Jesus Today. . .

WHAT THE LORD’S PRAYER MEANS TO US?

It is remarkable that the only thing Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them was how to pray. Lord, teach us to pray was an unlikely request. Being already devout men, one would suppose they knew how to pray, just as we suppose that we know how. Being with Jesus as they were must have made the difference. When they saw and heard him pray they realized they knew little or nothing about prayer. I say saw as well as heard, for they might not have always heard the Lord’s most intimate fellowship with the Father, for he had a way of withdrawing to himself for prayer.

Anyway, the disciples insofar as we know never asked Jesus to teach them how to preach, or even how to heal or to start congregations. They may have figured if they could but learn to pray, really pray, that would take care of everything else. It is a lesson to be learned by the disciples of the 20th century as well. To think of the problems our world faces in the 1980’s. If we could but learn to pray!

The prayer that Jesus taught his disciples in answer to their question is even more unlikely than the question was. It is one more reason why the Christ story cannot be sheer invention, for no inventor could come up with such a question and such an answer. Jesus responded to a very weighty theological question with but a handful of words!

The significance of this prayer for us is not so much the details that Jesus includes in the petitions to the Father, but that it provides us with principles of prayer for all times and occasions. By principles I mean basics or fundamentals that always apply or nearly always apply, while the details may differ. We sometimes err by being concerned with details to the neglect of principles. If the basics are ours, if we think in terms of fundamentals, then the details will take care of themselves.

When Jesus says “This is how you should pray,” he is saying something like Here are the principles which will apply to all your prayers. We all know that a prayer need not be only a few sentences or that it always be a recitation of this prototype that Jesus gave in the long ago. And yet the recitation of this prayer has always been very meaningful to the church through the ages. The most illiterate believer can be expected to know the Lord’s prayer or at least part of it. Indeed, the whole world honors it as part of the great literature of the ages. Ouida and I, oftentimes with visitors at our table, say this prayer in unison.

As short as it is, it still has a substantial problem in textual criticism, for the last petition, that glorious line For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever is not in the two oldest and most reliable manuscripts and therefore almost certainly not a part of the original prayer that Jesus taught. You will notice that the modern versions usually delete it or relegate it to a footnote. But that line is very ancient and has made its way into the great music of the church as well as the ritual, and it is generally accepted by Protestant churches as Scripture. Some of us feel that we have hardly recited the Lord’s prayer if that line is omitted, and yet we must admit that Jesus probably did not include it.

This illustrates how the church has determined what is Scripture. It was of course the church that determined that the Lord’s prayer (or the chronicles of Matthew and Luke) is Scripture. And by long centuries of meaningful usage the church has come to consider an addition to that prayer as Scripture. It is, after all, biblical, being found in 1 Chron. 29: II, or something very similar to it, long before the Lord’s prayer. Some well-meaning scribe added it to what Jesus prayed and it stuck, making its way into enough manuscripts to find a place in the great King James translation, which was all it needed.

That majestic added line is something like the eunuch’s confession in Acts 8:37: “I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.” Again you will find it omitted in most modern versions and for similar reasons. But even our own elegant J. W. McGarvey insisted it was a “justifiable emendation,” which should say something to those who have a rigid view on the nature of Scripture. No one was a greater defender of the Bible than McGarvey, and he was “one of us,” and yet he allowed that tampering with Scripture, actually adding to it, was sometimes justified.

So, for those who may be interested in my view of Scripture, I accept the last line of the Lord’s prayer as Scripture, though I concede that Jesus probably did not include it. Just as I accept Matthew’s qualification for divorce, “except for the cause of fornication,” as Scripture even though it is very likely that Jesus did not make that exception, as per witness Mark and Luke.

I have said this to remind the reader that whichever way we turn in the Bible, even to something as short and as innocent as the Lord’s prayer, we are faced with problems of textual criticism and the nature of Scripture. We should face such problems forthrightly, for we have nothing to fear insofar as the biblical message is concerned.

The first principle of prayer in the Lord’s prayer is the principle of adoration. Our Lord adored the heavenly Father and he is teaching us to do so. Our prayers should begin with praise, in adoration of the creator of heaven and earth, before we start making requests. Our heavenly Father, hallowed by thy name! is exalted praise of him who has made us his own children. 1 Pet. 1:17 sees significance in the very experience of invoking the great God of heaven as Father. “If you call him Father, think how you ought to live!” Peter is saying. So there is also a principle of transcendence here in that when we say “Our Father who art in heaven” we are saying that we do not really belong to this world, that our parentage is in heaven.

This lesson may be the most important to be learned from our Lord’s instruction: that when we pray we first praise the God of heaven. To say, Hallowed by thy name is to say that the Father is holy and glorious. We may do this in many different ways, as in the Psalms.

The second petition is really more of the same, for we are praising God for the great truth that his will is always done in heaven and perhaps throughout the entire universe, except on earth. And so we are to pray, and it is to be our will, that the Father will be honored and obeyed on earth as he is in heaven. Thy kingdom come! is another way of uttering this praise. William Barclay is probably right in seeing this as a Hebrew parallelism, where one line means the same as the next. Thy kingdom come thus means thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Those who suppose that we can’t pray that line since the kingdom has already come in the form of the church, and this included Alexander Campbell, must see that the kingdom is referred to in Scripture as both realized and as in anticipation. It was present (“If I cast out demons by the finger of God, then is the kingdom of God among you”), but it was also future (“Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?”). Just as with salvation: it is both now and future.

Jesus is not only praying for the glorious manifestation of God’s reign upon earth, or teaching us to, for it is also a way of praising God.

So the first half of the Lord’s prayer is praise and adoration, and this is most relevant as to how we should pray today. When we start out praying by asking for this and that and the other, we need to sit at Jesus’ feet and ask Lord, teach us to pray. He is telling us that as we learn to praise God in prayer it will then be time to pray for other things.

Another principle is that we are to realize our complete dependence on God—for our daily necessities, for the forgiveness of sins, for security from evil. Jesus places our daily bread first among these petitions, even before the forgiveness of sins. But that figures, for first of all we have to live. And we are dependent upon the Father for the necessities. Jesus wants us to sense that, deeply. It is an antidote for our greed and selfishness, and for our pride, to realize that every bite of food is from God’s hand, the one who is our Father. It is enough to ask God for necessities, certainly not for luxuries.

We see still another principle in the community spirit of this prayer. It is our and us, not I and me. The principle of community is basic to the Christian faith, for the church is the community of heaven. Together we are in exile. And so we invoke the God of heaven as our Father and we implore him to lead us not into temptation.

There is also what I like to call the “as” principle, which we often find in Scripture: forgive us our sins as we forgive others. Jesus is teaching us that it is the forgiving person that finds forgiveness from God, and that we will be forgiven as we forgive others. This does not mean, of course, that we are forgiven because we forgive others, for that would be law rather than grace. It means that if we really believe God has forgiven us, we will forgive others. If we are unforgiving, then something is wrong with our relationship with the Father.

The most difficult petition to understand is the last one: Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil (or the evil one). It is odd that Jesus would have us ask the Father not to do what God clearly does not do anyhow, and that is to lead his children into temptation. Jas. 1:13 clearly states that we are not to say that we are tempted of God, for “God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one.” The apostle goes on to explain that temptation is the result of our own lust. Why should we then pray to God that he lead us not into temptation. And that is the way it reads. It does not say Do not allow us to be led into temptation.

Again Barclay may be right when he says we must not be too theological in handling this problem, for while it is true that God does not himself tempt us he does rule over our lives in a world filled with all sorts of difficulties and temptations. This petition brings home to us the stark reality of our evil world, and that without the Father we are completely helpless. He is our Guardian in this world and he can save us from those perils that would be too much for us. So the prayer is saying something like Go easy with us; don’t push us too hard!

Beside all this there is the spirit of the prayer which shows that prayer must always be with humility and perseverance, and that we should pray for others more than for ourselves. Moreover we are to pray (and live) as if the eyes of God are always upon us. The great secret of life according to Jesus is to see ourselves always as God’s children. This frees us from any concern about what people may think of us, even if they think of us as “a great person of prayer.” Jesus teaches us that only one thing really matters, that we be the children of the heavenly Father.—the Editor