|
| |
Praying
the Lord's Prayer (Part 1)
Matthew
6:9-11
Lord,
Teach Us to Pray
February
9, 2003
In the next few weeks, we are going to focus our attention on the Lord’s Prayer—the prayer that our Lord Jesus Christ taught his disciples to pray. It is a prayer that models for us how and for what we should pray. The petitions in the Lord’s Prayer cover all the bases—everything we could ever pray for. Whether you pray a short prayer or a long one, you will never pray more than what is covered in this model prayer.
Most of us have heard this prayer, and many of us can even recite it—usually in the King James rendering of it. It is found in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 6, verses 9 through 13.
 “Our Father which art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come.
Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.”
Jesus did not intend this to be a prayer mantra to be repeated over and over again—he in fact had just taught against such a practice. In Matthew 6:7, Jesus says,
“When you pray, don’t babble on and on as people of other religions do. They think their prayers are answered only by repeating their words again and again.”
Jesus then says (as the King James translators put it), “After this manner therefore pray ye.”
In other words, “pray like this”
(NLT), or “This is how you should pray” (NIV). This prayer is not the exact wording that one must pray (though you can very well pray this prayer verbatim if you mean each word you are
saying--as we have discussed before, we should often pray "with our eyes
open", looking at our Bibles--praying God's words back to him as they are
given to us in the Bible). The Lord's Pryaer is a model of all the things for which we should pray—the priorities that should be reflected in what we pray on a regular basis.
It is the model prayer. Henry Ward Beecher once said, “I used to think the Lord's Prayer was a short prayer; but, as I live longer, and see more of life, I believe there is no such thing as getting through it. If a man, in praying that prayer, were to be stopped by every word until he had thoroughly prayed it, it would take him a lifetime.”
We will look in detail at the different aspects of this prayer in the coming weeks, but this morning we are going to just do it. We are going to pray through this prayer one step at a time, and use it as a guide for our personal prayer time.
1. “Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.
Jesus teaches us to pray “Our Father.” Amazing.
Jesus, are you telling me that since I am your devoted follower, that I have the privilege of praying to the Most Holy God of the Universe, the One and Only Ruler, the King of kings, the One who has created everything and can, by his own will, destroy it all as well, the One that when I think of coming into his presence I rightly shake in my boots—by the name “Father?” Amazing!
Yes!
As Paul writes in Romans, “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear, but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father”
(Romans 8:15). “Abba” is not simply a pop group from the 70’s. It is the Aramaic word that little children call their Daddy. It is the loving, caring, trusting word of a child to his or her father.
We pray that our Father would “hallow” his name:” “Hallowed be thy name.” What we are praying is that God’s name would be honored. This is the secret of all prayer: the central focus of a Christian is that God would be glorified—that God’s name would be hallowed. And the prayer is not that we would hallow God’s name, but that he would hallow his one name! It is our prayer to God for God to be God—that his splendor and honor and glory and magnitude would remain and continue to be intensified in our lives and in the lives of others.
So, we pray:
“Father, Daddy, I come to you as your child, lovingly trusting you and completely relinquishing myself to the fact that everything that I am and all that I have is because you are my Father. Thank you!
I want to live my life as a testimony to how incredible you are. I want anyone and everyone who talks with me and watches me and is served by me to be awed not by me and my good works but by you and your glory. I pray that you will do whatever it takes, no matter how uncomfortable it might be in my little corner of the world, to hallow your name. Break me of my selfishness and bring me into the realization that I am most satisfied when you are most glorified.”
2. Thy kingdom come.
God’s Kingdom is his rule over everything. Because of humankind’s sin, the world has been in rebellion against God being the King. But because of Jesus Christ, God’s Kingdom is breaking through one soul at a time, as we individually submit ourselves to his rule. But this Kingdom is not yet completely here—that won’t happen until Jesus Christ’s return.
So this prayer has two aspects to it:
1. We are praying for God’s saving, royal rule over individual souls to extend NOW as people bow in submission to him and begin to taste what heaven will be like right here and now, and,
2. We are praying for God’s perfected rule over all creation to come when Christ returns and what God declares in Romans 14:11 comes
true:
For the Scriptures say, “‘As surely as I live,’ says the Lord, ‘every knee will bow to me and every tongue will confess allegiance to God.’”
So, we pray:
“Maranatha! Come Lord! Come Lord Jesus NOW into the hearts of those who are still in rebellion against you, and come Lord Jesus SOON to bring to fruition what you started so long ago!”
3. Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.
As we talked about last week when we studied
“Praying for God’s Will,” praying for God’s will is praying for God to go about his intentions of making me the kind of person he wants me to be. It is not my giving him my laundry list of what I think he should do and then tacking on at the end of this prayer, “…if it be your will,” if we really don’t mean it—as if to end with this “loophole” so that if God doesn’t give us what we want we won’t be embarrassed.
Prayer is asking for God’s will to be done in my life, in my family, in my business, in my relationships, and in the world as it is done in heaven. In heaven, the angels are standing by to immediately do God’s bidding. In the universe, all the planets and galaxies move according to God’s design. It seems that only here on this teeny blue marble of a planet we call earth that there is this pocket of rebellion.
We are praying that that will no longer be so.
So, we pray:
“Lord, we relinquish our will to yours. Do what you will in order to bring about your purposes in the lives of my family and friends, on our society, and above all, in my life. Start with me. I submit my heart to your will. And you have made your will abundantly clear in Scripture—you want me to be holy, you want me to experience in real life what it means to be pure and pleasing to you and then to have tested and approved that your will is indeed good, pleasing, and perfect!”
4. Give us this day our daily bread.
Praying for our needs is as basic as, well, white bread. And that is why Jesus tells us to pray for our “daily bread”—in other words, pray for your daily physical needs, as indicated by your daily need for food.
We are to pray for our needs, not our greeds. We are praying for our daily bread—not for a storehouse of bread, but that God would provide what we need when we need it.
And we are to realize that all good things, even our ability to work and earn a living to buy our daily food,
come from God’s hand—we are praying to God that he would “give us” our needs. This is a prayer that is easily forgotten in a culture like ours where our relative wealth compared to these first century disciple makes us feel put upon when we can’t have the best bread from the bakery and not just the generic store brand. This is a prayer we forget to pray when we are so programmed that self-sufficiency is a virtue.
So, we pray, “Father, I do not want to presume that I can always earn a paycheck and provide food on the table. I admit to you my utter and complete reliance upon your hand to provide my needs. You told us that you would take care of us, more than the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. Help me to trust in that from you, and help me to overcome my propensity to be self-sufficient and the pride that comes from that. And make me a good steward of all that you have given me.
5. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
When we pray this prayer by recitation without a PowerPoint slide to aid us, half the congregation will say,
“Forgive us our trespasses…” others, “Forgive us our sins…”
Why? Because, the word “debt” means our sins and trespasses against God. In Luke’s account of the prayer, he uses the Greek word for “sins.”
At least we aren’t like the little Sunday School child who prayed, “Our Father, who art in heaven, how'd you know my name?” Or the other one that remarked, quite seriously, that God must have been named after his Uncle Howard (“Howard be your name”).
The Christian life is a life of forgiveness. We are called to continually come before our God and confess our sins so that he can purify us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). We are to offer our bodies as living sacrifices (Romans 12:1), and therefore need to continually be forgiven all our sins—both the sins of doing what we know we ought NOT do, and the sins of knowing what we ought to do and refusing to do it (sins of commission and sins of omission). God wants us to be in a holy, intimate relationship with him, doing his will as vessels for his glory. He wants to take a bunch of people who were once part of the problem and make them a part of the solution.
And how does he do that? By making us instruments of forgiveness; we become forgivers ourselves. Realizing how awful our sin has been and how incredibly gracious God has been toward us in forgiving us, we realize that the sins that have been committed against us are really nothing in comparison. As John Stott writes, “If we have an exaggerated view of the offenses of others, it proves that we have minimized our own.”
So we have been drawn into a continuing cycle of forgiveness—God forgives, we forgive, God forgives, we forgive, and on and on it goes. This is where our hearts belong!
So we pray, “Father, I come to you a sinner in need of forgiveness, AGAIN! How often I have come to your throne upon my knees asking for forgiveness. In my finiteness, I feel that I am not making much progress. I want to be holy, as you are holy, but where the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak. But I know, from your vantage point, you are pleased to see me here again, asking for your forgiveness. And that you know my heart, and that you see the progress I am making in my pursuit of godliness. Forgive me my sins, once again. And, Lord, I need you to heal my heart of its callousness toward those who have sinned against me. Make me an agent of reconciliation in this world—one who willingly prays for his enemies. Amen.
6. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Even though we will face temptations and trials of many kinds, we pray that the temptations of the devil would be bound in our lives, so that we would not fall into sin because of these.
In 1 Corinthians, we are told “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.” (1 Cor. 10:13).
So when we pray this, we pray that God would fulfill this promise: That God will not lead us down a path of temptation that will ultimately and fatally end in our sinning, but that he will “provide a way out,” thus delivering us from the evil one.
So we pray, “Lord, I am constantly under attack by temptations. I need to develop my spiritual ability to sense which way to take to find my “way out.” I ask you to deliver me out from the path that the evil one sends me on so often, and lead me onto the path of righteousness. For your glory and for my good! Amen.
7. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
While this doxology at the end of the prayer in the King James Version was most likely not in the original written by Matthew (thus it is omitted in most modern translations), it is theologically profound nonetheless. It is best to know that this is not the Bible here, but that it is still the heart-felt conclusion of any Christian’s heart, sort of an ending commentary on the prayer itself: For we are praying that we have submitted to God’s kingdom, we are in dire need of God’s power, and we live for God’s glory, forever.
So we pray,
“This is YOUR kingdom, not mine… What you say, goes. What you bid, I do.
This is YOUR power, not mine… I cannot depend on my own power to do anything of spiritual significance. I yield your power to make me, to sustain me, and to make me what you intend me to be.
This is YOUR glory, not mine… For it is when you are glorified that the world makes sense, that I find my heart’s yearnings finally satisfied. Since your glory is what you are passionate about, I am passionate for it too.
Forever!
Amen.
back
to top
back
to "Lord, Teach Us to Pray" series |
