How to Pray Part III

Intro

Step 1: Focus on God

Step 2: Seek First God’s Kingdom

We now move to the second half of the prayer. Jesus has shared three types of ways for praying for God’s Kingdom and now he will share three ways to ask God to help meet our our needs.

Step 3: Present your requests

We usually start with this and seldom move past it. In the model prayer Jesus teaches that our needs do matter to God and he hears and meets our needs but Jesus rightly orders these needs to come after orientating our heart to God and his will.

Matthew 6:11–13 HCSB

11 Give us today our daily bread. 12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. 13 And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. [For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.]

Give us today our daily bread

The first of the three requests to God is for our daily bread.

Did you notice the pronouns used here. It’s us and our rather than me and my. This is a prayer for needs but also the needs of other believers. We aren't’ praying alone when we ask God to give US OUR daily bread.

The Greek word for “daily” bread is unique and not found outside of the model prayer here in Matthew and in Luke. It could mean bread for today or bread for tomorrow or bread upon which we exist. But this confusion bothers translators more than people actually praying.

As we wake up in the morning and pray for our daily bread we surely mean today’s bread and as we pray in the evening we might lift up a prayer for God to meet tomorrow’s need. In both cases the bread is more than bread itself it refers to the needs that must be met in our life.

If you don’t eat bread every day, I’m not sure if you have another term that refers to your daily food. In Asia, growing up in the Philippines and living in Korea we did. It was rice. In Korea the expression for a meal litteraly means eating rice. In Jesus time in Israel they didn’t have rice but it was daily bread. It meant food in general and Jesus’ listeners would certainly remember the most famous daily bread of their history: Manna in the desert.

The picture here is of Israel in the dessert. God has freed them from Egypt and provides bread, manna, for them each day. Israel depended on God daily to meet their needs.

We too turn to God to meet our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. The prayer isn’t that we can become self sufficient and take care of our self without relying on God. This prayer recognizes our continual daily reliance on Him.

Have you heard the expression “give a man a fish and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for lifetime?” Jesus is teaching us that God has chosen option one. Feeding us for a day.

There are many ways in which it is good for you to become self sufficient and care for yourself, your family and others, but spiritually at least God doesn’t want you to become a fisherman, he wants you to be a son or daughter who dines daily at God’s table. He wants your ultimate sense of trust, to be placed in Him. He wants you to come to him to meet your daily needs and to recognize that you truly need him for your food, your health, your metal health, your spiritual health and all of your needs.

Turning to God for daily bread covers all of our needs, but this is quite different from our list of desires or wants like we might write out for Santa or put in our bucket list. You’ll notice that we are orienting our prayers around God’s will. We’ve put the God and his kingdom first so we bring new priorities in our requests.

We may even find our self changing how we pray. Rather than asking God for more money we may thank him that he has already provided more than we need. We may still ask for healing, but may also ask that that God uses hardship or sickness to make us more Christlike or open doors to share Christ’s love. When the baseline is for our lives to look like Instagram influences, or celebrities, or luxurious and comfortable we have much to ask for. But when the baseline is daily bread there is a lot more room for prayers for the kingdom.

And Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors

Jesus turns from food to forgiveness and there are two difficult elements of understanding this.

First Problem

We are to ask God to forgive us our..... our what?

The first difficulty is what word to use. Up to now most people have memorized the prayer the same way, but here we have two separate traditions. Debt’s vs Trespasses.

Debts is the correct translation of the Greek here in Matthew, but Jesus is using this as a metaphor for sin, or trespasses against God. This is more clear in Luke where Jesus uses the words sin and debt together: “and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone in debt to us.” Clearly Jesus has in mind debts as a picture of sin against God and one another and forgiveness of debts as a picture of God’s great grace and forgiveness towards us and our need to forgive others.

The first part, asking God for forgiveness, is pretty straight forward. In addition to asking God for our needs it’s important that our prayers recognize our sins and we pray to God for forgiveness. As believers we don’t always walk in step with the spirit and we should daily turn to God for his grace and mercy. This is great news for you. This is the first of two solutions that Jesus offers in the model prayer to your ongoing struggle with sin. Prayer of confession should be part of our daily prayers, not just our prayers on Ash Wednesday or during the season of Lent.

We might use general language like Jesus uses here in saying “forgive us our debts” or we may be more specific raising the specific ways we’ve sinned against God as we pray for forgiveness. Just as God promises to meet our needs, he also promises to forgive our sin. We can pray with confidence.

Second Problem

But what about “as we also have forgiven our debtors?” Is Jesus saying that our receiving forgiveness from God depends on our forgiving sins of others. Do we earn God’s forgiveness by how we forgive? Will he withhold forgiveness if we don’t forgive?

Peter was a little confused as well and asked Jesus in Matthew 18 how many times he needed to forgive his brother who sins against him.

Jesus responded by telling a story of a servant with a great debt he couldn’t pay. He fell to his knees pleaded and begged the master to forgive him this huge debt. The master, had compassion and released him and forgave him the loan. But the servant left and saw a fellow servant who owed him a small amount. Having just been forgiven a huge sum, what do you think he did? He started choking him and yelled pay me back what you owe. The servant fell to his knees, and pleaded and begged the first servant, the one who had just been forgiven the huge debt, to be patient and give him time to pay back the loan. Did he forgive him? No, he had the man thrown in prison. The other slaves saw this and were distressed so they told the master and handed him over to the jailers.

In this story the first servant did not earn his forgiveness. It was offered to him solely by the masters compassion because his seemingly sincere plea for mercy. The servant, however, showed that he had never truly been sincere. He didn’t wan’t compassion, he simply wanted more money. He never had a true experience with grace. God, unlike the master in the story knows the difference between a sincere request for forgiveness and when we are just putting on a show. He doesn’t need to wait to see how you respond to see your heart.

But know this if God has forgiven you, then God calls you to forgive. That’s the whole point Jesus is making to Peter and his making to us in the model prayer. Pray for your own forgiveness and then live like someone who has had a huge debt paid off by God by forgiving these much smaller debts of small sins against you. Be gracious and compassionate.

If you take a hard look at yourself and see you aren’t forgiving and compassionate don’t worry or stress. The solution is to turn to God who offers you his grace and mercy. So do that in your prayer. He’s offering forgiveness so come to him to forgive your debts and and from there begin praying for those who you have been withholding grace from.

And bring us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one

Jesus concludes with the final request from God, the second solution to our ongoing struggle with sin. I hope you’ve noticed that 2/3s, 6%, of the prayer requests Christ gives for us in this model prayer deal with spiritual realities. I’ve been realizing that for me, and and I think for most people, the vast majority of our prayer requests are not only about our needs, they are about our earthly not spiritual needs. For healing, for success, for overcoming challenges. But although those needs are important, but Jesus suggests here praying for spiritual needs twice as much as physical needs.

Having dealt with our past sin in praying for forgiveness Christ suggest we turn to asking for God’s help in avoiding future sin.

Bring us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one.

The idea here isn’t that God is our source of temptation. James 1:13 clearly teaches that God does not temp anyone. Jesus is not suggesting that God is planning on tempting us but will relent if we ask. Instead, the idea is that we are asking God to direct our paths to help us avoid temptation and deliver us from the the schemes of the devil.

We may see three great sources of temptation.

The world and it’s cultural values that go against God

Our flesh and it’s natural desires which go against God

And the devil and his schemes which go against God

We pray to God to help us avoid the lure of culture and our own flesh. That is prayer FROM temptation. But we also pray for protection IN temptation which we can not avoid- temptation brought by the schemes of the Devil. The word translated DELIVER is a Greek word which means to rescue someone from a fate from which they cannot escape on their own. It suggests that we are helpless on our own and are utterly dependent on God.

Just as God wants us to rely on him for our daily bread, he want’s us to rely on him for our daily battles with sin. Or put more positively, to rely on God’s nourishment in our daily hunger and thirst for righteousness. Through God’s daily bread of his Word and Spirit we are fed. This daily nourishment from God is what we need in order to face the temptations of the world, our flesh, and the Devil.

Summary

Step 1. Focus on God

Step 2. Seek First the Kingdom

Step 3. Present your Requests

Daily bread [survival]

Forgiveness (as we forgive) [salvation]

Protection from temptation [sanctification]

Close in Celebration

Matthew 6:13 HCSB

13 And do not bring us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. [For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.]

Your Bible may or may not include the ending of this prayer in verse 13.

For Yours is the kingdom and the power and glory forever. Amen.

The reason for that is that this line is not found in any of the earliest manuscripts or commentaries on this passage. Most scholars agree that the original prayer found in Matthew didn’t include this but that it was added later.

So what does this mean? Should we not use it? Can we not trust it?

You may run across a few passages like this in the New Testament and you will usually find a comment in the footnotes about them. Here is my advice:

Don’t worry too much. There is nothing in the New Testament that is changed by including or excluding them. These are quite rare, and in every case I’ve seen, the passage is a clarification of a truth that is apparent in that passage or from another part of the New Testament.

There isn’t anything good you are missing if this isn’t included.

There isn’t anything bad excluded if this is included.

You should probably prioritize the words that are certainly from Christ’s teaching.

With that said, these words, likely from the early church AND likely very helpful. They give us a great way to end our prayer.

We end by celebrating God’s goodness.

We recognize God’s kingship. We recognize God’s power, his ability to meet our needs. We recognize God’s glory, his holiness.

And close our prayer with Amen.