Pray Then Like This (Part 3)--Sermon on the Mount Series

            Last Sunday, the members of the music team and I got to talking briefly about the old party-line telephone systems that used to exist. If you’re not familiar with a party line, it was an arrangement in which you and your neighbors literally shared one phone line, so that if they were on the phone, you couldn’t make a phone call until they were done (or, if you wanted a little entertainment, you could just listen in on their conversation without them knowing about it!). That kind of arrangement seems completely foreign to us today with technology like cell phones, but it was fairly common not that long ago, especially in rural areas.

            Now, we are going to finish our study of The Lord’s Prayer today, and when we think about prayer, I suspect we normally think of it as a private conversation between us and the Lord—we feel like other people really have nothing to do with it. But as we will learn today, prayer is really more like a party line—not in the sense that other people can listen in on our prayers, but in the fact that the way we treat other people may “clog up the line,” so to speak. Our behavior toward others may cause interference for the prayers that we pray to God.

            Let’s quickly review the lessons that we have drawn from The Lord’s Prayer over the last two weeks, and then we will move on to consider two final lessons from this model prayer. So far, we have seen that we should pray in…

1. A manner that is personal

2. A manner that is respectful

3. A manner that is worshipful

4. A manner that is confident

5. A manner that is submissive

6. A manner that is petitionary

7. A manner that is repentant

            Now before we touch on our final two lessons, let me answer a question that you may have—what has happened to the words that we recite at the end of The Lord’s Prayer: “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.” If you are following along in our pew Bible, you’ll notice that the words aren’t there. No matter what kind of Bible you’re using, you’ll probably find that those words are either omitted or included with a footnote that says something like, “these words are not found in early manuscripts.” What’s going on here?

            You may remember that a few months ago, when we looked at Matthew 5:22, we talked about the history of how the Bible was copied. Well, when we look at the ancient copies of Matthew 6, we find some copies that contain the words “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.” and some copies that don’t contain those words. Our English translations are left to sort that out, which is why some translations omit those words and others include them with some kind of footnote.

            In my opinion, Jesus most likely did not speak those words on that occasion. Its hard to imagine why any copyist—let alone many copyists—would have omitted those words if they were in the original Gospel of Matthew. Here’s what seems to have happened—The Lord’s Prayer was apparently recited in church services from a very early date in church history (just as it is still recited in many church services today). In the earliest days of the church, Christians all shared a Jewish background, and at that point in history it was common for Jewish people to end their prayers with a statement like, “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever amen,” in the same way that we end most of our prayers with a statement like, “in Jesus’ name I pray, amen.” So its likely that The Lord’s Prayer was recited in church services with those additional words from an early date, and over time some copyists added them into their copies of the Gospel of Matthew.

            This discussion has more sentimental value than anything else, because it doesn’t affect anything that we believe as Christians and shouldn’t shake our confidence in the text of Scripture at all. But many of us have recited The Lord’s Prayer with those words since we were kids, so there is a sentimental connection there. Honestly, I don’t think there’s any problem with reciting those words when we recite The Lord’s Prayer; we can simply understand that we’re doing it as part of a long-standing Christian tradition rather than something that comes specifically from the text.

But let’s move along to our final two lessons from this model prayer.

8. A manner that is circumspect

            This statement simply means that we should pray with an eye toward our surroundings—not our physical surroundings, but our relationships with other people. This is why I said that prayer is more like a party line than a private line.

            Last week, we learned that is appropriate for us to ask for forgiveness when we pray, but there is a specific way in which we must show that we understand our need to be forgiven. In v. 12, the Lord teaches us to say, “and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” That’s very interesting—Jesus ties our request to be forgiven together with our obedience to God in forgiving others. The idea is that by forgiving others, we have shown our understanding of our own need to be forgiven.

            Since the Bible commands us to forgive others, we are sinning if we fail to do so, and that means that if we ask God to forgive us, yet we fail to forgive others, we are sinning at the same time that we’re asking for forgiveness! That doesn’t make any sense. That would be like asking someone to forgive you for being a bully while you’re punching them in the gut!

            When we fail to forgive other people, that reveals that we haven’t fully come to terms with the depths of our own sins, and that is a requirement for being forgiven by God. The biblical term “confess” literally means “to say the same thing as another,” so when the Bible speaks of confessing our sins—as in 1 John 1:9—it means that we must say the same thing about our sins that God says about them—that they are vile and despicable and a great insult to Him.

            But if we fail to forgive others, that is a sure sign that we are downplaying the severity of our own sins. Jesus tells a great parable to illustrate this idea in Matthew 18 [READ Matt 18:21-35]. That’s what its like when we fail to forgive others—it reveals that we have minimized the severity of our own sins.

            That’s why Jesus elaborates on this thought in Matthew 6:14-15—“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” When we forgive others, we are displaying a truly repentant heart, which is what God requires of us for our sins to be forgiven.

            Now let us not read vv. 14-15 as a requirement to either gain or keep our salvation. Notice that Jesus calls God “your heavenly Father”—He is speaking to those people in His audience who were already believers, those who could already call God their Father. We’re talking about the “family” forgiveness that we discussed last week—the kind that wipes away not any sort of legal charges, but the barriers that may hinder the fullness of joy and intimacy and inheritance from a father to his children.

            So we must understand that the way we treat others can cause “static on the line” when we pray to God; it may cause our “call” to be dropped, like when you drive through a dead spot in your cell phone network. Psalm 66:16-19 sums up the same idea: “Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for my soul. I cried to him with my mouth, and high praise was on my tongue. If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. But truly God has listened; he has attended to the voice of my prayer.”

9. A manner that is trusting

            We draw this lesson from the final two phrases of the prayer: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Our English word “temptation” really does not do justice to the Greek word that it is attempting to translate. When we talk about “temptation,” we think of some enticement that is designed to make us sin, and its very confusing to think that we would need to ask God not to put us in a situation that is designed to make us sin. As a matter of fact, James 1:13 tells us that God cannot even do such a thing: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.”

            What we have to understand about this Greek word in Matthew 6:13 is that it can refer to all kinds of difficult situations. It can refer to temptation if the one doing the tempting is Satan or simply our own sinful desires, but it can also refer to times of persecution or even the hardship that comes from dealing with a physical illness. So we might do well to translate this term in a more general way—something like “lead us not into difficult times.”

            In my opinion, even the words “lead us” kind of obscure a beautiful word picture that comes through in Greek. This Greek verb translated “lead us” is the same verb used to describe the actions of the men who carried their paralyzed friend to Jesus and lowered him down through the roof. Here in this phrase, it creates the picture of God literally carrying us through life, and our request then is that He would not carry us into difficult times.

            When I think of this request, then, I think back to times when my family used to go for walks when I was very young. I had a hard time keeping up, of course, so when I got tired and we still had a long ways to go to get home, I would say, “Dad, its shoulder time for Timmy,” and he would put me on his shoulders and carry me the rest of the way home. I think with this request to God we’re basically saying, “Lord, could we just always make it shoulder time? I’m so weak, Lord, and I know that my strength might give out, so would you carry me out of these hard times?”

            But as every parent knows, our children must learn to walk on their own and to keep going even when they’re tired. God knows and has even told us about all the good that can come out of hard times, so sometimes He does carry us into difficult moments—even moments when we face attacks and temptations from Satan, who of course is “the evil one” mentioned in v. 13. We need only to think about Job, or the Lord Jesus Himself, who was tempted by Satan in the wilderness, or the Apostle Paul, who said in 2 Corinthians 12:7 that he was given “a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to harass me, to keep me from becoming conceited.”

            The book of James tells us that we should actually rejoice when we face hard times because of the good that such moments can produce within us: “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials [the same Greek word as “temptations” in Matthew 6:13] of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

            But this encouragement from James sets up an odd situation—if James tells us to rejoice when we face hard times because they can do us good, why does Jesus teach us to ask God not to carry us into those times? I think the Lord is teaching us two lessons. First, that it is okay for us to bring our requests to God. Even though we know that hard times can be good for us, it is okay for us to ask God to do things a different way. Jesus prayed this very way in the Garden of Gethsemane when He said, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” He made His request for God to do things a certain way, but of course He ended that prayer with the words, “nevertheless, not as I will, but as you will.”

            Second, I think Jesus is teaching us that its healthy for us to pray in this way. Whenever we pray for God to do something about our circumstances, we are acknowledging our belief—our conviction—that God really can do something about our circumstances. In the same way that it is healthy to tell your spouse “I love you” over and over throughout your marriage, it is healthy for us to continue to acknowledge the truths we believe about God. When we pray about a certain need, we are again affirming our belief in God as provider. When we ask God again and again to forgive us for the sins we commit, we are reaffirming our belief in God as Savior and Redeemer. And when we ask Him not to carry us into difficult times, we acknowledge again that He is in control—our lives are in His hands, and we pray to Him because we know that He can intervene in our lives and because we know that He loves us enough to consider our requests.

            And though Jesus may not have spoken these words on that day, it is not a bad way to express our praise to God by saying, “thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”