Wednesday, January 2, 2013

The Lord's Prayer Part II - Talking to the Father about the Family, Part 1 of 61

TEXT: "In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread" (Matthew 6:9-11).

IDEA: There is no request that we have that is too “trivial” to bring to our Father in heaven.

PURPOSE: To help listeners appreciate and appropriate the breadth of the Lord’s Prayer.

Listen to this famous rendering of the Lord’s Prayer in music.

What strikes you about the prayer from the music?

I. The Lord’s Prayer in the music, as in the prayer itself, has two major movements.

First we talk to the Father about the Father (Matthew 6:9-10).

We talk to our Father about His “person”: “Hallowed be thy name.”

We talk to our Father about His “program”: “Thy kingdom come.”

Then we talk with the Father about the Family.

We talk to our Father about His “provision”: “Give us this day our daily bread.”

We talk to our Father about His “protection”: “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one.”

II. The Lord’s Prayer takes into account the entire span of life.

Helmut Thielicke put it this way: “The Lord’s Prayer is really a total prayer. Its petitions are like the rainbow colors of the spectrum into which light divides when it is refracted in a prism. The whole light of life is captured in this rainbow of petitions. Never can anyone say it sends him away empty-handed or that it does not take account of his need. It can be spoken at the cradle or the grave. It can rise from altars of great cathedrals and from the dark hovels of those who eat their bread with tears. It can be prayed at weddings and on the gallows. And the fact is that it has been prayed in all these places.”

We call it the Lord’s Prayer, yet it is a prayer that the Lord Himself could not have prayed.