Connecting with God: The Lord's Prayer

When you need an answer to a problem in your life, do you know where to look?

You won't find it in a library, or even on the Internet.

To find the reason for anything, you only need to look to the wisdom of the Lord's Prayer.

Although most of the people in your congregation can recite the words to the Lord's Prayer off the top of their head, they may not truly understand what those words really mean... let alone know how to uncover God's wisdom from it.

This special eight-part series from Pastor Rick Warren—Connecting With God: The Lord's Prayer—explores the sacred wisdom of the Lord's Prayer line by line to teach your congregation what they truly stand to gain from connecting to God the Father.

Each message goes into a different aspect of the Lord's Prayer to teach your members what they're really asking for when they say these hallowed lines.

Sermons included:

1. You've Got to Get Connected shares the importance of being spiritually connected in a world that's becoming more and more disconnected. Your members will discover four metaphors of what it means to be spiritually connected.
2. The Prayer of Connection looks at the four characteristics of God as our Father figure. He is not someone that we need to fear as a power or a force, he's someone we can connect with.
3. The Prayer of Surrender teaches us that when we're dealing with circumstances of life we can't control, we have to learn to give up our control and give it to God.
4. The Prayer of Dependence explores the four things that sustain us in life when we say, "give us today our daily bread". These are the things we need to survive, and we can only get them by depending on God.
5. The Prayer of Cleansing warns us about the destructive power of guilt in our lives. Your members will learn how to offer their sins to God to experience freedom from their guilt.
6. The Prayer of Release will teach your members how to forgive the sins of the people who've hurt them by looking at the story of the unforgiving servant in Matthew 18.
7. The Prayer of Deliverance tells us how to break free of temptation in our daily lives. Temptation is merely a choice, and we need to learn to make the harder choice that's better for us in the end.
8. The Prayer of Fulfillment shows us that the answer to everything is available in the Lord's Prayer. Your congregation will learn about the three sources of true fulfillment.

This resource includes:

• MP3 audio of each message for easy listening on an iPhone, Android, or any other MP3 player.
• Transcripts to read while listening to each audio and to highlight passages that stood out.
• Outlines (blank and with fill-ins) to understand the structure of each message and give to your members to take notes on.
• Talk It Over Discussion Questions to give to your small groups to discuss what they learned from your messages.