For Thine is
Matthew 6:9-13
Douglas Vincent tells the story of making a shut-in visit for the first time. He was scared to death. What could I do to help them? They were about to die and could barely understand me. Besides being scared, he said, I did not know if it was worth the time to go out to their house. But I decided to do it. I came in and talked a while with the caregiver and then I took the older man’s hand. He was not able to say much to me, but I told him about myself and how his church was praying for him. Then I read him some scriptures, and after some more limited interaction I prayed with him, and as I closed with the Lord’s Prayer, I could hear him trying to join in. As I ended, I looked up and saw tears streaming down his face. That’s the power of the Lord’s Prayer. Something so well-known and meaningful that it can move an elderly man on the brink of death to tears. What was Jesus trying to teach us?
This week we come to the end of this series on the Lord’s Prayer as we look at its closing, “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.” The interesting part of this is that the ending does not appear in most of your Bibles, at least not in the main body of the text. In Matthew 6:13 we see: “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one” and that’s it. But if you look at the footnote it reads, “some late manuscripts read ‘for yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’” It’s a footnote because the earliest manuscripts when the KJV was translated were not yet discovered. Since 1611, many earlier manuscripts have been found and they end with “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. Amen” Scholars call this ending the Doxology coming from the word doxo meaning glory. It’s a short word of praise, but it doesn’t begin to appear in manuscripts until the early 200’s. Most of the manuscripts, the writings of the early church Fathers and the commentaries on the Bible do not include that ending. It was only about 250 AD that it became commonplace. Those of you who have come from a Catholic background didn’t grow up learning to say the Lord‘s Prayer with the doxology. The doxology was said later in the Mass. Those who are Protestant grew up learning and praying the Lord’s Prayer with the Doxology.
So how did it become attached to the Lord’s Prayer? Very early in the life of the Church, when people prayed the Lord’s Prayer, they added the Doxology. A doxology at the end of a prayer was a common practice in the Jewish tradition and the early church. We see this throughout the prayers of the New Testament. Over time, the doxology was added to the Lord’s Prayer as a part of the text in the mid 2nd century. So it was not original to the Lord’s Prayer but how can you preach a series on the Lord’s Prayer without talking about this last phrase? These words may or may not have been on the lips of Jesus, perhaps not in the context of the Lord’s Prayer but it certainly was on the lips of King David. This is a doxology David prayed a 1000 years before Jesus. See if you can hear our doxology: Put on the PPT slides "Praise be to you, O LORD, God of our father Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. Yours, O 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, O LORD, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all.” 1 Chronicles 29:10-12 Do you hear the doxology in that? “For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.” Today we’re going to look at why the doxology and what’s its meaning truly is.
The first thing I want you to notice is the 3 letter word that connects the Lord’s Prayer with the doxology, “for.” The Greek word used has a number of different meanings but here it means ‘because.’ So here’s the idea: you can pray, ‘Daddy, hallowed by thy name, Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.’ You can pray ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ You can pray ‘forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. But you can only pray these things because the kingdom, the power and the glory forever belong to God and they last forever. The reason you can pray this prayer and ask for these things and trust that these things will be fulfilled is because “Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever.” This is why we can pray with confidence because God is God and the kingdom, the power and the glory forever belong to God.
So what do we mean by the kingdom, the power and the glory? First, let’s talk about kingdom. A kingdom is a geographic region that has a monarch whose reign is sovereign over it. Their rule is supreme and they have authority and power over all the people or subjects who live within their bounds. They have some power and authority over everything that is within that realm in some ultimate sense and the subjects have agreed to do the will of the king or queen. Now when we pray about the kingdom, we’re talking about the kingdom of God. So where is the realm of God? Everywhere. God reigns over everything. He was before everything that is and He will be after everything that is. And every part of creation is a part of God’s realm. The earth is merely God’s footstool. Now God created this planet and human beings with the express desire that He would love them and we would return that love and do His will. However, God also gave us the free will to reject Him as King if we so choose. From the beginning, the story of Scripture is of those who have rebelled against God and resisted His will for their lives.
When we get to the New Testament, we find that God has a plan to deal with the rebellion on this planet. His plan isn’t to send an army to conquer and enslave us but to send a Prince who will walk on this earth. He did not come to crush the rebellion, He will seek to win over the rebels by His love. This is the Gospel story. And the Prince begins to teach the people what the King is really like and what it means to live as a faithful subject of the King. When he began to teach, Jesus said, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near; believe in the Good News.” In these words, Jesus is saying the kingdom of God is all around us and he’s inviting us to make the choice to follow God as King.
Now Jesus describes the kingdom of God in very interesting ways. Put the following Scriptures on the slides He says, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.” Matt. 20:16 In other words, the values of God’s kingdom are exactly the opposite of what you would expect and how the word lives. In God’s kingdom, the children are very important when they were completely overlooked in the time of Jesus. He says, the meek, the lowly and the poor will all inherit the kingdom. He says, the prostitute and the sinners who repent go into the kingdom before religious people. And finally, the kingdom of God is exemplified by Jesus who ate dinner with sinners, prostitutes and tax collectors. That’s the kingdom. This is the kingdom we pray for, the kingdom we ascribe to God and the kingdom we join and become loyal servants to.
Power. God is power. When we think of the beginnings of the universe 14.5 billion years ago, scientists tell us that everything was condensed in something the size of the head of a pin. And then there was a massive explosion and all of the energy and matter began to expand and continues to scatter into the farthest reaches of the universe. The Bible puts it this way: before there was anything, there was God. The Lord God created the heavens and the earth by simply speaking a word. All the power, all the energy and all the matter that exist are a part of God. But there’s a 2nd aspect to this as well: when we pray, “thine is the power”, we are not only saying that God is all powerful but also in his presence we recognize that we are powerless. This is a difficult admission for us because we like to fool the world and sometimes even ourselves into thinking we have the power, we’re in control and we can make it on our own. Isn’t that the ideal of America, the independent, rugged individual who can overcome anything and make of themselves and accomplish what they want. So we pray “thine is the power” to not only remind ourselves that I am powerless without the Lord but to lay claim to that as well.
Three times a day in the early church, they would pray For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory in my life. When you not only pray those words, you claim those words, how freeing is that because you have given everything up to God. In AA there are three of the 12 steps that mention power. The first step tells us we don’t have it. The second step tells me where to find it, that is acknowledging a power greater than yourself and the 11th step tells me how to access it through prayer and meditation. Perhaps the greatest stumbling block to faith is giving up our power and acknowledging God’s.
And to God belongs the glory. Glory means fame, acclaim, and praiseworthy. It also can describe a certain majesty, magnificence and splendor. When people saw the glory of God in the Old Testament, they fell on their knees and began to worship Him. When the angels appeared to the shepherds to announce the birth of Jesus and the glory of the Lord shown all around them, the shepherds became terrified. That’s how overwhelming the glory of God is. The glory belongs to God. And the glory of God was poured into Jesus Christ, “And the word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen His glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.” John 1:14 In John’s Gospel, the moment that Jesus is glorified is on the cross. There, he displays the glory of God. How? Because on the cross he displays sacrificial love for a people who have rebelled against God and His efforts to save them, even by laying down His life. This is where glory is found. It’s in losing your life and in sacrificing it. This is the glory of God revealed in Jesus on the cross. For thine is the glory.
We are to live for the glory of God. Put this Scripture under the previous point on the same slide. The Psalmist (115) said, Not to us, O Lord, to thine do we give the glory.” Do you know how you give glory to God? You give glory to God when you come to worship and praise and give thanks to him. But also every time you do something sacrificial because of your faith, you glorify God. Every time you do the right thing instead of the wrong thing. Every time you do justice and acts of kindness, you glorify God. Every act you do to express love for God or love for others glorifies God. This is what you were created for. This is your purpose. The more you grow in Christ and the more you not only pray but live out “for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory of God” the more you glorify God. This is what Paul means when he talks about growing from glory into glory.
Lastly, let’s focus on the word, “Thine.” In those words, we proclaim everything that exists belongs to you, O God, and everything that I am belongs to you. We struggle with this. From the very earliest moments of when we learn to speak. We learn momma and then dadda and then we learn to say “mine!” To the other kids on the nursery or to our brothers and sisters, we scream out mine. And the problem is even after we have become adults those actions and those thoughts stay with us: my house, my job, my car, my clothes, my money, my, my, my, my. It’s hard to think and say thine. The problem is we are constantly fighting over what’s mine. And yet God is saying, you don’t understand. It’s not yours forever. It’s only on loan to you. You didn’t bring it with you and you can’t take it with you and in the end God says, it’s mine. A real change occurs within us when we move beyond just saying ‘Thine” and to actually believing and living as if everything really is Thine. When we do, we realize nothing is mine and it all belongs to God and we fully surrender it to Him to use as He sees fit. When you finally come to that point in your life, it becomes liberating and freeing to say thine.
And then there’s one final word. It’s the same word in Greek and Hebrew, ‘Amen’ which means literally “so be it.” What else can you say when you get to the end? When you have said, God you are my God and I am your child, you are all around me all the time as close as the air I breathe, hallowed be your name. When you say God, let your kingdom come on this earth so there is no more hatred or racism or violence, no more starvation and no more pain. And may your will be done in my life in thought, word and deed. When you say, God feed my soul so that I no longer hunger. When you live in His grace and say, O God forgive my sins and help me to forgive other people. When you ask Him to lead you, to take control of your life so the path you walk might be in Him and deliver you from all kinds of evil. When you finally say, “For thine is the kingdom” and it all belongs to you, yours is the power and the glory. What else can you say but so be it. Amen.
