Prayer
About this series:
The title of our teaching series throughout 2023 is The Kingdom Of God. The essential goal is to help people understand the Bible’s teaching on the kingdom of God and raise confidence in God’s plans for his kingdom’s expansion / multiplication.
Teaching about The Kingdom Of God is a great way to address life as a church community - this is how life together under God’s reign should look like. And to address our lives in the world - demonstrating to those in our sphere of influence the reality of God and what life looks like when God is your king.
The second part of our teaching on the Kingdom is called “Kingdom Priorities.” Here we look at some familiar biblical themes, and bring an emphasis on how they are a feature of God’s kingly reign.
About this talk:
Scripture: Matthew 6:5-13
This well known passage is situated in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7). While chapter 5 contains many of Jesus’ most well known teachings - for example, “Blessed are…,” “You are the salt of the earth… You are the light of the world” and “You have heard that it was said…But I tell you…” - chapter 6 records the most famous teaching on prayer in the entire Bible, what we know as The Lord’s Prayer.
The teaching on prayer is the middle of three sections on how to (and how not to) conduct oneself while engaging in various spiritual practices - giving, praying and fasting. In each of them Jesus denounces the way hypocrites practise them and announces the right way to practise them. A “hypocrite” (Gk hupokrites) was, positively, an actor in a theatre and, by extension, negatively, someone playing a part, not being authentic, the way they present themselves not being congruent with their internal self.
So Jesus says that prayer is a private matter for expressing trust in God, not a public matter for gaining status in the community. Nor should prayer be a mindless babbling when it is actually a because it is a matter of relationship with your Father. The true reward of prayer is knowing that your unseen Father has heard, not that the seen community has heard.
When Jesus says, “This, then, is how you should pray,” he is giving principles and a pattern for prayer rather than a formula. After beginning with an acknowledgement of the one to whom we pray and a request that his name be honoured, he continues, “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Keeping in mind what the Bible means by ‘kingdom,’ the desire of the one praying here is that the reign of God be increasingly expressed in our world, indeed that what happens in our world should increasingly be in line with the way it is perfectly done in heaven.
It’s not that the extension of God’s kingdom is restricted to our prayer, but that, as the whole Bible makes clear, prayer is, under the sovereignty of God, a key way God has decreed that his purposes should come about; a primary way that, by allowing us the privilege of partnering with him, his kingdom will come. Though there is much mystery in prayer, there is plenty of certainty which provides the basis for confidence in prayer, the primary one being that, “your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
While we are also to pray for Jesus to return and therefore for his kingdom to fully and finally come, the prayer here is for his reign to come in our world - “on earth as it is in heaven.” This is, of course, a major reason for prayer throughout the Bible - for God to be glorified and people blessed through his reign being increasingly experienced.
Given that some people will be feeling that they are failing in prayer, how everyone can grow in confidence in prayer?
How might a greater desire that, “Your kingdom come” raise our sights in prayer and lead us to grow in prayer? What might such prayer look like?
What are some of the obstacles people experience to praying in that way?
Audio only
