Advent Week 1

So let me give you a little bit of an advent primer, kinda a rundown on what it is we're doing. Advent is a season in the church calendar that prepares us for Christmas. It starts the fourth Sunday before Christmas and it ends on Christmas Eve. So if you are familiar with the church calendar Advent is not Christmas.

I know we have Christmas trees and all of this, but in a traditional liturgical church, the color schemes are different. There's no greens and reds. It's purples and pinks. It's a different holiday altogether. And then Christmas starts on Christmas day and runs for 12 days. Thus the song 12 Days of Christmas.

So Advent runs until Christmas Eve. Christmas starts, and Christmas is a separate holiday entirely in the church calendar. Now you might be thinking. What do you mean church calendar? Do we have a different calendar than the rest of the world? The answer is yes. Traditionally speaking, the church has something that we call the liturgical calendar or the church calendar, and the reason for it is really simple.

It's that the world's not gonna follow Jesus for you, okay? If you are living in this world, it's not just gonna happen naturally. You're not gonna walk out your door and find yourself swept along in the kingdom of God just by the stream of the world. In fact, just the opposite will. God's people throughout the history of their being God's people from the Israelites in the very beginning of the story all the way until now, have always lived as a kingdom following a king in a world of empire.

Where that king and that kingdom run very counter to the world that they find themselves in. And so they've always had to establish different kinds of rhythms to maintain a distinct life in Jesus. And we see this from the very beginning. And things like the way you dress and the way you wear your hair and the holidays, you celebrate God from the beginning gives his people the Sabbath and he gives them things like the Festival of Tabernacles and Passover and other holidays that are different than the holidays in the.

The reason these exist is to remind us who we are, cuz the world's not gonna do it for us. We're gonna find ourselves if we're following just the world's calendar, acting and thinking and behaving like the rest of the world. And so the church has established an alternate calendar with other holidays that are all grounded in the story of Jesus.

And the purpose is to root us in this story so we remember who he is and who we are. It's actually why we do Sundays. This is a regular every seven day habit that reminds us who God is and who we are. It's why we tie. It's a habit that reminds us who God is and who we are. It's why we pray.

It's why we fast. It's why we have seek first. It's why we do the things we do. It's to live and enact with our lives a different story and Christmas is a different story. It's a story of Jesus showing up in the middle of our world and changing everything by his very present. Now the problem though is that Christmas has gotten co-opted by the Empire.

It's a kingdom story that has been absorbed into the world's kind of calendar in a way that's not helpful at all. And today we find Christmas to be something that's a little bit more difficult to celebrate as Christians for a few reasons. There's that, there's actually a few problems with Christmas, the way the world celebrates it.

First one is, it comes too. In the church calendar. Traditionally, Christmas starts on Christmas, not Halloween. Do you know what I mean? Not before Halloween. It starts on Christmas and we start to celebrate it then. And there's a reason that this is important. It's because waiting matters. It's because anticipation and longing matter.

You can't actually experience joy, like real deep joy if you can't wait for something. Why is there such a shortage of joy in the world today? Yes. Yes, sir. That is correct. That's the correct answer. The answer is instant gratification, isn't it? You can have whatever you want within two days. Yeah. I talked to my, I've used this illustration before, so forgive me.

If you've heard it before, you can just do it. Kean does. And hold up the number of times you've heard me use this illustration. It's what she'll, I'll just be talking and she'll just hold up four fingers. Sometimes it's the worst, but anyway. I talk to my kids sometimes about how we used to have to listen to songs.

You guys, if you're old like me, remember back in the day if you wanted to hear a song, you had two options. Option number one was you drove to the record store. We used to have them. They sold records, tapes, cassettes, things like, I'll tell you all about a young people someday. You used to have to drive there and buy the whole album or a single, this is another thing, or you call the radio.

You hope that you can get through, cuz everybody else is calling the radio station too, and you get the busy signal. It's another thing I'll tell y'all about. It's this annoying beeping that happens on your phone. You get the busy signal, you wait for a while and eventually maybe you get through and talk to somebody.

You request a song and then you wait. You stick a blank cassette tape in the tape player and you close every, anybody remembering? Most of you have no idea what I'm talking. Some of you put it in the cassette and then you wait and hope that your song comes on and you hit record so that you can always have it.

Now what do. Spotify, bam, everything, whenever you want it. And it's cool, but I can't begin to describe to you the joy of being at the gym and hearing your song. Like hearing your voice on the radio, requesting a song and knowing that they're about to play you two. Cuz you called it in. There's something about it that just I can't describe the feeling and you can't get it on Spotify.

It's the same thing with everything in our world today. We have lost the joy, the painful and uncomfortable joy of anticipation. We do it with Christmas too, and I get it. I get a lot of people who start celebrating Christmas early say I love Christmas, and I get that. I get that you want to get to it, but the whole point of Christmas is there's this longing deep in us that nothing in the world can.

We feel deeply that the angst and the pain and the brokenness of this world, and we cry out and we wait, and we expect until one day, one day into the darkness breaks the light. This guy named Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes Christmas as waiting behind a prison door, and that door can only be open from the outside and you just sit and you stare.

And that's what Advent does for us. It provides us with a season of uncomfortable waiting because Christmas comes too quickly in the world. Another problem with Christmas today is it's not where I lost my spot. Here we go. We use it to escape from the real world. A lot of times, a lot of people what they love about Christmas is all the stuff that's.

it's that I can decorate my house and my tree and hide myself from the pain and brokenness of the world, which is why when pain and brokenness happens around the holidays, we feel like we feel shocked and appalled. Like, how dare this kind of bad stuff happened at the holiday season?

It's supposed to be the holidays. It's a season of fun and celebration and joy. But the fact of the matter is, that's not what Christmas is all about. Christmas isn't about hiding from the real world. It's. Transforming the real world. And oftentimes we look at Christmas with these rose color, or we look at the world with these rose colored glasses around the holidays, like things are supposed to be happy and bright, when in fact, the first Christmas was not happy and bright at all.

It was a broken and a dark world, a world in which the Roman Empire controlled the entire narrative, and the Jewish people were waiting, longing desperately for the kingdom of God to appear. And then Messiah popped in the middle. Into the middle of the brokenness and the pain and the loss, and he transformed it by his presence.

And the problem is when we do this, when we make Christmas about optimism, we lose all of the power of the great themes of Christmas. There are four themes of Christmas, of advent. In fact, hope, peace, joy, and love. And you'll see these and decorations all around. Like at South Coast Plaza, you'll see 'em on mantles over fireplaces.

These words that mean next to nothing anymore. But they're powerful words if you ground them in the real world, and that's what Advent does. Advent gives us a season not of optimism, not of rose colored glasses, but of realism, where we look the real world in the face with all of its pain and all of its brokenness, and we say there's one coming who will change everything.

We long for the kingdom of God to break. Advent is utterly realistic and it grounds Christmas in the real world. The other problem with Christmas, of course is not remotely about Jesus anymore. for those very reasons, the reasons I've just described. We have all these signs and all these symbols that we're supposed to point to Jesus and now they've become the thing in and of themselves where they attract all the attention to themselves.

Think about Santa Claus. What does Santa mean? Saint. What is important about this character that we still celebrate him all these years later, is that he was inspired by the person of Jesus to live a life of radical generosity. And through the years we have come to celebrate his generosity, but we've forgotten what that thing points back to, which is what I love so much about the way CS Lewis describes Santa Claus showing up in the Chronicles of Narnia and line the witch and the wardrobe as a concurs.

To Aslan on the move. Santa is pointing to something. The trees, the decor, everything. The gifts point to something, but they've become the thing in and of themselves, and Advent gives us an opportunity to remember what these symbols are all about. So advent is important. It's important that we don't just rush into Christmas because none of us will show up on December 25th, ready to celebrate incarnation if we haven't gone through a season of.

A season of belonging, a season of worship. How do we wait? So how do we celebrate advent together? This is where one of my favorite stories in the Bible comes into play. This is in Luke chapter two, verse 22. It says, when the time for purification rights required by the law of Moses when the time came, Joseph and Mary took Jesus to Jerusalem to present him before the Lord.

As it's written in the law of Lord. Every firstborn male is to be consecrated to the. And to offer a sacrifice in keeping with what the law what is said in the law of the Lord. A pair of doves or two young pigeons. Now, there was a man in Jerusalem called Simeon, who was righteous and devout, and he was waiting, hoping, longing for the consolation of Israel.

And the Holy Spirit had been was on him, and it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit that he would not die before he'd seen the Lord's. Moved by the spirit. He went into the temple courts, and when the parents brought the child Jesus to do for him what the custom of the law required, Simeon took him in his arms and praised God saying, sovereign Lord, as you have promised, now you may dismiss your servant in peace.

For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the sight of all nations, a light for revelation to the Gentiles and the glory of your people. The child's father and mother marveled at what was said about him. And then Simeon blessed them and said to marry his mother, this child is destined to cause the falling and rising of many in Israel and to be a sign that we will be spoken against so that the hearts of that the thoughts of many hearts will be revealed and a sword will pierce your own soul too.

There was a prophet also and a daughter of Pannu, of the tribe of Asher, and she was very old. She had lived with her husband seven years after her marriage and then was a widow until she was 80. She never left the temple, but worshiped day and night fasting and praying, coming up to them at that very moment.

She gave thanks to God and spoke about the child to all who were looking forward to the redemption of Israel. Simian and Anna give us a picture of how to wait, of how to hope for the kingdom of God to break into our world. Here's this man Simian, who's I have been shown by God that I will not.

Until Messiah shows up, he's just hanging on I'm going to live, I'm going to, I'm gonna keep showing up until he shows up. And so he go, he comes to the temple, he worships me. Pray this picture of Anna who never leaves the temple and just finds herself in prayer and worship, day in and day out.

Longing for Jesus to come, longing for Messiah to show up. And so as we step into advent this year, we've decided what better way to step in than to be intent. About prayer, about learning to pray together as a community. Look, there is nothing that will transform this church and through this church, the world like growing in our capacity to pray together.

And so we've decided to take this season of advent and to learn how to pray again. I know it sounds like a silly thing cuz prayer is supposed to be, I remember I, I got in an argument with a friend a while ago cause I said, prayer is hard. He said, no, it's not hard. It's simple. And I said, it is simple, but it's still hard, right?

Cuz the simplest things often are, it's not complex, it's not complicated. It's a conversation with God that's, it's as straightforward as that. But in a world where there's so many distractions, where there's so much pulling at our attention, it can be hard for us to remember even to have a conversation with God, to be intentional about dedicating that.

We thought as we enter into Advent together, how do we keep it simple and make the most powerful and profound investment we can make together as a community? And we thought, let's just work our way through the Lord's Prayer, as simple as that. I know it's not a classic advent text, it's not a Christmas text, but let's learn to pray together.

And so here we go. You ready for this? This is the book of Matthew chapter six, verse five, and when you pray, Jesus. Don't be like the hypocrites for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly, I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But 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, don't keep on babbling like the pagans, but they think they will be heard because they use many words. Don't be like them for your father knows what you need before you ask. This then is how you should pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as 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 the. For if you forgive other people, when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.

But if you do not forgive others their sins, your father will not forgive you your sins. We pray this prayer every week at the end of our service, but we wanna move beyond just the rote memory and practice. There's something important about that, about having these rhythms and habits, having these words ingrained in our minds and practicing as a community, but we wanna make sure that when we are saying these words together, we know what we're.

We also wanna make sure that at the end of every service once a week is not the only time we pray this. And so we figured we'd spend some time together over the next month working our way line by line through this prayer to see what Jesus wants to teach us as a community about how to pray as we wait for him.

So today, our father in heaven, hallowed be. Wow. What an intro. The thing that strikes me about this thing though, is it's not just a, it's not just a salutation. It's not just a formality. I think that's how we often treat the beginning of a prayer. Dear Heavenly Father, dear Lord, it's a like we're writing a letter dear Jesus, how are you?

I'm good. It's not just a formality when Jesus gives us this to pray. Our father in heaven, how would be. What he's giving us is an understanding of who we're talking to. Okay? It's context. We're talking about having a conversation with God here. That's what prayer is, and if you're going to have a conversation with God, it's going to be helpful to remember who it is you're talking to every time you walk into the room.

What's remarkable about this opening line though, is that who we're talking to, we have no business talking to. That's what this text shows us right off the bat, at least not talking to him the way that Jesus invites us to talk to him. See, he teaches us here to pray to the holy. That's what hollowed means.

We'll talk about that in a second. The holy God who dwells in heaven as our father, and in doing this, he introduces us into this tension of prayer that's just stunning and that we ought not ever miss. This tension between our father and the Holy God in heaven. So to understand exactly what Jesus is doing here and how shocking it is, we're gonna work our way backward.

We're gonna start at the end with hallowed Be your name. Hallowed Be your name. That word hallowed comes from the word holy. In Greek. It's huggos in Hebrew. It's I had it, I lost it. I know it, it's in here somewhere. See, stuff just flies outta my mind. I took four years of Hebrew and I can't think of it.

Kadosh, that's it. The word is kadosh in Hebrew. So basically the idea here is that holy or hallowed means to be set apart, to be distinct or different. The word is primarily used of God in the Bible. Okay? So it's actually the best way to describe what holy means is it's this catch all word to define what makes God, and not us.

It's like the word that describes God's godness. Okay? He is holy, he's distinct, he's other, he's different than everything else. Now he can make other things. When he adopts a people for himself in relationship to him, he calls them holy because they are his Now, as a matter of fact, he can make places holy.

You know when Moses walks up to the burning bush, he says, take off your shoes. The place you are standing is holy. In fact, even objects in the temple and the tabernacle are made holy by his presence. But all of this holiness is secondary and derivative. So holiness the sort of fountain, head of holiness is God.

Holiness is the defining attribute of who God is. It's what makes him God and not everything else. Does that make sense? So when the Bible tells us to pray, hallowed be your name. What it's saying is recognize the otherness. Recognize who he is. And there are lots and lots of stories in the Old Testament that give us context to help understand what holiness actually means.

There's the story I just mentioned of the burning bush where Moses kind of is out herding sheep, and he looks off in the distance, he sees a bush that's burning, but it's not being consumed. And as he walks up to it, he hears a voice speaking from the bush, take off your shoes, the place you're standing as holy.

And Moses has this awe-inspiring, terrifying encounter with God in the burning. We have this story that, that follows out of Mount Sinai where God leads his people out of Egypt after just a crazy series of. We call them the plagues, but there are these 10 plagues that happen in Egypt where God, essentially, this is not a sermon on exodus, but where God essentially picks off each of the gods of the Egyptians.

That's what the plagues are actually all about. They're about Yahweh taking on each and every one of the gods of Egypt and showing himself to be dominant over all of them. Ending in Pharaoh himself, who's considered to be a divine represe. Even he's not immune to God's power. And at the end of it, God leads his people to the base of Mount Sinai.

We hear it where he appears this, they call it a Theo. When God shows up visually, he appears as fire and thunder and he shakes the mountain and everybody backs away cuz they want nothing to do with it. Don't approach the mountain. This is the holiness of God. We have later on where God will dwell as a pillar of fire or a cloud in the Taber.

There's only a select group of people, the priests who come into his presence, and they are to come into his presence with awe and reverence. In fact, two of them, Aaron's sons don't come in with appropriate awe and reverence. It says they offered strange. This is in Leviticus 10. They offered strange fire before the Lord, and so fire fell from heaven and consumed them.

What strange fire means, lots of scholars have debated but it probably simply means they took fire from somewhere other than the altars. So they took common fire as opposed to holy fire into the presence of a holy. They were consumed in the process because the holiness of God is absolute and it's in.

We find this later on when the arc of the covenant where the holiness of God dwells is being brought to Jerusalem by David. You guys remember this story and it's on the back of a cart and as they're going through this stream, the cart, the oxygen who are carrying the cart stumble and the arc of the covenant begins to slip.

And this guy, with the best of intentions reaches out and he to steady the arc of the covenant and he touches it with his hand. And in a moment he dies because God was angry with him. No, it's because the holiness of God is inviable. You don't just take unclean hands and touch something that's holy. It is different.

It is other. It set apart. And this story is troubling. It was troubling for David. David got angry. David said, I actually don't want this thing anywhere near me. I was gonna bring this to my house, but I'm not gonna put it in my house anymore cuz there's something happening here that is not ordinary.

That's super. One of the most famous stories for me is Isaiah. When he has this vision, it says in the year that this is Isaiah six, in the year that that King Isiah died, I saw the Lord high and lifted up, and the train of his robe filled the temple, the train of his robe. So the cape, his cape filled the temple.

This is this massive vision of God. He's got these angels celebrating and singing to him, and then Isaiah's response, he falls on his face and he cries out, woe is me. I am undone. There's this sense in the presence of God that like common, ordinary, unclean doesn't belong, and this holiness is absolute, and it's actually terrifying.

The primary response to a vision of the holiness of God throughout the Old Testament is, This is where we get the idea of fear. The Lord, I know today in church circles, we don't like that at all. We really like to major on this. Jesus is my boyfriend, kind of God where he's cuddly and he's soft and he's nice and he's fun to be around.

And so when we think we read things like the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, we say it doesn't really mean fear. It means like awe or wonder. Because we have no idea what awe actually means. We, that makes us feel better. The problem is, when's the last time you were aw struck by anything?

The thing you were aw struck by is terrifying, isn't it? It's my family and I watched that movie, the documentary Free solo the other day. You guys remember, have you seen that there's a point at which this guy is, he's hanging onto this cliff, like a thousand couple thousand feet in the air, suspended by two thumbs.

Do you guys remember that? I don't know how he did it, but that the view must have been awe inspiring. Just turning around and looking must have been like, that would be awesome. And what makes it awesome, beautiful view. You might. That's what all means. I remember the last a time that I was awestruck.

We were my wife and I were leading a team of students. Heather and I were leading a team of students in Mozambique. Remember this when we were at by Kruger. We were sitting around this beautiful national park in South Africa. We're on the edge of something called the Crocodile River.

We're sitting, it was like midnight. We're sitting around the campfire telling stories when out of the darkness came this roar, like this just terrifying. Like lion's roar. And I remember all of us like there were a bunch of houses nearby and they all sh like shining spotlights on the nearby hill trying to figure out what was going on, where the lion was.

There was this like 14 foot electric fence between us and the park. So we were a hundred percent safe and we all sat out there for about 10 minutes thinking like that was amazing. And then we got so terrified that we went inside despite the fact that there was an electric fence because there was a lion in the dark and there's nothing quite like that.

Awe of this is amazing and I might die. Okay. That's the feeling here. That's what awe actually means. That's what reverence means. And this is the primary response to the presence of God in the Old Testament, which is why the primary word for worship in the Old Testament, do you know what it is? Shaha, which means to fall face down.

The primary word for worship in the Old Testament means to fall face down. Why do you fall? Face down. Cuz you're in the presence of a holy. And that's just what happens. Your knees go weak

and you are undone. The other word, by the way, in the Old Testament for worship is avada, which means to work. So at some point you get up off the ground and you start to work. You do what he tells you to do. So I say all that to say if we want to understand how to. We start with this idea of the Holy God who inhabits the heavens, who dwells beyond us, who is other than us, who is bigger than we are, who is amazing and terrifying and beautiful and captivating in everything we said but not in the soft and gentle and easy way.

Again, I just, all these lion images from the from Narnia, it's just such a perfect. But CS Lewis has given us of what Jesus is like. He's this lion that's not safe. I think of this, I think it's in maybe it's in the horse and his boy. There's this famous scene where essentially one, this young girl arrives in Narnia and finds herself chased by a lion to this river.

And when she gets to the river, she's she's found herself to be like supernaturally thirsty. She doesn't know why she's so thirsty. And she goes to walk to the edge of the stream and she finds that the lion has laid himself between her and. And she has this conversation with him where she's trying to talk him out of being dangerous.

And she says to him do you mind moving so I can take a drink? And he makes no response, just a low roar. And the way Louis captures it, he says, she may as well have asked the mountains to move, and then she says at least can you promise me that you won't harm me? And the lion responds, I make no such promise.

She says do you eat little girls ? And he says, I have devoured kings and kingdoms, men and women. Lewis says, he didn't say this, if he was as if he was bragging. Just a statement of fact. And then she says I better go find another stream. And he says, there is no other stream. This is the picture.

Do you see that? This is the, holy God, he's not safe, but he's good. That's the picture we have to hold in our minds as we step into prayer. And that story of Naab and Abai, the two priests who were consumed by the fire, God rationalizes what he did. He says, in the presence of those who approach me, I must be considered holy.

I must be hollowed. I must be sanctified. Don't walk in unaware. Don't walk in and unaware in prayer. We are walking where angels fear to t. We were walking into the courtroom of heaven. Let's not be unaware of who we're talking about here and now. Where this thing gets crazy is when Jesus invites us to call that guy Dad , because that's what he does.

He says, when you pray to him, pray our Father. Be new. The word in Hebrew, in ama is aba, which if it sounds like a simple word, it's because it is, it's the ama equivalent of one of the first words that a child would learn. It's too repeated. It's a repeated syllable. It's a Pru, a B, B, a, right? A simple thing that even a child can learn.

As a matter of fact, a child would learn it is one of their first words, and it's a word that's learned through embrace. You learn what Abba means in somebody's arms. As an infant, and your response is this natural language that comes out. Now, this is remarkable. People didn't pray like this before Jesus.

This is not one of those places where Jesus is just giving us what the cultural norms are of the day. This is Jesus bucking the cultural norms. There are two places in the Old Testament where God has referred to as Father, and both times in that context, it's father like George Washington is the father of this country.

It's father as in forefather, originator, never aba, never dad. And there's a reason for it. Everything I just said is the reason for it. You don't talk to him like that until you do. I had this conversation with a Jewish friend a while back, and I said we pray this prayer to God as father is that something that you have any context for?

And she looked mortified. She said, absolutely not. She said, everything I just told you, he's the holy one of Israel. He's the Almighty God, the creator of all things. Think about what that means. She said to me, how dare you call him father? And I said, that's it, . There is a real shock to this. The disciples must have gasped when Jesus said, this is how you're to pray cuz you don't approach this one like that until you do.

And how do you,

because that's how Jesus can approach him. And we go in with him. There's this great story I may have told before. Forgive me if I did. Thank you. Four fingers. Kevin, you don't even know this story, but you already know I've told it four times of a soldier during the Civil War who had lost his father and brother in the same day of fighting.

And he went to the White House with the hopes of getting exemption to get outta the war so he could care for his mother and sisters. And he showed up to the White House doors and he was told by the guards at the door, who do you think you are? The president's in the middle of a war. He's not, he doesn't have time.

So the soldier went and sat on a bench near the White House and was weeping or obviously in sorrow when a young boy walked up to him and said, what's wrong? And he sat down and the soldier just was feeling so vulnerable and whatever. He just spilled his heart to this young boy. Told him the whole story.

The young boy said, I think I can help you. Come with me, take some by the hand. He walks up to the White House gates and for some reason the guards just didn't see him or whatever, didn't notice, and he walks right past the guards. He walks up to the door of the White House. There's more soldiers up there, walks right past the soldiers through the White House.

At this point, the soldiers thinking, what is going on here? He walking through the halls of the White House and nobody's stopping, and he walks up to the door of the Oval Office that are guarded and he just throws 'em open and walks in and nobody says a word until the president turns around and says to him, son, what are you doing here?

It was Abraham Lincoln's. And he walked this man right into the presence of the president where he was able to get his request answered. And that's what Jesus is doing for us here. He's saying, come with me. You don't walk into the presence of this God by yourself, but if you come with me, you have an all access pass.

That's what prayer is. Prayer is taking Jesus relationship with the. And being swept up into it ourselves. Because of his sacrifice, because of who he is and what he's done, we now have his relationship with the father,

and so he invites us through him, with him to pray our Father to the holy God who dwells in heaven. That's the tension that we have to invite ourselves into, that we have to live in. Now, how does this affect the way we pray? Real simple, three things. It changes the way we think about God, I hope, and there may be some people in this room who need to change the way you think about God.

Just a bit toward the reverence side, , because we have in what we call low church like evangel. Church. We've just gotten used to the like, comfortable, safe, and easy. God. And maybe just, maybe we need the lion to roar in our face to remember who we're talking about.

Just think for a second. I just think of the most terrifying thing you've ever seen. Not evil, but just like naturally powerful, whether it's like a 60 foot wave or a giant mountain peak. And just think that the guy we're talking to, the person we're talking to made it that wave moves because he breathes.

That's who we're talking to.

And maybe along those lines, as we change the way we think about God, it changes the way we pray. because maybe we're not just showing up to get our needs met anymore, but instead we're showing up to say, what are you doing ? Because what you're doing is clearly gonna be better than what I'm doing. I showed up here and I intended to ask you to bless what I'm doing, but how about I just get on board with what you're doing?

Cuz I, I figure it's blessed already. Yeah. Yeah. It's not that we can't ask things, cuz we'll get to that in a second. , he's our dad, but, Maybe just, maybe if we hold this awestruck picture in our minds, we'll be more inclined to listen first before we. So it changes the way we think about God. It also changes the way we think about ourselves.

Here's the deal. If we go on the other side of this, to the God is my aba, my father who loves me, and if you need some help with this, there's a great book by a guy named Brennan Manning called Abba's Child. I cannot recommend highly enough. I've got a copy at the house. If you need to borrow it, buy it on Amazon.

Game changer, . Maybe on the other side. You need to lean into that. Maybe you've gotten, you've been around church for a while and you've got the fear of God. You're so afraid that you don't even talk to him. You're afraid that he doesn't care. You're afraid that he's not interested. You have all sorts of different fears around God that are keeping you away.

Maybe it's a fear of of your lack, your own lack of worth, that that you're not deserving to walk into the presence of a holy God. But yet what you need is on the other side is some self-esteem and not like the classic world self-esteem, but like self-esteem through Jesus. If I'm with him, I'm.

I can walk in or angels fear to dread to tread if I'm with him. And so maybe you're on the other side of this and you need through this conversation to change the way you think about yourself. Cause you've been told for a long time that you're broken or messed up, whether it's by yourself or by the enemy or by the church.

Even. We use this language. I am so unworthy, like all these kind of and true. Until you're in Christ. Yeah. In which case he sees you as Jesus. So unworthy? I don't think so. Cuz he's worthy. And if I'm with him, so am I.

And with that, pray boldly like you're talking to somebody who loves you, like you're talking to somebody who cares and can do something about the stuff you're carrying. There's this great poem that John Newton wrote. It says, thou Art coming to a king, large petitions with the bring for his grace and power as such that none can ever ask too.

Maybe some of you need to pray more boldly, less timidly, less apologetically. You're with Jesus. You're his guest of honor. You are his child. That's what Romans eight says. Those who are led by the spirit of God are children of God. Spirit you receive doesn't make you slave so that you live in fear again.

Rather, his spirit has brought about your adoption to sonship and by him we cry. ABA Father, his spirit testifies with our. That we are God's children. If we're children, then we are heirs. Heirs of God and COHEs with Christ, coheirs with Christ. You're with him. Maybe in prayer. You need to act like it. And all of this.

The third thing I think this does, it changes our view of God in prayer. It changes our view of ourselves, and I think the third thing I hope it'll do in me and in us, especially as we lean in this advent season, is give us a desire to. If this is what it is, if prayer is talking to this God as dad, then I don't wanna do anything else.

Honestly, if you had the chance to talk to your celebrity crush right now, would you wanna do anything else? No. Mike, you're a married man. I'm just I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But like somebody really important, like without all the political stuff and overtones, but if you had a chance to talk to a president, if you had a chance to talk to a great world leader would you drop everything to do that?

Yeah. That's what we're talking about here. Like times a billion. We get to talk to God as.

I get it guys. Sometimes I think it's boring too. Sometimes it's hard for me to, sometimes I forget too. But let's have this be a reminder to us of who we're talking to, who we're talking about, and have this draw us deeper into prayer, not just as individuals, but as a community. Because if we can do this, if we can live in this tension, if we can hold this vision in our minds through the season of Advent, I am convinced that God's gonna show up in powerful ways, in our lives, in our community, and in the world.

And that this season of advent might just change things. It might. It could, it will. So would you pray?

Father in heaven, you are holy and we are awestruck by the fact that you love us. Jesus. Thank you for your gift, for your sacrifice, for showing up in our stories to give us the relationship with the Father that you have.

Holy Spirits help us, teach us when we don't know how to pray. Pray through us and for us. When we forget who we are, remind us when we forget who you are, remind us we need you.

Lord, I pray to you to awaken in us in this church a desire, a longing for prayer. I pray that God, you would draw us to our knee. Day in and day out, and that as we pray boldly to our father in heaven who is holy, and we see the atmosphere shift around us, that would even inspire us all the more to pray when we see power unleashed in our lives, in our world, through the prayers that we pray to our Heavenly Father who loves us, would that inspire us to pray all the.

Lord, I pray that you use this, that you use this season of Advent to prepare us to celebrate Christmas well, but that the fruits of this season would go well beyond Christmas and that we would grow in our capacity to be praying people in a praying church. We love you and we thank you that you love us.

Church, if I could ask you to stand we're gonna respond together with worship. And something that we'd like to invite you into during worship is you might, may notice there's a Christmas tree over here with a basket next to it with some very tiny ornaments in there and some hooks. This comes from a book that CS Lewis wrote on prayer.

It's called Letters to Malcolm. And in there he talks about how he fes, he calls it Fes Studenting the Lord's Prayer with his own personal thoughts. Best tuning means to decorate. So it's the idea of hanging meanings on the Lord. And he basically says, without Oblating the original meaning and what it actually means, he will hang it, will attach his own meanings onto it.

Things that are significant and meaningful. And so as we talk about our father in heaven, how it would be your name, I wonder if you'd be willing to decorate this tree with your own personal meanings. Now, the vision in my mind originally was to get ornaments that were big enough for you to write.

Like full phrases and words on vision and execution with me are two different. So the ornaments are tiny and the pens are huge. , so probably one word, but just throughout, throughout worship if there's a word of meaning that's coming to you as you think about our father in heaven, whose name is holy, just come up, grab a pen, grab an ornament, grab a hook, write that word on there, as many words as you can fit.

You can write four or five if you can, and then just hang 'em on the tree. And throughout Advent, we're gonna be doing this every week with a different, And so by the end of Advent, this tree's gonna stay here. By the end of Advent, it will be decorated with all of our prayers and all the meanings that we attach to it.

During worship, feel free to come up and do that as well.