Series on Prayer at Fairlawn CRC, The Lord's Prayer, Part 2

Prayer Course, Session III The Lord’s Prayer, Pt 2
Praying for Our Own Needs

I. Body and Spirit – A Unity
The disciples asked Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” His reply to their request was the Lord’s Prayer. Last week, we noted that the Lord’s Prayer is both a prayer in itself and a model upon which to base all our prayers. We looked at the first half of the Lord’s Prayer, and I said that Jesus specifically begins with God and his Kingdom, so that the requests we make for ourselves and others are to be made in the context of God’s glorious character and an awareness of his surely coming Kingdom. The first half of the Lord’s Prayer sets our minds and our hearts on God and his glory, so that we see our present situation more from the perspective of God’s Kingdom and his character than simply our desire to deal with some problem we or those we care about are facing. There is nothing that is too small to pray about – but the most helpful, and God-honoring, prayers are those that have a Kingdom-centered perspective.
Today we will be looking at the three final requests made in the Lord’s Prayer. The first of these has to do with our physical needs: “Give us this day our daily bread.” The fifth and sixth requests deal with our spiritual needs: forgiveness of our sins and protection from spiritual dangers.
It is important that both spiritual and physical needs are addressed in this prayer. We human beings are both physical and spiritual beings, and we need to keep the two elements together. Both are essential for full human being. In Gen 2:7, we hear the following: “the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” The Hebrew word behind “breathed” and “breath” in this verse can mean “breath,” “spirit” or “wind.” According to Dr Meredith Kline, what this verse means is that God formed the physical body of the man, then breathed spiritual life into the man, so that he became a “nephesh chaim,” a living soul. Dr Kline said that, in the Hebrew way of looking at things, we have a body, we have a spirit, and, with those two together, we are a soul.
To care for only our physical needs would be unspiritual. But to pay attention only to our spiritual needs would also be wrong, for then we would be neglecting part of God’s own creation, the physical dimension. When God created the angels, he created beings who are spiritual. When he created the world, he created things that are physical. And when he created human beings, he created beings who are both physical and spiritual – we are embodied spirits. When Jesus had dealt with sin, he rose again in a physical body, showing how vital a body is to being human. God’s promise to us is not that death will free us from the bondage to the physical, but that when his Kingdom comes in its fullness, we will have bodies that are suited for eternity. The entire creation will be remade. The ravages of the fall will be undone, both for human beings and for all the rest of God’s great work. We will be restored completely, with hearts that love and trust God with all we are and have, character that reflects the character of the Lord Jesus, and bodies that are like the glorified body that Jesus took into heaven at his ascension.
All this is to say that praying for our physical needs is entirely fitting. The physical realm is not something that we need to go through on our way to a non-material “spiritual” existence at some point in the future. The physical realm will also be redeemed, and when it is, it will be a fitting arena for we who were created as both body and spirit, living souls. Thus, prayer for our physical needs is important. God is not simply “making do” with beings who have bodies. He intends to use all our nature, both physical and spiritual, to reveal his glory – and to give us joy in him and in his creation.

II. Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread
The fourth petition in the Lord’s Prayer, and the first that deals not with God and his character and kingdom, is one that asks, “give us this day our daily bread.” This request is not simply for a loaf of bread each day, but rather a prayer that each day, in some way, God will enable us to eat by providing food or the means to get it. Indeed, this request is not simply for food, but also for all that we need to sustain life. The basic physical needs of human life are food, clothing, and shelter, and so we are praying for all that we need to have these fundamental needs met – such as a job, transportation, and education to get a job, and so on. We are also praying for an orderly society, as Paul exhorts Timothy and the churches in his care, in 1 Tim 2:1-2, “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”
We are really asking for quite a lot in this simple phrase, “Give us this day our daily bread.” It is not simply a request for food, but a request for all that we need to sustain life day by day. At the same time, this phrase would have had a deep resonance for those who heard Jesus give it. Many of those who heard Jesus teach were day laborers. You probably remember the parable of the generous landowner, who paid all his laborers the full daily wage, a denarius, whether they had worked all day or only the last hour. A significant number of Jesus’ hearers lived one day at a time: if they worked, they ate – and if they did not, they went hungry. Daily bread was definitely something the people of Jesus day could relate to.
There is another dimension to “daily bread.” During the days of the wilderness wanderings, the people of Israel were fed by the Lord day by day. Each morning when they awoke, there was manna scattered on the ground. All they had to do was to go out and pick it up. This was spectacular provision by the Lord. If someone gathered more than was needed for the day, the leftovers turned rancid and were inedible. This was truly daily bread! They knew that God was providing for them, day by day, in a very direct way. Because God had declared that the Israelites were to observe the Sabbath, there was twice as much manna on the sixth day as the other days – but none on the seventh day. And on that day only, manna would keep overnight. The Lord kept providing manna until the Israelites had settled in the Promised Land, and their food would come through their labor and God’s gifts of sun, rain, and growth.
The people of Jesus’ day would have that story in their minds, and they would connect with the phrase, “daily bread,” both by their own situation and by their story as a people. That was one reason that they wanted to make him king when he fed the five thousand in the wilderness – here was a new Moses, to provide bread without labor! In John 6, Jesus taught them that the bread he would provide would not be physical bread, for their bodies only, but his flesh given as an atoning sacrifice and thus as the source of life eternal.
In our culture, most of us do not live as close to destitution as did the people of Jesus’ day. We have salaries, pension funds, social security, savings accounts and investments, and a large “social safety net” to help those who are struggling financially. The West in general and America in particular have wealth that amazes much of the world, and which would have astonish all those who lived more than 100 years ago. In 1988, I was part of a work trip to Costa Rica, which is one of the more wealthy nations of Latin America. At the end of the trip, when we were sharing with one another what we learned through our experience. One of the teens said that he had learned, to his astonishment, that the average family of the village where we were building a church building had the same annual income as he had brought to buy souvenirs: $200. Those families knew what they were praying for when they asked God for their daily bread. They were not starving, to be sure – but their pantry was not overflowing, either.
“Give us this day our daily bread” does not mean that we expect God to provide manna, so that we have each day’s food coming mysteriously in the morning. Rather, it means that we look to God to provide the opportunities and the resources we need to provide food, clothing, and shelter. We work, dependent upon the providential care and guidance of our heavenly Father.
But when do we stop working? How much is enough? There is a passage in Proverbs that I ran across years ago that says something very interesting. Pr. 30:7-9 has a prayer: “Two things I ask of you, O LORD; do not refuse me before I die: Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread. Otherwise, I may have too much and disown you and say, ‘Who is the LORD ?’ Or I may become poor and steal, and so dishonor the name of my God.”
With an abundance of possessions comes the temptation to forget God, thinking that one has amassed possessions by one’s own strengths and abilities. This is a danger that we can run, living in the wealthiest nation in history. But what we have did not come out of nowhere. Its source is ultimately the Lord, and we must recognize that. At the other end of the spectrum, poverty brings its own temptation – to reach out and take what is not one’s own. Theft dishonors God, for it says, “God cannot care for me the way I need to be taken care of.”
When we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we are acknowledging that all we have depends on God and his goodness. We are expressing trust in his providential care, that he will bring what we need when we need it. And we are also honoring the Lord as the creator of all things – the creator of a good creation that even in its fallen estate is filled with blessings.

III. “Forgive Us Our Debts, as We Forgive Our Debtors”
From our needs as physical creatures, we turn to our needs as embodied spirits, asking for two things – forgiveness and protection. As Christians, and especially as Reformed Christians, we know that God forgives us totally and purely by grace. There is nothing we have done, and nothing we could do, to deserve forgiveness. In Luke 17:10, Jesus says, “when you have done all that you were commanded, say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.’” Because we serve a God who is totally righteous and pure, nothing less than perfection will do. Even if we could become perfect today and live in that perfection to the end of our days, it would still not be enough to make up for the sins we have committed until today. We cannot deserve forgiveness; we can only receive it.
We are offered forgiveness because God, in his love and justice, appointed one man to suffer the just penalty of the wrongdoing we have each done. That man, unlike us, did not doubt the goodness and trustworthiness of God, but instead obeyed all that God had commanded. What God had commanded him included suffering unjustly. In himself, Jesus had done no wrong, yet he was treated by those with official powers – and by God himself – as though he were a rebel and a murderer. As Peter later said in his first Epistle, “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit,” (1 Pt 3:18).
We can confess our sins with full confidence that we will be forgiven. God has promised that all who rely upon his Son and his death will be given mercy. As the Apostle John says in his first letter, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.” (1 John 1:9)
If forgiveness is complete and purely on the basis of God’s mercy and not our own merit, then why does Jesus include the phrase, “as we forgive our debtors” in the model prayer he gives his followers?
I believe it is because that, while forgiveness is instantaneous, the cleansing promised in 1 John 1:9 is a lifetime process. We have the righteousness of Christ applied to us by grace, through faith – but our hearts, while regenerate, are still afflicted by sin. Sin is ultimately a rebellion against God, in which we do not trust him to know what is best for us, or to do what is best for us. Because we do not trust God, we seek to take matters into our own hands – and so we lie, and steal, and bear false witness, and on and on. We hurt others, and others hurt us. We cannot go through a day without sinning against someone, or without being sinned against.
When someone sins against us, we want them to suffer for it. In some ways, this desire is a good thing: it reveals part of the image of God, who is perfectly just and desires that all who have done wrong suffer the consequences of doing wrong. If we want justice done, we are like God.
The trouble is that, while wanting justice reflects that God is just, we are not just ourselves. We do not know what a fair response is. The reason for the Old Testament law that said, “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” was to limit retribution to an equal loss. Left to ourselves, we would be likely to exact a greater retribution from the one who harmed us.
While others sin against us every day, we seldom seek our version of justice against everyone who hurts us. We can let go of a lot – but there are certain events that come to us that grieve us deeply and bring pain on an almost daily basis. Perhaps a lie was told or a secret revealed that cost a reputation or ruined a relationship. Perhaps someone plotted against you to prevent you from getting a long-held goal. Perhaps someone deliberately hurt you or someone you care about, or damaged something precious to you, just to see your pain. Perhaps you were betrayed. The list of possibilities could go on and on. Deep pain that cries out for justice can come about in many ways.
How does one deal with that, in light of the fact that we pray, “as we forgive our debtors”? This question is reinforced because Jesus says, after giving the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, “for if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive you.”
If our forgiveness from God comes purely and completely by his grace, how can the Lord Jesus tell us that our being forgiving is necessary to receive forgiveness? There is a great deal to be said about this, but I will try to give you my best understanding of it. In one sentence: I believe that Jesus means that our willingness to forgive is an indicator of our own understanding of the grace of God. That is, if I believe that God has forgiven me completely and freely, without my earning or deserving that mercy, then I will be a person who forgives completely and freely. If I think that I must in some way earn God’s acceptance, I will require others to earn my acceptance by either apologizing in detail or by suffering, or both.
When Peter asked Jesus how often he should forgive his brother, Jesus replied with the story of the unforgiving servant, in Mt 18:21-35. In that story, a man is forgiven a debt of millions of dollars that he owed to his king. As he is leaving the king’s court, he encounters a fellow servant who owes him a few hundred dollars. He demands immediate repayment – and when his fellow servant says he will pay if he can have more time, the first servant has him arrested for failure to pay his debt. When the king hears of this utter lack of mercy, he has the first servant brought back before him, and sentences him to the same penalty that the servant gave his fellow servant: imprisonment until the debt is paid. The reason is simple: the first servant was unaware of the depth of mercy he had received. He did not recognize the price the king had paid to forgive him. The king, after all, had a legitimate claim on those millions of dollars, and he chose to give up that claim. The king took an enormous loss in forgiving the servant. Why could not the servant take a much smaller loss?
A forgiven heart is a forgiving heart. One of the blocks to our forgiving others is a lack of awareness of the depth of our own sin. I remember that in my early 20’s, my thinking went something like this: “All human beings are sinners. I am a human being. Therefore, I am a sinner.” I knew the facts of salvation by grace alone, but I did not recognize the generosity of God’s mercy because I did not know how deeply I had offended him. But one day I had a conversation with a friend who spoke to me about my habits of sarcasm and put-downs towards other people. I said, “That’s just my sense of humor; I do not mean anything by it.” But my friend persisted in saying that it was wrong, and that my words hurt more than I knew – and that I needed to stop making excuses for things I did wrong, and repent.
It was a very small thing, but that conversation got me to thinking in a way I had never thought before. I could not sleep the night after the conversation because the Lord brought to mind the excuses I used to avoid responsibility for the wrongs I did – nothing spectacular, but still instances where I did what I pleased and not what God asks. I knew myself as a rebel against God, even if my rebellion was relatively quiet. And I recognized that Jesus suffered the penalty a rebel deserves – which is indeed what the penalty of crucifixion was for in Roman law. I began to see how vast God’s mercy was to me, and knowing the depth and extent of that mercy made a profound difference in how I treated others, and I became more willing and more able to give mercy to those who hurt me.
A forgiven heart is a forgiving heart. Having an understanding of the depth of our own sin and the price that God paid to forgive that sin enables us to forgive others. It is not automatic and it is not easy, but it is real. It also helps to recognize that there is a distinction between an act of the will and our emotional state. We can choose to forgive, even if our emotions are shouting, “What he did to me was wrong and he must pay!” Over time, we can train our emotions to let go of that demand.
In 1 Peter 2, Peter is talking about the death of Christ for our sins, and in verse 23, he says, “When he was reviled, he did not revile in return; when he suffered, he did not threaten, but continued entrusting himself to him who judges justly.” When our emotions cry out for justice, we can say, “Lord, I trust you to deal with this person. I am not the judge; you are. You were merciful to me when I deserved no mercy; empower me to be merciful as you were.”
The reality is that one of two things will be true about the person who hurt you. If he is not trusting Christ, then he will indeed pay for the wrong he has done to you – eternally, and with an anguish greater than we can imagine. There is nothing in this life we can do to add to that coming suffering at the judgment from the one who judges justly. Therefore, all we need to say is, “Lord, you deal with it.” On the other hand, if the person who hurt you has trusted Christ for forgiveness, then Christ himself has already suffered for the wrong that was done to you. What can you add to that? What would you want to add to that?
We pray for forgiveness because we need it, every day. And so do those around us.

IV. “Lead Us Not into Temptation”
The final request we make in the Lord’s Prayer is for spiritual protection. The King James translation is “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” That phrasing can make it sound as if God may play games with us, laying snares so that he can say, “Gotcha!” when we fall into them. However, that is not what Jesus is saying. We know that God does not tempt us, seeking to entice us into sin. James tells us that, in James 1:13-15, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.”
God does not tempt us, but he may test us. We can cite instances of testing in Scripture. Adam was tested by God: “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.’” We know that Adam failed that test, not because God tempted him, but because Satan did, inciting a desire for Adam to be like God and implying that God did not really want what was best for Adam and Eve.
Later on in the Old Testament, we hear of another test, when God permits Satan to attack Job. Satan sought to prove that Job’s faith was a mercenary faith, worshipping God because of the benefits God offered. But when those benefits were removed, Job still trusted God. He passed the test.
We may be tested by God, but he will not tempt us. When God tests us, it is for the purpose of making us stronger, not in order to catch us doing wrong and gloating over our failures. Tests are a sort of “spiritual gymnasium,” where we do exercises to increase our strength and stamina. Hebrews 5:12 tells us, “Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered.” Christ was always obedient, but in encountering the trials and temptations of human life, he grew in the depth and understanding of what obedience meant. In the same way, as we encounter various trials and temptations, we can learn how to be more fully obedient, trusting the Father ever more fully to care for us and to guide us.
Even recognizing that God allows trials to come into our lives, Jesus knows that we are weak. Thus, we pray not be brought to the test because we know that, apart from his mercy, we will be like Adam and not like Job. This prayer reminds us of our weakness and our need. This request is the only one in the Lord’s Prayer that has a second aspect to it – not only “lead us not into temptation,” but also “but deliver us from evil.” That “from evil” would be more accurately translated, “from the evil one.” While we are indeed weak and vulnerable to temptation in ourselves, we are not alone in the situation. We have an enemy who delights in our disobedience and who seeks to entice us into further rebellion against the living God.
We do not live in neutral territory. We live in the midst of a battleground. We were born into a cosmic rebellion against God, born as soldiers of the one leading that rebellion. Through God’s mercy, we have been born anew, as soldiers of the heavenly King. But we are still vulnerable to the lies of that consummate liar, Satan. We need continued protection and strength to resist those lies and to continue to trust the one who is Truth Incarnate.
The final petition of the Lord’s Prayer asks for just such protection. Later on this fall, I hope to talk more about being protected, but for now, let me just mention the book The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis. That book has a lot to say about the forces of evil and how they operate on our hearts, and also how we can resist them.

V. A Concluding Thought
Today we have looked at the three requests of the Lord’s Prayer that are for ourselves. We ask for provision for our physical needs, for mercy, and for protection. These requests cover all our lives, both the physical aspects and the spiritual aspects. There are difficulties in all three requests: how much is enough? How can we forgive the unforgiveable? How can we be protected from the insidious lies that encourage us to distrust the living God?
There is one thing that I have discovered that is important in dealing with all three things: thankfulness. The more we cultivate a spirit of thankfulness, the better we manage in trusting God. If we are thankful, we can trust in God’s daily provision, and not constantly seek “more.” If we are thankful, we can more easily forgive those who have hurt us. If we are thankful, temptations are far less powerful.
God owes us nothing good. Yet in his mercy, we have life, we have material blessings in abundance, we have friends and family to love us, we live in a free country, we have minds to think, hearts to feel, hands to care. God has given us so much more than we deserve. Most of all, he has given us his Son and he offers us life eternal with him. Yes, we experience pain, and we do not have everything we might want – but that we have any good thing is astonishing, compared to what we deserve. Our God is gracious beyond measure.
And so we conclude the Lord’s Prayer with joyful praise: “For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen”