WHETHER WE KNOW it or not, we are all storytellers. The stories may be simple or complex, funny or tragic, about single events or whole family histories. We may tell stories about ourselves, or about other people. But telling stories is how we make sense out of life, linking the present back to a remembered past and forward to an anticipated future. Do you want to know who I really am? Do you want to understand how I see myself, beneath the curated image I let others see? Then sit down: let me tell you a story of how I got to be the way I am today, and where I think that story is going.

But we don’t just make up stories out of thin air. We inherit stories from our culture, from our families. An immigrant family, for example, may push their children to excel in school in ways that the children experience as harsh and demanding. Growing up among their American classmates, the story the kids may learn to tell is of clueless or even selfish parents who just don’t understand them. But the parents might tell a different story: We know how hard we had to work to provide our kids with the opportunities they take for granted. And it can all be taken away if they don’t learn to work hard too, harder than the other kids around them. If they fail, then all of our sacrifice has been for nothing.

Who’s right? Both. Neither. But the parents and children alike could benefit from what I have elsewhere called narrative humility: the recognition that there’s more than one way to tell the story, and that the story we tell may be at best a partial truth.

IN ONE SENSE, the Bible doesn’t merely tell stories, it is a story, the ongoing narrative of creation, fall, and new creation, with God as the main character. And here too, it’s possible to read the Bible in ways that lack proper humility, taking only the parts of the story we like, the parts that fit the story we want to tell, and leaving the rest.

Think of the stories of Jesus and the disciples in Mark 8 through 10. The disciples knew Jesus to be the Messiah, but they wanted him to be the Messiah their way. Three times he tried to get them to understand that being the Messiah, God’s anointed king, would mean first suffering and death, and then resurrection. But that’s not the story they wanted to tell, the story of an incredibly powerful man who could heal the sick and raise the dead, and who was coming to Jerusalem to restore the people to their former place of earthly glory. The disciples weren’t alone in this; surely the pilgrims who hailed Jesus with shouts of “Hosanna!” thought the same way.

Jesus wants them to flip the script. The Jews had their own tragic tale to tell, of a failed monarchy and exile, of the return from exile to the Promised Land only to live for generations under the thumb of first one Gentile nation and then another. Maybe, just maybe, if we’re obedient enough to God’s Law, he’ll send the Messiah to rescue us? Maybe we can go back to the golden days of King David? And to be fair, it’s not as if they wove that story from whole cloth. It was possible to read the prophets that way.

The problem was, when the Messiah did come, would he have to meet their expectations, or would they submit themselves to his? This is one of the central ironies of the gospels: the people who seemingly most longed for the coming of the Messiah didn’t recognize him as such when he did come, because he refused to follow their script.

THE LORD’S PRAYER sits at the center of the Sermon on the Mount, which some scholars believe gives it a special and meaningful place. Jesus wants his disciples to pray in a way that befits the kingdom of heaven, not as some mere religious ritual. He’s not giving people new words for an old habit, as if to say, I know you’re used to praying in such-and-such a way, but if you really want to get it right, you have to use these words instead. Rather, he wants to transform his disciples’ understanding of what it means to pray to God in the first place.

As we’ve seen, he first invites them to address God as their heavenly Father. This itself would have been new. While there were references to God as Father in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Jews did not typically address him that way. Could they think of God not merely as the transcendent One in heaven, but as their Father?

Next, he invites them to pray that God’s name would be “hallowed,” or treated as sacred. The Jews already viewed the name of God as holy and refused to say it out loud, but this may have become a routine rule about what they could and couldn’t say instead of a heartfelt recognition of God’s holiness. Could they, by praying for God’s name to be honored as holy, remember the holiness of God himself?

And then Jesus instructs them to pray this:

Your kingdom come… (Matt 6:10, NIV)

I imagine that many of Jesus’ hearers were already praying this in some fashion. But if so, the question is still whether they were praying for the kingdom they wanted or the kingdom God was in fact bringing in the life and ministry of Jesus.

As I said, we like to tell stories. Put differently, we imagine ourselves as if we were characters in a story. And typically, not just any character, but the hero or heroine of the tale. Think about a conflict you may have had recently with someone; how would you have told the story of that conflict to a third person? If you’re like most of us, you’d paint yourself as the protagonist or hero and the other as the antagonist or villain. I’m right, he’s wrong, and he refuses to listen to reason. Isn’t that just like him? Poor me: what I have to put up with.

But can you imagine how the other person would tell the story? They certainly aren’t thinking, I know I’m wrong, but I just enjoy making them suffer. No, in their story, they’re the hero and you’re the villain, the stubborn one, the mean one, the one who just doesn’t get it.

So whose story dominates when we pray for God’s kingdom to come? We can make our own story the important one. We’re the hero, but like all heroes, we’ve run into what might seem like an insurmountable obstacle. Thus we pray for God to come along and save us in order to get our story back on track. We have our own sense of what God’s kingdom should be, what we want it to be, and pray for that.

Or…we can pray “Your kingdom come” in a way that emphasizes the “your.” God isn’t a helpful or saving character in our stories; it is only by God’s grace that we get to be participants in his. That story may not play out quite as we expected: it might involve suffering, persecution, and the like. But it is always God’s story that is primary, God’s kingdom, not our little and limited fiefdoms.

And if we’re going to pray for God’s kingdom to come, it will mean praying that his will would be done. Let’s explore that next.