“Teach us to pray; the Lord’s prayer”. These are my thoughts on what the verses from Luke mean to me; it’s
how I’ve applied these precepts in my own life.
* The opening sentence is “Our father in
heaven; hallowed by your name”. It’s
like in a nutshell of who God is: We have on the one hand the invitation to see
God as a very personal God who is like a father, and on the other, the Jehovah
God to whom all things owe adoration and worship, and who reigns in heaven
which is the beginning and end of all creation.
“Hallowed” means “all holiness belongs to you”. . Some people struggle with the image of a
Father God, because their earthly father was a very flawed character, We can
feel compassion for those whose fathers were strict and severe, or violent or
abusive, or feckless or work-shy; Nevertheless, we can at least relate on an
intellectual level, to the ideal of a loving parent who has our best interests
at heart, and who will always be interested in our lives; who will forgive us no matter what, who provides for us and
looks out for us..” Our father” speaks of relationship; of being able to talk to God in our own
language, confident that He is listening. So we are invited to be in
relationship with the One to whom all sacredness and power belongs. And it seems that this prayer teaches us how
to get our priorities right. To start
with acknowledging who God is and what He deserves from us, is a good
beginning.
* The next bit is “Your kingdom come, your
will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. This has absolutely nothing to do
with our idea of earthly Kingdoms. I
confess, I’ve recited this bit since I was a child, not really seeing it’s
significance, or knowing what it really meant.
But after my son died, it became more meaningful. My son was a young policeman, and when we
gathered at Wesley for his funeral; as
we walked up the aisle we could see that the church was absolutely packed; everybody squashed into the pews, and the
little slide out seats too, and outside, and in the vestry. As we bowed our
head for the first prayer, I began to have a sort of mental picture of that
packed church and I could see lots of slender soft ribbons floating down onto
the heads of many of the people. In
later days, as I pondered and prayed over Ben’s death and where God was in all
of it, I could still see the ribbons descending. And I began to pray that whatever purpose God
had in allowing Ben to die, that it would begin to be put into place on
earth; I began to pray, that in relation
to Ben’s death, God’s will would be done on earth as it already was in
heaven. God’s will was done in
heaven; Ben was with him; God had counted Ben’s days; He’s counted all our days and he has the
final word on what happens to us.. Now I
prayed that this will and purpose would be done on earth too, for all those
people on whom the ribbons settled. I
felt that in this one way at least, Ben’s death would help someone else find
peace with God, as he himself had found. Perhaps this is fanciful to you; the silly imagination of a grieving mother. Maybe.
But this I know; God’s will is a
fact; a force; a divine energy; the divine intellect and purpose in the
shadow of which we can only stand in mystified awe. I could never say that it was God’s will for
Ben to die, but "in everything God works for good with those who love him,
who are called according to his purpose" (Rom. 8:28). Ben was called home
to God according to God’s purpose and I have to believe it works for good in
the big picture. Jehovah and parent God,
may your will be done for us, on earth, as it already has been done in heaven.
* Now we come to the petitionary part of
the prayer; “give us this day our daily
bread” This is the only part of the
prayer which is for our physical provision.
Or is it? I’m sure it means we should be asking for the bread of
physical life. Notice that we are
instructed to ask only for what we need today, on a daily basis, not for our
sustenance and health in the days to come.
Tricky, very tricky. It goes
against our inclination doesn’t it? We want to know that we will be secure with
food and money, long into the future. I don’t think many of us have any idea at
all of what it would be like not knowing where our next meal was coming from. But for the people of Jesus’ day, this was a
real prayer, prayed for their survival.. And we are to ask for others too “give
us”, not “give me”. And when we ask for bread, we probably should be mindful of
all those who grow it and cook it and transport it, and especially those who
are dying for the want of it.
This
idea of a providential God, supplying everything we need and looking out for
us, is a bit of a two edged sword and is never simple. God is not a Father Christmas giving us what
we think we want or even need. We can’t
say “God is good since he saves our children;
and we DO say this “God must have been looking after him or her because
they walked out of the wreckage unscathed”. But where does that leave people
like me, whose child was not saved? Why
was Peter freed from his prison cell by an angel, but Stephen was stoned to
death? Why was John the Baptist allowed to be killed at the whim of a silly
girl? We believe in God’s providence
when we get what we want, and we must also trust that providence when He allows
things to happen which we don’t want. If I’m going to believe in a God who is
absolutely good and always has my best interests at heart, then when Ben died,
I couldn’t turn away and declare that God isn’t a loving Father. This is mysterious stuff which we won’t
understand until we get to heaven. It’s
all mixed up with our free will, and God’s absolute will, but at the end of the
day, we are still the child, with the burdens and cares of our lives, coming to
God’s door, saying “Give to me what I need and I’ll trust you for what that
is; let your will be done for me and all
that happens to me”. In the face of the
death of my son, this is all I could offer God.
Could
these verses about bread also mean, that we should be asking for God’s very
heart to be shared with us; the bread of
Life; the Spirit. After all, the rest of these verses go on to speak of the Holy Spirit, and God’s
delight and desire to share his personhood with us, through the Holy Spirit.
(down in vs 11-13 where he says that as earthy fathers know how to give good
gifts, so the Father longs to give us the Holy Spirit)
* And forgive us our sins, for we
ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
We accept and embrace God’s forgiveness of us, but we aren’t always so
energetic about forgiving others who have wronged us. It can be very hard to
forgive people and our capacity to forgive is probably linked to how much they
have hurt us. Sometimes it can take a
long time to forgive and it takes much prayer. Maybe this is why we are
instructed to pray in this manner; so
that God can change us from resentful, ungodly people, into forgiving,
Christ-centred people. Prayer is not
designed to change or persuade God; it is designed by God to change us! Prayer
is a spiritual discipline through which we are formed into disciples of Jesus
Christ. And a surprising shortcut to forgiving people is to pray for them.
When my son had been dead for less than a year, I
encountered a woman who took every opportunity to establish a pecking order,
with me as the peckee. She could have
done me a good turn but she did me a bad one;
she could have shown compassion but she showed me veiled malice instead.
In her defence, the things she said and did were petty, small-minded and if I’d
been in a normal emotional state I could have flicked them off before they took
hold. But I was in a very dark place, with a great wound on my heart and soul.
It went on for months and as I drove home one rainy winter night, after another
bad encounter with her, at a meeting during which I was not permitted to speak,
I thought that I didn’t really want to be in the world any more. But after a
few more months and with a skerrick more emotional strength, another way of
escape presented itself. I began to pray for this lady. I prayed for God to bless her; I prayed that my attitude to her would
change. I prayed for God to love her and
for me to love her the way He did. We can’t change how others treat us but we
can change how we respond. She had added
to my burden of brokenness. But prayer
began to change the way I saw her and it allowed me to withdraw from the
arena. Her bossy pettiness began to fall
on my deliberately-deafened ears. I
yielded her up to God and if that meant she always had the last word and the
victory in the pecking order, then my reward was a healing emotional state. She
began to seem like a little girl, always trying to prove how much she deserved
praise and approval. I began to see her
with more compassion and understanding. Prayer did that. I’m sorry to be
sharing something which is so personal, but I discovered that this praying for
those who hurt us, actually works.
* The next
bit of this prayer is “And lead us not into temptation”. It’s no surprise that
we are told to ask God not to lead us into temptation. We could spend a month of sermons on this
one. Do not bring us to the time of
trial. Nobody wants trial. God knows how
frail we are; he knows we have need of
confession. - We all of us have inclinations to wander to a particular area of
sin; for some it might simply be eating
too much, or gossiping, or any type of natural appetite for which the human
race is so prone to distort and adulterate. Temptation never strikes when we
are strong and have the ramparts of our souls in place. The evil one knows our weaknesses as well as
the Christ does and he waits ‘til we are made vulnerable by any type of life
circumstance through which he can fire an evil dart. But with much praying and the help of the
Spirit, we can overcome any temptation.
We have Christ’s example in that too.
* We move on to the
verses 6 to 13 and they are really about persistence; the man who keeps knocking on his neighbour’s
door, the verses about seeking and finding, asking and receiving.
In his classic
book, The Meaning of Prayer, the great preacher, Harry Emerson Fosdick, puts it
this way: Some things God cannot give to a person until he or she has prepared
and proved his or her spirit by persistent prayer. Such praying cleans the
house, cleanses the windows, hangs the curtains, sets the table, opens the
door, until God says, "Lo! The House is ready. Now may the guest come
in."
The Rev. Dr.
Charles Reeb, pastor of United Methodist in St. Petersburg, Florida, has
expressed this attitude very succinctly:
“When we ask long enough, seek hard enough, knock loud enough, and pray
persistently enough, something happens on the inside of us. The discipline of
prayer begins to awaken us to the Holy Spirit inside of us, and our motives and
desires begin to change”.
It’s been said
(Peter Annet) that those who pray persistently are like sailors who have cast
anchor on a rock. As they pull on the anchor, they think they are pulling the
rock to themselves, but they are really pulling themselves to the rock.
This is what persistent prayer does. Especially, if God’s answer to us, is
eventually “no”. It pulls us closer to the rock of God’s divinity. .
And in that continual coming, God changes us;
in that persistent coming, we are changed into what God wants for
us. In that constant coming, He shares
his Holy Spirit with us. When our temporal needs are foremost in our minds, it
might seem that this isn’t what we need.
But it IS all we need in the whole of our life’s journey, and is what is
at the heart of this passage. Teach us to pray Lord? Yes, he teaches us to pray, but it’s not an
easy learning; we are often on a different wavelength, with different values
and different ideas of what we need. Yet, as we move closer to God in prayer, we may not
always get what we ask for;
instead, from the wisdom of God,
we get what we need. We get what God wants for us, for our spiritual and
eternal good. We find that as we move closer to our Rock, we begin to desire
what God desires, so that what we ask for, knock for, and seek after becomes
what God so desperately wants to give us. Then the truth of Jesus' words come
to life so that what we pray for we truly receive. This is the secret of how to
pray. In the name of the father, son and
Holy Spirit. Amen
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