to face trials of faith, in order to perfect in us His good and pleasing will. Now it may be hard to believe, but there is no temptation given to us that we cannot overcome with God’s help. No one is predestined to sin, although our own wills drive us daily to it. (Hence, asking daily for God to forgive.) I had a friend a long time ago who tried to argue that sin was good because it caused the Lord to have mercy. I think maybe he was joking. And the Apostle Paul addressed this more than once asking, “Do we sin so that God’s mercy will abound?” Of course not. But we are tempted; we do succumb at times. So, this part of the prayer is two-fold: we are asking the Lord to uphold us in the time of trial, but also that He will lift us up, will restore us, if we fall. Satan, though defeated at the cross, is still being given some reign in this world until Christ comes again. This demon who masquerades as an angel of light is still yet a very real and present danger. And so, we pray, “deliver us from evil.” Deliver us from the persistent trouble that is caused by sin and disobedience to God.
Not My Will, but Thine
That, my friends, is the exposition. But there is more to prayer than the theoretical understanding of it. Prayer is not an academic exercise, it is an exercise of faith. Like Jesus in the garden, we must be able to pray “Not my will, but Thine be done.” True prayer begins with resignation; resignation of our will to God’s. This is true submission to our Father. A. W. Pink writes, we
“spread [our] case before the Lord and ask Him to deal with it as He sees best, and if [we] count upon His wisdom and goodness, that is the exercise of faith; and if [we] have confidence that He will do so, that is the expectation of faith – the expectation not that He will grant what [our] carnal nature desires, but that He will give what is most for His glory and [our] highest good; anything other than that is not faith but presumption.”[2]
This resignation of our will is not just a “come what may” attitude of simply tolerating what we have no control over, it is an active participation on our part to conform our will to God’s will; to be in unity with God Himself.
When Jesus prayed, “Let this cup (this impending painfully agonizing and humiliating death on a cross) pass from Me,” we wonder why this prayer, by no less than Christ Himself, wasn’t answered in the way in which He wanted. But, as we’ve already mentioned, His prayer was not just “let this cup pass from Me,” but “let Thy will be done.” So, we see that His exact desire was answered, and it was the Father’s will that Jesus should suffer death.
Thankfully, it is not God’s will to have all of us suffer death prematurely. But the question must be asked, why does God seem to answer some prayers and not others? Why are some healed of various diseases and others left to suffer? Why do some people get new homes and others are stuck in their falling-apart houses with holes in the roof? Why do some people always seem to get the good parking spaces at Walmart? Why, why why????
Why do we pray?
First of all, we pray to give God thanks and praise for who He is. In Revelation 4 John witnesses the throne of God. Around God, in the first circle, are four creatures who are ceaselessly before the throne saying, “Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God the Almighty, who was and is and who is to come” (4:8). The next circle is the 24 elders, who represent all the people of the Old and New Covenants, who fall down before the throne saying, “Worthy art Thou, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power; for Thou didst create all things, and because of Thy will they existed, and were created” (4:11). Our Father is worthy to be praised and so we praise Him. Paul, in Philippians 4:6, says, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” In everything! God wants to hear our requests; As any loving Father, He wants to simply hear from us. So first and foremost, we pray because we must communicate with the God whom we love and obey.
Secondly, we pray to intercede for others. In the OT lesson we read of Abraham pleading for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. I don’t think Abraham was a big fan of those godless cities, but he had relatives there and he knew some of the inhabitants, surely. He was concerned for the welfare of the righteous who lived there, lest they get swept away with the unrighteous. Obviously, if you were paying attention to that interchange between him and the Lord, you got the impression that Abraham must have thought that there were more righteous people there than there actually were. But note, his concern was for the righteous; he was concerned about injustice being done. But God is not unjust – and the six people considered righteous were given the opportunity of salvation, though not even all of them took it.
And maybe God isn’t destroying cities like that much anymore, we still pray for justice, true justice. And we intercede for others. How often do we tell someone who has come to us with a heart-felt need, “I’ll be praying for you”? or “You’re in my thoughts and prayers.” Or we ask someone to “please pray for me.” I can’t tell you how many times I have kicked myself for not praying with someone right then. We should all get in the habit of praying with people when they ask it. John Bunyan, the man who wrote Pilgrim’s Progress, said, “You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed.”[3] Everything should begin with prayer.
There is the story of a man who, during prayer requests, asked the preacher to pray for his hearing. The preacher brought him up right in front of the church, anointed him with oil and had the elders lay hands and pray over him. When they finished, the Preacher asked, “How’s your hearing?” He answered, “I don’t know, it isn’t til next week.”
Well, maybe there was a bit of a miscommunication there, but the principle still stands. We should be ready to pray at the moment we are asked; before the next thing comes along and we forget.
James tells us to “confess your sins to one another, and pray for one another, so that you may be healed. The effective prayer of a righteous man availeth much,” or “accomplishes much” (5:16). Which brings us to another aspect of prayer, one that we may not want to hear. Sometimes we may feel that God doesn’t answer our prayers. Are you a righteous man, or righteous woman? Proverbs 15:29 says, “God is far from the wicked, but He hears the prayer of the righteous.” And Psalm 66:18 says, “If I regard wickedness in my heart, The Lord will not hear me.”[4] In other words, if you cherish your sin, God is not inclined to be listening to you. His first order of business is to wash you and cleanse you of the dirt.
Nevertheless, after a good and thorough self-check, God still doesn’t seem to hear. Maybe we aren’t listening to the answer He is actually giving. He generally answers “yes,” “no,” or “wait.” If God didn’t care anything about you His answer would always be “yes,” like a father who never disciplines his children but spoils them. If God existed in fear of your free will, His answer would always be “no,” like the father who never lets his children do anything for fear that they will always do something bad or get hurt. But if He is truly sovereign over all things and knows all things, or has determined all things, then His answer would often be “wait” because only He knows the best timing of things to be.
If we are going to pray, then, we must be open to His answer. We must acknowledge His sovereignty, and accept His answer. I personally, this is a confession now, I personally have a bit of a fear in praying for healing for people because I know that it is not always God’s will to heal someone. So, I get a little afeared of praying for little Johnny’s cancer and then Johnny dies. I feel that somehow it is my failure; maybe I wasn’t righteous; maybe I’m cherishing sin in my heart. But I have to tell you, that is a wrong attitude and I repent of it. Brothers and sisters, we must pray no matter what.
If you therefore, “have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith, just as you were instructed, and overflowing with gratitude… in Him you have been made complete, and He – Jesus Christ – is the Head over all rule and authority” (Colossians 2:6-10). As God is working on us, so is He working through us. Pray, brother; pray, sister. Leave the rest to God.
The Parable
Let us take a look at the parable that Jesus gave. A friend stops by after being on a long trip. He needs a place to stay and is hungry. Hospitality says let him in and feed him. But you have no food in the house. So you go to your neighbor’s house, also a friend. It’s kind of late so you’re knocking on the door to wake him up. “Hey, an old friend of mine dropped by and I have nothing to give him to eat. Can I borrow some bread and cheese?” Will your neighbor-friend say, “Go away, it’s late and everyone’s already in bed?” Isn’t the answer in the question? Of course he wouldn’t. Whether it’s out of love for his friend or, rolling his eyes, to make him quit knocking on the door, is not answered. We don’t know his motive. But Jesus tells us that we must be persistent and persevere in prayer.
First, we ask.
If no answer, we seek. We continue to seek out the Lord’s favor and answer to our need. We don’t stop at simply asking, but we seek the Lord’s will. Still no answer?
Then we knock. Let your heart’s cry become a constant knocking at the door of God’s very throne competing with the droning voices of praise from the four creatures and the twenty-four elders. Lord, I need an answer; With David, say,
“Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice,
and be gracious to me and answer me.
When Thou didst say, ‘seek My face,’ my heart said to Thee,
‘Thy face, O Lord, shall I seek.’
Do not hide Your face from me,
do not turn Thy servant away in anger;
Thou hast been my help;
Do not abandon me nor forsake me, O God of my salvation” (Psalm 27:7-9).
Like Bunyan said, first we ask. Then after asking we can do more – we seek and knock. But we can’t knock until we have asked. We know of Whom we are asking and in all humility we have thrown ourselves upon His mercy for He is the Lord Almighty. Then we, because we are His children, seek His answer; we step out in faith and implore – not demand – but implore His response. Then, with boldness of heart in the knowledge that He is our loving Father we persistently knock and knock and knock until the door is opened. This is perseverance and it is just what Jesus, the only begotten Son of God, has told us to do.
And then we accept His answer and know that whatever happens is for our good.
I cannot help but express the thought that God’s answer is not always what I think is good. But I am always wrong. Friends, if God is God, then His answer is always right. It is always for our good and for the good of those who love Him. Because “we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).
The final thing to talk about is this: what are we praying for? Well, we probably pray for a lot of things. But let all the things we pray for be put into two groups: things that edify others, the Church, our family and draw them closer to the Lord; and things that help us get along better in the world. Perhaps we could say selfless desires and selfish desires. Now only you can know where a particular desire lands. This is where prayer is truly personal, only you know your own motive and it’s not for anyone else to judge. But we must judge ourselves in this.
Coming back to the beginning, the prayer that God wants to hear falls in the realm of “not my will, but Thine be done. Let Thy will be done.”
Lord, give me the strength to face this trial;
Lord, give me the fortitude to endure this temptation;
Lord, give me the peace that passes all understanding in order to get through this;
Lord give me the words to speak into this situation;
Lord, give me wisdom to make good decisions for my family;
Lord, change my will to make it conform to Yours.
One of great saints of old, Francois Fénelon, a priest in the early 17th century, said this, “How can you pray? What is the language of God in the depths of your soul? He asks nothing but death, and you desire nothing but life. How can you put up to Him prayer for His grace, – with a restriction that He shall only send it by a channel demanding no sacrifice on your part, but ministering to the gratification of your carnal pride?”[5]
If we are truly seeking His will, the Lord will give, and much more besides. His Kingdom will come and He will reign from the very depths of your own heart.
Let us now pray as we were taught, saying,
Our Father, who art in heaven…
[1] “For Thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever.” Matthew; some mss.
[2] A. W. Pink, Divine Healing: Is it Scriptural? (Pensacola, FL: Chapel Library), 22
[3] John Bunyan
[4] רָאָה – raw-aw’ – approve, behold, consider, discern, (make to) enjoy, present, provide, regard, (have) respect…
[5] Francois Fénelon, The Best of Fènelon, Letter 9 (Gainesville, FL: Bridge-Logos Pub., 2002),16.
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