Preached at Clearnote Church, Indianapolis on March 12, 2023. From the "Beatitudes" sermon series. Songs courtesy of My Soul Among Lions .
Sermon Notes
Summary
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The sermon treats three petitions in Matthew 6:9–10—God’s name hallowed, his kingdom coming, and his will done on earth as in heaven—as a pattern that reshapes Christian desire rather than a magical formula. To hallow God’s name is to honor and revere him in conduct as well as speech. Because Christians bear his name, keeping their word, receiving providence gratefully, and refusing habitual grumbling affect how others regard him. God’s kingdom advances through gospel proclamation and the Spirit giving life, like yeast working through dough; it is not identical with political power and can flourish under persecution, poverty, or any civil order. Praying for the kingdom means asking first for one’s own sin to die, even when that change is painful. Asking that God’s will be done acknowledges the present gap between earth and heaven and calls believers into ongoing sanctification. As ambassadors, salt, light, and leaven, Christians should make homes and churches small pictures of heaven through truth, love, and care. The prayer is ultimately: change me, use me, and make me fruitful.
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So this morning, we're going to be moving on in our Jesus teaching on praying, from praying to God as our Father, which we covered last week, to the rest of the petitions concerning God's kingdom. My hope is this morning God will use his word to help us grow in our understanding of his kingdom. It's the sort of thing that's just a far off, like none of us would object to talk of or desire for God's kingdom. Jesus teaches us how to pray and what to desire regarding God's kingdom. And so my hope is that he'll help us grow in our understanding of his kingdom and really will help us live and negotiate the constant tensions that we face as Christians living on this earth. And really what I hope God does for me and for you is teaches us and helps us to lay aside our love for this world and to long to see his kingdom come and for our lives and for this earth to become like it is in heaven, which is what he teaches us to pray for.
Our text this morning is Matthew chapter 6, verses 9 to 15. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? Pray then in this way. Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. For if you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive your transgressions. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So as I've been preparing and thinking about the Lord's Prayer, I've been thinking about how to approach it. And last week was...
The way we settled on approaching it and the way I think about the Lord's Prayer is not so much as a great form of prayer or so much the words of it, but rather that these are the topics or the areas of our lives that we need to be considering and then bringing to the Lord. And so we're going to be approaching, as we started last week, we're going to be approaching the Lord's Prayer topically because our prayer life is connected. to our love for God and our knowledge of his character as well as his desires. And so in this prayer, we see how we should approach God, who he is, and what we should want. As we grow in those things, our ability and desire to pray for those things will also grow. And so as we work through the rest of the prayer, we're going to be working through it topically. If you'll notice at the very end of our section here, after the Lord's Prayer, Jesus teaches us to pray, and then he immediately transitions into forgiveness.
And he harkens back to what he said in the prayer. You know, we pray, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And then he says, if you forgive your transgressions, then your father will forgive yours. But if you don't forgive others, then your father will not forgive yours. And so this idea that the things that we pray about have real outworkings in our lives. And I think often when we talk about prayer or think about prayer, we think I should pray more. We think of it in terms of quantity or perhaps quality, but not in terms of substance. We think maybe I should pray better words or maybe I should pray more eloquently and not have awkward pauses or repetition and a bunch of ums and a bunch of silence. But I don't think those are the things that the Lord's concerned about. Our prayers will grow and our prayer life will grow as our spiritual life grows and as we desire the things that God desires. Because prayer is really the outworking of tension in our lives.
We pray, I've mentioned before, we pray when we don't have anything else to do or we don't think anything else will work. Many of us are young and we have lots of strength and we have lots of ideas, ideas for ourself, ideas for our future, ideas for other people. If they would just, if my kids would only, when we have those sorts of thoughts, we don't have any reason to pray because we think the problems are small and the solutions are simple. What you'll find over time is that your solutions, don't fit the problem because the problem is not what you thought it was. That the problems are actually much bigger and have to be worked on much more significantly. That a list of do this and do that and avoid these things and you'll have a happy life is insufficient for the troubles that we face in our lives. It's insufficient to deal with the temptations that our hearts are called away after. When we realize that or as we realize that, as we progressively realize that in our lives,
Prayer emerges as God's solution or God's prescription to life's troubles. But first we have to see the troubles. When you're young, you think the troubles are temporary. I'm old enough now that there are things on my body that hurt just regularly. And I didn't have to do anything particularly to make them hurt recently. I have things that hurt on my body from things I did 20 years ago. And they didn't hurt really. I mean, it hurt, you know, I rolled my ankle and tore up a bunch of tendons in my ankle. It didn't, I mean, it really hurt for a while, but you know, I just, I tied up my boot real tight and I just went back to work the next day and kind of hobbled around and that was that. But now, years later, and I'm only 40, man, there's something wrong with that foot. It doesn't, things are messed up inside of there. And I only use that story to illustrate the perspective or the approach to life that young people have, which is, it'll be fine.
It'll be fine. We'll get through it. What you realize as you get older is that if you don't work on it and work at it, it will not just go away. Not in the long run. The problems, the spiritual problems that we have don't just go away as we get older. We don't just naturally grow in maturity, in Christian maturity because time has gone by. We actually have to pursue it. We actually have to change. We have to become different in such a way that it's evident not just to us because we can lie to ourselves, but even evident to other people where they can say, man, I knew you when you were young and you were an idiot. But now I can see that you've grown. That doesn't happen just by time passing. That happens by that person, that young man or that young woman.
sorting out the difficulties and the tensions of life as they see them. They don't bury them, but rather they bring them to their Father in heaven. They ask to be changed. They ask to grow. And so as we approach the Lord's Prayer this morning, and particularly the first section where we're addressing the Lord's kingdom, I think first what we have to do is cultivate an appetite or a desire or an understanding for the Lord's kingdom to come. It's not sufficient for us to simply pray. Lord, your kingdom come. That has to, you know, that's like a, sometimes you go on websites, you know, and there's a little thing and it's a highlight. You know, if you click on it, there's going to be this dropdown tab. And so you click on it and all of a sudden, you know, it populates with all these other little tabs. And then you click on those and they populate, you know, there's all this content that was hidden under this little title. That's what this sort of prayer needs to be to us. When we pray, Lord, your kingdom come, it's not just, well, I hope it does, or I know it will, or...
I'll be glad when it happens. There's this dropdown that when our hearts touch on it, we go, oh, what am I praying for? What am I actually praying for? What does it actually mean for his kingdom to come? What would it look like? What's my part in it? How am I helping it come? How am I hindering it from coming? These are questions we should be asking ourselves as we consider this prayer. And you realize that if you're just like, oh, well, that's the Lord's work and he'll work it out. You haven't begun to think about what it means to ask for his kingdom to come or even to desire it. You say, that's not all that important to me. And so this morning we're going to talk about that. The first thing beyond addressing God as our Father who's seated in heaven that we come to in this prayer is this phrase, hallowed be your name. Hallowed's not a word we use right now, but hallowed simply means honored or glorified, revered. Hallowed be your name, respected, honored, glorified be your name, Father.
If God's kingdom is going to come, which is the next phrase, then part of his kingdom coming is that his name would be respected and honored and hallowed. And it's not the sort of thing that just happens over time. And it's not the sort of thing that we should just presume that we do. That because we're Christians, we're doing our part. Isaiah warns, and Jesus picks up this warning again in his gospels. But Isaiah warns first in chapter 29, verse 10, it says, This is not the sort of thing that God is commending and saying this is good. He's saying they say the right stuff, but their hearts are not in it. Their hearts are not close to me. And so hallowing God's name, respecting it or honoring it, or glorifying it, is a lot more than words. I'm sure you've talked to people before where you've, you know, words are an important thing. They're a very important thing. Because you've met people that say things, and you go, whatever, if they say, I'm going to take care of that, or I'll see to it that that's done, you have rest. You're like, I trust them. They're going to do it. And if there's a headache, they're going to take care of it.
But you've also met people that when they give their words, they say, yeah, yeah, no, no problem. I'll get that taken care of for you. And you're like, I don't trust that they're going to do it. And so words matter. That later example is an example of what Isaiah describes here. They pay lip service, but their heart's not into it. Their heart is not going to follow through on the thing that they've said. And that's a danger for us as Christians, that we would say the right words. You know, when you become a Christian, some of you grew up in the church, others of you, you know, perhaps not. I didn't. I didn't know how to talk like a Christian. I knew how to talk like a world. I knew how to cuss like a sailor. I knew how to tear people down. I knew how, I had plenty of education in how to talk, but I didn't know how Christians were supposed to talk. And so you get these looks when you're a new believer, you say something and people are like, oh, you know, he said that, didn't say that the right way.
He didn't say it with enough respect for God. He didn't say it with enough tenderness toward that person. He wasn't concerned enough that they might be offended. I didn't know how to talk. I just thought we say what we thought. And we mean what we say. What I learned was that a lot of Christians don't mean what they say. That they say, but they don't do. And we're all guilty of this to some extent. But it ought not to be the case that we're untrustworthy and that our words and our actions don't line up. If our words and our actions don't line up, then when we say these words, hallowed be your name, the question is, do you mean it? Do you mean it? Maybe it would help to talk about how we as God's people should do this work of hallowing God's name. What does it look like for us to do it? You know, if I'm saying this is a weakness of ours and something we need to be attentive to, you should be wondering, well, where do I fail at this and where can I work on it? It's a good question. One way to think about it is to ask,
What is people's perception of me as a Christian? Or do they even know that I'm a Christian? How am I representing Jesus Christ? And you're like, well, you're talking about behavior now. And I'm just like, yeah, but that title is on you. You bear God's name. If you're a Christian out in society and among your brothers, what is your reputation? What do people think of when they think of you? Are you the kind of person that they say, he's going to take care of it. I can count on her. Or are they like, Well, we'll see. You know, we all have this sense of like, we have like, we think of ourselves and then we have some sense of like, I don't know that everyone else thinks exactly the same things about me. They should, but they don't. We have this sense that some, maybe we're not quite as trustworthy in other people's eyes as we are in our own. And that's the thing I'm asking you to dig into and to think about. How do you believe, honestly, other people perceive you or think of you? Do they think, when they think of Dave, I was sorry, what do they think?
What is their perception? What is their thought? He'll take care of it or he won't. Because whether I'm going to take care of it or not, whether I'm going to see to it, whether I'm going to fix the problem or do the task or whatever it is that's set before me, tells that person and those who are watching something about what I believe about God, about whether I respect him and whether my words and his words matter. So what do people think of you? Do you have a good reputation? Do they say, hey, that guy does what he says he's going to do. That's surprising. Or do they say, man, he's just like all the rest of those young men. She's just like all the rest of those young ladies. What's your reputation? Here's another one. Are you thankful to God when hard things come into your life? You remember when Job lost everything and the only thing he had left was his wife and his wife said, you know what you should do? You should just curse God and die. And he says to her this thing.
that's just amazing and helpful. He says, shall we accept good things from the Lord and not adversity? Shall we indeed accept good from God but not accept adversity? How you respond to adversity and hardship and trials says a lot about whether or not you honor God in his name, whether or not you'll accept hardship from him or whether you're only in it for the good stuff. And as soon as the hard comes or as soon as the no comes or as soon as the delay happens, Your instant response is to grumble and to complain and to say, that's not right. God didn't do what he should have done. You remember me saying in weeks gone by that if we sit as God's judge and we do these sorts of things, it will lead to us never praying because we've convinced ourselves that he doesn't answer prayer. Do you only accept good from God and grumble and complain when difficulty comes? Do you think it's unfair that God would allow difficulty into your life? Do you think you're the only one who has difficulty?
How often is that the thought that we have? No one understands my struggles and my troubles. No one understands my past. No one understands my marriage. No one understands my kids. No one understands my finances. No one understands. No one understands. I'm all alone and it's not fair. And the good things that I want and really the good things I deserve, God's not giving them to me. So if you grumble and you complain and you turn around and say, well, when I pray, I'm going to pray that his name be hallowed. I'd just hold the mirror up and say, when you have opportunity to glorify him and to thank him for his work and his will in your life, do you do it? And we also be sitting here thinking, no, I don't do it the way I should. I don't do it the way I should. I know this is a problem because I look at myself in the mirror every day and I can look and see all of the good things that I have in my life.
that come to me from the hand of God. They don't make me happy though. The list of the things I don't have or that I want, that's the thing that has my heart. That's the thing that I struggle with. And I don't praise God for those answers, even because the answer is no, I'm not thankful. And yet I want his kingdom to come. And so I live in this tension, you know, you live in this tension where you're like, it's not as though I have nothing good from the Lord. My life, my hands are full of good things from God. They really are. But not everything is perfect. After all, it's not heaven yet, you know? And I am a sinner. So do I have any gratitude for God that can overcome the adversity that I face in this life or not? If the answer is no, I don't, then be careful that you're not being a hypocrite, saying one thing with your mouth, but believing something else and living something else in your heart, in your life. Then Jesus teaches us to pray these words.
That your kingdom would come. That we would ask God for his kingdom to come. That means that we desire that his kingdom would come. Have you considered what it would mean if God's kingdom were to come? What would happen if God's kingdom came? Would life be the same? What would change? How much would it change? How happy would you be with the change? Another way of asking the question is, or getting at this issue, is to say at some point you're going to die. And if you're a Christian, you're going to go to heaven. You've never been there. You don't even have a good idea of what it's going to be like. And I think it's one of God's kindnesses that he keeps back some of the glories and some of the good things that are coming, partly because I don't think we'd understand it right now. And partly because it would make living in this world harder. I think that's what Paul understood when he says, you know, for to live is Christ and to die is gain. As for me, I don't know which to prefer. I think Paul had some understanding of what was to come. And he was like, you know what? I don't know that I want to be here anymore. And that would make us way less effective.
at building God's kingdom in this world if we were so caught up in the good things that were going to come. And so I actually think it's God's kindness that we don't know in great detail what glory will be like and what heaven will be like. The danger that comes along with it is that we will love this world and we would be foolish to accuse God of being unwise in the way that he deals with us. But you do recognize that when his kingdom comes and when we pray for it, it's going to be very similar to what it's like living in heaven. There'll be perfection. There'll be no more sins. There'll be no sorrows. There'll be no more trials. There'll be no more death. We will be different. How different do you think you'll be when you don't have any sin left in you? Can you even imagine? Like when you see your sins in your life, what your perspective should be is at some point, all of the process, you should say, when I get to heaven, when I arrive in his kingdom,
all of this is gone. It's gone. And I don't know what will be left, but whatever's left will have been God's doing and it will be glorious. And I want it to go away. That's what it means to want his kingdom to come and to pray for it is that not just that the world would change, though obviously the world will have to change, but that you will have to change a lot, not just a little. Could you imagine someone coming to you and admonishing you or correcting you and you responding without sin and you saying, Praise God and thank you. You love my soul. Praise God. And not have it just be like words or a hard thing to say, but a heartfelt, honest gratitude. Wouldn't that be sweet? Won't it be sweet when you get to heaven and you won't have to be admonished anymore? You'll be done with that part. But if you want his kingdom to come in this world, then there's a lot of changing that has to take place. Change in the world. Change in us.
How does his kingdom come? If we pray, your kingdom come, what should we expect? Or is it sort of something that just kind of is going to drop down out of heaven? Or is there some sort of a game plan? I'll tell you what the game plan is, okay? Here's the game plan. The proclamation of the gospel and the work of the Holy Spirit, making people alive through it. That's how his kingdom is going to come. That's how his kingdom is going to come. That's how it is coming. When Jesus sent his disciples out, to go to the ends of the earth, to baptize and to teach. He was commissioning them to build and grow his kingdom. And God's been faithful to attend to the preaching of his word with the power of his spirit and cause his kingdom to grow. I think much of the difficulty we have today is that we think that the kingdom of God is somehow rolled up in and synonymous with the kingdom of this world. That actually this world is going to
become the kingdom of God. And it's not. Jesus told us in John, he said, my kingdom is not of this world. If it were, we would have come with swords and we would have come with power and we would have come with might. And so for his kingdom to come, it's like yeast. I don't remember where I was reading this recently, but they were talking about the work of a Christian and they said, the work of a Christian. And the work of the kingdom growing is like yeast being in a lump of dough, that it spreads very slowly over time throughout the whole thing, you know? If you've ever made risen bread or bread that rises, you know, you put all the ingredients together. You don't put the yeast in yet. You put it all together and eventually you put the yeast in the warm water and you activate it. And then you put it in the dough and you work it in and then you just leave it. You just let it sit. And you start with this lump of dough that you know is like the size of my fist. And then you come back in a few hours and what's happened?
Like that little tiny bit of yeast you put in there. It was just a big lump of dough. And then you put this little, you know, half a teaspoon of yeast in there. And all of a sudden it's worked its way through and grown the whole thing. That's how God's kingdom comes in this world. And it comes through the preaching of the word. And it comes through the quickening of the Holy Spirit. The problem is too often we conflate the kingdom of this world and God's kingdom. And if we conflate those two things, then the way that his kingdom is going to come changes. And oftentimes the way it changes is that we move to the mechanics of this world. How do you bring about change in society? You go to how it's governed and you start turning the dials and pulling the levers. You start dealing with politics, largely. You go to the halls of power and you try to adjust and affect change there. And I think it's a great failure that Christians would take and conflate those two things and think that working on...
The kingdom of this world is how you will bring the kingdom of heaven to earth. It is not. They're not the same. And they will not come about the same way. This is not to say that it's inappropriate in every instance for Christians to be involved in the kingdom of this world and be engaged in it. That's not actually what I'm saying. I didn't say that. But I am saying that they are not the same. And that if you have to pick between the two, that you're going to care about, that you're going to give yourself to, that you're going to desire and pray, would you change this, Lord? It ought to be that his kingdom would come. Here's the thing, and it's hard for us to understand. God's kingdom can come in any political environment. Any political environment. If you look at the early church and how the church grew from the apostles on through to, you know, the first three or four centuries, up till Constance and Opal.
The kingdom of God came and spread and grew. And what was life like then for Christians? Awful persecution, terrible oppression, and God's kingdom grew. None of us have lived in anything like that. Unless you grew up in another country, you've not lived in anything like that. And yet God's kingdom was coming and was growing while the kingdoms of the world at that time were trying to snuff it out. And so we do... A lot of harm when we conflate these two things and act like to pursue one is to pursue the other. They are not the same. They're not brought about in the same way. And one of them is eternal while the other is temporal and will go away. If you think, well, it's easier for the kingdom to grow when things in the world are peaceful, I say, perhaps. Though history doesn't exactly bear that out for you. God's kingdom and his people and the proclamation of his word and the power of his Holy Spirit go on.
building his kingdom in whatever environment they find themselves in. And so when we pray that his kingdom would come, we have to realize that it's a spiritual kingdom that's coming, that it's a spiritual kingdom that's being established, that it's a spiritual kingdom that's growing, and that the things that go on in our government or surrounding us in our country are not as big of a hindrance to this happening as we might want to make them out to be. It turns out that God's kingdom can grow if capitalism dies. It turns out that God's kingdom can grow if we all lose our money and become poor, like really poor. Not like poor like we are now, but poor like really poor. That God's kingdom can still grow and does still grow. And in fact, grows, I think, more freely where the people have realized that there actually is a great divide between the kingdoms of this world and the kingdom of heaven. Some of the most encouraging Christians you'll ever talk to will be the people who have come from nothing, who've come from a place where there's nothing.
And they've just been like, yeah, we don't have any. I mean, being a Christian doesn't have anything to do with having an easy life, a comfortable life, or any money. That's not what being a Christian has to do with. We love God in spite of all those, whether we have him or don't have him or whatever. We're Christians. We love his word. Those are the things we care about. If God's planted us in communist China, then so be it. We're in communist China, but we love God, and we're building his kingdom. And so when we pray that his kingdom would come, we really do have to divorce it from so much of the pressure that it faces to be yoked together with political commitments. They're not the same thing. They're not the same thing. And we could talk a long time about politics and Christians and how they should be involved in it, whether they should be involved in it, and all that sort of stuff. And I'm game for it. But it's all subordinate. It doesn't matter compared to the kingdom of God coming. And that's what Jesus teaches us to pray for.
is that his kingdom would come and whoever gets elected and whatever pressures we face as a result of it, the coming of his kingdom is not actually thwarted. Unless, of course, we yoke the two of them together and then we've got a real problem and sleepless nights. And so, yes, the kingdom coming is not the same as our political environment changing for the better. Our world would need to change a lot. Our world would need to become as heaven is for his kingdom to come and to be complete. And so I don't know that we're doing ourselves a great favor by spending a bunch of time focusing over there. Instead, I think we should ask ourselves, what does it mean for me for God's kingdom to come? What is required of me personally? Not of Congress or the president or the judges, but of me. How do I have to change? What do I have to do to be a more faithful citizen of the kingdom of God? What do I need to build so that there's something left behind for my kids and grandkids?
What does my life need to be about? What do I have to say yes to and what do I have to say no to? Where do I have to grow? The idea of the kingdom of heaven dropping down out of heaven is a really attractive idea because it removes all of the pressure from us. We don't have to think about it anymore because it's just going to happen. Some miraculous, you know, big, you know, wind of revival is going to come through and just change us all real quick. Now, God could do that. He really could do that. And he has done things. amounting to that at times throughout history occasionally. But the vast majority of his kingdom coming has come on the back of his bride, the church, loving the word, preaching the truth, and his spirit making it real to the people, people changing. Have you ever been around people who talk about the before and after of their Christian, like their life before I was a Christian and now after? And they're encouraging stories.
They really stir you up and spur you on because you're like, wow, look what God did. There's another side to those stories, having one myself. And it's that those stories are excruciating to go through. For the person who's telling you the story, for them to have gone through it, there is an amount of pain and hardship involved in those stories that you can't imagine unless you've gone through them. And the reason we're all encouraged by it, and the reason that the person is glad to tell the story is because they've come out the other side of it and seen God's kindness. but they are no longer the person that they used to be, right? That's my testimony. Some of you guys that have had these similar stories, James, it's like, can you believe what God did? Like, I mean, it's incredible. And it was so stinking hard and painful, and how many tears? Because what happens in those stories is that God gets a hold of the person or their life and their heart, and all of a sudden, it's time for open-heart surgery with no anesthesia. It hurts. It's so incredibly difficult.
But in the end, the person is changed and grown because of the work that God's done in them. And they praise God for it. And his kingdom in them has been established and is now a seed growing. Now, if I hadn't given that last explanation of what it's actually like to go through that, if I asked you, do you want to have that story, that before and after, we'd all say, yes. But now that I've said, actually, having that story means a lot of hurt and a lot of change, a lot of relational. and tensions and getting rid of old people and bringing in new people. And that's, do you want that? All of a sudden we're like, well, maybe there's another way, a less painful way, a less severe way. And so I ask you, do you want God's kingdom to come? Do you want to be a part of it? Will you sign up for that part of the work and ask God to do that? Because that's what you're asking when you pray, your kingdom come. You're saying, will you change me and make me more like Jesus? And I think we don't have a clue what we're asking for when we say that.
Like how much of us has to die and how different we have to become. Paul went through it. What did he say about his life before Christ? All those things, I consider them rubbish, dung, garbage, trash, so that I might gain Christ. If you've been through something like that in your own life and you've had God's kingdom established in your heart in some painful, miraculous type of way, you understand it was very difficult, very hard, and very good. And so when we ask God for his kingdom to come, this is what we're asking for. You've probably heard people talk about praying for patience. Have you ever heard someone warn you about praying for patience? Don't pray for patience. The way God will teach you patience is by giving you a bunch of opportunities to exercise patience. You should pray for patience. And when life is hard, you should realize God's answering your prayer for patience. And when you pray for his kingdom to come, and then you feel this burning.
fire around you, pushing you to change, you should realize he's answering your prayer. Will you answer his call? Or will you pour water on it and say, no, no, no, Lord, I didn't mean like that. I wanted them to change. And finally, excuse me, Jesus teaches us to pray that and to desire that the Lord's will, his father's will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Now we do know that in time, just like the previous two petitions, this will happen. It is happening. And that we or any other man's rebellion can't actually thwart this. His kingdom is coming and will continue to come. And the kingdoms of the earth will take their stand against the Lord and his Christ, right? Psalm 2. And the God of heaven will laugh at them. So these things will happen. And in that sense, it may seem a little strange to pray for them because you're like, well, it is already happening. It is happening.
It's going to happen. We can't stop what God's doing. He's already set this in motion and he's at work doing it. So like, I don't know, why are we, I mean, that's a comfort to me. And I want it to be a comfort to you, but I don't want it to be the sort of thing that you rest in. And you go, well, it's already happening and I don't have any part in it. I don't have to do anything or I'm not that important. You remember at the beginning, I talked about us having to live in this tension of, you know, what we should be and yet what we are.
And it's just tiring. To the extent that you know yourself, as you grow on in your Christian life, you will actually become less and less pleased with yourself and more and more pleased with God. Because you realize that if there's anything good in you, you didn't put it there. You'll see the things that you've put there. And then you'll see the mercy of God changing those things out. And so you become less satisfied with yourself and more satisfied with God and his will. And this is a tension that we live in. And so when we pray for his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, it's to acknowledge that there is a great chasm between earth and heaven and the way things happen. In God's wisdom, he's not chosen for this earth to be like it is in heaven yet. And so we live in this tension where sin is paid for and death is conquered, but it's not complete yet. We are still sinners and death is still coming.
So we live in this tension and we say, well, it'll all be better when I get to heaven. I don't have to worry about it. A lot of the church today has decided that really all we need to do with people is get them to become Christians, to get them to profess faith, to pray the prayer or to be baptized or whatever the line is that they have that they say, once you get over this line, there's nothing more to worry about. The question then remains for those people, what are they supposed to do with the rest of their lives? Is there anything more to being a Christian than becoming a Christian? Is there any yeast put into the loaf that's supposed to permeate and change and grow? Or are we just living our lives in this world sort of in a holding tank or in line for the roller coaster just waiting for our turn with nothing to do except slowly walk toward our reward? No. In this life, after you become a Christian,
Your whole life has to change. Your desires have to change. Because you realize that the way things will be are not the way that things are. Not in this world and not inside of you. And so you spend the rest of your life working out that discrepancy. Trying to sort out how worldly you are. How earthly you are. Trying to figure out what you desire and why. Who you'll listen to. Who you'll follow. what you want to be said about you when you die, what you want to leave behind when you're gone. Jonathan Edwards was a pastor during the first great awakening here in America. He was very young when he went into the ministry, late teens, early twenties. And when he was in his early twenties, he wrote his resolutions and there's about a hundred of them. And one of them, actually a number of them got at this same point, but one of them was that I should live in such a way that if I were to die and stand before the Lord,
that I'd have nothing to be ashamed of. That if I were to die tomorrow, if I were to die tonight, if my death was imminent, even if I didn't know it was imminent, that I would live in such a way that I would not be ashamed when I stood before my Lord. And so that was his way of articulating or acknowledging and committing himself to growth toward heaven and away from earth. You ever talk to somebody, you see something going on. Maybe you see a lesbian couple out somewhere and you think, that's not right. And then you think, But if I go say something to them, it's just going to go poorly. They're just going to get angry. It's going to be, you know, it's just bad. Well, in that moment, what you're acknowledging is there's this great chasm between how things will be in heaven and how things are on earth. You're also deciding whether or not you're going to pull toward heaven or sink your roots deeper into earth. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to go to somebody? Like if the Lord's will is being
more and more done on earth as it is in heaven, shouldn't we have some expectation that we would be able to go and address the problem of sin as it manifests itself and that it would be received well? But I don't know that any of us have faith for that. I think we write ourselves a pass and say, you know what, it's just hopeless. They're not going to listen. That'll be offensive. I'll lose my job. I'll get in trouble. I wouldn't want to say that. Well, then it stands to reason that I'd ask you, well, why do you pray that the Lord's will be done on earth as it is in heaven if...
You never find an application where you can and do say something. In heaven, we're not going to want that. That's sin. And in heaven, there's not going to be any of this. If we want his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven, we should realize that we're his ambassadors. We're salt. We're light. We're the mouthpiece. We're the yeast, the active agent, the ones who affect the change through the power of the Holy Spirit. first in ourselves and then in those around us. And so when we pray, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we're essentially signing ourselves up and saying, what is it that I should do and say and believe and be so that I can do my part to make earth just a little bit more like heaven? You see the little picture of this. If you've ever gone into somebody's house and you go into their house, you can kind of tell what kind of house it is. I don't mean by the decorations or the...
cleanliness per se, but I just mean like, you can tell if it's a house where people love each other or it's a house where it's just a locker room or it's like, you can just tell. And there's some houses you go into and you go, this house is different. Like, there's just something about it. I don't know, the marks on the walls or the, you know, the smell of the dinner or whatever it is. You're like, there's love in this house. It's obvious these people care. They care about each other and they have me here, so they care about me too. And so you say, There's something special about this house. And you really enjoy it. And you find yourself wanting to go back over to their house again and enjoying your time and finding reasons to spend time with them. What's going on? What's going on is you're seeing some little dim light of heaven in their house. That's what you're seeing. You're seeing some little small fulfillment of this prayer. That your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. That we as his people would do things like that and show...
those around us, one another, what's to come. And it's really sweet when we're the recipients of it. It's also really sweet when we're the ones who offer it to others. And so when we say, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we are signing up and saying, how can I, how can we pursue this, do this in our lives? I've made a point of applying each of these phrases. I've made a point of applying each of these petitions to us personally. It isn't because personally is the only application, but rather because it's the first application. If we won't apply these things and understand them for ourselves, we won't be any good at helping others to understand them as well because we'll be talking about something instead of showing them. This is what I'm talking about right here. Come with me or come to my house or come to my church or be with us.
And you'll see these things. And there's a world of difference between saying, you should go over there and you should come over here. Go over there and experience it versus come over here and experience. Come with us to experience it, to see the kingdom of God, to see people who love each other. I was just reading last night in a book about the early church, the patristic era and what the, this is the book you want me to read. So I read. about this letter. And they said that one of the things that was notable about the Christians in the first and second centuries, during this time of great persecution, one of the things that was most notable about them was their love for each other. Because they lived in a time of the Greco-Roman world, the empire at that time, the way they treated other people was not good. There was a class system and they were not friendly, nice people. It was just, they just bite.
bit and devoured one another. They were just awful. There was a note in there I've read before where there was a record of a father saying to his wife, because he had to go away on a journey and she was going to have the baby, he said, you know, if you have a baby and if it's a boy, keep it, and if it's a girl, just put it out on the hill. And that was not a strange or uncommon practice. In fact, the Christians were the ones who would come and take those babies in and care for them. And so this community of people These Christians who faced this awful persecution and who were very poor had this commitment to something outside of this life. And one of the things that the persecutors often noted about the Christians as they were being thrown to the beasts or persecuted and tortured was their peace and their contentment and their willingness to die even.
That they were willing to go to heaven, that they were willing to leave this world, that they understood that this place was not their home and that they needed to be faithful and wanted to be faithful to their God, to their Father. And that they were willing to suffer to that end and that that was all right. And so I want us to take these petitions and I want us to apply them to ourselves personally, realizing that I'm not asking anything of you that hasn't been incumbent on every Christian throughout all time. The things I'm saying to you are not because I think you're particularly bad at it.
This has always been the thing that Christians have needed to do, to engage in life as Christians and to pray that God would help them to do it. I was reading in that book about another guy who prayed and he was going to Rome and he was going to be killed. He was going to be a martyr. And the Christians he knew in Rome could have gotten him out of jail because of their connections. And so he sent a letter ahead saying, don't do that. Don't do that. Instead, Pray that I'll be faithful because I'm afraid that my faith will falter when the time comes. So pray that I'll be faithful to the end. There was an understanding of their personal responsibility and obligation and participation in the coming of God's kingdom, in the hallowing of his name and in of his will being done on earth. That same man when he was, I think it was him, maybe it was a different guy, said that when he was thrown to the beast to be devoured by these people, he said, when I'm in the presence of the beast, then I'm in the presence of God.
And they will be my ushers into the heavenly kingdom. This is how they thought about these things. This is how Christians viewed their life in this world. And it's so different than we do. And so I want us to see that the way we see things and the way we think about our lives, we should not presume that it's biblical just because it's our thought and we're Christians. Instead, we should seek to... Pray like Jesus teaches us to pray and to understand what it is we're asking for. Hallowed be your name. Help me to respect and honor your name and to accept both good and evil from your hand. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Change me. That's what this prayer amounts to. Change me and make me a Christian. Help me to live more and more like a Christian. Help the fleshly part of me die and get out of the way so that I can be more like Jesus.
That's what this prayer amounts to in terms of the practical application of it. I need to change a lot. And you're asking God to change you and to use you and to make you fruitful. Let's pray.