When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he responded with a model prayer – beautiful, balanced and brief (Luke 11: 1-13). It has come to be known as the Lord’s Prayer. In his book ‘Discovering Prayer’, Andrew Knowles, a former Canon Theologian of Chelmsford Cathedral, simply and succinctly takes us through the different sections of this prayer for life.
We begin with God - Jesus reminds us to whom we’re talking. We’re coming to Almighty God who is also our Father. We aren’t phoning through a big order to a supermarket store which sells everything. Nor are we practising some weird and wonderful thought-process guaranteed to release psychic powers. We’re coming simply, humbly into the presence of our Creator, having received the invitation to do so from Jesus himself.
It’s good to remember that God is ‘our Father’. We belong to a great, trans-national, cross-cultural family, some of whom have already died and some of whom are yet to be born. Wherever we are around the world, and at whatever point in time we live, we own God as our Father and Jesus as our Lord. So when we pray this prayer, we’re sharing with our Christian brothers and sisters, across every division of colour and class, of politics and economics, of time and eternity.
We say ‘yes to God’ - Not only do we begin with God, we also ask that all he wants to do in our lives and in our world may come about. We ask that all he wants to do in our lives and in our world may come about. We ask that men and women everywhere may realise who he is and humble themselves before him.
We ask that God’s kingdom may come - The kingdom of God exists wherever God is King. It isn’t located on a map, nor do we enter it by holding a passport! The exciting truth is that God is already King of millions of lives. He is already acknowledged as Lord in a vast number of situations. We see the effects of his rule when hate is turned to love, when bitterness is dismantled by forgiveness, when disease is overwhelmed by health, and when war gives way to peace.
But we must remember that God is a father and not a dictator. For this reason his kingdom can only come when individual people invite him into their lives and submit themselves to the changes he wants to make.
This phrase, ‘May your kingdom come’, more than any other in the Lord’s Prayer, has a tendency to rebound on the user. If we really want God’s kingdom to come, then we must open ourselves and our circumstances to God, whatever the cost.
And if we’re looking for the kind of changes in the world that only God can make, we may find that he promptly enlists us in his service! We may find ourselves doing anything from bathing an invalid to mailing a cheque for famine relief. We may even find ourselves called to lob in our whole life as the only fitting contribution we can make to the service of God’s kingdom in a particular situation.
We bring our needs to God - In the second half of the Lord’s Prayer we ask God to meet our basic human needs. We ask him for enough to live on, for forgiveness, and for protection.
‘Give us day by day the food we need’ has a strong echo of the days when the Israelites were supplied with manna in the desert. Every day they had ‘enough’, and the Lord’s Prayer asks that we may have the same experience of god’s faithful provision each day as it comes. In an age when many people are run raged by their desire for money and possessions, this is a wonderful promise from Jesus. All the same, we should notice that it is everything we need that God will provide, and not everything we want.
‘Forgive us our sins, for we forgive everyone who does us wrong.’ This reminds us that our standard of living is more than a roof over our head, food on the table and a shirt on our back. Our well-being is intimately tied up with personal relationships – within ourselves, between ourselves, and between ourselves and God. Our recurring need here is for forgiveness. We hurt people by our self-centredness, our anger and our prejudice. We hurt God by going our own way in defiance of his loving law, wilfully defiling all that he intended life in this world to be.
So we ask for forgiveness. We feel the need and we say the words. But it’s no easy matter for God to forgive us. It cost him the life of his only Son to show the reality and consequence of sin. As he died on the cross, Jesus took on himself the results of all our sin. This is the only way by which we can be forgiven and restored to spiritual life. This is the Christian Good News: that life with God – something we can never earn and certainly don’t deserve – is his free gift to us through the death of Jesus. Our sins are not only forgiven but forgotten, and if we mention them to God again he’ll wonder what we’re talking about.
But as we ask God to forgive us, we must check if there is anyone who in turn needs our forgiveness. How do we feel about our worst enemy? Is there any member of the family, or anybody at work, against whom we’re nursing anger, bitterness or resentment? Only as we forgive others can we enter fully into the wonderful experience of God’s forgiveness of us. This is not just a nice idea. It’s a condition for our own forgiveness. Elsewhere Jesus warns that if we don’t forgive, then we in turn shall not be forgiven. This teaching alone, if we take it seriously, will completely change our lives.
‘And do not bring us to hard testing.’ Sometimes this is translated, ‘Lead us not into temptation,’ and we may well wonder when, why and how God could possibly want us to be tempted. And we would be right – he doesn’t. But while God will never lure us into evil, he will sometimes allow us to be tested. Just as we will put ourselves through all kinds of discomfort to get fit or lose weight, so God will allow pressure on us to strengthen our faith or increase our insight.
In the face of this testing, Jesus includes a very human plea that God won’t go over the top in his efforts to refine us. It is encouraging to hear Jesus say this, because he was tempted over a longer period and with greater intensity than we’ll ever know. Enticed by Satan, or daunted by God, we often given in at a very early stage. Our Christian integrity disintegrates and snatches at hypocrisy to cover our shame. But while we often capitulate, Jesus never did so.
The Lord’s Prayer recognises that temptation is an integral part of our daily life. We’ll never lose it, so we must learn to use it. If we can use the force of temptations to push us closer to the Lord, rather than sweeping us away from him, then we’ll be harnessing their power for our benefit.
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Marvin Gaye - The Lord's Prayer.
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