Seeley Swan Pathfinder -

This is my last article in the Lord’s Prayer series. The traditional Lord’s prayer ends with the benediction, “Yours is the kingdom, and the power and the glory, forever, amen.”

This is the declaration, “Yours is the kingdom”. The kingdom of God is where God is always obeyed and God’s will is always followed. Full and perfect obedience to God, for now, only exists in heaven. But because of Jesus, as Christians, by faith we can choose obedience to God. Through the Lord’s prayer, we pray that God’s kingdom would expand into earth as it is perfectly modeled in heaven. 

As followers of Christ, we recognize God is in charge, the Lord is King. This is the prayer “Your kingdom come”. If we really believe this, when we pray we then accept that God will answer on His terms, not ours. 

This is an important reminder to direct our expectations. Through prayer we do not demand and assume. Instead, we humbly ask, even boldly ask, but with the understanding that God will always answer according to His will and purposes. 

That we can approach God in prayer is an amazing testimony to the standing we have with God through Jesus Christ. Through saving faith in Jesus, we have the intimacy of prayer to talk to our heavenly Father. And our Father wants our greatest good and desires to bless our lives. Prayer rests in the access we have with our loving God.

The letter of first John shows us the effectiveness of prayer when aligned with God’s will. 1 John 5:14-15 (NIV) “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us--whatever we ask--we know that we have what we asked of him.”

Prayer is not a blank check to ask what we want and expect to get it. When we pray, “Yours is the kingdom”…we recognize that our prayers must be lined up with God’s purposes. The message from 1 John 5 is that we can be confident that God hears our prayers, and prayers that flow out of being aligned with God’s Word will be answered. 

In everything that we do, we need to be grounded in God’s will. We primarily understand this through the Bible. In God’s Word we understand what pleases God, what life looks like when we are obedient. We learn from scripture the character we are expected to have and the actions we are called to pursue. The Lord will bless prayers that are in step with His purposes. 

A servant does the will of the master, when we follow Jesus, our lives reflect what pleases the master. When this happens, more and more, what we pray reflects the will of the master. The greatest outcome of prayer is to find contentment in God’s will and what pleases God.