A Prayer for All Seasons

A couple of years ago, President George Bush had his first summit conference with Mikhail Gorbachev. This was back when Gorbachev was at the height of his powers, and he was riding a wave of popularity. President Bush was impressed with the high calibre men that Gorbachev had gathered around him as his leadership team. So he asked him “Gorby, how do you recruit such top-notch people?”

“Well it’s quite simple.” Gorbachev replied. “I have just one question that I ask them. Let me show you.” So he called his foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, into the room and he asked him “Shevardnadze, who’s your father’s son if he’s not your brother?” Shevardnadze immediately replied, “I am.” and then he left the room.

Gorbachev turned to the President and said. “You see how it works George? That one question tells me all I need to know about a man. Is he quick-minded? Is he perceptive? Can he get to the bottom of things? I’ve used that question everywhere I go with good results.”

Well the President was very impressed, and when he got back to Washington, he thought he’d try the question out on some of his people. So he called Dan Quayle into the Oval Office and he said “Dan, who’s your father’s son if he’s not your brother?” Well Dan scratched his head, and he rubbed his chin, and after a few moments, he said “I don’t know, Mr. President, but I’ll try to find out for you.”

So Dan stepped outside the Oval Office, and he went over to John Sununu’s desk (Sununu was in town that week) and he said, “Hey John, the President wants to know who’s your father’s son if he’s not your brother?” And John Sununu looked at him and he said “I am.”

So Dan Quayle went back into the Oval Office and he said “Mr. President, I’ve got an answer to the question Who’s your father’s son if he’s not your brother? It’s John Sununu.”

“That’s funny,” said the President. “I thought it was Shevardnadze.”

Talk about confusion! We come back to the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus knew that his disciples would be confused about the subject of prayer. Although prayer is one of the most important activities in all of human experience, Jesus knew that prayer is prone to all sorts of abuse and misunderstanding. In fact, everything we do in the Christian life is easier than prayer. Preaching is easier than praying. Giving is easier than praying. Witnessing is easier than praying.

Martin Lloyd-Jones, a great English preacher, said “Prayer is beyond any question the highest activity of the human soul. Man is at his greatest and highest when, upon his knees, he comes face to face with God.”

But Jesus warned us that prayer, instead of being an act of communication between man and God, could become the handmaiden of our own selfish pride instead. We could actually use prayer to try to impress people. Instead of praying to God, we could be playing to the grandstand.

He told us that prayer, in essence, is a one on one encounter with God, so that in order to pray effectively, we’ve got to shut out all thoughts of other people and other concerns and other things. In order to pray right, we’ve got to figuratively speaking, go into our closet and pray in secret. We cannot make prayer a public performance and expect God to hear us.

And he warned that we could fall into a kind of mechanical view of prayer that substitutes quantity for quality. We can easily fall into the error of treating God as a sort of cosmic vending machine that, if you put in enough nickels, would answer your prayers. So he warned us against vain repetition in our prayers, of endlessly babbling our prayers without any thought or meaning. Power in prayer isn’t measured by the clock anymore than power in preaching is.

Now Jesus goes on to show his disciples how they ought to pray. Notice in verse 9 that he didn’t say “This is what you should pray”, he said “This is how you should pray.” The Lord’s prayer is a model prayer. It’s designed to show us how we ought to pattern our prayers. It is not a script for our prayers.

How ironic it is that people have taken the Lord’s Prayer and done with it precisely what Jesus told us not to do in the preceding paragraph. How many times have people prayed the Lord’s Prayer without any thought or meaning, just mindlessly repeating the words, thinking that in doing so, they’re really talking to God?

That’s not why Jesus gave us this prayer. He gave it to us as a sort of blueprint for our prayers. He gave it to us to show us the kinds of things we ought to be praying for, the kinds of concerns we ought to be including in our prayers.

So let’s look at some of those things. This prayer is divided into two parts. Each part contains three petitions. In the first part, the focus is on God. In the second part, the focus is on ourselves.

The prayer begins “Our Father in heaven…” That’s an absolutely essential place to begin. God is our Father in heaven. The Jews in Jesus’ day never referred to God as their father. They thought of God as high and holy, someone so transcendent that they trembled to approach him. They had many names for God, some of them so sacred that they would never even dare to utter them. They revered God, but they never thought of God as their father. That was too intimate. That was too familiar.

You can only say that God is your father if Jesus is your Savior. If you are trusting Jesus, the Bible says that God has adopted you into his family. He’s given you the right to call Him your father.

God is our father in heaven. Earthly fathers may disappoint us. In our society today, there are thousands, if not millions of kids growing up who have nothing but hatred and bitterness toward their fathers. For them, a father is not the image of trustworthiness, of love, of faithfulness. They may not even know their father on earth. But they have a father in heaven who is all of those things.

When Jesus begins this prayer by saying “our Father”, he’s reminding us that we have brothers and sisters who are also a part of God’s family. In other words, we can never be in isolation from others in our relationship to God. I was reminded of that this week in Chicago. I met many brothers and sisters in Christ who I had never known before. And together we came to God in prayer and said “Our Father…” When you become a Christian, you become a part of that great family of faith.

The first petition is “hallowed be your name”. When you hallow something, it means that you consider it holy. It means that you are setting it apart from everything else and making it special. The Jews had special utensils that they used in the Temple services. There were special forks and bowls and tools that they used in preparing the sacrifices. Now those tools were not used for anything else, because they were special. They had been consecrated to the worship of God. They were hallowed.

So what is Jesus saying here? He’s saying that when we come to God in prayer, we are coming to the only person in the universe who is by very nature holy. Even though God is our Father, we cannot talk to him as though he were just some ordinary person. We cannot be familiar or cavalier in our relationship with God. We need to reverence Him. We need to worship him.

The problem is that we don’t often do that. When we do pray, we often just barge into God’s presence and present him with a list of our demands. We forget that we are talking to the One who is holy.

And more than that, when we pray “Hallowed be your name” we’re saying that it is our desire that God’s name be hallowed in the world around us. We should be interested in seeing God’s name glorified. Are you committed to the idea that God get the glory in your life? Is it your desire that people who come in contact with you get a glimpse of the God who is holy?

If we fail to hallow God, our prayers are starting in the wrong place, indeed our lives are starting in the wrong place.

The second petition is “your kingdom come”. If we are disciples of Jesus Christ, we are citizens of the kingdom of God. That’s what the Sermon on the Mount is all about. And God’s kingdom is a kingdom of justice, righteousness, and peace. So our priority as citizens of that kingdom is to see that the operating principles of that kingdom become a reality here on earth. God knows that this planet surely needs it. The world needs the righteousness, peace, love, and joy that only God’s kingdom can bring. That’s why Jesus came. He came to extend God’s kingdom and rule to earth, beginning in the heart of each man and woman.

So when we pray “your kingdom come”, what we’re really doing is expressing to God that we want His agenda to become our agenda. We’re expressing that we want to see God’s sovereign rulership become a reality in our world. Like ripples on a pool, His rule begins in our own lives and spreads outward. When we say your kingdom come, we’re saying “God, I want you to be the ruler of my life. I want you to rule in my family’s life. In my relationships with my friends and my neighbors. In my business dealings. In my financial affairs. In my leisure time activities. In all these areas, be King, O Lord. Your kingdom come.”

Ultimately, God’s kingdom will come to earth with the coming of Jesus Christ. The Bible ends with the words “Even so, come Lord Jesus.” We ought to be living our lives with the expectation of His coming, putting into daily practice His lordship in every area of our lives. So that, when he does come, we can say that His coming and the coming of His kingdom is something we have been praying for, and preparing for, and watching for all along.

The third petition is “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Warren Weirsbe, the former pastor of the Moody Bible Church in Chicago said “The purpose of prayer is not to get our will done in heaven, but to get God’s will done on earth.”

Jesus once said “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me.” For him, the will of God was like meat and drink. And it should be so for us too: so much so that it is reflected in our prayers. In Gethsemane, when Jesus, because of his humanity, naturally recoiled from the thought of going to the cross, he prayed “Not my will but yours be done.”

When you pray, do you pray that God’s will be done? Do you pray that God’s will become the most important thing in your life? Do you pray that God’s will override your own will, even if it costs you something? Do you pray that your own wants and desires and dreams and plans be subordinate to the will of God in your life? So often we use prayer to express our own will about the way things should be instead of seeking God’s will.

Well that brings us to the second part of the the Lord’s prayer - the part about ourselves.

I want you to notice that it’s only as we focus on God’s glory, His kingdom, and His will that we are ready to pray intelligently about ourselves. That’s why the first part of the Lord’s Prayer focuses on God. The second part focuses upon ourselves and our needs. It’s only when we focus on God and his kingdom and his will that our own needs come into proper perspective. If we skip Part A and only concern ourselves with Part B, as we so often do, then we cannot pray properly.

Let’s look at that second part, which begins in verse 11. The first petition is “Give us today our daily bread.” There once was a little boy who was praying his prayers at bedtime. He said “God bless Mommy and Daddy.” Then in a very loud voice, he said “God, please give me a new bicycle.”

His mother, who was sitting on the bed beside him said “God’s not deaf son.”

The little boy said “I know Mom, but Grandma’s in the next room, and she’s hard of hearing.”

When it comes to praying for ourselves, sometimes we shout at God. We shout at Him what we think we need, or what we think we ought to have. But, keeping in mind verse 8, which tells us that God knows what we need before we ask, Jesus tells us simply to pray for our daily bread. Our physical needs are not unimportant to God.

When Israel was wandering in the wilderness, God gave them manna from heaven to feed them. But he gave it to them only one day at a time. He commanded them to gather it each day, and not to save any of it for the next day, except when the next day was the Sabbath. Some of the people disregarded this instruction, and they gathered more than they needed for the day. They tried to hoard the manna. They tried to find their security in a full pantry instead of in a Father who provides. The next day they found that the manna had rotted and was no good.

The Lord was teaching his people a lesson - the lesson of daily dependence on God for their needs. And it’s a lesson we need to learn today. It’s so easy to become independent of God. We think that we can supply our own needs from day to day, and God is there just for an emergency. So we fill our pantries and try to find our security there.

When the Persian Gulf war broke out, the churches were full of people praying. People were afraid, they were anxious, they were insecure. They knew they needed God. But now that the war is over, where are they?

We need to talk to God every day about our needs. We need to live in faith one day at a time.

The next petition which concerns us is “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” This is talking about sin. Sin is a debt we have before God. Remember that a Christian is a person who has become by the grace of God painfully conscious of the fact that he is a sinner. That’s what the Beatitude “Blessed are those who mourn…” is all about. (By the way, you can find every one of the Beatitudes in the Lord’s Prayer.)

When we come to God in prayer, we need to talk to him about the sin in our life. A.W. Tozer, a great man of God from Canada, wrote a book about the five vows of a Christian. One of those vows was this: Vow never to be dishonest about sin in your life. We need to be open with God about our transgressions, about our failings, about our sins. We need to have the kind of transparency expressed by David when he wrote “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.”

When we come to God for forgiveness, we experience that tremendous relief that David did when he wrote Psalm 32…

Blessed is he whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord does not count against him and in whose spirit is no deceit.

When I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.

Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord”—and you forgave the guilt of my sin.

Now notice that the forgiveness that we receive from God is tied to our willingness to forgive others. Jesus elaborates on this in v. 14-15. Someone has said that if you don’t forgive others when they trespass against you, you’re breaking down the bridge over which you have to cross yourself.

Jesus told one of his most famous parables about this. It was about a servant who owed his master a debt of about 20 million dollars. The master knew he couldn’t possibly pay the debt so he forgave him. But then that servant went out to another servant who owed him just 20 dollars, and he grabbed the guy by the neck and demanded payment. When the poor fellow couldn’t pay right away, he had him thrown into debtor’s prison. When the master found out about it, he threw that first servant into debtor’s prison. He withdrew his forgiveness.

That is a parable about the serious consequences of failing to forgive. If someone is unforgiving, as that ungrateful servant was, it is because he has lost sight of his own condition. When the servant demanded payment of that trivial debt, he had totally forgotten that he himself had owed his master an impossible debt, which his master had graciously forgiven. He no longer saw himself as a forgiven man - a man who had received forgiveness from his master.

Now when we go around being unforgiving of others, we’re doing exactly the same thing. And when we do this, it is because we have lost sight of where we ourselves stand before God. We have forgotten that the debt we owe Him is inconceivably greater than any debt that other people owe us.

When we fail to forgive others, we’re literally putting ourselves beyond the reach of God’s forgiveness. We’ve taken our eyes off the fact that we ourselves are sinners in need of forgiveness.

Forgiveness is when we release the guilty party of the debt he owes us. And that is precisely what God has done for us in the person of Jesus Christ. As the songwriter has written: “He paid a debt he did not owe because I owed a debt I could not pay.” That’s why we pray “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

Then the last petition. “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” Now that seems strange, doesn’t it? Why would God want to lead us into temptation? Why would we have to ask him not to? Wouldn’t it make more sense to ask him to keep us out of temptation?

Well this is actually a figure of speech called a litotes. That’s where in order to make a point, you state the contrary with a negative. Let me give you a couple of examples. If you go to the Mets game and the Mets starting pitcher gets shelled for 8 runs in the first inning, you might say “Well, that was not his best game.” It certainly wasn’t - it was probably his worst! But you have used a litotes to gently make that point. It’s understatement for the sake of emphasis.

The other day, Wayne Griffiths finished putting railings on the parsonage deck. I asked him how he felt about the job, and he said (because he’s such a literate person) that he was not unhappy with it. That meant that he was pretty pleased with it. He used a litotes to make that point.

This is what is happening here in verse 13. Jesus is using a litotes. When he says “Lead us not into temptation…” he really means “Lead us far from it, lead us into righteousness.” Lead us into situations where, far from being tempted, we’ll be protected and therefore kept righteous. That’s how we’ll be delivered from the evil one.

Not only should we pray for our daily bread, for our physical needs, but for our spiritual needs as well. We need to be totally dependent on God in order to be protected spiritually. We have inherent spiritual weaknesses in our pride, in our self-will, in our fleshly appetites which will lead us into spiritual peril unless God protects us and leads us in the other direction.

This then is how we should pray. We should make the foundation of our prayers a strong focus on God. We should commit ourselves to hallowing his name and making sure he gets the glory. We should seek for his kingdom to come in our lives, in our homes, and in our world. We should yearn that his will be done here on earth as it is in heaven. These are the things we should be praying for first. Because if we get these things straight, everything else will fall into place.

Our physical needs - trusting God each day for our daily bread, for our sense of security.

Our relationships with others - relationships built on the realization that we ourselves are sinners who have been forgiven by God.

Our own spiritual purity - trusting God to lead us into paths of righteousness.

These things find their proper place when our priority is to seek God’s glory.