We are in the midst of discussing the nature and purpose of prayer. We have talked about prayer being God’s language, it is how He speaks to Himself and how He invites us to join the divine the conversation of the Father, the Son and the Spirit. God’s intimacy with us is revealed through His consistency to us. God doesn’t change, James says that there is not even a shadow of turning in Him, Paul wrote in II Timothy 2:13 “If we are faithless, He remains faithful, for He cannot deny Himself.” This was Paul’s final letter, he was not just preparing to die, he was aware that he was about to die and as he summed up what his life had been, what his ministry had been and what his legacy would be; it came down to this thing that he had discovered, “none of it has been about me, what I have been is only because of who I have discovered God to be, He is faithful”. Our calamity doesn’t change His character, our decisions don’t change His desire, our selfishness doesn’t change His steadfastness, our proclivity for inconsistency doesn’t change His commitment to intimacy. As we discovered from Genesis 3 last week, when Jesus came to walk with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden after they had sinned it was not to bring judgment it was because that was what He did with them, it was what they did together. Their sin created great turmoil that would only be overcome by the payment of a great price but it did not create a chasm that would keep Jesus from being faithful to who He was, what they needed or how they had come to know Him. After they sinned Jesus came to walk with them just as He had before they had sinned, God was revealing His intimacy through His consistency. Those walks were how they had built and were building a relationship, those walks where God’s revelation of Himself, they were His conforming them into the image of Jesus, revealing to them who He was at His core so that He could teach them who they were created to be at theirs. Those walks were not just about keeping them from sinning they were also preparing them to be redeemed after they had sinned because those walks were not about instruction they were for the building of a relationship. Those walks were above all else where Adam and Eve were learning God’s character. Our first and most original example of prayer is found in those walks in the garden because prayer is not how man comes to God it is first and foremost how God has chosen to come to man and invite him to come and walk with Him, to come and sit down and enter into the divine conversation. Prayer is our vehicle to fulfilling God’s heart and God’s desire, it is how we become what He intended when He first said, when the Father, the Son and the Spirit said in complete unity and perfect love “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness . . .” This morning we are going to discuss the corporate nature of prayer by looking closely at the language of the Lord’s Prayer and the practice of the first church. Prayer is how God communicates with Himself, as the Son and the Spirit intercede always to the Father on behalf of those that have been brought to the Father by the Son. If prayer is God’s mode of communication, then that means that prayer is the foundation of God’s relationship with Himself and with us because communication is the foundation of every relationship. Today what I want us to see is that while God’s relationship with us is always intimate it was never meant to be private. When God said “it is not good for man to be alone” He was not learning something about who we are He was teaching us something about how He had created us and even about who He is. Prayer is not only how we build a relationship with God it is how God builds community in and through us. Last week we learned that intimacy is built through consistency today I pray that we will learn that community is built upon intimacy.