Pray Worshipfully Series

HoHum:

I love sports. Lately, I have been unable to watch sports so instead I go to ESPN and look at the stats for my favorite teams. Chicago Cubs (this year they are pathetic), North Carolina Tarheels basketball, Indiana Pacers NBA and now the Indiana Fever (Love Caitlin Clark). Been to several of the games. If at the game or watching on TV I talk throughout the game. To the players. The umpires. To the fans. Why do I place so much importance on my favorites team’s performance. Why do their wins make me happy? Why do their losses make me sad? Why do I get angry when they make mistakes? Why do I feel proud when they make the playoffs? They are my hometown team, sure. But what does that mean? As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify. Because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city. You’re actually rooting for the clothes, when you get right down to it. You know what I mean? You are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city.” What’s that all about? Why do we invest such effort and emotion into sports teams and their performance? I think it has something to do with the universal human need to worship, to identify with someone or something greater than ourselves. In Rick Warren’s book, the Purpose Driven Life, he wrote: “Anthropologists have noted that worship is a universal urge, hard wired by God into the very fiber of our being- an inbuilt need to connect with God. Worship is as natural as eating or breathing. If we fail to worship God, we always find a substitute, even if it ends up being ourselves.”

WBTU:

Christians from the earliest days until now have added a biblical doxology to this prayer: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.” These words echo a prayer of King David when he was receiving the gifts of God’s people for the building of a temple in Jerusalem in 1 Chronicles 29:11: Yours, LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, LORD, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all.” How fitting that this has been applied to the Model prayer of Jesus, the Son of David. N. T. Wright explains: “This concluding doxology doesn’t appear in the best manuscripts of either Matthew or Luke. But it was already well established within a century of so of Jesus’ day; and it is actually inconceivable, within the Jewish praying styles of his day, that Jesus would have intended the prayer to stop at ‘deliver us from evil.’ Something like this must have been intended from the beginning. In any case, it chimes in exactly with the message of the prayer as a whole: God’s kingdom, God’s power, and God’s glory are what it’s all about.” The Didache, a church manual composed around 100 AD had this doxology on the Lord’s Prayer. This ending seems understandable. As we begin to pray the Model Prayer, the petitions proceed from abstract to the more specific and personal. We pray for His glory “May your name be kept holy” and then for His kingdom to come on this earth, and for His will to be done not only outside of us but in us as well. Then, having prayed for bread “Give us this day our daily bread,” and grace “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” and leadership, “Lead us not into temptation,” and deliverance “deliver us from evil,” it seems logical to end as we began. To praise God for His kingship (authority), through which He exercises His power (ability), thus bringing about His glory (acclaim). These are more than mere phrases. Each phrase in this doxology helps those who pray it to respond to the praise of the One who is bigger and better and greater than us, who meets our needs, focuses our minds and changes our lives.

Thesis: Last 3 doxology statements of the prayer

For instances:

1. Pray, “Yours is the Kingdom”; I bow

We need to surrender to God in worship. Interesting that the Lord’s Prayer concludes in absolute submission to God. Makes me think that one of the reasons that we do not see more prayers answered is because we are not submissive to God. We are holding out for our will, our own plans and our own satisfaction.

I fear that in our hearts we say, “My kingdom come!’ We want our time to be used the way we want to use it. We want our money to be used the way we want to use it. We want our children to succeed in the way we want them to succeed. We want our plans to be approved by God so we will have what we want. We want our church to be comfortable, and not necessarily as aggressive as Jesus would have us to be. Jesus has authority as the King. Matthew 28:18-20: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.” Philippians 2:10-11 says, “at the name of Jesus every knee should bow,