Thy Kingdom Come

One of the things that we experience as the trickier parts of parenthood is the subtle or sometimes not so subtle arm wrestle between a mum or a dad and their child in terms of who owns the house. Often we think of the teenager pushing the envelope about who is in charge, but some of my closest friends have kids reaching that three or four year old mark who can be just as stubborn apparently. It's amazing how testy they can be about you limiting screen time on the iPad or when you tell them it's bedtime. I heard a story this week of a dad trying to have a very understanding and sympathetic, a rational conversation with his four year old daughter and trying to explain why she needs to listen to him in a very acceptable sort of way. He got on his knees and he asked her, Risi, who is the king of this house?

Thinking the answer was obvious since he owns the house, maintains the house, pays all the bills for the house. But without batting an eye and leaning forward dramatically to make the point, the little girl said, Reese is the king. Long live the king, hey? Now many parents can probably relate to that power struggle, but there is a similar struggle that comes in our existence as humans. One of the overriding narratives of the Bible story is the concept of one kingdom battling against another kingdom.

God's kingdom against the kingdom of the world. I don't know if you remember this. I know that it was quite popular in South Africa, but there was an eighties TV show by the name of Who's the Boss? Does anyone remember that? Yeah.

Who's the Boss? Starring Tony Danza. And it's exactly the type of question that the Bible asks. Who's the boss? The answer, of course, is always simple once you have become a Christian.

In one sense, there's really no doubt about who the boss is. The book of Hebrews sums it up by saying that Christ crushed the rebel resistance to God's kingdom and that at the beginning it is the beginning of the end. When He went to the cross, it is the beginning of the end for this resistance movement. The book of Hebrews sums it up in this profound way. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, He sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until His enemies should be made a footstool for His feet.

He is the king. He is the one in charge, but He is waiting and waiting and delaying until there's a final time where all His enemies will be subdued. The apostle Paul identifies these enemies at various times in his writings as death, the enemy of death, the enemy of sin, the enemy of unsaved humanity that has raised itself against God at various times. This morning, we need to understand this concept as we look at the Lord's Prayer, the battle of kingdoms. The question of who is the boss.

And while we pray the Lord's Prayer and while it is true that Christ is the king through His powerful work on the cross, we are still in the process where He is winning territory against humanity. Christ is still waiting until all His enemies become a footstool for His feet. Now following on from our previous talk last week on praying for God's name to be glorified, beginning these prayers, beginning our prayers with adoration, desiring the glory, desiring the honour, desiring the hallowedness of our God. Today, we come to the next phrase in the Lord's Prayer. So let's read that together in Matthew 6 starting from verse 9.

Matthew chapter 6, verse 9. Jesus said, 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. First thing we have to understand when we come to this prayer, this specific petition in the Lord's Prayer asking for God's kingdom to come and God's will to be done, the first thing we have to realise that we are actually praying to give up our own authority at this point. We are praying to give up our own authority at this point. We are petitioning God for submission to Him.

At face value, when we pray for God's kingdom to come, we may think that praying for God's kingdom to arrive is an extension of the evangelistic mission that the drive that the church should be involved with in bringing the world, bringing us unsaved neighbours that we prayed for, our unsaved siblings and children to God. We might think that, God, you have to establish Your reign in the lives of those heathens around us. We may think of it as an evangelistic request. And in part, that's true. But we have to understand as well this request alongside the other half of this request that we have prayed.

Your will be done. And once we start putting these two together, we actually see that at the heart of this prayer is a humble submission of yourself to God's reign. To pray for God's kingdom and His will to come is to pray for God to work in your heart to bring it more and more into submission to Him. The early church theologian, Saint Augustine or Augustine, said that a sovereign God is indeed reigning now. He is in control, this God of ours, regardless of whether we believe in Him or not.

But he said, at the same time, just as light is absent to those refusing to open their eyes, so it's possible to refuse God's rule even when He is reigning, at least for a little time. It's called rebellion, isn't it? A rebel exists in the kingdom where the king reigns. And for a time, whether days or weeks or months or years, that rebel is rebelling. But who's in charge?

It's still the king. The Bible calls this rebellion sin, and this rebellion is caused, it is the cause of all human problems. We were created to serve God, but when we start serving other things in God's place, all sorts of spiritual and psychological and even physical problems arise. Why do you have relationship problems? Why do you have self image problems?

Because you're serving something other than God. You don't live under His rule, at least not completely. You don't live within His will. And so the challenge is that we have closed our eyes to the light of God. And this is hinted at in the Lord's Prayer when Jesus adds that clause, Your will be done on earth as it already is in heaven.

God's will and God's reign is already established in part, but it is still in the process of overthrowing all the rebellions in the kingdom. And so the big picture image we have to understand when we come to biblical theology, it is very important for every Christian to believe this and to understand, and not just the pastors who preach this. Every Christian must understand the big story of the Bible. The big picture message of the Bible is this, that in order to be reunited with our divine purpose, the purpose that God created, in order to be reunited with that, we need God's kingdom to come fully in our lives. We need His kingdom to penetrate, therefore, not only this world around us, but our hearts.

Do you know that the single most preached about concept for Jesus in the New Testament, in the gospels, was not about atoning sin and the need for a blameless lamb. It wasn't about the issue of sin necessary specifically. The concept and the image that Jesus used most often is the kingdom. Isn't it? We just read about that this morning again.

The kingdom of God is like a man who had a huge banquet, and he throws open this door to those who really aren't worthy of it, but who would be willing to come. Jesus preached about the kingdom. Why? Because the whole narrative of the Bible is the battle between two kingdoms, God's and ours. And so praying for God's kingdom to come is a vitally important petition and request.

And specifically, it is a lordship petition. It is asking God to extend His royal power, not simply over the earth, but in every part of my life. And it's not just my thoughts, how I think about things, but it's about my emotions, how I feel about things, which is such an indictment on our current understanding that emotions and feelings are the be all and end all. Emotions and feelings are always right. Do what you feel.

Do what you feel is right. God's extension of His royal power overthrows and overhauls my thoughts, my emotions, my desires, and my commitments. Commitments. The request then for God's kingdom to come is then also tied with this second request, Thy will be done. Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.

Now, the father of the Reformation, Martin Luther, was very upfront about the meaning of this petition specifically. He paraphrases this request to God in this way. He says, this is what it's trying to get at. Lord, grant us to hear willingly and to bear it completely all sorts of sickness, he says, all sorts of poverty. Help us to bear disgrace and suffering and adversity, and to recognise that in this, Your divine will is crucifying our will.

To see all hardship as a process of crucifying our rebellion and aligning ourselves to God more fully. Now this is a massive statement, isn't it, to pray? It is a dangerous prayer when we pray for God's kingdom and His will to come into our lives. And we may be hesitant to make such a bold statement, but this paraphrase is getting to the heart of this matter. We are saying, God, I give You.

God, I give You permission to break me down in order to build me into what You need me to be. That takes incredible trust, doesn't it, to pray that? To pray that to a God who is all powerful, to trust, okay, You have that power, God, but I give You permission to do that. So friend, this morning, I want to ask you, how willing are you to pray that? How willing are you to pray that God may take things and break things and that He may overhaul some of the deepest emotions and thoughts and values that you have?

How regularly do you pray that? How regularly? The Lord's Prayer, how often do we pray that? How often are we encouraged to pray that? Every day, alongside our daily bread, we have to pray, God, overhaul my will.

This leads us to the next point because how on earth can you submit yourself to such potentially uncomfortable things? How can we do that? The thing is lasting submission can only be based on full trust. Here is the beauty of the Lord's Prayer. This is the amazing thing.

It just flows into one another. It's interconnected. It all works together. You cannot pray, Your kingdom come, God, Your will be done, unless you are profoundly certain that God is your Father. As much as a four year old might act up and resist dad's authority, often that same child with a healthy view of dad, a good dad, while they may not always understand why dad has asked or said certain things of them, that child instinctively trusts that dad has their best interest at heart.

So only if we can trust God as Father, can we ask for grace to bear our hardship with patience. Remember that He is the king of this kingdom, but He is also our Father. And because this Father is also the king, nothing happens to us that is a surprise to Him. In fact, He has allowed all that has happened to us for our good. Someone may ask, how can we be sure that God is trustworthy?

Why? Why should we trust Him? The answer is, I think, supremely, and I'm sure there's all different ways of approaching it. But ultimately, I think, ultimately, the example we have for why we may trust Jesus for giving us this prayer and God the Father to whom we pray is that this part of the Lord's Prayer, Jesus Himself prayed at one time, didn't He? In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus prayed, Father, not my will, but Yours be done.

This is ultimately why we can trust God. Under circumstances far more crushing than you will ever face, you will ever face, Jesus submitted Himself to the Father's will rather than His own. And what was the Father's will? It was to save us. And we say, hallelujah and amen and thank you for that.

But if Jesus said, my will be done, we would not have been saved. In John 6:38, Jesus said, this is the will of the Father that I should lose no one that the Father has sent me. I should lose no one that the Father has sent me, but raise them up on the last day. Jesus restates in the following verse this again. This is the will of the Father that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in Him should have eternal life.

That is the will of the Father. And how was that going to be achieved? By going to the cross. It is the will of the Father. The will of the Father was for a suffering Son, for the salvation of His people.

Ultimately, that is why we can trust this God. Jesus is not asking us to do anything that He hasn't already done for us under conditions of difficulty beyond our comprehension. Without trust in our God, we try to take God's place. Without trusting God, we try to take His place and we try to rule our lives stupidly according to our own shortsightedness. Instead of praying Thy will be done, we say my will be done and things start going wrong in our lives.

When we don't submit ourselves to God's kingdom and His will, when we don't fully trust God, then when those times of hardship or even good things happen, things like seeking revenge on those who have hard done us, that have harmed us. We will push back against them. We will resist and we will fight and we will claw for our little treasures back every single time when it is my will. And we hurt ourselves and we hurt others in that process every time. But Luther reflects further in saying that we will be protected from the horrible vices of character assassination against us.

We will be protected against slander and backbiting and the condemning of others only if we learn to commit ourselves to God. If we can't say Thy will be done from the bottom of our hearts, we will never know peace. We will continuously feel compelled to try and control everything around us. From controlling people to controlling our environment. We will go mad to make things the way we believe they ought to be.

And yet, at the same time, we have this split personality knowing that we have so little control. We know that we don't have the ability to control how people react. We don't have the ability to control our environment. And we live in this weird deception if we think we can control any of it. And the things we can control, that little bit that we can control.

We often prove ourselves to be weak and unwise kings anyway. We make unwise decisions with what we do have power over. And so ultimately, to try and to rule our own lives, and this is only, I think, something you get fully when you're a Christian. Ultimately, to try and rule our own lives is just dashing ourselves upon the rocks again and again and again. And this is why the other reformer, John Calvin, adds on this Lord's Prayer.

They loved writing about the Lord's Prayer. John Calvin adds that to pray Thy will be done is to submit not only our wills to God, but even our feelings so that when God is working in us, we don't become despondent. We don't become bitter. We don't become hardened. When we truly desire for God's will to be done, whatever the cost, we actually experience peace for the first time.

Regardless whether it is good things that the Lord is taking us through or hard things, you have peace in all situations. Trusting that your God is good and trusting that He has a purpose. Now up until today, we've looked at the first three parts of the Lord's Prayer. But if you read it carefully, you'll see that the beginning of the Lord's Prayer, this first third is all about God. We are not to let our needs and issues dominate prayer, Jesus is saying.

You know, how often do we pray, God, please help. God, I need this. Please send that. Jesus is saying this is an inadequate and incomplete prayer. The first third, probably the first half you could argue is about God.

It comes first. We are not to let our needs dominate prayer, rather we are to give pride of place to praising and honouring our heavenly Father, as we heard last week, to yearn to see His greatness and to see it acknowledged everywhere, and then today to aspire to full love and full obedience to Him, to aspire to that. Prayer, therefore, should start with adoration and thanksgiving, a God centred-ness. He comes first because truly, if we understand that correctly, it heals the heart of its self centred-ness. The heart that is always tempted to curve back on itself, to keep returning to its needs, which distorts ultimately our vision.

And then we'll see now finally when the prayer is nearly halfway through, that when our vision is refrained into the glory and the majesty and the power and the control of our God, and that we can trust Him now. Now we can start praying for what we need. But we submit ourselves and trust firstly that God will get everything right in our lives and that nothing that happens is outside of His say so, outside of His control. Now, if you're like me and you've been a churchy for a long time, this is one thing we can know in our minds and we can say, yep, God is in control and I should trust in His wisdom. But what about our hearts?

What about our hearts? Why should we desire God's kingdom and His will? For this reason, the kingdom of God. If you truly knew what it was, you would want and desire every single time over your kingdom. If we deeply know what it means for the kingdom of God to come in our lives, what it means for me to live fully and completely according to the reign and the rule of my good and loving God, I would choose the kingdom every single time.

John Piper, and it's interesting I put Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Piper on the same sermon here. But John Piper, in his well known book, Desiring God, which I recommend any Christian to read, in his book, Piper asked this question. How did Jesus describe conversion? How does Jesus describe conversion? How did Jesus explain what it's like to enter into the kingdom of God and to give up your own will and to ask God to reign over you?

He says this is what Jesus said. The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and then covered up again. Then in his joy, he goes and sells all that he has and he buys that field. And Piper says, he writes, I read that text for years without seeing this little phrase there in his joy. He says every sermon I heard on it was this, you can have the kingdom, sell what you have, and then take the kingdom.

It was all in terms of decision and resolve and commitment. But that little phrase, in his joy changed everything for me. Why desire God's kingdom and will? Joy. Joy.

And friends, this is what you have tasted if you are a true believer. And my prayer is that you have tasted this. If you haven't if you haven't, pray. Pray. If you haven't experienced the joy of what it means to have the kingdom friend, then perhaps you're not in the kingdom yet.

Perhaps you aren't there yet. The man who sold everything, everything to get this treasure did so because of the joy he experienced when he discovered it. Why desire God's kingdom for ourselves? Why pray for God's kingdom to come more fully into my life? Joy.

The joy of what it means to have God rule in my life. And so friend, do you truly believe this? Do you truly, truly believe this? Do you believe that God's will for how you should live is a joyful thing, or is it a burden? Is it a commitment white knuckling it through this?

So that if I just if I just hold on to it tight enough, maybe maybe it'll be true. Jesus at one time got slightly annoyed with Peter. When Peter asked him or said to him, Lord, we have left everything to follow you. You know, we know they were fishermen, they were business owners, they left their nets behind to follow Jesus in Mark 10:28. And then Jesus returns or replies to Peter.

He says, truly, Peter, there is no one who has left house or brothers, sisters or mothers, father or children or lands for my sake who will not receive a hundredfold back and in the age to come receive eternal life. Jesus is saying to Peter with a bit of incredulous incredulity, if that's the way, with astonishment. He's saying to Peter, what am I to you? What am I to you, Peter? Who do you think I am?

If you truly understood who I was and what I am offering you, you would have realised that I am everything. So Peter, have you truly lost and given up everything to follow me? People may give up brothers or sisters. People may give up children, and we know there are people in our church that have had to do it. People may give up lands to follow Christ.

But Jesus is saying, if you enter the kingdom through me, you will receive a hundredfold. And that's not literal. That's not saying you're going to have a hundred brothers now if you give up one brother. It is insurmountable, unimaginable how far greater your reward will be. Friend, you could give up everything on this planet and it would be like sawdust compared to the glory that you will delight in without end because of this wonderful Saviour who has brought you into this kingdom.

And so this kingdom is not a burden. This kingdom is a release. This kingdom is not then a foreign land. It is home. It is a home that you've always actually been looking for.

In his joy, the man sold all that he had so he could claim his treasure. The cost is trivial. In fact, who could even call it a cost? The prize is so magnificent that once you've seen it, those things that you have sold to have it fall off the edge of a cliff in light of its overwhelming joy and peace. And so we pray, Father, may Your kingdom come more fully.

May Your will be done more fully in me as it already is in heaven where You reign perfectly. Let's pray. Oh, we thank you that we belong to You. We thank you, Lord, that You have taken us out of the kingdom of darkness and that You have brought us into Your wonderful light. Father, where there are pockets of rebellion in our lives, we pray again this morning as we will always pray if we pray the Lord's Prayer.

Your kingdom come. Crush these rebellions. Lord, may Your will be done in our lives. We make horrible kings so weak, so shortsighted. We pray, Lord, for Your encouraging power in our lives.

We pray that You will transform us into the persons that You want us to be. But, Father, also give us a measure of Your grace to see that progress. Oh, God, we need to see that as well. Help us to see what You are doing in our lives. Lord, particularly this morning, I pray for those who are going through hardship.

We know that these things are not accidental, but help us to guard against the bitterness, which is just a reflection that we think that we are in control. And that when we lose things and we lose freedoms and we lose toys, and become angry, we somehow think we have control. Give us the grace to know just how weak and how incapable we truly are. And then help us to rest with peace. And our good Father, who knows what is best, help us to trust You more, God.

Help us to follow You even hesitantly and waveringly behind You, as You lead before us, oh, our good Shepherd, even through the valleys of the shadow of death, we pray that we will find the green pastures as well. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.