Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the leaders notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. Dr. Rutland is a world renowned leadership expert. He is a New York Times best selling author and he has served as the president of two universities. The Leaders Notebook is brought to you by Global Servants. For more information about Global Servants, please Visit our website globalservants.org Here is your host, Dr. Mark Rutland.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: I want to speak this morning on the Lord's prayer in the 23rd Psalm.
Now let me just say this to you, this is not going to be a proper sermon this morning. I'm going to just share with you some things about the Lord's prayer in the 23rd Psalm. So it's just. Just relax and kind of let this wash over you a little bit. It's just going to be kind of a fluid approach to this and not. I'm usually an extremely structured preacher. I like introduction, three points, conclusion.
But today I'm just going to share with you some things in my life that produced this book and some connections between these two great devotional classics.
So if you have your Bibles, if you'll take those and turn first, or you could look at the screen, I think they'll put it on there. To Matthew, chapter six.
I'm going to begin reading at verse nine and then I would like everyone to Turn to the 23rd Psalm after we see this Matthew chapter 6, beginning with verse 9, Jesus is speaking. If you have red letters, you'll have it there. The gentleman in the sound booth wanted to know which version I wanted to read from. I said, boys, exactly the way Jesus wrote it. I want, I use the King James Bible. I'm not hung up on it. You don't have to have a King James Bible to go to heaven. It's one will be given you when you get there. But why stand in that long embarrassing line?
You're a jolly church. I always appreciate a church that can laugh. You should go with me. You should go to some churches where laughter has never touched that face.
So I'm going to read from King James and it'll be on the screen in King James, but you follow me in whatever cheap communist imitation you got.
All right? All right.
Matthew chapter six, beginning with verse nine, Jesus is speaking after this manner. Therefore pray ye, our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. Now, everyone, if you will please turn back to the book of Psalms, the 23rd by number.
And I'd like us to all read Psalm 23.
If your version reads slightly differently, it won't make any difference. They'll be close enough. All right, let's read together. Aloud. Will you read it with me? Aloud. Are you ready? The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Thou anointest my head with oil. My cup runneth over. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
Just put your hands on your Bible and let's pray together.
Heavenly Father, with our hands on the Word and our hearts and minds as open as we know how to get them, we ask you to do all the rest.
Lord, I yield myself to you as fully as I know how to do.
I ask that you would somehow overcome every frailty in the speaker and every distraction and listener and establish divine communication from you, Us Word.
Brush aside every barrier that when we leave here today, we will say one to another, surely the Lord has spoken unto us in the mighty name Jesus, the strong son of God, Amen.
Amen. And amen.
So someone asked me in a television interview on this book, how long did it take you to write this book?
Well, there are two answers to that.
One is decades.
Decades of some internal struggle.
The other answer is, it's the fastest book I ever wrote.
When I finally sat down to write this book, I literally couldn't write fast enough.
I felt like it just poured through me and out the end of my pen.
I wrote this book longhand in a spiral notebook. I didn't type it, and I literally couldn't write fast enough.
The woman who typed it from my handwriting also felt that I had written it pretty quickly.
So we stayed on the phone a lot. She said, what is what meant.
She thought she was typing a Joe Biden speech. She couldn't?
No.
The other side of the question is, how long did it take for this book to germinate in you? Is really what I think they were at.
So this book is a book that I wrote out of pain and not out of blessing, and may show up in the book, but I have since I was in junior high school, because of events that happened at that time, struggled on and off with some levels of depression.
If you have never struggled with depression or if you don't have anybody in your family who's ever struggled, it may not be what you think.
Depression is not what happens when you feel bad because something bad has happened to you.
Depression is usually not even contextual.
It's just something that settles in like a.
Like a cloud, inexplicably, that you just suddenly are depressed. And maybe at a time of tremendous success, as we outwardly count success.
When I was the president of Southeastern University, I entered into the last, and I'm believing the last, the last substantial season of depression.
It's been more than 20 years ago, but it came hard and fast, the sense that one has.
I tried to explain it to a group of young adults. They were asking about depression. I said, it's like a phone booth just drops down over you.
And I stared at their blank little faces, and I realized that none of them had ever seen a phone booth.
So evidently, at sojourn church, your drummer is so crazy, you have to lock her up in a glass booth. So.
So it's like that.
That one might be, as it were, encased.
And everything seems fine outwardly, and you can see everybody and they can see you, but it feels like you can't reach out. I don't want to wallow in this. I'm not trying to talk. This is not a message about depression.
That's not what this is about. But I wanted. I'm trying to share the context with you.
Perhaps you don't even want to hear it.
Everybody values transparency until it happens. Then they say, oh, that's a little more than we wanted to know.
But it had been a recurring pattern in my life since those early days. And so that time was really a nightmare.
And I felt like I had fallen down a well, and the sides were slimy and slippery, and I just felt like I couldn't get out. And it began to dawn on me that it was the end of so many things. My marriage, depression and anger go together, and we were struggling.
Depression and isolation go together.
And so I felt it might be the end of leadership and ministry. I was the president of a university that was going, blowing. We were building buildings. Enrollment was skyrocketing.
It was every outward expression of anything you want to call success.
And I just Felt like I was at the bottom of a well.
And one night I got up in the middle of the night. And just sleeplessness is also a challenge with all that.
And I was just kind of walking around in the house trying to pray.
And I think that you may not want to hear, and I can understand that you may not want to hear of a pastor who has trouble praying. That may not be encouraging.
But I was struggling.
And suddenly the question came in my mind, is this the end of everything?
Am I going to make it out of this?
Now listen to. Listen to Dr. Mark, if you don't know this. Satan makes house calls.
And you toss a question like that out into the air and he is happy to answer it for you.
So I said to my. Just how you say things, I said, am I going to make it out of this? And a voice as horrific as the grave spoke to me and said, you don't have a prayer.
It buckled me.
I can't tell you you don't have a prayer.
Let me tell you something else, though, the good part.
The Holy Ghost makes house calls, too.
So immediately I heard that.
It was as though I was sitting in the middle of a debate in my own living room.
You don't have a prayer.
Immediately another voice said to me, you do have a prayer. You have the one I gave you. Why won't you use it?
And the Lord's Prayer just came up in my spirit.
Now, I didn't grow up in a church like this, Spirit filled and with liberty and worship. I grew up in very liturgical Methodist churches, very uptight. And I'm trying to think of nice words, incredibly, excruciatingly boring.
And the liturgy was inaccessible to a child. It didn't feel anything to me.
So the Lord's Prayer was part of that.
Please forgive me.
Thanks for asking me to do this, really.
So the Lord's Prayer was part of the liturgy. We said the Lord's Prayer at every single worship service.
But we droned through it with our usual bovine enthusiasm.
Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come thou.
So like many, and perhaps like many of you, as I moved over into the spirit filled side of the community of faith, I sort of jettisoned a lot of the liturgical things that had been meaningless to me or even deadening.
And along with that, the Lord's Prayer.
I don't even know how seldom over the years between my 20s and my 50s, that I had even said the Lord's Prayer.
But suddenly that night, it just came into me And I laid hold. I needed handles to get out of that well.
I needed handholds on the wall of a. Of a slimy well.
And it became the Lord's Prayer.
This. Pray it.
As I tried to crawl back up to the surface and break that cloud of depression.
I don't want to go on and on about depression, but I'm going to just say one word to you about it.
So I have had multiple people say to me, you seem like the last person on earth that would ever struggle with depression, but you just need to hear that whether somebody is jolly with you in public has nothing to do with what he struggles with alone in his room.
Maybe this is shaking you rather than encouraging you, but will you stay with me?
So I began to pray the Lord's Prayer.
Or let me be even more transparent sometimes. I just said the Lord's Prayer.
I don't know if I was praying it or not.
I just began to let it flow out of my mind and my spirit and my words, just saying it over and over and over and over again.
5, 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 times a day, literally. I know you may think I'm exaggerating. I'm not. I mean, over and over and over again.
And I found immediately one thing that I had never thought of before, hence the title of this book. It takes about 21 seconds to pray the Lord's Prayer.
Unless you're from Mississippi, it takes 45 seconds, but it takes about 21 seconds to pray the Lord's Prayer. I got a big charge out of it during COVID Everybody was talking about how you should wash your hands for 21 seconds. I said, oh, great. Our Father, which art in heaven.
So if you pray the Lord's Prayer, every time you wash your hands, you get double cleansing.
But I just began to saturate myself in the Lord's Prayer, to marinate my brain, my spirit, in the Lord's Prayer.
And the phrases, words, syllables by syllable, seemed to rise up out of the dust of liturgical numbness and come alive for me.
The Lord's Prayer, instead of being a relic of dead liturgy, it became a living vessel of deliverance and empowerment to me, became sweet to me.
One of the wonderful things about praying the Lord's Prayer, and I recommend it to you.
Yes, I hope you'll buy the book.
Dozens of them, give them away, everything else, but I recommend the Lord's Prayer itself to you, that you take it on as a life force while you walk. The wonderful thing about the Lord's Prayer, once one really has it committed to memory and can pray it without having to struggle for the words, is that you can pray at anywhere, anytime with your eyes open, with your eyes closed, Sitting in a doctor's office or driving or whatever. You don't have to close your eyes. Just begin saying the Lord's Prayer over and over again.
It can give you tremendous peace.
I've been held at gunpoint in Africa, and I was doing work there.
I hear people all the time say, I just can't seem to really get my prayer life going.
Okay, let me just say something to you.
When a drunken African soldier has got an AK47 jammed in your belly button, it's amazing how you can just pray. It just.
Prayers just comes alive.
And the Lord's Prayer just.
In long journeys in boring meetings, the Lord's Prayer just became so much a part of things.
I began to think about specific parts of it.
One part that is something that I'd never seen before.
Thy kingdom come. Finish this with me. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.
Now, everybody that said on earth, would you please raise your hand?
Take your hands down. Everybody that said in earth, will you raise your hand? Those are the people who learned it in the King James Version.
It's a surprising thing in the King James Bible.
The preposition is in contemporary people who pray, pray it on.
Now, both are fine. If your theology rests on prepositions, you're doomed anyway. But if one prays on earth, one has a sense of the geopolitical and physical earth. Yes. Yes. Thank God. Let your kingdom come on earth, O God. Let it start at Washington, but let your kingdom come on earth.
On the earth of other people, let it come in my family, that's an outward. But what if the preposition is in thy kingdom, thy will be done. Thy kingdom come in earth.
Okay, what could that mean?
The Lord's Prayer is not the journey to the center of the earth.
You're not talking about inside the globe.
What could it be about?
Well, what are you made of?
Dust thou art, and to dust thou returnest. Ashes to ashes, earth to earth.
We are made of earth.
David writes in another place. O Lord, remember our frail frame that we are made of dust, of dirt.
So what if you were praying, thy kingdom come, thy will be done in the earth, which is me.
So sometimes when you're praying the Lord's Prayer, take it to a physical level.
In earth. In the earth of my brain, my thoughts.
In the earth of my mouth, in the earth of my heart. Now, don't do that in public, okay? But Alone in your room, make it even physical, engage with the prayer.
Then I began to add on to the Lord's Prayer, the 23rd Psalm.
So I just said them back to back, back to back, back to back, over and over and over again.
And then what happened was I began to see how they so wonderfully and mysteriously seemed to mesh.
They. They almost came together in my spirit. As one thing I want to just bring to your mind, not anything you don't know, but med on thought of it for a while, of some of the connections and similarities and quote, unquote coincidences about the 23rd Psalm and the Lord's Prayer. First of all, they were written a thousand years apart by two men born in the same small village.
David was born in Bethlehem, wrote the 23rd Psalm 1,000 years later.
Think about this.
Psalm 23 was already ancient writing when Jesus was born. A millennium had passed.
Two men born in a tiny village write the two premier devotional classics of two of the world's great religions, Judaism and Christianity, certainly in the New Testament.
I think I can state this unequivocally, that in terms of the broader community of faith worldwide, the most quoted passage of Scripture in the New Testament is the Lord's Prayer, because it's prayed by some people, I think, that don't even know where it is in the Bible, communally, individually, ecclesiologically, in church.
The most quoted passage of the Old Testament in the contemporary, in the contemporary Christian church is certainly the 23rd Psalm.
In times of crisis, funerals, people pray and say and memorize the 23rd Psalm.
Now, interestingly, I have a very good friend who's a Jewish scholar in Israel. He's not a believer, but he's a wonderful friend of mine. And so when I wrote this book, I sent him the manuscript and asked him if he would just look it over and see if there was anything that he might want to add or anything that I had wrong. And he called me. We had a long conversation by phone from Jerusalem, and he said, here's something you may not know. He said the 23rd Psalm is almost never used in Jewish liturgical settings. In a synagogue, in a Jewish ceremony of some kind. The 23rd Psalm is almost never used, except it is sometimes used on the. As the closing prayer at the end of Shabbat, the last night of Shabbat, the end of it. He said, they might have, but in synagogue would not. He said in some.
Some communities of Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, they might use the 23rd Psalm in specific things, but not Much. It's just not used much liturgically. I said, why not? He said, because it doesn't sound Jewish.
I said, the 23rd Psalm.
I said, it was written by, like, David.
He said, no, it just doesn't sound Jewish. It's so personal.
The Lord is my shepherd.
He leads me, he feeds me, he forgives me.
He said, that's just not the way Jews pray. Our prayers are corporate.
We pray for the Jewish people, for the nation.
He said. He said, mark, you want to know what sounds really Jewish?
It's the Lord's Prayer.
He said, the Lord's Prayer is corporate. Our Father doesn't say My Father. Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy name. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. He said, it's a corporate prayer. In fact, as a result of that conversation, he wrote an article which was published in the Jerusalem Post, saying there is no reason that any Jew in the world can't pray the Lord's Prayer. It was taught by Jesus.
He said, it's a Jewish prayer.
I was preaching at a megachurch in California one Sunday, and I had preached something along the lines of this. And afterward, I was talking when this lady came to me and she said, look, this is my first time ever in a Christian church. She said, I'm Jewish.
And she said, do you think it's okay for me to pray that prayer? I said, now, sister, you need to talk to your rabbi. But why not? Why wouldn't it be okay?
She said, well, it's a Christian prayer. I said, well, we use it.
But I said, you got to remember, it was taught first to Jews.
There was no Gentiles in the crowd. It was taught to Jews by a Jewish rabbi.
And a Jewish rabbi who never met a Christian until after he died.
I'm not sure. She.
She said, I'm going to start to pray that prayer. She said, that prayer that moved me.
I said, you never heard it before? She said, I never heard it before.
But she said, it resonated with me. And I said, of course it did. You're Jewish.
The prayer is Jewish.
But the 23rd Psalm, my friend in Jerusalem. He said, when I hear the 23rd Psalm, it sounds like the way you Christians talk.
And he actually reminded me of a Christian hymn.
He said, here's a Christian hymn that really makes.
It's hard for us. And you sing it all the time. I come to the garden alone and he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I'm his own. He said, that's just not the way we pray.
But he said, that's what the 23rd Psalm is. David is talking about his personal, intimate relationship with God. And he said, it's a little squeamish for us.
My first chapel at ORU. When I left Southeastern and became the president at Oral Roberts University, my very first chapel, I had to the students and the faculty and the administration, everybody, all in the first chapel. And I had everybody pray the Lord's Prayer. I felt it would be the most unifying thing. The one prayer would get every one of us in the room pray all together at one time and bring unity to a university that. That had been wounded.
Evidently, I wasn't right.
After the service, I was headed back to the Green Room, and one of the coeds came to me weeping hysterically. And she had her cell phone, and she said, this is my mother. It's my mother.
So I thought her father had died.
I took the phone, I said, ma', am, this is Mark Rutland. She said, I can't believe you're trying to make this university into a Catholic school.
I didn't even know what she was talking about.
I said, ma', am, I said that. I said, what do you mean, make it into a Catholic school? She went on. She was hysterical because I had everybody pray the Lord's Prayer.
The fact that I explained to her that it wasn't actually taught by a Catholic, but, see, like by Jesus, it really didn't seem to penetrate.
And she withdrew her daughter.
She took her out of Oru over the Lord's Prayer.
So it will just show you the power of the prayer for our healing and protection.
And it can energize situations in positive and negative ways that you may not imagine.
When you pray the Lord's Prayer, do you think Satan says to himself, oh, if they're going to pray the Lord's Prayer, I'll just leave them alone?
You may incite the enemy, but you also defeat the enemy.
Now, think about some of the structure of the two. Just briefly.
They both begin the same way, and they both end the same way.
Our Father, who art in King James English. Our Father, who art making in contemporary American English. Our Father who is.
Our Father who is.
How does David begin? Psalm 23. The Lord is Our Father, who is the Lord is.
Both of them begin with the fundamental reality of the isness of God.
The ultimate reality of the universe is that God is that God is. They both begin with the reality of God.
If you didn't get anything else out of either one of them, if every day you would just say, God is.
God is. You can start listing things, but not just stuff that he is or things that he is, but that he is.
The Lord is my shepherd, yes. The Lord is our Father, yes, but he is.
That's the reality.
But they also end the same way.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.
For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever, forever dividends.
And I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
They both begin with the ultimate reality of God, and they both end with the foreverness of God. God is and God is forever.
In between that, there's all of these wonderful blessings and teachings and admonitions.
Take, for example, the absolute non negotiable of the Lord's Prayer, which Jesus, by the way, when he editorializes on the Lord's Prayer, he mentions, it's the only thing he mentions is forgiveness.
Forgive us our debts, our trespasses, our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us, who trespass against us.
I got a fresh new look at trespassing. One time I was talking with Allison, with my wife, and she said, what does it mean? Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those.
We began to talk about it, and she said, take it out of the Lord's Prayer.
What if you're charged with trespassing?
What does it mean?
I said, well, it means you've entered into someplace that you have no right to be into.
So she said that that's another way of talking about sin.
I entered into something I shouldn't have been into.
I've trespassed onto something that I shouldn't have been in.
So then she said, the opposite is also true. There are people who trample on our lives.
I took it to heart, nurtured it in my heart. Not too long after that, I counseled with a pastor's wife, and I should say an ex pastor. They had left the church very wounded, very beat up.
And she said that 25 years earlier, she and her husband had gone through a marital issue, serious.
But they dealt with it and got counseling and dealt with it.
25 years later, some members of the board of the church found out about it and dredged it up and dealt with it publicly.
And she said, I felt walked on.
And I said, yes, ma'. Am.
They trespassed on your private life.
And I said, the only way for you to find healing and forgiveness is to forgive them for trespassing on your life, because there was a time when you trespassed where you shouldn't have been.
The depth in these is beyond any. You could spend the rest of your life studying both of these great classics, syllables by syllable. You wouldn't exhaust it.
Well, you've been so patient.
Let me start to bring to a conclusion.
The good news is that it really became medicine to my soul.
I believe by faith that I will never again have the kind of plunge into depression that I had more than 20 years ago. Now, you know, there are times everybody feels bad. You know, the Cowboys lose to some team, there's no conceivable way they could lose to, you know, depression settles in for a moment, but I'm talking about that depth of depression.
It's never really come again. And I'm claiming God's victory over it.
But I believe that the healing power of the Lord's prayer in the 23rd Psalm was really what made the difference. Medicine to my soul. He restores my soul.
Your soul is not your spirit.
Your soul is the bank of your emotions, your mind, your thoughts, your creative imagination.
He restores how I think.
He restores my soul, my mind, my thoughts.
Anybody here that struggles with your thoughts.
He restores. He heals. He transforms mind, inner self, the creativity of us that can imagine every kind of crazy, wicked, stupid thing can reshape it and remold it and restore it so that it can imagine the things of God.
So let me.
So let me close with. Now that I've talked about the Lord's Prayer so much, let me close with one thing about the 23rd Psalm.
I.
When I was in undergraduate school, right at the end of the Civil War, it's really rude to laugh at a guest speaker. And I took a course in Western literature, and the professor, who was just a few years older than us, just a young guy, he was a very outspoken atheist, and he mocked, not just Christianity, religion, the existence of God pretty consistently. There was probably just a handful of Christians in the class, and we just.
Frankly, it just wasn't worth it. We just kept our heads down and our mouths shut.
But one day some girl asked him, said, look, before we come to the end of this semester, we want to know what you think about something. What is the greatest poem ever written? We've been studying Western literature all this whole semester. What is the greatest poem ever written? What do you think? He said, it's not what I think.
He said, I will tell you what is the greatest poem ever written.
We said what?
He said, the 23rd Psalm.
Well, we were just.
We were gobsmacked. I mean, this is atheist.
So everybody kind of sat there, but this girl, God bless her heart, she said, well, I just don't understand that.
She said, you've been telling us all semester you're an atheist now. You said, the 23rd Psalm is a greatest poem ever written. Why would you say that?
He said, all right, you ask me.
He said, I'm a Jew from Baltimore and I married a Catholic girl, and we just were finished with religion.
He said, we had a baby who died of sid, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.
And he said, my little ex Catholic, I thought wife wanted a priest at the funeral. And he said, I was furious.
He said, we nearly got divorced over the funeral of our dead baby because I didn't want a priest at that graveside, a Catholic priest or rabbi or anybody.
He said, as they lowered that little coffin into the grave, he said, that old priest said the Lord's Prayer.
And he said, this Jew standing at the grave for just a moment, he said, I knew there's a God in Israel.
He said, I apologize. I'm so sorry.
He said, if a poem written 3,000 years ago can make a lapsed Jew believe in the existence of God, even for a moment, that's the greatest poem ever written.
[00:39:05] Speaker A: You've been listening to the leader's notebook with Dr. Mark Rutland. You can follow Dr. Rutland on X at Dr.markrutland or visit his website, drmarkrutland.com where you can find information about his materials and and his app. Join us next week for another episode of the Leader's Notebook.
