Matthew 6:9-13 — The Lord's Prayer

Frank: Six petitions. That is the whole of it. Six short requests, and the entire thing fits in a single breath if you say it slowly, which means the most prayed prayer in the history of the world, the one prayed in every language on every continent for two thousand years, takes about fifteen seconds to say out loud.

Linda: Fifteen seconds. That is genuinely surprising when you put it that way, because it feels enormous. It feels like the whole of the Christian faith is loaded into it.

Frank: It is. And yet a child can hold it. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, I'm Frank, that's Linda, and today we are sitting with the Lord's Prayer, Matthew chapter six, verses nine through thirteen. The prayer everybody thinks they know.

Linda: Which is exactly why I want to slow it down. Because I have said this so many times my mouth does it without me. Let's actually read it, Frank, before we do anything to it.

Frank: Let me read it straight through. Jesus is teaching, and he says, pray like this. "Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy. Let your Kingdom come. Let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors. Bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen."

Linda: Fifteen seconds, and you feel the weight of it land anyway. So where do we start? Because there is a first word here that I usually blow right past.

Frank: The first word is the whole revolution, honestly. Father. Now here is what you have to feel to get this. The people Jesus is teaching were not people who had never prayed. These were devout Jews. They had the Amidah, the great standing prayer, three times a day, rich, ancient, soaked in Scripture. And that prayer opens by approaching God as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. You come near through the covenant fathers, at a reverent distance. And Jesus stands up and says, no, open your mouth and say Father. Behind the Greek there sits the Aramaic word Abba, which is not the formal word. It is the word a small child says at home, unguarded, warm, the word you say when you climb into a lap.

Linda: The right to say Father is not something I worked up to. That is what I am hearing. It was handed to me.

Frank: Handed to you at enormous cost, yes. And this is where the whole Bible bends toward one word. Go back to Exodus, at the Red Sea. God tells Moses to say to Pharaoh, "Israel is my son, my firstborn, let my son go." Before there is a law, before there is a temple, God claims a slave people as a son by sheer redeeming love. And then jump forward to Paul, in Romans eight, and he says something that reframes everything. He says you received the Spirit of adoption, and by that Spirit we cry, "Abba, Father." So notice, when you say Father, that is not a natural word rising up out of you toward a stranger. It is the Spirit's own cry, rising through you, purchased by the Son who became a curse so that you could become a son. This is what the church calls adoption. You do not pray Father upward toward someone far off. You pray it because God has already come down and made you his. But here is where people get stuck: they think "adoption" is just a nice church metaphor. How does it actually cost you something?

Linda: The word adoption isn't soft at all. It's a legal act. In the ancient world an adopted son had the full name, the full inheritance, the full standing of a natural-born son, and it could not be reversed. God didn't just love everybody generally—he went to the Son to purchase the papers. The cross is the adoption fee.

Frank: Because the text will not let you say it that way, and I think the difference is everything. A general fatherhood is a metaphor. God is sort of like a dad, kindly, in the sky. Adoption is a legal act. It is a status changed. In the ancient world an adopted son had the full name, the full inheritance, the full standing of a natural-born son, and it could not be reversed. So the claim is not "God is fatherly toward people." The claim is that you, specifically, were outside the family, a debtor, a slave, and God went to the Son to purchase the papers. The cross is the adoption fee. That is why Paul can say the Spirit cries it through you, because you would never dare say it on your own. Do you see how that thread runs through history?

Linda: The trembling of a brand-new believer saying that word for the first time, the slaves at the Red Sea, Jesus on the cross—all one thread, all one story of purchase and belonging.

Frank: One thread, running through. The right to say Father was purchased. It was never assumed.

Linda: Then here is what jumps out at me next, and I have honestly never noticed it. You get three whole requests in before you ask for a single thing for yourself. Name, Kingdom, will. And only then, bread. That cannot be an accident.

Frank: It is not an accident. The order is the sermon. The order is the whole lesson. Count it the way you just did. Before one word turns to your own hunger, the heart gets turned outward and upward. Hallowed be your name. Now that little word, hallowed, sounds like church furniture to us, but underneath it is the verb hagiazō, which means to set something apart as sacred, to treat it as utterly other, in a category by itself. And here is the part people miss. Look at the mood of it. What's the grammatical shape of this petition?

Linda: It's a request. It's a petition, not an announcement. And that matters because God's name is already holy—so why are we asking for it to be hallowed?

Frank: That is exactly the question. Yes. His name is already holy in itself, holy whether one single tongue on earth ever acknowledges it. So what on earth are you asking for? You are asking that his holiness be recognized. That it be given its due weight in hearts, including your own, that cheapen it every day. You are asking that your life would stop obscuring him. And think about what that is, in the deepest sense. In Eden the creature grasped to be the center. He reached out and took, to put himself in God's place. This first petition is the great reversal of that. The redeemed child opens his mouth and asks, Father, be the center again. Let it be about you.

Linda: The first thing Jesus tells me to want is not my own good. It is that God be treated like God.

Frank: The first thing. And the church has long taught, this is old Reformed and Puritan ground, that God's chief purpose in everything is his own glory, and, this is the sweet part, that your highest joy is found precisely in wanting that same glory above your own comfort. The healthy soul asks first that God be honored. That is not God being needy. That is God pointing you toward the only thing big enough to actually fill you.

Linda: Here is where it turns for me, though. Because right after all that soaring language about the name and the Kingdom and heaven, the very next line is give us bread. That gear-change is almost jarring. One second we are in the throne room, the next we are asking for lunch.

Frank: And that jarring feeling is the point. This prayer refuses to split worship from need. The same lips that reverence heaven ask for the next loaf, in the same breath. But you have to feel who Jesus first said this to. For most people in that crowd there was no pantry. No week's groceries, no savings against a bad month. A day laborer stood in the market at dawn and hoped a landowner would pick him. If he got picked, he worked, and at sundown he got paid, because the Law itself said you must pay the poor man before nightfall. That coin bought the evening meal. And if nobody hired him, or he got sick, or the harvest failed, the family did not eat that night. Bread went stale fast in that heat. Life ran one loaf at a time, right at the edge of the cliff. When Jesus says give us our daily bread, the word he uses for daily carries a wrinkle most of us miss. What is he doing with that word?

Linda: It's doing something specific to how we understand need itself, isn't it? There's a way of praying that only makes sense if you're living one loaf at a time.

Frank: There is. It is a rare word, and it carries the sense of the bread we need for the day that is now upon us. The ration for today. Not the storehouse. Not next month. This day's portion. And here is the thing that reframes the whole request. Jesus does not put this only on the lips of the poor. He puts it on the lips of everyone who follows him, rich and poor alike. So the man with a full bank account prays the exact same words as the man who cannot see past sundown. Which means it was never really a prayer about your reserves. It is a confession that you live from his hand daily, whatever your balance says.

Linda: That actually stings a little, because when I get anxious about money at night, I am not asking God for today. I am running the math on the next six months. I am trying to secure the reserve so I never have to depend on anybody.

Frank: We all do that. And God, listen to this, God wrote dependence right into the economy of the poor. He built a world where his children would have to learn to ask. He feeds his children one day at a time. And one day at a time is enough. That is not a threat. That is a mercy.

Linda: There is a harder line in here, though, and I want to go straight at it, because I think it is the one everybody races past. "Forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors." That little word, as. That is terrifying, Frank. Is Jesus saying my forgiveness from God is conditional on my forgiving other people? Because that sounds like grace with a price tag.

Frank: It is the most frightening word in the prayer, and I do not want to soften it, because Jesus did not. But let me be very careful about what it is and is not saying. He is not making your forgiveness of your neighbor the price of grace. You do not buy your way into God's mercy by being nice. What he is saying is that a heart which has genuinely received forgiveness cannot then sit there clutching the debts of other people. Grace that is really grasped flows outward, or it was never grasped at all. Paul says it plainly over in Colossians, forgive each other even as Christ forgave you. And as the old commentator said about as tightly as it can be put: "Those who desire to find mercy with God, must show mercy to their brethren." Does that sound like punishment, or something else?

Linda: The unforgiving heart is being exposed, not punished. If I am still white-knuckling somebody's debt, it is evidence the mercy never actually reached the bottom of me.

Frank: That is exactly right. And now feel the cost of it, because this line is not sentimental. To forgive a real debt means releasing your right to be repaid. Your right to the apology. Your right to hear them admit it. Your right, if we are honest, to watch them suffer the way you suffered. And that is pride, and that is self-protection, and you have been holding onto it for what feel like very good reasons. This line comes and pries your fingers off of it, one at a time.

Linda: I have a name coming to mind right now. It came up the second you started talking. And I do not want to hand that debt back.

Frank: Of course you don't. Nobody does on willpower. And that is the only way this line is survivable, honestly. You do not forgive out of an empty account, gritting your teeth. You forgive standing inside a mercy already given to you. The debt God cancelled at the cross while you were still his debtor. He forgave you everything. From a full account—from that reality—how do you actually live this out?

Linda: This room makes sense for a moment, but then I go right back to holding the grudge at dinner. What moves forgiveness from this prayer to the table, to the actual moment?

Frank: Then let's make it as concrete as Jesus made it. This week, that name is going to surface at a specific moment. Maybe their message lights up your phone. Maybe their empty seat at the table. Maybe somebody just says the name and your stomach tightens. That is the moment. And obedience there is not a warm feeling washing over you. It is a sentence you say to God. "I release what they owe me. I am not going to collect it anymore." It might mean finally sending the text you have drafted and deleted five times. It might just mean deciding not to drag the old wound up again tonight. But the prayer itself—does it keep framing the whole day for you, or just that one moment?

Linda: The frame holds all the way through. Not just the forgiveness line, but every petition working together, all day long.

Frank: It does, and I would say do it out loud. Tonight, with the people under your roof, or by yourself if you live alone, pray this prayer slowly. And when you get to "let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven," stop right there and name one thing in your own house that you are handing back to God's will instead of forcing your own. Say it plainly enough that you could tell somebody tomorrow what you prayed. And then when the anxious money math starts at eleven at night, don't reach for the calculator. Ask him for just what today required and what tomorrow will need. Small. Specific. That is how he taught it. What does it look like when the prayer circles back to the beginning?

Linda: Everything lands back where it started. The prayer ends with yours is the Kingdom, the power, the glory forever—straight out of David in First Chronicles, "yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power and the kingdom." Every request just gets lifted back into the hands of whoever owns everything anyway.

Frank: It ends where it began. It opens with Father and it closes by handing the whole world back to him. Six petitions, bookended by his glory. And the reason you can pray any of it, the reason you get to say that first word at all, is that the Son made the way. Take that into today. You are not praying up toward a stranger. You are a child, climbing into a lap that was bought for you.

Linda: Here is what I would leave you with. That name you thought of a minute ago, the one your stomach tightened around. What would it cost you, today, to pray for them instead of against them? Don't answer me. Answer him.

Frank: Pray it out loud tonight. That is the whole charge. Just say the fifteen seconds, slowly, and mean the word "as" when you get to it.

Linda: This one's part of the Dig Deeper app, so if you haven't got it yet, go look up Dig Deeper in your app store and come dig with us tomorrow.