Turn with me once again, if you would, to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, or in Matthew chapter 6 this morning. We'll pick it up at verse 9, and today we're considering the prayer that our Lord taught his disciples. We call it the Lord's Prayer or the Model Prayer. And I'll be reading a slightly modified version of the ESV this morning.
I'll say more about that in just a minute. But Matthew chapter 6 verses 9 through 15. I invite you to stand with me in honor of God's Word as we read it together. Jesus said, Pray then like this. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.
Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the power of God. And the glory forever. Amen. For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
But if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. This is the Word of the Lord. Let's pray.
Let's follow it obediently. So help us now by giving us eyes to see, ears to hear, wills that are bent toward obeying your perfect and holy Word. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
You may be seated. I have a very vivid memory of what my prayer life was like in the third grade. My parents had taught us kids to say our prayers each night before we went to bed.
And so the evening ritual that my sister and I performed at bedtime was to kneel down next to our bed, say our prayers, tell each other goodnight, and go to sleep. Well, I didn't much like the praying part back then, but I knew it was something I should do, so I started trying to come up with ways to minimize the amounts I had to spend in praying while still being able to legitimately say that I had prayed. One night as I meditated on this deep theological quandary, the thought occurred to me that if you reduce prayer to its most basic components, you're either asking God for something or you're thanking Him for something. And the thought occurred to me that if I asked God for everything and thanked God for everything, there would be nothing left to pray for.
I had covered it all. So all of this led to the brilliant conclusion one night that all I had to do each night was pray this one sentence, Lord, thank you for everything and please help everything. Amen. Now my apathy issues aside, that of course is not what godly prayer looks like. My attempt to reduce prayer to its most basic components was pathetically wrong. What we find in the Lord's Prayer on the other hand are the most basic components of biblical prayer.
Nothing in principle can be added to what we find in these verses. Many theologians in fact describe the Lord's Prayer as a pattern prayer. In other words, it demonstrates the kind of praying or the categories of prayer that we're to be engaged in. This is the pattern that our prayer should take. So these verses aren't something Jesus intends us to simply recite in worship services, although it's appropriate and helpful to pray scripture, including the Lord's Prayer back to God. But the purpose of the Lord's Prayer is primarily to model for us the core principles that make up godly Christian prayer.
All the principles that ought to guide us in prayer are to be found here. Now before we identify those principles and try to apply them to our own prayer life, I want to remind you of the sort of larger context in which these verses are given. We're right in the middle of Christ's teaching his disciples about true righteousness and the point of emphasis over and over again here in these verses is that true righteousness doesn't flaunt itself. The hypocrite flaunts itself.
It wants to be noticed. God's saying that true righteousness doesn't flaunt itself. It's not preoccupied with approval of man, but with God's approval. And then Christ applies that principle to three areas of Christian living. He applies it to giving, to praying, and to fasting. So in these verses leading up to the Lord's Prayer, Jesus tells us that prayer is about God's glory. It's about God's wisdom.
It's about God's power. In short, Christ teaches us to minimize ourselves and maximize God's glory, as we saw last time. So that's the background information leading up to what we know as the Lord's Prayer. So when we hear Jesus say on the heels of that teaching, pray then like this, we should expect to find a prayer that models what it means to minimize ourselves and maximize God.
And that's exactly what we find. The Lord's Prayer is consumed with God's glory. In fact, this prayer contains six petitions, six requests that we are to pray, that we bring to God, and they're either asking God to glorify himself or they're asking God to enable his church to glorify him. So the Lord's Prayer, which is to serve as a model for us in all of our praying, is a prayer that is first and foremost preoccupied with, consumed with the glory of God. Now notice how this prayer begins.
It doesn't just jump in and start asking for things. It establishes a particular relationship between the one praying and God. And it does this with those familiar words, our Father who art in heaven. Over the years, there have been those, if you can believe it, who claim that this prayer has no place in the Christian life because it doesn't acknowledge that we come to God in Jesus' name.
I would beg to differ. The mediating work of Christ on our behalf is very much implied by the fact that we call God our Father. You see, the only reason we can call God our Father is because Christ is the mediator between God and man.
Our access to God depends on Christ's atoning work. And we acknowledge that every time we say our Father. This reality assures us that God is listening. He cares about us.
He thinks about us. He wants us to pray. God is near when we pray. He's our Father. But notice also that our prayer is not just addressed to any Father. It's our Father in heaven. And this title ought to remind us that this God who cares about us and is close to us when we pray is absolutely and infinitely transcendent.
This God is not our chum, our buddy. He is the sovereign king of heaven who does all that he pleases. So before any petitions are made, this relationship between the one praying and the one receiving prayer is established. When we pray, we address one who transcends us and yet condescends to call us his children. Well, let's look then at these six requests, these six petitions as we learn how to pray in such a way as to be consumed with the glory of God. In the first three petitions, we are saying, God, glorify yourself. This prayer begins by getting our minds and spirits centered on what matters most, God's glory in this world.
And God is glorified when his character is revered. So the first petition then is this, hallowed be your name. To hallow is to hold in reverence, to honor, to glorify and exalt. And God's name is so closely associated with who he is that to hallow his name is to hallow him, to hallow his person, to hallow God. What we're praying for then in this first petition is that God's glory would shine in the world in such a way that people would give him the respect and the honor, the praise, the worship that is due him. We're praying that when people see the mighty acts of God, tornadoes and floods and tidal waves and earthquakes and the sunrise and the sunset, that they would fall on their faces in awe at the power of God. That when people experience the gracious acts of God, the changing of seasons, the taste of good food, the sound of beautiful music, that they would fall on their faces at the creativity and goodness of God.
We're saying to God all that men would recognize the excellence of your character. Church, our world does not revere God's name. I'm not just talking about the way we flippantly throw around his name by using it as an expletive. Much more prevalent than that is the way in which people disrespect God's name by dismissing his word. You see, every thought, word or deed that runs contrary to God's word is a failure to hallow God's name. So we pray with Isaiah, oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down to make your name known to your adversaries, that the nations might tremble at your presence. God is glorified when his character is revered. But notice also that God is glorified when his rule is acknowledged.
And so our second petition is this, your kingdom come, your kingdom come. Now back when we were looking at the first beatitude, we defined the concept of the kingdom of God. That was several Sundays ago, so let's define it again.
Here's the definition that I've found to be most helpful. The kingdom is God's reign and realm in which the blessings of his reign are experienced. The church is the fellowship of those who have entered into the enjoyment of its blessings. So think of the kingdom as the realm of God's blessings. You see, there's a sense in which God's kingdom, his reign is universal, right?
I mean, even the most hardened rebel is under the sovereign rule of God. But when we ask God to let his kingdom come, we're referring specifically to the gospel with all of its benefits being advanced in our world. In other words, we're asking God that the peoples of this world would be on the right side of God's reign. God's kingdom comes as sin and rebellion are subdued.
John Calvin says to the extent that iniquity abounds, God's kingdom is not yet come. And so this prayer for God's kingdom to advance is really a missionary prayer. It's asking not only that those already in the kingdom, those already in the realm of God's blessing be made more aware of his power and his grace in their lives, but also that those outside of the kingdom would be brought into it.
Brothers and sisters, this is a prayer that we ought to pray right up until the second coming of Jesus Christ. Because in this world, there will always be those who are outside of that kingdom of blessing. So we desire for them to come into this realm of blessing.
Notice how this second petition flows from the first petition. The only way that people are going to properly hallow the name of God is if they are brought into the kingdom of God. To pray thy kingdom come is to ask God to remove all hindrances to his name being hallowed by men. So we've seen that God is glorified when his character is revered, and so we pray hallowed be your name. We've seen that God is glorified when his rule or reign is acknowledged, and so we pray your kingdom come. But notice, thirdly, that God is glorified when his will is obeyed, when his will is obeyed. And this third petition then is your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
And again, notice how this petition flows from the previous two. God's name will only be hallowed properly as his kingdom advances, and God's kingdom will advance only as his will is obeyed. Now I would suspect that most of us here this morning have no problem affirming the absolute sovereignty of God, and by that we mean that nothing can thwart or alter his will. And so when we pray that God's will would be done on earth, are we simply praying for something that will inevitably happen anyway, regardless of whether or not we pray? And if that's the case, why bother praying at all?
There's a distinction to be made that I think will help us better understand what it is we're asking in this third petition. When the Bible speaks of God's will, it distinguishes between God's will in the sense of what will happen through the course of time, and God's will in the sense of what he morally desires of his people. Now theologians have given all sorts of labels to kind of define these two categories, the decrees of God versus the precepts of God, or the perfect will of God versus the conditional will of God. I'm going to simply call this morning the secret will of God versus the revealed will of God. His secret will compared to his revealed will. Now the secret will of God is unknown until it happens. God has already predetermined what tomorrow holds, and nothing can stop that from happening. Several passages in the Bible describe the secret will of God. Psalm 115 3 says, Our God is in the heavens. He does all that he pleases. Daniel 4 35, God does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of earth.
None can stay his hand or say to him, What have you done? Romans 9 18, God has mercy on whomever he will, and he hardens whomever he will. So this is the secret will of God. No one can know it till it happens, and no man can change it. But on the other hand, the Bible frequently speaks of God's will as a moral standard to which he holds all men responsible.
And this will is fully disclosed or revealed to men. God makes his will in this sense known, and yet sometimes men disobey it. Examples of this in Scripture would be Matthew 7 21, the end of the Sermon on the Mount.
Jesus says, Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. It's the revealed will, the moral will of God. Romans 12 2, Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God.
What is good and acceptable and perfect, or 1 Thessalonians 4 3, for this is the will of God, your sanctification. So the question is, in what sense is the will of God being used here in Matthew 6 10? Well, if we're praying for God's secret will, his sovereign, unchangeable, unstoppable will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, I think we've got a problem, because Jesus would be implying that God is sovereign in heaven, but not on earth. The Bible teaches that God is sovereign everywhere and all the time, and so this third petition is referring to God's revealed will, and is asking God to bring about a world in which people obey the commands of God.
God is glorified as his will is obeyed, because as his will is obeyed, people are ushered into his kingdom, and as people experience this kingdom with all of its blessings and grace and peace and beauty, people give God the reverence and respect that his name deserves. So we see in these first three petitions what selfless, God-honoring prayer sounds like. It's prayer that says, God, glorify yourself.
But it doesn't stop there. Christ then teaches us not only to pray, God, glorify yourself, he also teaches us to pray, God, enable your church to glorify you. Enable us to glorify you. And the first request that he tells us to make in this regard is this, give us this day our daily bread. What if the elders of our church called on you to organize a corporate prayer meeting, and your assignment was to get the people of Grace Church praying for the glory of God to be central to all of our ministries and worship services and small groups, I would suspect that given that assignment most of us would get really spiritual and have the prayer group pray for the lost and for the preaching and for revival to fall and repentance to come about.
And don't get me wrong, those are all good things. We should keep these things central in our praying. But would we see value if given that assignment, would we see value in praying for Aunt Bessie's gallbladder surgery or for Joe Church member's job situation? When we dismiss temporal and physical needs in prayer, we're dividing something that God doesn't divide.
We're betraying the fact that we don't understand what it means to pray for God's glory because we act as if God's glory is something up there and real life is something down here. But Christ wants us to realize that we cannot glorify God rightly on this earth unless He physically sustains us. We're physical creatures and part of our ability to glorify Him involves our physical well-being. And so Joe's job loss has the potential to distract him from seeking and pursuing the kingdom of God.
Aunt Bessie's gallbladder affords God an opportunity to show off His power and grace in her life. There's nothing unspiritual about praying for physical and temporal needs. Now in praying for physical needs, most of us are probably prone to one of two imbalances. Either we neglect the physical for the sake of the spiritual or vice versa. We neglect the spiritual for the physical.
Both extremes miss the mark. Neglecting physical needs in prayer is wrong because Jesus tells us to ask for bread. And I think by bread here, He includes anything that is necessary to sustain life. In just a few verses, Jesus is going to tell His disciples to look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them.
Are you not of more value than they? God cares about our physical needs because our capacity to glorify Him is largely connected to our physicality. But the other extreme, the tendency to focus on our physical well-being and lose sight of the spiritual is just as damaging. Jesus guards against this extreme as well by qualifying the bread in this petition. Give us this day our daily bread. In other words, give us what we need for today.
There's moderation in that request, isn't there? It's not an excessive lusting after physical abundance. It's simply saying to God, Lord, please remove any temporal limitation that would diminish my ability to bring you glory here.
You don't need a seven-digit income for that to happen, but you do need income. You don't need to live in the most upscale house that money can buy in order to efficiently advance God's kingdom, but you do need a place to live. Give us this day our daily bread because we cannot glorify God rightly on this earth unless He physically sustains us. This brings us then to the fifth petition in which we see that we cannot glorify God rightly on this earth if we are under His condemnation and wrath.
The fifth petition says forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. Confession of sin then is to be a part of Christian prayer. Now this may seem obvious to us, but there are a lot of Christians who deny it. Some deny it by saying, you know, Christ has already forgiven me for every sin, past, present, and future. Why do I need to ask forgiveness? Their view of justification precludes the need to confess sin. Others deny the need for confession of sin because of a misunderstanding of sanctification. They think salvation has brought them to a place of sinless perfection, and so there's no need for this continual confession of sin. Well, the fact of the matter is, right here in the Lord's Prayer, Christ tells Christians, remember they call God their Father, Christ tells Christians to confess their sins in order to receive forgiveness. So whatever our theology of prayer is, it must include the necessity of confession. Now I trust that we all see the error of this idea of sinless perfection. Passages like Romans 7 or Galatians 6, 1 John 1, make it very clear that believers will struggle with sin. So I suppose the more difficult question then is, why do Christians need to ask forgiveness if Christ has already forgiven them? And the simple answer is this, we need to confess our sins every day because we sin every day. We need to confess it because we do it every day. The objective work of Christ needs to be subjectively acknowledged every day in order for us to maintain a right perspective of ourselves and a right perspective of God's grace.
Again, don't misunderstand. I'm not suggesting that the salvation of a genuine child of God is ever in jeopardy. Our justification before God has been settled once and for all if we're truly in Christ. But as recovering sinners, we need frequent and regular reminders of the grace of God.
That happens as we humbly agree with God every day about our sin. And perhaps the best illustration of this idea is found in the Gospel of John chapter 13. Jesus is there in the upper room with his disciples and he's preparing to wash their feet, but Peter resists and he says, Lord, don't wash my feet. And then Jesus corrects him by saying, if I don't wash your feet, you have no part in me, Peter.
So Peter in typical fashion overreacts and he says, well, then wash my whole body. But then listen to what Christ says, the one who has bathed does not need to wash except for his feet, but is completely clean. In other words, Christians don't need the comprehensive washing of justification over and over again.
That's a once and for all event. But we do need frequent reminders to stay holy in an unholy world. We need regular assurances that God does forgive us when we sin. And then is the purpose of the continual confession of sin for a believer.
At the end of the Lord's Prayer, we find two more verses devoted to clarifying this fifth petition. Evidently, Jesus wanted to make sure we understand the importance of forgiveness. And so he says in verse 14, if you forgive others, their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, their trespasses, your Father forgive your trespasses.
This is a very strong, strong statement. When we refuse to forgive others, we, in Calvin's words, knowingly prevent God from forgiving us. Now, the question arises perhaps in our minds, is this inconsistent with the fact that we are saved by grace alone?
Well, no, it isn't. There aren't any inconsistencies in Christ's teaching. Notice how Jesus doesn't say, forgive us our debt because we have forgiven our debtors. He says forgive us even as we've forgiven. The desire and ability to forgive others is not the grounds for God's showing grace. It's the evidence of God's grace in our lives.
It's like faith must accompany salvation. A heart that freely forgives others must accompany salvation. But these things aren't the grounds, they aren't the cause of God's grace.
They're evidence of God's grace to us. So this fifth petition recognizes that we cannot glorify God rightly on the earth if we are under his condemnation and wrath. We need to forgive even as we have been forgiven. Finally, we come to the sixth and last petition, one that acknowledges that we cannot glorify God rightly on this earth if we are held captive by sin. The prayer says, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. So the fifth petition looks back at sins we've already committed. The sixth and final request looks ahead at our need for grace in order to avoid future sin. And we need to recognize that God never tries to get us to sin, although he does test our faith. It's the devil who incites us to sin. And so in this sixth petition, we're praying against the devil's attempts to ensnare us, not the trials of faith which come from God and which every believer must endure. In light of our own proneness to wander away from him, we're begging God to intervene and guard us from voluntarily running towards temptations. Well, this brings us to that familiar closing statement of the Lord's Prayer, a statement which, again, focuses our minds on the glory of God by saying, God, you deserve all the glory.
You deserve all the glory. And the statement is this. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.
Amen. Now, for centuries, the Church has concluded the Lord's Prayer with these words. And I want to address something that I wish we had several hours to talk about this morning.
I want to address it briefly, though. It has to do with the reliability and accuracy of the Scriptures. We are a Bible-believing church. By that, we mean that we accept the divine inspiration of the Bible.
We affirm its inerrancy. What it doesn't mean is that man's handling of God's Word has been without error. For centuries, man has copied and translated and passed down the Scriptures to successive generations, sometimes with great accuracy and faithfulness, sometimes in a careless way. The result has been that when one compares all of the surviving copies of the New Testament, there are some slight inconsistencies. Now, liberal theologians who deny the inerrancy of Scripture, who deny the inspiration of Scripture, love this kind of thing, and they try to use this to cast doubt on the reliability of the Bible. The amazing thing is that even though these inconsistencies show up from time to time, they're never so glaring as to call into question any of the fundamental doctrines of the Christian faith. Well, it turns out that the last statement here of the Lord's Prayer, which we're so familiar with, happens to be one of these questionable texts. Many of the oldest surviving copies of the Greek New Testament don't have that final statement in them.
If you've got an ESV translation, it probably has a footnote explaining this. And while I don't have time to lay out the whole debate about whether this clause should be included or not, I do want to make the point that this final clause of the Lord's Prayer is a biblical statement. It is entirely consistent with the Bible's teaching regarding the kingdom and the power and the glory of God. In fact, a strikingly similar prayer is found in 1 Chronicles 29, 11. David had just received a huge offering to be used in building a temple for God, and he prayed, Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is Yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and You were exalted as head above all. I don't know if the prayer Christ taught his disciples included this last clause or if it was something that was added later, perhaps as part of the liturgy of the early church, but I do know this.
It's a true statement. The kingdom and the power and the glory truly do belong to God. And this statement is, in fact, consistent with the whole tone of the rest of this prayer, a prayer that is unswervingly fixated on the glory of God. You know, it's sometimes hard to take a familiar passage like the Lord's Prayer and read it with fresh eyes. What we've tried to do today is think about this model prayer in light of Christ's teaching on the subject of prayer. Jesus wants us to pray in such a way as to be consumed with the glory of God, and that's what this model prayer demonstrates. Christ shows us how to alleviate the showiness and anxiety that so often distract us in prayer. He shows us how to love the God of prayer more than the object for which we're praying.
He shows us how to have a God-absorbed prayer life. And honestly, it's sometimes very difficult to maintain this consistent God focus in our prayer life, isn't it? If we pray at all, we often find ourselves so obsessed with the needs of the moment and quickly immerse ourselves in praying for those needs without ever taking the time to get our perspective right. We forget to view all of life through the lens of God's preeminence and power, and instead we get stuck in the bog of the temporal, the immediate, the visible.
The church's short-sighted, self-absorbed prayer feeds our anxieties rather than alleviating them. I wonder how much of our worry would be silenced if we would simply learn to saturate our praying with an intentional, fervent focus on God, His position, His power, His glory. So when you pray, let your trajectory be the glory of God.
Aim for that. The opinions of man won't matter. The mixed-up pieces of life's puzzle will begin to fall into place, and God's name will truly be hallowed in our hearts. Let's pray. Lord Jesus, thank you for showing us how to pray. We're naturally bent towards thinking of ourselves first, and yet you show us how to get beyond ourselves and seek your kingdom and your righteousness first. Holy Spirit, give us grace now to go and obey your word. Help us to pray like we've been taught by our Lord and Master. God in heaven, I beg that you would cause your name to be hallowed as it ought to be in my heart. Let your name be hallowed in this church. May it be hallowed in our city, in our nation, and all around the world. Yours is the kingdom, yours is the power, and yours is the glory forever. Amen.
