When You Pray Talk 3
Jamie Yohanis · When You Pray
23 November 2025
https://media.glenabbey.church/talks/when-you-pray-talk-3

[0:01] Morning folks.
[0:02] Morning.
[0:03] There you go, happy to see me.
[0:06] Clearly.
[0:06] Well, we'll make a start here.
[0:08] We've got 50 minutes of a teaching to squeeze into 30 minutes.
[0:12] So we've been reading this text the last number of weeks.
[0:15] And this is from Matthew's account.
[0:18] Jesus says, "Pray then like this, "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
[0:23] "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth "as it is in heaven."
[0:27] We've got our verse for today.
[0:29] Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also forgiven our debtors and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
[0:38] Now, if you read this text for the first time, you might come across, you might find it quite disjointed or maybe a little bit jarring.
[0:48] We start off with quite lofty, weighty issues.
[0:51] We're thinking about the kingdom of God, his eternal sovereign reign.
[0:55] We're thinking about his will, the creator God's priorities and that he wants to execute in the world.
[1:03] And we're thinking about his name, the holiness of his name, the complete and total otherness of who God is.
[1:10] We're thinking at quite a high level.
[1:12] And we go from thinking about the eternal, thinking about those weighty issues to a slight left turn, thinking about bread.
[1:20] From the eternal glory of God to tomorrow's breakfast.
[1:25] And it's a little bit jarring if you're not used to it or if you're not really understanding how those things connect.
[1:30] It's a perfectly legitimate connection.
[1:32] What is the connection between praying for daily bread and praying for the kingdom of God to come to bear in the here and now?
[1:42] Well, there are a couple of reasons.
[1:44] A couple of things that we could say.
[1:46] They're connected because of the familial ties that bind them.
[1:51] It's the father's priorities are for his will.
[1:56] He is very concerned about what he wants to do.
[1:59] The father's concerned about his kingdom and his reign.
[2:01] He's very concerned that his kingdom comes to bear.
[2:04] The father's concerned about his name, that people come to know who he is.
[2:08] He's really concerned about those things.
[2:10] He's also concerned about his children because it's the father who connects them all.
[2:15] And actually, it's more than just the father's concerned about those things.
[2:19] his children become concerned about those priorities as well.
[2:23] If you think of it in terms of a family business, children are being inducted into a family business.
[2:29] As God's children mature, or maybe as part of how they mature, is they become increasingly concerned for God's priorities.
[2:38] They're concerned for his will.
[2:39] They're concerned for his kingdom.
[2:41] They're concerned for his name.
[2:42] And just as they're concerned for him and his priorities, he's concerned for them and their priorities, fundamentally connected through those spiritual familial bonds.
[2:51] And we could test it, we could tease it a little bit further and say, not only is this just part of it, it's actually fundamentally essential to understand what the Lord's Prayer is.
[3:02] Presumably, there is benefit to the ubiquity of the Lord's Prayer, that it's kind of everywhere in our culture, and you can't really grow up here without coming into contact in some way.
[3:12] And I think there's got to be benefits to that, I'm not criticizing that.
[3:16] But one of the problems with the Lord's Prayer being so familiar is that it strongly implies that it's a prayer for everybody.
[3:24] It really isn't.
[3:25] The Lord's Prayer is not a prayer for everybody.
[3:28] The Lord's Prayer is specifically for those people who are children of God.
[3:32] It only makes sense whenever it's prayed by the children of God, because that's what children do.
[3:37] They pray to the Father.
[3:39] It doesn't really make sense.
[3:40] Lots of people pray, and there's lots of stuff to pray about, and I'm not criticizing people for praying if they don't consider themselves Christians.
[3:47] That's probably a good thing to do.
[3:49] But the issue is this.
[3:51] Those are essentially pagan prayers in their real nature.
[3:55] If we're not children of God and we're praying to something out there or whatever, we're not really praying in any kind of Christian sense.
[4:02] And in order for us to actually take the Lord's Prayer seriously, in order for it to mean something serious and profound and meaningful and what it is meant to be to us, you need to be a child of God.
[4:12] So if that is you, if you're someone who doesn't consider themselves a Christian and you're interested in praying, or you're maybe interested in exploring this prayer a little bit, I would strongly urge you to consider praying the prayer that is definitely listened to by God.
[4:26] One of the things that you come across in the Bible is that God does not promise to listen to or answer every prayer.
[4:35] Hurtful to say that in a church.
[4:38] God promises and obligates himself to his own children.
[4:41] And he promises that he will definitely listen to their prayers and he will definitely answer their prayers.
[4:46] He may listen to people who are not his children.
[4:48] He may or may not.
[4:49] And he definitely does from time to time.
[4:51] Except this fundamental prayer, which is if we're not a child of God and we come to God and we say, I want to be your child.
[4:59] I want those promises in the New Testament to apply to me.
[5:02] I think Chris read it a couple of weeks ago in John 1 where John says,
[5:07] all who received him and believed in his name he gave the right to become children of God or Paul says in Ephesians 1 they were predestined for adoption that God wants everyone to be in his family he wants everyone to become his child and if and when they do he obligates himself to them as their father and he makes these promises to them if you say that if that's what you want if you're not a if you're not a Christian and you want to be you can pray to God I want to be part of your family.
[5:34] I want the death and resurrection of Jesus to apply to me.
[5:37] I want to come into what you're doing.
[5:39] I want to receive you and for you to receive me.
[5:41] And if you do that, I think you'll find this prayer makes a whole lot more sense.
[5:46] It will certainly begin to bear fruit in your life in really tangible ways that it might not otherwise.
[5:52] One of the other interesting things you find is this idea of daily bread.
[5:57] So there are lots of examples of God's provision throughout the Bible.
[6:01] It's kind of a major thing that God provides for his children.
[6:04] He provides for his people.
[6:06] There is one instance that's almost definitely in the background whenever Jesus is speaking on this.
[6:12] And it's the account of manna in the wilderness.
[6:15] If you're familiar with the people of Israel and Exodus, they come out of Egypt.
[6:19] And God gives them manna from the Jew on the ground in the morning.
[6:22] And he provides for them every day across their 40-year trek through the desert.
[6:26] So that's almost definitely in the background here.
[6:29] and one of the things that I worked on, we're going to look at that text, I was going to ask your permission, we're definitely doing it.
[6:35] We're going to look at the Exodus account and draw three lessons.
[6:38] We could draw loads, but we're only going to look at three because there are lots of these parallels.
[6:44] Whenever God refers to Israel as his son, it doesn't happen that much in the Old Testament, but he does refer to Israel as his son.
[6:50] But when he does, it's always in the context of the Exodus.
[6:54] And so what the picture is that God saves his people from slavery, in Egypt.
[6:59] He declares them his son.
[7:01] He brings them through the desert, providing daily sustenance on the way to the promised land of Canaan, the land full of milk and honey.
[7:09] And the parallel is for believers in Jesus, that God saves us from slavery to sin and to death and to judgment.
[7:20] He declares us his children.
[7:22] He's bringing us to the promised land of the new heavens and the new earth and along the journey, along the way, he provides for our daily needs, our daily sustenance.
[7:32] So that's the kind of parallels that give us the justification to look at it this way.
[7:38] So we're going to look at the Exodus story.
[7:41] I hope that's okay.
[7:43] So here's an account from Exodus 16.
[7:45] We're going to read through it and we'll pick it apart a little bit.
[7:48] This is from Exodus 16.
[7:51] In the desert, the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron.
[7:54] They did that quite a bit.
[7:56] The Israelites said to them, if only we had died by the Lord's hand in Egypt.
[8:00] There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted.
[8:04] But you've brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.
[8:09] Then the Lord said to Moses, I will rain down bread from heaven for you.
[8:13] The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day.
[8:17] The Israelites did as they were told.
[8:19] Some gathered much, some little.
[8:21] and when they measured it by the omer, the one who gathered much did not have too much, and the one who gathered little did not have too little.
[8:29] Everyone gathered just as much as they needed.
[8:32] Each morning, everyone gathered as much as they needed, and when the sun grew hot, it melted away.
[8:40] Okay, so first lesson of three.
[8:42] We pray to God to give us, to our Father to give us because of our fragility and because of his resources.
[8:49] The Israelites were brought out into the desert.
[8:52] I don't know if you've ever been in a desert.
[8:54] I have.
[8:55] It's a pretty scary place.
[8:56] If you go out there and you've got no resources or no provisions or you haven't planned or prepared, it's a very dangerous place.
[9:04] It gets very dangerous very quickly.
[9:06] And not only did they suffer the threat of dehydration, sunstroke during the day, hypothermia at night, that's before you get to the point of did they have enough food, which they definitely didn't, for approximately 600,000 people who were brought into the desert.
[9:19] It's a perilous position, and they were complaining, and we might want to criticise them for complaining, but I can at least understand why they were complaining.
[9:27] It's scary to be scared, if that's not two tautologists.
[9:31] It's difficult to be put in that vulnerable position.
[9:35] But what they have in a microcosm form, this little, their lives are are under threat.
[9:40] Everybody experiences, all humans experience that kind of fragility, that kind of vulnerability.
[9:45] We live in a world that is kind of hostile to our ongoing existence.
[9:51] And we're kind of used to stability and security, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that.
[9:57] But we all know from experience, even in the last few years, all you need is one war or one blockade or one virus or one crash, even one that happens on the other side of the world, and all of a sudden things in our daily lives become quite scary quite quickly.
[10:14] And the confidence, the assumptions that we made about tomorrow's provision are seriously called into question.
[10:21] We do live in a fragile environment.
[10:23] And more than that, Christians more than most have every reason to expect difficulty.
[10:28] If you read through the New Testament and see the experience of the first Christians, they were persecuted, they had their possessions taken off them, they were excommunicated, from their people, they were beaten, sometimes even killed.
[10:42] We aren't anticipating, or we have no real grounds for anticipating everything to be joyously happy all the time and for tomorrow to be okay.
[10:50] There are grounds for expecting difficulty.
[10:52] And in that kind of hostile and fragile environment, it's very vulnerable making.
[10:57] We experience that quite profoundly.
[11:00] And what we can say is that whenever we come to terms with the nature of the reality in which we exist, we see that we are vulnerable.
[11:07] We are fragile.
[11:08] out.
[11:08] And we do a lot of politicking.
[11:10] We see that there's lots of the tumult in our society is about trying to guarantee provision for tomorrow in some shape or form.
[11:18] And again, there's a place for that, I'm not criticizing that.
[11:21] But there are no guarantees.
[11:24] And the only guarantee is the God who saves people.
[11:27] The only guarantee is the God who can provide.
[11:30] And what I think we take from this prayer and what I think we take from the Exodus story is God's the only guaranteed provision.
[11:37] And whenever we're, instead of only or merely or primarily thinking about how we can plan to provide and secure and all the rest of it, we need to come to God and say, you need to give us what we need.
[11:51] And we know that you can give us what you need, what we need.
[11:54] God is the only guarantee.
[12:01] And two, we pray to God because he has the resources to give us.
[12:06] If God can turn the lights out in Egypt, if God can turn the river Nile blood red, if God can bring the people through the Red Sea and kill all the Egyptian army in the process, then he can provide food.
[12:20] It's really not an issue.
[12:21] If it's a question of power and availability
[12:25] and the resources to provide for needs, there's no question.
[12:29] The creator God who made the world with the word of his mouth can provide whatever it is that we need.
[12:35] Ironically, I think in our culture, we are prone to think that we ought not to bother God with our problems, with our needs.
[12:45] So I've got problems, everybody here can say I've got problems and needs, and I've got things, but it's my responsibility to sort those out.
[12:52] It's my responsibility to make my own life.
[12:55] And there is again a place for that as well.
[12:57] But what we don't do is realize that God is not only,
[13:03] infinite in his ability to provide for our needs, he's generous and caring to provide for our needs on an individual basis.
[13:11] And I think especially, you know, your modern man needs to hear that God wants to provide for what it is that you need.
[13:19] And he's the only one he guarantees that he will provide for that need.
[13:22] And so instead of that kind of pseudo noble, I don't want to bring my problems to God, everybody's got their things out there, everybody needs, poor little me, I don't want to, I'll just sort this out.
[13:32] There's none of that.
[13:34] God says, I am going to treat you.
[13:36] I am the infinite creator of the universe.
[13:38] I'm going to treat you as my child.
[13:40] I will give you what it is you need.
[13:42] I know the hairs on your head, if you're privileged enough to have hair on your head.
[13:45] And I will attend to your needs as they come.
[13:49] And so we can come to him and we can bring him our needs with that kind of confidence.
[13:56] We also pray daily.
[13:59] Lord, why did you do that to me?
[14:01] Well, it's my life and I'm working perfectly all the time.
[14:03] Okay, we pray daily because it engenders dependence.
[14:07] So this is, I know that we're looking at an example of a text where people are not showing that kind of dependence, but what you see is that God is creating that kind of dependence.
[14:18] So they went out day by day and they gathered what they need.
[14:21] Now, 40 years is about 14,000 days, something like that.
[14:26] And over the course of going out in the morning to collect the bread, from the morning Jew and gathering up what they need.
[14:33] And then they did it the next day and they gathered up the bread.
[14:35] And then they did it the next day and they gathered up the bread.
[14:37] It builds a kind of rhythm.
[14:39] Whatever you need from God, it's gonna be there in the morning for you.
[14:43] Whatever you need from God, he's provided for you.
[14:45] You just need to come and receive it from him.
[14:47] And it builds up that kind of rhythm, but also reinforces the message.
[14:52] Egypt is not gonna save you.
[14:53] The storehouses of Egypt are not your provision.
[14:56] I'm your provision.
[14:58] come to me and I will give it to you what it is that you need.
[15:04] And it's really interesting to think about that day and daily parallel for us.
[15:09] That what God wants to create in us is a daily dependence where we're not worried about tomorrow.
[15:15] Not because there's not a lot to worry about tomorrow.
[15:17] It's actually quite a lot to worry about tomorrow.
[15:19] If you ever noticed in Jesus' teaching on anxiety, which is just a few verses after this, in Matthew, he says, you know, don't be anxious about tomorrow.
[15:28] And I'm like, yeah, that's great.
[15:29] There's none to worry about tomorrow.
[15:31] Jesus is going to look after it.
[15:32] No, he's like, don't be worried about tomorrow because tomorrow's got enough, today's got enough trouble.
[15:37] Tomorrow's trouble will look after themselves.
[15:39] And you're like, oh, that's just a, that's not really a teaching about anxiety as much as this teaching about the days that trouble comes.
[15:46] But what I find interesting about that teaching is that he's trying to focus us in on the day.
[15:51] There are no guarantees about tomorrow.
[15:54] God doesn't provide for our needs tomorrow.
[15:56] He provides for our needs today.
[15:57] And what he wants to do is for us to come to him and to receive from him on a daily basis what it is that we need.
[16:04] And for us to come and ask on a daily basis for what we need.
[16:07] And I think what that actually does is it builds confidence.
[16:11] Because if God provided for my needs yesterday, and he provided for my needs today, what grounds do I have to worry about tomorrow?
[16:20] There will be difficulty tomorrow.
[16:21] There will be difficulty next week.
[16:23] But God doesn't offer some kind of spiritual Tupperware.
[16:27] There is no provision that we can keep in store and bring it out of the freezer when we need it.
[16:32] He gives it today, every day, whenever we come to receive it from him.
[16:36] And we don't need to worry about tomorrow, not because there aren't troubles tomorrow, but because he provided for me yesterday.
[16:42] He provided for me today.
[16:43] He'll provide for me tomorrow.
[16:45] And I think that you would have that after 40 years in the desert, Not necessarily with a sense of entitlement, but with a sense of confident expectation.
[16:53] Of course he's going to provide for many needs because that's what he always does.
[16:56] He's that kind of faithful and generous God.
[17:02] Okay.
[17:05] And there we go.
[17:07] We're going to jump ahead to Numbers 11 for this.
[17:11] I find this is one of the most interesting texts in the Bible, do we?
[17:14] Now the rabble that was among them, this is the people of Israel, had a strong craving.
[17:19] And the people of Israel also wept again and said, oh, that we had meat to eat.
[17:24] We remember the fish we ate in Egypt that cost nothing.
[17:28] The cucumbers, love cucumber, the melons, the leeks, the onions, and the garlic.
[17:33] But now our strength has dried up and there is nothing at all but this manna to look at.
[17:38] I suppose you would get sick of manna every day after, I don't know how many thousands of days you would need to be in to get sick of it, but you would get sick of it at some point.
[17:47] From Mount Hor, they set out by the way to the Red Sea to go around the land of Edom.
[17:51] And the people became impatient on the way.
[17:54] And they spoke against God and against Moses.
[17:56] Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?
[17:59] For there is no food and no water, and we loathe this worthless food.
[18:05] So they're complaining about the fact that they don't have any food, when, of course, the food that they've got is the thing that's keeping them alive.
[18:12] But I think we can take from this fairly legitimate lesson that we pray that God would give us bread because it builds contentment.
[18:21] One of the priorities that God has for our lives is that we would become contented with the thing that it is that we have.
[18:27] Now, you'll notice that we pray, give us this day our daily bread, not give us this day our daily caviar.
[18:34] It's not about luxuries.
[18:37] It's not about super abundance.
[18:39] It's about provision of needs.
[18:41] And in an agrarian society like theirs, Bread is the most basic food staple.
[18:47] It's the thing that you need to exist.
[18:49] It's not about luxuries, which is worth considering.
[18:53] Because if God is this magnificent creator God with all this power, and he's this generous God, he can provide for all their needs, why is it that he provides only manna?
[19:05] Why does he not provide melons, cucumbers?
[19:07] Why does he not do those other things?
[19:09] Everybody loves garlic.
[19:10] Why would he not provide garlic if it's so easy for him to do?
[19:13] And I think it's partly because what he's trying to do is to teach us that the nature of contentment is not built around the accumulation of things or the satiation of every need that we have or every want that we have.
[19:26] It's about genuinely receiving what we need from him and recognizing that it is a gift.
[19:32] So we learn with Paul, like Paul says in Philippians 4, we learn to be content in every situation because if we've got what we need to live, we've got what we need.
[19:43] And if we've got what we need to live because our father's provided it for us, then we've been given a gift.
[19:48] What is there to complain about?
[19:50] And if you're anything like me, and sometimes you fantasize about long dead relatives, like an old aunt, I didn't know her, we weren't close, but she died and she left me all this money.
[20:01] What would I do with all the money that she left me?
[20:04] Anybody else?
[20:05] No?
[20:06] You don't wish death to your aunts?
[20:08] No, the...
[20:10] This aunt, he doesn't exist, but if she did, I wouldn't know her.
[20:15] What I would do, the first thing I would cover is my student loan.
[20:18] That's absolutely killing me.
[20:19] But I would think about all the things that I would do, and then I start to worry about how I would invest that money in order to make sure that I have more money.
[20:27] And what would I do?
[20:27] I would invest it for my kids, and I want to generate wealth that I can own stuff.
[20:33] I almost begin to stress out about all the weight of the responsibility of the money that I don't have.
[20:39] coming from this dead end.
[20:41] There is no end of that satisfaction.
[20:44] There's no point at which you get, oh, and now I am content.
[20:48] What it is, is being content with what God has given us, and him teaching us to say, if you've got what you need, greed isn't going to satisfy you.
[20:58] Contentment with what I've given you satisfy, and recognizing that I have given it to you so that you can live.
[21:06] More than that, it breeds distraction.
[21:10] So, you know, the famous words of Jesus when he's engaging with Satan and the temptation, man does not live by bread alone, but from every worth it proceeds from the mouth of God.
[21:21] Whenever we have super abundance, whenever we have our needs met plus and plus, plus, plus, plus, what we actually find is that we're distracted from the things of God.
[21:31] we're less interested.
[21:33] Like Jesus' parable of the soils, the thorns begin to grow up around our lives and choke out any spiritual interest.
[21:42] And that's the real threat.
[21:43] Man does not live by bread alone.
[21:45] He needs some bread to live, but he lives and he flourishes and he grows and he does the things that God wants him to do and he reaches the heights that God wants him to reach by engaging with God and having his spiritual needs met fundamentally by coming to Christ in faith and salvation, and then by learning to grow as his child.
[22:05] That's what it's really about.
[22:07] And if we're so distracted with our super abundance that the worries of this world choke that out, then that's not really God providing for our needs.
[22:17] And so what he wants to do is to help us to live, help us survive, help us to thrive and enjoy.
[22:22] It's not about major austerity or anything like that, but recognizing that once our needs are met, what more is it that we're looking for?
[22:29] What more is it that we need that God can't give us from engaging with us personally himself?
[22:35] So, maybe I shouldn't say this.
[22:38] Maybe you shouldn't pray, give us a stay or daily bread.
[22:43] If you pray it and what it results in is that God actually begins to strip back our lives so that they come to really be about daily provision.
[22:55] I think there is a little bit of a risk involved whenever we say, God, I want you to provide for my needs.
[23:02] Maybe God might put us in a position where we actually experience those felt needs more strongly so that we can experience his provision more readily.
[23:12] This is an interesting verse from Proverbs.
[23:16] Oh, wherever we go.
[23:21] Here we go.
[23:21] You'd think I'd made this.
[23:24] This is from Proverbs 30, where the writer says, give me neither poverty nor riches, feed me with the food that is needful for me, lest I be full and deny you and say, who is the Lord?
[23:36] Or lest I be poor and steel and profane, the name of my God.
[23:41] So there is a sense in which if we really pray these types of things, we will experience those needs in order for God to meet those needs more daily.
[23:49] So there you go.
[23:51] Maybe you don't want to pray that.
[23:53] I'm joking, obviously, we should pray.
[23:55] That's the whole point.
[23:56] So a couple of things then just to finish this off.
[24:02] There are three kinds of asking.
[24:05] This is very simple and I've just made it up.
[24:07] But there are three kinds of asking.
[24:09] We cannot ask God for what we need.
[24:11] We can ask wrongly and we can ask rightly.
[24:14] And there are a few questions in the notes for folks to consider at home groups.
[24:19] But I do wanna make just a couple of comments.
[24:21] We cannot ask God because, and I'm thinking primarily here about believers, We cannot ask God because we have hyper-independence.
[24:30] We don't really want to rely on God.
[24:32] We are what one author calls functional atheists.
[24:36] We believe, but we don't believe that much.
[24:38] We trust God, but not actually when it comes to the real things.
[24:42] It's a reflection and indication of what we genuinely believe in our hearts whenever we don't ask God for the things that we need.
[24:50] And so it's worth considering that.
[24:52] that she, it's not to criticize, it's to say, I wonder what we're missing out on because we don't bring what our needs are to God and ask for him, whether those needs are physical or material or whatever else.
[25:06] I wonder what we're missing out on when God says, I'm here, I'm waiting for you, I want to provide for you, that's what I do as your father, and we're saying, no, not for me.
[25:16] And as James says, maybe we don't receive because we don't ask for what we need.
[25:22] And then there's asking wrongly, which is of course, you know, the very selfish, I pray for things in order for me to be satisfied.
[25:30] What I really care about is something other than God.
[25:33] And what I'm praying for is that God would give me that thing so I don't actually need God anymore.
[25:38] Those are kind of wrong prayers, which are gonna end badly or not gonna be answered.
[25:44] But what's actually worse whenever we're overly prescriptive in our prayers, when we say to God, here's my need, here's my legitimate need, and you must answer it in this way, at this time, in this fashion, or I will not be satisfied.
[25:57] It's not so much a child asking a father as it is a customer engaging with the customer service, and then maybe the complaints department, and then maybe it turns into a viral Karen video, where we're saying, God, you need to provide for my needs in this way at this time, and if not, I'm going to use that as a predicate for not trusting you.
[26:17] Sure, what's the point in trusting God?
[26:18] He never provides for us anyway.
[26:20] When actually what we really mean is, I specified to God what he would do and how he would do it, and he didn't do that, and I'm now using that as a predicate for my rebellion and my refusal to follow him.
[26:30] That's not going to end up well either.
[26:32] If we ask wrongly, we'll often be disappointed.
[26:37] Asking rightly is simply this.
[26:40] It's less to do with what we say and more to do with our intent and our attitude behind it.
[26:45] We say, God, this is what I need.
[26:48] These are the problems that I'm having.
[26:49] This is what I'm facing.
[26:51] And we say, I don't know how you're going to answer it, but I trust that you will.
[26:56] In your time and in your way and whatever way you want to do it in a way that I don't even understand or maybe can't even predict.
[27:03] But I'm going to remain open to looking and seeing how you provide for me in my life.
[27:07] But here's my need.
[27:08] You must help me.
[27:09] because remember I'm your child and you promised to help your children.
[27:13] Give me today what I need.
[27:16] And I think when we do that we'll be surprised and we'll see, we'll build up a portfolio of God's, of evidence in our lives that God provides for us and he provides for us personally and he provides what we need when we need it.
[27:29] And that he is in the round and in the end across the totality of our lives, truly faithful.
[27:38] What I'd like to do is to finish just by, I'm gonna read a Psalm as a prayer.
[27:45] But before I do that, I'd like to take 30 seconds or so.
[27:48] And I would encourage you to think through the ways in which God has provided for you across the whole of your life.
[27:56] And especially, of course, everything from the point at which he saved you, which he made and brought to bear in your life need to become his child.
[28:08] Whenever you became a Christian, you recognized that Jesus' death needed to apply to you from that point to the meal that you had yesterday that is keeping you alive today and everything in between.
[28:20] And think about his provision, the fact that he's a provider, the fact that he cares and he cares personally.
[28:26] And then we're going to finish by reading a psalm.
[28:45] Thank you.
[29:25] The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
[29:28] He makes me lie down in green pastures.
[29:31] He leads me beside still waters.
[29:33] He restores my soul.
[29:35] He leads me in path of righteousness for his name's sake.
[29:40] Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.
[29:46] Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
[29:48] You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
[29:52] You anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows.
[29:56] Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
[30:07] Thank you.
[30:07] Thank you.