(Against the background of Jesus’

teachings and practice of prayer)

(Practical Implications)

Dr. Paul Tudor Jones

02/26/95

INTRODUCTION – There only two fixed forms of Christianity, the Lord’s Supper and the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus’ teaching was all informal, and he never tried, like the founders of other religions, to bind His followers forever to some fixed system of creed and practice. He left them free to think for themselves and to throw His message into new forms which would keep its meaning fresh and real in every changing time. Yet He bequeathed to them these two ordinances which they were to preserve just as they had come from His hands: The Supper which tells us what He did for us, and the Prayer which sums up what He taught us. A Christian service would be complete if it consisted only of an observance of the Supper and a repetition of the Lord’s Prayer. They contain all in a microcosm.

Thomas Carlyle, in a letter written shortly before he died, recounted how during a sleepless night he had set himself to think out the Lord’s Prayer, and had found that at every point it carried him beyond his depth. He felt he might explore it forever without fully knowing what was involved in any one of these simple petitions he had learned as a child. This fact was early realized by Christian teachers. It was so simple — dealing with just the ordinary things of life — they felt it must have some hidden, cryptic meaning. Then they began to search below the surface for doctrines and mysteries. They took the prayer as a sort of allegory. The old expositors were mistaken in their method, but they were right in their belief that much more is implied in the prayer than is actually said. With all its simplicity, it contains, at least in outline, all that was profoundest in later Christian thought.

The greatness of the prayer consists just in this, that it takes the common things of life and makes us conscious of all that they signify. Jesus explains here the ways of God. He bids us look at the familiar things just as they are and try to understand them. How have we come by our daily bread? Why should we forgive injuries and resist temptation? How do we get the power to do so? Our life, which seems so ordinary, has a meaning in it which is far beyond our comprehension, and in everything we do we come into contact with the final realities. So in this prayer Jesus is not speaking in riddles. He is trying, rather, to lift the veil which prevents us from seeing what is right before our eyes.

For one thing, Jesus makes us feel in every sentence of this prayer that our life in time is bound up with the eternal. “Our Father, Who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name: Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” We find ourselves on this earth busied with its little passing interests, but have our place appointed us in God’s great order of things. If we are to live truly, we must take account of the eternal world to which we belong and keep ourselves in harmony with it.

Elton Trueblood in his little book, The Common Ventures of Life, developed beautifully the Quaker philosophy of the sacramental nature of all life.

Consider the Parable of the Gears — there are two gears — one huge, turning; the other small, still.  At any given moment, through any individual given in will and spirit to God, eternity can be geared into time. We are the cogs in the power drive from eternity. Only through such contacts can the divine power be released in the world. The wheels of God grind on and on. It is only when we allow our lives to be meshed into the eternal purpose that the power of heaven makes contact with earth. Prayer is the meshing process — the pushing in of the clutch — to relax, to let go; then the act of will gearing in to God. Let God.

See the abrupt and easy turns in the Lord’s Prayer about the coming of the Kingdom and the hallowing of God’s name to: “Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, and shield us from temptations” — then back to “Thine is the Kingdom and the power and the glory”.

See how this puts the shine and glisten on every commonplace contact! It brings to our grasp that wonderful reality Jesus called “the abundant life,” the divine life, right now. In the second place, since our lives are linked up with God everything in this earthly life is of endless value.

In the midst of life we are in eternity. We seem to be shadows chasing shadows but all the time we are face to face with the great realities. They are present to us in all our common experiences and if we could rightly see these passing things they would enable us to know God and to work along with him in the fulfillment of his purpose. His will may be done on earth as it is in heaven. Jesus takes the common things of life and in His prayer brings them into relation to God and to God’s eternal purpose. “Our Father who art in heaven, give us this day our daily bread”.

Finally, this prayer, in which people wait on God as God’s children, awakens in us the sense of our human personality. All religions before Jesus had been collective. Individuals had their relationship to God by virtue of their belonging to a certain tribe or cult. It was the grand discovery of Jesus that every human being had a destiny of its own, a personal claim on God.

But the prayer is also communal, not only individual and personal. Remember the Lucan account of the incident in which Jesus gave His disciples the prayer. They came asking Him to teach them to pray, as John the Baptist had taught his disciples to pray. They wanted to have a peculiar prayer for their little fellowship. But there is nothing sectarian about the prayer he gave them. We have seen that in practice the prayer has been used by all the various denominations of Christians. One reason is that, although it is communal in nature, it is also individual and personal in nature and encourages each petitioner to think of his or her fellow disciples as individuals who stand in a like personal relationship with God.

Very obviously, Jesus gave His disciples a prayer that would unite them. He saw people divided and He gave them a prayer to unite them into one brotherhood.

How this may be done has ever been the great problem which all our laws and institutions were intended to solve. The problem grows terribly urgent in our time. Communication, travel, etc., have thrown us together whether we will it or not. Our world has become a neighborhood. Social partitions are collapsing. We went through a social revolution in the Civil Rights movement and stripped the laws enforcing segregation from our society, but now we are bedeviled by racism. If the human race is to survive on earth it must make itself one. But where is the bond that will hold us together?

Jesus found it in that element in human nature which makes us humane. Living in this world we belong to another. We are never so much identified with earthly things, but when we look beyond them we are able to renounce them and to sacrifice this life altogether for a hope or an ideal which will never have any visible fulfillment. The ultimate springs of our action are spiritual, for essentially we are spiritual and not earthly beings. It is not just the writers of scriptures but we ourselves who on occasion experience the sense that we are strangers on this earth — foreigners in a strange land — huddling together for fellowship.

The prayer of Jesus appeals to that sympathy which people feel with one another in a world which is not truly their own. It speaks of our Father, of the will that is done in heaven, of the higher life to which we are aspiring amid earthly hardships and temptations. If this distracted world is ever to find harmony, it will not be through science, or culture, or organization, but through a deeper understanding of the Lord’s Prayer.