A model prayer – beautiful, balanced and brief

The sermon I've been sharing today at St Andrew’s and Holy Cross Basildon and St Peter’s Nevendon is adapted from Discovering Prayer by Andrew Knowles, published by Lion Publishing:

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.

Tempted to live independently of God

Here's the sermon I shared at St Mary’s Runwell this morning:

Jesus’ baptism was a mountain-top experience for him. Through his baptism Jesus was commissioned for God’s work; for ministry. Jesus said to John the Baptist, who questioned the need for Jesus’ baptism, “Do it. God’s work, putting things right all these centuries, is coming together right now in this baptism” (The Message).

Jesus was equipped by the Spirit to carry out this work and affirmed in the rightness of this work when the Father said, “This is my Son, chosen and marked by my love, delight of my life.” Jesus then knew he was in a partnership with God working to put the world to rights.

Immediately after the high of his baptism, he has the low of forty days in the wilderness being tempted (Luke 4: 1-13). This is a common pattern in scripture and one that mirrors the story of the Exodus. Moses and the Israelites have a mountain-top experience at Sinai where they are commissioned by God to be a nation of priests then they have a wilderness experience for forty years.

We too can expect to experience times of great closeness to God – spiritual highs – followed by times of temptation, struggle and wandering. Both are part of living authentically as Christians and the season of Lent is almost an attempt to institutionalise that pattern; to set a period each year in which each of us deliberately set out to use experiences of self-denial or sacrifice in order to refocus or faith and commitment.

Talking about Jesus, the writer to the Hebrews says in Chapter 14 verse 5, “we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are.” Jesus is in touch with our reality when it comes to temptation because, when Jesus was tempted, the temptations with which he was confronted were the same temptations to which we, in our culture, regularly succumb.

Jesus was tempted to provide for his own material needs himself by turning stones into bread. He was tempted to gain prestige and celebrity for himself by throwing himself from the highest point of the Temple and surviving; in other words, to boost his own ego. Finally, he was tempted to gain all the power and wealth of the world for himself; tempted to pursue his own ambitions.

In all these ways he was tempted to live independently of God, to refuse to view life as God’s gift to him and to refuse to live out God’s purpose for his life. Jesus knew that he had been commissioned at his baptism to put this world to rights but was then tempted to see his work as something for himself and not for God. He rejected these temptations; continuing to thank God for the gift of life itself and living his life to fulfil God’s purposes.

We are continually tempted in the same and similar ways. The temptations to provide for ourselves, boost our own egos, and pursue our own ambitions are likely to be or to have been familiar ones for us; particularly in our workplaces. And, as Tom Wright has pointed out, these temptations “are not simply trying to entice us into committing this or that sin ... they are trying to distract us, to turn us aside, from the path of servant hood to which our baptism has commissioned us. God has a costly but wonderfully glorious vocation for each one of us. The enemy will do everything possible to distract us and thwart God’s purpose.”

As those who follow Jesus, ultimately we are called to the same job of work. Whatever our specific work role or ministry, we are called to work together with God in the shared task of putting the world to rights. This is what Paul means when, in Romans 8.21, he says that the world is crying out for the children of God to be revealed.

To do this we need the same resource as Jesus; the equipping and leading of the Spirit. Led by the Spirit, our work can involve creativity, care and collaboration; biblical signs that work is undertaken in partnership with God. The five marks of mission also indicate what we are to do: tell the good news of the Kingdom; teach new believers; tend human needs by loving service; transform the unjust structures of society; and treasure the integrity of creation.

“As God’s children,” Tom Wright says, “we are entitled to use the same defence” as Jesus himself. “Store scripture in your heart,” he writes, “and know how to use it.” When we do, we are able to see through the temptation to think of all that we have as our own and, instead, to view our lives and all that we have as a gift from God.

The Bible tells us that we are stewards and stewards have the job of looking after something that belongs to someone else. As Christians, we are stewards of all that God has given to us – our life, our talents, our time, our money, our possessions, our family, our community, and the world in which we live. God has rescued each of us from sin and gifted us with time, talents, treasure, people and the world in which we live. After Easter, we will be reflecting more together across our three churches on these themes of stewardship.

For now, let us view life as a gift, let us give back to God generously and joyfully, let us remember our calling to partner God in putting this world to rights and, in and through these things, “say a firm ‘no’ to the voices that would lure us back into darkness.” May it be for each one of us. Amen.

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Mark Heard - Treasure Of The Broken Land.