Rabbi Schneider — Insights from the Lord's Prayer
I'm in the midst of a series now that I'm calling Capturing God's Heart. On last week's broadcast, we were looking at the prayer of Jesus in the Book of Matthew, chapter number 6.
And the reason that we're doing this, beloved, the reason that we're studying Jesus's words here is because we know that the heart of Jesus captures the heart of God, that Jesus, the Son of God, more than anyone has the heart of God and has captured the heart of the Father.
So when we examine the prayer life of Jesus, we gain a window into the type of person that captures the heart of God. We know, once again, that Jesus is the, is he God in the flesh. But he's also a Son. And as a Son he has a relationship with the Father.
He's captured, and always has captured, the Father's heart. You see, the reason we're taking time, beloved ones, to study the prayers of the saints, we were studying in previous weeks the prayers of the writers of the Old Testament.
Going forward I will be beginning a new series. We'll be looking at apostolic prayers, the prayers of the New Testament writers, looking into their hearts to know the things that capture God's heart so that we can incorporate these same dynamics in our walk with him today.
The point is, beloved, that many people, listen, without knowing how to capture God's heart because they don't know who he is, and they don't know how he responds, and they don't know what pleases him, many people who are seeking after God in ignorance, and the result is that their spiritual life is operating at a very minimal level.
So for example, we read Jesus telling the parable in the Bible about the talents he had given out. And then he finally called the man that he had given one talent to. And this individual that only received one talent came before Jesus. And Jesus said, okay, I gave you a talent and I left you to multiply that talent all these years.
And now I've come back to you to see what you've done with the talent. And remember what the man said to Jesus? He said, well listen, he said, Jesus, he said, you gave me a talent and I protected it.
I hid it in the ground and buried it to be able to present to you when you came back and here it is. And Jesus said, you wicked and lazy slave, why did you do that? Why didn't you take what I gave you and do something with it, use it, multiply it, work it, invest it?
And the man said, well I knew you, the man said to Jesus, to be a hard man. And the point is, is that this man suffered spiritual shipwreck, get it now, because he didn't know the heart of God. He didn't know how to capture God's heart. He had a wrong perception of who God is. And unless we know who God is, we can't capture his heart.
So by looking at the lives of the authors of Scripture and looking here at the Lord's Prayer of Jesus himself, we can learn who God is. And knowing who he is, beloved, we can walk with him in spirit and in truth. And in so doing, capture his heart.
Remember Jesus said that the Father is looking for those, Jesus said, who will worship him in spirit and in truth; that God is looking to and fro across the earth looking for a person, looking for a man, a woman or a child that will capture his heart. His eyes run to and fro across the earth looking for somebody that loves him.
You see, you can capture God's heart. You have the ability, beloved one, listen one, to capture God's heart. And we do this through revelation, through the revelation of knowing who he is, and then by choosing to love him, and walking in obedience to the revelation that we have.
And so we're then studying the lives of the New Testament writers, the Old Testament writers. We've already done the Old Testament writers. And now we're looking at the life of Jesus here. And we can learn of how to capture God's heart by examining how Jesus told us to pray.
Now again, I began here last week when we looked at the Lord's Prayer in Matthew, 6, and Jesus said, pray in this way. We all know the Lord's Prayer; Our Father that art in heaven, hallowed is thy name.