S.O.T.M. Prayer: Petition [Matthew 6:11-15]

Stand for the reading of the word of God [Matthew 6:11-15]

Preaching through the Lord’s Prayer I find myself wrestling with a couple difficulties. One, as I read, meditate, and truly consider the words of our Lord in this prayer I find there is really nothing more that needs to be said. In a very simple form our Lord outlined everything that is needed for prayer in our Christian lives. And the more I study this prayer the more I believe if we use this prayer as our Lord intended, there really is nothing more to be said. But, on the other hand, we are frail and fallible, sinful creatures, and the result of that is we need to have things analysed and elaborated on.

This has been the goal in looking at this prayer. Today we will look at the last section of the prayer and consider the last three petitions…some claim there are four here…but I stand by the belief that lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, is one petition not two. But we don’t need to split hairs over that. Now before we get into the specifics of the last three petitions there are a few general observations I want to make about them before diving into them with more detail.

The first is the all-inclusiveness of these petitions. All our great needs are summed up in them. ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. ‘Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors’. ‘And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil’. Our whole life is found there in those three petitions, and that is what makes this prayer so utterly amazing. In such a small section our Lord has covered the whole life of the believer in every respect. Our physical needs, our mental needs and, of course, our spiritual needs are included.

The body is remembered, the soul is remembered, the spirit is remembered. And that is the whole of man, body, soul and spirit. Think of all the activities going on in the world at this moment, the organizing, the planning, the legislation and all other things; they are for the most part concerned with nothing but the body of man, his life and existence in this world of time.

That is the tragedy of the worldly outlook, for there is another realm, the realm of relationships—the soul, the thing where man makes contact with his fellow man, the means of communication with one another and all social life and activity. It is all here. And above all, we have the spiritual, that which links man with God, and reminds him that he is something other than dust, and that as one commentator says, ‘Dust thou art, to dust returnest, was not spoken of the soul’.

Man has been made this way; he cannot escape it, and our Lord has provided for it. We can’t help but notice the all-inclusiveness of these petitions. That does not mean that we should never enter into details; we must, we are taught to do so. We are taught to bring our life in detail to God in prayer; but here we have only the great headings. Our Lord gives us these and we fill in the details, but it is important for us to be sure that all our petitions should belong under one or other of the headings.

The second general comment concerns the wonderful order in which these petitions are put. As I have thought about this prayer and meditated upon it, I’ve felt a sense of surprise that the first one in this section should be what it is? Let us look at it again in its setting: ‘Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven’—a wonderful, exalted, spiritual level. I would have expected that immediately after that would come the spiritual needs of man followed in a descending order by the needs of his soul and at the very end some remembrance of the body and its needs. But that is not how our Lord puts it. Immediately after those exalted petitions about God and His glory, He says: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. He starts with the body. There is indeed something surprising about that at first sight, but the moment we stop to think about it we shall realize that the order is absolutely right.

Our Lord is now considering our needs, and clearly the first thing that is necessary is that we must be enabled to continue our existence in this world. We are alive and we must be kept alive. The very fact of my existence and being are involved, so the first petition deals with the needs of our physical frame, and our Lord starts with that. He then goes on to deal with the need of cleansing from the defilement and guilt of sin; and, lastly, with the need for being kept from sin and its power. That is the true way to look at man’s life. I am alive and I must be kept alive. But then I am conscious of guilt and unworthiness and sin, and feel the need to be cleansed from that. Then I think of the future and realize that I need to be delivered from certain things that face me there.

Our physical frames need certain things to continue to live, so I must pray about my physical existence. But I also realize that that is not the only aspect of my existence…that’s only one aspect. There is something more than this life…eternal life. Our Lord said this, “this is eternal life, that they might know The only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you sent.” Having been concerned with the physical life now, by the grace of God, I begin to learn about what really makes life, life, that is I should fellowship and commune with God. That is really living friends. Fellowship with God, but with that I know there are also things that tend to interrupt that fellowship. I am sinful, therefore I need forgiveness of sins to truly enjoy life to the fullest.

So that is the order—daily bread; forgiveness of sins; to be kept from anything that may cast me again into sin, to be delivered from everything that is opposed to my higher interests and to my true life. The sum of it all is that ultimately there is nothing in the whole realm of Scripture which so plainly shows us our entire dependence upon God as does this prayer, and especially these three petitions. The only thing that really matters for us is that we know God as our Father through Christ Jesus. That was some general observations, let’s look at each petition separately.

Give us this day our daily bread

It has been said that one of the most difficult phrases in the bible is ‘our daily bread’ What is the exact meaning of this expression? I’m not going to get into all the different views and theories. It, at least, means ‘give us this day what is necessary for us. That’s it at it’s basic, all we are to ask for is what is necessary for each day. It is a prayer for necessities. Bread is the staff of life; and I agree with those who say it should not be confined to the matter of food only. It is meant to cover all our material needs, everything that is necessary for the life of man in this world.

Having said that there is something rather remarkable about the connection between this request and the previous requests. Isn’t it one of the most wonderful things in the whole of Scripture, that the God who is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, the God who is forming His eternal kingdom and who will usher it in at the end, the God to whom the nations are but as dust—that such a God should be prepared to consider your little needs and mine even down to the smallest details in this matter of daily bread! But that is the teaching of our Lord everywhere. He tells us that even a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without our Father, and that we are of much greater value than many sparrows. He says that ‘the very hairs of your head are all numbered’. If only we could grasp this fact, that the almighty Lord of the universe is interested in every part and portion of us!

There is not a hair of my head that He is not concerned about, and the smallest and most trivial details in my little life are known to Him on His ever-lasting throne. This is something you find only in Scripture. You go straight from ‘Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven’, to ‘Give us this day our daily bread’. But that is the way of God, ‘the high and lofty One that inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy’; but cares for our basic daily needs. That is the whole miracle of redemption; that is the whole meaning of the incarnation which tells us that the Lord Jesus Christ takes hold of us here on earth and links us with the almighty God of glory. The kingdom of God, and my daily bread!

While it should go without saying, it needs to be said in a day of prosperity gospel teaching…that we should pray only for what is absolutely necessary…not for luxuries and abundance. This gets twisted around in an affluent society like the one in which we live. This prayer is about what is necessary.

People have asked me before, “if God knows all that we have need of before we ask Him…then why do we need to express our needs to Him?” Well, one, because He tells us to, but also this brings us to the very heart of prayer. We do not tell God these things because He is not aware of them. No, we must think of prayer more as a relationship between father and child; and the value of prayer is that it keeps us in touch and contact with God.

[optional] {{{A.B. Simpson, preacher and founder of the Christian Missionary Alliance gave an excellent illustration of this need to be in contact with God in prayer, he said, “so many of us tend to think that God as our Father gives us the great gift of grace in one great lump sum, and that, having received it, we just go on living on it. ‘But’, he said, ‘it is not like that. That would be very dangerous for us. If God just gave us all His glorious gifts of grace in one lump sum, we would be in danger of enjoying the gift and forgetting all about God.’ For though we cannot understand it, God wants us, and as our Father, He likes us, to speak to Him. He is like an earthly father in that respect. The earthly father is grievously wounded by the son who is content to enjoy the gift the father has given him but who never seeks his company again until he has exhausted his supplies and needs some more. No, the father likes the child to come and speak to him; and this is God’s way of doing it.}}}

This, surely, is the marvelous thing, that God likes us to come to Him. The God who is self-existent, the God who is not dependent upon anybody, who is from eternity to eternity, who exists in Himself apart from all—this is the astounding thing, that because we are His children He likes us to come to Him, and likes to hear us. The God who made heaven and earth, and orders the stars in their courses, likes to hear our petitions. That is because God is love; and that is why, though He knows all about our needs, it gives Him great pleasure when He sees us coming to Him to ask for our daily bread.

But we must also realize the flip side of that…our utter dependence upon God, even for our daily bread. If God willed it so, we should have no daily bread. He could withhold the sun; He could stop the rain; He could make our land absolutely barren so that the farmer with all his modern implements and chemicals could not raise a crop. We are absolutely in the hand of God, and the supreme folly of our day is the folly of thinking that because we have acquired a certain amount of knowledge and technology, we are independent of Him. We cannot live for a day without Him. Nothing would continue were it not sustained and kept going by God. ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ It is a good thing for us at least once a day, but the more we pray it the better, to remind ourselves that our times, our health, and our very existence, are in His hands. Our food and all these necessary things come from Him, and we depend upon His grace and mercy for them.

Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors

Dealing with this petition often causes confusion to what our Lord is talking about exactly. Some ask, ‘has not all of our sins been forgiven in Christ Jesus, is there now no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus, haven’t we been justified by faith? What does it mean to be ‘justified by faith’? It is God’s declaration that He has dealt with our sins in full in the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, the sins we have committed and the sins we shall commit, that He has imputed to us the righteousness of Jesus Christ, and regards and declares us to be righteous in Him. That is justification by faith.

But, He is not talking about justification; He is not dealing here with the case of a sinner who has been awakened to the fact that he needs to have his sins forgiven and so comes to God and receives the gift of salvation and realizes his justification in Christ—that is not what we have here. Here, rather, is what our Lord speaks of in John 13. You remember that as He washed the disciples’ feet, Peter said to Him, ‘Lord, not my feet only, but also my hands and my head’. ‘No,’ said Christ, ‘he that is washed need not his whole body washed, only his feet.’

There is only one washing of the entire person—that is our justification. But having been justified, as we walk through this world we become soiled and tarnished by sin. That is true of every Christian. Though we know we have been forgiven, we need forgiveness still for particular sins and failures. It is all stated briefly in chapter 1 of John’s First Epistle, where we see that the Christian, though walking in the life of faith, may yet fall into sin. What are we to do about it? John tells us to ‘confess our sins’. And ‘if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness’. John is not writing to unbelievers; it is a letter to believers. He is writing to Christians, and our Lord was speaking to believers here. It is not a prayer for anybody, but only for those who have become the children of God in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The second part of this petition, ‘as we forgive our debtors’ does not mean we are forgiven because we forgive others, that’s misunderstanding what our Lord is saying. No, It means that the proof that you and I are forgiven is that we forgive others. If we think that our sins are forgiven by God and we refuse to forgive somebody else, we are making a mistake; we have never been forgiven. The person who knows he has been forgiven, only in and through the shed blood of Christ, is a person who must forgive others. He cannot help himself. If we really know Christ as our Saviour our hearts are broken and cannot be hard, and we cannot refuse forgiveness. If you are refusing forgiveness to anybody I suggest that you may have never been forgiven.

You may say, that’s a bold statement, I know it is, but I think it’s accurate, it’s what Jesus said in verses 14-15. But I also say this with all humility, when I see myself before God and realize even something of what our Lord has done for me upon that cross, when I think off what God has forgiven me for and what price was paid for that forgiveness…how can I withhold forgiveness from anyone? People will say, But you don’t know what they did to me!!! How can I ever forgive them? The great puritan Thomas Watson nailed it when he said, “we are not bound to trust our enemy, but we are bound to forgive them.”

This petition is full of atonement, it’s full of the grace of God. We see how important it is by the fact that our Lord actually repeats it. Having finished the prayer He goes back and says (in verses 14 and 15), ‘For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.’ The thing is absolute and inevitable. True forgiveness breaks a man, and he must forgive. So that when we offer this prayer for forgiveness we test ourselves in that way. Our prayer is not genuine, it is not true, it is of no avail, unless we find there is forgiveness in our heart. God give us grace to be honest with ourselves, and never to repeat these petitions in the Lord’s Prayer in a mechanical way.

Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil

That is the final request and it means this. We are asking that we should never be led into a situation where we are liable to be tempted by Satan. It does not mean that we are dictating to God what He shall or shall not do. God does test His children, and we must never presume to tell God what He is or is not to do. He knows that we need much training in our preparation for glory. But though it does not mean that we are to dictate to God, it does mean that we may request of Him that, if it be in accordance with His holy will, He should not lead us into positions where we can be so easily tempted, and where we are liable to fall. It means that we should request Him to preserve us from this, and not to lead us in this way.

This is what our Lord meant when He said to His disciples at the end, ‘Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation’. There are situations which will be dangerous to you; watch and pray, always be on guard lest you fall into temptation. And coupled with that is this other aspect of the petition, that we pray to be delivered from evil. Some would say ‘from the evil one’, but I think that limits the meaning, for ‘evil’ here includes not only Satan but evil in every shape and form. It certainly includes Satan; we need to be delivered from him and his wiles. But there is evil also in our hearts, so we need to be delivered from that, and from the evil in the world as well. We need to be delivered from it all. It is a great and much needed request.

Why should we ask that we may be kept from evil? For the great and wonderful reason that our fellowship with God may never be broken. If a man merely wants to be holy as such, there is something wrong with him. Our supreme desire should be to have a right relationship with God, to know Him, to have uninterrupted fellowship and communion with Him. That is why we pray this prayer, that nothing may come between us and the brightness and the radiance and the glory of our Father which is in heaven. ‘Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’

Satan’s goal is to discourage us, defile us, devour us, and defeat us. Without the Lord’s guidance through this worlds minefield of vice and temptation we will be defeated. This prayer for deliverance from temptation and evil is preventative medicine. This is a petition to be prayed at the beginning of every day, and through out the day. Just as important is our daily bread so is deliver us from evil.

But let’s not forget the postscript: “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever.” Our Lord didn’t stop with ‘deliver us from evil’, but ended where He began…with praising God. And that’s where our prayers should end as well, where we began, praising Him for who He is and what He has done.

Andrew Murray [1828-1917] was a pastor and missionary. He wrote more than 240 books. Yet for all his achievements he was best known as a man of prayer. One of his best known books, With Christ in the School of Prayer. He provides a powerful word in the form of a prayer that is fitting to conclude our study of the Lord’s Prayer, he writes...

“Lord Jesus! Enroll my name among those who confess that they don’t know how to pray as they should, and who especially ask you for a course of teaching prayer. Lord, teach me to be patient in your school, so that you will have to train me. I am ignorant of the wonderful privilege and power of prayer. Lead me to forget my thoughts of what I think I know, and make me kneel before you in true teachableness and poverty of spirit. Fill me, Lord, with confidence that with you for my Teacher, I will learn to pray…Blessed Lord! I know that you won’t put that student to shame who trusts you. And, with your grace, that students won’t shame you, either. Amen.”