Many have undertaken a formulaic summary of the Lord’s prayer by which we can structure our prayer journey. Nonetheless I thought I’d have a crack.
Matt 6:9-13 Pray like this: Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. 10 May your Kingdom come soon. May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven. 11 Give us today the food we need,[a] 12 and forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us. 13 And don’t let us yield to temptation,[b] but rescue us from the evil one.[c] NLT
With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply. Like this: Our Father in heaven, reveal who you are. Set the world right; Do what’s best- as above, so below. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil. You’re in charge! You can do anything you want! You’re ablaze in beauty! Yes. Yes. Yes. (MsgB)
Hold on tight, this morning we’re having a 9 point sermon, we’ll be racing thru and if you miss any, I’ll try and post it up on the web page later in the week. I want to simply draw out concepts that we can see when we dig in and analyse the Lord’s prayer so that we can we’ve then into our own prayer practice. As we do, it can help us to structure and discipline our own prayer life.
Here are the 9 ‘R’s I think summarise the Lord’s prayer:
Relationship
Recognition
Reverence
Relinquishment
Reliance
Repentance
Response
Renovation
Rescue
And…….Repeat.
1 Relationship.
The Lord’s prayer begins with
“our Father.”
Two words denoting 3 enormously deep things, all relational.
1: Father is the primary understanding of our relationship to God. It is the language of adoption.
2: the ‘Our’ (as opposed to “my”) denotes not just the vertical relationship to God but the horizontal relationship that we have with other believers.
And 3. This prayer is coming out of Jesus’ mouth as he instructs his disciples. That is, the moment he says ‘Our father’, there is a claim of deep friendship, even brotherhood with Jesus himself. in short he is identifying with the disciples, not simply praying for them, but along-side them. That amazes me every time I think on it.
So, a parent child relationship with God, sibling relationship with other believers and, let’s say an older brother to younger sibling relationship with Jesus is denoted.
2 Recognition
“in heaven”.
That is, as opposed to earth. Heaven is above earth. Not literally of course. No, it is above earth in the sense that it is a completely different dimension, a different level of reality and consciousness which even the damage of sin has not and can not eradicate the human longing for and God’s rule is utterly unchallenged.
God is our father, but as intimate as this relationship is and should be, it is important to recognise that every word that proceeds from God, comes from a different perspective. He sees and knows stuff that we don’t. In prayer we begin to realise that without it we are condemned to inevitable self-deception. When we pray about a decision, we’re acknowledging this very fact. The thoughts of God however are un-tainted, pure and free from all constraints. This is why prayer basically always precedes wisdom in decision making.
3. Reverence.
It’s the natural outcome of the combination of the first two. The first two being relationship and recognition. We tend to think that reverence is connected mainly to fear. But fear alone just ends up producing hatred and cynicism. Psalm 130:4 specifies that the fear of the Lord relates to recognition that with him there is….judgement? No, forgiveness. It catches us out.
“may your name be kept holy.”
The more classic translations are of course ‘hallowed be your name.’ Such a deep word ‘hallowed’. It’s not just respect or even revered but also loved and rejoiced in. Taking God’s name in vain is turning what should be blessed into a curse.
How will people know the difference the gospel makes without a culture of reverence suffusing everything we do? Another sign of a growing prayer life is a growing reverence for God.
4. Relinquishment.
“May your Kingdom come (NLT adds ‘soon’). May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”
So in heaven, God’s will is done absolutely without question and with absolute immediacy. The side-effect of that is, heaven is also absolutely free from worry. Nothing brings peace like absolute relinquishment to the will of God.
Here’s a few sentences that struck me once from one of my favourite spiritual writers of all time Henri Nouwen:
“We are so afraid of open spaces that we occupy them with our minds even before we get there. Our worries and concerns are expressions of our inability to leave unresolved questions unresolved and open-ended situations open ended. They make us grab any possible solution that seems to fit the occasion. (I would add, ‘and often call it the will of God.’) They reveal our intolerance of the mystery of life and make us look for labels to fill the emptiness with self-created illusions.”
Wow.
How do you escape this constant worry? How do you escape these self-created illusions? Relinquishment to his will, his kingdom. The life of victory is the life of relinquishment of will and absolute obedience. Disillusionment is a product of our focus.
5. Reliance.
“Give us today the food we need.”
This is not just an instruction to recognise the providence of God and ask that he provide out of it. No, it is also an instruction to not take advantage of God’s provision Ie: it’s not saying give us enough for the rest of our lives.
Proverbs 30:8-9: Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread 9 Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the Lord?’ Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonour the name of my God.
In a comfortable financially abundant western atmosphere, we only often learn reliance on God during some level of risk or discomfort.
Embrace it. If it drives you back to Jesus in absolute need, your worst nightmares can become a source of new life.
6 Repentance
“and forgive us our sins,”
You can’t ask for forgiveness of sins if you don’t recognise yourself as a sinner. And that’s what we are. We’re not merely trespassers. (in terms of how we understand it today) I’m not a fan of that translation. Sin is not simply crossing over some boundary into a forbidden space. It’s so much deeper than that
So let’s start talking about Sin, at least talking about how Sin is not just bad things that we do. Far more often, it is some of the best things that we do from impure or even mixed motives. Because until we do this, we’ll never make it to the next one:
7 Response
“as we have forgiven those who sin against us,”
Yeah it’s in a past tense I know, but the textual order is following a recognition of God’s forgiveness of us. It pretty much implies that you’ll never pray this and mean it until you know what it really means to be saved by…GRACE. This is THE intersection in the prayer journey. (see 6:14-15) This is why Jesus returns to this later.
When Jesus adds the additional teaching in verses 14-15 he’s saying: for the sake of your soul, NEVER move past this point in your prayers, until you have done it and the ‘lights have changed from red to green’. Moreover, every time your thoughts retreat to that place, Thank the lord for his grace and patience with you, and decide again to forgive.
I was talking with a great couple once who shared how when they were in the middle of a bit of a tiff in their marriage, one of them just got some space alone and prayed through the Lord’s prayer in his head……. until he got to this point and he froze. Realising he could not continue until he forgave his wife, it paved the way for ‘patching up the relationship. Sometimes, the way you know that you’re really praying is so simple:
It stops you in your tracks.
8 Renovation.
“And don’t let us yield to temptation”
This is the reason I used this translation. I think that it is more accurate to the thrust of Scripture than “lead us not into temptation.” (Though that is closer to the literal translation.) The Bible is aware that temptation is quite frankly an unpleasant fact of life. It is also used (not caused) by God in the testing of his people.
There are also far simpler ways in Greek to say something like: “Lord remove temptation.”
It seems therefore to be coming from an awareness of the vulnerability of the human heart to temptation and that God is in ultimate control of our withstanding it. That is the key to why I’ve summarised this as renovation.
Simply put, it is during temptation that God does his greatest renovation work on our hearts when we do not give in but stand faithful. I like the Msg translation of it: “Keep us safe from ourselves.”
Here’s an example; you’ve been wronged. You want revenge. Even the passive-aggressive type that doesn’t look like revenge (or so we think) but instead, you resist that temptation and turn the other cheek. You may scream, rant and rave in prayer (Psalms anyone?) but in refusing to fall to the temptation of moving in the flesh, you sow according to the Spirit. Hey presto renovation.
God renovates our heart. No one really likes it when he smashes out a wall to make a new entry. But that’s part of the process. Real spiritual maturity comes from trusting God when it doesn’t seem like our only option.
9. Rescue.
“but rescue us from the evil one.”
This one is obvious. We need rescuing. That’s why our fairy tales are full of knights in armour. The great fantasies of human literature revolve around the concept of rescue.
Only the Bible has the unflinching audacity to reveal in detail the true horror of what we actually need rescuing from. Therefore, Scriptures are as unpopular as they are popular because they do not muck around in their unmasking of reality. Truth is always more extreme than fiction. It’s no bad thing to always remember, we are always in need of constant rescue.
So there’s 9 concepts you need to cover in your prayer journey Relationship, Recognition, Reverence, Relinquishment, Reliance, Repentance, Response, Renovation, and Rescue. As I sat there on Friday, impressed at myself at such a list Alycia came into the study and said “there’s still one more.” I said “rubbish, no there’s not.” She said yes there is, and I give it to you now…….Repeat.
Repeat. It takes time. Over and over and over again;……..repeat for the rest of your life.
Bless ya:)