Over the course of the past few months, I have found myself overwhelmed by the abundance of troubles that exist in our world and my own feelings of powerlessness in knowing how to deal with them. However, in these feelings of powerlessness I have been struck by one line of the Lord ’s Prayer in Matthew 6:10. Jesus prays, “...your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” This is part of the model of prayer that Jesus gives in his famous Sermon on the Mount and is intended to be something that his followers emulate. For in praying like Jesus we are acknowledging the reality that God is the ruler of all and that therefore nothing is outside of his hands. He is in charge not us. This should be very freeing. Indeed, praying like Jesus means that we are relinquishing our will, our rights, our desires and opening ourselves to God’s ways. It is an honest statement that our ways are not working and that we are without adequate power to save ourselves or our world. We are in need of God’s intervention. It is a yearning for things to be made right and an openness to God acting in accordance to who he is, not how we think that he should act. It means that we are welcoming God’s priorities and seeking to see them enacted in the world around us.
As Christ followers we live in the tension of waiting for God to finally make all things right but also in the now where God is already at work in his world. Therefore, our prayers are in anticipation of the complete rule of God but are also looking for God to come and bring a taste of his goodness to our present - so we acknowledge the supremacy of God, submit to his ways and look for him to act. It is no longer about us but about him. However, perhaps as we yield to him, God will use us to bring the grace, love and goodness of his Kingdom into the brokenness of this world.
It is not about us.
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