Woodland Hills Church

We live in a spiritual war zone. We must partner with God to bring about his will on earth as it is in heaven. How can we do this? Simply through prayer! We can impact the world by laboring with God to resist the forces of evil through spiritual warfare. We can join in this battle by praying continually with faith and persistence believing our prayers will impact the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.

Is prayer really that important? Does it really play a purpose in the grand scheme of things? If we believe the Scriptures to be true, it seems that prayer is “insanely” important – so much that we are to pray with “shameless audacity.” Some get bogged down with the idea of prayer because they see it as a religious ritual that is too complex and difficult to do in our regular lives. Yet the reality is that prayer is basically talking with God in an ordinary way about our ordinary lives.

Every day we confront choices that reflect and form our character. Will we live for ourselves, or for the Kingdom? God wants us to be trustworthy for Kingdom service and it’s true that he tests us to refine our character, but he doesn’t tempt anyone. If that’s true, why does Jesus teach us to pray, “lead us not into temptation?”

Is the good news of Jesus Christ really as good in your mind as it was in the mind of Jesus? God's dream for humanity is far more amazing than most of us realize. He wants to “marry” us, to invite us into his family and walk in radical love with us.

In the next part of the Lord's Prayer, Jesus teaches that prayer is about daily dependence on God to meet our needs, even though most people in our self-sufficient world do not think this way. We also discover the crucial role that forgiveness plays in our lives and the surprising freedom it can bring.

One of the first phrases in the Lord’s Prayer is “hallowed be your name,” and most of us have prayed it countless times. But what does it even mean? What are we asking God to do, and how does this prayer relate to how we live our lives as Kingdom people?

Christ's entrance into our world is both great and small. Jesus is the Son of God, a great and holy king. Yet he enters the world without much attention – in a small stable as a small child. Strangely, that “smallness” adds to his greatness. We ponder that “smallness” during our Christmas Eve service.

Christmas is a time of celebration and hope! The birth of Jesus celebrates the coming of the promised Messiah. God loved us so much that he gave the gift of His only Son, Jesus, to redeem and bring us back into relationship with Him. As we celebrate the coming of Jesus, we also expectantly await Christ’s return.

Prayer is one of the most important aspects of our lives as Kingdom people. So why is it something we struggle with so much? Jesus used the Lord’s Prayer to teach his disciples when they asked him how they should pray. Perhaps surprisingly, his example is very different than the way many of us pray today. If we started from scratch, what kind of prayer life could we have if we followed this example from Jesus?

It’s easy to both love and hate the Christmas season. On one hand, it’s a sacred time when we remember and celebrate Christ’s birth. But on the other, our culture has made it into a frenzy of consumerism and materialism. In the Lord’s Prayer we find all the basics of what it looks like to follow Jesus. What can we learn from this example that will help us keep our Kingdom priorities during the craziness of the Christmas season?