Understanding the Lord's Prayer

Thank you. You've been talking, if you've been in the Sunday school time, about the Lord's Prayer or the Disciples' Prayer, and there are two of them, as you heard already. I want to read first from Luke chapter 11, the story of how Luke reports the Lord's Prayer to us. Everything is different from the perspective of people. For example, if you were watching a car accident, someone might report the accident saying there was a car coming down, coming down the road and turned left and the other car hit it. Someone else might say there was a Chevy Malibu that was coming from north to south, and then they made a left turn, and then there was a Ford Focus that was coming from the south to the north, and they hit them on the back quarter panel of the car. That could be the same description of exactly what happened from a different person's point of view. The Bible doesn't tell us in detail everything that took place, but what it does let us know is, from the perspective of the people who are writing, they tell us information that was important to them. Luke, when he tells this story, says one day Jesus was praying, chapter 11 of Luke, verse 1. One day when Jesus was praying in a certain place, when he finished, one of his disciples said to him, Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples. And he said to them, when you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, give us each day our daily bread, forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us, and lead us not into temptation. Now, when Matthew describes the same series of events with Jesus, it's just a little different. He starts with verse, chapter 6 of Matthew's writings. I'm going to begin reading with verse 5. But when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogue and on the street corners, to be seen by men. Let me read this again. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. When you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your father who is unseen. Then your father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your father knows what you need before you ask him. This is how you should pray, our father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread, forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. Jesus is giving the disciples a method of prayer. It is an outline. You see from Luke's story to Matthew's story, the same emphases are given, but they're not exactly the same words or the number of words. This lets us know something about how to interpret the passage. Jesus was praying, Luke says, and the people around him saw him praying, and they asked him if he would tell them how to pray in the way he did pray, and he gives them this message. What we find in this story is not necessarily the prayer of Jesus, nor is it the prayer he requires or asks us to pray. In fact, in Matthew's story, when he gives, before he gives this, he says you're to go into a closet by yourself and pray. Most of the time when this prayer passage is used, it's used in a public setting where a lot of people say the same words over again and again and again, not in a private closet. In fact, I doubt very seriously if there is very many people who pray this prayer in the privacy of their own home in their prayer life. Jesus did not ask us to do that. This is the reason we don't say it in our own public services, because it's not intended to be a prayer that you pray. It is intended to be a guideline of the prayer that you pray. For example, if you were to go on a trip, you might do things like saying, okay, I'm going to pack what I need for the trip. Now everyone who goes on a trip, if it's going to be three or four days or two days long, would need to do that, have that on their list. I'm going to pack what I need for this trip. Denise travels a lot, and I'll guarantee you that what she packs when she gets ready to go on a trip is different than what I pack when I get ready to go on a trip. And if you say, I want to pack some things for recreation, your packing for your recreation will be far different than other people who are taking a different trip, because they're different people. What Jesus gives us here is an outline for your prayer. Every prayer you pray is to follow this outline. Jesus begins by saying, you start with our Father. It seems a little odd to us, maybe, in our culture, because the word Father doesn't have a lot of power for us. In fact, if you watch television, you get an idea that fathers are the goofiest, mind-wrenching people you could find on earth. They're making mistakes, and they're out of the jokes. But in the biblical days, the father of a clan, or a group of people who were his descendants, had a position of power and authority, even the position of life and death for the people who were a part of his family. His word was the final word. What he had to say was as binding as any law in the universe. The Father represented a position of authority and power. So what Jesus is describing for us is that the prayer he's going to give is a person who prays it and has this effective prayer must be a certain kind of person, a person who has surrendered themselves to the authority of God. John tells us that those who believe in Christ were given the authority or power to become children of God. This is what he means by the Father. So if you have surrendered your life to Christ at any time and said, God, I pledge myself to live in obedience to you the rest of my life. I've turned away from the life that I live that's self-focused. I turn away from the life where I make choices based on what I want, the way I want, and when I want it. But from now on, my life is to be moved by your principles and your instructions and your teachings. Then you're qualified to pray this prayer. Oh, of course, anybody can say these words, but God responds differently to someone who's given themselves to him than he does to someone who's simply living the way they want to. They can pray these same words, but it's like a stranger came to my house and said, You're my dad. Now give me some money to go to school. I would say, Who are you? I don't know you. I'm not going to give you anything. There is a special connection that comes from someone who surrendered their lives to God, and God has made them a child of his that's not available to people outside of this. Are all the people in the world made by God? Yes. But there is a special spiritual relationship that does not come automatically with the fact that you're born in a human body. Everyone in the world and everything in the world finds its source in God. He creates everything, and every human being is made in the image of God. But there is a special place for those who are children of God by spiritual rebirth. This prayer is for that person. And so if people talk to you about God not listening to what they have to say, the first issue may be they've never really surrendered their lives to God so he could make them his child. Now what Jesus is telling us is every time you pray, you must go back to this original promise that you made to God. God, I give you my life. You are the final authority for what I think, how I live, how I spend my time, how I spend my money, the relationships that I have. You are the final authority. The word father is a powerful word for authority in the scriptures. Now in the culture we live in, a lot of people don't have a close connection to their fathers. And sometimes they don't even know really who their parents are. They don't sometimes even know or have a close relationship to their parents. But when you pray this prayer, you think of the person in your life who you would do anything in the world for that person. You look up to them as a person that you accept as someone who has the right to tell you what to do. And you think of that person and the role that God plays in your life in the same way that that person does. So when you begin this prayer, you have to start by saying, God, I've given you my life. I promised I'd spend my money the way you tell me, my time the way you tell me, that I would open my life to the things that are important to you and close them to the things that are negative in your eyes. You are in charge of my life. You can't pray without that. Now you don't have to say the words all the time, but you have to have that attitude and spirit toward God or he is not interested in what you have to say. If somebody comes and asks you for advice and you know they're not going to take it, you're reluctant to give it. If somebody comes and says they're in desperate need of money but you know that they're just going to throw it away on drugs, you're not interested in giving it. So when you come to God, he is concerned about responding to your prayer if he thinks you really want him to engage in your life, if you're really ready to receive what he has to tell you. God knows our minds and hearts, but he wants us to recognize that place in which we live in submission and authority to him. Our father who is in heaven. This next line points to a significant thing for us. This is the father of the universe. Everything in the universe is under his control. So we remind ourselves that God is the ruler of everything. Two reasons for that. One is it recognizes his absolute authority over us. The other is it recognizes that he has all power in the universe to respond to the prayer that we're going to ask of him. So whenever you start, if you wanted to have some money and you went up to somebody you knew was broke and hadn't have a penny, you'd be sort of foolish to say, can you give me a hundred dollars? They don't have it. They can't give it. And whatever it is you have in your life, if you come to God and you don't have absolute confidence that he can do whatever you ask from him, you're wasting your time. So when you start, whatever your problem is, whatever the issues you're going to pray about, you need to recognize that God is the final authority and whatever he says to you, you are going to do it. You've promised that to him. Then you have to believe that however complex your problem is or however difficult your problem is, whatever you need, God can provide. Our father in heaven, holy and hallowed. That's a critical thing for you to recognize. God is not going to talk to you about the things the way other people in the world talks about you and the issues that you face. He is holy. He's different than you. So what he says to you is going to sound a little different. He has different values than humans around you. So what he asks of you is a different thing than people might say to you. So when you finish praying and you think you've gotten an answer from God, if you go around to people around you and tell them what God's told you to do, you can expect a lot of them to say, well that doesn't sound right to me. Are you sure that's what you ought to do? But you see, you are talking to your father who is in heaven who is different than all the people in the world. He lives by different standards. He has different goals. He has different passions. So once you've characterized God with all of his power, with all of his authority, and you've recognized that he has power over the universe, and he knows all things, and he's different than you, once you've started there, then you are prepared to pray. Making sure that you're in the right relationship with God is how Jesus begins both the prayer in Luke and the prayer in Matthew. And when you begin to pray, then you can be able to ask God exactly what you need. He starts by saying the first priority you ought to ask for is not for yourself. Your kingdom come. God has a passion. I don't, maybe I shouldn't use that word passion because it sounds like you're really strongly interested in it. He lives for one thing, and that is to see every human being in the world to come under his authority and his control. That's what the story of heaven is really all about, a place where every single person there acknowledges the authority of God, the rules by which we ought to live, and they live by those rules. God's greatest passion is to have you come to surrender your lives to him. His passion is that every person you know, you would be concerned that they come and surrender their lives to his authority. He wants the priority of every single one of our lives to be not ourselves, not our family, not our community, not our church, but the lost world in which we live. And before we get to the things he wants us to ask him for, he wants to make sure that we're on board with the team. Your kingdom come. A simple phrase describes what God wants you to do. He wants you to be looking around at the community in which you live, where people are not in the kingdom of God. They're not accepting his authority. They're living by whatever choices they have, and to be passionate about asking him to help you know how to encourage these people to enter the kingdom of God. And if you don't have some people that are not followers of Christ, and you skip this and you go directly to the tragedies that you face and the problems you face, he can read pretty clearly that you're not interested in him and what he's interested in. You're just self-focused. If you're focused only on yourself, God sees you not as one of his children who lives under the control of his spirit, but a selfish human being who just wants what they want for themselves. This is not the mark of a person controlled by the spirit of God. For if the Holy Spirit controls your mind and your will and your emotions, you're looking around you at the world and saying, these people need to know Christ. What can I do to help them come face to face with him and the reality of what he wants to do in their lives? So if you skip this one, God looks to say, you're not interested in me or my kingdom like you told me you were. Lord, I give my life to you and your purpose. This is my purpose, the whole world around you, and yet you don't even care to address it. So he said, I want you to pray. Lord, how can I be concerned about the things of your kingdom? He not only means the unsaved people that are around you, he means those in the church that are straying and those that are having difficulty in trial, he means the church itself. I'm committed to give myself and my time and my life to the body of Christ, which is the kingdom of God. So when you pray this, when you start saying, God, who are the people around me that are unsaved that you've sent me here to pray for and to lead to you? God, what are the things in the church that need to be done? How can I help with that? What is the role that you have for me? And give me a passion to be obedient to what you've asked, and to put that ahead of all my pleasure and fun and family and everything else, because your kingdom is a priority to me because it's a priority to you. What can I do to further and strengthen your kingdom? And you see, the next part of that that Matthew adds is it's your will being done in my life. So when you pray this prayer, then you stop here and you start thinking, what am I doing that is really in the will of God? What kind of service do you do to God? How are you giving to God? What are the things that God's asked of you that you're willing to do? How do you, have you subjected your own will to the authority and will of God? And you think about these, and you pray about them, and you talk about them. Can you see that Jesus, as he prayed all night, did not simply say these things over and over again, but he used them as a method by which he addressed the Father and could pray all night, just praying this prayer, following the outline that he's given to us. And you can't pray this prayer in two minutes. You can say it in two minutes, but you can't pray it. It's an outline to let you know how God wants you to talk to him. Your kingdom come, your will be done in my life. So you talk to God about the things that you are doing that you know he wants you to do, and you ask him to give you wisdom to do it, and time to do it, and the ability to do it, and the spiritual power that when you do it, it has an effect. And then you ask God, if there's anything else that you want me to do that I've turned down, that I know I should have done, but I haven't done, what are the things that you're telling me, and over and over they keep coming to my mind and you think about that a while, what have I said no to? Did you really want me to say no to that or is that just me, God? I want your will to be done completely in my life and there's not a one of us who comes before God who can say to him, I'm doing every single thing that I know you want me to do. So when you're confronted with that, you stop and say, God, I know this is your will. Here's why I haven't done it. Is that a good excuse for you? And there may be good reasons why some of the things you can't do, but there also may be reasons why he would say, you know, you haven't done this because you really have not surrendered this part of your life to me. You haven't done this because you'd rather do what's convenient for you and comfortable for you than you would what I tell you I need you to do. Now, once you've identified his authority and you've placed the kingdom of God as the most important priority you have, then you can say, God, I'm starving to death and don't have any food. Would you please provide that for me? See how far down on the line that is for God? And yet when we get in financial trouble, it becomes even greater than our father, which art in heaven. God wants our lives to be shaped by the priorities that he holds, not the ones that we do. When you come to this one to say, I need some food or material help, and this prayer for food is really a prayer for anything in the material world that you might need to live by. It might be help, it might be food, it might be any relationships with people, all these things that are necessary for human life. God gives us the freedom to ask for it because when we enter his kingdom, he makes a promise to us. He says, I am your Lord and I will provide for you. So you have a right to say to your father, here is my material need in this world. Whether it's food or whether it's clothes or whether it's a house or whether it's transportation in some way, whatever it is materially that you need, God has already made when you surrender your life to him, this promise, I will provide for you, signed God. So when you come to ask, you know he has the reservoir because he's the creator of the world, and you know he's made a promise to you, and you can, as Jesus said, just pray and not worry about material things. Why do you worry about all these things? He said in the Sermon on the Mount, I promised you I'd give them to you. So all you need to do at this time is to say, you're in charge of my life. Your kingdom is first for me. Now provide what I need to be able to live in obedience to you and to work in your kingdom. What person in the world would hire you to do a job and not give you the tools you need to do it? God didn't do that. There's never anything that the church lacks to do its job. I know we look around and we see the things that we wish we had that we don't have. But the fact is we can do every single thing God has assigned us with the people he's given us to do it with. If every one of us will simply do what he tells us. So every material need that you faced in your life, God has provided for us. And so you can go to him boldly now that you've established his place in your life and say, give us today our daily bread. Now you notice in that prayer, it's not say, give me now everything I need from now till the day I die. What God simply promises is day by day, his provision will be adequate. We really get upset with God, I think a lot of people do, when they want him to provide and assure them so they have in their hand what they need for a week from now. He doesn't make that promise to us. Every day, his provision will be made. And then he says in Matthew, forgive us our debts. But in Luke, he says, forgive us our sins. They're the same thing, obviously, the same prayer, the same things, just using different language. A debt is something that you owe to someone. And when you violate God's instructions as a child of his, and remember, these are people who are children of God, and when you violated something that God has told you to do, you owe him an explanation. You owe him an apology. You owe him a confession that you failed to keep the promise you made in the very first part of this. Our father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. You haven't hallowed his name. You said, well, I know God tells me I should do this, but it's just fun. I'm going to do it anyway. I know God says I should give this money to him, but I'd rather buy something else. See, here we're in a place where we've violated the will of God. So when you get to this one, you stop and say, God, I'm going to think about my life. What about my money? Have I done what you want with that? What about my time? Have I done what you want with that? What about my life? Is there any part of it in which I failed to do what you want? And then you say, forgive me of violating the promise I made to you. There's not one of us every day that can't come to this prayer and say, God, I need forgiveness. As I search my heart, I see that there are some things that are not exactly what you want. Now, there may be times when you start this prayer that you go to the first, when you talk about God the Father and his kingdom, and then you may only want to talk about one of these. You may need to come to the sin part because God has suddenly revealed that to you. You don't have to pray for every one of these, but you always have to start with the first two, because you cannot enter into that relationship of conversation with God unless you treat him like he's God. You're my Father, the authority of my life. And my primary thing in the world is your kingdom. And then he's willing to listen to you. So all the rest of these, you can come to them maybe one at a time, but don't start with your problems and ignore all those other two at the top. For they are the preliminary relationship that allows you to talk to God about your material needs or to talk to God about forgiveness for sins, because it connects you with him as if he were your spiritual father. So you look at these sins and you say, God, forgive me for what I've done. I have debts against you. I have sins that I've committed to you, and I ask for forgiveness. Then the Lord says, this is the way you should end this prayer. Lead me not into temptation. Now, this sounds rather strange or odd to us, maybe like sometimes God does lead us into temptation. But remember, you started out talking about God as the supreme authority in your life. And you say, I'm following you, God. But as you begin to live day by day, you do things that put you in a position to be tempted. Everybody has different kinds of temptation. Some people can sit down at a meal and eat what they want. My wife can sit down at the table, put stuff on her plate and eat, and there'll be one spoon of something left on her plate. And she says, I can't eat anymore. This is beyond my comprehension. I never have gotten to the place where I can't eat one bite more. I've wondered what would happen if she ate that extra bite. Would she just pop open or would she fall over on the floor? What would happen to her? But she has a limit. Every one of us have in our own lives different ways of living. We know that God has given us temptations or we placed in a world where we have temptations. You know what yours are and I know what mine are. And as we live our lives, we're asking God, guide me in places where the temptation will not be so strong that I cannot resist it. We get into trouble because we don't build those fences between ourselves and temptation. And if it were completely dependent on us, we would never be able to resist any temptation or grow strong in the face of it. But what he's praying about is, God, don't let me get in a place where the temptation is stronger than my spiritual strength at this time. It's sort of like lifting. If you're going to move a refrigerator, I don't suggest that you get an eight-year-old boy to help you. Get Tim to help you. He can lift up his end of that deal. And if you're struggling with temptation and it's bigger than you are, what you're asking God to do is would you guide me in a way that leads me around something that I can't handle. Now, all of us have different kinds of temptations. And when you get to this part of the prayer, open your life up. What is it, God, that I repeatedly find myself doing that after I do it, I feel guilty to you? I know what happens when I get in a situation where there are other people talking about folks, I join in. Guide me so that when I get in that situation, I leave instead of joining. Guide me whenever a program comes on on television that stirs the lust inside of me so that I change the channels or turn away something else. Guide my life to help me so I don't fall into the place where I'm unable to take care of my spiritual life. For every one of us, there are different dangers. But what God asked us to do is to request of him the wisdom to recognize the dangers, a way to escape the dangers or avoid them, the ability to do the right thing even when we do not have the strength to do it. Guide me, Father, away from the temptations that might come to me. And then he says, deliver me from the evil one. I'll tell you what happens when you come to Christ. Before you come to Christ, you have developed patterns in your life that are kind of addictions. It can be anything as simple as eating too much or it could be watching television too much or whatever it might be, spending your money unwisely. But all of us have developed these addictions inside of us and we begin to depend on them for some kind of pleasure or joy in our life. So we know that each one of us has those and you may conquer some of them. I've heard of people that say, I've gave my life to Christ, I've smoked all my life and the day I gave my life to Christ, I quit just like that. Never a problem. Other people struggle with it. Every one of us has a resident in us of yielding to sin in different ways. And Satan has such a strong hold in us that when we think about giving that up or not doing it, we just can't seem to bring that to bear. And so what he says is, you end this by saying, God, Satan has me by the foot. I don't have the strength to pull away from him, but you do have the strength to take him out of my life. And you need to think about your life. Where are the things that you do in your life that when you look back on it, you're ashamed of it? You wouldn't want to stand up here in this crowd and announce it. You wouldn't want to tell it to your family. You wouldn't want to tell it to your friends. Those are the places where Satan has your hold on your life. And so you end by saying, God, I cannot save myself from the power of the devil, but I know that you can. If I would just have your power in my life, you could reach out and grab hold of me and snatch me away from the strength that Satan has on my life. To be honest, sometimes the things that we've developed habits in our lives that we know God doesn't want, they do something for us. So when God takes that out of our lives, we will feel a loss. So even though we know it's not quite right, we keep on doing it because it brings us some sense of benefit. All the sin that we do, we're deluded into thinking it's going to help us. That's what Satan's delusion is. So God, Satan has deluded me into thinking that doing this really benefits me. You've seen it in people that get on drugs. People are not on drugs. They say, how can people do that? Don't they see it's going to destroy them? They're going to lose their teeth. They're going to lose their money. They're going to lose their family. And when you don't have that addiction, you look and say, I just can't understand it. But someone that looks at your life and sees the sin that holds you is stepping back and saying, well, why didn't Doyle act better than that? Why does he do that? Can't he see it's destructive to himself? Well, we sometimes know that God says it's wrong, but we get some immediate benefit. Now, if you want that out of your life, this is where you stop and say, God, here is something in my life that I hate, but I just keep on doing it. Grab Satan's power and help me to turn loose and for you to take him out of my life. See, this is not a prayer that you pray in two minutes. It is a prayer that Jesus prayed all night long, and you can see that it's a prayer that takes time. Again, it's not that you pray every single one of these. For when you come to God, sometimes in prayer, you may have one particular issue that's really a burden to you. But remember, start with the authority of God, who he is, you're surrendered to him, that you're really more interested in the kingdom than your little bitty problems. And then when you've affirmed what God wants you to say, you are my Lord and I'm living for you, then you can say, okay, God, here's what I need. And because he knows that you're his child and you belong to him, he's made a promise. I will provide your needs. I will protect you from the things that destroy you, not only the physical ones, but the spiritual ones, which is your temptations in Satan. And I will give you the ability to be able to live free of the dangers that are around you. I will provide for you, I will protect for you, and I will guide you. And that's the sum of this prayer. It is a prayer that God would do what he promised you to do when you surrendered your life to him. And when you pray that prayer, it is consistent with what God wants, and it will be consistent with what you need, and God will answer it. Now if you think that you can say to God, okay, here's what Doyle said, so I'm going to pray this and I expect you to answer it today. Forget that. I'm not saying that. He will answer it when it's appropriate for it to be answered. Sometimes it's the last minute. Sometimes it's weeks before. Sometimes years before. But he never fails to keep his word to his children. Would you bow your heads, please, for a moment? For the really critical step here in this prayer is not the words of the prayer, but the heart of the one who prays. Can you look back in your life and see that you at one time said to God, I'm going to quit living doing the things that I enjoy and start doing the things that are important to you. Can you look back at your life and the day when your life was changed and Jesus Christ became the Lord of your life? And you know for sure that happened to you, then this prayer is yours. If you've never done that, then this prayer will be foreign to you. What God wants you to do is simply say to him, I've lived my life the best I know how, but I've not lived it asking you to tell me how to live. And what God wants from you is to say, today I want you to take control of my life. And my promise to you is from this day forward, as best I can, I'm going to live in submission to you and make your kingdom the top priority of my life. And you do that by simply saying those things to God right now in your mind. He will want you to come and say publicly and openly to people, I've surrendered my life to Christ and share the promise you've made, but it begins with you in your mind and in your heart. I don't really want to ask you if you're a person that prays as you ought to. I don't think any of us really feel that, but what I do want to say is God convicted you today that something in your life should change. That's him talking to you. If you're not willing to listen and do what he tells you, don't go begging next week to help you out. He'll come back to this one thing and say, okay, if I'm your Lord and you do what I tell you, then I'll keep my covenant promises to you. But when you don't keep yours, I can't. So what's he told you to do? Is it a job, changing your life, become a member of the church, be baptized? In this moment, God's talking to you. You do what He tells you. Your life depends on that. I'm going to ask the pianist to play, and I'll be here at the front. Carl's going to be here. If you have some promise you want to make to God and want us to pray for you, we'll do that. If you want to declare that to the congregation, we'll allow you to do that. This is God's time to talk to you. Do what He tells you. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. According to your commands. Dan's indicated he has something that happened to him that he'd like to tell you about. You need to get in front of the mic up here, down there, whichever. That's a pretty loud mouth, let's see. Well, we know that, but we're quiet at ears. Well, as some of you know, I joined up with the Gideons about six months ago. And I've been so busy this summer, I just couldn't, with hail, hail storms and stuff, I couldn't get away. The last couple, this last couple weeks I've been involved in, we have what they call a distribution. And we had a distribution at Martin County JUCO. And that was kind of my training wheels there, you know. But this last week we went to Fort Hayden State. And I'll tell you what, there were eight of us. We gave out 6,000 Bibles. And I'm not bragging, that's not to say what we did. But my partner and I, who I think God lined me up with, he had been to Mexico. He had been to China with the Gideons, which is making me really want to get involved. But anyway, what really I want to tell you is I gave a Bible, there's these little testaments, you know, small testaments, New Testaments. I gave one to a girl that was, we were over by the, if you know Fort Hayes or the campus. And there's some dorms back behind and there's a bridge in between. So we were working that bridge. And we gave, this other guy and I, we gave 600 Bibles out because we catch in between class. But anyway, gave a Bible to a little girl and she was out of class going back to the dorm. And I didn't think anything about it. About, oh, probably an hour, maybe two hours later she came back. And she says, can I give two Bibles to my roommates? And that really said, this is the right stuff. I mean this really, I think that was God confirming that this is what I should be doing. Getting the word out. It's the beginning. Some of these kids probably have never had a Bible in their house or in their room at all. And I just pray that, you know, I know as a college student I was too broke to do anything else. But open the Bible up, you know, maybe they'll do that too. As time goes on. It's authority blessed. And I would, these distributions we do, you don't have to be a member of a Gideon to be involved in it. We're going to go to Manhattan. We're going to go to KU and some other places around Wichita State. And if any of you would like to go, let me know and we'll get it set up where you can go with us. But anyway, I just thank God for that opportunity. Would you stand please for a moment to pray? We appreciate so much you telling us how we can have meaningful conversations with you. It helps us to understand why you don't respond to us sometimes. It helps us to understand how we can talk to you in a way that will make our lives change and our world change. We're thankful that Dan's come to talk to you to us about one way in which he put the kingdom of God ahead of everything else. We're thankful for his example for that. May every one of us seek your kingdom above all else in our lives. That we might see the joy of participating in what you're doing. Lord, teach us to pray. Amen.