The Lord’s prayer
Three key personal requests on which we need to focus.
There are three essential things in Matthew 6:9-13, in the so-called ‘Lord’s Prayer’, that we are told by Jesus to request from our heavenly Father for ourselves as individuals. These highlight the areas that are of the most importance for us in His eyes.
There are issues and concerns that we may think are of great importance to us when we pray – and there are issues that are of most concern for us from the LORD’s point of view! The prayer that Jesus taught us is short, simple and easy to memorise. It contains the essential elements that our prayers should have although we may fill out these elements as our specific situations need.
The first request
The first request is, “Give us this day our daily bread”. Before we request anything else for ourselves Jesus addresses this daily need. To poor people who heard these words this may have been a desperate daily need as they may well have worried about where their next meal was coming from. For believers in the West today the need for a daily meal does not carry the same urgency as many of us have cupboards and freezers that contain more than enough food for the day at hand. The words “daily bread” encompasses for us the sustenance that we need for the day ahead of us, including food, but not just food. We can start our day presuming that we have what we need in the way of physical, spiritual, mental and emotional resources to get through it. But how many of us have run out of these resources long before the day has ended? What Jesus taught here is intended to remind us that we need our heavenly Father’s resources to be able to face the day in a way that honours our heavenly Father. Jesus did not refer to the days far ahead but only to the day at hand as if to emphasise that tomorrow is in our heavenly Father’s hands and that we can trust Him for the tomorrows. If we can trust the LORD for today then we can also trust Him for all the tomorrows!
The second request
The second request is, “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors”. It is too easy to overlook or excuse our own personal wrongdoings as we concentrate upon the ‘more important’ things we need to pray about. If there is unforgiven sin in the believer’s life how can the LORD hear his prayer? And if I do not forgive others the LORD will not forgive me! These words of Jesus are about the most searching and uncomfortable words that He ever spoke. It is much more comfortable to side-step the thought of our own sins and get on with life, but Jesus would draw us up short as He gets us to face the issue of our own personal sin and our response to those who are “our debtors”. For Jesus to put this request into this prayer shows how important this issue is to Him yet when was the last time any of us said such words to the LORD, apart from when we recite the ‘Lord’s Prayer’?
After our daily personal needs Jesus is emphasizing, in these words about sin and forgiveness, the importance of an open and clear relationship both with our heavenly Father and with our fellow human beings. Jesus did not confine the forgiveness that we need to give to others only to our Christian brothers and sisters, but it is for all our “debtors”! It is often the case that personal human
relationships are the most difficult to handle and it can seem that whatever we do to put a relationship on a good footing gets misunderstood and we can feel that whatever we do is wrong, yet there is one thing that we can do at such times, and that is to forgive where forgiveness is needed. We are not accountable for other people’s actions and reactions, but if we forgive where we need to forgive we know that our heavenly Father has also forgiven us our “debts”and that our relationship with Him is as it should be.
The third request
The third request is, “Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one”. Matthew places the Sermon on the Mount near the beginning of his gospel and not long after Jesus had been “led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil”(Matt 4:1), so Jesus knew what temptation was all about. None of us, with our fallen nature, will ever know what those temptations were like for the sinless Son of God. Jesus was “led” into a place where He was severely tempted and He now tells us to pray that such an experience be kept far from us. There will be times when, in our walk with the LORD, we will face great times of testing that cannot be avoided but we are never to seek to be brought into such places.It is hard to actually imagine anyone asking to be led into such circumstances if they know anything of the LORD and His ways, yet who knows? So, how are we to understand these words?
This request reveals the heart of someone who wants to walk in a way that pleases the LORD, the heart of someone who seeks to be sensitive to the promptings of the Holy Spirit in their life. Perhaps such a person knows the waywardness of their heart and knows that they cannot fully trust their inner promptings and, therefore, acknowledges their need of the LORD’s help to walk as they should. How many times have we walked into a situation where things seemed superficially to be well, and yet we had a gentle nagging in the back of our mind about what we were doing? And once we were in that situation we then found that compromising our stand for Christ was the real issue. The “evil one”has schemes and plans against every child of God; he knows every trick in the book and has seen many of his schemes come to pass. We are only here on earth for a few short years whilst the “evil one”has been doing his evil work for generations and knows how to entrap unwary believers. If we are not sensitive to the LORD when He would lead us away from such temptation – then who knows where we will end up?
The aim of this request is to lead us to a place where we can express with King David that, “He leads me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake” (Psalm 23:3).This third request is expressing a desire to be sensitive to the sometimes gentle promptings of the Holy Spirit in our Christian walk. Many of us would have avoided much heartache in the past if such a prayer had been in our hearts and on our lips!
Twice Over!
The ‘Lord’s Prayer’ is recorded twice in the gospels. If we look at Matt 5:1 we see that Jesus gave the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ to His disciples in the sermon “on a mountain” while in Luke11:2-4 Jesus gave the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ in a context where the disciples had asked Jesus “teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples”. Is it too much to think that the disciples, as they spent more and more time with Jesus, somehow thought that they had come to a time when they should rise to a ‘higher’ level of prayer and therefore asked Jesus this question? But Jesus gave them the exact same prayer! Whether we have been following Christ for many years or for a few, whether we are leaders in the church or not, Jesus would emphasise these same three elements in our prayers to our heavenly Father.
As we face the way laid out before us let us do so acknowledging that these three areas highlighted by Jesus will need our continual attention from now until Jesus returns. As followers of Jesus we will always be in need of the LORD’s grace and mercy to walk in a way that pleases Him. Perhaps the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ should play a bigger part in our relationship with our heavenly Father! The apostle John wrote, “Now this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us. And if we know that He hears us, whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we have asked of Him” (1 John 5:14 & 15). Jesus told us what to ask for in the ‘Lord’s Prayer’; therefore if we take Him seriously we have the LORD’s promise that He will hear us and grant us what we have asked. We may not always know how we should pray regarding a particular concern but we do know that we should pray for the LORD’s sustaining power, for our sins to be forgiven, and for an increasing sensitivity to the LORD and His promptings through the Holy Spirit.