Paul Stewart

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.

This is the last in a series of posts on the Lord's Prayer based on a message I preached at Gateway a couple of weeks ago. You can listen to my message here.

You can’t pray like this every day, you can’t beg for the restoration of the world, for the coming of the Kingdom of God, for the Hallowing of God’s name on earth and not expect to be opposed by the ruler of this present age.

We live in contested space. This world is not neutral.There are competing political regimes and economic regimes and cultural regimes and spiritual regimes. Every inch of this planet is claimed and counter-claimed and reclaimed and counter-claimed.

If you begin to take prayer seriously you will find the spiritual intensity of your life rise up and you will certainly face opposition. So Jesus tells us to pray. To pray for deliverance and protection from, not just evil in general, but from the evil one. Namely Satan. Who has his own rule and reign and authority in earth and is not super exited about giving that up to anyone. As we begin to pray, Jesus teaches that we need to also pray for protection because this will get spiritually intense. 

If you are not on your guard, you could be taken out. One lustful look from a coworker. One word from your boss. One lie you choose to hold on to. We live in contested space.

But the good news is this: We are not fighting for victory, we are fighting from victory.

We are implementing the victory of God that Christ has already won on the cross. Way back in Genesis, right after the Fall, God promises that His son would one day crush the serpent's head!

The starting point of the story of renewal is the victory of God over Satan’s system - sin, hell, death, all of these things. And so we know there will be opposition. We expect it. We prepare for it. We suit up for it. We take it very, very seriously. But we know that ultimately the battle has already been one. The victory is already ours in Christ. 

Which is why we can pray, "For thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen!"

Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

What does this mean? Are we are forgiven only as we forgive?

Interestingly this is the only part of the prayer that Jesus feels compelled to amplify upon.

Matthew 6v14
For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.

We know that the gospel is a free gift - nothing that we could have earned on our own. So this can not mean we have to demonstrate to God how good we are at forgiving other people before he will forgive us.

Jesus is simply describing the very nature of created order - we must give in order to receive. For example, I cannot receive love if I do not give love. Augustine said, “God gives where He finds empty hands”

If our hearts are such that we can only see how others have hurt and offended us, we cannot see how we have offended God and so we find no need to seek forgiveness. If we are always calculating how much this person or that person has violated our rights then we will not, by the very nature of things, be able to pray this prayer.

Forgiveness is the only thing that breaks the cycle of retribution and releases the grace of heaven among human beings. Karl Barth said, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.” When we get before God and come to grips with the pain and the tension and the angst of our fallen world and the sinful nature of our own hearts, when we to clasp our hands before our heavenly Father and ask Him to bring it all back into alignment, this is truly the beginning of an uprising!

Give Us This Day

Last week I started writing a series of posts on the Lord's Prayer from a message I preached at Gateway a couple of weeks ago. You can listen to my message here. This prayer is the foundation of all Christian prayer. It provides shape and meaning to our faith. It was taught by Jesus, in part, to show us what the point of Christian spirituality is and how to get to the point in our prayers.

Jesus shows us that point of prayer is seeking to weave the Kingdom of God into a broken and fallen world. The first half of the pryaer is towards God and the second part is towards the earth. The first half is concerned with God’s honor, kingdom, and purpose, and only after that do our own needs find a place.

When Jesus says, “Give us this day our daily bread” that is simply saying “Father I want to be dependent upon you... I know everything I have is coming from your hand.”

This is reminiscent of the way that God provided manna for the  children of Israel as they wandered through the desert. Yet in our world, with all of our stuff, it is difficult to remain dependent on God. We look to therapists and medication and money and vacations.

But God says, “Would you rely on me for your daily rations? Would you remain dependent upon me for the very sustenance of your life? For your daily piece of bread? And would you remember to pray and give to those who do not even have that? For in my Kingdom everyone has just enough to get them through each new day and it all comes from me."

Your Kingdom Come, Your Will Be Done

This week I am writing a series of posts on the Lord's Prayer from a message I preached at Gateway last weekend. You can listen to my message here.

When we pray for God's Kingdom to come we are aligning our hearts and lives around his just and righteous rule and reign in the universe and his authority in our lives. When the Old Testament prophets spoke about this they described God's rule in seven primary ways:

Deliverance
Righteousness & Justice
Peace
Joy
God’s Manifest Presence
Healing
Return from Exile

Jesus is saying, "I want you to pray for the rule and the reign of God to break out into the world around you. In your neighborhoods. In your homes. In your relationships. In all your situations!" And when it does you will see people being set free from that which is enslaving them. You will see righteousness and justice being established. You will see the ceasing of conflict and the restoration of peace. You will see a sense of great joy in life. There will be a sense of God’s manifest presence. You will see healing - souls, emotions, physical bodies. And there will be sense that the people of God have come home. They have finally found their place as God’s people in the world.

These are the things that we are to be praying for and seeking in our world. These are the things that we are to be calling down into our situations

In other words, prayer is not only about conversing with God, prayer is about collaborating with His actions in the world.

The apostle Paul said we are “God’s fellow workers” We are co-laborers with Christ. So when we see poverty and disease, the lack of justice, hostility and hatred we are to bring these things to God and ask that all of these situations would be transformed. That the rule and reign of God would break in.

Prayer is seeking to weave the Kingdom of God into a fallen world. 

Hallowed Be Your Name

Yesterday I began a series on the Lord's Prayer from a message I preached at Gateway last weekend. You can listen to my message here.

We are to pray that God's name is “hallowed” in the world. This is to pray that people may recognize and acknowledge God's holiness give Him the reverence which He is due. This is not because God has some selfish desire to become famous on earth, but flows out of His desire to restore the brokenness of the world.

Consider this: where did the universe begin to unravel? In the garden when humanity decided to "hallow" something other than God and their relationship with Him. In that moment sin enters the world and we can no longer figure out our relationship with Him, with each other, with ourselves and with all created order.

We all “hallow” something in the world. We take something or someone (other than God) and elevate it to first place in our lives and as a result our lives spin out of control.

Jesus knows that when we cry out to our Father we return in some sense to the purity of Eden. That connection is restored, and we are beginning to undo all of the things that disorder the world. When we "hallow" God we are religning our hearts and when we rightly order our hearts, when we let lesser things go, we can then begin to pray, "Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."

Our Father in Heaven

Yesterday I began a series on the Lord's Prayer from a message I preached at Gateway last weekend. You can listen to my message here.

This first time in the Scriptures that a Jewish person cried out to God as a father in prayer. At this point all religion ceased to be equal. At this point, Christianity moves into a new path where it offers you the right to become God’s actual children in the world.

Many people pray to a distant god but here we have God calling us back into relationship. Yesterday I said that prayer is seeking to weave the Kingdom of God into a fallen world, and this is the first step.

Consider the Garden of Eden. What was our relationship like with God in the Garden? In Genesis it says humans walked with God in the cool of the day - without shame or distance.

That is ultimately the greatest longing of our soul. In this prayer, Jesus is saying that through Him you can be reconnected with your Creator. That in your room, on your own it is possible to return back to Eden in your heart.

This is God’s invitation to you in this prayer. He is your Father. You are his son. You are his daughter. He wants to welcome you back home.

The Kingdom of God advances as our hearts find our true home with the Father.

The Lord's Prayer

“Prayer is an expression of who we are... We are living incompleteness.
We are a gap, an emptiness that calls for fulfillment.” - Thomas Merton

This weekend at Gateway we explored Jesus' instruction on prayer. In one sense, prayer is something that everyone does and it is also something that everyone struggles with. Every faith has some form of prayer. Remote tribes pray for rain & children & victory in battle. The Incas & Aztecs went so far as to sacrifice humans in order to attract their god’s attention. Five times a day Muslims stop whatever they are doing to pray. Even people who think of themselves as atheists or agnostics, when they are surveyed, most of them will actually say, "There are times when I come to the end of my rope and I pray." 

Philip Yancey says, “We pray because we want to thank someone or something for the beauties and the glories of life, and also because we feel small and helpless and sometimes afraid. We pray for forgiveness, for strength, for contact with the One who is, for assurance we are not alone”

We pray because our deepest desire is to know God and yet one of our biggest struggles in Christian spirituality is prayer. So in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount Jesus comes along and teaches us how to pray.

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 deliver us from the evil one.

This simple yet incredibly profound prayer has shaped Christianity for over two thousand years. It was taught by Jesus, in part, to show us what the point of Christian spirituality really is and how to get to the point in our prayers.

Over the next few days I am going to offer a few mediations on each line of this beautiful prayer, but you could really sum it up this way:

Prayer is seeking to weave the Kingdom of God into a fallen world.

All of us are trying to recover from the effects of the fall. We are all struggling with idolatry, sinfulness, futility, and brokenness. So many things seem unraveled from the way they were supposed to be. What Jesus wants us to do is to join him the the weaving of the Kingdom of God back into a fallen world.

Karl Barth said, “To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.”

This is what the Lord's Prayer is all about. It is a holistic prayer. It embraces the whole world - from the coming of the Kingdom of God to our daily bread. Large things and small things. Spiritual things and material things. Inward things and outward things. Nothing is beyond the scope of this prayer. 

Prayer is a struggle because creation is at war with God but the Lord's Prayer helps align our lives around his Kingdom. Jesus invites his followers to converse and collaborate with Him to accomplish good things on earth and advance his Kingdom purposes through prayer.

Jesus on Being Single

On Sunday, we looked at Jesus’ words on Marriage, Divorce and Singleness in Matthew 5:31-32 and 19:1-12. You can listen to the message HERE. Unfortunately I did not have time to get to singleness in my message. It is the last thing Jesus says in this passage and it is very puzzling.

Matthew 19v11,12
Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For there are eunuchs who were born that way, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by others—and there are those who choose to live like eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it.

What in the world does Jesus mean about this eunuch stuff? Essentially Jesus is saying that just as some people are constitutionally unable to marry, some people are spiritually called not to marry. And the power of the kingdom of God in their life enables them not to be married.

Jesus says this in response to the disciples question. He has been talking about the essence of marriage (vv. 4-6) and divorce (vv. 6-9) and the disciples respond, If this is the situation between a husband and a wife, wouldn’t it be better not to get married at all? 

Jesus says, you don't get it. The only people who can be unmarried are those who accept it as a calling from God.

Now, some people are permanently called to be single. Which means that the power of the Kingdom works in their lives so that they do not want to be married. They are not depressed by loneliness. They are not sexually burning.

Of course, many people who are single know that this is not a permanent calling for them. In that case, singleness is still a temporary calling and the only way you can endure it is if you look at it as a calling from God.

How do you do that? The Apostle Paul puts it this way...

I Corinthians 7v27 
Are you pledged to a woman? Do not seek to be released. Are you free from such a commitment? Do not look for a wife.

Are you married? Do not seek a divorce. 
Are you unmarried? Do not look for a wife.
Are you married? Don’t try to become single.
Are you single? Don’t be to eager to get married. 

Marriage is a lot of work. Singleness can be tough. Don’t be too eager to change status.

This was shocking in that day. In ancient society there was no such thing as individual success or achievement. It was about your family becoming successful. You had to be married. You had to have children. Essentially there were no single adults except for widows and prostitutes. But Paul says that singleness, as an adult, was a perfectly acceptable way to be. This was revolutionary!

Stanley Hauwerwas says, “One of the clearest differences between Christianity and all other relgions was Christianity’s idea of singleness as a paradigm way of life for its followers.”

Church historian Rodney Stark recounts how in first century Rome, Caeser Augustus would have widows fined if they didn’t get remarried within two years because single adulthood was absolutely illegitimate. You had no significance if you did not have family. You were nothing if you did not have heirs. There was no future.

But the church took care of widows. Gave them the choice if they wanted to get remarried or not. The church, the family of God, became their significance.

So the New Testament provides the highest view of marriage the world has ever had and then says its quite alright to live your entire life without it. Why?

1 Corinthians 7v29
What I mean, brothers and sisters, is that the time is short. From now on those who are married should live as if they were not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep.

We live in the overlap of the two ages. In Christ we have a foretaste of the new age to come. We’ve been brought into the divine community of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  And we can experience that right now! The Church is designed to be a foretaste of our future love, future grace, future family.

“From the beginning we Christians have made singleness as valid a way of life as marriage. What it means to be the church is to be a group of people called out of the world, and back into the world, to embody the hope of the Kingdom of God. Children are not necessary for the growth of the Kingdom, because the church can call the stranger into her midst. That makes both singleness and marriage possible vocations. If everybody has to marry, then marriage is a terrible burden. But the church does not believe that everybody has to marry. Even so, those who do not marry are parents within the church, because the church is now the true family. The church is a family into which children are brought and received. It is only within that context that it makes sense for the church to say, ‘We are always ready to receive children. The people of God know no enemy when it comes to children’” - Stanley Hauwerwas

Therefore singleness is not inferior or superior to marriage. Jesus was a single person and He is the paradigm of true humanity - so it can’t mean to be single is to be subhuman. 

Paige Benton Brown in her article “Singled Out by God for Good” puts it this way: “I am not single because I am too spiritually unstable to possibly deserve a husband, nor because I am too spiritually  mature to possibly need one. I am single because God is so abundantly good to me, because this is his best for me.”

If you are single and you accept it as a calling - either permanently or temporararily - If you say, I am not going to fear or despise marriage. Nor am I going rage against my singleness. Instead I am going to use the freedom I’ve got as a single person to serve people and to serve God.  I’m not going to use my singleness to indulge my desires, I am going to use it for the kingdom... If you die in that way - it will be resurrected and turned into something beautiful.

Brown puts it this way, “Let’s face it: singleness is not an inherently inferior state of affairs... But I want to be married. I pray to that end every day. I may meet someone and walk down the aisle in the next couple of years because God is so good to me. I may never have another date... because God is so good to me.”

Singleness is not an inferior or superior calling - but it is a calling - and it can only be survived if you accept it as a calling and surround yourself with a community of believers who will love and support your calling as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Creating a Discipleship Culture

Mike Breen believes the missional movement will fail. Why? Because we don’t have a missional problem or a leadership problem in the Western church. We have a discipleship problem.

In his new book Building a Discipling Culture he argues that most American pastors have been educated and trained to build, serve and lead the organization of the church. But most have never actually been trained on how to make disciples. So we can grow our volunteer base, form systems and organizational structures and preach sermons on Sunday mornings but never actually create disciples.

Many of us serve in or lead churches where we have hundreds or even thousands of people showing up on Sunday. But we have to honestly answer this question: Do their lives look like the lives of the people we see in Scripture? Are we just good at getting people together once a week and maybe into a small group, or are we actually good at producing the types of people we read about in the New Testament? Have we shifted our criteria for a good disciple as someone who shows up to our stuff, gives money and occasionally feeds poor people? 

Here is the problem: You don’t build churches in order to make disciples; you make disciples and get the church.

In fact, Jesus never called us to build his church. Jesus said, “I will build my church.”  Our job, and the last instructions he gave us, was to make disciples. It is out of this we will get the church. If you make disciples, you always get the church. But if you make a church, you rarely get disciples.

But no one accidentally creates disciples. Discipleship is an intentional pursuit. Dallas Willard says every church should be able to answer two questions: First, what is our plan for making disciples? Second, does our plan work? 

Disciples are people who learn to be like Jesus and learn to do what Jesus could do. Breen argues that this involves both Character and Competency. We need the character that Jesus has and we need to be able to do the things that Jesus could do. Discipleship is learning, over the course of our lives, to become people who have both. If we produce disciples who have one without the other they will either have limited impact or cause unlimited harm.

Character: Are their lives characterized by grace? Peace? Love? Transformation? Patience? Humility? A deep relationship with the Father? A love of the scriptures? Can they submit?  Do they see the world through the eyes of the Kingdom and not the prevailing culture? 

Competency: Can they disciple people well who can then disciple others? Can they do mission well? Can they hear the voice of their Father and respond with action, with His authority and power? When they pray, do things happen as they did for Jesus? Can they read and teach scripture well? 

But here is the deal: In order for this kind of learning to take place discipleship must be more than just a plan or a strategy or a system. Disciple making must become a part of the church’s culture. People who are not only learning about the reality of the Kingdom of God (competency) but who are being shown how to live in that new reality (character) by immersing themselves in the culture of the church.

The sermons might be great.
The music could be incredible.
The website is beautiful.
The newcomer assimilation system is second-to-none.
But if the culture, language and rhythms of the church do not reflect the life and ministry of Jesus, the church will fail to produce disciples.

Discipleship is creating a new culture.

Ecclesiastes: Finding Meaning in a Meaningless World

"When I surveyed all that my hands had done
and what I had toiled to achieve,
everything was meaningless,
a chasing after the wind;
nothing was gained under the sun."
- Ecclesiastes 2v11

Have you ever put a ton of work or effort into something only to have it fall apart? You find yourself wondering, “What’s it all for? Why did I try so hard?” At some point, all of us are confronted with the tension of living meaningfully in a world that often feels meaningless.

This fall at Gateway we will be exploring the book of Ecclesiastes. It’s essentially the findings of man who devoted his whole life to pursuing wealth, wisdom and understanding in a world that often feels meaningless. 

Most of the books of the Bible we go to to find answers. Ecclesiastes is a book of questions. The book is meant to push you to the logical conclusion of your assumptions. To lay bare the foundations of your life. To push you to the boundaries of your thought. To ask, “Why do you believe that?”And "If you believe that, do you see where that ultimately leads?"

• September 11th | The Question of Meaning
  Is There Any Reason for Existence? | Ecclesiastes 1:1-18

• September 18th | The Question of Psychology
  Why Are We So Unhappy? | Ecclesiastes 2:4-11

• September 25th | The Question of Pain
  Does the Harshness of Life Make Sense? | Ecc. 3:9-4:11

• October 2nd | The Question of Ethics
  How Do We Know Right from Wrong? | Ecc. 6:12, 12:13,14

• October 9th | The Question of Labor
  Why Are We Working So Hard? | Ecc. 2:17-23; 4:4-11

• October 16th | The Question of God
  How Do We Know Him? | Ecclesiastes 11:7-12:8

These are the questions that philosophers have been wrestling with for centuries and these are the questions that we should be bringing to the rest of Scripture so that we can see the true beauty and the power of the gospel.