Praying to Give Up Your Own Authority

We're going to read this morning from the Lord's prayer in Matthew chapter 6. And we are going to be focusing on one aspect of that Lord's prayer in particular. Let's turn to Matthew 6:9-13. Jesus told his disciples, "Pray then like this: 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 and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." So far, our reading.

One of the trickier parts of parenthood that I don't personally know, but have observed very recently, is the subtle, or sometimes not so subtle, arm wrestle between a parent and their children over who rules the house. We often think of the teenager who pushes the envelope of who's in charge, but having spent Christmas this weekend with my little nephew Freddie, you realise it's not just teenagers. I heard a story of a dad who tried to have a very sympathetic, understanding conversation, a very fatherly conversation with his four-year-old, trying to explain why this four-year-old needs to listen to him. He asked her, "Who is the king of this house?" Thinking the answer is obvious because he owns the house, he maintains the house, he pays the bills for the house.

But without batting an eye, leaning forward dramatically to make the point, the little one said, "I am the king. The king is dead. Long live the new king." There's a similar struggle when it comes to our existence as humans. One of the main themes, in fact perhaps the single greatest theme of the Bible, is the concept of God's kingdom.

God's kingdom over and against the kingdom of the world, over and against the kingdom of man or of Satan. In fact, you could summarise the whole message of the Bible as God being busy restoring His kingdom that has come under a rebellion led by humanity. So the main question that the Bible keeps asking throughout the unfolding narrative is the question, "Who is the king?" Some of us might also remember that eighties sitcom "Who's the Boss?" with Tony Danza.

I have never seen it in Australia for some reason, but I remember watching it in South Africa as a young man. My parents loved it. "Who's the boss?" That is exactly the question of our existence. Who is the boss?

It's no wonder then that when Jesus was asked to teach us how to pray, that we've read in the Lord's prayer again this morning, one of the statements, one of the most important statements in this godly prayer is this: "God, may Your kingdom come and may Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." This teaching that Jesus gives us, and it's not just a once-off. Jesus says, "This is how you are to pray. Pray then like this," verse 9 starts, is to be habitually praying for God's kingdom to come and for His will to be done. So the question we have to ask, and it's a very good one, is to ask why?

Why is it so important that we go to God to pray to him, often when we go to him with very personal needs, very personal requests? Why does Jesus say that we are to come to him to ask that His kingdom come? And that His will be done when I want my will for my requests to be done as well? Why do we pray, "May Your kingdom come and Your will be done?" Well, let's have a look first at those two-pronged requests or petitions that we make in that statement.

The first one is, "Your kingdom come." At face value, when we pray for God's kingdom to come, we may think that we are praying for His extension, for God to receive more glory on earth. We started this morning by saying, "The heavens shall declare the glory of our God." And so we think that this request for God's kingdom to come is that many more other people may come to know Him, that His kingdom be extended and expanded here on earth. You might think that "Your kingdom come" is therefore an evangelistic request, that God may convert more and more people into His kingdom.

In part, you could say that that is true, that God would hallow His name, which is the first part of the Lord's prayer, that He would honour His name more and more. But we also have to understand the request that comes in the second half of this statement: "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." And when we understand that, we actually see that at the heart of this prayer is a humble request that God will place in me His reign more and more, that He will convert me over into His kingdom more and more. To pray for God's kingdom and His will is to pray for God to work in our hearts, to bring us more and more into submission to Him.

The early church theologian Saint Augustine said that a sovereign God is reigning today. He is reigning now regardless of whether we believe in Him or not. He is King. And yet, Augustine says, just as light is absent to those refusing to open their eyes, so it is possible to refuse God's rule, at least for a short time. Because at this point that we live in today, in human existence, we live in the age of rebellion.

If we ever get to the new heavens and the new earth, and we have some sort of great graph to show how the history of mankind and the history of all that exists unfolded, we would be marked in this space as the age of rebellion. And this rebellion, the Bible calls sin. This rebellion is the cause of all our human problems. We were created to serve God, but when we serve other things in place of God, all sorts of spiritual and physical and psychological problems come up. So the question, why do I have problems with my relationships?

Problem of self-control in my life. Why do I have these things? It's because we are serving something other than God. There's a part of us that still isn't living under His rule. And whether you are a Christian or not, there are aspects of our lives where we've closed our eyes to the light of God.

And this is hinted at in the Lord's prayer. In that clause where Jesus says that, "May Your will be done on earth as it already is in heaven." God already reigns completely and fully in some part of existence, just not all the time on earth. So the big picture message of the Bible is exactly this: that in order to be reunited with our divine purpose, we need God to come more fully into our lives. It is actually such an important thing to be praying.

"God, may Your will come more fully into my life." We need His kingdom to penetrate, not only this world, not only bringing more people into His kingdom. He needs to penetrate our hearts. This is why the concept of the kingdom of God is one of the single biggest topics that Jesus preached on in His earthly ministry. Remember those times.

Remember those parables where Jesus would begin, "The kingdom of God is like." "The kingdom of heaven is like." It is the biggest thing He taught on. Why?

Because the whole narrative of the Bible is telling us the story of two kingdoms at battle, ours and God's. And so praying for God's kingdom to come is vitally important. It is part of good praying. It is specifically a lordship petition, you could say. It is asking God to extend His royal power, His royal authority, not simply over the earth, but in every aspect of my life.

So that is "Your kingdom come." But then there's the second part of that request, "Your will be done." The father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, was very upfront about the meaning of this specific request that "Your will be done." He paraphrased it in this way as the prayer that we are praying in that moment. He says, "Lord, grant us grace to bear willingly all sorts of sickness, poverty, disgrace, suffering, and adversity, and to recognise that in this, Your divine will is crucifying our will."

How comfortable do you feel about that? This is what we're praying when we pray for God's kingdom and His will to come. It is an extremely bold statement. We are saying, "God, I give You permission to break me down in order to build me into who You want me to be." It's a statement of trust.

I want to ask you, are you praying that? How often are you praying that? So we've seen the two-pronged requests. Here's the secret, however, to being able to pray willingly for God's kingdom to come and for His will to be done: submission can only be based on trust.

Here's the beauty of the Lord's prayer. The entire prayer is wonderfully interconnected. It all works together. In other words, you can't truly pray, "Your kingdom come, Your will be done," unless you are also profoundly certain of the first words that you have uttered when praying: "Our Father who is in heaven."

You can't trust God. You can't entrust Him that His will be done unless you believe that He is your Father. As much as my little nephew resists his dad's authority, often, that same boy who has a healthy view of Dad, while he may not always understand why Dad says or asks certain things of him, that boy will instinctively trust his Dad to have their best interest at heart. And it's the same when we pray for our Father's will to be done. Only if we trust God as our Father can we submit to His leading.

In other words, remember, this King of the kingdom is also your Father. But because this Father is also the King, nothing that happens to us, nothing that He willingly brings across our path is a surprise to Him. Because He is sovereignly allowing everything to happen according to His plan. Unlike the conditional relationship that many of us operate in with one another, with even family members, and especially when we think of God, the conditional relationship: "God, You will bless me if I will do this. If I stay this good, then You must give me these good things."

The reality is for a Christian, that because of the work of Jesus on the cross, we've been given access to God who has now adopted us into the family. We read it before in Romans, He's given us a spirit that cries out, "Abba, Father." So that when we go to God, and we go and pray to Him, we approach Him as Father. And because He is now family, His love and His leading of us comes from unconditionality. He hears and He responds to prayer out of sheer familiarity and warm acceptance.

But it would be a pretty empty thing if this Father was like any other dad. A father's love can go pretty far in healing broken hearts. And earthly father's love is indeed a precious thing. But if God was only a Father like our earthly fathers, then there would be no point in praying to Him. We may as well go to those earthly fathers and say to them, "Dad, may Your will be done."

But God is no ordinary Father, because He is higher and greater and wiser than anything and anyone on earth. He sits on His throne in heaven and He rules with wisdom and authority. Our Father is also the King. And so He has power. He has power to change my life.

He has power to influence my situation. He has the power to change me. And so when we pray, "Father, our Father in heaven, Your kingdom come, Your will be done," we acknowledge that God is both good, because He is our Father and He has good intentions for us, but also because He is King. He is supremely able and powerful.

And so we have to come. This is what Jesus is teaching us in the Lord's prayer. We have to come habitually to pray that God's will be done, because if we can't, and we don't truly desire God's will to be done, the truth is we will never know peace. If we are still praying for our will to be done, if we are still praying for our rule to come, we will feel compelled to rule everything around us. You only have to think of the way that some of our other brothers and sisters from other denominations pray, anxiously praying for healing, praying with concern and worry and nervousness, because they cannot imagine that God will have any other will that is different to their personal will. They don't stop to consider what is God's will in this situation.

No. God must do what I see is right. He must heal because I need so and so to be healed. But friends, God is ultimately the God of peace. The lasting thing that God gives us, the thing that really only matters is that He gives peace in all situations.

Otherwise, we go mad trying to control the things the way that we believe they ought to be. But the reality is controlling life is so far beyond our ability. Who can control their life? Who can control the relationships around them, the people around them? We live as if we think that we have any control.

And even the things that we have control over, we often prove ourselves to be stupid kings, terribly unwise. Who would rule under the reign of me? No one. This is why John Calvin adds that to pray "Thy will be done" is to submit not only our will to God, but even our experience, our feelings associated with God's will being worked out in our lives. In other words, when God is doing a work in us, to pray, "God, Your will be done," means not only do we allow God to have His rule over our lives, we also don't become despondent or bitter about it.

We don't white-knuckle it through and say, "God, just do what You've got to do." We're joyful about it. We have peace about it. When we truly desire for God's will to be done, whatever the cost may be, it's only in that moment that we taste peace. So when we pray for God's kingdom to come and His will to be done, we are asking that His will be done, not simply for the world around me, but inside me as well.

But I can only do this because I have submitted myself to a heavenly Father that I trust. And then, third and finally, we can only submit ourselves to God because we trust Him, but there is a part of us that also knows that when we pray for His kingdom to come, we are praying because it is a very good kingdom. If you and I truly believe everything that the Bible tells us about God's kingdom, if we truly believe every single teaching that Jesus gave us about that kingdom, it would be the only thing we'd be praying for. If we deeply know and if we deeply believe what it means for the kingdom of God to come, I would choose the kingdom every opportunity I had. John Piper in his well-known book "Desiring God" asks this question.

How does Jesus describe becoming a Christian? How did Jesus explain what it's like to enter the kingdom of God? Well, He said it in this very succinct way in Matthew 13:44. "The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and then covered up. Then in his joy, he goes and sells all that he has to buy that field."

And Piper says, "I read that text for years without reading the phrase 'in his joy.'" He says that every sermon on that passage, all I ever heard was, "You can have the kingdom, but you must sell all that you have, and then take the kingdom." What came across was that this is a decision of resolve and commitment and white-knuckling it through. But that little phrase, "in his joy," Piper said, changed everything. The treasure that the man finds causes joy to so fill his heart that selling all that he has is the least he can do.

Friends, this is what happens when we become believers. And I hope that you have tasted this at some point. If you don't know whether you have a treasure in what you have received in Jesus Christ, then I want you to go home and pray about it. If you haven't experienced the joy of what it means to have the kingdom, it might be possible that you have not received the kingdom yet. The man who sells everything he has to gain the treasure he found in the field does so because of the joy he experienced having discovered it.

That is why Jesus got frustrated one time when Peter said to him in Mark 10, "Lord, we have left everything to follow You. Look at what we've given up to follow You," he says. And Jesus turns to Peter, and He says this in Mark 10:29. "Truly, Peter, there is no one who has left house, or brothers, or sisters, or mother, or father, or children, or lands for My sake, who will not receive it a hundredfold, and in the age to come, eternal life." Jesus says to Peter, "What do you mean you've left everything?

Who am I to you, Peter? If you truly understand what you have when you have given those things away to follow Me, if you truly understand what I offer you, Peter, you would realise that I am everything. So the question is, have you truly lost everything?" And so even for us, if we were to lose a brother or a sister for becoming a Christian, if we lose a husband or a wife, and there are some even in this church who have, if we lose a career or a reputation, Jesus says it's not even worth comparing.

Because in return, you receive a hundredfold. Friends, you could give up everything on this planet for Jesus Christ, and it is still the happiest day of your life. Because the freedom and the true life that you and I have been given, because we have entered that kingdom, it is not a burden, it is a release. Because the kingdom is not a foreign land, it is our home. The home that we've always been looking for.

The kingdom is like a man who, in his joy, sold all that he had so that he could claim this treasure. And the prize is so magnificent. The prize is so worth it that once you have seen it, the things that you may have sold, the things that you may have given up to have it, well, they fall off the edge of a cliff in light of the glory, in light of the freedom, in light of the peace. And so it is this kingdom that we pray for. When we pray to God, "Your kingdom come."

So let us pray often and urgently. Let the kingdom of God come. Let it arrive. Let it grow. Let it be established more and more in every part of my life.

And we say then, "May His good and holy will be done in me, and through me, in the world around me." When we pray in this way, we say, "Father, I don't want to rule over my life the way that I think is best anymore. Please take over from me. Please take over from me. Please let everything happen in the way that seems right to You."

We're going to pray now and we often, well, every time we do have a sermon, we're going to pray. But we're going to pray the Lord's prayer together. What other prayer can we do? And I want us, as we pray, just to remember and see the things we are asking for as we pray. These are the most significant things we can ask for when we come to God.

So as we're sitting, let's pray this together. 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 sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are Yours now and forever. Amen. Lord, we come specifically today as we reflect on the urgency of the importance for us to give up our wills, for us to truly live humbly. Lord, where there is temptation, will You protect us?

Because we know those temptations are leading us away from Your will. Those temptations are building up our kingdoms at the expense of Yours. Lord, help us to know that we may ask for Your will to be done in our lives, trusting and hoping for that, because You are our Father. That we are adopted sons and daughters, that we are Your family members, heirs of God, co-heirs with Jesus Christ. And Lord, when we struggle with thinking that we have given up so much or the cost is too high to follow You, God, help us to see and remember the joy of what it means to follow Jesus, to be giving up everything and anything that does not lead us to You.

Anything and everything that ensnares and entangles and distracts us. Help us to trust that Your holy will for our lives, a lifestyle that is Christian and thoroughly godly, Lord, all those things are for our good and for our joy. Father, help us to pray in a way that is suitable and right. Help us to live a life that reflects that.

Holy Spirit, continue Your work in us, that we may more and more fully say, "Your kingdom has come, Your will is being done in my life as it is in heaven." In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.