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.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: In this podcast today and in the next few podcasts, we I want to introduce you to two of my favorite friends, old friends. They have brought healing power to millions for centuries. I invite you to meet them or meet them again and come to know them more intimately than ever before, perhaps more fully than you've ever known you could know them. And those two great friends of mine are the Lord's prayer and the 23rd Psalm. Hello, I'm Mark Rutland. Welcome to the Leader's Notebook. I'm so glad that you've decided to join this podcast. I'm gonna be teaching in this episode and in the next few episodes on a book that I wrote a few years ago called 21 seconds to change your world. 21 seconds. That's about the time that it takes to pray the Lord's Prayer.
In this book I deal with the interconnectedness between the Lord's prayer and Psalm 23. They fit.
They are gears that interlock gently, perfectly, never grinding. They turn the human soul toward the healing for which it yearns.
Seen, prayed and laid out side by side, the parallel splendor of these two great friends of mine is absolutely miraculous. Let me introduce you, or more likely reintroduce you to my beloved friends the Lord's prayer and Psalm 23.
I want you to have the book on which these next few episodes are based. It's called 21 seconds to change youe World.
Y lotenemos este libro in espanol.
Bainti unos segundos para cambiar su mundo. We want you to have it in English or in Spanish or both. And at the end of this podcast, someone is going to tell you how to enter the right code and just get a great discount.
It's time for you to have these books. And they're going to be people you think of as you hear these podcast episodes that you think, oh, they need that book. So I hope you'll get it and get as many copies as you want.
Now I'm going to do something that I've never done on the Leader's Notebook.
I'm going to actually read to you from the foreword to my book, 21 seconds to change youe World.
This was written by Mark Batterson, one of the great writers on prayer.
And he wrote the foreword for this book. And I'm gonna just read you what he wrote. I want you to hear this, and then I'll have a few words to say.
Mark Batterson wrote this.
Have you ever heard someone talk about how their entire life changed? Their entire life was saved because they had a thought that was just out of character enough to think upon it and act?
There are tons of stories about people hearing a quiet voice in their head saying something like, hey, just look up or turn left at the corner, or even something as universal as you are loved.
For me, that voice is loudest when I write.
Writing is where I listen and record. But there is also still a gap between this writing and that still small voice of the Holy Spirit. And I pray every day that God will meet me in the middle.
Prayer is about listening to his voice in the depths of your heart.
I hit my knees so that voice will get louder and louder.
Dr. Rutland shares his vulnerable story of how he heard the voice say you have a prayer, which was a catalyst for his personal restoration and rebirth.
The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the heart and mind and soul of the one who prays.
If I had to teach one message over and over and over again, it would be how to pray.
The good news is that the best teacher in the history of mankind made it really easy for people like me to teach this message.
Thousands of years ago, Jesus gave us the template for prayer. We call it the lord's prayer. Thus, 21 seconds to change your world, with its strangely simple and wildly profound message, was born.
This book is bold. Dr. Rutland's book is vulnerable. It is revolutionary. By combining two ancient poems, Dr. Rutland has given us a compass for our intellect and our spirituality that is both universal and sufficient. In the Lord's prayer, in Psalm 23, everything that you might feel needs to be said when you pray is said beautifully, whether it's solitarily or congregationally. I've always said that I believe we are all only one prayer away from a totally different life.
Dr. Rutland has taken it a step further. It's exactly 21 seconds. That is how long it takes to completely revolutionize your world.
But let me clarify that this message is not about a time limit or succinctness or turning prayer into something to check off on your list.
It's an exegetical look at the beauty, simplicity, diligence, and profundity found in something that we've all likely taken for granted merely because it's been there forever. Dr. Otten looks at this mega prayer narratively, historically, structurally, literarily and practically.
He takes us all way back to the man who first prayed it and asks, if it's good enough for Jesus, isn't it good enough for us?
If you ask me what I pray far more than anything else, the answer is, hands down, the favor of God.
While it's difficult to describe or define the favor of God, it is what God can do for you that you cannot do for yourself.
Asking for a better way to pray is a prayer that can and should be prayed. It's funny that prayer is one of the most difficult and yet simplest things to do every single day. Sometimes, though, it might be all we have, it's hard to find the right words.
We can all attest to this. Who hasn't felt the blush of guilt from having to admit that you don't pray enough or that you should pray more? But always remember one thing when it comes to prayer, it's better to have a heart without words than words without a heart.
The Bible gave us the words, and Dr. Rutland's book reinforces and sheds a new and relevant light on them.
You are only 21 seconds away from living a totally different life.
Mark Batterson thank you. Thank you, Mark Batterson, for writing that beautiful foreword to this book.
And that's the reason I read it to you, because it introduces the book as I want to introduce you to the Lord's prayer in Psalm 23.
Now the question is, why did these two power packed devotional masterpieces fall into such disuse or misuse?
Very disparate elements of Christendom have regrettably nudged the Lord's Prayer toward a musty and seldom opened cabinet.
It happened because of several errors, some of which were the opposite of each other, but the effect was the same. Assumed irrelevance for many Roman Catholics, the use of the Lord's Prayer for acts of penance sometimes devolved in the minds of Catholic lay people, that is, into punishment rather than penance.
Say three Our Fathers, three Hail Marys, and do something nice for the person you hurt. Not the intent was genuine. It was to push the penitent soul straight into a dynamic encounter with spiritual formation.
But somewhere along the line, for some at least, saying the Lord's Prayer became the parochial version of writing I will not talk in class a hundred times on the blackboard.
Some traditional Protestants likewise deposited the great prayer in the dustbin of spiritual irrelevance, or at least powerlessness in quite another way.
Liturgy.
By relegating the Lord's Prayer almost exclusively to liturgical use, it kind of became the mindless suffix to the pastoral prayer, that obligatory annex tacked on corporately just before the Amen, where the pastor might say something like, we pray all this in the name of Jesus of Nazareth, who taught us to pray by saying.
And then the congregation would drone through it with bovine enthusiasm.
The prayer, which began as a genuine spiritual formation dictated to us by Jesus himself, became what outdoor lights are to the meaning of Christmas, what Protestant liturgists and the Roman Catholic rite and ritual of penance began.
Charismatics and Pentecostals finished.
Paranoid about any possible liturgical subversion and terrified that something might look God forbid traditional, they by and large ignored the Lord's Prayer.
When I became the president at Oral Roberts University some years ago, certainly the best known charismatic university in the world, I began to occasionally use the Lord's Prayer corporately in in the chapel service.
It was not long before one mother, mother of a student that is, called me in tears that her daughter was in spiritual pain at being subjected to such a practice.
I was, this mother maintained, destroying the student's worship experience by asking them to say the Lord's Prayer.
Pointing out to her that Jesus himself gave us the prayer and told us to use it proved an irrelevant and effete argument in the face of her passionately held convictions.
College students, she insisted, should not be put through such a grueling and spirit killing experience as praying the Lord's Prayer together in chapel.
Some charismatics even dismissed the prayer as too elementary and lacking in faith.
Odd, isn't it? Since it is the one prayer that Jesus told us to pray, I find myself reluctant to dismiss the Lord's direction on prayer.
It could be that those who believe they have moved beyond the Lord's Prayer have actually marched on to some greater victory and left some of their ammunition behind.
I found much more winsome the response of a visitor at Free Chapel Church in Orange County, California.
After hearing me teach at length on the Lord's Prayer, she told me how excited she was to go home and memorize the prayer and start using it. She said she had never heard the prayer before and found it quite beautiful and that hearing it had a powerful effect on her.
I was actually surprised that she had come to adulthood without ever hearing the Lord's Prayer until she explained to me that she was Jewish.
I answered her by telling her it is a Jewish prayer. A Jewish rabbi taught it to his Jewish followers. It was decades before a single Gentile ever heard it or prayed it.
Absolutely delighted with this fact, and it is a fact.
And utterly charmed by the prayer itself. She assured me that she would use it just as I recommended it.
Not coincidentally, that conversation and the thrill of discovery I saw in her eyes in no small part helped me decide to write this book.
Have you laid aside the Lord's Prayer, or has it become perfunctory or even forgotten?
What about the 23rd Psalm?
Does it thrill you to pray?
Is the medicine of your soul's restoration?
Do you merely repeat it without considering its importance? How long since you prayed and meditated on this powerful Psalm 23?
That precious Jewish woman was not the sole encouragement I received to write this book.
Pastor Jensen Franklin invited me to teach on the Lord's prayer and the 23rd Psalm at free Chapel at the main campus in Gainesville. He expressed that he was personally touched in a new way by the ancient prayer, and he graciously but firmly pressed me to write this book and furthermore, not to wait.
My wife, Allison also urged me to do so.
In other words, two very significant Christian spirits in my life seemed to bless.
Just as that Jewish visitor blessed my intention to write this book, I interpreted that to mean that the book might be a blessing to neophytes and veterans alike.
I was, of course, thrilled that a Jewish woman who had never heard the Lord's Prayer could express such genuine excitement for this teaching.
Knowing that two wonderful, mature, experienced Christian leaders, such as my wife Allison and Pastor Franklin were so deeply stirred was the final impetus I needed.
The Lord's prayer and the 23rd Psalm together became the cocktail of life that healed my own mind when I needed it.
Mixed and well shaken, repeated back to back over and over again, prayed aloud, prayed silently, desperately, joyfully, sometimes with such a ragged faith that it could hardly be called faith. These two ancient devotional instruments became the medicine of my soul's restoration.
And since I wrote this book, I've heard countless, literally countless people say it became medicine to their souls as well.
There is, of course, the issue of this book's title. I found that it takes 21 seconds to pray the Lord's Prayer.
Try it. See how long it takes you.
This is a remarkably short amount of time to do something so powerful to commune with God about the state of your soul.
I remember when the COVID pandemic first began to sweep the planet. I remember that folks, scientists and doctors and people at the cdc, if we trust what they say, said we should wash our hands for 21 seconds. The coincidence did not elude me.
While you wash your hands for 21 seconds to be healed, or at least to be spared of a disease, why not pray for 21 seconds and wash your spirit with one of the greatest prayers ever taught for the purpose of this teaching, in the 23rd Psalm that I'm going to be doing here on this podcast, I'm going to usually quote it as it is quoted in the King James Bible.
This is for two reasons. First, most people who have at some time in their lives, even way back in Sunday school, memorized Psalm 23. They did so in the King James Version.
Likewise, it is the version most often used in public worship. Beyond that, quite frankly, it is simply my preference.
I personally cherish the rich Shakespearean sound of the Lord's prayer and the 23rd Psalm in the King James Version. No other translation has ever hit me with anywhere near the impact.
Again, if you prefer some other translation, please use that one. I don't care what version or in what language you read the Lord's prayer or the 23rd Psalm or in which language you pray it.
I do care that you pray it.
Come then, veteran visitor, window shopper, sanctified saint, Whoever you are, wherever you are in your journey with God, these next few episodes of this podcast of the Leader's Notebook are for you.
I want you to take my hand and let us begin.
I promise you, you're gonna love this.
Now, at the end of this podcast, someone is gonna tell you how you can get this book in English or in Spanish for you and for your friends.
First, however, pray with me, wherever you are, if you can, out loud, if not silently, pray with me the Lord's Prayer. And then together we'll say Psalm 23.
Let us pray just as Jesus taught us to pray.
Our Father, who 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.
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, all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
God bless you, my friend.
I'm Mark Rutland, and this is the Leader's Notebook.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: To order a copy of 21 seconds, please visit the store at drmarkrutland.com Enter the promo code 21seconds to receive $5 off of each book. Or you can call us total free at 888-823-8772. Thank you for listening to the Leader's.
