Welcome to Wednesday! Hope you’re ready for a good day in God’s grace.
As you remember our message for this week is entitled “Game On”. It comes from Luke 11:1-13.
Yesterday we examined this text. We saw how an understanding of this Scripture can be organized around the guiding thought, “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. This principle can be used to unify the entire passage in ways that each verse advances us in praying Jesus’ prayer.
Today we look at the context of the text. We seek to find out more about the world in which the word was first spoken. We expand our understanding of a Scripture by considering it’s historical and Biblical settings so we know more of its power in our present day.
Dr. David Clark has commented that in first century Palestine, the historical setting for the Scripture, “many Jews were looking for a more personal encounter with their God. They believed that the glory of the Lord was not confined to the Temple in Jerusalem, and that in the ‘temples’ of their homes and synagogues they would be like priests. They would offer sacrifices, not of animals, but of prayer.” With this understanding, Jesus’ teaching of the Lord’s Prayer became a source of great empowerment for people of faith.
The Lord’s Prayer is found in both the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke. In Matthew Jesus teaches the crowds his Prayer early on in his ministry. The setting for the Prayer is the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6). This teaching is surrounded by a great many other truths on a variety of topics. In this setting the Lord’s Prayer is contrasted with the hypocrites’ prayer. The hypocrites pray to be glorified by others. The Lord instructs that we should pray to glorify God. The hypocrites pray in public to be noticed. Jesus says we should pray in privacy, as an act of intimate fellowship with God. The hypocrites pray by piling up holy phrases. The Lord prays in a way that gets to the point. You can see the tension sighted by Dr. Clark in Matthew’s contrast of the hypocrites and the Lord.
In Luke Jesus teaches the prayer to his disciples in the midst of his ministry. He has already done many miracles, taught many Kingdom truths, drawn many crowds, commissioned and sent his followers to proclaim the Kingdom. The disciples have seen how prayer is a cornerstone to his ministry. They have witnessed prayer’s results in power and effective practice and so they request, “Teach us to pray even as John taught his disciples to pray.”
As we join these two settings of the Lord’s Prayer, they bring an important word of caution. Too often we “say the Lord’s Prayer” rather than “pray the Lord’s Prayer”. Since we know it so well and say it so regularly it becomes easy to repeat it by rote. It can quickly become a matter of piling up phrases. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer we take time to see it as an intimate moment with “Our Father”. We pray that through this time of prayer we participate in how God’s Kingdom comes and the Lord’s will of love is done in our world as it is in Heaven. We pray for those things that make this possible for us (daily provision, daily forgiveness from God and for others, daily deliverance from temptation and evil). As we “Prepare with Prayer” we discover, as those first disciples did, that “praying” the Lord’s Prayer brings power to our prayer life and vitality to the daily practice of our faith.
In that blessing I give thanks for this teaching of our Lord. And I look forward to being with you again tomorrow In the Pastor’s Workshop.
Prayer: Gracious God, thank you for the blessing of this day. We praise you for the gift of your prayer, the Lord’s Prayer. Help us to learn how to use it more fully and pray it more faithfully. Save us from “rote repetition” of your Prayer or any prayer we lift to you. Let our time of prayer be a joining of hearts, our heart with your eternal heart, in ways that You minister healing and hope to our lives. Let our moments of prayer lead us into moments of serving others with joy. This we ask and pray in the name of the One who taught us to pray “Our Father”, even Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen