SUNDAY SCHOOL: The Lord's Prayer "For Thine Is The Kingdom"

Welcome back to the Shepherd's Church podcast. Just like our Lord's Day sermon, we hope that this Sunday School message blesses you and strengthens you in your faith. Let's pray. Lord, thank you so much for today and for your prayer that you gave to us, your saints.

Lord, help our hearts to be encouraged, help our minds to be full, help us, Lord, to be a grateful, praying people. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.

Amen.

The Lord's Prayer as a Theology of Prayer

So today we're gonna be talking about the phrase in the Lord's Prayer, for yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen. So this is the way the Lord's Prayer ends. Now, when Jesus taught his disciples, are we recording, Patrick, by the way?

Okay, good, I don't wanna lose it. I could start over, but now I might have to. Anyway, when Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he gave them more than just a few devotional tips. He gave them a model, he gave them a structure, he gave them a shape, he gave them a theology of prayer.

And he didn't just tell them what to say, he told them how that they are to think about the discipline of prayer. Every line in this prayer teaches us something about the order of God's kingdom and the disorder of our own human hearts.

But what's often missed is how this prayer ends. It doesn't sort of trickle out in ephemeral nothingness, it doesn't limp to its conclusion and then collapse in exhaustion. It ends with a crescendo, it ends in the throne room of God.

For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen. What an epic end to a magisterial prayer. That line is not just a polite benediction, it's a coronation, it's the crowning crescendo of the king's prayer.

Jesus starts the prayer by focusing our eyes upward on the holiness of who God is, how he's our father, how his coming kingdom is going to inhabit the earth and how we his people are gonna hallow his name so that his glory fills the earth as the waters covers the sea.

And then he leads us through our daily dependence on how we will actually accomplish that mission. Give us our bread, forgive us our sins, lead us not into temptation. Those are the three prayerful weapons of world domination that will equip us to make his kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.

But notice where he brings it back. He brings it right back to the throne room where he's hallowed in the end. For yours is the kingdom. The final line mirrors the beginning. It's not a new direction, it's a return.

It's a return to the adoration that we began with in the very beginning. It's a return to the majesty. It's a return to the fear of the Lord. It's because this prayer, according to Jesus, is not ultimately about us and about our needs and about our expectations, but it's about God being exalted.

When Jesus taught us how to pray, he didn't teach us how to ask and petition only. He taught us how to magnify and glorify God. That's actually biblical theology. If you understand Genesis to Revelation, it is the book of the glory of God.

And that's why the final phrase matters so much. It reminds us that prayer is not a shopping list. It's not a therapy session. It's not self-talk. It's a cry of dependence before the throne of God that we would acknowledge who he is, that our doxology would be deep.

If we forget who we're talking to, we forget God. That's why the prayer ends back where it began. So as we open up this final line of the Lord's Prayer, we're not dealing with psycho babble fluff. We're not dealing with filler.

We're standing on holy ground. Now, I wanna begin because I enjoy this with the Greek, because it wasn't written in English. You may ask some people, especially people who grew up at the church down the street from where I grew up, they might say that the translation that Jesus used was the King James, but Jesus spoke in Aramaic, and the scriptures were recorded for us in Greek.

So we need to slow down and hear what these phrases were actually saying. It starts simply for yours, and in Greek, that's suestin. It's the way of saying that this belongs to you. It's yours. It is your possession.

No one else's. It's already yours, which means there's no negotiation. There's no conditionality. Jesus is praying. He's not praying, may it one day be yours, or we hope that one day we're gonna get it back.

He's saying right now and forever, yours, Father, is the kingdom. And then he names three things that belongs to God underneath the umbrella of his kingdom. The kingdom, the power, and the glory. So underneath the banner of God's ownership, there's the kingdom, the power, and the glory, and each one begins with the, not a.

It's not yours is a kingdom, and yours is a power, and yours is a glory. Yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. The kingdom means that God rules. Jesus is teaching his disciples 2 ,000 years ago to pray that God rules, not Satan, that he governs every inch of the cosmos, not the devil.

Revelation 11, 15 says, the kingdoms of the world have become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever. That's not punted into the future to where one day the God of this world, Satan, is going to be cast out.

He already has been cast down, and Christ already rules. Matthew 28, 18, all authority in heaven and on earth had now been given to me. The disciples in Matthew 6 were taught to pray about something that would crash upon the world two years later in Matthew 28.

All authority, all power, all dominion belong to Christ from that moment and forevermore. The power means that he has the right and the might to act. He has the strength to speak galaxies into existence.

He has the authority to raise the dead and crush his enemies. Matthew 28, 18 again says, all authority, which that's not a complicated phrase. If there is any authority to be had, he has it. If you have any authority in your life, it's borrowed.

If you can look at a single human being on earth who's exercising even a modicum of dominion, it's not theirs, it's borrowed, it's on loan. All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Therefore, all authority must serve him.

Therefore, when we stand before our King in heaven, one of the major reasons why people will be sent to hell forever is not just that they've sinned, it's that they've used his authority shamefully, the authority that belongs to him and him alone.

The glory here is the brilliance of God's being. The word doxa in Greek means glory, it means beauty, it means worth, it means weight, it means brilliance,.

It means light.

Isaiah 48, 11 says, my glory I will not give to another. That means every answered prayer, every act of mercy, every miracle is not just a show of how spiritual we are, but it's a showcase upon the power of God.

And then Jesus adds the best part with the phrase forever. In the Greek, it's is to ionos, literally into the ages, without end, without expiration date, without limits. There won't be a moment in all of eternity where the kingdom of God ever gets handed off.

When Jesus, this is such an important point. I know we're a postmill church, so we take this for granted. The fact that Jesus said, yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever, means that the world will not collapse into ruin.

It means we will not revert back to the sacrificial system. It means that he literally will continue to reign from now until the day that he returns to crush death personally himself and usher us into the eternal state.

There will not be a day, there will not be a nanometer or a nanosecond, I'm not big with science, a nanosecond. There won't be a nanosecond where God's rule or Christ's rule lapses. What a comfort, what a comfort that you and I have in a world that is still being conformed to the image of Christ.

And I've been thinking a lot about this lately. My timeline, this is such a Christian cliche, but it's true. My timeline and God's timeline are usually not in sync. Because when I read a phrase like, yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever, I'm like, amen.

Let's take over everything now. Let's take over Chelmsford, let's take over Boston, let's storm the gates of New York City, let's infiltrate Washington DC and let's just take over. And I'll say, because the word forever is there, those places will be subdued.

Whether it's called Chelmsford when it happens, whether it's called Boston, whether it's called New York, whether it's called Washington, whether America is still standing when it happens, the space that our feet strike will all come under the dominion and the power and the authority of Christ before Christ returns.

That's what he's promising, because he said forever. And then he ends with the most beautiful word of all, amen. Amen is not just the post script at the end of a letter. Sincerely, Kendall, that's not what amen is.

Amen is yes, I believe this. Yes, I agree with this. Yes, I stake my life on this. So for the second member of the Trinity to say amen to what he just said means that there is no way that it cannot happen.

That his kingdom really will come on earth as it is in heaven. That his glory really will fill the world as it waters, covers the sea. When he said amen to that prayer, he rubber stamped it as being accomplished.

Now we are working it out in space and time. We're seeing it happen in space and time. We're the bride. Christ has bought the world. We are the bride who's decorating it. You think about a relationship.

I did not appreciate this fast enough in my life. So to, if my wife is listening to this later, I love you and thank you. I paid for a house when we got out of seminary on the John Bon Jovi plan. We were living on a prayer, but I bought it.

That was my budget. And it was an old Victorian, which means that it was ugly. And in the description in Zillow, it said has character. And I was like, oh great, I like character. No, when you buy houses, you do not want the word character in the Zillow description.

That means 1970s wallpaper that one day you are going to be steaming off the wall for hours and hours and hours to remove tiny pieces of glue. That's what character means. I bought a house that was far from what I wanted it to be.

My house didn't align with my vision. My house didn't align with my will. I hated actually the way that it looked. But my wife eagerly and joyfully with the limited budget that we had, began working on it, began decorating it, began conforming it.

She would ask me questions. What do you want to see in this house? And I would tell her things like I say, like me not know. And I would try to describe my thoughts on decorating and she would accomplish it.

When the true and better Adam came to this earth and he married his true and better Eve, the church, and he bought and paid for the world on the cross, he gave her the responsibility of decorating the world for his glory.

The church's role is to take what Christ has purchased and to extend his dominion, to decorate it, to make it glorious, is to rip down all of the pagan wallpaper that has made this place look trashy and to turn it into a glory for his name.

Wherever our feet strike, we've been commanded to make it a fit place for Jesus's foot to rest. So when he says, for yours is the kingdom, for yours is the power, and for yours is the glory, he's saying these things belong to God, purchased by Christ and through the spirit.

It will be accomplished through his church. That's how the prayer ends. Now, any questions on that?

Amen?

It's a beautiful ending to the prayer, isn't it?

It goes along with the increase in...

Yeah.

Yeah, Ron.

I like what you said, decorate.

Yeah.

Yeah, Ron just said it matches up with Isaiah 9, of the, yeah, 9, 6, and 7. For unto us is born a son, and unto us a son is given, and of the increase of his government, I'm skipping ahead to 7 now, of the increase of his government and of his peace, there will be no end.

So you think to yourself, I'm gonna borrow a metaphor from Jesus here. You have a lump of dough, and you put a microbe of leaven in it. Of the increase of that leaven, there will be no end. The whole lump will eventually be leavened.

So if Jesus is promising that his government will increase until it can't increase any further, then what we have is the whole world owned by Christ, ruled by Christ, and under the dominion of Christ.

The Gospel as the Means of Kingdom Expansion

Yes, sir. What role does the gospel play in the expansion of the kingdom? Yeah, well, the gospel is the citizenship papers, and that's, we preach, it's the means of grace by which people come into the kingdom.

We're not jihadist in the sense that we're just gonna go with our bayonets and our weapons and go take things by force. The weapons of this kingdom are word, prayer, and sacraments. So by preaching the word, and by having church services where we administer the word and the sacraments, the kingdom is built through that.

Good question, because we want to always clarify that. Yes, sir.

Christ's Throne on David's Line and the End of His Government

How is it on the throne of David, and only uphold it with justice and righteousness, from this time forth and forevermore?

Amen.

There's so many passages in the Bible that I never saw until like 10 years ago. Psalm 22, if you're here on Easter, we'll cover one of those. It's unbelievable. Ken, another thing, the prayer actually addresses it.

Hallowed be thy name. The verbal tense is not, you know, let his name be hallowed. It's you and I be hallowing his name. And how do we hallow the name of God? We declare his gospel. We declare him holy.

We declare him good. So it's implicit even in the prayer.

All right.

Well, if there is no other questions, then let us pray the prayer that the Lord taught us to pray. Let us close out. Derek will sum up the series next week and give us the most insightful things we've ever heard about this prayer.

And then we'll move into our five solas series, which will be also pretty fun. So let's pray. Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.

Amen.

Amen.