Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us

After we’ve asked the Father to provide for our needs, we go on to ask for pardon: “Forgive us our sins”. “Forgive” follows “give”. The two petitions are linked by Jesus, “give us today our daily bread” with “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us”. By linking them we recognize our need for pardon when we think of our need for food. Also, as we confess our own guilt, we bring to mind our relationships with other people too.

Augustine called this request, “the terrible petition”. If we pray, “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” while at the same time harbouring an unforgiving spirit, we are actually asking God not to forgive us.

You are part of the forgiven fellowship if you honestly know God as your Father. Sometimes it’s hard to forgive some particularly damaging thing done to you. But the sins we do against God, which we ask forgiveness for, make others’ offences against us much more trivial.

How can we ask God to forgive us, when we refuse to forgive others? Our forgiveness of others doesn’t cause God to forgive us. Rather, it is eveidence that we, ourselves, have entered into God’s forgiveness. Those who live in the relief of God’s pardon find it easier to forgive those who offend them.

It’s said that, “to sin is human, to forgive divine”. We’re never closer to God’s grace than when we admit our sin and cry out for pardon. And we’re never more like God than when, for Jesus Christ’s sake, we extend forgiveness freely and completely to those who have sinned against us.

This is the seventh post in a series offering a reflection based on each of the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer

Give us today our daily bread

When Jesus said, “Give us today our daily bread”, he wasn’t suggesting that we make a trip to our local supermarket for a loaf of Warburtons finest bread. He was, though, making the point that it’s okay and right to consider our daily needs in our prayers. After all, without the strength we need for each day, we will find it difficult to truly do his will and serve his kingdom.

Some of the early Church Fathers spiritualized the bread to refer to the bread which was served at Holy Communion. Part of the reason at least, which is easy to understand, was that it seemed too earthly praying for something as mundane as groceries, after praying for God’s glory.

Yet, “daily bread” does mean just that, daily bread. The word, “bread” refers to that food which sustains us. And in the wider sense too, bread refers to all that we as humans need to live. Food for our next meal matters to our Father in heaven, he does concern himself with what’s on our shopping list.

The word translated as “daily” — the focus of this petition — proved to be a bewildering one for scholars for centuries. I understand it doesn’t appear anywhere else either inside or outside of the Bible. It was eventually translated because of a housewife’s shopping list that was found on a scrap of papyrus by an archaeologist a, relatively, few years ago. She had written this word for “daily” next to several items on her list. It’s thought that it meant something like, “enough for the coming day”.

With our fridges and freezers solving our longer term storage problems, we rarely need to purchase food for a single day nowadays. We store up such an abundance of food that we’ve become less aware of its production and gathering, less thankful for it.

When we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”, we’re not asking for everything from the Harrods Food Hall. We’re praying for bread, the necessities for life rather than luxuries. Enough for the day to come, not enough to store up for years to come.

When we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread”, we’re asking not just for ourselves but other family members too. If we are given two loaves, and our brother or sister none, then our prayer for daily bread has been answered — we have to share rather than hoard. That should apply corporately as well as personally. It is said that God provides enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.

We can bring all of our requests to God, even the small, mundane, ones. We can pray for all the things that matter to us — bread, a coat, a pair of shoes; enough for the coming day. If we need them, then as well as mattering to us, they matter to our heavenly Father too.

This is the sixth post in a series offering a reflection based on each of the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer

Your will be done on earth as in heaven

Our praying for God’s will to be done on earth as in heaven provides us with a basic foundation for our prayers. We’re asking that his will be done in our lives and in the world around us. Although we do all too frequently seem to get things upside down, and pray as if we expect God to change the way he is doing things just because we’ve given him our petitions. When we’re at our worst, we seem to expect God to change the universe and give us what we want, in much the same way as we’d expect a genie to give us what we demand after we’ve given his lamp a polish.

We must recognize the importance of conforming our will to his will — not his will to our will. Prayer isn’t about getting God to do my will; it’s asking that his will be done in my life, my family, my business, and in my relationships, just as it’s done in heaven.

Forty-two years after his death, Beethoven’s body was exhumed. Apparently, someone had buried him in a way that revealed his attitude; he was found with his arms up and his fists clenched in defiance. Beethoven became deaf at thirty, and remained so until he died aged fifty-six. He felt that God had hemmed him in and died an angry and bitter man.

It was only in grim resignation that Beethoven prayed for God’s will to be done. It’s possible to resent that God is God while praying for his will to be done. Many people despise God because he hasn’t made them master of their own fate. But those of us who have a relationship with God, and know him as Father, who know that his heart is not only righteous and holy but also gracious and kind, can know that all things will work together for good for those who love God.

This is the fifth post in a series offering a reflection based on each of the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer

Your kingdom come

When Jesus told us to pray, “your kingdom come”, he was speaking about his future messianic reign on the earth. Throughout Scripture, the story of the Bible looks forward to the return of the Messiah, Jesus Christ, who will rule in righteousness when the kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ (Revelation 11:15).

This concern for God’s rule on the earth is basic to our view of history. The German theologian, Joseph Wittig said that a person’s biography should begin with their death, rather than their birth. His argument was that we measure the contribution of life by its end, not its beginning. And that is how we should think about history.

We sometimes wonder if history is going anywhere. Is it simply a set of repeated events going around in cycles; heading towards nothing but oblivion? Many famous people have dismissed history over the years — one memorable one being Henry Ford’s summing up of history as “bunk”.

But history is heading somewhere in the Bible — the return of Jesus Christ. That light shines before us, and the darker the age, the brighter seems the glow.

When we pray, “your kingdom come”, we’re looking forward to that time when God’s messianic kingdom will be established by Jesus’ return to earth, as prophesied throughout the Old Testament. We direct our gaze, as we pray, to the day when the kingdom of this world will become the kingdom of our God and of his Christ.

When we pray, “your kingdom come”, we’re also saying something else. We’re saying that we shall submit our will to God’s will. It follows that we want God to work his will out in our lives now, if we want him to rule over all people in the future.

When we pray, “your kingdom come”, we’re acknowledging God’s right to rule all people — including us. If we desire it for others, we must desire it for ourselves too. We shouldn’t pray for God’s rule over others, unless we honestly desire his rule over ourselves.

When we pray, “your kingdom come”, we’re praying for the second coming of Christ now, not at some convenient point in the future. Nothing in our lives should take precedence over his coming. That’s what we mean when we pray, “your kingdom come”.

Amen. Come, Lord Jesus.

This is the fourth post in a series offering a reflection based on each of the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer

Hallowed be your name

A name was extremely significant in Hebrew thought. Names weren’t chosen by parents because they thought the initials would look good on their luggage. Neither did they choose a name because it reminded them of their Uncle Albert or Aunt Victoria. When they chose a child’s name they hoped it would embody the personality, characteristic, or character they wanted to see developed in the child.

We see in the New Testament when someone’s life or outlook changed, in times of crisis, often his name was changed to match. When Jesus first met up with Peter he was called Simon, and was a shifty and undependable person. But Jesus changed his name to Peter, which means “rock”. It took a while, following his renaming, for Peter to live up to the new name, but eventually the shifting sand was changed into rock.

We read in Psalm 9:10, “And those who know your name put their trust in you”. The psalmist was saying that those who knew God’s character and power would put their trust in him, not that those who could pronounce his name would put their trust in him.

When we pray, “hallowed be your name”, we’re talking about the character and person of God. To hallow means “to set apart, to make special, to sanctify”. When we pray, “hallowed be your name”, we’re praying that God will be set apart in our prayers in such a way that it will be clear that we reverence him; we’re praying that God will be God to us.

This is the third post in a series offering a reflection based on each of the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer

Our Father in heaven

Right at the beginning of the prayer, we need to know who it is that we’re praying to. When we come to the God of the universe in prayer, Jesus tells us, we can call him Father. There’s a complete summary of the Christian faith wrapped up in that single word, Father. When we bow before God, and call him Father, we acknowledge that at the heart of the universe there is not only ultimate power, but ultimate love too.

It’s a wonderful privilege, to be able to call God, Father. The people of God in the Old Testament didn’t address him individually as Father. In fact, the word Father for God was rarely used, and on those occasions it was used, it always referred to the relationship of God to the nation of Israel. As far as we are aware, people such as Abraham, Joseph, Moses, David, or Daniel — those great saints from the Old Testament — never addressed God as their Father when they prayed to him in the solitude of their tents. Yet in the New Testament, that is how we’re told to speak to God — at least 275 times! When we come to the sovereign majesty of the universe, because of what Jesus did for us on the cross, and his subsequent resurrection, the word that should fall readily from our lips is Father. Awesome!

When we address God as “Our Father in heaven”, as in the Lord’s Prayer, we recognize the intimacy that we have with God as our Father, and also the awe we should have as we come to him in prayer. By teaching us to pray in this way, Jesus is saying that this One to whom we come to as Father is the sovereign God of heaven, the God of all power, the God of all authority.

The early Jewish Christians probably understood having a proper awe of God easier than intimacy with him. We seem to have swung to the other extreme nowadays, and God is often referred to in anything but awe-inspiring terms. I can’t quite imagine the men and women of the Bible speaking of “the big man upstairs”, or other similar phrases. To say that God is our Father doesn’t imply that he is a great, big, huggable teddy bear.

The Bible manages to keep the tension between intimacy and awe. In the letter to the Hebrews we read, “Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16). The fact that we come to a throne should fill us with awe. But it’s approachable because it’s a throne of grace. Thanks to Jesus Christ, the sovereign, almighty God of the universe has allowed us to approach him in prayer, and address him as Father!

This is the second post in a series offering a reflection based on each of the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer

The Lord’s Prayer

As our Saviour taught us, so we pray. Words that will be familiar to many, as the words that introduce the Lord’s Prayer in Common Worship through Ordinary Time. Words that I say most mornings when I’m praying Morning Prayer. So what do we mean when we say, “As our Saviour taught us”?

We can find a version of the Lord’s Prayer in two of the gospels in our Bible — Matthew (6:9-14) and Luke (11:2-4). In Matthews gospel it forms a part of the teaching in the Sermon on the Mount; where much of Jesus’ teaching concerning godly living, praying and fasting can be found. And in Luke’s gospel it’s a response to the disciples’ request to teach them to pray. I’m sure Jesus would have taught the disciples about matters of faith on several occasions and in many different situations. So I have no real difficulty in making allowances for the differences between the two different accounts we have.

Many people around the world will use slightly differing wording for the Lord’s Prayer; but they all say basically the same thing. However, these are the words I’m most familiar with, the same wording as we’ve used at Godmanchester for the majority of our services for many years now:

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.
Lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power,
and the glory are yours
now and for ever.
Amen.

When I say “familiar”, I mean it in the loosest possible sense of the word. One of the downsides to my health issues and the medication I have to take as a result of them, is what it has done to my memory. It always used to be very good, and very reliable; but is a long way from that now. I can be in the middle of praying the Lord’s Prayer, as well as many other very familiar prayers, and just completely lose track of what I’m saying. It’s okay when I’m just following along with others, I can pick up the thread again without too much problem. But when I’m leading a service, leading others in the prayer, I’ve stopped relying on my hopeless memory, and unashamedly have the words written out in front of me — took me a while to be unashamed about it though.

It’s a wonderful prayer, with wonderful words, which say very much for us. But we do have to remember sometimes that the Lord’s Prayer was given to be a pattern and basis of prayer for real people in the real world. It’s the pattern our Lord gave his disciples; and through his disciples, gave to us too. So when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we need to take the time to really think about what we’re saying in each of the clauses. Not easy in a public service when it tends to be recited straight through, but is possible in our private devotions. That way we can really pray the prayer in the way that Jesus wanted us to.

This is the first post in a series that will offer a reflection based on each of the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer. As I write each post, I will return to this one and make links of the words of the prayer above.