At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen (Matt. 6:9-13).

The next petition in the Lord prayer is for the kingdom of the Father to come. We are addressing the Father, as was made plain at the beginning of the prayer, and we are praying for His kingdom to come. There are a number of key observations that can be made about this.

The first is that Jesus wanted His followers, down throughout church history, to be praying for (and therefore longing for, and working for) a coming kingdom. Our task is not to labor for the kingdom to go, but rather for the kingdom to come. Our task is not to get the saints out of here, but rather to bring the kingdom of God down to earth.

The second thing is that the process has already begun, and needs to be understood as a long, slow, and gradual process. After John the Baptist was imprisoned, the Lord Jesus began His preaching ministry in Galilee saying this: “And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15). The coming of the Christ inaugurated the advance of the kingdom, but this occurred at the point that Daniel saw in his vision, when the stone was cut without hands.

“And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever” (Daniel 2:44).

The stone struck the statue of the great pagan kings, and after that it grew into a great mountain. That great mountain is the kingdom of God. The kingdom was established in the ministry of Jesus Christ, and has been growing since then. It has been steadily growing because we all—as instructed—have been praying for it to come.

The next point is that we should understand this petition in the light of the following one. What does it mean for the kingdom to come? The next prayer is for God’s will to be done on earth as it is done in Heaven. The most obvious application of this, which is quite appropriate, is to be praying that we would be as obedient to the will of God here on earth as the angels are in Heaven. When God wants something done in Heaven, presumably the angels do it with suitable alacrity. That being the case, if we are thinking about what we are praying, we should not be dragging our feet in our obedience.

The last application is to understand this petition in light of what follows and also what went before. We have just finished hallowing the name of God the Father, and the Father is “in Heaven.” We have been praising and honoring Him there. As the Spirit gathers us up together in the worship service, we are escorted into the heavenly places, where we honor and hallow His name. Having just hallowed His name in Heaven, we are now asking that His name be hallowed on earth, as we have just hallowed it in Heaven. So as God’s people worship Him rightly, His name is hallowed in Heaven, and then also on earth. As His name is worshiped and hallowed properly here, His kingdom comes.  

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen (Matt. 6:9-13).

The prayer began by addressing our Father, and reminding ourselves that He is the Most High. He dwells in the highest heaven and, more than this, the highest of all the heavens cannot contain Him (2 Chron. 2:6). This next element of the Lord’s Prayer continues with this theme of magnifying God in the first instance, taking it as our first priority.

When we pray to Him, we must not rush to our requests. God knows what we need, and He wants us to pray for them. But He wants us to remember who we are before we come to the petitions. So we begin by exalting the name of God (hallowed be), we continue by interceding for the work of God (His kingdom), and we then proceed to lift up our own little portion of that kingdom work (daily bread, temptations, etc.).

The verb rendered here as hallowed is hagiazo, meaning to sanctify or set apart, or treat as holy. We set God’s name apart as holy in two ways. One is when we formally acknowledge that it is holy. We have to remind ourselves of this by what we say—and it is important that we say it. The second way we hallow His name is by doing what it says elsewhere in the prayer, specifically when we confess our sins.

The third commandment says that we are not to take the name of the Lord our God in vain (Ex. 20:7). This is commonly applied simply to false swearing or cussing, and although speech is certain a part of it, the word there means to lift, or to carry, or to bear. The principle way we bear the name of God is through our identity with Him as His people. This was true of the Jews in the Old Testament, and it is true of Christians in the New.

“And all people of the earth shall see that thou art called by the name of the Lord; and they shall be afraid of thee” (Deut. 28:10).

“And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch” (Acts 11:26).

As Christians, we bear the name of God, and we must not bear it in vain. We hallow the Father’s name in how we address Him in the prayer, but we also hallow His name by not bearing around unconfessed sin in our lives. We must pray for forgiveness.

The use of Father to address God is an invitation into a profound familial intimacy. He is not ashamed to own us as members of His family. But that familial intimacy must never be allowed to degrade into a flippant or casual use. We are taught to use the name Father, and in the next breath we are required to hallow that same name.

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen (Matt. 6:9-13).

So we are invited to pray to God our Father, and we have noted that this is a distinct shift in emphasis. The idea of God as Father comes front and center in the New Testament.

We now come to the next phrase, which is worthy of more meditation than we might want to give it. Of course God is in heaven. Isn’t that where God lives?

Well, yes and no. But the Lord wants us to pray this way for a reason, but before we get to that reason we have to remember two foundational truths about God. The first is that He dwells in eternity (Is. 57:15), and that this is “outside” even the highest heaven. The heavens, along with the rest of the material universe, are created, and God is “higher” than that, or “outside” of that, or “beneath” all of that. The second foundational truth is that God the Father is omnipresent throughout the entire created order. We can see this in the fact that Jesus invites us to pray (here, on earth) to our Father, who is in heaven. As we do this, there is no suggestion that we need to yell. This means that our God in heaven is also here with us, and knows what we need before we ask—as Jesus reminds us just a few verses later (v. 32). In this sense, He is “on earth” every bit as much as He is in heaven.

And yet, the Lord tells us to pray to our Father, who is in the heavens. I say heavens because the phrase is en tois ouranois, in the plural. When we pray to God our Father we are therefore not praying in the direction where He is located (for He is everywhere), but like the ancient Jews we are facing the place where He has determined to establish His throne, where He decided to settle His name.

“The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord’s: But the earth hath he given to the children of men” (Psalm 115:16).

So when we think of God, He wants us to think “up.” When we pray to Him, we are called to think away from the subterranean caverns. This is not rendered ludicrous by the fact that Australians are praying in a different “direction.” That doesn’t matter. What matters is that we (and the Aussies) understand that God our Father must be given glory, as the Christmas angels did, “in the highest” (Luke 2:14).

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen (Matt. 6:9-13).

One of the first things to get straight in learning how to pray is the lesson of learning who you are praying to. Jesus is teaching His disciples to pray, and whenever you send a message of any kind—be it a letter, or email, or text—you need to put an address on it. Who are you talking to? Who should pay attention? Who is being addressed? If we don’t think about this carefully, we might find ourselves in a frightful muddle—beginning our prayer, for example, with “Dear Jesus,” and concluding it with “in Your Son’s name, amen.”

Now what Jesus instructed His disciples to do here—address God as our Father—was a radical innovation. There are a handful of places in the Old Testament where the fatherhood of God is referred to, but the total amounts to about fifteen instances (e.g. Deut. 32:6; Ps. 68:5). And in none of these instances is God directly addressed as “Father.” In the ancient Near East, where male deities and their consorts were common, it is perhaps not surprising that there was an avoidance of this kind of expression, which could have been taken as part of a pagan and sexualized fertility religion.

This is in sharp contrast to the New Testament. Jesus here instructs His disciples to make a point of praying this way. When you pray, make sure you say, “Our Father.” It was the Lord’s favorite expression for God—He uses it around 65 times in the synoptic gospels, and over 100 times in the gospel of John alone. The rest of the New Testament follows this example—in the Pauline letters, God is referred to as Father over 40 times.

At the same time, because God is the source of all that exists, because God is the Creator, it would seem that the Fatherhood of God would be a natural metaphor to draw. If there were no sin, this would be true, and so when liberal theology emphasized the Fatherhood of God and Brotherhood of Man (FOGBOM), they could only do so by minimizing the reality of sin. God is a universal Father, but sin necessarily interferes with our understanding of this, which is why liberals began by emphasizing the Fatherhood of God and ended by not understanding the difference between a father and a mother.

“For this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named” (Eph. 3:14–15).

The phrase rendered here as the whole family comes from pas and patria—all the fathered. Every kind of lineage derives its name from the Father of the Lord Jesus. God objectively is the Father of all. But because we rebelled against Him in the Garden, disobeying His prohibition of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we were estranged from our Father. This meant that we either pursued a carnal sort of fatherhood, as in the fertility religions, or we withdrew, not daring to use the term Father.

By His sacrifice on the cross, Christ changed all that. The issue of sin has been addressed through the death and resurrection of Jesus, and this is why we are summoned to approach God as our Father in Heaven. This is only possible because Christ dealt with all of our sins and also with the sins of others. If we believe we cannot come to a Father because of our own sins, Christ teaches us otherwise. If we believe that our experience with an abusive earthly father means that we could never address God as a Father, Christ teaches us otherwise.

So then, Christian prayer is addressed to the Father, in the name of the Son, and in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Father is the destination, the Son is the road, and the Spirit is the car (Eph. 2:18).

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At thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore (Ps. 16: 11)

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen (Matt. 6:9-13).

Before considering the Lords Prayer phrase by phrase, we should begin by taking it in as a whole. In English, it takes less than twenty seconds to say, and it seems strange that the Lord said that we were to pray after this manner. Haven’t we all read the impressive stories of prayer warrior missionaries who wrestled in prayer for hours until they were finally able to punch the principalities and powers on the nose?

And yet, when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, the way John the Baptist taught his disciples, He gave them an even shorter version of this particular prayer (Luke 11:2-4). Jesus explicitly teaches us that prayer ought not to be a big production we shouldn’t make a show of praying in church or on street corners (Matt. 6:5). Men like praying for men under the guise of praying to God. Jesus says to hide the fact that we pray (Matt. 6:6). On top of that, He says that we ought not to think that God is in any way interested in the word count and to the extent that He is interested in it, He wants us to make a point of going short (Matt. 6:7)

Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few (Eccl. 5:2).

Of course we would be veering to the opposite extreme if we said that it was a sin for prayer to go long. Before the Lord selected His disciples, He prayed all night (Luke 6:12), and in the Garden of Gethsemane, He prayed long enough to lose the disciples who were with Him (Matt. 26:41). But even with that granted, it seems that Christians who know their prayer life to be inadequate should begin by simply praying the Lords Prayer, as brief as it is.

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