Prayer for Church Introduction

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Our Father in Heaven #Church Building Update We wanted to give you an update on the church land and building project. Last time we gave you an update we told you about a 19 acre parcel we had identified on Overland and Linder that we wanted to split with Compass Charter. We have been pursuing that through the summer but the hang up has been Compass Charter as they have some complicated financing and are further out then we are. We are trying some new strategies as of this week and hopefully within the next month or two we will have some more to share. But we just wanted to say that in the meantime please continue to pray. This is not about land. It's not about a building. It's about Jesus Christ. And we want to point to the affections of all people's to the all-satisfying person of Jesus Christ now, through a building project and after a building project if that's what the Lord wills. We are still hopeful that this joint effort with Compass will work out, but are exploring all possible options. We are totally willing to trust the Lord on his timing in all this. It's his money, his church, his timing and so while we are excited and trying our best to do all the research possible, we can't force anything.

Prayer for Church -Prayer for our church that we would stay faithful as things get harder -Prayer for wisdom, the right kind of risk, boldness -Prayer for our nation 15 years after 9/11

Introduction Certain words after a while lose their meaning because we are too

familiar with them. For example, if you have lived in Boise your whole life you know that Boise, Nampa, Kuna and all these little cities are part of the treasure valley. Now when I said treasure valley, you didn't actually process those words. Think about those words. A valley filled with treasure. If I were to say, gold valley or silver valley or billionaire valley, the freshness of the language would have woken you up and you would be curious as to why they call it that. But treasure valley, because of its familiarity, just becomes this placeholder in our brain. Pete Olesen, president of the Chambers of Commerce, coined the name "Treasure Valley" in 1959 to reflect the treasure chest of resources and opportunities that the region offered. So now you know why it's called treasure valley. And just kind of rehearing that, might wake you up a bit and look around. What does this valley have to offer such that someone would have named it that 55 years a ago. Now the reason I say that is that today, we are coming to what is traditionally called the Lord's prayer and is functionally the 'treasure valley' of the Sermon on the Mount. It's super familiar in our ears. So the main work we have today is to get our minds into such a state that we might actually hear the meaning of these words, not just whatever non-meaning those words conjure up. We want to reinfuse it with meaning, renotice, relook, reexamine with fresh eyes so you leave curious and excited and wanting to slow down not bored and ready to move on.

Context Now it's key to remember that this prayer doesn't just fabricate itself out of thin air. There is a context. The Lord's prayer comes in the

middle of this section where Jesus is contrasting external righteousness and inward righteousness. The hypocrite projects an image of himself out there to the world and is craving the admiration of his peers. This is why he gives ostentatiously; this is why he prays long and colorfully; this is why he fasts obviously. With all his religious effort, he's laboring, working even purchasing the praises of men. Jesus says, don't give like that. Give in secret. Don't fast like that. Fast privately. And it's against this backdrop that Jesus instructs his listeners how to pray.

This is classic self-righteousness. The self-righteous, legalist believes that God's approval and recognition of me goes up in direct proportion to my effort. If I pray longer, with more pious language, with more eloquance, with increased passion, then God is more likely to notice me, hear me, or do something for me.

God puts silences to this nonsense with such a simple prayer that we are going to explore in detail the next couple of weeks.

That's it. He doesn't even say amen. Doesn't he even know your supposed to say amen. That's it. It's so simple. It's so short. There's no deep theological terms. Now this morning we are focusing exclusively on this familiar first phrase - Our Father in heaven. The goal of today is to reimagine what those words really mean and the implication. That short phrase tells us two very important things. The person to whom we pray and our relationship to him. Let's start with that first one.

The Person to Whom We Pray

I don't think we can overstate the importance of the addressee to whom we pray. Our father, WHO IS IN HEAVEN! For the purpose of this point, think of your prayer as a letter you send. When you address a letter you put three lines of text that will direct that letter to the place where that person dwells, anywhere on the globe. And presumably that physical location tells you something about the significance of the person to whom you write. If you look that address up on google maps you might see a trailer park, or strip of apartments or perhaps a row of starter homes or maybe some nicer subdivisions or perhaps a mansion or maybe even the pentagon or white house. If you letter is addressed to either one of those last two places, it is likely that the recipient will have a lot more power to handle you request than your average joe. Well, here we addressing our prayer to our Father who is in heaven. Don't just glaze over that. What does the address tell you about the power, influence and authority of the person who dwells there? Who are we praying to? We are praying to the God who is in heaven. What kind of power might a person have who actually dwells in heaven. Listen how Isaiah thinks about the God who dwells in that place. This is from Isaih chapter 40:22.

Where is this God to whom we pray? God is pictured here as sitting above the earth's orbit looking down on the circle of the earth. Just for the record, just to be in heaven is not an easy feat. It took mankind 10,000 or so years of technological advancement to get to the place where we could send a few men up high enough to look down at the circle of the earth.

Here we are like small little fleas trying to fling ourselves off of our host planet to get some sort of view and perspective of where we are. This is a picture of the space shuttle endeavor taken from one of Nasa's chase planes. Think about it. This is a 1.7 billion dollar attempt to fling ourselves off the surface of the earth. 1/2 a million gallons of liquid propellant, they burn that fuel at a rate that would empty a typical family swimming pool in 25 seconds. All of this to escape earth's gravity. The brightest minds in the world, leveraging the resources of an entire nation to get 7 people into orbit.

Here your looking at a time-lapse video from on board NASA's Johnson Space Center by filmmaker Fede Castro. In order for us to get this video thousands and thousand of engineers and millions of laborers had to work for decades through series of trials and errors. This is not cheap. You think spending the space shuttle endeavor to space was expensive. The space station according to an article I read in space review costs approximately 150 billion dollars. If you think of that cost in terms of housing astronauts onboard, that's about 7.5 million dollars per day per astronaut or approximately their weight in gold per week. That's what it takes for us to sit above the circle of the earth in a very small special chamber sheltering us from the deadly radition emitting from the sun, sheltering us from the the oxygenless vacuum that would instantly boil the moisture away from every cell of our body.

And yet God just is. Perfectly unaffected sitting above the circle of the earth. And he sees all! We look down and see cities that shine up at us in a dizzing network of lights and superhighways that merge into a bright hubs - Cairo, Chicago, Amstradem, Tel-Aviv, Budapest - masses of humanity that represent bottomless mystery to us. God looks down and sees every individual, every person; he sees into the heart of of the businessman in New York, the construction worker in Dubai, the child wandering the trash heap in Manilla; he instantly can deconstruct their worldview and understand what motivates every one of them, what they love, what they care about. He watches the stock exchange rise and fall, investments flourish and crumble. He knows every language, every shout of rejoicing, every cry of suffering. He sees every baby born, ever marriage, every death. He sees inside the walls of nursing homes, universities, hospitals, retail stores, offices and churches. He watches every argument, witnesses every court case, overhears every secret conversation, watches every computer screen, sees what's going on inside every car, listens to every radio station, knows what's on every TV show. He knows about what goes on with the white trash as well as the white house. He knows everything there is to know about commoners and kings and the text says they are like grasshoppers. They move about, scurrying quickly in all their activity and he simply is. Pictured as sitting above the circle of the earth, watching.

Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Verse 15 says, "Behold, the nations are like a drop from a bucket, and are accounted as the dust on the scales; behold, he takes up the

coastlands like fine dust... All the nations are as nothing before him, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness. To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him" (Isaiah 40:15-18)? Think of the nations of the earth, all their greatness, great companies, Coca-Cola, Walmart, Microsoft, Apple. Fine dust that can be blown away. Great kingdoms that have come and gone, Babylon, Assyria , Egypt, Greece, Rome like a drop in the bucket. The great kings, emperors, presidents - the Neros and Nebuchadnezzars, the Hitlers and Husseins, the Washingtons and Wilberforces, those leaders that so careless titled themselves great. Herod, Alexander, Louis, Constantine, they are accounted by him as less than nothing and emptiness. "Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed, saying, "Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us." He who sits in the heavens laughs..." (Psalm 2:1-4). God's position is so superior. Seated above the circle of the earth, God laughs at the arrogance of men. What do you think you can do from your position. God laughs! Hah. You think you can thwart my plan! That's actually funny. Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. It's so easy for those words to roll of our tongue, our father who is in heaven. This is the person to whom we are praying. Do you think he has enough power at his disposal to help you with your problems? Do you think he might help you but lacks the energy to do it?

Heavens no! David looked at the sky and said, God you are amazing! Let's praise him for it.

He commanded and the stars were created. It's so hard to imagine the power, represented in that creative act so casually mentioned in this passage. To appreciate this, let's consider for a moment just how powerful a single star is. Let's consider the sun. So amazingly difficult to comprehend. Here we are floating out in space 93 million miles away from the sun. To conceptualize that distance, if you were to get on a rocket ship and travel 30,000, a speed that would enable you to circumnavigate the earth every 45 minutes, it would take you 150 days to reach the sun. Every single thing that moves on the earth, that grows on the earth, receives it's power from the sun. All our gasolines power came from the sun. All the hydorlectric power we create comes from the sun, all wind comes from the sun. All plants get their energy from the sun. All animals get their energy from eating plants or other animals that get their energy from the

sun. The sun is amazing. No wonder people worshiped it. But how powerful is it really?

One of the ways to picture this kind of power is to look at some of the imagery coming back from the Solar Dynamics Observator's AIA instrument. This is time lapse where each second of video represents 6 minutes of real time. This captured a solar flare event on July 19, 2012 that had some particularly beautiful formations. This almost brings tears to my eyes contemplating the power represented in this flaming ball of hydrogen. You get a sense don't you of how hot and large the sun is. Energy is blasting out in every direction but obviously an infinitesimally small amount of it reaches the earth. Most just shoots out into empty space. To get an idea how much energy hits the earth, every second 1 hp of energy falls on every square yard of

land. Scientist calculate that 4 million tons per second of mass is being converted into energy and the earth is only catching about 5 pounds of that mass. How do you conceptulize the total output of the sun? The actual number is 5x10^23 hp? But what would that be like? Have you ever taken an ice cube out of the fridge and tried to melt it by putting it in hot water. It takes longer than you think. It takes an enormous amount of energy to melt ice and even more if you do it quickly. Well in one second the sun puts off enough energy to melt a bridge of ice 2 miles wide, 1 mile thick, which extending the entire way from the Earth to the Sun. And yet even with that amount of power being given off Astronomers estimate that the sun still has 99.9 percent of its energy left. Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed by your name

The Milky Way Of course anyone can look up in the sky and realize that our sun is not the only star. In fact, we are one star in 200 billion in our milky way galaxy alone. When you go out and look up at the night sky on a super clear night far away from the polluting city lights you see about 2000 stars. 99.9 percent of those stars are stars in our milky way galaxy. If you took all the starts from our milky way galaxy away, you'd probably be able to barely make out 3 objects in the sky (these would be galaxies you can see with your naked eye). One of those galaxies would be andromeda. Since we are in our own galaxy it's hard to make out. But we can take a peek at our nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda.

This image, captured with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is the largest and sharpest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy — otherwise known as M31. This is a cropped version of the full image and has 1.5 billion pixels. You would need more than 600 HD television screens to display the whole image. It is the biggest Hubble image ever released and shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disc stretching across over 40,000 light-years. As tightly packed as these stars look, they are still so incredibly far apart. Try to conceive of the distances between these 'tightly packed stars' in our own galaxy.

Very excitingly we actually have a satellite headed toward our nearest star known as Alpha Centari. So soon we will have a satellite to explore it, depending on how you define the word soon. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were twin satellites that left earth in 1977 the year I was born were flung around the sun to pick up some speed and are now travelling at a staggering 38,000 miles per hour and right now they are about 13 billion miles from us. In August of 2012 they finally left the solar system. The closest star in our galaxy is Alpha Centari and it's headed there but don't hold your breath. Voyager 1 won't reach it for another 40,000 years. Try to conceptualize that distance by imagining a laser you place on the earth that can bend as you shine it. That's one light second 186,000 mps. In one second that light could travel 7.5 times around the earth. Travelling at that speed it would take 4.3 years to reach the solar system. Or here's another way to conceptualize it. Picture the sun from that last video and our tiny little earth floating next to it. Now in your mind, shrink that massive flaming wonder to the size of a penny. The nearest star, Alpha Centari, would be about 350 miles away. That's the nearest star. At that scale the size of our milky way galaxy would be something like 7.5 million miles across. That would be like going to the moon and back 15 times. 200 billion stars just like our sun make up that milky way Galaxy each with their own planets and solar systems. That's such a tough concept to grasp. Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name

Galaxies

And yet there are billions and billions of not stars but galaxies. There was a project recently released galled the GAMA project which stands for The Galaxy and Mass Assembly catalog. It is a detailed map of the Universe showing where galaxies exist and have mapped them in 3D.

So what you are seeing here are the real positions and real images of the galaxies that have been mapped so far. Distances are to scale, but the galaxy images have been enlarged so you can see them better. Every one of these is an actual image in the actual location it is found in space. This project maps 300,000 galaxies, a process that took 210 nights over the course of 7 years using the Anglo-Australian Telescope. This is a map of 60 square degrees, or just 0.14% of the night sky (less than the space a full moon takes up in the night sky)

Do you not know? Do you not hear? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he...who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in" (Isaiah 40:22). As impressive as it is to map 300,000 galaxies, this represents a mere fraction, 0.00015 percent of the 200 billion galaxies in the universe. What you are looking at is a tiny filament of galaxies in the night sky. Keep that word filament in your mind. As we soon through space we seek spiral galaxies, eliptical galaxies, irregular galaxies. Not even shown here that we are bypassing, would be black holes, nebula, etc.

Astronomers used to think that galaxies were spread out randomly

but now they are discovering that they are structured much like a web of a spider where they cluster in long filaments which then meet in nodes where you have these giant clustering of galaxies interspersed with dark matter and dark energy whatever that is. So imagine that last video fly through of the galaxies as a single filament in this larger network that your looking at now. These filaments intersect in nodes which represent superclusters of galaxies.

Where is God's sanctuary pictured in this passage? In the heavens! Awesome is God from his sanctuary! That puts the awe back in awesome doesn't it? For centuries, people wondered what those pricks of light in the night sky were. At some point, someone probably shivered when they realized that all those pricks of light were actually stars just like the sun they were staring at every day.

Then for centuries more people assumed that the only stars out there were the ones you could see. Can you imagine being some of the early astronomers who pointed their scopes at the night sky cloud and started to realize that this night sky cloud we call the Milky Way was filled with so many billions of distant stars that it literally glowed in the night? Just imagine the shivers it would send down your spine to have your mind opened up that large. Later astronomers would have similar shivers when they realized there were 3-4 other galaxies out there just like ours. Not only was our galaxy filled with billions of stars. There were others out there! Modern astronomers shivered again to realize there were not just two or three but billions and billions of galaxies.

One of my favorite stories of the hubble telescope is when in 1995, astronomer Bob Williams wanted to point the Hubble Space Telescope at a patch of sky filled with absolutely nothing. And he wanted to do it for 100 hours. That's like asking if you could clear out the mall to have a private birthday party. You have to understand that this was an incredibly risky move. The Hubble telescope was undergoing tons of scrutiny since it was launched with a warped mirror and was somewhat defective. After fixing the mirror the last thing they needed was another failure. Why would you want to point your telescope purposefully at the darkest portion of the night sky. Nobody could see a single thing in that portion of the sky. It was picked that way on purpose. Bob Williams literally risked his career and took 100 precious hours of the Hubble's telescope time. And this is the photo that came back.

This single photo from Hubble captured the imagination of the world. In this single photo more than 3000 galaxies were discovered in a portion of the sky 1/30th the size of the moon. Talk about chills running down your spine. Back of the napkin math estimates that there are probably something like 5 times as many stars in the universe as there are grains of sand on earth. Can you even conceive of that? Go to Bruneau Sand Dunes and just try to conceive of that mount of sand as all stars. That just one dune in one insignificant city. The miles of costlands. 5 times the number of stars as grains of sand. That is so hard to conceive. Ravi Zaccharius in sermon once pointed the most humble understatement in the entire Bible. Here's how the King James renders Genesis 1:16: "And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also" (Gen 1:16

KJV). Since then the photos that hubble has been returning to earth are nothing short of staggering.

In Hawaii there is a bay in Kona named Laniekea which means immeasurable heaven. Man no, kidding. Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name Let me read a medley of Psalm which are really David's prayers to God as he considers his greatness: "Your righteousness, O God, reaches the high heavens. You who have done great things, O God, who is like you" (Psalm 71:19)? "Your way, O God, is holy. What god is great like our God? You are

the God who works wonders; you have made known your might among the peoples" (Psalm 77:13-14). "There is none like you among the gods, O Lord, nor are there any works like yours. All the nations you have made shall come and worship before you, O Lord, and shall glorify your name. For you are great and do wondrous things; you alone are God. Teach me your way, O LORD, that I may walk in your truth; unite my heart to fear your name. I give thanks to you, O Lord my God, with my whole heart, and I will glorify your name forever" (Psalm 86:8-12). "For the LORD is a great God, and a great King above all gods. In his hand are the depths of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his also. The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land. Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the LORD, our Maker! For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand" (Psalm 95:3-7). Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name

our relationship to him If black holes and supernova and white dwarfs don't make your mind spin, then this ought to. Some look at all of this and feel cold. How can I relate to such a being. He's so not like me. We have this intense desire to relate to people that are like us. It's hard to relate to people that are so different than us. How could a God who has this much power, this much intelligence, this much creative energy would be interested in having a relationship with us that can be liked to a child to his father? The text says that we are to think of God as our Father! That is crazy.

David summarizes feeling this better than anyone else.

We pray not only to a great God, a powerful God, a God so powerful who can speak the universe into existence, but we also pray to a personal God, a God who loves us. This is monstrously strange. What is this image of a father supposed to do for us? What does a perfect father do? He cares for the weakness of his children. He nourishes them along in their ignorance and inability. He nourishes them in their sickness. He provides for them things they can't provide for themselves. He uses his power for the good of his children.

So when we pray to God not only can he answer your prayers, he wants to. He is tender toward you.

That word abba is the Hebrew equivalent of daddy. One of my favorite things about children is that they are unashamed at crying for their daddy for help. If you are president of the United States, you by virtue of your position are the most powerful man in the country. Nobody wields more power than you. Your schedule is full of important people. In the morning you met with ambassadors from the European Union. Later in the afternoon your meeting with leaders from the United Nations. Because of some international interruptions, you have canceled four appointments today for people who have waited 8 months to have an audience with you. Your schedule has you meeting with the minister of foreign affairs in the evening to discuss the crisis in Syria. And during that last meeting your four year old daughter barges into the middle of an important meeting and crying and says, "Daddy, my friends at school were so mean to me. I need a hug." What dad could say no? The son and daughter has a special relationship to

the father. They get priority. They get his attention. They get his heart. That almost sound irreverent to say. That we somehow the God of the universe would be concerned with something so insignificant. How arrogant do you have to be to think that you are that important that God would even bat an eye in your direction?. How could the God of the universe even care?

We are praying to the God of the Universe who is our Father who cares for us. What a comforting thought. What a beautiful thought. You can come like that child and be welcomed with open arms. So this week think that way: Do you have a family situation that is hard for you? Well God has power to help and he cares for you so pray. Do you have a stress in your life outside of your control? Do you have a medical illness? Do you have a son or daughter who is wandering from the Lord?

Do you have sin in your life that is causing you so much sorrow? Do you have unmet desires that constantly frustrate you? Do you simply want to know Jesus better?

Let us pray.