Matthew 6:10-11 | Praying For God's Glory

This sermon was recorded at Faith Evangelical Free Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

Good morning.

I said to the first service, and I will say it to you as well: you have not been led into the spirit of praise and worship of our God so far, then you're still asleep.

What a wonderful way to be brought into the presence of our God.

I encourage you to take a Bible if you have one or your copy of it, however you have it, and open it to the Gospel of Matthew in chapter 6.

If you are visiting with us, we want to welcome you and gladly invite you to hear from our great God and Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, with us this morning.

We've been working our way through Matthew's Gospel in the last several months, specifically in the Sermon on the Mount and in the last couple of weeks, specifically in the Lord's teaching us how to pray.

So as you're turning, we'll let you know that I have a book to give away this morning.

It's one of my favorite dead guys, JC Rile.

Language has been updated, so you don't have to worry about that.

And it's a short book, about 70 pages.

It's entitled, Do You Pray?

It's like a little devotional type of book that really challenges us in whether or not we pray and how we pray.

I have five copies available to you.

They'll be at the welcome desk outside after the service to the first five people that get there.

So don't make a mad rush.

They're not that expensive.

If you want one, come see me and I'll get you one.

So Matthew chapter 6 is our passage this morning.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

Matthew chapter 6, we've been looking at the instruction of the Lord Jesus.

Matthew 6 · chapter mention

And he began in verse 5 talking about prayer, specifically beginning about how not to pray.

And then in verse 8, he began to instruct us in how to pray, understanding that God is our Father, that we have a relationship to him.

And we looked last time at the section in verse 9, Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name.

Our verse for this morning is quite long, so I want you to really pay attention because it takes some getting used to how long this section is.

Jesus says, Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

That's it.

It was going to be on one slide, but I can't get it there, so we'll get that fixed.

You know this.

You know this verse.

On earth as it is in heaven.

But do we understand it?

Do we get what Jesus means when he says, God, please bring your kingdom?

Author John Webster wrote, The disciples are the ones who know what others do not know or choose not to know.

Specifically, that God is invading the world, that the world is governed by the rule of God in Jesus.

End quote.

I love that picture, that God is invading his world so that the world is governed by his rule.

Jesus prays, Jesus tells us to pray, Your kingdom come, your will be done.

What exactly does that mean?

How are we to understand that?

There have been all kinds of kings and kingdoms throughout earth history.

We've never had to live under the rule of a king or in a kingdom in our age.

So how do we have to understand that?

How do we process what Jesus has to say about praying?

The first king and kingdom that we find in the pages of Scripture is Pharaoh, king of Egypt, in Genesis chapter 12.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

At that time, Egypt wasn't as large or as powerful as it would one day become, but there was a king who presided over a kingdom.

Then in Genesis 13, the very next chapter, we see many different kings mentioned when Abraham marshaled his fighting forces to rescue his nephew Lot.

Those many kings were limited to ruling over a city, or maybe a handful of cities in close proximity to one another.

Then as history progressed, kings and kingdoms became larger and more powerful, dominating such that they crushed peoples and even came to exterminate nationalities.

Kings did as they pleased in order to further their own kingdoms and increase their rule and their wealth and their control over their subjects.

We haven't lived that.

So how do we understand this statement by Jesus to pray for a kingdom to come?

Here in America, it feels as though we are experiencing the slow siphoning away of our freedoms.

But even that is nothing compared to the evil and cruel rule of a wicked king who does whatever he wants to his subjects.

Of course, there were good kings along the way.

There were kings who were kind and generous and loyal to their people.

And in response, people could turn in in love to their king and serve him with loyalty.

We've never lived that.

How are we to properly pray your kingdom come?

My favorite works of fiction is J.R.R.

Tolkien's anthology is probably the best term to apply to it.

The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I like the movies too, but the books are better.

In the last book of that series, The Return of the King, you have this man who seems to have been just a normal, normal man who's been trekking along with his friends for ages, protecting them, fighting for them.

Then all of a sudden he is enthroned as a king.

And you see him in all of his glory and all of his power and all of his authority, and these little hobbits who've been hiding away are brought into his presence and they're just astounded by what they see.

And they fall on their faces in front of him.

How do we get to be like that in prayer?

How do we come to understand God's kingdom such that when we pray, we are astounded by who our God is?

When Jesus instructed his disciples here in prayer, that the kingdom of Rome ruled with Caesar as its emperor.

It was around the time of the birth of Jesus, in fact, that Caesars began to claim divinity, demanding that their subjects worship them as gods and even as a son of the gods.

So it's no coincidence then that when Matthew writes his gospel, he mentions the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of God, 51 times.

51 times Matthew reminds us that it is God's kingdom that is the important kingdom, not Caesar's kingdom.

And if God's kingdom is important, then it is vital to know about that kingdom, that we know how to become citizens of that kingdom, that we know the master of that kingdom, and that we know how we must approach the king of the kingdom.

So in teaching us to pray, Jesus has first instructed us to remember that we are to have a relationship with the God of heaven, specifically one of Father and children.

If we are to pray properly, we must come as children of the Heavenly Father.

We must know Him.

We must know what He is like, we must know who He is.

We must seek to worship Him in our prayer.

And then Jesus tells us that we are to pray to this Father who is in heaven, who is enthroned as holy, your kingdom come.

And over that kingdom there is a king.

So prayer by a child of God must begin with this sense of awe and of respect and of knowledge that there is a king who rules over this kingdom.

That was an open threat to Caesar's rule.

It was a wake-up call.

And it ought to be to us as well.

Because the Father's kingdom has a king, and neither the father nor the king will tolerate opposition.

There are places on earth today where many false gods are worshipped.

But here, at least in the West, we we tend to think that if we we at least claim the name of Christian, whatever brand of Christianity we have, we we tend to think that we worship the one true God.

And I hope that's true of you.

I hope that is a reality in your life.

But the problem is that reality, what we perceive to be reality, is not necessarily always true.

Our perception might be that we do indeed worship God as our king, but our lives often show a different kind of reality.

Our lives often display that we have other kings that come first.

Maybe our kings are our family, our jobs, our hobbies, our friends, our money, our resources, our time, our efforts, our freedoms.

See, we we we listen to and we obey the demands of that which rules over us.

Whoever exercises authority over us, whatever exercises authority over us, is what we obey.

And those things that we obey are often desires that trump the king of heaven.

But if we are to come to God properly in our prayer, we must remember that he is the true king.

And he is a king who demands that we obey him.

We're reminded by Jeremiah the prophet in Jeremiah chapter 10, verse 10 it is the Lord who is the true God.

Jeremiah 10:10

He is the living God, and he is the everlasting king.

There is never a moment when he is not king, when he does not rule.

And that is a key attitude and spirit to have when we come to our Father in prayer.

That's implicit in seeking his kingdom.

Theologian NT Wright has written: By the time Jesus was born, Caesar Augustus had already been monarch for a quarter of a century.

As King of kings, he ruled from Gibraltar to Jerusalem and from Britain to the Black Sea.

He had done what no one had done in 200 years before him.

He had brought peace to the wider Roman world.

A kingdom of absolute power, bringing glory to the man at the top, and peace to those on whom his favor rested.

He continues, watch what happens now.

This man, this king, this absolute monarch, lifts his little finger in Rome.

And 1,500 miles away, in an obscure province, a young couple undertakes a hazardous journey, resulting in the birth of a child in a little town that just happens to be the one mentioned in ancient Hebrew prophecies about the coming of the Messiah.

And it's at that birth that the angels sing of glory and peace.

So the author asks, which is the reality and which is the parody?

Is Caesar Augustus the reality of glory and peace and power?

Or is the infant in Bethlehem the reality?

You know, we're almost overly familiar with the Christmas story.

On the one hand, it's it's impossible to be too familiar with it.

But on the other hand, we can become so familiar with it that we miss important aspects.

I know it's not Christmas yet, but bear with me.

You remember, don't you, when the Magi came to Jerusalem to see Herod, seeking the newborn king of the Jews.

Magi came asking where he was, where he was to be born, and Herod didn't know, so he went and asked the religious experts.

And the religious experts pointed him to an Old Testament prophecy in the book of Micah, in Micah chapter 5, specifically verse 2.

Micah 5 · chapter mention

They said to him, Micah wrote, but you, Bethlehem Ephraim, who are really too little to be even counted among the clans of Judah, from you will come forth for me, one who is to be ruler in Israel.

Of course, when Herod heard of that, he immediately dispatched the Magi to find this young child.

And right after they left, he set about making preparations to go and murder the child.

Because he can't have competition.

That ought to cause us to sit up a little bit straighter because the Christmas story then is about kingship.

It is about a king exercising rule and authority over his kingdom.

The great human ruler is Caesar sitting on his throne in Rome.

The arrogant man who wants to be Caesar is Herod sitting on his throne in Israel.

Neither of them will tolerate a threat.

Neither of them will tolerate opposition.

And if we dig a little bit more, we begin to realize what is happening.

In Micah chapter 5, verse 2, it speaks of the city of Bethlehem, this little village.

Micah 5:2

But there's more in the context, looking a little bit further down in verse 4, Micah spoke of something that would make any king nervous.

Speaking of this promised king, he said, And he shall stand and shall shepherd his flock in the strength of Yahweh, the God of Israel, and in the majesty of the name of Yahweh his God, and the people will dwell secure.

For now he shall be great to the ends of the earth, and he shall be their peace.

So much for Pax Romana, the Roman peace.

There's a new king on the block in Bethlehem, and he brings peace.

When Micah recorded those words, the peace that Israel needed was rescue from Assyria.

And we know, because of the rest of the New Testament, that the peace that Jesus brought was peace with God.

There was this rescue from our sin that separated us from God, and Jesus brings ultimate peace with God.

But Matthew's readers and the listeners that Jesus has around him on that hillside that day would immediately think of Rome and Caesar, Emperor Augustus.

Here's N.

T.

Wright again.

Herod was worried by what the wise men told him.

If someone had told Caesar Augustus what the angels had said to the shepherds, he would have been worried too.

Suddenly, the Christmas scene ceases to be a romantic pastoral ideal with the rustic shepherds paying homage to the infant king.

It now becomes a clear statement of two kingdoms destined to compete.

Kingdoms that offer radically different definitions of what peace and power and glory are all about.

Here is the old king in Rome, turning 60 in the year Jesus was born.

He perhaps represents the best that pagan kingdoms can do.

Already before his death, many of his subjects have begun to regard him as divine.

And here by contrast is the young king in Bethlehem born with a price on his head.

He represents the dangerous alternative, the possibility of a different empire, a different power, a different glory, a different peace.

The two stand over against one another.

That is your world.

We have a world that demands your attention.

It wants sovereignty over you.

It wants you to pay attention to it, to give into everything that it demands, that it desires.

And Jesus says, No, wait a minute.

I am king.

Before we dare come to God in prayer, we must first reject any earthly person or any earthly thing or object that takes our allegiance and come and bow before the one who is truly king of kings.

Now you and I don't have a Caesar demanding our worship, thankfully.

Our leaders aren't considered divine, at least not yet.

But we are tempted, we are tempted to give our time, our efforts, our money, our strength, even our joy to many other things than the King of Kings.

If we are going to pray properly, we must so love the King of Kings that our allegiance, our submission, and our worship goes to him.

If God is our Father, then praying to Him is done in recognition of the true King.

Now, praying for God's kingdom not only implies that there is a king, but that that king has authority and he rules.

If we are going to pray the way that Jesus is teaching us to pray, we must understand that God's king rules.

There is a God who is powerful, who is sovereign, who exercises his authority over his realm.

That's made perfectly clear in the pages of your Bible.

We're given a very clear illustration of his rule over all things, and it's found in the book of Daniel.

And it surrounds a powerful king by the name of Nebuchadnezzar.

Nebuchadnezzar was the most powerful king in earth history up to that point in time.

His kingdom was the most glorious and the most powerful that had ever existed up to that point in history.

You remember him, right?

I hope you do.

He's the one who destroyed Jerusalem and carried off all of the inhabitants of Judah into captivity for 70 years.

That same king demanded that a golden statue 90 feet tall be made to represent him.

And he demanded all of his subjects bow down and worship that image.

Daniel chapter 4, verse 22 tells us that Nebuchadnezzar had become extremely powerful.

Daniel 4:22

It says, Your greatness has grown and reaches to the heaven and your dominion to the ends of the earth.

But then God stepped in and humbled Nebi.

And as a cow, he lived outside feeding on grass for seven years.

Why would God do that?

Why would God take the most powerful human being in existence at that time and make him deranged?

We're told exactly why God did that.

Four times in Daniel chapter four, Nebuchadnezzar is told that God's judgment would come upon him until he knew that the Most High rules the kingdom of men and that heaven rules.

And then in the very next chapter, Daniel chapter 5, beginning in verse 21, we see the results.

Daniel 5 · chapter mention

And his body was wet with the dew of heaven because he was outside all the time.

Until he knew.

But the most high God rules the kingdom of mankind and he does whatever he wants.

Do you think God takes it seriously when people don't recognize that he is king and yet they they come and demand that he meet their prayerful needs?

He sits in heaven enthroned and laughs.

You want me to do for you when you don't believe that I'm king?

You think that God is offended when we take his rule lightly and yet still expect him to meet our prayerful demands?

God couldn't make it any clearer than he did in Psalm 103, 19.

The Lord has established his throne in the heavens and his kingdom rules over all.

You may not see it, you may not sense it, but God sits enthroned over everything and he rules.

Period.

End of story.

Tom Schreiner published a book a few years ago entitled The King in His Beauty.

He contends that God's kingdom is a potential theme that is woven throughout all the pages of Scripture that ties it all together.

I can understand that.

I can see that.

He wrote, God is the sovereign creator who extends his kingship over the world.

Another theologian has written, God has no rivals.

God has jurisdiction over all created persons and all created things.

Think about that.

God rules over angels and demons.

God rules over persons and animals.

That's all true.

But we must remember that God created the entire universe and he rules over all of it.

Not just portions of it.

Not just portions where we give him a little bit of authority and say, oh God, okay, God, you can have this part of my life, but not this part.

He created earth and human beings, and his ruling lordship is exercised over all of us, and that means we must pray in submission to his rule over us.

And that means we must desire his will.

That means our desires need to be submitted to his desires, and his purposes then begin to take priority over our desires, over our plans and aspirations in life.

Those of you who are younger and are still seeking out what is ahead of you in life, let me tell you, your life will be made a whole lot easier if you submit to whatever God has to you.

Because He is King and He rules.

Well, that's where the bad news enters in.

You see, God created everything perfect.

It tells us in the book of Genesis that he looked at everything that he had made and it was very good.

In that very good creation, God authorized mankind on his behalf to rule over his world.

He established man as his image, as his representative, as his ambassador, so that everyone who saw Adam's authority would see God, would see the king who rules over everything.

But man rebelled, didn't he?

And in that rebellion, he demanded that I be king.

I'm refusing God's rule and setting myself up as king.

And that attitude and that temperament has passed down to each one of us so that by nature we're born kicking and screaming, rebelling against the king and against his rule over us.

We don't want it.

That's why this is so important.

Because the only ones who want it are the children of the Father.

If we desire to come to God in proper prayer, we must first recognize that He is the King and that He rules.

But that means then that His children are in a position of being subjects of the King.

There are only two kinds of people in the world.

There are, first of all, those who are enemies of the King, living in rebellion of his rule, and those who by his grace have laid down their arms, ceased their rebellion, and become his children by faith in Jesus, the great King.

Those are the only two kinds of people in this world.

There are those who continue to do their own thing, fulfilling their own desires, and there are those who have submitted their will to the Father to fulfill his desires.

There are those who have bowed the knee to Jesus as King of kings and Lord of Lords, and there are those who will bow before him as they receive the judgment over their unrepentant rebellion.

There's only two kinds.

Praying for God's kingdom inherently means that we want his kingdom to come because we are citizens of it.

And we desire to see its full display.

We desire to see the rule of Christ our King in all of its glory and all of its power and all of its authority on full display here.

See, God's authority and rule and glory and kingship are on full display in heaven this very moment.

When we pray, your kingdom come, your will be done.

We are desiring that our Father's rule and authority and glory be evident here on earth.

Not just in heaven.

That's the scope of it.

He says, bring it down so that it's here.

See, we ought to, we ought to want, we ought to have this innate desire within us to see our eternal homeland here.

We ought to be so caught up in our king, in his glory, in his beauty, in his awesomeness, that we want to see his authority and his rule exercised here.

Have you become a subject of the King?

Have you recognized that Jesus is God's promised anointed one, that the Messiah who God sent, who is God with us, the King of Kings?

Have you humbly died to yourself?

Have you humbly died to your self-appointed rule and submitted to the rule of the King?

Have you said, Lord, I give up my rebellion and I ask that you pay for my sin, that you take on my rebellion and you give me a new heart to be a new birth, to be a new child of God and a citizen of your kingdom.

That spirit is at the heart of genuine prayer.

Because it's that kind of spirit that Jesus meant back in chapter 5, verse 3, when he said, Blessed are the poor in spirit, because they possess the kingdom heaven.

Once we become subjects of the king, an amazing thing begins to happen.

We find that as we become enamored with this king, and we see him and we know him and we we walk with him, we find that our desires begin to be molded to his desires.

And among the greatest of those desires is that God's rule, his kingdom, would be in full effect in his creation.

As the sovereign king who rules over the universe and everything in it, God will accomplish his purpose.

You can fight it as long as you want.

You won't win.

Satan's been fighting it for an untold number of millennia now, and he won't win.

Human beings have attempted to thwart God's purpose and have failed.

They will ultimately fail.

And at God's appointed time in history, his kingdom will come in all of its glory, in all of its fullness, with Jesus reigning as King of kings and Lord of Lords.

So praying that his kingdom would come implies that those who come to him properly in prayer not only submit to his rule, but they look forward to it.

They anticipate it with great desire.

See, the promised Messiah King has already come to initiate his kingdom.

He's already been here.

And he's coming back.

He will come again to bring his kingdom to its fullness, to its completion.

The first disciples, and we'll see this a little bit later in Matthew's gospel.

The first disciples expected Jesus' kingdom to be present and for him to reign over all the earth.

Right before Jesus ascended into heaven, they asked him if that was the time, if that was the moment in history that God's promised kingdom would finally be fully realized.

You see, they expected Jesus to reign.

They expected his rule.

They anticipated that they would see the fullness of Christ's kingdom.

They were just carrying on what had been set before them because 700 years before that, God's people were anticipating his kingdom.

Isaiah spoke of it.

Isaiah the prophet wrote, Behold, the Lord God comes with his might and his arm rules for him.

Behold, his reward is with him and his recompense before him.

They anticipated that for century after century after century, and that should be our anticipation too, even if the Lord tarries another 700 years.

Jesus established hope for us.

He said in John chapter 14 that even though he was going away, he was going away to prepare a place for us, and he would come again to receive us.

John 14 · chapter mention

There's hope and anticipation of what's coming.

And the New Testament epistles further explain that hope by showing us that God has made us kings and priests of God.

And he says that we will rule with Jesus.

He even says in one place that we will judge angels.

That's Christ's kingdom, folks.

Revelation is very clearly full of confusing pictures and symbols and statements, but one thing that is undeniably clear is that Jesus is coming back.

The king will come.

The king will return.

And he will return with great power and great glory and full authority and magnificent glory.

And God's kingdom will be experienced on earth.

You anticipate that.

We experience a small shadow of that right now, that in his church, his kingdom rule has begun in his church, but it's a very small part.

So Jesus is telling us here that when we come to the Father in prayer, we should possess an attitude and a spirit of homesickness.

You ever been homesick?

This world is not our home.

If you are a child of the Father, your citizenship is in the place where King Jesus is, where he rules, and where his subjects worship him.

So prayer should include a childlike homesickness that anticipates the day when Jesus brings home to us.

When Jesus will rule over all of his creation in the way that he's promised from the very beginning pages of Scripture.

And so, as his children, we come to the Father, asking him to bring about the fulfillment of his promise by taking away our homesickness.

Because the kingdom is come.

Charles Spurgeon wrote Ere the drama of world's history shall come to a close, it shall be known throughout the entire universe that the Lord, He is God.

And the Lord alone shall be exalted.

So often we are quick to spill out our request to God.

Look at that next time.

Verse 11 give us this and give us this and give us this.

We're so quick to do that.

And presenting our request to Him is not necessarily inappropriate in and of itself, but those who are the poor in spirit will first come with an appreciation of the relationship that God has created with his children.

That he has adopted us as sons and daughters through the blood of Jesus Christ.

And that realization will move us to worship and submission to the rule of God as King over His creation, and of Jesus as the King of kings and the Lord of lords.

So genuine prayer doesn't come to the Father and say, Let me have my way, please.

No, genuine prayer comes to the Father and says, Please come soon, King Jesus, to rule and to reign.

And until you do, I am your devoted subject.

Pray together.

Lord Jesus, confess that we so often take up arms against you.

Instead of submitting to your dominion, we set ourselves up as rulers, as kings.

We seek your forgiveness and your cleansing and the work of your spirit to humble ourselves so that we might bow before you, the great king, that we might offer our prayer to you, our Father in heaven.

Not with a demanding spirit, but with humility of children coming before the Father, asking for home to come to us.

So Lord Jesus, your people bow before you now.

And we say in the words of John's gospel or John's revelation at the very end of the book, even so come, Lord Jesus.

Amen.

That concludes this sermon from Faith Evangelical Free Church.

Our mission is to declare the Word of God and disciple believers into mature, devoted followers of Jesus.

You can learn more by visiting our website at faithfree.com.