THY KINGDOM COME

We’re often content to ask for less. We enter the throne room of God with a satchel full of requests – promotions desired, pay raises wanted, transmission repairs needed, and tuition due. We’d typically say our prayers as casually as we’d order a burger at the drive-through: “I’ll have one solved problem and two blessings, cut the hassles, please.”

But such complacency seems inappropriate in the chapel of worship. Here we are before the King of kings. The pay raise is still needed and the promotion is still desired, but is that where we start?

Jesus tells how to begin. “When you pray, pray like this. ‘Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. Thy kingdom come.’”  (Matthew 6:9-10)

When you say, “Thy kingdom come,” you are inviting the Messiah Himself to walk into your world. “Come, my King! Make Your throne in our land. Be present in my heart. Be present in my office. Come into my marriage. Be Lord of my family, my fears, and my doubts.” This is no feeble request; it’s a bold appeal for God to occupy every corner of your life.

Who are you to ask for such a thing? Who are you to ask God to take control of your world? You are His child for heaven’s sake! And so you ask boldly. “So let us come boldly to the very throne of God and stay there to receive His mercy and to find grace to help us in our times of need.” (Hebrews 4:16) 

-- Max Lucado in “Cast of Characters: Common People in the Hands of an Uncommon God”

#5841

THE ARGUMENT FOR PRAYER

“One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When He finished, one of His disciples said to Him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.’  Jesus said to them, ‘When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be Your name, Your kingdom come…’”  (Luke 11:1-2 NIV)

Jesus never argued the validity of prayer any more than He argued for the existence of God. God was not something to be proved by argument; God was simply there, the beginning and the end of experience. Just so, prayer was not something to be proved by argument; prayer was there, the native breath of the soul. Prayer was mankind’s instinctive tendency, wrought into the very constitution of our nature. Its well-springs lay deep down beneath the region of argument; they lay in hearts which God has made for fellowship with Himself, which therefore (as Augustine at a later day expressed it) would always be restless until they found rest in Him. Hence Jesus never argued the matter.

But certainly there was a sense in which His own prayer life was the one unanswerable argument. Did any disciple -- Thomas, for example -- have doubts about prayer, genuine, honest doubts? Nothing was more likely to vanquish his doubts than the sight of Jesus upon His knees, for knowing Jesus and realizing what an utterly sure and reliable insight Jesus had into all the deepest things of life, such a disciple would feel it better to trust Jesus’ certainty rather than his own uncertainty. He would think it wise to attach more importance to Christ’s conviction than to his own doubts. In all matters of faith this is an enormously valuable principle, and certainly it carries weight here. Doubts are dispelled and dissolved before the shining prayer life of the Christ. The praying Christ is the supreme argument for prayer. 

-- James S. Stewart in “The Life and Teaching of Jesus Christ”

#5645

A LIFE-ALTERING PRAYER

“Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  (Matthew 6:10 NIV)

"On earth as it is in heaven." Jesus' prayer was, "Make up there come down here."  Make things down here run the way they do up there.

Jesus told us to pray, "Bring heaven down here."  We begin with our body, our mind, our appetites.  Then it spreads to the office, our family, our neighborhood, our church, our country.

God doesn't reveal Himself to us just to make us happy or to deliver us from loneliness.  He also comes to us so that we can in turn be conduits of His presence to other people.  He invites us to join Him in making things down here the way they are up there.

This news is the best news the human race has ever heard.  It is not just good news for the world around us; it is good news for us.  Psychologist Viktor Frankl wrote, "What man actually needs is not a tensionless state, but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.  What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost, but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him."

This is maybe the most dangerous, exciting, life-altering prayer a human being can pray: "God make up there come down here."  Every time you pray it, your life becomes Beth-el, the place where God dwells. 

-- John Ortberg in “God Is Closer Than You Think” 

#5086

A PRAYER FOR DIFFICULT TIMES

Editor’s Note: The following prayer is an adaptation of the Lord’s Prayer for difficult times. My wife first introduced this to me over 25 years ago. On this National Day of Prayer during the Covid-19 Pandemic I thought it particularly appropriate for today’s SOUND BITES.

A PRAYER FOR DIFFICULT TIMES

Our Father, in spite of the present difficulty, You are still in heaven and the world is still ordered. May my response hallow Your Name. The coming of Your Kingdom is more important than my own difficulty -- so, may I not hinder its coming by my worry. Cause this event to be an opening up to Your will on earth, which I can see as clearly as if I were in heaven. I must recognize that You still provide the necessities of life; I have bread enough. May this event help me to recognize how important it is to secure Your forgiveness and to forgive those who have sinned against me. And may this not be an occasion for temptation to lose faith or respond as an unbeliever. Deliver me from any evil response or action in this difficulty. The overriding and all-important fact of life is that to You belongs the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, and even this event is caught up in that fact. Amen.

--  John Killinger

#4838

ABBA, FATHER

“Because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”  (Galatians 4:6 NRSV)

Calling God “Abba” is rooted in Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane: “And He said, ‘Abba, Father, all things are possible for You. Take this cup away from Me. Nevertheless, not what I want, but what You will.’”  (Mark 14:36 NKJV)

Abba was an ordinary family word of Jesus’ day. It conveyed intimacy, tenderness, dependence, and complete lack of fear and anxiety. Modern English equivalents would be Daddy or Papa.

No Jew would have dreamed of using this very intimate term to address God. However, Jesus always used this word in His prayers (Aramaic abba or its Greek equivalent pater), with the exception of His cry from the cross.

And Jesus instructed His disciples to use this word in their prayers as well. We are empowered to speak to God just as a small child speaks to his father.

-- David Jeremiah, quoted in “His Passion: Christ’s Journey to the Resurrection”


#4795

FREE TO FORGIVE

“…and forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us.”  (Matthew 6:12 NLT)

The words "you are forgiven" are the most hopeful words we can hear.  When we are laboring under a burden of guilt over things we have done and things we should have done but didn't, we can despair of ever being whole and free.  Someone has said of guilt, "It's a gift that keeps on giving."  Guilt has a way of gnawing away at our spirits until all that remains is discontentment, unhappiness, and fear of facing our sins.  As the psalmist wrote, "When I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all the day long" (Psalm 32:3).  Forgiveness heals us by making whole a life torn apart by guilt.

With forgiveness comes hope for a new and restored relationship with God, others, and self.  Once the crushing burden of guilt is lifted, we need not be "paralyzed"; we are free to live the full and abundant life God wants for us. We are free to forgive.

-- Adapted from Robert Martin Walker in “Prepare Him Room”


#4422

OUR DAILY PROVISIONS

“Give us this day our daily bread.”  (Matthew 6:11)

Truth is, I think, if God just gave us our daily bread, many of us would be angry. “That's all you're going to give me? You're just going to give me enough to sustain me for today? What about tomorrow or next year or 10, 20, 30 years from now? I want to know that I'm set up.” And yet Jesus says just pray for your daily provisions.

-- Francis Chan

#4388

THE WHOLE THRUST OF THE LORD’S PRAYER

To be effective, [the Lord’s] prayer must flow out of a truly committed heart: it must be the definition of our spirit, our attitude to God.

An unknown author put it this way: “I cannot say ‘our’ if I live only for myself. I cannot say ‘Father’ if I do not try to act like His child. I cannot say ‘who art in heaven’ if I am laying up no treasure there. I cannot say ‘hallowed be Thy name’ if I am not striving for holiness. I cannot say ‘Thy kingdom come’ if I am not doing all my power to hasten it. I cannot say ‘give us this day our daily bread’ if I am dishonest, or seeking something for nothing. I cannot say ‘forgive us our trespasses’ if I bear a grudge against another. I cannot say ‘lead us not into temptation’ if I deliberately place myself in its path. I cannot say ‘deliver us from evil’ if I do not put on the armor of God. I cannot say ‘Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory’ if I do not give the King the loyalty due to Him from a faithful subject. And I cannot say ‘forever’ if the horizon of my life is bounded completely by time.”

The whole thrust of the Lord’s prayer is that when we give God His rightful place, He gives us our rightful place. But not before.

-- Selwyn Hughes in “Every Day Light: Treasure for the Heart”

#4183

FORGIVENESS IS KEY

“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”  (Matthew 6:12 NIV)

Forgiveness can be the great cleansing action that allows one to begin again. Retribution or restitution is not enough. They serve as payback but they do not allow for the deep scouring that is necessary to truly start anew. The ancient Israelites knew the principle well for they instituted the practice of the Sabbath year. Each seventh year was set aside so that all could begin over again: fields lay fallow and all debts were forgiven. This crucial period of rest was seen as necessary for the harmonious functioning of society and the fertility of the land. The earth can be depleted, our societies become imbalanced and unjust. Similarly, as individuals and as families we require a time of absolution so that we might truly begin again and become fertile fields that yield a rich harvest.

The prayer most identified with Christianity, the one taught to us by Jesus Himself, incorporates the crucial insight that forgiveness is a key ingredient as we live into the promised Kingdom.

-- Wendy M. Wright in “The Time Between”

#4165

DELIVER US FROM EVIL

"Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

 

No man consciously chooses evil because it is evil.

He only mistakes it for the happiness he seeks. 

 

-- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

 

 

#3266

TEACH US TO PRAY

I recently attended the president's Easter prayer breakfast at the White House, along with a couple hundred religious leaders from across the country.  Before breakfast, a seventy-six-year-old African-American preacher who served alongside Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights movement said a prayer.  I could barely hear his words, but his faith was loud and clear.  He prayed with such a familiarity with the Father that it was convicting.  It's like his words were deep-fried in the faithfulness of God.  After he said amen, I turned to my pastor-friends… and said, "I feel like I've never prayed before."  I felt like he knew God in a way that I didn't, and it challenged me to get closer to God.  I wonder if that's how the disciples felt when they asked Jesus to teach them to pray.  His prayers were so qualitatively different that they felt like they had never prayed before.

-- Mark Batterson in The Circle Maker


#3262

THE FORGIVENESS BRIDGE

He that cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he himself must pass if he would ever reach heaven; for every one has need to be forgiven. 

-- George Herbert, quoted by N. T. Wright in The Lord and His Prayer


#3260