“When you pray, pray like this…”
The Lord’s Prayer, this prayer given by our Lord Jesus to his disciples and through them to us, can be the beginning and the end of our conversation with our Father each day. I grew up thinking my time of prayer and Scripture reading was a way to win favor with God–and man! Then for a time I gave over the practice almost entirely because pride and self-satisfaction had grown up around it, and I didn’t know how to weed them out. Later I was given, and by God’s grace took, this advice: begin and end your days with the Lord’s Prayer, as a way of beginning or beginning again to grow in this discipline of daily prayer. The words, like those of all Scripture, are as infinite as the Word who gave them to us, so that no matter how many days we have left to us we can never plumb the depths of them. And on the days when we have no words in us, when we are groping in the dark, they can be our lifeline, our Father’s hand lifting our heads that we might see our Way.
And so we pray:
Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed by your name,
Our Father is in heaven! In vain the nations rage, our hearts turn to that which does not satisfy–Yahweh is seated on his throne, let all cry holy!
your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
In our minds, in our mouths, in our hearts.
Give us this day our daily bread.
May we never be satisfied with anything less than the Bread who came down from heaven, and may we daily feed on Him.
And forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.
Covered in your blood, from the foot of your cross we see our enemies and say with our Savior, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
Save us from the time of trial
Lift up our heads that we may see the Way you have provided out of every trial, trouble, and temptation!
and deliver us from evil.
From every evil thought, desire, and inclination of each of our hearts; and from all attacks of the evil one, the powers and principalities of this world–Father, deliver us! Fight for us, hold us that we may stand fast, encamp your heavenly armies, your horsemen and chariots around us.
For we are yours, and
Yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever and ever, amen.
Rebekah
Psalm 66
On Sunday we read the first half of Psalm 66 together. I love the arc of this Psalm. It starts by praising God for his deeds, calling the whole earth to come and see what God has done for his people. Verse 5 (or 6, depending on your translation) is really beautiful—it ties together the division of waters to form land at creation (Gen. 1:9) with the parting of the Red Sea (Ex. 14) and Jordan River (Josh. 3). Look at all the ways that God has been faithful to his creation, and to his people!
But then, in the middle of the Psalm, the tone turns. Bless God, don’t stop praising him. Don’t stop, even though he has tested us. God had us in his net, but he never let our feet slip. He let our enemies run over us, but he also brought us through that trial into a place of plenty.
All of us will run into times when it feels like we’re in that net. Israel faced invasions, droughts, famines, and corrupt leadership. We face grief, loss, anxiety, disease, and a host of other pains. There’s a lot to be said for the ways that God can and does use these trials to refine us like silver, but I think in those moments the most important thing we can cling to is the truth the Psalmist cites at the end: “Blessed be God who has not refused my prayer, nor turned his mercy from me.” The God who made the ground you stand on will not let your feet slip, and he will not let the waters wash you away. Even if those trials wear you down—even if they expose your weakness and faults—God is not turning his mercy from you. He will not reject your prayer.
Sometimes the abundance on the other side will feel impossibly far away, but we know the truth that the Old Testament saints could only glimpse: Jesus has already passed through the valley of the shadow of death for us, and he is with us in our trials. If that is true, then there is cause for joy even in the darkest place. The Psalmist’s testimony will be ours too—“Come here and listen, all you who fear God, and I will tell you what he has done for me!”
Justin
Song Spotlight
Over the last couple of years I’ve been fascinated by Jesus’ words on the cross: “it is finished” (Jn. 19:30) I’ve become convinced that this is meant to remind us of the end of creation in Gen. 2:2—“And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done.” Jesus said these words at the end of the sixth day of the week, as the seventh was beginning. He spent the seventh day resting in the tomb. However, the work he did there wasn’t the old work of creation. It was re-creation!
In short, Jesus was declaring that on the cross he had undone all the evil and brokenness that wracked creation since Adam and Eve first disobeyed God. The curse of sin that made the ground hard and thorny was undone in the man wearing a crown of thorns. The guilt and shame that made Adam and Eve hide was covered up by the man whose clothes had been taken away. Even death itself was conquered by the one who would rise from the dead, and who offers his resurrection life to us!
There are times when it is certainly appropriate to hear those words and respond somberly, as we do when we read the crucifixion story every Good Friday. But the Bible also tells us that Jesus went to the cross “for the joy that was set before him” (Heb. 12:2). If that is true, then it is also appropriate for us to respond with that same joy! The risen Christ is the first fruits of the resurrection, and in him and through him all will be made new!
We’re going to sing a song on Sunday called “It Was Finished upon That Cross” that does just that. It brings us into all of these themes I mentioned earlier—the curse is broken, we are clothed in Christ’s righteousness, death itself is conquered! We’ll sing and celebrate the words Jesus used to proclaim victory in the middle of the darkest hour.
I especially love this part in verse 3: “Death was once my great opponent / Fear once had a hold on me / But the Son who died to save us / Rose that we would be free indeed.” The victory is won—even though we still have to walk through the brokenness of this life, the end is already fixed. Eternity in God’s presence is given to us in Christ. That’s something to celebrate!
Justin