2. The Lord’s Prayer
Christians say what our Lord taught us to say. We use the words that he used. He stood in our place, and spoke these words, and as we repeat them, and make whatever petitions and requests occur to us, we stand behind him, and are members of his company. His identity becomes ours too. We are drawn into the conversation, of Father and Son, until we participate in their life and become the son who can say ‘Father’.
Our Father who art in heaven…
The Lord has us sons and heirs who can speak to you as to our father, using Father as your name. You respond to each of us as you child. What we have comes from you to us, personally and directly.
God is Father and Jesus Christ is the Son. He has now brought us into this sonship, so that we may stand with Jesus and call God, ‘Father.’ Our relationship to God is person to person and intimate. Since Christ has told us to use Father as his Name, we have Christ’s confidence to stand before God, and before all the powers and authorities in creation, and to speak. As the Lord speaks to us, we can hear and reply and make our wishes known to him, person to person.
The Lord tells us to make these seven requests:
Hallowed be thy name….
Thy kingdom come…
Thy will be done, on earth as in heaven…
Give us this day our daily bread…
And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us….
Lead us not into temptation
And deliver us from evil
In these seven requests we ask that Godmake known the holiness of his name, and so make it known that he is our lord; that he asserts his rule, his reign or kingdom, so we are not subject to the rule of others. We ask that he make clear the goodness of his intentions for us; that he enables us to provide for ourselves and one another; that he forgives and releases us from the consequences of our actions and so gives us a new start; that he does not allow us to be tested beyond what we can bear, and that he delivers us from evil and from evil men.
Hallowed be thy name….
We ask the Lord to make himself known to us. We ask him to show us who he is. He can make himself known to us, so that we are able to grasp his identity in its all uniqueness and distinctiveness. He hallows his name, that is, he makes his holiness evident, so we can acknowledge that there is no one like the Lord, that he is without peer and without parallel. He is the only Lord. Though there may be other authorities, none of them is holy.
The Lord has made his name known to us through all the patriarchs and prophets of Israel, and at last, in Jesus Christ, he has made it known fully and definitively. We ask him to reveal his holiness more and more so that we may increasingly grasp the claims he makes on us and live only in the light of the truth, so that we can learn for ourselves what is true, so we can explore and make discoveries, and so we can see what is right and good. To say that God is holy is to say that he is entirely himself, and also that he is so for our sake. The best favour he can do for us is to be himself, and aid us to acknowledge his holiness and so to hallow his name.
Thy kingdom come…
We ask the Lord to establish his leadership, his rule, and his justice for us. We ask him to take power away those regimes and ideologies that intend to control us and to save us from the leaders that tyrannize us and which want us to obey them as though they were gods.
Thy will be done, on earth as in heaven…
We ask the Lord to carry to completion his good will for us. His desire is for our good. The Lord has higher ambitions for us than we do for ourselves. He intends to redeem and perfect creation, by uniting earth to heaven, so that the glory and holiness of heaven comes to all creatures and fills creation.
Heaven is the company God surrounds himself with. He summons them, they come and take their place around him. This company is waiting to receive us. They point us to him, and they point us to our place in that company. Heaven is the company that lives in the truth. In this assembly all is revealed. Nothing is concealed. We cannot keep our past out of sight. Everyone will see everyone for who they are. All of them will share the goodness, the truth and the beauty of the whole company of heaven, which represent the good will of God for us
Give us this day our daily bread…
We ask the Lord to give us what we need. The Lord knows what our needs are, and he supplies them. He does not supply them to us all at once, but delivers them to us through time as we are able to receive and employ them. What he gives us are simply resources but also opportunities. He gives us openings through which, if we take them and act well, our agency increases. Good decisions make still better decisions possible. He has created this world in order to provide for us. We must ask him, and take what he gives us, confident of its goodness.
We want to be content with what we have. We ask for what is sufficient for this time. We do not want to accumulate or to consume more than is good either for us or for the world that provides us with these resources.
We give thanks for our place in this material creation, for the particular characteristics of our own country and its land. By our creation, we are given a place in this material creation. We have bodies, which must grow and work, and feed and rest. With our bodies we can live and work together, share what we have and enjoy life together. We give thanks for these bodies of ours, for the place that is home to us, and our ability to work and bear children who will continue what we have started when we are gone, and so we can give thanks for our place in a history and in the work of creation.
We do this in a world in which others are not confident about their bodies or their needs, and who are not able to trust or share with one another. They are in flight from materiality. They are afraid of labour. They are afraid that there will not be enough resources if they do not seize them for themselves and conceal them from us. They are afraid to go out into open air, to discover the healthy unpredictability of their natural environment. They are afraid to commit to the work by which they can support themselves and provide for others. They want to make themselves as disembodied as they can in order to evade one another. They seek to separate themselves from us, and want us to become as fearful of the materiality of creation as they are.
Christians give thanks for our givenness to one another, made available to one another by our bodies and by the material means of life that sustain them. We accept that all resources come to us in time, and so daily, and come to us as gifts created by the work of many other people, and that all of them aspects of God’s gift to us of creation. So we ask for, and we give thanks for, our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses….
We ask the Lord to release us from one another. We ask him to take away from us the excessive power that we have exercised over other people, and so release them from our grip, and let them forgive us the excess or the deficit that we have imposed on them.
We trespass when we exceed our authority. For fear that we would not have enough, we have taken more than we needed. We have consumed in excess and have insisted on a standard of living that we are unable to sustain.
We may al confess and repent on behalf of the powers that be. They have trespassed against us, and we can help them to acknowledge this by saying what needs to be said, and by admitting the offence that has become too difficult for them to admit to. We can invite them to acknowledge that all our civic and national life and economic prosperity come from the culture that the gospel has brought into being. We can invite them to stop damaging our nation by their attack on that culture by ending their defiance of God.
We have become used to having limitless power at our disposal and are reluctant to adjust to a lower and more sustainable use of power. When we acknowledge that we have exceeded our authority we may discover a more realistic way of life. We confess this, and bed that that our trespassers are forgiven, and the damage we have caused is made good.
Forgive us our debts….
We live under various obligations. We have a commitment to our parents, grandparents and all the generations whose lives and work have contributed to the prosperity we now enjoy. They have a claim on us, and we are in debt to them. They want us to have children and work in order to bring those children up to adulthood. They are determined that we should pass on what we have received and so serve the next generation and the continuity of the nation. All previous generations want us to understand that we have to pass on the life we have received. Our obligation is moral and demographic. This is the debt we must pay, and for which we must be forgiven if we cannot pay it. We pray for forgiveness and a new start and a chance to do what we have not yet done.
In this prayer we acknowledge this ongoing debt of service, that links us together in families and over generations, and through the world-wide supply of goods and services. This is debt is concealed. We may assume that it is fair and possible for our own children to service the debt obligations we have placed on them. But those debt obligations now far exceed the ability of the next generation to pay. We may assume that the workers in those countries that supply goods to us are adequately paid for them. But they may not be. They may never have the prosperity we have enjoyed.
We need to give up the assumption that governments take care of the general welfare, and that they will provide for us what we do not provide for ourselves. We are under an obligation to care, first for our children and the next generation, and then for our own parents and those who once cared for us. We ask the Lord to give us the means to provide for those nearest to us and so pay our debt to them.
Our refusal to seek judgment and ask for forgiveness has allowed our generation, and our governments, to assure us that we are not in debt, that we have trespassed, that we have earned our riches, and we are not under obligation to anyone for them. They have led us to believe that we are rich, and are entitled to all we possess. They assure us that we don’t really have to work ourselves, that we do not have to pick up tools, go out into our fields and cultivate our own crops. Anyone who does not do so, believes that other people will always work for him, in ways disguised by long supply chains and the complex division of labour. They believe that the energy necessary for an industrial economy will always be there to power industry, even if that industry is now invisible to us on other continents. They believe that they will never have to do this themselves directly. All this is delusory. We have trespassed and we are in debt, and our dignity depends on us seeking judgment about the truth of our position.
Lead us not into temptation…
‘Temptation’ means ‘testing’. Testing is what we undergo in hard times, when we are unable to control what is happening to us, and when our confidence and security are gone. We ask the Lord not to test us beyond what we can bear, not allow us to be pushed beyond our breaking point.
The Lord promises that we will not be tempted beyond what we can endure. We will not be broken, but we will be made stronger by all experience that God allows to come to us. By enduring, we become stronger.
Christians are being tested, and must endure. We are undergoing a trial and persecution. Wedges are being forced in, dividing us and blinding us from the overwhelming number of ends and purposes that we as humans do actually share, such as respect and family, and the struggle to prevent our powers from being removed and the fruits of our work being taken away from us.
Some are in such a panic to secure their position, and refuse to accept any drop in their standard of living. They are turning away from the rest of the nation, ready to abandon the rule of law and our way of life. Many people are willing to fall into line with the latest emergency measures, perhaps believing that such measures will affect others but not them, or that the situation will change and the crisis disappear.
The centralisers may mistakenly believe that they will survive any conflict. But they are betraying their own people, and breaking the rule of law that protects them as well as us, and the national cohesion that means that we do not regard one another as enemies. We must go through these trials and can do so if the Lord gives us the means to withstand them.
We can ask the Lord to identify the temptations on us, and so show us how we are under attack. Temptations always present themselves as new and attractive, though they are always old, and they represent an attempt to take our decision-making away from us and so to disempower us.
It took many generations of hard-lived Christian discipleship for our culture to emerge. This culture gave previous generations the qualities of self-restraint, public accountability and responsibility, and of the rule of law. But it will not take generations to destroy and lose this culture. It takes even less time to create economic chaos, suspend the rule of law, put in a state of emergency, suspend civil rights and end political stability. If we allow this to happen economic confidence, stability and prosperity will not come back in our lifetime. We must therefore resist temptation. We are being tested. We must be ready to say, ‘We must obey God rather than man’ (Acts 5.29).
But deliver us from evil
We ask the Lord not to send us into the time of trial. We ask him to rescue us from the hostile powers that have a hold over us.
Do not let us compromise or arbitrate between God and any other power. Do not let us test our strength against the Lord, or make him wait, or imagine we can hold out against him or defy him.
We ask the Lord to deliver us from evil men, and to prevent us from being so taken over by this evil that we ourselves become one of those evil men.
How can we know what is good and what is evil? What is evil? Evil is whatever causes the destruction of man and creation. How can we know what is good? We can learn what is good by following the Commandments the Lord has given us.
The governments and institutions of our time have overreached. They have too high view of their own authority. They do not acknowledge that they are not the source of their authority; they refuse to acknowledge the real source of their authority, or acknowledge the limits of their authority. They are unable to acknowledge or respect anything that they have not made. Those leaders, institutions and political classes that do acknowledge the source and limits of their authority are good: they understand that they are accountable, they underhold the rule of law, and will enable that settlement to continue for another generation. Those leaders, institutions and political class that do not acknowledge the source and limits of their authority are evil: they pursue power without reference to public well-being, evade responsibility, undermine the rule of law and make it unlikely that peace will continue for another generation. Their overreach will divide and destroy that nation.
Christians are witnesses of the increasingly totalitarian response of our political class to the unmanageable systemic contradictions that they have created and concealed. Christians have to withstand the pressures such regimes put upon us. We must learn how to challenge and resist them and avoid getting caught up in their schemes. Through enduring whatever suffering they inflict on us, we can grow and develop the character of Christ. The nation will regrow once the Church has recovered its voice, and by offering our lives, given its true witness to the world.
For thine is the kingdom…
‘Kingdom’ means the rule. A country is rational, peaceful and prosperous when under the rule of law. The law is supreme when there is a consensus that justice is fundamental, and that justice depends on truth, and that the discovery of the truth depends on public examination and judgment, and so on courts with powers of enforcement. It depends on our understanding that the law is master, and so that the law is above the monarchy, the government, the party, the media and every other section and interest. The law is not whatever the present government decides. The law is the summarised accumulated experience of many generations about what makes life possible and so of what things have to be ruled out in order to keep life tolerable. The jurisdiction we have inherited has been formed by generations of Christian discipleship and learning. In this jurisdiction everyone is equal under the law; justice is performed in public and the powerful are held to account. God is acknowledged to be the source of true authority. He is the good judge, who can see through all deceit to uncover the truth, and release all who have been held captive by the falsehoods of powerful people and regimes.
…the power
God starts, continues, endures and completes his work. All power comes from the Holy Spirit, and is to be used for good. God exercises his power with a patience that outlasts all resistance.
…and the glory…
Glory is the revelation of the truth. It enables the proper recognition and acknowledgement of reality, that is unafraid and does not shun the whole truth in its fullest dimensions
Christianity has given us the highest account of human being. Man is given his glory by God. God raises man. In particular he glorifies the poor, who have received no glory from any other source. Those who had none, are given glory. ‘He has put down the mighty their seat and has exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things and the rich he hath sent empty away…’
Jesus Christ has gathered around him a people, who are present and recognisable in every place as his Church. He regards his people as his glory. From this people come the Christian and discipleship and skills that form the culture which sustain any society that receives it. This culture brings peace in nations and between them, so that, precariously, a civilisation may emerge. This civilisation has a glory that comes from Christ. The Christian people encourage us not to give in to fear and despair but to respond to the call of God, to discover the dignity intended for us, and to join them in prayer to God our Father.
As it was, is now and ever shall be, world without end…
Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today and forever. He is the source and founder of our humanity. Those who refuse to give glory to God despise our Christian forebears, conceal our history and attempts to destroy our national culture and memory. Driven by envy, they hold out against the gospel, belittle our people and want us to despair. Christians oppose them. We declare in public that authority, power and glory belong to God, that they come to us from God and that we must return them so that he can refresh and restore them for us. We say simply that the Lord is God, and that God is our Father. We give thanks to God. It is in acknowledging what we receive from him, and that it is indeed him that we receive it from, that we truly receive it.
From the practice of saying this prayer the Christian community has learned to give thanks in all circumstances. Thankfulness is our fundamental characteristic. The people and nations that absorb this thankfulness also develop a fundamental contentedness that enables them to endure frustrations and stay at peace with one another. From the petitions of the Lord’s prayer, we learn that God is ready to give what we need and to take away what we cannot cope with. He will take us through difficult hard times and keep us company, so that we do not face them without him, whose self-mastery is constantly available to us to draw on, and that at last we will overcome and arrive with him at the perfect sonship.
For a second account of the Lord who makes this possible, and who is our Lord, we turn to the Ten Commandments and so to fundamental statement of the gospel, and fundamental proposition of all Christian teaching, that only God is God, and he is our God, God for us. This is the first commandment. The nine that follow are amplifications of the truth of the first, that God is the Lord. The Lord is God. The ten commandments orient us so that we are the people who know this and have authority to declare it. We are true recognisers of God, who has given his recognition to us. We have received glory from him and so we give glory to him.
