"LordsPrayer" Tagged Sermons
Prayer’s real, grand goal should be the End itself rather than merely present relief, a claim tested against Luke 11:3’s request for ‘this day tomorrow’s bread,’ read here as reaching toward that same end. Jesus, Paul, and James agree remarkably closely about what prayer is actually for, despite writing in different genres and settings. Praying for today, properly understood, already means praying for the last day.
God leads his people into trial and temptation without leading them into sin, and the seventh petition depends on that distinction. The ‘evil’ in view is apostasy, a sin the modern church has largely stopped naming. Christ, tested in Gethsemane, keeps believers from sinning inside their own trials.
The fifth petition, on forgiveness, dominates the Lord’s Prayer more than its brief wording suggests, because it compresses Christ’s entire ministry into one request. It keeps all its shock. We forgive as we have been forgiven because of the covenantal grace of union with Christ, and Matthew 18’s unforgiving servant warns against losing sight of that ground.
The manna of Exodus 16 lies at the heart of the fourth petition’s daily bread, a connection the catechisms have never fully drawn out. ‘Give us today tomorrow’s bread’ captures the petition’s startling shape. The petition asks all along for Christ himself, the eternal Sabbath bread.
Readers usually approach ‘thy kingdom come’ in one of two ways, as personal holiness or as world renewal. Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21 point instead to God’s own work alone. Real prayer starts from the end God has already accomplished, and the petition rests on what God does.
Christ’s own righteousness already answers the first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer on behalf of believers. The cross stands at the heart of that answer. God delivers his people from their own cross as he delivered Christ from his, through resurrection and never by exemption.
The first petition of the Lord’s Prayer asks for something specific, and Ezekiel 36’s promise of a name vindicated among the nations gives it eschatological weight. The already and not yet governs this petition as it governs the whole Sermon on the Mount. Those who truly pray for God’s name to be hallowed will stand in the day of his coming.
‘Our Father in heaven’ raises a real question about what ‘in heaven’ means, and Bultmann’s answer falls short. God remains transcendent even as he becomes newly accessible, and Romans 8’s language of adoption holds that paradox together. Christ’s own Sonship is the hinge that opens that access.
In the Lord’s Prayer believers say ‘our Father’ together, so God’s Fatherhood belongs to his people as a body, beyond any one believer. Three means of grace are the ordinary channels through which that Fatherhood reaches them. Galatians 4:7 makes the astonishing claim explicit, that in Christ’s coming God himself becomes the inheritance his adopted children receive.
Christ’s coming does more than permit prayer. It gives believers a new obedience, exercised through him. The Lord’s Prayer shows three ways Christ has brought in a new covenant, and what the prayer teaches rests on what that covenant has already accomplished.