Category: The Lord’s Prayer

This, then, is how you should pray. Matthew 6:9

This last phrase of the Lord’s Prayer makes everything right. Earlier in the prayer we spent time acknowledging sin and our need for forgiveness. We admitted how hard it is to forgive others. We asked God to provide what we need each day for food and of Himself to give us life. We’ve requested safety from evil and strength against our ability to fall into temptations. This is necessary work if we are to have a vibrant and growing relationship with Jesus.

Now, at this point in the prayer, we turn our focus off of the things we need and onto God himself. In this phrase of the Lord’s Prayer we declare that the entire kingdom of heaven belongs to him. He rules with absolute and perfect power. No one and no thing gets any of the credit. Only God. Along with the kingdom and the power to run it, God also gets all the glory.

This glory isn’t the kind a celebrity receives for starring in a movie. Neither is this glory like the sun on a cloudy day–shining in one place for a little while until something heavy and dark moves in to cover it up. The kind of glory the Lord’s Prayer is talking about is the glory that shines brighter than sunlight reflected on water. It is blinding with its purity and holiness. God’s gracious love is what is shining through this dazzling glory. For describing its brightness, sunlight is the closest example we have. For describing its warmth, the bluest flame of a fire is the best representation.

The hottest part of the fire is the place that burns blue. Have you ever seen lightning in a summer sky? The bolts appear blue to our eyes. The purest, brightest light also carries the most intense heat.

So it is with God’s glory. In the Lord’s Prayer, we ask for God’s purity and his holiness to burn bright and intense in our world and in our hearts. For how long? Not just for an hour or for a day or a lifetime, but forever. Without beginning and without end. It just is–this perfect, holy, power stands at the center of everything reflecting shining glory on everything around it.

And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. Matthew 6:12

Of all the phrases in the Lord’s Prayer, this one may be the hardest one to pray and mean it. Sometimes those people we don’t like deserve to be ignored or to have their feelings hurt because they treated us just as badly or maybe even worse.

Oh, but wait a minute. If we make that choice to inflict the same pain on someone that they did to us, who is to say that God wouldn’t notice and then withhold his forgiveness from us? It’s hard to know what our sins are and in what ways or how many times each day we commit them. In the verses following the Lord’s Prayer Jesus says, “For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your father will not forgive your sins.”

These are strong words from Jesus. But they are gracious ones, too. He says them because he knows sin’s power to hold us in bondage. The NIV translation of the Lord’s Prayer uses the words debt and debtor in place of the word sins. Use of the word debt carries the meaning of owing money. In this case, we owe God for something we’ve done that is wrong and offensive to him. Use of the word debtor means that someone owes us for the same reason. The fact that wrong has been done puts us in debt to God or to another person, and it also puts someone in debt to us.

What would happen if God kept track of every sin we committed? We’d soon rack up a bill we couldn’t repay. He knows that. Since God is loving and slow to anger he forgives us. He lets us go free. No bondage. No record of wrongs. No debt. He expects us to do the same. When someone hurts us or treats us badly, he wants us to forgive and let them go free. Each time we must forgive someone else becomes an opportunity for us to imitate our heavenly father by showing love and resisting getting angry.

When I think of this phrase from the Lord’s Prayer, I think of children asking for food. We get hungry so we need to eat. Like children look to Mom or Dad to feed them, we look to our father in heaven to provide food for us. But this is only one of the ways God provides for us. In addition to our physical bodies, our souls need nourished too. Jesus knows that if our souls don’t get fed regularly they will die just like a body will eventually quit working and waste away if not fed with the proper food.

Our souls don’t need meat or vegetables to survive. They need a very different kind of food. Nutrients like grace, love, healing, salvation, and redemption is what gives life to our hungry souls. In John 6, Jesus calls himself the Bread of Life. In verses 33 and 35, he says, “The bread of God is the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. I am the Bread of Life. Whoever comes to me will never go hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

In this prayer, when we ask God to please give us this day our daily bread, we’re really asking God to sustain both our bodies and our spirits. When we pray and spend time with Jesus each day, we will have all we need to stay satisfied and to sustain our lives. There is one more way Jesus instructs us to pray by giving us this phrase about daily bread. This is through intercession, which means praying for others. Once we experience God’s care for us, we should ask God to also care for the hungry. These people may be physically hungry because they live in places without enough food. They might also be spiritually hungry because the gospel still needs to reach them. Our prayers should be for God to satisfy them with all the benefits of the kingdom of heaven.

As taught in the beatitudes from Matthew chapter 5, the kingdom brings comfort, mercy, righteousness, peace, and the promise of seeing God. Another phrase of the Lord’s Prayer asks for God’s kingdom to come to earth. This is what we are praying for when we ask God to care for the spiritually hungry. Sins are forgiven. Disease is healed. Evil is routed. God’s supreme and holy power reigns. In God’s kingdom, the cry for daily bread becomes a proclamation that a banquet feast is taking place around God’s throne and all are welcome.

Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Matthew 6:10

This prayer is part of a larger teaching Jesus gave called the Sermon on the Mount. In this sermon, Jesus described the kingdom of heaven. It doesn’t have borders, flags, or castles like earthly kingdoms. Instead, the kingdom of heaven is found in people’s hearts. God is the king. His home in heaven is the “castle” from where he rules.

Jesus also describes in the Sermon on the Mount who the citizens of God’s kingdom are. They aren’t the wealthy, the powerful, or the experts. Rather, these citizens are the poor in spirit, the defeated, the weak, the mistreated who long for mercy, and the people who work for peace.

These are the ones in need of someone who has all the power, all the riches, and all the answers. That person is Jesus, God’s Son who has come to earth. This is the first step God took in bringing his kingdom to earth. The second way is through his children. Because of our relationship with Jesus, we have the power through prayer to advance his kingdom. Any time we ask for God’s healing, his justice, or his presence in our lives or in the lives of others, we have played a role in bringing God’s kingdom to earth.

God’s kingdom and his will both work for the redemption of his people and his creation. Healing is part of God’s will. Justice is part of his will. Saving people and forgiving them of sin is in his will. When we ask for these things and cooperate with God to bring them about, we are doing God’s will. This phrase of the prayer contains strong words. God’s kingdom is perfect and it will last forever. We are invited to participate in the actions that help it come to earth. When we accept, we enjoy the satisfaction of living according to God’s plans and we see the changes that happen because God’s kingdom is coming.

This, then, is how you should pray: “our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” Matthew 6:9

To best understand the Lord’s Prayer, we first must put ourselves in the place of the disciples. They followed Jesus from town to town witnessing first hand his power to heal, to cast out demonic powers, and to calm the weather. Jesus’ relationship with his father in heaven enabled him to do this kind of work. The disciples trusted Jesus. They learned to love him and their desire to be like their Teacher may have prompted their plea, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Behind those words breathed the longing to have a close relationship with God like the one Jesus enjoyed.

Jesus offers them this prayer as a pattern to guide their communion with God. This pattern balances God’s will with our needs. The phrases, “hallowed be your name,” and “yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever” stabilize the entire prayer with an attitude of worship. We should revere God’s name. We should look for his kingdom to come, and to wish for his plans to be done instead of ours. This prayer calls us to fix our eyes on eternity.

This pattern for prayer also reminds us that we have a father in heaven who loves us very much. The first line of this prayer addresses God as Father, and not as King or Judge. God is both of those things, but by naming him as our father first, we know we can go to him with all of our troubles, fears, and hurts. He listens and then takes care of us and provides for us as his special children. This is the one Jesus is teaching us how to talk to and be in relationship with. What a wonderful comfort.