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: Have you prayed the Lord's Prayer today?
I didn't ask if you repeated it.
Have you prayed the Lord's Prayer today? Hello, I'm Mark Rutland. Welcome to the Leader's Notebook. I'm so delighted that you've joined me for this episode, this particular episode of the Leader's Notebook. I'm continuing a series based on my bestselling book, 21 Seconds to Change a World.
That book deals with the confluence, the coincidental connections at touch points between the Lord's Prayer or the Our father and the 23rd Psalm. I deal with the reality that these two great devotional masterpieces were written by men born in the same small village a thousand years apart.
It's actually a remarkable coincidence of God, if you will. Coincidence.
The language of both of these masterpieces is so beautiful. David's poetry in Psalm 23 and Jesus economical language of prayer that that touches basically on every aspect of human need or challenge in 21 seconds of praying it in English.
I want to continue this series today and I want to deal with some of the worshipful aspects of it. We often think of it as dead liturgy or as part of the penance, say the Our Father five times, do something good, mow the church lawn if you're a Roman Catholic or as an ecclesiastical or liturgical liturgical Protestants praying the Lord's Prayer at the end of the pastoral prayer and the pastor ends and he says, and we pray all these things in the name of Jesus who taught us to pray by saying, and then everybody kind of drones through the Lord's Prayer in unison.
What I'm urging, what I'm pleading with you for is to pray the Lord's Prayer, to turn it actually and Psalm 23 into an act of worship.
And that's what I want to deal with today.
In the past episode we saw that Psalm 23 and the Lord's Prayer both begin with the simplest and most profound of all declarations of faith, the ultimate reality of God. David said, the Lord is.
Jesus said, our Father who is. And then Jesus added, our Father who is in heaven. God is and he is our heavenly Father.
These two things come together and form the greatest of all theological truth and experiential Reality. God is only the fool. David says it in two different Psalms. Only the fool says there is no God.
There is God. He is God and He is heavenly.
Now, that being said so simply, so beautifully as it is in the Lord's Prayer, Jesus then goes directly into the next level, which is worship. And worship is what we want to zero in on today. If God is and he is, and if he is our Father and He is, then worshiping him as God and as our good God is the only logical and sensible and reasonable response.
I believe with all my heart that one of the reasons that people who call themselves atheists or claim to be atheists claim that is because they don't want to face up to the obligation to a obey God or B worship him in their self worship in their idolatry of self. They therefore deny that God even exists. Because if he exists, he it is essential that you deal with the reality that he is God and that he is worth being worshiped.
Leadership means being good at leading.
Statesmanship then seems rather obviously to define itself. That's statecraft. Like the Secretary of State, is he a good statesman? Churchmanship, craftsmanship, gamesmanship, and a host of other words that end with ship.
What about wor? Ship?
It means to be good at discerning what is worthy of our adoration and to express that discernment as praise.
Worth ship.
That's where it came from.
Jesus prayer establishes that right in the foyer, in the anteroom. As we start in the front door of the Lord's Prayer, it begins with worship.
When we begin by stating God's worthiness to be praised, he is worthy of our adoration. Even before we make a single petition in the Lord's Prayer, we make it clear that we understand the ground rules. And those rules are simple.
The Lord is God and we are not.
He alone is worthy of our heart's praise. So worthy that even his very name is holy.
We say it this way.
Hallowed. Holy.
To be hallowed. To be venerated, to be adored. Hallowed be Thy name.
All inner healing is tied to a proper human God relationship.
When that perspective gets out of whack, every mechanism of psycho emotional balance becomes distorted. And it becomes distorted quickly, often with terrible, terrible side effects.
Spiritual confusion. The twisting and perversion of worth ship causes emotional disease such as self pity, self absorption and every other hyphenated sin.
The story is told of a deeply depressed woman who came to see a psychiatrist seeking relief.
After five sessions, he wrote out this prescription, handed it to her, said, here's A prescription. Go and do this. And here's what it said. Go to Niagara Falls and check into a motel for five days. All day except for meals.
Go stand at the bottom of Niagara Falls and stare up at it and contemplate its awesome power.
Do this, the doctor said, and I will see you when you get back.
The woman stared incredulously at the note before exploding in anger. You quack. She shouted. You absolute charlatan. I pay you hundreds of dollars an hour for every session and. And for what? For this?
You tell me to go stand at the bottom of a waterfall and contemplate its power?
The doctor, unruffled, calmly explained the remarkable prescription. This way. Here's what he said.
I've seen you now for five sessions.
I mostly listened, and you talked without stopping for an hour. Every time.
All you talked about was you. Your dreams, your hurts, your failures, your guilt, your wounds, your grief.
All you need to get well is to see something bigger than yourself.
A restored perspective is often among the most important ingredients in the prescription. Each of us needs to get well, to get well emotionally.
I've studied emotional healing. I've tried to receive as much of it myself as I can. I wrote an entire book on emotional healing, courage to be healed, and I am absolutely persuaded. Nothing can dissuade me of this. The fundamental medicine for our inner selves, our souls, our minds, is the worthiness of God to come to the pure, unadulterated conclusion, his name is holy.
My name is just a handle, a way for other folks to speak to me or about me. But it's just a name, not the very essence of me.
I could even legally change my name. It doesn't really change who I am.
Yet when Moses asked God to know his name, the Lord simply answered, I am.
That is so powerful.
In other words, God is His name, and his name is holy.
He is holy, and he is worthy to be adored. When we assign that level of worth to God, he alone is worth my admiration.
Then I am actually on the threshold of the beginning of true worship. I've assigned worthship.
Another necessary ingredient in the prescription of our healing is hope.
A dear friend of mine who is an Orthodox rabbi in Israel pointed out to me that that passage which we read in Exodus in English, where God speaks to Moses and says, I am that I am. Moses says, tell me what your name is. And God says, I am that I am. Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I am hath sent me unto thee.
He points out. My friend points out that in Hebrew it is translated rather, I am that I will be. Not I am that I am. I am that I will be.
This name for God speaks of hope.
I am the future.
I am a new future waiting to make new all things in that future. In other words, when we reach tomorrow, I am.
Who says I will be is there ahead of us?
That is our hope.
We know he is to be worshiped.
How then are we to worship him? That is the question.
I think that many in the church, especially music leaders, for example, do not realize how awkward singing in public is for many others in the church, especially men.
One such man came to me and said that he dreaded singing in the church where I was pastoring. He said, my wife just seems to love it. He said, I'm glad of that. I want her to love it, but I just can't seem to love it. I can't sing. I can't stay on key. I can't even follow the tune. I feel uncomfortable. And to tell you the truth, I wish we could just skip the singing and go straight to preaching.
That then makes me feel bad. He said, I know I'm supposed to be blessed in worship. She is. My wife really is. He said, she puts her hands up and sings like a bird. And it's beautiful. I love to just stand there next to her and listen to her singing.
Nobody wants to hear me. Even when I sing softly, it just doesn't do it for me.
But my wife wants me to sing. She speaks to me all the time. Why don't you put your hands up? Why won't you worship?
I guess that means something's wrong with me. He said, at least it's wrong with my faith.
I said to him, maybe you have singing and worship. Confused, he stared at me in frank astonishment. He said, well, maybe I do. My wife says, they're the same thing. Aren't they the same?
I said, singing in church should be worship.
But not all worship is singing.
I suggested to him, I said, why don't you try worshiping in a different way while everyone else is singing, you worship in a new way. He said, well, how would that be? I don't know what in the world I would do. Everybody else is singing. How can I worship while they're singing and not sing?
I suggested this.
I said, when everyone else starts singing, close your eyes, lift your hands up and pray the Lord's Prayer. Repeat it over and over and over again. Then Psalm 23.
Then do them back to back, back and forth.
Add any other scriptures you want.
Start with those Two, raise your hand just like your wife does.
Just close your eyes and begin to very softly repeat the Lord's Prayer. While everyone else is singing, you just verbally softly raise your voice and begin to repeat the Lord's Prayer. Then intersperse it with the Psalm 23 and then any other verses. So you worship verbally by quoting scripture while she's singing.
Focus is also a part of worship. And with the whole church singing, you will really have to focus so you're not distracted by what they're singing. So you focus on who God is. You focus on praying the Lord's Prayer when they're singing. You concentrate with all your might on the Lord's prayer in Psalm 23 when they sing.
Try worshiping like that.
Try it for a few weeks, a month or two, and then come back and give me a report.
He agreed to try it.
I want to add he agreed reluctantly, but he agreed.
Several months later he came back to me and he was eager to share his experience.
He said, in the first place, I'm truly enjoying worship for the first time.
He said, my wife even commented on how she loves seeing me worship. She said, I see you standing beside me with your hands raised and I can see your lips moving in worship.
She thought I was singing, and for a while I just let her think that.
But then I decided to tell her the truth and see how she would react if it would freak her out or if she think I was cheating somehow, if she thought saying the Lord's Prayer instead of singing, if she thought I was faking it.
So I told her what I was doing.
I thought she would just try to talk me into singing.
Instead she. She said, I think that's wonderful.
She said, I want you to keep doing that. That blesses me while I sing.
You pray and we're worshiping in two of the great styles of worship.
After a few weeks, she said, I'm going to try it myself. Sometimes I can sing and I love to sing, but occasionally I'm gonna stop singing and I'm just going to say the Lord's Prayer. She said, you know what we could do? We could hold hands in worship and just say the Lord's Prayer together while everybody else is singing.
He said, what do you think of that?
I said with a little bit of sarcasm in my voice. I said, imagine that. That is wild.
Worshiping in church. Who would have ever dreamed of such a thing?
He didn't pick up on the sarcasm at all. The sarcasm went right past him. He said, I know, in frank amazement he said, isn't that something? Worshiping in church as if it had never occurred to him.
I'm not saying. Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying that you need to substitute singing for saying the Lord's Prayer. I'm just saying that singing in church should be worship. But not all worship is singing.
When we really worship God, when we focus on him and worship him as he is, His Name is holy, we begin to see all the navel gazing in the world would not liberate us from us.
Between morbid self pity on the one hand and narcissistic self exaltation on the other hand.
We find ourselves sick emotionally and sick spiritually, stranded on the sandbar of wounded souls, unable to nudge ourselves off. We need a mighty tugboat to come and push the ship of our souls off that sandbar where we're stranded.
What can it be?
Staring up at him day after day, seeing him in all his wondrous grace and grandeur, begins to lift us off the bar, puts us back out onto the sea of healing.
No purer statement of worship has ever been given us than the one Jesus gave us. Hallowed be Thy name.
When we begin to concentrate on the power and the grace and the goodness, the holiness, the sacredness, the hallowedness of the name of Jesus, the name of God, it changes our worship. It transforms it, it enlivens it and illuminates it.
I pray that every time you pray the Lord's Prayer, when it comes to that one phrase, our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Pause for a moment. Think about the holiness and the power of his name.
Think about his holiness, that God is holy. He is good. He's not one thing, one time and one thing another. He is not only I am, which is love, which is God, which is holy, but he is also I am that which he will be. He will never be anything other or less in the future.
He is the same God who spoke to Moses, the same God revealing himself through Jesus. He the same God who speaks to you now every time you pray, who listens to you and communes with you when you pray.
So how are we going to end this episode of the Leader's Notebook?
With the Lord's Prayer. How else? We've been ending every single one of these episodes with the Lord's Prayer. I don't know where you are right now as you're listening to this podcast. Maybe you're in your car. You cannot close your eyes while you drive. Not even for 21 seconds.
But maybe you're alone. Maybe you're listening to this podcast in your office, or maybe you're out on a power walk with the earbuds in wherever you are. If you can pause Just for 21 seconds, we're going to pray the Lord's Prayer together. Now, remember, I didn't say we're going to say the Lord's Prayer or repeat the Lord's Prayer. We're going to pray it.
Reach down inside yourself. Bring up that worship.
Turn this into a moment of worship. Focus.
Fashion your eyes. Fix your eyes on God as he is.
Quit thinking about yourself.
In future episodes, we can talk about how to petition God, how to ask God for things. But this morning, this time, right now, this episode, whatever time it is, where you're listening to this, this episode, we're going to pray the Lord's Prayer.
And what we're going to pray is that it will be worship, adoration of who God is and of his holiness.
So, as I lead you, I'm going to pray the Lord's Prayer. I want you to pray it with me if you can.
If you're listening to this in an office or in the reception room or your doctor's office, then you may not want to pray it out loud, but you can pray the prayer intellectually, mentally.
The focus is not whether you close your eyes or whether you stop walking or whether you say it out loud. The focus is the focus to focus on God and on his holiness and his worthiness, so that when we say your name is holy, it is worthy of being worshiped, and that is worthship. Worship.
Worship with me now, right where you are, as we pray, not say as we pray the Lord's Prayer.
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.
Do you see that? The prayer ends as it began, with worship. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thine is the kingdom. Thine is the power. Thine is the glory forever. It begins as it ends, with praise, with adoration.
I know it may seem strange, but let's pray it one more time.
Let this great prayer break in on you.
Let it become worship right now. Worship with me. Can you lift your hands? Are you in a place where you can close your eyes?
Don't just repeat the prayer. Enter into the prayer and let the prayer get into you.
Come now, let us worship together.
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.
Isn't that wonderful?
I love that prayer. And I'm telling you something. God loves it when we love it and when we pray it.
I want you to stay tuned. Now someone is going to tell you exactly how you can get as many copies of this bestselling book, 21 Seconds to Change your world. As many copies as you want.
Also, let me just remind you, you can also get the book in Spanish. Banti uno segundos paracambiar sumundo. 21 seconds to change your world. I want you to have it and I want you to get it for your prayer group or your home study group, home cell group or your family members.
This book is the heart's cry of one writer. Me to re engage with the greatest prayer ever written and the greatest poem ever composed, the Lord's prayer and the 23rd Psalm.
Thank you for joining me today for this episode of the Leader's Notebook. And I'm Mark Rutland.
[00:23:58] Speaker A: To order a copy of 21Seconds, please visit the story Dr. Mark Grutland. Com. Enter the promo code 21Seconds to receive $5 off of each book or you can call us toll free at 888-23-8772. Thank you for listening to the leader's Notebook.
