But blessed as receiving Jesus by faith may be, and sitting at His feet in the delight of love to hear from Him more and more, prayer must not be forgotten. It has an incalculable value for us here below. It is in this world that we pray. Worship is the outgoing of the heart in heaven. Not that worship for us now is not true, for it is the greatest privilege into which the Christian is brought while on earth. A Christian thus anticipates the mind and employment of heaven. He will still be a worshipper when glorified; but he is a worshipper here, for the hour “now is when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth; for the Father seeketh such to worship him.”
Nevertheless, before the soul can worship in anything that could be said to be the power of the Spirit, prayer is the early and habitual resource day by day; and after Christian worship is entered into, real prayer abides and always must be for our wants and desires here below.
The disciples felt their need of prayer. They were stirred up to it by the fact that John taught his disciples to pray. They were born of God; but for all that, they lacked power for prayer, their souls were feeble in it. “And it came to pass that as he was praying in a certain place.” No one was so prayerful, so dependent on His God and Father as Jesus; nor does any evangelist present this so much as Luke, nor consequently under so many different circumstances. “When he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples. And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, [Our] Father [which art in heaven], Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. [Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.] Give us day by day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation [; but deliver us from evil].” (Ver. 1-4.)
I fully believe that this is the same prayer substantially that we have in Matthew, at the very same time and place. Luke does not adhere to the mere historic sequence of events any more than Matthew. But there is this difference in the way in which Luke and Matthew relate facts or instructions of the Lord: Matthew puts what our Lord says in a certain dispensational order, leaving out the occasions that drew them forth; Luke puts His instructions in their moral order with the facts they illustrate. Thus Luke introduces prayer at this point, after hearing the word of Jesus; because the divine word is what brings the knowledge of Jesus into the soul, as prayer is the outgoing of heart to Him who has given and shown us mercy and revealed it to us in His word. A man must believe before he prays. “How shall they call on him in whom they have not believed?” None can believe without the word of God; but when one has received the word of God, if it be only to plow up the conscience and attract the heart, one prays.
Thus the disciples at this time feel their need of prayer and the Lord teaches them how to pray. The Lord did not give them prayers suitable to the new position and circumstances they would be brought into after redemption. If He had descanted in prayer about the church, the body of Christ, or the working of the Spirit by the members of that body, it would have been utterly unintelligible to them. The prayers that we have of Paul afterward could not have suited the condition of the disciples then, because they were not yet in any such standing. The conduct that would suit a married woman with her husband, &c., would be unbecoming in one who was still unmarried. For a woman who is only affianced to be praying about the children she was going to have when she might never have any, or about the household when the wedding-day might never come, would be most evidently out of season. The Lord Jesus perfectly suited what He said to the condition and circumstances of those whom He addressed. The disciples had not received, though quickened of the Holy Ghost, the indwelling Spirit in the way they were going to have Him; consequently they could not pray as on that ground. It is a blunder to suppose that the gift of the Holy Ghost is conversion. When the Lord Jesus went to heaven, He sent down the Holy Ghost. The saints of the Old Testament were converted, but they had not the Holy Ghost as all have who rest on redemption since Pentecost. The disciples wanted to know how to pray, and the Lord gave them a prayer suited to their then circumstances. Only the Spirit of God has given a difference between the form in Matthew and in Luke. One is as divinely inspired as the other; nothing can be more perfect than both are. The Gospels are absolutely perfect, each for its own object, and we need them all. The difference of their design affects the prayer, as it does everything else.
Our Lord then directs the disciples to their Father. This is the first and very significant word of the prayer. When believers in addressing God now use the titles of Jehovah or Almighty God, do they not forget that they are Christians? When God was intelligently addressed as Almighty, it was in the days of Abraham and the patriarchs. They were the days of promise. Afterward, when the nation of Israel was called out and put under law, it was as Jehovah-God that He was known. Now it is as Father that the Christian knows Him. (See 2 Cor. 6) Luke says simply, “Father” (not “Our Father which art in heaven,” as Matthew has it).
The first petition is, “Hallowed be thy name.” The desire is that in every case the heart might make God its object; as we hear in James, “the wisdom that cometh down from above is first pure, then peaceable.” It first judges by God, and seeks the glory of God. “Hallowed be thy name.” Such is and ought to be the prime desire of the renewed mind, that the Father's name should be sanctified in everything. All else must yield to this. “Hallowed be thy name.”
The next petition is that His kingdom should come. It is not the kingdom of the Son of man, the kingdom of Christ, that is spoken of here, but the Father's kingdom. It is not My kingdom come, but “thy kingdom come.” The Father's kingdom is distinguished from the Son of man's kingdom. It is the sphere in which the heavenly saints will shine as the sun. The Son of man's kingdom is the sphere in which all people, nations, and languages shall serve Him, and out of which the angels of His power shall cast all scandals. (Matt. 13) Heaven and earth will be both put under the Lord Jesus when He comes, and both will constitute the kingdom of God. But the Father's kingdom is the upper department, and the Son of man's kingdom is the lower one. (Compare John 3:3, 12.) The Lord teaches them to pray for the Father's kingdom. This is blessed and perfect. The Son would teach the children of the Father to wait with reverence and delight for the Father's glory. This was the animating spring of every thought and feeling of His own heart. But the Father's kingdom is not all the scene of glory.
Hence He adds elsewhere, “Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.” Though left out of Luke by excellent authority, it is undoubtedly read in the Gospel of Matthew, because the future kingdom will bring in the earth as well as heaven. This confirms the distinction between the Father's kingdom and the Son's. Not merely shall heaven be blessed, but the earth. All is to be made subject in fact as all is put under His feet in title. The will of God is that all should bow to the Son, and that the crucified One should be exalted. The Son loved to exalt and did exalt the Father at all cost; the Father will accomplish His purpose that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
Then comes a petition expressive of dependence on God for our ordinary need. “Give us day by day our daily bread.” It takes up the pure and simple need of the body. The word “daily” is a very imperfect expression in English of the original term. Ἐπιοὑσιος really means our “sufficient” bread, (seemingly a word expressly formed for this idea in contrast with superfluity). One cannot without slighting the wisdom of the Lord ask for more than sufficiency. One ought not to look for more even from the Lord of heaven and earth. He bids me ask for bread enough for each day's wants. Yet is it thoroughly the spirit of the One who, after He had fed five thousand men with the five loaves and the two fishes, bade the disciples gather up the fragments which remained that nothing might be lost. And then and thus twelve baskets were in fact filled. How easy it might have seemed for Him by whom all was supplied to have exerted His power afresh! He would not have one atom to be thrown away because He had unlimited power. What a lesson for us!
Next comes the need of the soul. “Forgive us our sins.” It is not merely “our debts” (as in Matt. 6): a Jew would understand this; but Luke, writing particularly for Gentiles, tells the disciples to say, “Forgive us our sins.” This does not refer to a sinner's forgiveness, when he first comes to the knowledge of the Lord, but to the disciple under the daily government of his Father. How misleading then it is to make an unconverted person take the ground of asking forgiveness like a child of God! Under the gospel the way for the unconverted to receive the remission of sins is by faith in the blood of Jesus, by receiving the gospel itself. The common use of it is to confound all truth by mixing up all, the world and children of God, as if they were alike disciples drawing near and asking forgiveness for their daily sins. The forgiveness of a child is all that is spoken of here, the removal of what hinders communion, not that which the gospel publishes to the most guilty that believe in the Savior and Lord, but the daily pardon which the believer needs. It is therefore the habitual need of the soul, just as the daily bread was that of the body. “For we also forgive every one that is indebted to us.” This is remarkable, because it evidently supposes one who has a forgiving spirit already, and no one is so really except he who is forgiven by the grace of God. And God does hold His children to this. How can a man who does not forgive another pretend to enjoy the forgiveness of his own sins before God? There is a righteous government on our Father's part, and the particular sin which grieves the Lord is not forgiven till we confess it to Him. “If ye do not forgive,” says our Lord in Mark 11, “neither will your Father which is in heaven forgive your trespasses.” It is the cherishing a spirit entirely antagonistic to the Spirit of the Lord. If there were a child in a family going on in a course of self-will, there would be a bar for the time to mutual good feeling. So with God our Father; if there were a persistently bad spirit towards another, so long the Father does not forgive as a question of communion and of daily intercourse with Himself. It ruins the intelligence of scripture to make it all a question of eternity. In the Epistles of the New Testament the remedy or duty in such circumstances takes the form, not so much of asking forgiveness, but of confession, which goes far deeper. To ask for forgiveness is easy enough and quickly done (as you may learn from your child); to confess one's fault in all its gravity is a very humiliating process, and if not with a view to forgiveness and the restoration of communion, it is a mockery of God. To confess, to judge oneself, is therefore far beyond asking forgiveness.
The last clause here should be, “and lead us not into temptation,” The heart, knowing its own weakness, does spread its desire before the Lord; it feels the need of being kept, not of being put to the proof. “Deliver us from evil” is left out in the most ancient copies. The only right and true way of understanding the mind of God and the best homage to scripture is always and only to cleave to that which is undoubtedly of Himself. This is not to take away anything from scripture; it is to lay aside what is not scripture. We have these words quite rightly in Matthew besides: we gain by their omission here instead of losing. The question arises, Why should it be given in Matthew and omitted here? “Deliver us from evil” refers, I believe, to the evil one and the exhibition of his power, which a Jew ought always to have before him, that tremendous hour which will be allowed as a final retribution on the nation, before they are delivered for the reign of Christ. As Luke had the Gentiles in view, this was naturally and wisely left out. Deliverance from this scourge would have been less felt by them, and hardly intelligible; as the earthly millennial portion disappears for a similar reason. What is general and moral abides here.