Happy New Year! I don’t know if you’ve made any resolutions yet? Over the years, I’ve worked out that 1st January is probably the worst time to start – which is why I waited to post this! I’m always impressed by Paul’s prayers for the churches e.g. Ephesians 1:15-23 and Colossians 1:9-14. They speak about growth – in knowledge, wisdom and understanding of God and what he has done for us. To grow like this requires habits (they used to be…
The Shepherds’ story is a very familiar part of Christmas, being told through carols such as While Shepherds Watched their Flocks by Night. (The account is in Luke 2:8-20). The trouble is, when something is familiar we can overlook it’s significance. The shepherds are an example. In ancient times, shepherds were not very high up the social scale. They had to look after sheep day and night. The job was hard, dirty and dangerous. Their lives were spent mostly outside…
I recently read Psalm 40, which includes this verse: Blessed is the man who makes the Lord his trust, who does not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after a lie! Psalm 40:4 Very often, when we come across a verse like that, we tend to focus on being ‘blessed’ – and how we should trust in the Lord. Rightly so. But I got to wonder about the other part of the verse.1 It’s is saying that…
Well, I never meant it to take this long! But I realised that I started this series about this time last year when our church was having a week of prayer – and we’ve recently finished the 2024 week of prayer. The final part of Jesus’ prayer is bracketed by ‘forgive others as God has forgiven you’. In a sense, that’s looking backwards to sins we have committed. So in that context, we are told to pray ‘Lead us not…
Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors Matthew 6:12 This is the penultimate petition on Jesus’ model prayer. It clearly carries some importance as immediately after giving the prayer, he returns to the importance of forgiving others. He says that because God has forgiven us, we must forgive others, then goes further saying that if we do not forgive others, God will not forgive us. Does that mean that God will stop forgiving us? That we…
Well, here we are again after something of an extended break! Daily Bread Continuing with the Lord’s Prayer, we get to the next petition which switches the focus. So far, the prayer has been God-centred – His name, His holiness, His will. In summary, the prayers have been ‘in heaven’. But now it’s very much down to earth. Give us this day our daily bread. Daily bread is a recognition of our dependence on food. And at the most obvious…
This phrase ends the first section of Lord’s prayer. It applies directly to the previous phrase ‘your will be done’, but equally applies to the two preceding statements. In many ways, these three phrases are developing the same theme, as when God’s will is done, then his Kingdom will be coming which is where his name is hallowed. In this phrase, Jesus draws a distinction between ‘on earth’ and ‘in heaven’. God’s will is done in heaven, so there will…
When I started this blog, I’d intended to take a look at the different aspects of God’s will – those things that are ‘the secret things’ of God, and the ‘things that are revealed’ (Deuteronomy 29:29). Good Friday But I wrote this on Good Friday, and going through the events that lead up to Jesus’ arrest, there’s a place where he uses the expression ‘your will be done’ for a second time, so I’ve taken a different perspective on what…
Continuing this overview of the Lord’s Prayer, we’ll look briefly at the next phrase and what it might mean to pray ‘your Kingdom come’. The Kingdom of God is a vast subject – mainly because it’s a theme that runs right through the Bible – so we can only scratch the surface here, but hopefully uncover some useful thoughts about the Kingdom. In the UK we’ve been used to having a Queen as head of state for some 70 years…
I’m sure that for many of us the Lord’s Prayer is very familiar, such that we can recite it from memory. It means that it’s easy to become over-familiar with the words. Coming straight after the introductory ‘Our Father in heaven’, the phrase ‘hallowed be your name’ can feel more like part of a greeting. In fact, it is probably the most important part of the prayer, providing a foundation for the rest. So what’s in a name? On my…