When Life Shrinks to the Size of Our Problems
00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)
00:00:02.580 | We've all been there.
00:00:06.240 | Maybe you're there right now.
00:00:08.080 | You see problems in every direction.
00:00:12.360 | As you look at your life, all you can see are the troubles.
00:00:16.320 | You see your sins, your shortcomings, your challenges,
00:00:19.800 | your relationship struggles,
00:00:21.240 | and all those places in life that have been long neglected
00:00:24.600 | and now need your focused attention.
00:00:27.160 | It all adds up.
00:00:28.480 | And now you find yourself in that place,
00:00:30.040 | tempted to live a life that has shrunk down
00:00:32.920 | to the size of your problems.
00:00:34.980 | Pastor John has been there.
00:00:38.400 | It's why he took a leave of absence in 2010,
00:00:41.440 | eight months away from ministry
00:00:43.520 | for what he called a soul check.
00:00:45.780 | Months spent scrutinizing the problems
00:00:48.240 | that he saw in his life, his marriage, his worship,
00:00:50.720 | his fathering, his pastoring, his public life, all of it.
00:00:54.440 | During these searching months,
00:00:56.920 | he pinpointed five besetting sins within himself,
00:01:00.160 | problem areas that needed attention.
00:01:02.400 | He named them, isolated them, and confessed them.
00:01:05.760 | And he would come to call them an ugly cluster of sins
00:01:09.100 | that included selfishness, anger, self-pity,
00:01:13.180 | quickness to blame, and sullenness.
00:01:15.560 | We've talked about the season and his personal discoveries
00:01:18.760 | on the podcast back in APJs 220, 1227, and 1501.
00:01:24.120 | It was a significant season in his life.
00:01:27.320 | But that leave ended at the end of 2010.
00:01:30.600 | On January 9th, 2011, he preached for the very first time
00:01:34.540 | in those many months.
00:01:36.120 | And he preached on the Lord's Prayer
00:01:37.920 | in a sermon titled, "Our Deepest Prayer,
00:01:40.600 | "Hallowed Be Your Name."
00:01:43.320 | In the Lord's Prayer, our Savior teaches us
00:01:46.260 | to ask for several things.
00:01:47.440 | We ask for our daily needs.
00:01:49.160 | We ask for food, for personal forgiveness
00:01:51.560 | from our sins within, for a forgiving spirit
00:01:55.460 | to forgive those who sin against us,
00:01:58.000 | and to be kept from sin.
00:02:00.120 | Our loving Father cares that we pray
00:02:03.000 | for all these daily needs.
00:02:04.600 | But before those requests, we pray for greater things,
00:02:08.400 | that God's name would be hallowed,
00:02:10.320 | that his kingdom would come,
00:02:11.880 | and that his will would be done.
00:02:13.840 | From this, Pastor John took another important lesson
00:02:17.480 | from his leave to explain here he is
00:02:19.600 | in that first sermon back coming off his leave,
00:02:22.200 | referencing his journal of reflections from his time away.
00:02:26.080 | Here's Pastor John.
00:02:27.040 | - There's something unique about petition number one.
00:02:32.400 | It's one of a kind in these six petitions.
00:02:36.040 | Hallowed be your name.
00:02:40.120 | In this petition, we get the one specific,
00:02:45.760 | named, subjective response of the human heart
00:02:50.040 | that God wants everybody to give.
00:02:51.780 | Hallowing.
00:02:53.600 | Hallowing.
00:02:56.320 | That is, you reverence, you sanctify,
00:03:00.000 | you treasure, you esteem, you respect, you stand in awe.
00:03:05.000 | This is something that goes on in here.
00:03:08.880 | It's the one request that names what's supposed
00:03:12.600 | to go on in here toward God.
00:03:15.600 | Name is who he is.
00:03:18.920 | So when you say, "Hallowed be your name,"
00:03:21.400 | you mean, "Hallowed be you."
00:03:22.920 | I'm hallowing, treasuring, esteeming, reverencing,
00:03:27.200 | honoring Yahweh, and he's in and signified by his name.
00:03:32.200 | So here's another journal entry.
00:03:38.160 | October 9, "My one great passion."
00:03:43.160 | Nothing, and remember writing this sentence.
00:03:47.760 | I mean, sometimes, I mean, I read it now,
00:03:49.440 | it just didn't have the same clout it did then.
00:03:52.640 | God just says things to you, and you feel like
00:03:56.040 | a moment of clarity has happened,
00:03:58.080 | and all the clouds have been blown away,
00:04:00.360 | and you know something with such crystal clarity.
00:04:05.080 | You wish it would always be that way.
00:04:07.440 | (laughs)
00:04:09.520 | Nothing is more clear and unmistakable to me
00:04:15.840 | than that the purpose of the universe
00:04:19.080 | is for the hallowing of God's name.
00:04:21.480 | His kingdom comes for that.
00:04:26.360 | His will is done for that.
00:04:31.320 | Humans have bred sustained life for that.
00:04:37.200 | Sins are forgiven for that.
00:04:40.480 | Temptation is escaped for that.
00:04:43.680 | If you press up as far as you can go
00:04:48.720 | into the mind and the intention and the purpose of God
00:04:52.240 | for all things, Petition 1 nails it.
00:04:56.160 | You can't go any higher.
00:04:58.760 | You don't hallow God's name because
00:05:02.600 | something else better, higher, more important should happen.
00:05:06.920 | The hallowing of God's name is the termination of everything.
00:05:11.920 | So he starts with the biggest request of all.
00:05:17.600 | Pray that that happens in everything.
00:05:20.800 | So, one last journal entry, October 10.
00:05:24.280 | You can see the sequence going here as day after day.
00:05:26.720 | I'm thinking about this.
00:05:27.920 | I just wrote this prayer.
00:05:31.080 | Lord, grant that I would, in all my weaknesses
00:05:36.080 | and limitations, remain close to the one clear,
00:05:41.880 | grand seam of my life, your magnificence.
00:05:48.000 | Sooner or later in your life, young people, heads up,
00:05:57.120 | old people know this, sooner or later in your life,
00:06:01.760 | pressures and problems become almost overwhelming.
00:06:07.680 | Physical problems, "Give me bread."
00:06:13.720 | Relational and mental problems, "Please forgive me."
00:06:18.200 | Moral problems, "Don't let me go into that temptation again."
00:06:26.200 | And what I want you to see is this.
00:06:30.000 | You have a father.
00:06:31.520 | He's a thousand times better than any earthly good father
00:06:37.300 | or bad father.
00:06:38.700 | You have a father.
00:06:41.760 | And this father cares about every one of those.
00:06:47.640 | You can't pray about a problem he doesn't know
00:06:50.660 | and care about, none, no matter how small they are.
00:06:54.560 | And he beckons you to come to him
00:06:59.560 | and to talk to him in prayer about them
00:07:03.600 | because he knows what you need
00:07:05.760 | and he's not surprised by anything.
00:07:08.560 | Now, that's the usual way we attack our problems directly.
00:07:13.120 | God, help me, got a problem.
00:07:17.480 | And all the attention begins to focus on the problem.
00:07:20.680 | And yes, God, you're saying, "Come,"
00:07:23.300 | but your life is starting to shrink up
00:07:26.160 | around the problem or the set of problems.
00:07:30.480 | You wake up thinking about it,
00:07:31.480 | you go to bed thinking about it,
00:07:33.120 | and your life is shrinking little by little
00:07:35.180 | down around this cluster of pain and problems,
00:07:39.160 | marriage problems or kid problems
00:07:40.920 | or health problems or work problems.
00:07:42.660 | Your life is just shrinking down.
00:07:44.880 | And all the while you're calling on
00:07:47.000 | the last three petitions.
00:07:48.880 | God, help me.
00:07:49.960 | I need some bread, I need some money,
00:07:52.680 | I need some forgiveness, I need some help morally.
00:07:55.640 | And you're crying out and your life is just shrinking down.
00:07:59.040 | Now, when I say it that way,
00:08:01.240 | I don't mean stop doing that, okay?
00:08:03.640 | I do not mean stop crying out to God.
00:08:06.320 | I don't mean stop knowing your problems are there
00:08:09.240 | and saying, "I need help."
00:08:11.520 | I want you to see that God offers you
00:08:14.160 | another strategy of victory.
00:08:18.560 | It's not different.
00:08:20.840 | That is, it's not contradictory.
00:08:22.800 | It doesn't replace what I just described,
00:08:26.280 | but it is indirect.
00:08:28.960 | It's indirect.
00:08:30.860 | There's a direct way of,
00:08:32.000 | "I've got a problem, I'm going after it."
00:08:33.920 | And then there's something indirect.
00:08:37.120 | And here I'm thinking about the first three petitions
00:08:39.600 | of the Lord's Prayer.
00:08:41.840 | God made you to be a part of something big.
00:08:47.720 | He made you to be a part of something spectacular
00:08:51.840 | and magnificent.
00:08:53.720 | And you're allowing, perhaps,
00:08:55.680 | you're allowing your life to just shrink down
00:08:58.000 | around these problems.
00:08:59.440 | And God's in it and He's patient, He's loving,
00:09:02.200 | and He provides help.
00:09:03.360 | But I'm just saying there's another strategy,
00:09:07.280 | there's another way to add,
00:09:09.840 | it's a supplemental remedy for life.
00:09:14.960 | Namely, to be drawn up.
00:09:18.680 | Let yourself be drawn up into the first three petitions
00:09:23.680 | of the Lord's Prayer.
00:09:27.640 | God made you to be a part of hallowing His name
00:09:30.600 | and extending His kingdom and seeing His will be done.
00:09:35.000 | He made you for something magnificent,
00:09:37.360 | something mundane as well.
00:09:39.680 | Oh yes, He made that.
00:09:41.560 | Cares about that, wants you to live there.
00:09:45.080 | But what we fail to see, I speak from experience,
00:09:50.080 | what we fail to see often is that when we lose our grip
00:09:55.360 | on the greatness of God and His name and His kingdom
00:10:00.520 | and His global will, we lose a divine equilibrium in life
00:10:05.520 | and we become increasingly vulnerable
00:10:09.520 | to those problems overwhelming us.
00:10:13.080 | When we lose our grip on His name, His kingdom,
00:10:18.080 | His will, the big, universal, global, glorious,
00:10:26.120 | awesome, magnificent purposes into which
00:10:29.160 | we have been caught up, when we lose our grip on that
00:10:32.560 | and life begins to shrink down around
00:10:35.360 | even a God-pursued problem solving,
00:10:38.920 | we lose an equilibrium, a divine equilibrium.
00:10:43.920 | I've called it ballast before in life, in your boat.
00:10:50.960 | You've got this little boat and the waves are,
00:10:54.920 | and you're ballast, heavy and deep.
00:10:58.760 | And I'm just shifting images here to go up
00:11:01.400 | into those first three petitions.
00:11:03.520 | I'm pleading with you as I close that you not lose your grip
00:11:08.160 | on the supremacy and centrality of hallowing
00:11:11.080 | the name of God in your life.
00:11:13.280 | I'm urging you from the Lord's prayer and from experience
00:11:18.280 | that you do go to God for bread
00:11:21.800 | and you do go to God for forgiveness
00:11:25.280 | and you do go to God for overcoming besetting sins
00:11:28.360 | and you do go to God to advance His will
00:11:31.240 | and to seek His kingdom and you do all of it
00:11:35.080 | for the hallowing of His name.
00:11:37.560 | The great value in your life, in your marriage,
00:11:41.560 | in your parenting, in your single life,
00:11:44.040 | in your friendships, in your studies,
00:11:45.280 | the great value is I will live
00:11:49.400 | so that both my heart and other hearts
00:11:52.560 | hallow, esteem, reverence, lift up, honor, value,
00:11:57.560 | treasure the name of God over all things.
00:12:03.800 | Keep your feet on the ground.
00:12:06.120 | We live there, we will never not live on the ground
00:12:10.880 | with its mundane aspects.
00:12:14.280 | But you may not see it clearly now,
00:12:17.720 | but I testify and I say from scripture,
00:12:21.160 | there is more deliverance, more healing, more joy
00:12:26.160 | in that, in the hallowing of God's name
00:12:31.480 | as your supreme goal and priority than you ever dreamed.
00:12:36.480 | It's so indirect, it just feels often irrelevant.
00:12:41.480 | I've got this massive problem and you're telling me,
00:12:45.080 | hallow the name of God.
00:12:49.760 | Yeah, I am.
00:12:51.120 | It is a request.
00:12:53.080 | Hallowed be thy name means let your name be hallowed
00:12:55.640 | and who needs to do it more?
00:12:58.180 | I do.
00:12:59.840 | It's a global prayer, but it starts right here.
00:13:02.120 | When I wake up in the morning,
00:13:03.180 | I'm not hallowing the name of God most mornings.
00:13:05.600 | I'm thinking about my problems
00:13:07.440 | and they seem to be bigger than God.
00:13:09.000 | So I pray this.
00:13:10.880 | This is a prayer.
00:13:12.680 | Isn't that encouraging that Jesus would tell us,
00:13:16.160 | ask the Father to help you hallow him.
00:13:18.640 | So I invite you, beckon you, 2011,
00:13:25.240 | go deep and go high in the Lord's prayer.
00:13:29.920 | Let him be a sweet, close, tender, warm,
00:13:34.920 | need meeting, caring father to you.
00:13:39.640 | And on that, rise up and join him through prayer
00:13:44.640 | and life in the seeking of his kingdom
00:13:52.660 | and the doing of his will all to the end
00:13:54.640 | that his name be hallowed.
00:13:57.000 | - Powerful, that sermon was preached in January, 2011.
00:14:00.720 | A sermon titled,
00:14:01.560 | "Our Deepest Prayer, Hallowed Be Your Name"
00:14:04.160 | on the Lord's Prayer in Matthew 6, verses 5 to 15.
00:14:07.640 | His first sermon back from an eight month leave.
00:14:11.000 | The whole sermon is on the site right now as always.
00:14:13.140 | And this clip came from Jessica Clark
00:14:15.160 | in Christianburg, Virginia.
00:14:17.520 | She writes this,
00:14:18.360 | this clip and entire sermon has completely changed
00:14:21.580 | how I approach prayer.
00:14:23.600 | Learning to petition the hallowing of his name
00:14:25.680 | has been one of the greatest blessings in my life
00:14:27.880 | and it has lifted my eyes above my circumstances
00:14:31.300 | and my trials down here on earth to the glory of God,
00:14:35.560 | resulting in genuine daily joy in him.
00:14:38.580 | His words have stuck with me
00:14:40.120 | and greatly blessed me over the years.
00:14:43.160 | That's awesome.
00:14:44.000 | Thank you, Jessica, for that testimony.
00:14:45.560 | And thank you for listening to today's sermon clips.
00:14:47.480 | Our clips are crowdsourced now.
00:14:48.680 | You tell us what bits of Piper's sermons changed your life,
00:14:51.600 | like this one from Jessica.
00:14:52.940 | And we share that clip with the ABJ audience.
00:14:55.640 | If you've got one, email me.
00:14:56.800 | Give me your name, hometown, the sermon title,
00:14:59.560 | the timestamp of where the clip happens in the audio,
00:15:01.360 | and tell me how it impacted you.
00:15:02.760 | Put the word clip in the subject line of an email
00:15:04.480 | and send it to me at askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:15:08.080 | That's an email address, askpastorjohn@desiringgod.org.
00:15:11.920 | Well, we have addressed the challenges
00:15:15.440 | of being a Christian loner in ABJs 109 and 212.
00:15:20.200 | A lot of helpful counsel can be found
00:15:21.680 | in that pair of episodes, ABJs 109 and 212.
00:15:25.280 | A listener named Brian heard them
00:15:27.120 | and writes in to ask a question that compliments them.
00:15:29.960 | What would Pastor John say is the difference
00:15:31.400 | between being a loner who is a Christian
00:15:33.840 | and a loner who fails to love the brothers?
00:15:37.080 | As John puts it in 1 John 3:14.
00:15:40.280 | Is that the same thing?
00:15:41.360 | Is being a loner the same thing as being unloving?
00:15:46.160 | It's a great question.
00:15:47.000 | Up next time, I'm your host, Tony Reinke,
00:15:48.520 | and we're joined in studio with Pastor John
00:15:50.040 | on Friday for that.
00:15:51.200 | We'll see you then.
00:15:52.100 | (upbeat music)
00:15:54.680 | (upbeat music)
00:15:57.260 | [BLANK_AUDIO]