The Lord’s Prayer
Series: Metamorphosis | Bible text: Matthew 6:1–18.
You can compare Our Father to a mountain region: It is vast and full of beautiful places. We take a train ride through the middle of the Lord’s Prayer to get to know it better and to marvel at it.
A fortnight ago we met to start the Lifegroup Weekend together. We had a lot of fun! – For example, at the «Shiitli um» or in the canoe. And we studied the Lord’s Prayer, probably the best known prayer in Christianity. It made me very happy to see the joy you all showed and I am therefore even more pleased to continue this journey today.
Train ride through the Lord’s Prayer
At the life group weekend, we looked closely at individual phrases, thought about them and tried to perceive God in them. Today we want to approach the Lord’s Prayer a little differently. Today’s sermon resembles a train journey. The Lord’s Prayer can be compared to a mountainous region: It is – despite the short and few sentences – very extensive, multi-layered and full of surprises. Figuratively speaking, in many places we find mountain lakes, streams and waterfalls; various trees and flowers; marmots, ibexes and jackdaws. We can’t take in everything in one morning! But we will travel through the region in a short time and thus get to know it better. My wish for this morning is that we can all get our bearings a little better in the Lord’s Prayer and we can’t wait to stop at one of the mountain lakes. And then at the next one.
The setting of the Lord’s Prayer
Before we drive through the Lord’s Prayer, let’s zoom out and take a bird’s eye view of the surroundings. The Lord’s Prayer as we know it is in the Gospel of Matthew. It is therefore in the second large block of the Bible: the New Testament. The Gospel of Matthew tells us about the life of Jesus. The Lord’s Prayer is in the so-called Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus speaks of life as a child of God. It fits in particularly well with our theme for the year, «Metamorphosis», for two reasons: Firstly, because we spend most of the year in the Sermon on the Mount and secondly, because praying plays an extremely central role in our transformation to Christlikeness. The Lord’s Prayer occurs in the Sermon on the Mount in the section where Jesus talks about real and false living according to God’s heart. In doing so, he addresses three cornerstones of ancient Judaism: Almsgiving, prayer and fasting. In the part about prayer, he describes how people formulate long prayers in the hope that they will be heard through them. The Lord’s Prayer is the antithesis of these steam prayers, which do not actually expect God to intervene. The prayer that Jesus gives to his disciples – and thus also gives to us – on the other hand rests on the statement: «Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.» (Matthew 6:8 LUT). Jesus tells his disciples how to pray. And we now want to look at these rich words together. Together with Gerhard Maier, we divide the prayer into four sections: (1) Salutation, (2) You-prayer, (3) We-prayer and (4) Praise.
1 – Salutation
Jesus starts with the salutation «Our Father in heaven!» (Matthew 6:9 LUT) and thus immediately says to whom the disciples» prayer is addressed: to God in heaven, the Father of the disciples. Whoever follows Jesus is not «just» a co-worker, fellow player or contract partner, but a child of God. And all these children of God belong – as «Father» already says – to the same family. To the family of God. Schlatter sums it up when he says that the combination of «our Father» and «in heaven», keeps us from being overconfident, because we know that God is near and yet also far and very different. It is precisely because he is «in heaven» that the first two words mean so much.
2 – You-Petition
With the first three petitions, the You petitions, Jesus first directs our gaze away from the disciples and, in our case, from us. That is very good! How often we go round in circles because we are only concerned about ourselves! So often we hurt our loved ones because we simply cannot look beyond the mirror and always seek our advantages. Jesus starts differently: He directs our gaze to this wonderful Father whom we may honour. To be able to worship Him, rather than us, is redemption in action. Jesus prays ahead (Matthew 6:9b-10 LUT):
«May your name be hallowed.
Your kingdom come.
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.»
The first request recalls Psalm 115:1: «Not to us, Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory for the sake of your grace and faithfulness!» Not us, but God is to be given the glory. That is what the term «name» means – it includes the person in question. The second request is full of hope, – and is at the same time a daring insolence of Christians towards the forces of evil. It reminds me of the novel «Jacob the Liar», which is set in a ghetto. It tells how the hope that the Red Army would soon reach them and liberate them completely changed the lives of the Jews and gave them new strength. Even though this is not a perfect comparison, this story shows us something of the dynamic of the second petition. We ask that another kingdom come than the present one. In this kingdom there will be neither suffering, nor hatred, nor bitterness. Followers of Jesus believe that this kingdom is coming and that they will be welcomed by the Lord – Jesus. Despite a clear view of the future, the Lord’s Prayer is grounded in today, as we will soon see. Through the third request we learn that God’s will is not yet carried out everywhere. His will is the good and perfect. We pray that his will will prevail everywhere. At the same time, we are challenged to let ourselves be transformed to live according to his will, as our annual verse describes well: «And do not conform yourselves to this course of the world, but be transformed [in your being] by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.» (Romans 12:2 SLT). We are to ask for it and act on it.
3 – We ask
The four «we» petitions follow. They concern our lives at the core and, excitingly, are formulated in the plural. So we can – we should – also pray it together. We pass it in our train journey (Matthew 6:11–13):
«Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.»
In the Fourth request we ask the heavenly Father together to give us what we need to live. It starts here with bread, but it does not end there. The request for daily bread also includes everything else we need to live. For us Swiss, this sentence often feels a little empty. We live in material abundance. But we only have that as long as God wants it. We are also dependent on him. Perhaps you have come across the so-called «year without a summer» in history class. That was 1816, a year when famine broke out in our areas because of great crop failures due to bad weather. The most common explanation for the great weather collapse is the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia a year earlier. The dust and ash particles spread through the atmosphere and massively reduced solar radiation. Things can happen that quickly, even in Central Europe. That is why this fourth petition is especially important for us. It reminds us that everything comes from God’s hand. In the Fifth request Jesus refers to our debts. He does not primarily mean our financial debts – but he uses them later in another speech as an image to describe our guilt before God. He makes it clear that when we become guilty before God, this debt does not fizzle out. It remains like a monetary debt and grows when new debts are added. Also like a monetary debt, our offences must be repaid. The problem that constantly accompanies us is that we are incapable of living guiltlessly from birth. Egoism reigns in us from day one and piles up high mountains of debt. We must not rush too quickly past these words of Jesus: they are unique in the whole history of the world! Jesus can pray these words because he also solved the age-old problem. He went to the cross so that our guilt could be forgiven. If we believe in him, our guilt will be remitted. And we become able to forgive others as well. We must not say that casually. There are really many very bad things on earth. Forgiveness is possible because we are between the cross and the return of Christ. All who believe have had their great mountain of debt forgiven by Jesus! And for them there is also a well-founded hope: He is coming again and then God will wipe away the tears of all His children, heal their wounds, wash away all that is defiled, restore what is broken and make them partakers of His glory. In the sixth request we pray that God will not lead us into temptation. How are we to understand this? Does God want to put traps in our path of life? In Matthew 4:1 (LUT) we read: «Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.» God’s Spirit leads Jesus to a place where he is tempted by the devil. God also leads his children into tempting situations from time to time so that they grow in faith. But God himself does not tempt. However, we have developed a twisted relationship to temptations in recent years. The «sweet temptations» have long since begun their triumphal march in advertising and want to convince us again and again that once should not be once. The devil tries to do the same: he wants to sell us things that look tempting at first – and eat us up from the inside at second. Jesus knows temptations from his own experience and is the only one who never gave in to them throughout his life. He instructs us to take temptations seriously and ask God for help. Prayer is the way of resistance. We come to the Seventh and final request. Jesus teaches us to pray for protection from evil. Interesting is his prayer in John 17:15 (LUT) where he prays: «I’m not asking you to (i.e. the disciples) out of the world, but that you preserve them from evil.» As long as we are part of this world, there will be evil. Also in the lives of Jesus» followers. But it is important that they are in the world and spread God’s light – because: there is hope for restoration!
4 – Praise
About the praise at the end (Matthew 6:13 LUT)
«[For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever. Amen.]»
and the many follow-up questions we discussed in detail at the Lifegroup Weekend. I will briefly summarise again. The ending is missing in the oldest copies of the Gospel that we see as the textual basis. Therefore, we do not know with certainty how Matthew originally formulated the ending. It would be quite possible that the praise at the end changed again and again – that was common at that time. In any case, the words that have been handed down here are not a novel invention that was smuggled into the text. The wording was taken from the Greek translation of 1 Chronicles 29:11. Should we also change the ending every now and then? There are advantages and disadvantages to this. It makes sense to pray words from the Bible at the end as well. In addition, this prayer connects us with all other Christians worldwide. I would therefore be rather cautious. But I also think that a different ending can broaden our prayer horizon. For example, we could put Romans 11:36 (LUT) at the end every now and then: «For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory for ever and ever! Amen.» Closing with praise to God is definitely valuable. We thus close the circle with the first three petitions.
We are at the end of our train journey through the Lord’s Prayer. What are you taking with you? Where would you like to stop today or tomorrow and dive in further? The Lord’s Prayer is so rich that I don’t want to condense it into one thought and hand it to you now. Rather, I hope that the joy of it has been awakened and that you will immerse yourselves even more. The best way to do that is to pray it – and that’s what I want you to do. As I said at the Lifegroup Weekend: The Lord’s Prayer definitely belongs on the list of things to do every day. It is far too precious to be relegated to another list!
Possible questions for the small groups
Read Bible text: Matthew 6:1–18
- How is the hope that God’s kingdom is coming expressed in your life? What do you wish you could live differently against this hopeful background?
- When do you find it difficult to forgive others? Why?
- What temptations have been with you for a long time? How do you deal with them?
- What became particularly important to you (through the sermon or over the years) about or in the Lord’s Prayer? Why?
