A Prayer for All Time(06Mar2011)
Series: Loving God by Following the Way of Jesus
The Way of Jesus M5 (11 03 06)
Speaker: Ken Shigematsu
Title: A Prayer for All Time
Text: Matthew 6:1-15
BIG IDEA: The Lord’s Prayer can become a pattern for our prayer.
When I was about to meet my future parents-in-law for the first time in Japan, I was nervous, I didn’t know what to say. I asked my parents who were born and raised in Japan, what I should I say when I’m with them. They said, “Say nothing. Remember silence is golden in Japan.”
I remember someone I know who grew up in a time when going on actual dates as a teenager was more common—a time when young people still watched the Oscars—and she said I was petrified before going on a date because I was so shy and didn’t know what I might say to keep conversation going. My mom gave me a few simple questions to ask my date and that made it a lot easier…
Sometimes we don’t know what to say in a conversation with people. Sometimes we don’t know what to say in a conversation with God. Today Jesus helps us know what to say in prayer.
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve talking about prayer. Last Sunday we looked at the story of Mary and Martha and considered how we can discern how to give Jesus a gift he really wants and can actually use (if you were snowed in, you are welcome download the message from our website). Today we’re going to look at a prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray. His disciples according to the Luke version of the prayer ask Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Prayer certainly can be spontaneous. You don’t need a university degree in prayer to pray, but we can also learn to pray. The Lord’s Prayer is more accurately “The Disciples’ Prayer.” It is the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray and it is the prayer that teaches us how to pray.
This prayer can either be prayed word for word, but also as pattern for our prayers.
Here is Jesus’ teaching. If you have your Bibles please turn to Matthew 6:5:
5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
9 “This, then, is how you should pray:
“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10 your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us today our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,[a]
but deliver us from the evil one.[b]’
14 For if you forgive others when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
In verses 5-6 Jesus says, “When you pray don’t pray to impress other people, but pray in private to your Father who is unseen.” Jesus was not condemning public prayer. He himself prayed publicly. But in a culture where people admired pious, religious people, in a way that it is not true today, people would sometimes pray to impress other people. Jesus is saying here that the motive for prayer is not to impress other people but to know God more deeply.
Jesus said in verse 7, “When you pray, don’t keep on babbling like the pagans.” In Jesus’ day, for example, Greeks would pile up as many titles of the deity as possible, hoping to secure his or her attention. Pagan prayers typically reminded the deity of the favours or the sacrifices they had offered in an attempt to get a response from the god on some contractual ground. Jesus says, “Don’t do this.”
Prayers do not have to be long prayers. For some people, several brief times of prayer throughout the day work better than a half-hour block of prayer. If you find yourself constantly thinking about when your prayer will end, it may be time to pause and move on to something else. Part of the gift of this prayer is that it can be prayed briefly. It can be stretched out over an hour or several hours. It can be prayed literally over an entire lifetime. But the Lord’s Prayer can also be prayed briefly. I find that after a swim when I sit in the sauna for 3 or 4 minutes I often recite the Lord’s Prayer in silence.
Martin Luther says, “How many people have prayed the Lord’s Prayer a thousand times? If they were to pray the Lord’s Prayer a thousand more times or ten thousand more times, they wouldn’t really have prayed or tasted it at all. They don’t get comfort or joy from its proper use.”
Martin Luther is saying the Lord’s Prayer is incredibly rich but people run by it like a mine with jewels in it--gold, diamonds, rubies--but no one seems to know how to mine its treasure.
Today, I hope we can gain four windows into the Lord’s Prayer: Abba, Adore, Accept, Ask 2x.
First, Abba:
The prayer begins with the words “Our Father in heaven…” Commentator Dale Bruner says, “The greatest gift of the Lord’s Prayer is the simple phrase, ‘Our Father’.” I have heard some people say that you should not encourage people to say “Our Father,” because some people have such a terrible image of their earthly father that they have no idea what a good father is. But even if your earthly father was terrible, you are able to intuit what an ideal father would be like. In fact, the only way you could know that your earthly father was bad was if you had some ideal in your mind that you were comparing your earthly father to. Whether our fathers were great or terrible or something in between, we can imagine an ideal father.
The New Testament was originally written in Greek, but Jesus spoke in Aramaic, a dialect of Hebrew. The consensus among modern scholars is that the Lord’s Prayer begins with the Aramaic word “Abba,” and that Jesus taught his disciples to pray in Aramaic, rather than in classical Hebrew. As you may know, the word “Abba” is a very personal word—less like father actually and more like daddy or poppa. It’s the kind of word that is so personal that you can only use it to refer to your own daddy, not if you are speaking about someone else’s father. It is a personal intimate word that you can use when referring to your own daddy, but could not presume using when referring to someone else’s dad. You then have to use a more formal term.
God is a king, as we saw a few weeks ago, a king with a kingdom. In modern language we might say he is a prime minister (if we think of our Canadian context or a president). In order to have access to a king or a prime minister or a president, you have to have accomplished something great or have something amazing to offer. The Vancouver Canucks are on a roll this year. If they win the Stanley Cup, the coach might get a phone call from Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The team might get an invitation to 24 Sussex Drive. Or I am guessing that is more likely to happen if the Calgary Flames were to win the Stanley Cup. But you have to have done something or be someone great to come before a prime minister, a president, or a king. The exception would be if you are a son or a daughter of that person. The image that comes to mind is the picture of John Kennedy, Jr. behind the desk in the Oval Office of President Kennedy.
Before John, Jr. achieved anything he had access to the President; he had access to the Oval Office; he had access to the President because he was the son. The same would have been true for Caroline, of course. If we are sons and daughters of God, we have been adopted into his family because we have received the forgiveness Christ offers us and the invitation to become part of his family. We have access.
We pray “Our Father in heaven…” When Jesus prays “our Father in heaven” he refers to God’s position as King, not just president of the United States or Prime Minister of Canada, but Lord of over all the universe, but he is also our loving Father, our Abba, and so we have access. So when you pray “Hallowed be your name…” or when you pray “Our Father…” remember that he is your Father. You have access to him, not because of something you have done, but because of something that Christ has done on your behalf. He died on the cross so that you could be a son or a daughter. You have access as a child.
Abba
Adoration
We pray “Hallowed be your name…” The word “hallowed” literally means “to make holy” or “to set apart.” There is a sense in which God’s name is already holy. It is already set apart—it is already exalted. So praying that God’s name would be made holy, as Ken Bailey says, is a bit like praying for wood to become solid or fire to become hot, when wood is already solid and fire is already hot…and God’s name is already holy.
Even though God is holy, many people don’t recognize God’s holiness, so we pray God will manifest his holiness before people. This is why in Scripture in places like Ezekiel 20, God says, “I will manifest my holiness among you.” So when we pray “Hallowed be your name…” we are praying that God would manifest his holiness to people and that his name which refers to his person would be recognized as holy.
In the film version of Babette’s Feast a renowned opera singer from Paris named Papin visits a remote Danish coastal town. He enters a church service and hears Philippa singing in the pew as a member of the congregation in her extraordinary voice. He wants to teach her how to sing and bring her to Paris to sing for the opera, but Philippa feels like she is unable to move from her small Danish town to Paris. The renowned French singer Papin tells Philippa, “In paradise you will be the great artist God intended you to be. How you will enchant the angels!”
Have you ever known someone who had great talents or great virtue, but for whatever reason their life circumstances would likely never be recognized for all they are? We have a yearning for them to be discovered and recognized. When we pray “Hallowed be your name…” we are praying that God’s name would be discovered as holy…as great. It is a prayer that people would recognize how amazing God is.
I’ve been in conversation with someone who wants to cultivate an experience of more spiritual reality in her life—but says, “I am not so sure about Jesus.” There’s a yearning in my heart that she will one come to discover how amazing God is through the face of Jesus. Jesus is the visible image of God.
We started with Abba, moved to Adoration, and now we move to Acceptance.
Then we pray “Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven…”
The phrase “Thy will be done…” is reminiscent of Jesus’ own prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane who in his humanity did not want to go to the cross, but prayed “not my will but thy will be done.” It is a prayer that let’s go of our will on a particular matter and asks God to take over. In this part of the prayer we don’t always recognize what God’s will is for us and what is best for us.
If you are a parent, or become a parent, you will understand there are times when a young child wants something that is not necessarily in their interest. Our two-year-old son hates to be physically restrained in any way. There is a park not far from our house with a wooden bridge for kids. When I walk over it holding his hand, he wants to break free and run across it all by himself. One time when he was in one of those moods where he really wanted to walk it by himself, I let him walk over the bridge by himself as I stood under the bridge. He ran right off the bridge, falling head first—7 feet high. Thankfully, I caught him before his head hit the ground. (A woman walking by said, “Nice catch.”)
If you give a young child whatever they want, they can end up in the hospital and maybe dead. The gap between a parent and a young child is far closer than the gap between us and God. Someone has said that God gives us what we would give ourselves if we knew all the facts, if we had the perspective of all eternity in mind. Like Jesus, we pray, “Thy will be done.”
The reason we can pray “thy will be done” is because Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane—when in his humanity he didn’t want to face a gruesome death on a cross and bearing the sin of the world in himself… but he did—for us, so we could be forgiven and freed from our sin—so we could call God Abba. When we recognize God is Abba and in Christ died for us—when we recognize how deeply we are loved, we can say thy will be done—we can accept.
It’s a prayer not just for us to accept God’s will in our lives, but prayer for the world too. It’s a prayer for his will—for his justice, peace, and love accepted among the people of Libya and Egypt and in Christchurch, New Zealand… for people to accept God’s will so that there is economic justice, racial equality, women’s rights, for the well being of refugees.
Abba, Adoration, Acceptance, and Ask.
Ask
Nearly half the prayer focuses on God, but then the prayer shifts as Jesus ask Abba to provide for your needs.
And so we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread…” The first part of the prayer is focused on the character of God and the will of God. The second half of the prayer focuses on our needs: “Give us this day our daily bread…” We cannot serve God without food. It’s hard to get food without work. So this prayer is for food, work, clothing, shelter. It is not a prayer for cake…it is a prayer for life’s basic necessities. “Give us this day our daily bread…” There is not consensus on what the Greek word translated “daily” means. It can be translated “give us today our food for the day,” or “give us today our food for tomorrow.” Perhaps it is best translated “give us today the food we need.”
In the ancient world this was a very relevant prayer as people by the standards of today were impoverished, so they were praying either give us our food for today or give us today our food for tomorrow or give the food we need.
Remember, it says “our daily bread.” This may be surprising to us because we live in such an individualistic culture, but nowhere in the Lord’s Prayer does Jesus say “pray I…” It is okay to pray I, but he teaches us to pray “our.” So we pray “our daily bread…” It is not just a prayer where my need for bread would be provided, but our need for bread would be provided—a prayer for our neighbours who are in financial need and for people around the world.
Ken Bailey who spent 40 years living and teaching the New Testament in places like Egypt, Lebanon and Jerusalem and whose cultural insights I’ve drawn from for this sermon tells this story about Mother Teresa.
Mother Teresa writes: “I will never forget the night an old gentleman came to our house and said there was a family with eight children and they had not eaten, and could we do something for them. So I took some rice and went there. The mother took the rice from my hands, then she divided it into two and went out. I could see the faces of the children shining with hunger. When she came back I asked where she had gone. She gave me a very simple answer: ‘They are hungry also.’ And ‘they’ were the family next door, and she knew they were hungry. I was not surprised that she gave, but I was surprised that she knew….I didn’t have the courage to ask her how long her family hadn’t eaten, but I am sure it must have been a long time, and yet she knew—in her terrible bodily suffering—she knew that people next door were hungry, also.”
This woman, Ken Bailey says, with the eight children may not have known the Lord’s Prayer, but there was only ‘our rice’ and not ‘my rice’ even when her children were hungry. The prayer for our bread includes the neighbours. There is our Father and our bread. The Father is not our personal saviour. He is the Saviour of the world, and it’s not our bread we pray for, but bread for the world.
This prayer also seems to assume that we are truly dependent on God for our material needs. For those of us who are wealthy, and we may not think of ourselves as wealthy, but if our income is $25,000 a year, we are wealthier than approximately 90% of the world’s population. If our income is $50,000 a year, we are wealthier than 99% of the world. Remember almost half the people of the world live on than $2 a day or less. If you don’t feel wealthy, it is because you are comparing yourself with people who are in the 99th percentile of wealth.
What it means to be able to pray this prayer from our heart if we are wealthy, frankly, is to be giving our money to God and to the poor at such a rate that we are actually dependent on God.
It doesn’t mean that we never save, but it means that we actually trust God with our money. There is a tension between responsible saving and living by faith—I don’t claim to have the answer, but I know if God is our Abba we are called to trust him and take a risk.
When I was working for a large corporation in Tokyo as a single person, even though the cost of living in Tokyo was extremely high, I was making far more money than I needed to live on. So I was giving away considerably more than a tithe. My Japanese pastor came to me one day and said, “Ken, I know you are thinking about going into the pastoral ministry one day and you are planning on going to seminary to prepare. Don’t feel like you have to tithe, because you will need the money for seminary and you are probably wanting to be saving your money for that.” I appreciated his concern for me, but my response was, “Look, if I can’t trust God with a simple tithe now, first of all, I have no business going into the Christian ministry. If I can’t live by faith, I have no business calling others to live by faith either.” I ended up giving God substantially more than a standard tithe…. As I look back, it was a gift to me because the money I gave away seemed to miraculously come back. God provided all that I needed for my seminary education, and just all that I needed.
Let me give a example a little more current. My wife and I are more liberal arts people than math people. We are not quantitative enough or organized enough, so our charitable giving is driven by a tax return calculus. But, partly because there have been substantial needs at our home church and around the world, we have received a significant tax refund (relative to our income) for the last several years. There’s a part of us that wants to sock that away for a rainy day, but there’s also a part of us that feels it’s a rainy day for someone else in the world, and we are putting away some money for our son’s education (we’re Japanese, after all). So nothing close to heroic, but there’s a part of us that says there is a rainy day for some else. God’s been so faithful to us… let’s have a little bit and give most of this away. Every New Year, my wife looks back across and the year and writes the things for which we were most grateful. My wife said, “Because of our tax we were able to give a gift to a project for kids in a certain part of the world.” I said, “Oh yeah, that’s great. I’ll add that to my list, too”.
The assumption of this prayer is, if we are wealthy by world standards, give at a rate where we actually having to trust God for our money.
And we pray, “Forgive us our debts….” Debts are a metaphor for sins. As we are forgiven, we forgive those who sin against us. In Jewish rabbinic tradition it was thought that every sin accumulated is a kind of debt before God. This is a prayer to ask God to remove our debts from him. We thank God that because of the work of Jesus Christ paying off our debts through his death on the cross for our sins, God is much more willing to forgive our debts than Visa or Master Card.
PAUSE: Is there anything for which we need forgiveness? TAKE A MOMENT.
We pray that God would forgive our sins. Just as we need food for the health of our body, so we need forgiveness from God for the health of our soul. As we receive forgiveness, we in turn forgive those who have sinned against us.
The great reformer Martin Luther says: “This is not so much a precondition for forgiveness as it recognition that we, in fact, have been forgiven.” We are forgiven, and so we forgive others.
Remember five years ago--the morning of October 2, 2006, a troubled man named Charles Carl Roberts barricaded himself inside the West Nickel Mine Amish School, ultimately murdering five young girls and wounding six others. Roberts committed suicide when police arrived on the scene. It was a dark day for the Amish community of West Nickel Mines, but it was also a dark day for Marie Roberts—the wife of the gunman—and her two young children.
But on the following Saturday, Marie experienced something truly amazing while attending her husband's funeral. That day, she and her children watched as Amish families——came and stood alongside them in the midst of their own blinding grief. Despite the crime the man had perpetrated against, the Amish came to mourn Charles Carl Roberts—a husband and father and to comfort this family.
Donald Kraybill is an expert on the Amish tradition. He teaches at Elizabethtown College, near Nickel Mines. In an interview, he explained how forgiveness, in the biblical sense, is love letting go when wrong has been suffered. "To a person, the Amish would argue that forgiveness is the central teaching of Jesus. They will take you to the Lord's Prayer—where we affirm that we forgive others—even as we ourselves have been forgiven…”
As we pray for forgiveness, we pray to be delivered from the sin that caused us to need forgiveness in the first place.
The prayer “Lead us not into temptation…” can perhaps be better translated as “do not permit us to go into temptation.”
In the Garden of Gethsemane the night before Jesus goes to the cross, Jesus says to his sleepy student Peter, “Watch out and pray that you don’t fall into temptation”(Mark 14:38). This petition of the Lord’s Prayer is a request to God to help us avoid this self-destructive tendency. John Calvin wrote: “It is a prayer where we are conscious of our weakness and ask to be defended by God’s protection so that we have strength to prevail against the forces of darkness and our soul from Satan.” As a mentor of mine says, “A ton of suffering may not hurt us, but one ounce of sin can destroy us.” A ton of suffering may not hurt us eternally—it may refine us, but one ounce of sin can destroy us. My professor Haddon Robinson prays: “When I am given the opportunity to sin, take away my desire to sin. And when I have the desire to sin, take away the opportunity.”
Ask for our bread, bread for the world, and forgiveness.
The postscript “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.” was probably not in the original manuscript of the gospel. It was probably added by a scribe later. It is actually an illusion to David’s prayer (1 Chronicles 29:11) where David prays: “Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom.” It was likely a prayer that was used in the early church and added by a scribe to some of the New Testament manuscripts.
When we reflect on how great God is--that he is Abba, worthy of Adoration, trustworthy to Accept his will, and asks us to Ask for what we need and when we recognize all that he has provided for us, what else can we see say except: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.”
Take time to pray the Lord’s Prayer, petition by petition.
(Lord’s Prayer on the powerpoint)
“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10 your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us today our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,[a]
but deliver us from the evil one.[b]’
“For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.”
The Way of Jesus M5 (11 03 06)
Speaker: Ken Shigematsu
Title: A Prayer for All Time
Text: Matthew 6:1-15
BIG IDEA: The Lord’s Prayer can become a pattern for our prayer.
When I was about to meet my future parents-in-law for the first time in Japan, I was nervous, I didn’t know what to say. I asked my parents who were born and raised in Japan, what I should I say when I’m with them. They said, “Say nothing. Remember silence is golden in Japan.”
I remember someone I know who grew up in a time when going on actual dates as a teenager was more common—a time when young people still watched the Oscars—and she said I was petrified before going on a date because I was so shy and didn’t know what I might say to keep conversation going. My mom gave me a few simple questions to ask my date and that made it a lot easier…
Sometimes we don’t know what to say in a conversation with people. Sometimes we don’t know what to say in a conversation with God. Today Jesus helps us know what to say in prayer.
Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve talking about prayer. Last Sunday we looked at the story of Mary and Martha and considered how we can discern how to give Jesus a gift he really wants and can actually use (if you were snowed in, you are welcome download the message from our website). Today we’re going to look at a prayer Jesus taught his disciples to pray. His disciples according to the Luke version of the prayer ask Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Prayer certainly can be spontaneous. You don’t need a university degree in prayer to pray, but we can also learn to pray. The Lord’s Prayer is more accurately “The Disciples’ Prayer.” It is the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray and it is the prayer that teaches us how to pray.
This prayer can either be prayed word for word, but also as pattern for our prayers.
Here is Jesus’ teaching. If you have your Bibles please turn to Matthew 6:5:
5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
9 “This, then, is how you should pray:
“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10 your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us today our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,[a]
but deliver us from the evil one.[b]’
14 For if you forgive others when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
In verses 5-6 Jesus says, “When you pray don’t pray to impress other people, but pray in private to your Father who is unseen.” Jesus was not condemning public prayer. He himself prayed publicly. But in a culture where people admired pious, religious people, in a way that it is not true today, people would sometimes pray to impress other people. Jesus is saying here that the motive for prayer is not to impress other people but to know God more deeply.
Jesus said in verse 7, “When you pray, don’t keep on babbling like the pagans.” In Jesus’ day, for example, Greeks would pile up as many titles of the deity as possible, hoping to secure his or her attention. Pagan prayers typically reminded the deity of the favours or the sacrifices they had offered in an attempt to get a response from the god on some contractual ground. Jesus says, “Don’t do this.”
Prayers do not have to be long prayers. For some people, several brief times of prayer throughout the day work better than a half-hour block of prayer. If you find yourself constantly thinking about when your prayer will end, it may be time to pause and move on to something else. Part of the gift of this prayer is that it can be prayed briefly. It can be stretched out over an hour or several hours. It can be prayed literally over an entire lifetime. But the Lord’s Prayer can also be prayed briefly. I find that after a swim when I sit in the sauna for 3 or 4 minutes I often recite the Lord’s Prayer in silence.
Martin Luther says, “How many people have prayed the Lord’s Prayer a thousand times? If they were to pray the Lord’s Prayer a thousand more times or ten thousand more times, they wouldn’t really have prayed or tasted it at all. They don’t get comfort or joy from its proper use.”
Martin Luther is saying the Lord’s Prayer is incredibly rich but people run by it like a mine with jewels in it--gold, diamonds, rubies--but no one seems to know how to mine its treasure.
Today, I hope we can gain four windows into the Lord’s Prayer: Abba, Adore, Accept, Ask 2x.
First, Abba:
The prayer begins with the words “Our Father in heaven…” Commentator Dale Bruner says, “The greatest gift of the Lord’s Prayer is the simple phrase, ‘Our Father’.” I have heard some people say that you should not encourage people to say “Our Father,” because some people have such a terrible image of their earthly father that they have no idea what a good father is. But even if your earthly father was terrible, you are able to intuit what an ideal father would be like. In fact, the only way you could know that your earthly father was bad was if you had some ideal in your mind that you were comparing your earthly father to. Whether our fathers were great or terrible or something in between, we can imagine an ideal father.
The New Testament was originally written in Greek, but Jesus spoke in Aramaic, a dialect of Hebrew. The consensus among modern scholars is that the Lord’s Prayer begins with the Aramaic word “Abba,” and that Jesus taught his disciples to pray in Aramaic, rather than in classical Hebrew. As you may know, the word “Abba” is a very personal word—less like father actually and more like daddy or poppa. It’s the kind of word that is so personal that you can only use it to refer to your own daddy, not if you are speaking about someone else’s father. It is a personal intimate word that you can use when referring to your own daddy, but could not presume using when referring to someone else’s dad. You then have to use a more formal term.
God is a king, as we saw a few weeks ago, a king with a kingdom. In modern language we might say he is a prime minister (if we think of our Canadian context or a president). In order to have access to a king or a prime minister or a president, you have to have accomplished something great or have something amazing to offer. The Vancouver Canucks are on a roll this year. If they win the Stanley Cup, the coach might get a phone call from Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The team might get an invitation to 24 Sussex Drive. Or I am guessing that is more likely to happen if the Calgary Flames were to win the Stanley Cup. But you have to have done something or be someone great to come before a prime minister, a president, or a king. The exception would be if you are a son or a daughter of that person. The image that comes to mind is the picture of John Kennedy, Jr. behind the desk in the Oval Office of President Kennedy.
Before John, Jr. achieved anything he had access to the President; he had access to the Oval Office; he had access to the President because he was the son. The same would have been true for Caroline, of course. If we are sons and daughters of God, we have been adopted into his family because we have received the forgiveness Christ offers us and the invitation to become part of his family. We have access.
We pray “Our Father in heaven…” When Jesus prays “our Father in heaven” he refers to God’s position as King, not just president of the United States or Prime Minister of Canada, but Lord of over all the universe, but he is also our loving Father, our Abba, and so we have access. So when you pray “Hallowed be your name…” or when you pray “Our Father…” remember that he is your Father. You have access to him, not because of something you have done, but because of something that Christ has done on your behalf. He died on the cross so that you could be a son or a daughter. You have access as a child.
Abba
Adoration
We pray “Hallowed be your name…” The word “hallowed” literally means “to make holy” or “to set apart.” There is a sense in which God’s name is already holy. It is already set apart—it is already exalted. So praying that God’s name would be made holy, as Ken Bailey says, is a bit like praying for wood to become solid or fire to become hot, when wood is already solid and fire is already hot…and God’s name is already holy.
Even though God is holy, many people don’t recognize God’s holiness, so we pray God will manifest his holiness before people. This is why in Scripture in places like Ezekiel 20, God says, “I will manifest my holiness among you.” So when we pray “Hallowed be your name…” we are praying that God would manifest his holiness to people and that his name which refers to his person would be recognized as holy.
In the film version of Babette’s Feast a renowned opera singer from Paris named Papin visits a remote Danish coastal town. He enters a church service and hears Philippa singing in the pew as a member of the congregation in her extraordinary voice. He wants to teach her how to sing and bring her to Paris to sing for the opera, but Philippa feels like she is unable to move from her small Danish town to Paris. The renowned French singer Papin tells Philippa, “In paradise you will be the great artist God intended you to be. How you will enchant the angels!”
Have you ever known someone who had great talents or great virtue, but for whatever reason their life circumstances would likely never be recognized for all they are? We have a yearning for them to be discovered and recognized. When we pray “Hallowed be your name…” we are praying that God’s name would be discovered as holy…as great. It is a prayer that people would recognize how amazing God is.
I’ve been in conversation with someone who wants to cultivate an experience of more spiritual reality in her life—but says, “I am not so sure about Jesus.” There’s a yearning in my heart that she will one come to discover how amazing God is through the face of Jesus. Jesus is the visible image of God.
We started with Abba, moved to Adoration, and now we move to Acceptance.
Then we pray “Your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven…”
The phrase “Thy will be done…” is reminiscent of Jesus’ own prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane who in his humanity did not want to go to the cross, but prayed “not my will but thy will be done.” It is a prayer that let’s go of our will on a particular matter and asks God to take over. In this part of the prayer we don’t always recognize what God’s will is for us and what is best for us.
If you are a parent, or become a parent, you will understand there are times when a young child wants something that is not necessarily in their interest. Our two-year-old son hates to be physically restrained in any way. There is a park not far from our house with a wooden bridge for kids. When I walk over it holding his hand, he wants to break free and run across it all by himself. One time when he was in one of those moods where he really wanted to walk it by himself, I let him walk over the bridge by himself as I stood under the bridge. He ran right off the bridge, falling head first—7 feet high. Thankfully, I caught him before his head hit the ground. (A woman walking by said, “Nice catch.”)
If you give a young child whatever they want, they can end up in the hospital and maybe dead. The gap between a parent and a young child is far closer than the gap between us and God. Someone has said that God gives us what we would give ourselves if we knew all the facts, if we had the perspective of all eternity in mind. Like Jesus, we pray, “Thy will be done.”
The reason we can pray “thy will be done” is because Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane—when in his humanity he didn’t want to face a gruesome death on a cross and bearing the sin of the world in himself… but he did—for us, so we could be forgiven and freed from our sin—so we could call God Abba. When we recognize God is Abba and in Christ died for us—when we recognize how deeply we are loved, we can say thy will be done—we can accept.
It’s a prayer not just for us to accept God’s will in our lives, but prayer for the world too. It’s a prayer for his will—for his justice, peace, and love accepted among the people of Libya and Egypt and in Christchurch, New Zealand… for people to accept God’s will so that there is economic justice, racial equality, women’s rights, for the well being of refugees.
Abba, Adoration, Acceptance, and Ask.
Ask
Nearly half the prayer focuses on God, but then the prayer shifts as Jesus ask Abba to provide for your needs.
And so we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread…” The first part of the prayer is focused on the character of God and the will of God. The second half of the prayer focuses on our needs: “Give us this day our daily bread…” We cannot serve God without food. It’s hard to get food without work. So this prayer is for food, work, clothing, shelter. It is not a prayer for cake…it is a prayer for life’s basic necessities. “Give us this day our daily bread…” There is not consensus on what the Greek word translated “daily” means. It can be translated “give us today our food for the day,” or “give us today our food for tomorrow.” Perhaps it is best translated “give us today the food we need.”
In the ancient world this was a very relevant prayer as people by the standards of today were impoverished, so they were praying either give us our food for today or give us today our food for tomorrow or give the food we need.
Remember, it says “our daily bread.” This may be surprising to us because we live in such an individualistic culture, but nowhere in the Lord’s Prayer does Jesus say “pray I…” It is okay to pray I, but he teaches us to pray “our.” So we pray “our daily bread…” It is not just a prayer where my need for bread would be provided, but our need for bread would be provided—a prayer for our neighbours who are in financial need and for people around the world.
Ken Bailey who spent 40 years living and teaching the New Testament in places like Egypt, Lebanon and Jerusalem and whose cultural insights I’ve drawn from for this sermon tells this story about Mother Teresa.
Mother Teresa writes: “I will never forget the night an old gentleman came to our house and said there was a family with eight children and they had not eaten, and could we do something for them. So I took some rice and went there. The mother took the rice from my hands, then she divided it into two and went out. I could see the faces of the children shining with hunger. When she came back I asked where she had gone. She gave me a very simple answer: ‘They are hungry also.’ And ‘they’ were the family next door, and she knew they were hungry. I was not surprised that she gave, but I was surprised that she knew….I didn’t have the courage to ask her how long her family hadn’t eaten, but I am sure it must have been a long time, and yet she knew—in her terrible bodily suffering—she knew that people next door were hungry, also.”
This woman, Ken Bailey says, with the eight children may not have known the Lord’s Prayer, but there was only ‘our rice’ and not ‘my rice’ even when her children were hungry. The prayer for our bread includes the neighbours. There is our Father and our bread. The Father is not our personal saviour. He is the Saviour of the world, and it’s not our bread we pray for, but bread for the world.
This prayer also seems to assume that we are truly dependent on God for our material needs. For those of us who are wealthy, and we may not think of ourselves as wealthy, but if our income is $25,000 a year, we are wealthier than approximately 90% of the world’s population. If our income is $50,000 a year, we are wealthier than 99% of the world. Remember almost half the people of the world live on than $2 a day or less. If you don’t feel wealthy, it is because you are comparing yourself with people who are in the 99th percentile of wealth.
What it means to be able to pray this prayer from our heart if we are wealthy, frankly, is to be giving our money to God and to the poor at such a rate that we are actually dependent on God.
It doesn’t mean that we never save, but it means that we actually trust God with our money. There is a tension between responsible saving and living by faith—I don’t claim to have the answer, but I know if God is our Abba we are called to trust him and take a risk.
When I was working for a large corporation in Tokyo as a single person, even though the cost of living in Tokyo was extremely high, I was making far more money than I needed to live on. So I was giving away considerably more than a tithe. My Japanese pastor came to me one day and said, “Ken, I know you are thinking about going into the pastoral ministry one day and you are planning on going to seminary to prepare. Don’t feel like you have to tithe, because you will need the money for seminary and you are probably wanting to be saving your money for that.” I appreciated his concern for me, but my response was, “Look, if I can’t trust God with a simple tithe now, first of all, I have no business going into the Christian ministry. If I can’t live by faith, I have no business calling others to live by faith either.” I ended up giving God substantially more than a standard tithe…. As I look back, it was a gift to me because the money I gave away seemed to miraculously come back. God provided all that I needed for my seminary education, and just all that I needed.
Let me give a example a little more current. My wife and I are more liberal arts people than math people. We are not quantitative enough or organized enough, so our charitable giving is driven by a tax return calculus. But, partly because there have been substantial needs at our home church and around the world, we have received a significant tax refund (relative to our income) for the last several years. There’s a part of us that wants to sock that away for a rainy day, but there’s also a part of us that feels it’s a rainy day for someone else in the world, and we are putting away some money for our son’s education (we’re Japanese, after all). So nothing close to heroic, but there’s a part of us that says there is a rainy day for some else. God’s been so faithful to us… let’s have a little bit and give most of this away. Every New Year, my wife looks back across and the year and writes the things for which we were most grateful. My wife said, “Because of our tax we were able to give a gift to a project for kids in a certain part of the world.” I said, “Oh yeah, that’s great. I’ll add that to my list, too”.
The assumption of this prayer is, if we are wealthy by world standards, give at a rate where we actually having to trust God for our money.
And we pray, “Forgive us our debts….” Debts are a metaphor for sins. As we are forgiven, we forgive those who sin against us. In Jewish rabbinic tradition it was thought that every sin accumulated is a kind of debt before God. This is a prayer to ask God to remove our debts from him. We thank God that because of the work of Jesus Christ paying off our debts through his death on the cross for our sins, God is much more willing to forgive our debts than Visa or Master Card.
PAUSE: Is there anything for which we need forgiveness? TAKE A MOMENT.
We pray that God would forgive our sins. Just as we need food for the health of our body, so we need forgiveness from God for the health of our soul. As we receive forgiveness, we in turn forgive those who have sinned against us.
The great reformer Martin Luther says: “This is not so much a precondition for forgiveness as it recognition that we, in fact, have been forgiven.” We are forgiven, and so we forgive others.
Remember five years ago--the morning of October 2, 2006, a troubled man named Charles Carl Roberts barricaded himself inside the West Nickel Mine Amish School, ultimately murdering five young girls and wounding six others. Roberts committed suicide when police arrived on the scene. It was a dark day for the Amish community of West Nickel Mines, but it was also a dark day for Marie Roberts—the wife of the gunman—and her two young children.
But on the following Saturday, Marie experienced something truly amazing while attending her husband's funeral. That day, she and her children watched as Amish families——came and stood alongside them in the midst of their own blinding grief. Despite the crime the man had perpetrated against, the Amish came to mourn Charles Carl Roberts—a husband and father and to comfort this family.
Donald Kraybill is an expert on the Amish tradition. He teaches at Elizabethtown College, near Nickel Mines. In an interview, he explained how forgiveness, in the biblical sense, is love letting go when wrong has been suffered. "To a person, the Amish would argue that forgiveness is the central teaching of Jesus. They will take you to the Lord's Prayer—where we affirm that we forgive others—even as we ourselves have been forgiven…”
As we pray for forgiveness, we pray to be delivered from the sin that caused us to need forgiveness in the first place.
The prayer “Lead us not into temptation…” can perhaps be better translated as “do not permit us to go into temptation.”
In the Garden of Gethsemane the night before Jesus goes to the cross, Jesus says to his sleepy student Peter, “Watch out and pray that you don’t fall into temptation”(Mark 14:38). This petition of the Lord’s Prayer is a request to God to help us avoid this self-destructive tendency. John Calvin wrote: “It is a prayer where we are conscious of our weakness and ask to be defended by God’s protection so that we have strength to prevail against the forces of darkness and our soul from Satan.” As a mentor of mine says, “A ton of suffering may not hurt us, but one ounce of sin can destroy us.” A ton of suffering may not hurt us eternally—it may refine us, but one ounce of sin can destroy us. My professor Haddon Robinson prays: “When I am given the opportunity to sin, take away my desire to sin. And when I have the desire to sin, take away the opportunity.”
Ask for our bread, bread for the world, and forgiveness.
The postscript “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.” was probably not in the original manuscript of the gospel. It was probably added by a scribe later. It is actually an illusion to David’s prayer (1 Chronicles 29:11) where David prays: “Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, O Lord, is the kingdom.” It was likely a prayer that was used in the early church and added by a scribe to some of the New Testament manuscripts.
When we reflect on how great God is--that he is Abba, worthy of Adoration, trustworthy to Accept his will, and asks us to Ask for what we need and when we recognize all that he has provided for us, what else can we see say except: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.”
Take time to pray the Lord’s Prayer, petition by petition.
(Lord’s Prayer on the powerpoint)
“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10 your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us today our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,[a]
but deliver us from the evil one.[b]’
“For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.”
posted by Shigematsu at 4:09 PM
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