Sermons
. Religious leaders teach their followers how to pray. This is the
prayer Jesus taught his followers. We call it "the Lord's
prayer: because the Lord Jesus taught it. The prayer as we pray it is found in Matthew's Gospel. This is a
similar but shorter in Luke's Gospel. I think Jesus may have taught
in two versions. Over the centuries the Lord's Prayer must have been prayed
trillions of times. As people have prayed it, it has taken on certain
connotations for them. They associate a word or phrase with something
in their own experience. This is natural and can be a very good
thing. Of course, some of the connotations may be misunderstandings. You
may have heard the mother who asked her daughter what she had learned
in Sunday School. The little girl replied that she had learned that
God's name is Howard. The mother was startled and asked her to
explain. The little girl said that the Sunday School teacher said
that the children should say "Howard be thy name" when they
pray. But many of the connotations have true and inspiring meanings to
people. What I want to try to do this morning is to describe what I
think the prayer meant before it took on the fuller connotations.
What was Jesus teaching us to say when he gave us this prayer? As I try to make the prayer clear, I am not suggesting that we
change the wording. I think we should never change the words but pray
it just as Jesus gave it. What I am offering this morning is not new
wording but an understanding of what we are praying when we pray the
prayer in the old words. All prayers are addressed to God, so we begin with the way God is
addressed in this prayer. It's rather special: "Our Father who
art in heaven." "Our" is plural which means this is a corporate or
community prayer. It is certainly all right for us as individuals to
pray it, but when we do we should pray with the understanding that we
are members of God's covenant people, members of the church. Praying
together helps us overcome excessive individualism. I love the
fellowship here and am glad we pray the Lord's prayer together every
Sunday. "Our Father. The Jews of the Old Testament era thought of God
as father, and sometimes they thought of themselves as God's
children. But no one before Jesus addressed God as Father. God is close and friendly and reassuring to us; being children of
God is wonderful gift. "Our Father who art in heaven." Heaven, of course, is
God's home, another world that transcends our created world. So when
we pray to the God in heaven, we are praying to Someone who far
beyond us, transcendent to us and our world. The biblical teaching that emphasizes this best is creation. God
is the Creator of the world, not a part of the world. Jesus put these two ideas together: God is our close and personal
and friendly and loving Father who is also the transcendent and
distant Creator of the universe. This is important. God is transcendent yet also personal, distant
yet also close. As much as we possibly can, we want always to think
of God in this dual way. Nothing helps us to do this better than the
Lord's Prayer. We turn now to the largest section of the prayer. It consists of
six requests. Some people say it's disrespectful or childish to ask God for
things, that we should confine our prayers to offering praise and
expressing thanks to God. I appreciate the desire to respect God. But
it cannot be right to discourage people from asking for things,
because in this prayer that Jesus gave us we ask for six things in a
row. The first request is Hallowed be thy name. Hallowed means honored,
revered. The third of the Ten Commandments forbids us from misusing
God's name. Here we are asking that God's name be honored. God's name stands for God. So we are praying that God will be
honored. I think the best way to grasp what Jesus had in mind here is to
ask the question: honored by whom? Who is that we are praying will
honor God? The answer, I think, is people, human beings. This is not a prayer
that angels will honor God, because they already do. It's a prayer
that human beings will honor God. Of course, some people do honor
God, but not all, so it is a prayer that human beings who do not
honor God as God will come to honor God. We could express this request this way: Father, may more and more
people come to honor you as God. The second request is Thy kingdom come. The kingdom of God was the principal theme in Jesus' preaching,
and we have a pretty good idea of what he meant by kingdom of God. He
meant God reigning as God over the people of God. The kingdom isn't
the people themselves; it's God's rule over the people. So this is a
prayer for God to reign over the lives of people. We could express it this way: Father, please extend your gracious
rule over the lives of more and more people. The third request is thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. God's will is a reference to God's great purpose in creation. What
purpose did God have for creating the universe? I think God created
the universe in order to bring together a community of people to be
the people of God. In other words, God created the world in order to
gather together a family of people to be God's own family. God is
their Father, and they are God's children. So the third request may be expressed this way: Father, please
bring more and more people into your family. These first three requests are, I think, parallel requests. We
could express them this way: Father in heaven, please make it happen that more and
more people honor you as God. In other words, please make it happen
that more and more people come to live under your gracious rule. In
other words, please carry out the purpose for which your created the
universe, that all people come to be members of your wonderful
family. I believe God is God is already answering this prayer, bringing
more and more people into the family. I think a day is coming when
God's kingdom shall come in all its fullness on earth and when God's
will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven. I live by that hope.
I think evil will lose and God will win. I think the darkness will
turn to dawning, and the dawning to noonday bright, and Christ's
great kingdom will come on earth, the kingdom of love and light. Now I turn to the fourth request: Give us this day our daily
bread. With this request we turn from a great cosmic vision to the
practical issues of our lives. We need food to eat, and we ask God to
give us food. And of course the other things necessary for life. Some people pray for luxuries; I'm not sure we should do that.
There's a risk of greed there. But we may certainly pray for necessities. And, remember, this is a corporate prayer. We pray for necessities
not only for ourselves but for all the people of God. The fifth request is forgive us our debts as we forgive our
debtors. The meaning of this request is simple, but the wording is
complicated. The word "debts" is a metaphor for sins. In
fact, in the Gospel of Luke the prayer uses the word sins. Many
churches use the word trespasses, which is also a metaphor for sins.
Neither Gospel includes the word "trespasses" in the
prayer, but in Matthew, after Jesus gives the prayer, he talks about
forgiving trespasses. This is simply a prayer for forgiveness for the sins we have
committed. We all understand that. We know we have not loved God with
all our hearts or our neighbors as ourselves, and we want God to
forgive us and to help us do better. We're not talking here about a transaction -- I ask for
forgiveness / God forgives -- but a relationship. God is our Father,
we are God's children, and we want our Father to forgive us. We want
to live with God in God's family without hurting others, and when we
do hurt them, we want to be forgiven by them and by the Father of us
all. The request includes "as we forgive our debtors." When
we are hard-hearted and refuse to forgive those who hurt and wrong
us, we make it impossible for us to experience God's forgiveness. I
think God always wants to forgive us, but we won't truly receive
forgiveness from God until we forgive the people who hurt us. The sixth request is "lead us not into temptation but deliver
us from evil." We could think of this as two requests, but I think it works well
to think of it as one. Two years ago Pope Francis created a lot of conversation when he
suggested that "lead us not into temptation" needs to be
re-worded. God doesn't lead us into temptation, he said, so the
prayer should be "do not let us fall in temptation." That
is certainly the way I think about it. God is not the source of our
temptations; as James wrote in his epistle, "God cannot be
tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one" (James 1:13). So
this is a prayer for God to help us resist the temptations we
experience to behave dishonorably and to act selfishly and to hurt
people. The closing words of the prayer are "thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory, forever, amen." That is how they
read in the King James Version that many of us grew up with. If you have a newer translation of the Bible, you may find that
these words have been moved to the footnotes. The reason for this is
that in the 400+ years since the KJV was published, we have
discovered new Greek manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew which do
not contain these words. These manuscripts are older and more
dependable than the ones available 400 years ago, so it now seems
probable that Matthew did not write these words when he wrote his
Gospel. On the other hand, some manuscripts do have the words, and of
course they have become a part of our traditional way of praying the
prayer Jesus gave us. I think they are surely appropriate words for
our prayer, and I think it is wise to include them when we say the
prayer. What we are saying when we include the closing words may be called
doxology or worship. We are acknowledging that God rules over the
God's people and over all the world, and that God is glorious. I
believe this is true, and I think that closing this prayer with words
of praise to God is a good idea. In just 65 words.THE LORD'S PRAYER
Matthew 6:5-15
Introduction
Addressing God
Six Requests
Conclusion
In summary: In the Lord's Prayer