This was the exhortation in the call to worship a few years ago when we first introduced the Lord’s Prayer into our worship service.
This morning we have the privilege (and high responsibility) of introducing the Lord’s Prayer into our public worship of God. This will be done at the conclusion of the prayer of conclusion, following the sermon.
We have sought to do this carefully, because many of us have had bad experiences with worship where congregations have rattled their way through this prayer without heart, without soul, without faith. They have prayed in just the way that Jesus prohibited when He taught the prayer. Do not be guilty, He said, of battalogeo, vain repetitions, mindless chattering, pagan assumptions.
But obedience at this point is a matter of the heart, not words, and the modern evangelical church has discovered that there is more than one way to be guilty of vain repetitions. While more liturgical churches have often been guilty of prayers that disobeyed the Lord at this point, modern evangelical extemporaneous prayers have often wandered around like a lost child. We have tended to vainly repeat words that reveal our own deep confusions.
We must therefore reject all false choices. We should pray this prayer for one simple reason—Jesus told us to. We should not pray it in a faithless, superstitious way—because Jesus told us not to. While it is better, as John Bunyan taught, for your heart to be without words, than for your words to be without heart, in the grace of God, we do not have to make this choice.
This is because God in His grace has given us the words. And He in His grace has also given us the heart.