“It will always help us if we regard this world as organized not for our comfort but for our training.”[1]  So says our friend William Barclay.  The old saying was the world is my oyster: I love oysters!  Turns out the world is my gym: time to sweat, strain, and push yourself, and be pushed.  No pain no gain.  I always hated that slogan or whatever it is—that truth.  It seems God wants us to be lifelong learners.  He has so arranged life that we are always in training, always learning.  Learning what—Life is hard? life isn’t fair?  No.  We learned all that a long time ago.  We’re now continuing to learn that this life is about endurance, perseverance, persistence, obedience, and trust.  Faith, in other words.  Sounds like work.  Work, work, work!  What’s the reward?  Where’s the reward?

The disciples of Jesus wondered; disciples do.  Jesus spoke of reward; he also spoke of work: more often than not, the work sounded difficult, demanding.  He also spoke of the one with whom all things are possible.  Jesus spoke of prayer.  He prayed, often, fervently.  He went all in when it came to prayer.  His disciples noticed.  They wished they could pray like that, have that sort of prayer life, that connection.  Prayer connects us with God.  The Church is connection to God.  When we pray, we are putting faith into action.  Prayer is one of the simplest, loveliest, most blessed ways God gives for us to put faith into action.  God is always teaching us about faith as He trains us in faith.  God marshals this world to train us in faith; faith draws us nearer to God and makes us more effective disciples in a broken world.  If you want to be an effective disciple, pray.

We say the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday.  Long ago, that was not typical in a Presbyterian service, not because this prayer was not valued, but because there was a historic, Reformed aversion to set prayers, praying by rote: saying words without a heart-and-soul investment.  No throwaway prayers!  Matthew very carefully places the Lord’s Prayer at a particular point in his account of who Christ is and what Christ does for those who will receive him.  To receive Jesus, to believe in Christ—this is not normal: it’s a miracle!  Faith is a miracle.  Don’t ever let anyone tell you that God doesn’t work miracles.  Give your testimony!  Share your faith.

Immediately after he teaches this prayer we know so well but maybe contemplate so rarely, Jesus speaks of the supreme importance of forgiveness, as if the underlying theme of the Lord’s Prayer is forgiveness.  If you do nothing else when you pray, remember forgiveness: the forgiveness you already have and the forgiveness you have to offer.  Now, forgiveness is necessary only when there has been a fault, a trespass, a sin.

If you spend much time in the psalms, it won’t be long before you begin to hear them as prayers for forgiveness, healing, restoration, salvation.  Today, let forgiveness stand as a term that includes all of that: healing, restoration, salvation all come from love by grace.  Is that not what this table, set today so simply, so beautifully, so powerfully, reminds us of, every time?  Forgiveness by love through grace: Christ—and the Spirit through whom Jesus is Christ for us.

Ancient peoples understood clearly that guilt was removed by sacrifice; sacrifice involved blood, the very stuff of life.  Transgression was just that serious.  Sin was just that serious.  Only blood could pay.  Life is God’s gift; sin spits upon God’s gift.  Guilt is removed by blood.  Since we cannot offer our own blood and live, the blood of another is required.  God shall supply our need.  God shall supply the lamb.  God supplies the lamb because no amount of blood we can offer from this side of eternity can atone for our sin, as God has already told us.  All tainted and fallen, this side of eternity.  Not so?  Read the headlines.  Look around you.  Look inside.

We do not have the power to purify.  We cannot forgive ourselves.  All the blood that was offered from this side of the veil was always at best a symbol of faith, an earnest prayer to God who alone can forgive.  Our guilt remains until God is pleased to remove it; it does please Him to remove it, because God is forgiving.  God has the power; God has the lamb; God gives the blood by which you and I and anyone who desires it can have forgiveness and rededicate ourselves to loving and serving God.  We aren’t forgiven then to continue in our rut of slavery to sin; we are forgiven to become servants of God.

The Lord’s Prayer teaches us many things, including how and with whom to begin our own prayer.  This prayer gives us perspective on that old question, what is prayer?  I suppose we each have our God-Mart shopping lists: Lord knows I have mine!  And prayer, I think we all know at heart, isn’t really about our shopping lists, important as these are to you and me.  We need help!  We know!  Barclay reminds us that “Prayer must never be an attempt to bend the will of God to our desires; prayer ought always to be an attempt to submit our wills to the will of God.”[2]  I believe we are mature enough in the faith by now not to think we can “bend the will of God to our desires,” let alone pray as if we could.  But even believers can believe and act in a way that seems to say God will just have to come around to my way of thinking, or my God doesn’t disapprove.

Barclay knows what he’s writing about when he writes that prayer “ought always to be an attempt to submit our wills to the will of God.”  An attempt.  We’re not always successful; our attempts may not even be remarkably successful most of the time.  And we keep trying, candidly, sincerely, penitently, humbly; we keep at it, trusting that God is at work with us, in us, to bring about this very thing, this blessed submission to the will of God, willingly, obediently, faithfully.  We won’t always understand; we won’t always like this obedience thing—it goes so contrary to our nature, to what we want, and we just don’t see—don’t want to see—why what we want is so very wrong.  Jesus could tell us, if we’d listen, but my Jesus would never disapprove.  It matters whose Jesus we have.  The only Jesus who will truly do any good is Christ Jesus, Messiah and Lamb of God, the Living Word of the Living God.  Where Christ is, purification is at work, the blood of the Lamb: forgiveness, mercy, grace, love.

God has a forgiving heart for those who are forgiving.  Father, help us to be forgiving, that we may be forgiven!  As we “have forgiven our debtors,” so “forgive us our debts” (6:12).  But what are these debts?  It was Shakespeare who wrote, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”  There is more than one verse of Scripture warning us about the dangers of debt, and lending.  Debts are owed to another.  What we owe to another, that other expects from us.  What does God expect from us?  Well, sin and failure, of course, but this isn’t really what God is looking for; that’s not what He wants from us.  He expects that we will put into practice the faith training He has been giving us in this life.  He expects that, since we are in Christ, since Christ is in us by the Spirit, our Father in heaven will see His child in our actions, in our words, in our choosing, in our thinking: mercy, grace, love, truth, righteousness, faithfulness, obedience.

When Jesus teaches us to pray that our Father in heaven would forgive our debts, he is teaching us to ask always, daily, for God’s mercy upon us, insofar as we, daily, don’t quite meet God’s expectations.  What we owe to God we fail to make good.  We fail in our duty to God. [3]  No, not always!  Enough, though, that we have no way of making up what we owe: O to grace how great a debtor daily I’m constrained to be!

As our indebtedness to You, Almighty Father, grows each day, especially as we in Christ come to know more fully all that we truly owe to the glory of Your holy name; and as we never can hope to repay You, and as the best we can do is humbly to love and serve You by the grace You are pouring out abundantly upon each of us each day; therefore, Father, cause us to be merciful, even as You are merciful.  Cause us to be patient, even as You are patient; help us to be loving, even as You freely and sovereignly choose to be loving towards us.

The beautiful thing is that, when we keep praying this way, our praying over time, by grace, begins to have an effect upon us; praying the way Jesus teaches begins to reshape and redirect our hearts.  This is what God has wanted all along: that we would want His Word to be the shaping, guiding force in our lives.  Then, we demonstrate our connection to God—our Communion with God—as we live this life, being shaped and guided by the Word of God breaking the ropes of whatever worldly words, thoughts, and values would bind us.

Near the end of his physical journey with us on this earth, Jesus prayed: “Not my will but Thy will be done.”  Jesus has been teaching us that prayer, showing us that prayer, living out that prayer before us all along: Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.  If you want to know God, if you want to have eternal life, start living to do God’s will more and more, here.

Through prayer, we submit our wills to God’s will.  Prayer is an invitation to God in response to God’s invitation to us.  Prayer is our Yes to God, our Amen.  Prayer is openness to God, even as he has opened his arms and heart for us through Jesus Christ.  Prayer is an offering to God, which means that prayer is our sacrifice.  What those who make their sacrifice come to discover, by grace, is that God has made the sacrifice already that atones for our sin, that forgives our debt, forever.  This is the faith that we share with brothers and sisters all across this nation and all around the globe, in buildings like ours, or that rise lofty in stone, wood, and glass, or that are no bigger than a family room, or a tin shed, or a dirt-floored hut of woven sticks.  One faith, one Lord, one Lamb; one bread, one body.  The Word is God’s gift of life for you, for anyone who will receive and believe.  From this table, Jesus still teaches us about this Word, this gift, and this life.  Here, God Himself offers us not mere symbols but a Sacrament—connection, participation, Communion.  Together with brothers and sisters around the globe, let us here, today, rejoice in God’s Word.  Rejoice in the Lamb.

Now, to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.

               [1] William Barclay.  Gospel of Matthew.  Vol. 1.  Daily Study Bible.  1956.  Philadelphia: Westminster P, 1975.  201.

               [2] Barclay, 199.

               [3] Barclay (221) writes of debt as “a failure in duty.”