The Lord's Prayer
25 Oct 2023
It isn’t very often that I get to preach on a passage that everyone in the congregation will know off by heart. These Sunday evenings leading up to Christmas are different though. The Lord’s Prayer is probably the most familiar part of the whole of scripture - for christians and non christians alike.
We shouldn’t let that familiarity bread contempt. There is a reason why we learn it as children, and teach it to the next generation. It is a foundational aspect of our relationship with God. Although we call it “The Lord’s Prayer” it perhaps should more properly be called “our prayer”. Or - how we have been taught to pray by the Lord himself.
As I mentioned in the first sermon in the series (available to listen online if you missed it), the Lord’s Prayer is both a prayer we are to say verbatim and a pattern for our prayers. In Luke’s gospel Jesus says “When you pray, say….” implying that we should say these precise words often when we pray. In Matthew’s gospel Jesus introduces it by saying “pray then like this”, which seems to stress these are also subject headings of the priorities we should have when we pray. Either way it is important we understand the prayer, so we don’t stray into the kind of vain babbling the Pharisees did when praying, and so we are able to share Jesus’ priorities.
As I write I am just preparing my third message in the series. I am still taking in what we have seen in the first two, especially all that it means for us to address God as “Our Father”. It’s a very simple statement, and it have may be the very first thing that came out of our mouth in prayer when we turned to the Lord in repentance and faith. Yet, that statement is so rich in meaning. In particular it points to what prayer really is. Jesus, God the Son, turns to his people and says “you can address God the way I do. He is OUR father”.
Can you imagine being adopted as a child into a family after being in care? How would it feel the first time the older brother in the house took you to the parents and said “this is our dad?” That’s the kind of sense this opening statement has.
Prayer isn’t us trying to get God’s attention, or twisting the arm of an unwilling God. Prayer is us joining in a relationship and a conversation God the Son is already having with God the Father. We are loved and heard because we are joined to Jesus Christ. So it makes sense that his priorities in prayer should be our priorities. We should listen to the Lord teach us those priorities in the Lord’s prayer.
The key to growing in our prayer lives isn’t to spend lots of time thinking and reading and learning about prayer by itself. There is an industry of Christian books and speakers and talks focused on “techniques’ and long lost lessons about prayer. They may have their (small) place, but we need something more fundamental.
We grow in prayer by getting to know Jesus Christ better. In particular, by seeing that being a Christian isn’t simply something we have done (deciding to follow Christ) or a formula we have fitted in to (had our sins forgiven) but that we have been united to Jesus Christ. The more we know him, and the more we grasp the wonder of that (through all that God tells us in his word), then the more we will pray. We will see that prayer is something we get to do, not that we have to do. We are able to pray - it’s not a duty to perform.
As J. Todd Billings writes in his conclusion to his book “Union With Christ”
“……we are united to Jesus Christ, the King, as his children. It cuts through our self centred ideologies, putting the action of the Triune God in Christ at the centre. Yet as it does so, we are not left behind but are brought into an exciting new world, one in which we are united to Christ and filled with the Spirit who prays to God as Abba, Father in and through us. This new world - coming forth to us from the future - reveals our true identity as ones created for communion with God. As adopted children, we are freed to act with gratitude, to love God and neighbour as ones who have been forgiven of sin and given new life in Christ.”