Do you guys remember the movie Dangerous Minds came out a while back?
You've got to be a little bit old to remember that one about Michelle Pfeiffer. She's a teacher who goes into an inner city school. And it's filled with all the stereotypes. The drugs, the gangs, the violence, the lack of hope, right? And I remember when this movie came out.
I remember I was in seventh grade when this movie came out, which meant that I didn't go to. To the theater to watch the movie because I wasn't old enough to go see it. It was too much. And so I remember when it came out, I remember seeing the commercials, and I remember thinking to myself, I can't believe they made a movie about my school. And that was a bit naive.
Cause I was a seventh grader, all right? And I was a little bit dumb, but also, like, it was too close to reality, more than it should have been, all right? And so, like, it was. It was a good picture of kind of the environment I was at in junior high at that time. But the movie is Michelle Pfeiffer.
She's the main character. She goes in and she steps into this place that's got a lot of darkness to it, a lot of difficulty. Again, a lack of hope. But she sees the potential, and she eventually begins helping her students. And I remember struggling even with the title of the movie, like, what does it mean to have dangerous Minds?
Maybe it was the environment that they lived in had shaped them in such a way that they became dangerous because of, again, the environment. Or maybe I think really more the idea of the movie is that she's unlocking the potential of who these young people were and the danger that exists whenever they actually could reach what they were able to reach. And when hope is restored, it becomes something dangerous. Now, we're starting a new sermon series today, and we're calling it Dangerous Prayers. And it makes me think back to that movie, Dangerous Minds.
But the prayers aren't dangerous because the environment that they are prayed in, and they aren't even dangerous because of the potential that these prayers hold, although that is closer to the picture. Over the next two weeks, we're going to look at two separate prayers that I believe are dangerous. And you may not see it that way at the beginning, but I think maybe you'll be there with me at the end. And they're dangerous because of how God answers those prayers. In fact, I think that you may not want to pray these prayers after we finish these sermons.
I think that if you take this seriously, if you follow along, you take it seriously, it will probably change your life. And the reality is maybe you don't want your life to change.
But I believe that God wants your life to change. I believe that God wants my life to change. I believe that he calls us to something better than the realities that we live in. And beyond that, it's not just that he wants things to change, but that Jesus actually says we should pray these prayers. He tells us to pray these prayers.
I mean, we could spend all sorts of time looking through Scripture and finding all sorts of prayers that seem to be dangerous. But what makes these two prayers that we're looking at so different or unique is the fact that they come straight from Jesus, that it's words that he tells us that we're supposed to pray. And maybe that holds some weight with you. And so maybe you don't want to change your life. But I think Jesus wants to change your life.
And I think that Jesus tells us directly that we're supposed to pray these things. And so we should probably lean forward. And you may actually find some joy in this, that while there is danger, there's also some excitement that comes along with it. And so this first prayer that we're going to look at is one that you may be very familiar with. It's the Lord's Prayer.
It's from Matthew 6. We kind of walked through it already in this service once. It's something that you may be familiar with probably to some extent. And it starts with that very simple phrase, this, then, is how you should pray. It's right off the bat.
Jesus tells us, this is what it looks like when I teach you to pray, it should look like this. You need to pray these kinds of things. This is what it should be. So he says, 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 and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but. But deliver us from the evil one. Now, Doc preached on this passage back on July 5th just a month ago, and he said that this is the most prayed, unprayed prayer. And I tend to agree with him.
And what he meant by that was that almost all of us know this prayer. Many of us have at least memorized parts of it, if not all of it at some point in our life. And in fact, you probably don't even have to have grown up in church or ever even been in church to have heard this prayer or to potentially have even memorized it. Just a few weeks ago, I'm down in Texas with family. I'm hanging out with my parents, with my sister and her husband and their family, and we're catching up, sharing stories.
My sister begins telling me about her oldest kid. Now, she's got three kids. Her oldest one is 7 years old. His name is Cannon. And she begins telling me about him.
He's a little baseball prodigy, incredibly gifted. He knows the game. He's talented and athletic. He could probably play with boys twice his age if his body didn't resemble a 5 year old instead of a 7 year old. All right, so like he's, he's a little guy, all right?
But she's telling me these stories, all the giftedness. He's doing the travel teams already. He's doing all the different kinds of stuff. And she's sharing these stories. And she says, we, we signed him up this summer to play in a rec league, just a simple kind of local league, because they felt like he probably needs to play with his friends and kids within his own community.
And so, you know, that kind of makes sense. And so they get him into this league and Cannon gets drafted by a coach that they don't know. And it becomes pretty clear very quickly that the coach doesn't know much of anything when it comes to baseball. It becomes very frustrating to my sister. She's very angry about this.
My sister's very competitive. She's watching just chaos. And basically the only thing that the coach taught the players on this team was, if you get the ball, you've got to give it to Cannon. Just get the ball, throw it to Cannon. That's all you got to do.
Which is maybe decent advice for their team. But it's not really good baseball coaching. Right. And so my sister's frustrated watching this every week. It's just chaos.
There's no growing, there's no learning. Their son is getting frustrated because kids don't understand the basics of the game. It's just a catastrophe. And then as she's sharing these stories with me, she remembers, she says, oh yeah, there was one thing that the coach did that I liked. And she said, he taught the kids the Lord's Prayer.
So before the games, this little team of 6 and 7 year olds would get together and they would recite the Lord's Prayer together before they would go and play. It's not an uncommon situation. That may be how you learned the Lord's Prayer. I think it's kind of weird, but it's not that uncommon. I remember teaching this prayer to my kids and it sounds like the preacher was being very spiritual and teaching his kids this prayer.
That's the wrong take. Alright. What it was was I was a tired dad who didn't have the mental capacity to walk through bedtime with them anymore. And so I would lean on the light switch as I would say this prayer because it required very little thinking on my part. And so I would do this.
And over time, my kids began to learn to pray and they began to pray it out loud into realizing and thinking through. I'm probably not paying attention to this prayer. I think it is the most prayed unprayed prayer. Now, Doc took this passage again just a month ago and he worked through the idea that the Lord's Prayer elevates God to his rightful place while it's also putting us in our proper place, our lower place. And I think that's a great message.
It was a great message on this prayer. I'm right in line. I think it's a great idea. I want to take this prayer just in a little bit different direction today. And this isn't in con.
This isn't to be contrary. This is just different, a little bit of a different path. Because as I see this prayer, as I read this prayer, as I've meditated over this prayer, I've begun to see this prayer as something dangerous. I think you can see it in several places. One of them is where Jesus says that we're supposed to pray for our daily needs.
And that doesn't seem too dangerous. It's at least a little bit risky to think that as I'm Praying. I'm asking God to be the one who provides for me daily instead of me being the one to provide for me daily. It seems like a little bit of a risk, a little bit of a reach. Maybe more so is in that other spot where Jesus says we're supposed to pray for God to forgive us in the same way that we forgive the people around us.
That's incredibly risky. That's very dangerous because I know how hard it is for me to forgive the people around me. Quite frankly, I don't want God to forgive me in the same manner that I forgive the people around me. My prayers are that God would forgive me much better than I forgive the people around me. So I think that part's pretty dangerous.
But maybe the most dangerous part of this prayer is a section that we tend to fly right past without second thought. It's right there at the beginning of the prayer where he says, your kingdom come, your will be done. On earth as it is in heaven. Your kingdom come, your will be done. It's a prayer that God's kingdom would expand, that Jesus kingdom would expand.
Kingdom come has this idea of taking ground. It's moving from where the kingdom currently resides and it's reaching into new places. I think of ancient wars or more modern wars even, where two sides come up against one another and there's a boundary between the two of them. And whoever wins, the other side retreats. And that new found area, the one that wins, is now taking new ground.
It's the expansion of their reign and of their authority, which I think is the picture of what we're seeing here. It's a prayer of progress and growth and expansion. And that word will. It's a prayer for God's will to win out. It's a prayer that what God wants won't stall out as a simple want, that it will be, that it will move from a want to a truth to a reality.
It's a prayer that God's hopes and desires would come to fruition, that they'd become a reality. Which means that it's probably worth at least pausing and asking the question for, well, then what is God's will? What is the point? What is it that he wants? And there's a lot of different answers that we could give to that question.
In fact, our culture, our world, our churches, all answer that question in so many different ways, so many different things that we say that God wants. And I suppose to some extent they're all true, but they also kind of funneled back down to one major Truth, all of them point into the direction of this. And I think we can define it this way, that God's will is that every person would accept and acknowledge him as Lord. That's his will. There are tons of little things that we can do that would be good or beneficial or that they could even make God happy.
And yet all of it is to the purpose to drive people towards accepting and acknowledging him as Lord. Nothing beats. Nothing beats when someone chooses Jesus as Lord. And so when we pray this prayer, we're praying for, to a large extent, submission to his authority. We're asking for him to take authority.
That's that kingdom language. It's the idea of reign authority, of ruling over an area. And so we're asking that his kingdom would expand. We're asking that his will would exist. And if that's going to happen, then it's going to start with us.
When we pray for his kingdom to come and his will to be done, the first place that's going to show up is in our lives. We're asking him to come and to take root and to have reign, to have authority over us. But it goes beyond us because we're also praying for his kingdom to expand past us. We're praying for that kingdom to take new ground. We're praying for others to submit to God's authority.
And this prayer, as much as we just know it and we have it, memorized it, this isn't a generic spiritual prayer. This prayer for the expansion and for God's will to come into reality has a destination. He says, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. The place in which his kingdom and his will advances is not a generic spiritual location. This prayer asks for God's kingdom to take ground in literal places.
The places that Jesus kingdom takes ground have postal codes. They come with addresses and with living rooms and with bedrooms.
They come with office space and cubicles. They come with pickleball courts and swimming pools, and they come with restaurants and shopping centers. This prayer is about Jesus spiritual kingdom stretching out over new ground in this world. World. It's more specific than that.
It's in this continent, it's in this country, it's in this state, it's in this county, in this city, in this school district, or in this neighborhood, or in your very home. This is a dangerous prayer because when we pray your kingdom come, your will be done on earth. This is dangerous because that's where you live. That's where you are. You live on earth.
You live in this continent. And in this country, and in this county or this state, this county, this city, or maybe a different city. I don't know. Maybe you live in a different county. Maybe you live in different school districts or in different neighborhoods.
And we certainly all live in different homes. But this prayer is that this kingdom would show up in those specific places. This is a dangerous prayer because of how God answers this prayer. It's dangerous because you are the answer to the prayer. Can you see it?
It's kind of like wishing for kids. I don't know if you remember that stage in life or maybe you're still there. Remember, Remember when you were young and you had kids and you were exhausted and it was like. Like you knew that it was a blessing. It just didn't feel like a blessing.
You remember that and then remember you had friends who didn't have kids and they would tell you how badly they wanted kids, and you were like, are you sure? Like, I love my kids. They're great. But, like, I mean, it's hard. Like, do you understand what it is you're saying you want?
Right. This prayer is kind of like that. We don't realize that this prayer is kind of like volunteering. It's dangerous to not know what it is that you volunteered for. And we don't always see this prayer this way because we pray for Jesus, his kingdom to expand.
Like, you know, over there. Like, I need, like, those neighbors in that house. They really need Jesus kingdom to show up over there. Or maybe it's that neighborhood or it's that part of town, or maybe it's that school district needs a whole lot of Jesus. Maybe that's what's going on.
Sometimes we pray for that nation way over there, or we pray for other places in the world, and that's, you know, missions work, which is very valuable, and that's a very legitimate thing, and it's something that we should do.
But if you pray this prayer, you're praying that Jesus Christ kingdom and his will will expand on earth just like it is in heaven. And there's a really good chance that you're going to be a part of the strategic plan for expansion in your little corner of the earth. It's going to start with you, and then it's going to extend past you to those who are around you. It's a dangerous prayer because you are at least part of the answer to this prayer.
Back in May, I got a phone call from my dad. My mom and dad have recently moved down to southeast Texas, which is a very different world. Than west Texas, where we grew up and where they lived. And so they're down there. They moved there to be closer to my sister.
They live in the same neighborhood as my sister now. And so they've moved down there, and they're starting life again. There's a big move, and so they're figuring out their places and all that kind of stuff. And they found this church that they seem to like. And in May, my dad calls me and he says, hey, my church is doing this really, really cool thing, and I'm wondering if you've ever seen it.
And so he begins to tell me about this, saying that the church has the word for it would be like an aphorism, all right? But he tells me about this church and how they have, like, on signs in their building, and they have it on shirts, and they've got billboards around town, all this stuff. But it's a very simple. Just says, in southeast Texas as it is in heaven. He's like, have you ever seen that?
And I was like, no, I've never seen that. It's really cool, dad. I really liked it. And it just kind of sat there in the back of my head. And then in June, I went to a CIY move conference with our high school students up in Bowling Green, Ohio.
We're hanging out for the week, doing all the stuff that we do, and I noticed that on one specific day, I kept seeing the same T shirt over and over and over again. It was all these kids from one of the groups was wearing these youth group T shirts that they'd made. And on the back of the shirt, it says, said in Columbus as it is in heaven. I like that. I thought that was a really good idea.
Guys, I'm going to tell you that this prayer is dangerous because this isn't about some vague location. This prayer is fulfilled in Frankfurt because you live on earth, and so this prayer has a destination. And you're likely going to be the answer to your own prayer in your location on earth. In fact, if you've got the guts, if you're willing, I'd encourage you to take out a pen and write in your Bible. I love to write in my Bible and make all sorts of notes.
Maybe you're on your phone, you got an app, you can do it there, too. But I would love for you to just make a note on this verse somewhere in the margin or in the notes on your app, and just write out, in Frankfurt as it is in heaven, because I think that's what this prayer means.
We should probably talk about what it means to bring this kingdom to earth. We've already said it this way, but I gotta say it again. It starts with you. There's a great quote from a guy named David John Seale where he says the challenge of the church is to get heaven into us, not simply get us into heaven. I think that's a good picture.
I think it works really well with our definition of what the will of God is. God's will is that every person would accept and acknowledge him as Lord. That means that all of this starts with you. That even if you've ever prayed this prayer casually, I want you to hear and understand that you're inviting Jesus Kingdom into you. Starts with you.
Before you can want his kingdom to come to earth, you've got to want it to come and show up with you.
Maybe that's where you're at. Maybe you've never invited Jesus Kingdom to you and maybe that's a conversation we need to have. I would love to have that with you after the sermon or sometime later today. Send me an email. I'd love to talk to people about what it looks like to begin having a relationship with Jesus.
I should warn you though, that when Jesus Kingdom shows up, it creates change.
When you accept and acknowledge Jesus as Lord, it begins the process of becoming more like Him. And as we begin to change, as we practice submitting to the will of God through our acceptance and our acknowledgement of Jesus being our Lord, we become ambassadors of this kingdom. We become examples of what his kingdom does when it takes ground on Earth. In fact, I believe that if you read through history, you're going to find that the Christians who did the most for the present world were those who submitted most to Jesus. And so it starts with you.
And there's hundreds, maybe thousands of other ways that we could take this idea about what it looks like to bring his kingdom to earth. I'm going to give you two ideas. I think one of them is that it looks like making things new. There's an old interview I saw with a guy named LeBron James. Now, I know that that name right off the bat already creates some friction for people in the room.
And I get it. I'm not the biggest fan of LeBron James myself. But I love this interview, alright? I love how he answered this. It's early in his career, he's just started.
There's all this hype around him. He's got reporters following him around. And in one of these interviews, a reporter comes up to him and asks him what is it like to be the new Michael Jordan? And some. Yeah, you guys laughed because you're like, yeah, right, right.
Okay, let him make a good answer. All right? He answers with, I don't want to be the next Michael Jordan. I want to be LeBron James, which is the right answer. It's the right answer on multiple levels, but it's the right answer and it's a good answer.
It's the right perspective. Guys, I'm going to tell you that as Christians, we ought to be in the business of making things new. Not trying to replicate or just do what has been, but to be in the business of making things new. And the reason I say that is because God is in the business of creating new things. That's what he does.
Sometimes we talk about God as creator as if it's a past tense thing. He didn't stop creating when he was done with creation. He continues to work. He continues to create new in this world all the time. And in fact, if you look to the very end of it, Revelation 21, he says, he who was seated on the throne said, I'm making everything new.
This is what God does. He makes things new. And so one of the ways that we participate in bringing his kingdom to Earth is when we choose to make things new. His kingdom expands to us. And then it keeps finding new ground to take.
It keeps extending past us. And it should cause us to ask questions like this, how am I making things new for the people around me? Or ask questions like, what do I see around me that is far from the design that God gave it? Or even just very simply, how can I make the world a better place? How can I improve the world around me?
See, one of the ways that we show a glimpse of Jesus kingdom to others is by doing something so overwhelmingly excellent for them that it defies any standard by which they've been treated. Extraordinary acts of kindness or unexpected generosity, especially from strangers, just blows people's minds, doesn't it? I think it looks like this. I think a couple years ago, we had a group of guys in our church who have skills and work skilled labor. They can build things and do things.
And we caught word of a man and his wife here in town. Man was a veteran. They had a home that had reached the point where it needed some serious work. And they didn't have the funds and they didn't have the skills. And so a group of people kind of surrounded and found a way to just bless these people by basically rebuilding their home from the floor up.
It's an incredible thing, and that's a nice thing, and that's a new thing. And that's simple enough. But the story ends with the veteran and his wife accepting and acknowledging Jesus as Lord, which is what God's will is. It's bringing his kingdom and his will to earth. Just a couple weeks ago, we're sitting in an elders meeting, and one of our elders, Brian Pelletier, starts talking about these two sisters who live over in Scott County.
They're elderly ladies, very old, living in a tiny little home, just the two of them, no plumbing. Brian says that you can see the inside of their house when you're standing outside of their house through the walls. And this group of people started coming together to build them a new home. It's going to be small, I would argue, probably smaller than anything that anyone in here lives in. Going to have plumbing, it's going to have insulated walls.
And in the conversation, Brian says, oh, yeah, by the way, these two women are atheists. To which I said, not for long, because that's what Christians do, right? We're creating new things. We're bringing heaven to earth when we make things new, and we're bringing his kingdom to earth when we make things good. And we're giving people the opportunity to accept and acknowledge a good God as Lord.
One more idea. You could also live a subversive life. I want to take you back to the Old Testament. Book of Daniel tells a story of main character Daniel, but it also talks about three of his friends a few times and stories that you may be familiar with. But it's the young men who are taken into captivity in a place called Babylon, which is a foreign land.
And they're not taken there as slaves. Instead, they're given the opportunity to participate in some preferred training, some leadership training. There's some potential seen in these young men, except that this training that they received gave them food that young Jewish boys wouldn't eat. And then they were also, like, expected to pray to this statue of their leader. And then they were told that you can't pray to anything but the statue of that leader.
And Daniel and his friends, they found some peaceful ways to protest. Landed Daniel in a lion's den, you've probably heard that story. And it landed his friends in a fiery furnace. Maybe you've heard that story. And they are incredible stories of God's provision and protection in hard times of faithfulness.
But don't miss this part. We usually fly right past this idea. Daniel and his friends also sought the success of the kingdom that they were forced to live in. They brilliantly walked this line of humbly serving their captors, while never disobeying or turning their backs on God. In fact, in Daniel 6, it tells how even the officials who are overseeing all this recognize that they don't really ever disobey.
They're always very peaceful. They're always very humbly serving us and our nation, unless it has something to do with the laws of their God. They're very faithful, they're very loyal. And Daniel and his friends, they kind of get elevated into some special positions. That's cool.
But more importantly, their God is over and over again recognized and celebrated in a foreign land. If you read through this story just over and over again, people keep believing in this God because of these young men's faithfulness.
Daniel and his friends brought God's kingdom to earth and the way that they lived Faithful Lives in a Contrary Culture I think it's fair to say that our culture is a bit contrary to the church. And so what would it look like for us to live subversive lives in a contrary culture? Can you live a disciplined life in the face of opposition? Can you value others when the world around us values self? And can you deny self while our world celebrates indulgence?
Could you just be grateful instead of complaining? Could you hold your tongue or maybe even your typing fingers when the world around you is getting louder and louder? Can you be faithful to your spouse? Can you forgive and reconcile? Can you live generously?
You see every single one of these things, and then so many more are practical ways that we are bringing Jesus kingdom to earth. And when we do so, we're just creating an opportunity, we're creating a chance. These are practical ways that people are led to a relationship with Jesus where he becomes their Lord. It's the role that we play.
And bringing his kingdom to earth may be the only way some people catch a glimpse of heaven.
It's kind of a dark, sad thought. An author named Randy Alcorn actually writes that out. He says it this way. He says the best of life on earth is a glimpse of heaven. The worst of life is a glimpse of hell.
And so for Christians, this present life is the closest they will come to hell. For non believers, it's the closest they'll ever come to heaven.
When we bring his kingdom to earth, we're giving people a glimpse of heaven. We give people the chance to see something other than the eternity that they've known. And it's why we started our year off with a little campaign that we called Just One. I don't know if you guys remember that. We still have our number one set up over here.
We still got the five gallon bucket to the side filled with ping pong balls. But this was the idea, we were asking and challenging one another to be ones who bring Jesus Kingdom to earth, that we would share the realities of the spiritual world into our physical world in the little corner of earth that we're on. And so when we share the gospel and we have spiritual conversations with people or maybe we just invite someone to church, the challenge was that you come in that next Sunday and you grab a ping pong ball and you drop it. And in that number one, and then we've been tracking, I'll tell you, I think we're a little bit behind where we should be for the year. And I don't know, that's just because we don't do it.
Maybe we forgot, I don't know, maybe, maybe you've been actively bringing Jesus Kingdom into this world and you just haven't followed it up with those ping pong balls, man. We're not going to encourage you to do that. You ought to do it in the service. You can do it after or before. Come in on a Tuesday, it doesn't matter.
But there's encouragement that we get when we see that as a family, as a church, we're all buying into this, we're participating, we're doing our part in our little corner of the earth, wherever it is that we've been called. Because, guys, our world needs more heaven in it. Jesus and his kingdom needs to expand. And if you can pray this Lord's Prayer, if you've ever found yourself praying this Lord's Prayer, then you should probably be able to see how you have a role to play in the answering of this prayer. And I don't like, I firmly believe this.
I don't believe that anyone is more qualified to bring his kingdom to your corner of earth than you. It's us. And so if you've got the guts, if you can look at his prayer, you can see it's a little bit dangerous to pray. I want to invite you to pray this prayer with me. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come, your will be done in Frankfurt as it is in heaven. Amen.