The Lord's Prayer (Pt. 3)

 

[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. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” (Matthew 6:9-13 ESV).

 

The next petition Jesus uses in the Model Prayer is “Your Kingdom Come” (v. 10). For us to really understand this we need a bit of context and background. As Jesus launches his public ministry he announces, “The kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (Mark 1:14-15). If we are to enter and live into the demands of God’s kingdom, we must repent. That is to say we must turn around and go in the opposite direction of our self-centered inclinations. This is the only way to follow Jesus. The clear call of grace is to a life of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit. This is certainly not a call to works, but a call to recognize the will of God is at the opposite end of the spectrum from the world.

 

Submitting to the ways of Jesus won’t help us make friends with the world; instead, we’ll be joining a revolution against the kingdoms of the world. This is where the Lord’s Prayer gets “political.” Think of King Herod, who was so threatened by the birth of Jesus that he set out to kill him (cf. Matthew 2:3, 13-18). Or think of the devil, who sought to tempt Jesus by giving him all the kingdoms of the world if he would worship him (cf. Luke 4:5-8). Both Herod and the devil understood full well that Jesus was a threat to those who rule the world of fallen men.

 

The tendency of many Christians today is to domesticate Jesus and tame his radical message by portraying him as a gentle person whose sweet words comforted the distressed and whose death provided forgiveness of our sins. While absolutely true, that’s not a complete picture of Jesus, and it’s certainly not what praying “your kingdom come” is advocating. The teaching of Jesus in the Beatitudes (cf. Matthew 5:3-12) hardly makes the case that the kingdom ushers in an easy way of life. In fact, the Beatitudes suggest that little about God’s kingdom is easy. If we genuinely pray for God’s kingdom to come to this world, we are in truth praying for the coming of justice. We are praying for the will of God to be put over all there is in creation. This is a radical petition, but it is essential for our world to finally be set free from sin and death.