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Dallas: And then some out of the Sermon on the Mount. On last Sunday we came to the point where we were discussing how we are to go out and reach out and be of help to others. And the final point that I came to was the role of prayer in this helping relationship. We want to spend the day today talking about prayer in the Kingdom of God. You see, prayer is so important because it’s the only protection we have against our finitude and our ignorance and even our malice in dealing with other people. We want things for other people, and very often certainly we think they’re good for them, but very often we don’t know what’s good for them. We really don’t, and we may be able to spout a scripture or two or three or fifteen or cite this tradition or that or the other, but in the last analysis every person’s soul is in the hands of God. That’s why it’s so important to talk about prayer.
In Luke 11 we have a concentrated series of lessons about prayer. I’d like to read the first thirteen verses together, and I trust you will have various versions before you, and perhaps we can compare alternative readings if that is important to do as we go through the lesson today. Rainier, the lessons are over there if you could get them on.
And it came to pass that as he was praying in a certain place, when he had ceased, one of his disciples said, Lord, teach us to pray. Now if you want to know how to do something, you go find the person who knows how to do it, one who is doing it. Jesus was a master of prayer. He prayed early and late and in between. He prayed always, he prayed all night, he prayed for days. He prayed when he was tired, and he prayed when he was fresh. He prayed, he prayed, and as he was praying, his disciples were struck with the fact that they needed to learn how to do something.
Something is something we learn how to do, right? It isn’t something that we automatically know how to do, it’s something we learn how to do. And that’s the first step in progress in prayer, is you sit yourself down and you tell yourself, you set yourself down I guess, and you tell yourself, I don’t know how to pray. I must learn how to pray.
Now what do we do ordinarily? Well we handle it the same way we do with little things like getting along with people. We think you ought to know how to get along with people automatically. So you don’t have to learn how to do that. So we stagger through life, running into this person and into that and having that crash and this disaster, and we wonder, why can’t I get along well with people? Well it’s very simple, it’s something you have to learn how to do, if you didn’t learn how to do it, you don’t know how to do it.
It’s the same way with praying. Many people are by praying, just like they are with good personal relations. They think good personal relations is something like lightning. It just strikes here and there, bang, bang, bang, you know, and so they go through life looking deeply into the eyes of this person or that one and saying, is lightning going to strike here? Am I going to find a friend? And they go through life also saying, well, is prayer going to hit me now so that I can pray? It isn’t that kind of thing, it is something which we must learn how to do, and the disciples were struck with this when they watched Jesus and listened to Jesus pray.
I’m sure there must have been something of a mixture of exasperation and desire, maybe a little despair, when they said, Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us to pray. We need to know how to pray. You feel that need, the need of learning how to pray, of enrolling in this school, of making some kind of progress from course to course until, if you don’t get a diploma, at least you develop some abilities in praying. Do you know of anyone who knows how to pray? Do you know of anyone whom you would expect an answer to come if they asked something of God? Katherine Marshall, wife of Peter Marshall, a rather famous preacher and chaplain in the Senate for many years, said that when he had his first heart attack, she wanted one thing. She wanted someone who knew how to pray, and she didn’t know anyone who knew how to pray. How many people know how to pray? So you can see why these disciples would have said that.
Now, they had seen this man in action not only on his knees with his eyes closed or however it was he prayed, whether standing on his head or whatever else, but the important thing was they realized that when he prayed, he got through to God. They needed to know how to do that.
Now Jesus responds to the request by giving a model prayer, and we want to return later and talk about this some, but for the time being, I just want to proceed all the way on through now to the 13th verse and read what he said in response to the request of teaching how to pray, because he didn’t just give them how to pray, well, say these words. He gave some very profound teachings here about the context of prayer.
And he said unto them, we’re in the 11th chapter of the Gospel of Luke. And he said unto them, when you pray, say, our Father, which art in heaven, what is the first word? Our. You might circle that word because that’s very important. Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in heaven so on earth, as in heaven so on earth. Give us day by day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone that is indebted to us. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Have you noticed that there’s not a single first person singular pronoun in that entire prayer? There’s not a single one.
And he said unto them, the Matthew version, as you know, goes on, for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.
But now, in the Luke version, he stops after the request to deliver us from evil and begins to teach in a different way. He was teaching now, he was saying, these are the sorts of things that you should pray for. This should be in the content of your prayer. Now he’s beginning to teach on a different type of point.
He says, which of you shall have a friend and shall go to him at midnight? Now midnight, of course, in that land at that time, people weren’t, you know, out coming home from the movies or whatever at midnight. They were asleep, and they’d been asleep for several hours. At midnight, he comes to you and says, friend, lend me three loaves, three loaves of bread, for my friend is in a journey, and he’s come to me, and I have nothing to set before.
Now the point of the illustration is its triviality. It’s its triviality. You mustn’t miss that point. The point of the illustration is its triviality. I mean, he could have found, you know, vital, vital things, like someone’s dying, and I’ve got to have something to help them with, but what does he need? Loaves of bread. Why couldn’t the guy just go to bed and sleep and get up in the morning and have breakfast? The point of the illustration is its triviality, and will you please mark that, okay? It’s its triviality. The greatness of God is displayed more than anywhere else in the small corners of life.
Three loaves of bread for a man on a journey at midnight, and this neighbor comes over and wakes his friend up and says, give me some bread. Now the friend will say, he’s not going to answer, just write off the seventh verse, trouble me not, the door is now shut. Now, shutting the door was a rather large operation, do you understand why? It wasn’t like shutting a door for us, right? Shutting a door was a matter of setting things in place, perhaps bolting it or putting a large beam across it, fixing it in place. In other words, it was something you had to get up and spend a little while doing and undoing. The door is shut, and my children are with me in bed. I don’t want to wake them up and get them all upset and have to get them back down. I cannot rise and give thee.
So not only is it a trivial request, this trivial request is causing the man some trouble. Now Jesus says, he just reports here a commonplace, a fact. Though he will not rise and give him, because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity, he will rise and give him as many as he needs. How does Phillips read that verse some more, the eighth verse? Any you’ve got, anything you’ve got. Just have a different version. But I tell you this, though he won’t do it as a friend, if you keep an eye on him, he will get up and give you everything you want, just because of your persistence.
What is importunity? Well, it’s a kind of gentle bugging. That’s what that is, a persistent, gentle bugging, so that you have to choose finally between doing something that you wouldn’t like to see yourself do, like pour hot water on his head or something out the window, or get up and give him what he wants. Get up and give him what he wants.
Now Jesus uses this illustration as a kind of intuitive basis for the following remarks. And I say unto you, ask, and it shall be given to you, seek, and ye shall find, knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? Or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent, reptile? Or if he ask for an egg, will he hand him a scorpion?
Jesus is getting at this principle of the give that is in the universe. There’s give in the universe. He goes at it one way, he goes at it another way, and now he says, he caps it off with the theology. If ye then, being evil, you honoree mollies, you know, I’ve seen mean people, mean people, who still would give. If ye then, being honoree, small-minded, tight-fisted, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?
Now that is the highest theology in the Bible, in that verse. And it tells us that at the center of the universe there is a person who is indeed more than a person, but he is a person. And that it is the most outstanding characteristic of this being that he gives when he is asked. That he gives when he is asked.
Now I go over that very slowly. I want us to ponder that, think about it, because most of our troubles in religion and in life come because we don’t believe that. We don’t believe that, and to the contrary, we believe that if we want something, we had better go get a big stick and knock it out of the universe somewhere and jar it loose so we can grab it. That’s where our troubles come from.
Humans come wars. Where do wars come from? James tells us, doesn’t he? They come from a war which is inside, a war of desires which are unsubordinated to what is good for everyone and what is in honor for God. There’s a war inside. War doesn’t start outside, it starts inside. It starts with people who do not believe that there is a Heavenly Father who gives when he is asked. They may believe a part of that, and they may think, well, if you just hold your mouth quite right, or if you hold the right doctrines, or if you, if you, if you, if you, if you, you might get something out of it. But the truth about him is that he simply gives. He is not small, he is not mean, he loves to give. He loves to give, he loves to forgive. That’s the nature of God. He loves to give to all kinds of people, short, tall, thin, fat, black, brown, white, sick, well, whatever he loves to give.
And it is the limitations upon that faith which accounts for the fact that many people find themselves wandering loose in a jungle with no one to care for them. They will not accept that giving principle which is at the heart of the universe.
Now if you’ll look at your sheets, I want to go over some things rather slowly and methodically. First of all, I’ve had, I’ve written out a statement of what prayer is, because I find that very often there’s some problem with understanding what prayer is, and I’ve described it here as an expression through conscious act or thought of thought or speech to that person who is at the controls of the universe of an attitude of love, worship, or praise or of a request for what is in the interest of the kingdom but beyond our power. Now that is kingdom praying. That is praying within the kingship of God, within the kingdom of God.
Praying is not pleasant fellowship. It isn’t singing songs, though it might be related to that in certain ways. It isn’t merely thinking nice thoughts or thinking about someone or being concerned about someone. It isn’t any of those things. Prayer is a definite conscious act of thought or speech. It is something which you do. It is not something which happens to you. It is addressed to God. The 11th chapter of Hebrews says, He that cometh to God must believe that he is and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him. The 65th Psalm addresses God simply as the one who hears prayer and says, O thou that hearest prayer unto thee shall all flesh come. It is addressed to this giving personal center of the universe.
Now I’m sure that a lot of people in this room even have trouble with that. And I’m sure that many people avoid such things as prayer meetings because basically they can’t see any point in coming in here and bowing your head and closing your eyes and talking to the benches. And that leaves the person feeling very uncomfortable. But the reason why I go over these things is because I hope to help make them explicit so that a person can honestly say, you know, I just really can’t quite take that and work on that problem as it is instead of sort of skating along and saying the words at the right time or, you know, kind of like people who don’t have, don’t know which forks to use and they’re in a nice luncheon and so they watch the person cross the table to see when he picks up which fork to use for what purpose. And I think we do that a lot in religion too, maybe in prayer we sort of see when everyone else is closing their eyes and what tone they’re using and so we close our eyes and try to speak in just that tone of voice and so we kind of get a little social thing going there. And we never do probe then into the deep issues of, well, what am I doing here? That question comes up maybe we sort of jam it down in some corner somewhere.
But the truth is you cannot pray unless you believe that there is a God who has power over the things you’re concerned with and who hears you and who will respond to you. See this was the astounding thing about Jesus as he really believed that. He knew it. He was in touch with it and that’s what made it easy to pray. See when your faith is right, the easiest most natural thing in this world to do is to pray. You know that? That’s right. It’s the easiest most natural thing to do in this world is to pray.
When your faith is not right, it’s impossible to pray except out of some kind of forced desperation. We often try to force prayer, you know. We’ll say now here is something that’s needed and we’ve heard prayer works and so let’s all get together and really lay it in there. And ordinarily these things don’t work out well. Sometimes there are breakthroughs and people get some experience to go on and then they can really move. But ordinarily they don’t work out well. And the reason they don’t work out well is mainly because the people involved keep having the sneaking suspicion that there’s something better they could be doing. And you know what? They’re dead right. They’re dead right. And I could go into some things that would be better for them.
But you know very often we’re hindered from saying it is now time for me to get up and go do something better because after all what’s more religious and holy than praying? But there’s a time not to pray. For example, if a person has clearly set themselves on a principle against God and they have offended some person, let us say, and they know that there’s some wrong there and it needs to be straightened out, possibly one could pray about that as a prelude to getting up and straightening it out. But there’s no point in praying about the missionaries and the need for guidance for the government officials or whatever because there is something wrong in the heart. And the scripture says, it’s a limit that has to be taken with limitations, but it says if I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me. Now that doesn’t just mean if I do anything wrong he won’t hear me. It means if I’ve got my heart set on it, if I’ve got my heart set on it, very clear choice in rebellion against something that is obviously right, obviously right, then I better take care of that before I go on to the prayer meeting. Psalm 66, 18.
So there are times to do other things. Now don’t go out and accept the theology of the blind man or the ex-blind man in the ninth half chapter of John. He said, we know that God doesn’t hear sinners. Well, if God didn’t hear sinners, we’d be in a bad way, wouldn’t we? We’d be in a very bad way. God does hear sinners. But on the other hand, people who are in rebellion against him cannot make a business out of praying in the way that they ought and the way they should if they want to have the kind of life before God and before man and before themselves that they want and need.
So it isn’t always time to pray, and we must have fixed in our hearts the fact that how we pray, the effectiveness of which we pray, is going to depend upon how clear our minds are both in understanding what God is like and in choosing his way.
You know, when those people came together in the upper room in the first chapter of the book of Acts, I spent days in that room praying. And sometimes I’ve heard people say, oh, that’s what we need to do. That’s what we need to do. We just need to get a room and get together and just pray for ten days. They don’t usually. I’ve never seen a group that really was ready for that. I’ve never seen a group that was really ready for that. And if people try that, they get all kinds of spiritual indigestion, all kinds of really bad things happen. They are not ready for that. Those people were ready for that. They had been getting ready for it for about three years, and they had really been put through all kinds of meat grinders and everything else in the process of getting their minds in a shape where they could come into that room with one another and pray together for that length of time. You can bet there wasn’t one who thought, you know, I’ve got something better to do than this. There wasn’t a one, I’m sure, who that thought even came through their minds, because they knew where they were. They had been prepared for that experience.
Now praying is like fasting and other spiritual disciplines. You have to understand that there is an order in these things, and that if you cross up that order, it’s going to hurt you. A person who attempts to play two hours of full court basketball, if he hasn’t done anything like that for a while, is in for trouble. My wife used to see me coming after I had done that, and she would prepare the bed and the hot tub and the ointments and all the other things, and I wouldn’t be able to use them anyway. I’d just sort of groan and roll over and die for about three days, and then the fourth day I’d be able to get up and sort of pick my legs up and move again, but just barely.
And it’s the same way in the spiritual realm. Prayer is all-important. We must come to it rightly, and until we learn to pray rightly, the rest of our lives before God is not going to go rightly. We must learn how to pray. We must accept prayer for what it is, and then put ourselves in the way of developing the habits of prayer.
Now Jesus, I’m not going to read these examples. I’ve given you examples here on the sheet of both Christ and then some of the early disciples. I’m not going to read through these, but I hope you will. See in order to do this, you must have developed the habits of praying.
Here’s what happens to people. They say, well, I ought to pray, and so they decide to pray all night, and it’s such a dismal failure that they don’t try that again for five years. It’s such a disappointment. Instead of taking the measured, reasonable, right way of working into a life of prayer, you want to do it all at once. You want to do it all at once. You may have heard the story of the college president, a young man brought his son to him and said, I know you have this nice four-year course, but I’m wondering, couldn’t you give a degree to my son in six months? And the man, the college president, replied, it takes a hundred years to grow an oak tree, but you can grow a squash in a few weeks. Do you want to be an oak or a squash? Do you want to be an oak or a squash?
In the spiritual life we have to decide whether we want to be oaks or squash, and we have to get very firmly fixed in our mind that when we see Jesus and we see Paul and we see all of these people doing what they are doing, we are going to defeat ourselves if we simply say one day, I’m going to do that. What you will do is you will be so disappointed that you give up, and what we have to learn is to accept the day-by-day, week-by-week discipline as we progress in understanding and in experience and in our habits, and the time will come when it will not be a burden for us to spend hours or days or whatever is right in prayer, because we know how to handle it.
Now I want to turn to some other points than just the definition of prayer and the examples of Jesus and his immediate disciples. I hope you will study those examples, they are really very good. I especially recommend to you the one under number 3, Philippians 1, 9-11. It gives you several places where Paul gets you into the content of what he prayed for for others. In Paul’s prayers were largely intercessory prayers, they were prayers for others. One mark of how much he loved his people was how much he prayed for them. I think I said last time, when we love others, we are always immediately drawn into prayer, because when we love others, we want much more for them than we can ever provide for them, and that makes us turn to God and ask for him to supply those needs. And love drove Paul to constant prayer. When he left people and went to another place as a kind of wandering teacher and preacher, he didn’t really leave them. And as he says in one passage to, I believe, the Thessalonians, ye are in my heart, ye are in my heart. And he carried that as a burden of prayer all the time.
But what did Jesus teach now about prayer, and there are a number of headings here that I have listed and I’m not going to be able to go over all of them by any means. But I want us to just look at the three headings, I won’t be able to go into the scriptures on all of them, and some of them I do want to try to go into.
The first one, the heart of the Father. What is this heart like? And we’ve already read the passage here. This is the one we just read out of the eleventh chapter of Luke. What’s the heart of the Father like? Jesus in teaching uses the device of a friend and then of an earthly father as a way of showing what it’s like. And now I want to return and ask you, and let’s see if we can, what kind of response you’d like to make to this. Why does God ask you to pray? Because he loves you, well, but suppose he loved you and you didn’t ask. That raises the problem. Many people say, well, he loves me, so I don’t need to ask, I don’t need to pray. That’s the basic reason is he loves us, though. That’s what lies back of all. And that’s this second verse, the second reference here, the one in John 16, 23-27, he’ll study that. That’s the passage where Jesus said, For the Father himself loveth you. He’s talking in that context about prayer.
And to freely respond to him. Do you have any thoughts on that? He likes to be asked, that’s an interesting statement. And I think it’s certainly true. Does the Father like to be asked for things? Well, very often the Father gets asked for so many things that they like to resign from that department. But the truth of the matter is, a father who had a child who didn’t ask him for things would be a father who was hurting. Child who said, oh, well, I don’t need to have anything to do with him. Or even a child who said, I know he cares about me, so I’m not even bothered asking. I’m not even going to talk. He’ll take care of whatever needs to be done. What would you think if you had a child like that? He’ll take care of whatever needs to be done.
You see, love means an intimate kind of communication between people. And you can’t have love without that. You may have something we might call good will, but you can’t have love without an intimate kind of communication about things which matter to the people involved. You’ve got to have that. And if there isn’t that, there’s no love. That’s why, for example, in a marriage or between parents and children, very often great mistakes are made because a father will say, well, I love my kid. Or I love my wife. What was that joke he told us about, that Dr. Kramer told us? Yes, he told Ed Hallig was here, so I won’t repeat it. But it isn’t a joking matter. And the person who says, well, I love him, so why bother to tell him? It’s just a little knife. Because love means reaching out to people and communicating within about things of common concern. And sometimes it just means reaching out to people, period, for no big reason or no big deal, just reaching out.
And now what we are asked to believe by Jesus about prayer is that prayer is exactly that kind of thing and that it is the heart of God which is seen in wanting to be asked. Say let me ask you something. Would you like to be asked? Hmm? Would you like to be asked? It says here, it says, the Father is the Holy Spirit. That’s right. It doesn’t say in the package what’s right. Why do you suppose he said that? It’s rather surprising, isn’t it, in that context, don’t you feel a little surprised when you read that? How much more shall the Father give the Holy Spirit to him that asks it? We were talking about bread and eggs and things like that. Now all of a sudden, this, you’ve got that, you’ve got it all. It’s like in the eighth chapter of Romans, there’s that passage, I believe it’s 832, He that spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not also with him freely give us all things? And Jesus is saying your Heavenly Father will give the best of all gifts, if you would ask. There’s no limit to what he’ll give you, that’s good. Do you believe that?
There’s a very good reason why one shouldn’t, isn’t it, because if you don’t want anything, nothing will ever give you joy. Joy comes from the satisfaction of one. On that model of bliss, all the people out in the graveyard are blissful, they don’t want anything, they’re perfectly happy, if that’s happiness. Or people who are knocked out on some drug or whatever, or just hit them on the head, they won’t want anything. Instant happiness.
But I understand, you know, there were people, you’re talking about the Stoics, they lived in an extremely bad time in the history of the ancient world, and there was a kind of mass failure nerve which led them to say, ah, best of all is to not want anything, to be done with desire. You know, that’s one of the oldest philosophers, for example, the way you escape the wheel of birth and death in Hinduism, is just to cease to desire, to cease to desire, at that point you sort of fade out.
So I think that there are very good reasons, and I trust you’ll agree why one shouldn’t accept that, happiness, fulfillment in human life is a matter of having wants, and not having all of them necessarily met, because you certainly can’t have all of them met, many of them are inconsistent, but of having the main ones met in a good way, and the main ones have to do with our relations to other people. Such things as wanting to be wanted, wanting to be asked. One of the saddest figures in all of our folklore, I guess, is the figure of the wallflower, isn’t it? One who goes to the dance, but is never asked to dance.
No you get what you ask for, you’ll have other ones, that will count. Well fulfillment certainly isn’t a matter of simply never wanting anything again, it’s a matter of, what about the future? You don’t live in the past, you have a future ahead of you, and it’s a time of enjoyment of what you have and of other things which may come, for example even if I’ve had the kingdom of God for one day, that’s not going to take care of tomorrow, I will want that again tomorrow, and I’ll be granted that again tomorrow, and I will enjoy that as I go along. Well I’m there all the time, but that comes one day at a time, and my wants and the satisfaction and fulfillment of my wants are new each day. His mercies don’t fail, great is his faithfulness. Morning to morning new mercies I see, that’s the way it goes. I want and I receive from the hand of God, day by day.
Now being in the kingdom of God I think is being assured of that, being in constant contact with it, knowing where the blessings are coming from. That doesn’t mean we have them all at once, we receive them as we go through life. And I think what that does is that staves off, there is a level of want which is terribly destructive. You know if a person is just famished, he can’t even accept, it’s like a horse that gets thirsty enough and kill himself when he gets to the water. And there can be an excess of desire which is terribly destructive, and that kind of wanting I think I certainly would agree with you on that part of what I am standing to say. We know we know that no more, and we come to peace on that matter because we know that.
Well not the bread I eat, yes I do, I say give us this day our daily bread. And I don’t mean just the Holy Spirit, I mean the kind you put butter on, perhaps not, but I am really convinced at least that he invites me to pray for that, and not just sort of say well I’ll take care of it myself, or provisions are made or whatever, but day by day to accept bread for that day and not for tomorrow from his hand.
The heart of God in this matter is something which again I hope all of these things are things which you need to look into, think about, read about, talk about, discuss about, work on these things until they settle into your mind what they mean in the way of an experience of living in the Kingdom of God.
Now the attitudes of the person praying, I am going to skip those in this session because I have talked about these at other times around here, and they are very important, but I want to skip over those and come to section C under 4, the content of the Kingdom of Praying.
Now here I am just going to re-read and get you to look at a little more slowly the words of the prayer in the Sermon on the Mount in the 6th chapter of Matthew. Now when Jesus gave these words, you must understand that he was not giving you something to repeat by rote, and it’s very important to understand that because that’s precisely the way this prayer is used. I’ve known people, for example, who when they got in a tight spot would run through that thing like this. Our Father who art in heaven, how it be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, and they would do that over and over and over again. Can you believe it? When just before this Jesus said, when you pray, don’t pray like the heathen do. They think they will be heard because you talk a lot very fast. Don’t do it. Don’t pray like that. I’ve actually known people who just run through that thing as fast as they could. They thought there was efficacy in saying the words, just like some people think there’s efficacy in saying, in Jesus’ name, amen, when you get done. That’s magic. That’s what it is to pray in Jesus’ name, no such thing. And to pray as Jesus showed us how to pray here is not to utter these words. It is to pray along those lines.
Our Father, we address him out of the midst of a community in which we live. Praying is not an individualistic thing. Individuals do it, but they always pray out of their perspective from among their brothers and sisters. Our Father, who art in heaven. Now heaven is the seat of all power and authority. It isn’t up there. There may be something out there, all right, I mean there’s a lot of stuff out there to explore, isn’t there? But it isn’t up there. And if you just think, people on different sides of the world pointing up to heaven aren’t pointing the same place, are they? Or if you point an hour later, you’re pointing a long ways off from where you pointed the first time. So try not to think of this heaven as simply some little space platform out here somewhere, with harps and fleecy clouds and all that sort of thing, because it isn’t. Heaven is a reference. It’s the way the Bible uses to refer to the seat of all power and authority. Our Father, our heavenly Father, our Father with all power and all authority.
First request, hallowed be thy name. The first request is a request that God be honored and recognized for what he is. Make yourself known so that people will respect you and know who you are. That’s the first request.
Now remember this, if you’re going to pray, you have to pray on the basis of the good of the Kingdom and of the King. And please never forget that. Our wants are important, but they are not enough to make the total basis of our prayers. If we want someone straightened out or bent double or whatever, as we often do, and we pray about that, then the basis of our prayer must be something much more than just, well, I’d like that, you know, it’d be nice if this would happen. Like I’ve known people who are concerned about their children or their husband or their wife and they want to get them saved or in a church or something like that. If you talk with them a little while, you get the sense that the only reason they want that is so they won’t feel uncomfortable about having non-Christian kids or non-Christian husbands. Well, there’s a little better basis for praying than that.
Hallowed be thy name, the first request, and then thy kingdom come, a prayer for the Kingdom of God to come in fullness for his will to be done on earth just like it’s done in heaven. Now, the implication there is that it is done in heaven, that, you know, to speak pictorially God doesn’t say, well, now, Gabriel, I’d like you to go down today and see about such and such. Well, Lord, if you don’t mind, I’d like to finish watching this television program. And it isn’t done that way in heaven. The idea is that in heaven when God speaks, people obey because they know it is good and they know it is right and they take part in the ordinances of heaven as something which is good and right within. Thy kingdom come now on earth, though, you see.
The prayer is that the order of heaven would descend to earth, that the goodness and the beauty and the rightness with all of the joy and the strength that comes with it should descend into an earth where there is evil and where there is harm and weakness and sickness and that this would be taken away.
Now I don’t want to stop too soon here, but I just want to stress that you see all of these things that Jesus is giving are their abstraction and I can’t pray. I can’t pray thy kingdom come, thy will be done in simply those empty words and succeed in praying as he is directed, because if I want to pray that I must pray about Dick Ramsey, Steve Graves and myself and my children. That’s where the kingdom is to come. I suppose some people think it’s going to be some sort of pink cloud which will start at the east coast and roll over the whole continent or something. It’s not that.
The kingdom of God, when we pray for the kingdom of God to come, we are praying that it will take over the lives of ourselves and the people around about us and we pray in the details, like if a person is having some particular problem in getting the kingdom principles into his financial affairs or into his sex life. We pray about that. We pray about that. If there’s a problem between parents and children in and around us, we pray about that and we say thy kingdom come into that, thy will be done there as it is done. That’s the way we pray for the kingdom to come. Please remember, these are more categories under which we should pray. The content of our praying should fall. We do not pray thy kingdom come, thy will be done by saying thy kingdom come, thy will be done. We pray it by taking the lives of those around us, ourselves and all those around us, and we look at those relations in those lives and we hold them up before God and pray for him to infuse them with his life, to take them over, to implant new principles where they’re needed, to refurbish the ones that are a little rusty or whatever, and to write his law in the heart and make it a good thing. That’s the way we pray things. Believe me.
Please remember, you cannot pray the Lord’s Prayer even by saying these words slowly.
Give us this day our daily bread. One day at a time is enough. Suppose you had a child and you came and started cooking pancakes one morning and you put them on the table and they start disappearing and you find that he’s eating a few and he’s putting a few in his pocket and you say, well, what’s the matter here? Why are you doing this? Well, I’m not for sure that there’ll be pancakes tomorrow or maybe you’re not going to keep feeding me. Is that the way a child thinks about things? A child doesn’t think about things like that. I mean, as far as a child is concerned, you’ve got five tons of pancakes and more coming. That’s the way a child thinks about his father. Consequently, he doesn’t need to make a storeroom somewhere. It’s sufficient for him to say, I’d like something to eat now. Give us now our daily pancakes. Well, we’ll ask for those tomorrow.
Give us day by day our daily bread, that day’s bread. Give us day by day that day’s bread. Now you see, this attitude of trust and the attitude of asking go together because if you don’t have the belief in a God who can be trusted, you’re going to get you a big knapsack. You’re going to find some place to tuck away the goods to take care of your future. Remember Jesus taught, didn’t he? Don’t lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust doth corrupt and thieves break through the steel. You can trust God day by day to provide the daily bread, the daily gasoline, the daily whatever you need, day by day. You can’t burn tomorrow’s gasoline today. You don’t need it until tomorrow. Sufficient unto the day is the evil and the good thereof. You don’t need to borrow any of it from tomorrow. You can’t use it. If you used it today, you’d still need some tomorrow anyway, because tomorrow has to have its gasoline and its air and its food, its whatever you need. Give us day by day our daily bread.
Now again, you can’t pray that by saying, give us this day our daily bread. It’s not just talking about bread, it’s talking about the things you need day by day. It means praying for a babysitter. It means praying for automobile repairs or money to make it or whatever you need day by day. Saying, Lord, I need this today, day by day, our daily bread.
Now we come to a very important clause in the prayer, because it is a prayer for forgiveness. This will be the last part we’ll be able to touch on today. But I want to stress the ironclad law that is built into this request, and it’s stated in the fourteenth verse of the sixth chapter of Matthew. The request is, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Then Jesus goes on to say, if you forgive men their trespasses, your Heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Simple statement.
And you know why it’s true? Because an unforgiving heart can’t believe that God is like He is. A mean, grudge-filled, unforgiving heart cannot accept the fact that God forgives. That’s why so many people don’t know the forgiveness of God. It is simply because they’ve got little grudges, little hatreds, that they’re not going to give up. They’re going to hang on to them. They may do all kinds of things with them, dress them up in all sorts of ways, prove that they’re justified. The fact remains, they will not forgive, and Jesus says they are not forgiven. They’re not forgiven not because God is mean, and He’s saying, well, look, you give me this and I’ll give you that. They’re not forgiven simply because in that condition they cannot approach God and receive forgiveness. They can’t let their own awareness and heart be flooded with that sense of forgiveness which comes from God, because they have got an unforgiving heart.
That’s a part, I think, of what it means to pray in Jesus’ name. In His nature? Yes. In His cause. Right. That’s very good, I think. But the point is, we ask for forgiveness. Jesus taught us to pray, baby.