One day, a vicar was mowing the lawn in his garden when he saw a kitten climbing an apple tree and getting stuck. The poor little thing was very frightened stuck up high on a branch and it was desperate to get down, so it started to meow.
A week later he goes to visit a parishioner a few doors down the road. Just imagine his surprise when he sees the same kitten curled up on the sofa. So the vicar says, “I’m just curious, but where did you get the kitten from?” “Oh,” says the parishioner, “you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Last week my little girl was begging me for a kitten. I didn’t really want one but I hated to disappoint her. So I said, let’s pray about it and if God wants you to have one he will answer your prayer. No sooner had we said ‘Amen’ than this little fella flies in through the window! Two miracles vicar! Firstly the answered prayer and secondly a kitten that flies!”
God does answer prayer. Sometimes in remarkable ways…
I’ve got a book of Christian cartoons at home and there’s one with a pastor praying in his office. His secretary comes in, finds him on his knees and says, “Oh good, I thought you were busy working!” In reality, most of us find prayer quite hard. If you do, don’t worry about it, it’s not you. It really is quite difficult. A former bishop of mine, Geoffrey Rowell, once said, “In the contest between prayer and work, work always wins because it’s easier.” That sounds about right to me. Prayer is much harder than work.
You know the Mission that Mother Teresa founded in Calcutta? Well apparently there was a time when the sisters and volunteers were becoming totally overrun by the demands placed on them. There were simply far more helpless mothers, half-dead old men, abandoned orphans, and sick babies than they could keep pace with. They had to turn people back. Open wounds had to be left untended until the next day, leaving them exposed to infection. Desperate children had no option but to go away and sleep in the streets.
So one day one of the novices approached Mother Teresa and said, “What are we going to do? We can no longer cope. We are sending people away. We simply do not have the resources we need. Some of the sisters are discouraged and exhausted.” Do you know how Mother Teresa replied? She said, “Then we shall have to get up in the morning one hour earlier. And we shall spend that extra hour in prayer.”
I’m glad they had Mother Teresa running that place and not me. I would have said, “Then we shall have to get up in the morning one hour earlier to fit more people in.” Because, you see, Geoffrey Rowell is right, in the contest between prayer and work, work always wins, because it’s easier.
So it’s good that when Jesus talks about praying in Matthew 6 he doesn’t say, “Oh just get on with it, it’s not rocket science.” No, he explains how to go about it. “Don’t show off using fancy words,” he says in v5, “it’s not a performance. Be yourself.” “Don’t overcomplicate it,” he says in v6. “You really need to find a private space where you can be alone with God.” “And don’t waffle on and on with long, repetitive lists,” he says in v7, “God knows what you want to say.”
We’re looking at the Lord’s Prayer over this autumn term. The Bible tells us that Jesus gave this prayer in response to the specific question by the disciples. “Lord, teach us to pray.” It’s quite a good question to ask, that. If somebody came up to you and said, “You’re a Christian aren’t you? Oh good. I was wondering, tell me, I have wanted to learn to pray for years; where do think I should start?” What would you say in reply? Would you offer a technique? Would you recommend a book? Would you be lost for words? Do you think you’d mention this prayer?
Jesus gave it to us as a model and it’s perfect. We call it the Lord’s Prayer, but actually it’s ours. “This then is how you should pray”, he said (in Matthew 6.9). And it’s really simple.
“If you want to pray, well here is the sort of thing you can pray about. You can start by praising your heavenly Father; “hallowed be your name.” You can pray that God’s rule of law will be established over the world. “Your will be done on the earth just like it is in heaven.” ‘Your will be done’ doesn’t mean, ‘You know, whatever, Lord.’ Quite the reverse. Margaret Sentamu, wife of the Archbishop of York once said, “As Christians in Uganda, during the Idi Amin regime, we continued to pray the Lord’s Prayer. But… when we prayed ‘thy will be done’ we were praying that God would intervene in this dreadful situation we found ourselves in, which lasted nearly ten years.” “Your will be done” means “let heaven invade earth.”
Then you can ask him about the things you need. There’s no need to grovel or cringe. Just ask - he’s your heavenly Father who loves you. “Give us today our daily bread.” You can pray about relationships, especially for short accounts and for a forgiving heart. “Forgive us our sins, as we also have forgiven those who have sinned against us.” Oh, and pray to resist falling into sin. “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Or, as one child remembered it, “lead us not into Thames station but deliver us some e-mail!”
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name… But what about the third line of the prayer, the line which says, “Your kingdom come?”
The Kingdom
What does Jesus mean when he talks about the kingdom of God? When we talk about kingdoms, we normally think of a geographical entity, a political state with territory, a flag and national anthem, like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or the United Kingdom. (Actually, the United Kingdom is not really united at all. Ask a Scot, for example, how happy he will be cheering for England during next year’s World Cup! So the U.K. is not united and it's not a kingdom either; other than that, it's quite a good name. Our nation is, in fact, a devolved and increasingly fragmented constitutional monarchy. But the United Kingdom sounds a bit more snappy doesn’t it?
If the U.K. were a kingdom, in the strict sense of the word, it would be governed by an all-powerful monarch, and not by four elected parliaments or assemblies. Queen Elizabeth’s power is symbolic; she reigns but she doesn't rule. But in a kingdom, the sovereign has position – and power as well. The king decides. Full stop. And his people submit, never questioning. There are no elections. There is no parliament. There is no democratic debate. There is little in the way of free speech.
How would you like to live in a country like that? Not so sure? But would you change your mind if the king was always wise and fair, who made sure that no one had to beg, that the sick were given good care and that the old were given a decent life, a king who ensured, that in his kingdom, children could play safely in the streets, a king who loved his subjects so much that was willing, if necessary, to lay down his own life for them? Would you like to live in a kingdom like that?
Everything about the kingdom you live in, is dependent on the character of the king who governs it. With a good king, you have a happy kingdom and loyal subjects. When Jesus came, he said that a kingdom like that was within touching distance. You could get into it. It's not far away now. That’s why the Bible says he preached the good news of the kingdom of God. You can see why it's good news, can't you?
This kingdom, rather than being a geopolitical nation state, I define purely and simply as “wherever God’s reign and rule is exercised and embraced.”
The Kingdom that Comes
The kingdom of God happens to be what Jesus chose to speak about more than any other thing. It as his favourite subject. According to the last verse of the Acts of the Apostles, it was the main emphasis of Paul’s teaching too. “Boldly and without hindrance Paul preached the kingdom of God,” it says.
And Jesus said, that when we pray, we should say, “Your kingdom come.” What exactly do you think that means? I looked up all the references in the New Testament when the words “kingdom” and “come” occur in the same sentence (which, with a computer is fairly easy to do) and I discovered that there are three distinct meanings to that phrase.
1) Within
The first meaning is internal and personal and it comes, for example, in Luke 17.20-21. “Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, ‘the coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, “Here it is”, or “There it is”, because the kingdom of God is within you.’”
He said it to the Pharisees, these churchy, religious, pious men who loved dogma and ritual. “God’s rule has got to be within you,” he said. It means, “I want God’s rule of law to be the decisive factor that guides my heart.” Happy are you if Christ’s authority rules your relationships, your finances, your values, your time. It is a wonderful thing to live under God's government. It is the key to a life of blessing.
Jesus never preached the church; he preached the kingdom. You can go to church all your life and still live independently of God’s rule. Is the kingdom of God just a nebulous concept or does God reign in your heart? This is what was going on when we sang earlier, “Reign in me, sovereign Lord, reign in me. Captivate my heart, establish there your throne.” Did you mean it when you sang it?
2) Around
The second meaning of “your kingdom come” is “Let it break in all around.” This is where the powers of heaven suddenly break in confronting the darkness, with blessing and healing and deliverance from evil spirits and release from oppression and rebirth into new life. Jesus said in Matthew 12.28, “If it is by the Spirit of God that I drive out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.”
If I’m honest, when I pray “Your kingdom come” that is the guiding, overarching image in my mind. And this is what our second reading in Luke 10 was about, wasn’t it? “When you enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is set before you. Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you.’ But when you enter a town and are not welcomed, go into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your town we wipe from our feet as a warning to you. Yet be sure of this: The kingdom of God has come near.’”
This is why we say, “Your kingdom come” when we pray for healing on the streets. Since July the team has prayed for nearly 350 people and we have seen numerous people healed, several lives transformed and a small number of people becoming followers of Jesus. The kingdom is coming in Stockton. May it come more!
Say, “Your kingdom come” when you pray for your friends and family who haven’t yet tasted and seen how good the Lord is. They say that the American preacher D.L. Moody made a list of 100 people, and prayed for them each day, that they would be converted. By the day he died, ninety-six had become Christians. The other four were converted at his funeral. “Your kingdom come.”
3) Everywhere
So the kingdom comes within and around. Every time we say, “Lord, your kingdom come” we mean, “have more of my heart, let your ways be my ways, bring me to a deeper repentance, have your way in my life.” We also mean, “God, do great and mighty works of power in our town and nation; heal the sick, deliver the oppressed, bring a revival of signs and wonders that the world may believe.”
The final sense of “Your kingdom come” is what Jesus meant when he said this at the last supper; “I will not drink again of the fruit of the vine until the kingdom of God comes.” In this sense it’s the future event when God’s supreme reign and rule will finally be established everywhere. One day a voice will proclaim, “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever.” Until then, we pray for the hastening of that day.
In his book The Pleasures of God, John Piper makes a list of all the blessings of that day. “In the kingdom” he says, “we will inherit the earth and the world, but this is secondary. In the kingdom we will judge angels, but this too is secondary.
“In the kingdom we will reign on earth with Christ and possess power over the nations; we will eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God; the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, the lion will eat straw like an ox; the little child shall play over the hole of the cobra and put his hand in the adder's den; we will beat our swords into ploughshares and our spears into pruning hooks, nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; justice shall roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream; our bodies will be made new, and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and death shall be no more, neither will there be crying or pain or guilt or fear anymore; and we will sit on the very throne of the King of kings - but all these are secondary privileges of the kingdom.
“The main reward of the kingdom, the reward above all others and in all others, is that in the kingdom we will behold the glory of God and enjoy that glory with the very pleasure of God. …The great hope of all the holiest people is not only that they might see the glory of God, but that they might somehow be given a new strength to savour it with infinite satisfaction - not the partial delights of this world, but if possible, with the very infinite delight of God himself.
“Surely this is the river of delights. This is the water of life that wells up to eternal life and satisfies forever.”
O God, let your kingdom come…
Ending
I’d better close - or we shall be here till kingdom come. I think I want to end by leading you all in a prayer that covers each of the three senses of this cry from the heart, “your kingdom come.”
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 4th October 2009
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