REVOLUTIONARY PRAYER
Forget yawning through it in school assemblies – the Lord’s prayer is hair-raising.

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name, Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one, For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. (Matthew 6:9-13)

REMEMBER “the Lord’s prayer”? Perhaps you used to recite it as part of school assemblies. I’d make a wild guess that no-one there was electrified by its astonishing revolutionary impact. More of a bored mumble through strange-sounding phrases like “which art in heaven”. Obscure and dull, right?

Wrong. The fact is that this prayer Jesus taught His disciples contains the heart of His mind-blowing teaching about the “kingdom ofheaven” revolution He was bringing about.

Consider. The prayer features in the middle of some of Jesus’ teaching about the kingdom (Matthew 5-7). And in it there is a startling, radical definition of the kingdom:

“Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”

The implications of this are mind-blowing. For a start, it means a life of total commitment to one another – who says “I’m off” in heaven (“I’m moving out to hell”)? It means love, forgiveness, grace, fearless truth.

It means a life of radical sharing – who calls anything “mine” in heaven?

Consider. This prayer, famously, starts with “Our Father”. Note – not “my Father”, but “our Father”. In fact, the words “my” or “mine” don’t feature in the prayer at all.

This is a drastically communal prayer. Jesus teaches us to come to God as “Our Father”: that is to come together as a family, a brotherhood. Not that this means we don’t have an individual relationship with God. We do. But the kingdom is about a people.

Furthermore, it’s a family which prays for “our daily bread”: a sharing people. Even the basics – “bread” – are shared. And if we share our basic subsistence, it surely follows that we should share everything else. God provides; we share. This is what the first church did:

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship (the word means “sharing”), to the breaking of bread and to prayer... All the believers were together and had everything in common.” (Acts 2:42 & 44)

So go on. Pray it. I dare you. But that means you’ll have to begin to live it – heaven’s lifestyle... on earth.

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Now to live the life? Check out info on our Jesus Army Training Year.

Further reading See what you think about the ebook Kingdom Seekers.

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