Newcomers Fellowship Missions Updates

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Newcomers Fellowship Missions Updates Local and global missions is always happening in our church all the time. It takes many different forms. Anywhere from summer Mexico missions trips, youth group gift boxes during Christmas, individual missions trips, giving to one time missions needs in East Asia or Ukraine or The Republic of Georgia, helping or teaching at the monthly rescue mission and city light outreach opportunities, talking to the neighbor over the fence or sponsoring a child on your refrigerator door.

If you don't know, 11% of our annual budget is allocated to missions and our goal is to spend all of that money every year. As part of our missions budget we have a line item allocated to meet special missions needs that arise throughout the year. Over the years, it's been incredibly helpful to have money set aside to meet unexpected needs that arise in the course of the year. This month we were able to meet three really awesome needs and we wanted to let you know how your faithful giving is helping people in need: Gisel (pronounced like the Gi in Giraffe) Gutierrez. Gisel grew up in the Sepulveda's church, and is now in her mid-20's. She has many medical complications related to type 1 (juvenile) diabetes. She has lost the vision in one eye and recently had surgery to try to save the other. Their church took out a loan to try to help with her medical expenses. When we heard about her situation during our Mexico mission trip, we wanted as a church to come alongside Gisel as well.

The second gift was for the family of Edwin Perez, a member of the Orelas church, who recently died after battling cancer. As Pastor Ramon wrote in an email, "Edwin was a service-oriented person, always using his musical talents in the church. Please pray for strength and comfort of his wife and three young children, as well as his parents, Fernando and Nayita." We continue to develop a relationship with pastor Tia in India who runs a seminary and outreach ministry to his community in Bangladore. This month we were able to help with the sponsorship of 3 more students in the seminary program which was a great encouragement to them. So for $833 dollars we can help train 3 additional pastors who will spend a lifetime ministering to unreached peoples in their villages. That is money well spent. Thank you for your faithful giving.

Introduction

We are in this section of the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus teaches us to pray. And each week we are going to pray this prayer together as a way of learning according to the pattern that our Lord taught us:

Today we study that phrase, "Give us this day our daily bread." Up to this point we have had prayers of declaration. We have had a prayers of confession. God you are in heaven; I am not. You are my father; I am your child. You are holy; I am not. I want your kingdom; not mine. I want your will do be done; not mine.

And now finally we get to a prayer that asks God to do something for us, to actually change our situation. 'Lord, give us this day our daily bread.' This is a petition, a supplication. We have a need and we are

asking the Lord to meet it. This is the reason most people even pray to begin with. They need something from God and so they go to God and ask him to change something that isn't going well for them. Need often functions as a trigger that alerts us and gets us moving toward God, but it is almost universally the case that this initial impulse needs shaping. We often come to God very selfishly. We want him to do something for us. We come to him with the assumption that we know what's best for ourselves. We'd be happy if he was just a Genie in a bottle. If we rub the bottle, then he has to do whatever we ask. That's not the right way to come to God.

Asking is Good Growing up, I would hear preachers make this point and I would begin to think that asking was a bad thing. I should never ask because asking is selfish. I should only worship, only submit, only declare, only acknowledge, but asking was for the immature. That is the absolute wrong takeaway from this passage and represents what I think is even a greater immaturity than wrong asking. Of course God wants us to ask. And the way to illustrate why we absolutely must ask is by considering the alternatives. Suppose you have a need, a real need. You are medically ill or you have no money to pay your rent or your child is misbehaving in some way and you can't get him to see. What should you do about it?

Should you seek help from other men who may be able to temporarily patch your problem but can offer no real long term solution? (maybe they could give you a loan or small gift as a financial boost, or operate on your medical problem, or give you some advice on parenting) But is that really going t help? Should you try to muster up some solutions on your own? But you don't have any solutions. That's why your in the mess to start with? Is it just a try harder and suck it up sort of attitude? Should you stop caring?

Your alternatives are so lame. You see, of course God wants you to ask. He's the only one who can even help. How foolish it would be to ignore the one person who not only can help but wants to help. Imagine being in a room filled with beggars and you need $1000. And your dad, who happens to be a billionaire is in the room as well. He's got $5000 dollars behind his back if and is dying for you to ask him for it. But you go around and collect pennies from all your beggar friends. Not only is that stupid, imagine how that hurts the heart of your father. He wants you to ask. He's your father and he actually wants to help you be who he created you to be. He wants you to be truly satisfied. He wants you to experience satisfaction. As a father, I can see this. As a father my happiness is forever and permanently bound up in the happiness of my children. I can never just be unaffected by the condition of my children. This is at once a blessing and curse as a parent. Your happiness is no longer your own. There are forces outside of you that will impact you. If your child is suffering, you will suffer with them. If your child is succeeding and rejoicing you will find yourself so happy.

Your joy is bound up with the joy of your children. Now why is that? Why do you feel this bond to your children? Because you are made in the image of God. Do you remember the parable in Luke 11 where Jesus says, "Which one of you if your child asks for a fish, you’ll give him a snake, if your child asks for an egg, you’ll give him a scorpion?" He says now if you want to give your children good gifts, how much more will your heavenly Father give. It says there is no parent on earth, and there never has been a parent on earth, who has wanted joy for his or her child the way God wants joy for you, for his children. Our love is imperfect. The Bible says, “How much more?” It means if my heart is bound up with the joy of my children, how much more is God’s heart bound up? Now couple that thought with what we talked about the first two weeks. God's joy is bound up in yours. He wants to help you AND it just so happens he is unlimited in power and insight. So if those things are all true (which they are), then of course God wants you to ask. But here's what he doesn't want: He doesn't want you to demand. What is the difference between asking and demanding? I think we can extract three principles here from the text that give us some guidance on this. Coming to God in a spirit of submissive asking means coming to God confessing:

The difference between request and demand is really a question of submission. It's a perspective of who is in charge, whose the owner, who has the right. Let's say you just pull a thousand dollars out of the bank and it's in one of those clean white envelopes that's the perfect size to hold bills. And let's say you lay it down on the table and your five year old runs over and picks it up and giggles and runs away. And you say, "Now little pumpkin, please, give daddy that envelope." Are you asking or demanding? Sure your starting off polite, but your not really asking. It's not really an option. You are demanding. And you demand by reason of the fact that money is yours and by reason of the fact that you are an authority in her spunky little life. And if she doesn't give it to you, you will take it from her and she will be disciplined.

Now, that 5 year old will grow to be a 15 year old. And I want you to imagine that same crisp envelope is tucked neatly into your shirt pocket and your 15 year old daughter comes to you with those big puppy dog eyes and says, "Daddy, can I have $20 bucks to go to the movies with my friends." Now is she asking or demanding? Hopefully she's asking. Hopefully she realizes it's not her money. Hopefully she recognizes that if dad says no, it's over. He's the authority. And if she doesn't recognize it, well, then hopefully daddy can help her see it. Now I'm going to use a 'how much more' argument. If you as a father are owner your own resources and an authority over your children and if it is appropriate for your children to ask (not demand) resources from you, how much more is it appropriate for you to approach your benevolent God in the posture of humble submission to his will and ask him (not demand). To demand would be like you treating God like your 5 year old daughter. Give me the answer to my prayer you little imp. What right do we have to approach God that way? We don't deserve it. We don't own it. And we aren't in charge. We don't know what's going on. Is God on trial for having been cruel or mean or not benevolent toward us? Has he not proven his fatherly love to us by sending his Son to the cross? Do we not have the promise of God that all his work is for us?

Our job is to ask our father who loves us and wants to help us and then trust in his good decisions for our life. Do you see now why the Lord's prayer starts with this attitude of submission? Our Father who is in heaven, holy is your name. Your Kingdom come. Your will be done. On earth as it is in heaven. It is prayer of absolute submission as we come to him with our need. Don't forget to connect these thoughts. Very often we read the Lord's prayer in disconnected chunks. Our Father who is in heaven... Pause. Hallowed be your name...Pause. Your kingdom come your will be done on earth as it is in heaven...Pause. Give us this day our daily bread.... Pause. But these thoughts, I think are logical, related and progressive.

When we say, give us this day our daily bread we have preceded that prayer with a prayer of submission and a prayer of confession. I submit to your perfect will because I confess my imperfect one. I confess your power and so if you give me bread or withhold my bread I trust you because you are my loving father. So submissive asking means confessing that God is the good giver.

Asking submissively is confession or our mortality. The confession that we need things outside of ourselves to sustain life. Its a confession of weakness, need and limitation. When the text says, "Give us this day our daily bread" one of the ways we can hear that prayer is a confession of need. We can't have annual bread or even monthly bread. Our tanks are small. We are weak. We need food every day. Sure you might be able to go a day or two without food, but it won't be comfortable. You can't be

comfortable in a day without eating. We need daily bread - 3 times a day really. Sometimes it's fun to think about people who seem to have risen above the fray of us mere mortals. Maybe some powerful politician or a movie star or a sports hero. But no matter how powerful you are, there are certain things that money, power and influence just can't buy. Everybody has to sleep. You can't buy a lifetime supply of energy. We need sleep. Nobody can purchase muscles that never tire. You can't buy freedom from disease. You can't buy a lifetime exemption from having to go to the bathroom. And you can't buy a lifetime supply of calories. Everybody must eat.

These are giant human equalizers. They reveal our frailty, weakness, dependence and need. Agrarian societies were much more in touch with this than we moderns are. All agrarian societies knew hunger. Hunger could strike at any time. At any season a family might experience insect invasion, destroying animals - either before the harvest or after, theft, invasive weeds, fire, hail, drought. There was no crop insurance. They just suffered. And this causes them to be much more aware of their lack of control. They didn't have much of a safety net. Israel for example, was so highly dependent on the rains for their survival. If it didn't rain, the crops wouldn't grow and that meant hunger for the next year. We look at weather as a tidbit of interesting information. A drought year or a wet year makes almost no difference in our functional living and makes actually no difference in the way we eat. But imagine if your very meals were connected to the clouds how

longingly you would look at pray for weather. To bring it closer to home, imagine if your monthly salary rose or shrunk in proportion to the amount of rain we got in a year. If it was a year wear we received 50% of average, then your monthly paycheck shrunk to 50%. That meant cutting back on everything. No fruit cause fruit it expensive. No meat. Just the minimum. If we got 200% then your paycheck would double. The snowpack meter atop Shafer Butte would be the most visited page on the internet. Our modern equivalent of bread is money. With our money we buy food, mediciine, health care, shelter. All our needs are provided for with money. Our droughts come when when we loose our job, we worry when we suffer a giant loss through a medical bill or a furnace going out or something along those lines. So while the methods for making bread have changed, the human response from lack of bread or lack of money which buys bread does not. We panic. We fret. We worry. We scheme. And God in this passage is just asking us to confess that we need daily bread and the he is the giver of it. We don't go trying to fix it ourselves. We go to God, who knows our need, and we ask him. We say, "God you know I don't have money right now. And I know you are good. Lord, you know our need and I ask you to meet our need in your timing. If you ask us to be uncomfortable for a while, we submit to that. If you want to meet our need soon, we submit to that. But we are looking to you for the need. Not our friends, not our efforts. We are looking to you as the great provider. So if you have lost your job, or you are in a tight financial situation,

go to your father who knows your needs. Ask him. Pray to him. So we've looked what it means to ask, not demand. And as your seeing here, even our asking is confessing. We confess that God is a good giver. We confess that we are the needy receivers. There's a third point, I would wager to say, perhaps the most important.

When the text says, "Give us this day our daily bread" another way we can hear that prayer is a confession of our minimum need. In other words we are aren't praying for a lifetime of bread. Our need at the moment isn't a lifetime's worth of bread. I just need bread now and then I'll be content until my next meal at which point I will need more bread. The prayer as it is prayed here is not a confession for all future needs that I could possibly conceive. It's a prayer for my current need. Now that is a tough concept for Americans. We love the concept of

a security blanket don't we. We want that golden parachute. We want that nest egg. We want enough so that I don't ever have to worry about bread again. But you know what God calls people who think like this? Fools. Do you remember the parable of Luke 12?

Who doesn't like the thought of this? I don't want to pray for daily bread or weekly bread. I want to pray for seven lifetimes of bread. What happens in this parable?

The problem with wanting a lifetime of bread is you don't know how long your lifetime will be. Suppose you are age 35 and you knew for absolute certainty you would die at age 37 when would you retire? How much bread would you need then? Jesus is saying in this parable and also in the prayer, we aren't to unnecessarily concern ourselves with the future. That is God's domain. We want lots of bread so we can be free of our dependence on God. But that is not the right heart attitude. If lack of bread made you more dependent on God, more aware of his presence, more in tune with his provision, why pray for anything more than daily bread. I know that many of you have lived seasons of your life in desperate financial strain. And in many ways it was so not fun. But do you not look back on that time with a certain fondness? A certain amount of longing to be in those times again where every meal was unknown, every prayer over the table was a

prayer of true gratitude? Do our longings for more bread represent biological need our our desire to be independent from God? Do our longings represent physical necessities that are not being met or do they represent longings to have power to do what we want.

That ought to scare us a bit. That ought to create in you a bit of distrust. Do we really even know what we need. We may want something and want something badly, but we ought to be suspicious of our wants. Our wants are not things to be trusted. Our wants are uncultivated and we need to leave it to our heavenly father to cultivate. To prune back our wants, to let us suffer when he sees fit. In praying, God give me daily bread, we are confessing our minimum need, not our maximum wants. The issue is to learn contentment in whatever season God brings your way. Contentment could be defined as not wanting more than God gives.

So often our prayers are prayers for things way beyond food and clothing. We want better cars and houses, better experiences, better gadgets, better things.

I think the model here is to pray for you minimum need. It might be good to compare and contrast two opposite models of spirituality. Prosperity theology says, the more bread you have the more God is blessing you. You must be doing something right spiritually, because look at all the bread you have. Poverty theology says just the opposite. You must be so godly because you've given it all away. You have so little bread, there are days when you don't have any at all and you just have to starve. You must be extremely godly. But what is God saying here? He's not saying to be poor or rich. He's saying be content with what he gives you. Your not striving, cheating, robbing to get more. Your content. Do you remember the story of the Israelites in the desert? Bread for

them was manna. And God specifically told them to collect their manna daily. On Saturday, they could collect twice as much but on Sunday they were to rest. If they collected more than a days worth it would rot and maggots would infest it. And the point we usually take away from that was that they would learn to depend on God. I will provide for you daily. I don't want you to hoard a bunch and then loose your dependence on me. And while that is true, there was actually a larger point God intended and we are told exactly what that point was later on in Deut 8. The setting here is God reminding them of their great history, how he cared for them, how he brought them out of Egypt with a mighty hand. God recounts for them his miracle working powers in plundering the Egyptians, helping them cross the red sea, sustaining them in the wilderness. In this same speech he also, looks forward and promises them victory as they go into the land of Israel. How he will send hornets ahead of them into battle, how he will perform miraculous signs for them and drive out their enemies. He says, when you go into the land to possess it when you sit in houses you didn't build and eat from vines you didn't plant and your tables are filled with bread.

At that moment I want you to remember something. Remember how...

The manna was God's provision, but so was the hunger. He let them eat so they would not die. But he let them hunger so that they would remember that it's not all about food. If you read the text here, the lesson was more in the hunger than it was in the food. Life's not about filling the belly. Jesus is going to say that in chapter 7 of Sermon on the Mount, "Is not life more than food and clothing?" When we make the whole point of life about food and clothing and stuff we've lost the point. You know one of the ways you can tell if you've made your life about bread? If you say things like this, "As soon as I get to this benchmark, I'll stop pursuing." If you are constantly comparing yourself to others and you say, "The key is getting into a financial situation like them." If you have contentment prerequisites that start like this, "If only...." If only I had this job, if only I had this ability, if only I made this amount of money, if only my situation would change in this way.

Jesus says, no. You've got it all wrong. "Is not life more than food and clothing?" This text is saying that sometimes Jesus withholds money to teach you that you love money too much. You think the solution to your problems is money. But the solution to your problem is to stop thinking that the solution to your problem is money. "Is not life more than food and clothing?" I think a lot of Americans hear that statement and scratch their heads. Really? Life's not about that? Then what is it about? If life is not about building barns, and then tearing them down and building bigger ones. If life isn't about 401ks and retirement and eating and drinking and being merry. If life is more than stockpiling loaves of bread, then what is it about? It is about learning to love the only thing worth loving. It's about cultivating your love such that you want the right things. Instead of praying, "If only I had this job or this money or this clothing, then I'd be happy" we pray, "If only I had more of you Jesus. I want you." Listen our loves and wants are horribly broken. The greatest problem of mankind to date and the greatest problem that mankind will ever have is that he trusts what he wants. It should be patently obvious that we shouldn't trust our desires. Our desires are so messed up.

All through our society are devices, laws and rules that we create that protect us from things we want. We don't want to wear safety belts but the law makes us because it's actually just stupid to drive around without one. That law is designed to protect us from our desire to be free when we should be restrained. We want drugs because they make us feel good but the law makes them illegal because it's actually just stupid to use drugs. If you go to Wahooz and ride the little gocarts, every kid and adult who gets in there wants to go faster. But they put a governor on the engine because they know (it's not even a question) that if they took those governors off and let kids go as fast as the engines would take them, that before the day was over they'd have twisted limbs, compound fractures and compressed spinal columns alongside a stack of corresponding lawsuits. We have this irrational trust in our wants don't we? We can look at the less mature and say, of course he doesn't know what he wants. What if you gave 5 year old kid a genie in a bottle. The genie has to do whatever the kid asks. What would you do? I tell you what I would do. I would run for my life. What would he ask for? He might ask that the genie remove gravity or turn all the food in the world into candy or get rid of all parents. I mean, he has no clue. He's a fool. Would you give that bottle to a 10 year old? No, ten is too young still. What is the age where you have stopped wanting dumb things? When your 15 you look back at ten and think, man I was so immature. But now I know. When you are 25 you look back at 15 and shudder. Yes, but now I know. When you are 35 you look back and 25 and wince.

When are you old enough to take hold of that bottle and rub it with confidence, knowing full well, now I want the right things. Now I can trust my wants. I'm no longer a fool. No, the Bible says your always a fool. You never know what you need and your wants are always twisted and distorted and dark. So when we say "give us this day our daily bread." We pray it in submission. Perhaps God sees a need to humble us like he did the children in the wilderness. And maybe he will give us daily manna, just the bare minimum of what we need to keep us sustained and dependent. Or perhaps he will bless you like he did Joseph and fill your barns so that you can give to others when the famine hits. But whatever he decides to do, the desire is for God himself, the giver of gifts, not the gifts themselves. Your wants are singularly focused. Your desires are for him and him alone. Give me what you think I need.