Zac Harrel: The Everyday and the Eternal

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Zac Harrel: The Everyday and the Eternal (Matthew 6:11)

Zac Harrel, pastor of First Baptist Church in Gustine, Texas, explains the central importance of prayer to the Christian life. He reminds us that the purpose of prayer is to ask God to advance his kingdom. In prayer, we ask God to accomplish what we cannot, from the “big picture issues” to the “minute details of our life.” Focusing on the Lord’s Prayer, Harrel points out how the first three requests in Jesus’ model prayer are about eternal things that remind us God is the source of all we have. To read the sermon, click here to access the manuscript.

When we pray we bring every request and every need to God. Sometimes, we think God doesn’t care about the little details of our life, but that is far from true. Yes, God wants us to be aware of the way He is working in the world, to pray for His Kingdom come, His will be done on earth as it is in heaven, He wants us to be about the business of seeing this Kingdom advance, but how this Kingdom advances is in many ways not the way we think. The most effective advancing of God’s Kingdom doesn’t happen from big stages, books, movies, or cultural artifacts. It happens in the everyday lives of the people of God as they love God and neighbor where God has placed them with the gifts of His grace He has given them.

This sermon was delivered during the morning worship service at First Baptist Church in Gustine on June 9, 2019 as part of a series on the Lord’s Prayer.