Chapter VII: The Lord’s Prayer

OUR Lord is not satisfied with giving us abstract principles of prayer, but teaches us how to pray by giving us an example:

“After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in
heaven,” &c.

In regard to this great prayer, I would content myself with calling attention to the points of chief importance, and trying to explain some few difficulties, which lie in the separate clauses, and then very briefly indicating some of the principles which as a whole it enshrines.

“Our Father which art in heaven.”

The spirit of a prayer depends in great measure on whether the worshipper’s thought of God is true or false, adequate or inadequate. The Christian invokes God under the completest of all His titles, the title of Father, for “God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying, Abba, Father.”[69] And we call Him the _Father which is in heaven_, not because He is far off us――for in the Kingdom of Christ heavenly and earthly things are mingled and we “are come unto the heavenly Jerusalem,”[70]――but because He is raised far above all the pollution and wilfulness and ignorance of man “as the heaven is higher than the earth.” So we invoke our Father, infinitely above us yet unspeakably near. And the first prayer we offer is:

“Hallowed be thy name.”

What is the name of God? That is very well worth our consideration. The name of God in the Bible means that whereby He discloses or reveals Himself. You may indeed almost say that the name of God means God Himself as He is manifested. God has shown Himself to man; He has spelt out His great name, letter by letter, syllable by syllable, before the eyes of men or into their hearts, in nature, in conscience, by the voice of His prophets and in Jesus Christ His Son. Thus to hallow or sanctify His name is to set store by His revelation of Himself, as Father, Son and Spirit, one God. To pray that His name may be hallowed, is to pray that His revelation of Himself may be accepted of men, and His religion professed openly and secretly: that He may be acknowledged in conduct and worship, in Church and in State, on Sunday and on week-day.

“Thy kingdom come.”

The kingdom of God meant to the Jews, of course, the kingdom of the Messiah: that is to say that coming age, when heaven and earth shall be fused in one, when God shall be manifested in His glory, when all things shall be seen in their true light, and the reign of Christ in truth and meekness and righteousness shall be not only real but also manifest and indisputable. This is “the end of the world,” the “far off, divine event,” which is still future. At times, indeed, the Church as it already exists among us is called “the kingdom of God,” but at other times (as is implied here) the Church is regarded as a divine institution, representing indeed the kingdom here and now in the world, but also preparing for its arrival in the future. To pray for the coming of the kingdom is therefore to pray for the spread and progress of the Church, and also for the diffusion in every way of all truth and meekness and righteousness and of all that can find its place in the city of God. It is to pray for the overthrow of every form of “lawlessness”――lawless lusts and appetites, lawless ambition and insolence and denial, godless worldliness and lies and vanities, cruelty, oppression and malice in every shape. For all these are forms of rebellion; and we know that they represent only a temporary usurpation. We are looking forward to, and would fain hasten, the coming of the King.

“Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.”

This is a prayer against all wilfulness and also against all sloth: a prayer for the vigorous co-operation of all rational creatures in furthering the divine order of the world. And we should notice that the phrase “as in heaven, so on earth” refers probably to all the three preceding clauses: Hallowed be Thy Name, as in heaven, so on earth; Thy kingdom come, as in heaven, so on earth; Thy will be done, as in heaven, so on earth. The Church of Rome, in the _Catechism_ put forth by the Council of Trent, specially exhorts her clergy to call the attention of the faithful to this connexion of the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer.

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

Strangely enough, one of the most difficult words in the whole New Testament is this word translated “daily” in the Lord’s Prayer. Nobody can be quite certain what it means, but probably it means “the bread for the coming day.”[71] Give us to-day the bread for the coming day, is therefore a prayer that the bodily needs of the immediate future may be supplied for all members of the Christian family. It is a prayer which only those can truly pray who are contented with such satisfaction of their bodily needs as enables them to do the work of God, who will ask nothing for themselves that they do not ask for others, and who are content to wait from day to day upon the hand of God.

“And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.”

We cannot do God’s work without the supply of our physical needs: therefore the last prayer was offered. But equally we cannot do God’s work unless we are at peace with Him: therefore this prayer follows. Sin may be regarded from many points of view――as a flaw or mistake in our nature or conduct: as a violation or transgression of a divine law (as in ver. 14): or (as here) as an act by which we have robbed God of His rights and incurred an obligation or debt which we cannot satisfy, and in regard to which we can only appeal to the divine pity. From the first point of view what is needed is nothing else than recovery and correction: from the second point of view we need forgiveness, but forgiveness of such sort as is only morally possible when our will is brought back into harmony with our Father’s will. Only from the third point of view is forgiveness the same as being let off. And the position which the petition to be forgiven holds in this prayer, prevents us from supposing that we can be “forgiven our debts” without having been brought into union with God’s will and into the fellowship of His Kingdom.

On the principle involved in this petition our Lord Himself immediately comments:

“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.”

Here is the divine principle which, as we noticed before, is made so plain in the parable (St. Matt. xviii. 31), where the unthankful servant finds that all the debt which had been forgiven him has rolled back upon him because he in his turn has behaved himself unforgivingly, unmercifully, towards his fellow-servant. God deals with us as we deal with our fellow-men; and if we want to know how the face of God looks towards us, we must examine ourselves to see what is the aspect we present towards them.

“And bring us not into temptation.”

Now, this clause is intelligible enough to our hearts, but rather difficult to explain exactly. St. James writes, “My brethren, count it all joy when ye fall into divers temptations.” How can we pray not to be tempted or tried when we know that it is only through temptation that we can become strong? One explanation is to be got from our Lord’s words to His disciples at the time of His agony in the garden: “Watch and pray, that ye enter not into temptation.” If you fail to be on your guard, if you live carelessly, without watching or praying, God suffers you, as a punishment, to be brought within the scope of temptation, and you find it too strong for you. Therefore the prayer may be interpreted by expansion thus: make us watchful and prayerful, so that we never be suffered to fall into temptation as into a snare. But it seems better to interpret the prayer more generally as the expression of that self-distrust for which we have only too sufficient grounds, as a prayer like that of Christ’s, “Father, if it be possible let the cup of trial pass from me without my drinking it, nevertheless, thy will be done.”[72]

“But deliver us from the evil one.”

That is “from the devil.” Modern society seems to be very unwilling to believe in the devil or diabolical temptation. It has been cleverly said, “Satan never did a more successful stroke than when he persuaded people to disbelieve in his own existence.” There is truth in that. It is a real hindrance to our spiritual struggle, and an increase of despondency, if we forget that evil solicitations come, not only from our own nature, but from evil spirits. Moreover, if Christ is a true prophet――if He discerned the conditions of our spiritual struggle――certainly diabolical temptation must be real, for He is always talking of it. When He sees evil at work, evil for body or soul, His mind penetrates behind the appearances and detects hostile wills working to pervert the kingdom of God, hostile wills which He knows are to be at last subdued to God and are even now controlled by Him, but which He knows also to be at present active and malevolent. He looks forth upon the disorder of the world and says, “An enemy hath done this.” And He teaches us to pray for deliverance from the evil one.

The familiar doxology “For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, Amen,” which in our Church, though not over the greater part of Christendom, follows here, was not in the original Lord’s Prayer, though it was added to it very early. It was a doxology in use in the early Church, which was added at the end of many of the prayers, and which in very early times came to be attached to the Lord’s Prayer in some of the manuscripts. It was thus given a place which it cannot rightly claim, though it states, grandly enough, the reason why we thankfully worship the Father.

It remains for us to notice some of the great principles which are enshrined in the Lord’s Prayer as a whole.

1. The Lord’s Prayer is not one prayer among many, as you may have a number of collects for a number of different objects, and each particular collect is just one prayer among many. The Lord’s Prayer is rather the type and mould of all Christian prayer: “After this manner pray ye.” Understand the Lord’s Prayer, and you understand altogether how to pray as a Christian should. It is not really an exaggeration to say that the climax of Christian growth is to have thoroughly learned to say the Lord’s Prayer in the spirit of Him who first spoke it.

And this has been clearly recognized in the use which the Church in all ages has made of the Lord’s Prayer. Among human compositions there are hardly any more beautiful than the liturgies in which Christians, at the altar, have approached the Father of their Lord in the pleading of His sacrifice. Now, almost all the ancient liturgies, both Eastern and Western, are so constructed that the point upon which each service converges is the saying of the Lord’s Prayer. That is the point up to which they climb. That is their central act; because the highest thing in the way of worship that the Christian can do is to say Christ’s own prayer in the freedom of that approach to God once won for him by the Son of Man.

So, in our English Communion service, we put ourselves into the right frame of mind by saying the first Lord’s Prayer; and afterwards, in the power of His sacrifice and in the unity of His life communicated to us in His body and blood, we say again the Lord’s Prayer with its doxology as the highest point of our whole service.

Once more, in the daily offices of morning and evening prayer the Lord’s Prayer occurs at the beginning, and again in the prayers after the Creed. It occurs at the beginning to put us into the right frame of mind for praying; and at the end it sums up our petitions――all that we have learned to pray for in the Psalms and lessons. And to leave out the second Lord’s Prayer, as is sometimes done by way of shortening the service, is surely to betray ignorance of the structure of the service and of the use of the Lord’s Prayer.

This is indeed the way in which the Church, catching the spirit of her Lord, has used the Lord’s Prayer; and, as individuals, it is a great happiness and power for us when we have learned to use it freely. Whatever particular object we may want to pray for, we have never prayed for it aright till we have prayed for it in the words and spirit of the Lord’s Prayer. That, I repeat, is not one prayer among many. It covers all legitimate Christian praying, and indeed the saying of it affords the best test whether our wants of the moment can become a prayer offered “in the name of Christ.”

2. I say “in the name of Christ.” The Lord’s Prayer is the great prayer in His name. You know how many people have a very strangely childish notion, that praying in the name of Christ means simply the addition of the words “through Jesus Christ our Lord” at the end of their prayers. But depend upon it they do not by adding these words, or any words, bring it about that their prayers should be in the name of Christ. To pray in the name of Christ means to pray in such a way as represents Christ. The representative always must speak in the spirit and meaning of those for whom he speaks. If Christ is our representative, that must be because He speaks our wishes, or what we ought to make our wishes; and if we are to pray in the name of Christ, that means that we are, however far off, expressing His wishes and intentions.

Therefore, as this Lord’s Prayer represents profoundly and perfectly the spirit of Him who first spoke it, and who taught it to His Church, it follows that it is, beyond all other prayers, the prayer in Christ’s name. Do you then want to know whether this or that thing can be prayed for in Christ’s name? The answer is to be found in another question, Can it be legitimately covered by the clauses of the Lord’s Prayer?

3. The knowing and saying of the Lord’s Prayer, as the prayer in Christ’s name, was in the early Church regarded as being, like the knowing and saying of the Creed, the privilege of those only who were members of the Christian family. It was the prayer of the family because of its first words, “Our Father.” The Christian creed, we know, would teach us to believe that God is the father of all men, and that He wills all men to realize their sonship. They cannot reach true manhood till they have come to know themselves to be, and to realize what is involved in being, sons of God.

But since sin has separated men from God, it is through Christ and by the partaking of His Spirit that they enter or re-enter into the privileges of sonship. Thus the right of calling upon God as “Our Father” was believed to have come with the coming of the gift of the Holy Ghost: “God has sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, whereby we cry, Abba, Father.” We are apt to have rather “free and easy” notions of the divine fatherhood. And it is important to be reminded that to call God our Father, we must ourselves be sons, and it is they who are led by the Spirit, they and they only, that are the sons of God.

This Lord’s Prayer then is the prayer of the great Christian family; the prayer of the whole Catholic Church; the prayer which, though it may be spoken by a single member in a quiet corner, yet is instinct with the aspirations and needs and wants of all that great society which represents all nations and kindreds and peoples and tongues in this world and in that which lies beyond the grave.

4. There is a searching lesson which lies in the order of the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer; for in praying much depends on the order in which we rank the objects of prayer.

There is a saying, not recorded in our canonical Gospels, but which yet the very earliest traditions of the Church treasured, and ascribed to our Lord; the saying is this: “Ask for great things, and the small things will be given unto you. Ask for heavenly things, and the earthly things will be given unto you.” Now, that is exactly the spirit of the Lord’s Prayer. It puts our wants in the right order. It puts first the heavenly things, the great things, and not the little things, the earthly things, the things that seem to touch us closest.

We know that it is not easy to adopt this order in our prayers. There are many who have lost altogether the habit of praying and who are won back to it by some anxiety or trouble that touches them nearly. Some son or daughter perhaps lies dying, and the father and mother, who long have been alien to the habit of prayer, are driven back to it by the very stress of their pressing need. Or some calamity is threatening to overwhelm ourselves, and we fall on our knees, after a great interval of prayerlessness, to implore that it may be averted. And, of course, we must bless God that anyhow men should be brought to pray: and God can lead us to higher things through things which touch our flesh and blood, from earth to heaven. But the point is that that is not the right order of prayer. The true Christian does not pray first for the things that most nearly touch himself. That impulsive prayer which springs simply out of our own needs is not the prayer “in the name of Christ.”

We remember what our Lord said to the disciples in those solemn hours in the upper chamber before His passion: “Hitherto ye have asked nothing in my name.” They had presented all kinds of petitions and requests; but in their own name. So it is so often with us. Hitherto have we asked nothing in His name. But that of course is a fault to be altered. We must let our prayers be in Christ’s name: that is to say in the order reflected in the Lord’s Prayer.

Now, let us examine it. The prayer of human instinct runs: My Father, give me to-day what I so sorely require. But the Lord’s Prayer begins with “Our Father”――not “my,” but “our.” I must begin with losing my selfishness, with recollecting that I am only one of the great body of God’s children, of the great mass of humanity. Thus I cannot ask for anything for myself which conflicts with the interests of others. And the invocation proceeds, “which art in heaven.” It places us in a reverent way at the feet of God. “God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore, let thy words be few.”

“Hallowed be Thy name.” It puts God’s revelation of Himself to men above all human needs. We are so apt to think last of the glory and honour of God; but here as we pray we are forced to exalt it into the first place; and next, “Thy kingdom come.” That is――May that divine order which, point by point, in many parts and many manners, through all the great web of history, has gradually to be woven out――may that great purpose of God find at last its fulfilment. Thus we are forced as we pray to merge our own narrow interests and schemes till they are lost in the largeness and wisdom of the divine method.

“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Here we are forced to bend our stubborn or short-sighted wills to conformity with the divine will and to make the law of heaven the pattern for earth. Only then, when we have exalted God’s glory above man’s need, when we have subordinated our little designs utterly to the great purpose of God, when we have bent our little wills under the great and divine will――only then are we allowed to express our wants for ourselves.

And even so how modestly, how restrictedly. “Give us,” we pray, not anything that we may want, but “to-day the bread for to-morrow:” enough to do God’s work upon in God’s way; and so that our eating may not involve others’ hungering. And then, because we cannot do God’s work unless we are in His peace, “Forgive us our trespasses”――not anyhow; but according to that necessary law by which God deals with us as we deal with others; “as we forgive them that trespass against us.” And, because we are weak and frail, “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.”

Is there not then in this prayer the whole philosophy of praying? And when we come to think of it, we shall find that the philosophy or secret of prayer lies in the recognition of the same law of correspondence, which has been the secret of scientific progress in the development of the resources of nature, and which, in that department, Francis Bacon has the credit of teaching men, or of putting into words for them. Before his time men had been trying to get extraordinary good things out of nature in accordance with the whims and fancies of astrologers and alchemists: they had dreamt of making gold, or finding the elixir of life. But all this was profitless because it was done in ignorance of nature’s actual laws. And Bacon spoke a prophetic word when he said “Nature can only be controlled by being obeyed;” that is――in reverent correspondence with nature as it is, is the secret of power. Now, in the higher region, that is what our Lord taught us about prayer. Man had been offering all sorts of prayers, sacrifices, propitiations. That God mercifully regarded such ignorant worship we cannot doubt: but it _was_ ignorant of God’s character and method. Now, so far as is good for us, our Lord has enlightened us about the nature and method of God: and He has shown us that prayer should not be an attempt to impose our own whims and fancies on the wisdom of God, but a constant act of correspondence by which we bring our short-sighted wills and reasons into correspondence, the intelligent correspondence of sons, with the perfect reason and will of God, the all-wise Father of all human souls and of the great universe.

5. Here finally we find an answer to all our manifold questionings as to what we may pray for, and what we may not.

Our Lord gave us that answer also in another way at another time――in the prayers of His passion. In His passion He prayed for the coming of the kingdom, in that great prayer recorded in St. John’s Gospel. He prayed then without qualification. Similarly, He prayed for those rough soldiers who were unwittingly doing Him such awful wrong: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” But when, in the garden, He asked to be Himself delivered from the coming agony, in the true humility of His manhood He prayed conditionally, “Father, _if it be possible_, let this cup pass from me.”

Now, that is exactly the lesson of the Lord’s Prayer. There are many things which God has revealed to us that He intends to give us. He has promised that He will give us all those things which belong to His kingdom and its righteousness. For these things we can pray, not only urgently, but with the certainty of faith that we must win them for ourselves and others by importunate asking. We cannot, of course, force the will of others, but we can with the assurance of faith win for others, as for ourselves, the spiritual opportunities, resources, and advantages of God’s kingdom.

There are also many things God has revealed that He does not mean to give us, and there are laws of His ordering, spiritual and physical, that by revelation or natural investigation He has made known. For these things, then, or against these laws, we must not pray; we must not ask that God will violate His general laws in our private interest.

But there is a great mass of things which lie in between these two regions of certainty. We do not know if it is God’s will that this or that person should recover from sickness, or this or that calamity should be averted. God is wiser than we are. We do not know whether it is God’s will that we should have the rain that is so necessary for our crops. There are things like these that lie in a region of uncertainty into which the intelligence of man cannot penetrate. So then as the object of prayer is not to bring the divine will down to the human, but to lift the human up into correspondence with the divine, for all these uncertain things we can pray indeed, but uncertainly――“If it be possible, let this or that come to pass; nevertheless, not my will, but Thine, be done.”