Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, + Amen.
These days, there’s a guide to just about everything out there. Go to the book store and you will find aisles and aisle of books for any kind of thing you could need a guide for: cookbooks, hobby guides, money management books, “self-helps,” books that call you a dummy and give you a simple guide to whatever topic you may be interested in. We follow instructions and guides when we put together furniture, we follow recipes when we cook, our phones can give us step by step directions so that we can get to our destinations safely and quickly. Even if you get stuck on a certain level in a video game, there are hundreds of thousands of guides out there to just help people solve whatever problem or puzzle they face. In my preparation for this sermon, I even found a number of books titled: “How to Read” or “How to Read a Book.” I have to stop and wonder how many copies that actually sell based on their audience, but that’s not what’s important here. All of this being said, guidebooks are important. We like to have things that guide us in how we can do things the best way, the right way. Jesus’s disciples are asking Him for just that in our reading today.
After Jesus had been praying, His disciples asked him to teach them how to pray. Often times when we see the disciples asking Jesus a question the first thing that we do is critique them, they often have some sort of wrong intuition or intention behind their questioning or some sort of ulterior motive, but here, this is a perfectly reasonable question to ask! Jesus was their good teacher sent by God, and whether they knew it at this point or not, it was God made flesh before their eyes. He truly is the best teacher possible for this topic. While we know that Jesus often spoke to His disciples in parables or asked other questions of them when they brought him questions themselves, here Jesus actually gives a pretty straight answer, and familiar words to boot: “When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name. Your Kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.”
These are good words, and we know them well. We say them every Sunday in church. I pray them every day in the office and every night when we put our son to sleep. They provide us with a good guide and model for how all our prayers should go: We invoke the name of our good Lord, we ask Him to bless us, we entrust our lives to him. But when we look deeper, we find that the Lord is going above and beyond the question of the disciples in his answer. This prayer that the Lord gives us is so much more than a model for how we ought to pray and what we ought to pray for.
The Lord’s Prayer reminds us from where our help comes. Every petition that we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer is based on something God has already promised to us! God’s name is holy, an unchanging blessing to us that He gives us to call upon as a child calls upon their Father. He invites us to relish in our existence as His children every time we come to Him in prayer. His kingdom comes in the promised Christ, who became flesh for our benefit and fulfilled the law for us, cleansing us of our sin and bringing the Kingdom of God here to us in Word and Sacrament. He promises that His kingdom will come in an even greater way in the end of all temporal things, where He will bless all those who believe with eternal life in the new heavens and new earth. He promises to give us our daily bread, every daily need of our body, mind, and soul. All earthly things come from Him and he has promised to deliver our needs to us. He also promises to forgive us our sins through the grace of Jesus. When we pray these things in the prayer that Jesus teaches His disciples, we affirm our belief that our whole life is laid in the hands of God and hold Him to His promises.
Our Lord loves when we bring His promises before Him. When we bring these promises He has made back to Him in prayer, we acknowledge our belief that He actually means them! When we ask God to give us our daily bread or for forgiveness of our debts, we affirm that we believe he will truly give it to us as He has promised. When we pray for His kingdom to come, we affirm that we believe it is truly coming to us! Just this week I met a man in town who told me that Jesus had told him He was coming in a few months. While we know that no one can know the day or hour of God’s coming, what faith it is to truly believe that Christ’s kingdom is coming soon!
Jesus teaches us to pray in this way because it looks to God in prayer rightly, not seeing prayer as simply a way to get what we want, but an utter reliance on God to give us what we need. Prayer is not like some Disney movie Wish Upon a Star, but an asking in trust of our Heavenly Father to give us what we truly need from Him.
In our Gospel reading today, Jesus also gives a parable of a man coming shamelessly to his neighbor at midnight, asking for loaves of bread to help host his guest. The first reaction of the neighbor is not to help his friend, telling him “do not bother me; My family is in bed for the night!” Yet, in the parable, he ultimately gives in because of the friend’s persistence. The Lord is not like this. He neither slumbers nor sleeps. When we come to him, even in the midnight hour, he hears us. He is never “too busy for our prayer.” He is never hesitant to hear our prayer and does not give an answer to us simply because we’ve annoyed Him enough for Him to give in. Our Lord gives to us freely when we pray to Him because He loves us and truly wants to give what is best for us.
Dear friends in Christ, when we pray, remember that we are only dear children. We come to our Father in heaven asking Him for all things in prayer, knowing and trusting that He will take care of us and that all good things come from Him. Yet, our will does not supercede God’s. We do not know what is best for us, only God does, and He provides for us exactly what we need. As a child, I remember sitting in the grocery cart or walking alongside my parents and eagerly asking them if I could get a pack of Pokemon cards or a candy bar on our way out of the store. More often than not, they would not get them for me, but not because they had not listened to my request or out of a lack of love, they instead had answered my request with something better, providing for me in ways that actually served my needs rather than my passing wants, with the clothing, food, and other “daily breads” that the Lord Himself had provided them. It is the same with our Lord. Every prayer that we give to Him is answered, just not always in the way we desire in our simple and sinful hearts. Each time we ask, seek, and knock in the face of our Lord, he answers. Our Lord may give us what we want, He may answer that our desires must wait for a time, or may bring us something greater and better for us than whatever we could request. The Father hears our every request, our prayers perfected before Him by the Holy Spirit, and in His ultimate wisdom grants us whatever is best. There may be times where we find our prayers feeling unanswered or answered in a way we do not like, but we must have faith that every answer that our Lord God gives to us is good for us and comes from His divine providence.
The Words of this prayer also ultimately drive us to remember how God has provided all of these things in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ. His name is made holy before our very eyes in the work of Jesus, both in the time of the scriptures and even today as we partake in His gifts of Word, His Flesh, and His blood. His kingdom comes here every Sunday when we receive the Word and Sacraments in faith. Our daily bread is provided even beyond our food, drink, shelter, and all daily needs in the Holy Supper. And our sins are forgiven upon the cross of Christ where he was ravaged and died so that we may be made clean in God’s eyes.
In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches us all how to pray in His Divine Love, not giving a magical formula for how we must pray to get exactly what we want, but driving us back to Himself, acknowledging that all things come from Him and that all answers He gives to our prayers come directly from His goodness, mercy, love, and eagerness to provide for us. It is our prayer that God would forgive our doubts or displeasures in His answers to our prayers, that He would foster in us faithful hearts and righteous desires, and that all of our prayers that we bring before Him would be blessed by the Holy Spirit. For His truly is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, forever and ever. Amen.
In the Holy Name of Jesus + Amen.