“Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.”
When we pray the Lord’s Prayer there is a move from addressing and praising God at the beginning to asking for things throughout the rest of the prayer. This week we begin to look at what we ask God for and why we ask it.
First, it’s actually okay to ask God for anything. After all, you are just asking! God will still be God and although God is at work to offer us life and love, God doesn’t work for us like a servant or employee. God is free to be God and we may have no idea how any of this works anyway. So we ask as we see fit.
But, and this is a big but, all of our asking is done in the context of “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.” In other words, no matter what we ask for from our perspective (better health, healing for a friend, etc. or a nicer bicycle or bigger yacht, etc.), if we ask with these words being true, all that falls into perspective.
In other words, you can ask for anything – but faithful prayer asks for what God wants to happen to actually happen.
My favorite example of how this works is the last night of Jesus’ life. Jesus has finished dinner with his disciples. He knows Judas is a traitor and that soon Roman troops will come to arrest him. He knows he’s probably going to be killed. None of this sounds good – even to Jesus! So Jesus asks, “If this cup can pass without me drinking from it, let it be so.” In other words, I really don’t want to be arrested and killed! But then he says the words that make any prayer faithful, “but not my will, but your will be done.” In other words, “I’m asking to live and willing to die, all at the same time.”
One reason it is great to use the Lord’s Prayer as a key part of your prayer life individually is that it grounds and centers your prayer life around faithfully wanting what God wants. That’s the same reason it works so well for us to pray it together each week when we gather as a faith community. It grounds us in being sure all of our prayers are grounded in an honest desire for what God wants.
So, don’t hesitate to pray for whatever you want – but always do so in the context of the bigger request to desire what God wants. In the end, the world is God’s project and God has a dream for it. Faithful prayer returns again and again to the desire, hope and promise that God’s dream – the kingdom of God – will be fulfilled.
