WHAT DO WE typically pray for when we pray?

Note that the question itself is already biased. We pray “for” something, because we have a need that we want God to meet. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But that’s not all there is to prayer.

Imagine having a relationship with our children in which the only time they ever talk to us is when they want something (some of you don’t have to imagine that; it’s already your reality). Even if what they want is legitimate, that’s not much of a relationship, is it?

A better scenario is that parents love their children and know that their children love them in return. The kids feel safe enough in their parents’ love to admit when they’ve messed up and seek their forgiveness and guidance. And when they say “Thank you,” it’s not merely out of obligation, but because they’ve learned to be open-hearted and grateful.

That may not be how it went or how it’s going with our own kids or parents. But can we imagine all of this being true of our relationship to God in prayer?

You may be familiar with the popular “ACTS” acronym for prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. Prayer has many faces, many facets. It can be the heartfelt praise of God for who he is: adoration. It can be the honest confession of our sin and weakness. It can be grateful thanks for all of God’s gifts. And, of course, it can be petition or supplication, humbly asking God to meet our needs, whatever they may be. We can see all of this in the prayers of Scripture, particularly in the Psalms.

The acronym gives us one way of getting at the bigger picture of prayer. We will always ask for things from God, but we should also express our love, repentance, and thanks. And to widen the picture out still further, even petitionary prayer — asking God to do this or that — has different emphases.

LET’S GO BACK to the Lord’s Prayer as we find it in Matthew 6 (there’s another version in Luke 11:2-4). We’ve spent some time pondering the first half of the prayer:

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
    on earth as it is in heaven. (vss. 9-10, NIV)

“Your name…your kingdom…your will.” Here, the requests are all in the second person and focused on submission to the sovereign will of God.

But then the prayer shifts to the first person, from “your” to “us” and “our”:

Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,
    as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
    but deliver us from the evil one. (vss. 11-13)

We’ll tackle each of these petitions in turn in the next few posts. But before we do, I want to make a general observation that covers all of them, indeed, that covers the entire prayer.

I said last time that the first part of the Lord’s Prayer can be understood eschatologically (there’s that word again!). The word “eschatology” come from the Greek word eschatos, which refers to something that comes last or at the end. Eschatology, then, refers to the study of what the Bible teaches about the so-called “end times.” As you may know, that’s always been a subject of great controversy in the church, and I have no wish to open that theological can of worms here.

But there’s a more general sense of eschatology that’s important to our reading of Scripture. If you’re looking for it, it’s easy to see how future-oriented the Bible is, in both the Old and New Testaments. It’s not about putting together clues to figure out the specifics of what will happen when Jesus returns. It’s about knowing that the future is in the hands of a sovereign and gracious God who is even now at work in the world to bring that future to pass. And knowing this, it’s about living accordingly.

Or to put it in the language of the Sermon on the Mount: it’s about knowing that the kingdom of heaven was inaugurated in the life and ministry of Jesus, and that one day, that kingdom will be complete when the King returns. One day, just as Jesus taught us to pray, God’s name will be fully revered as holy and his will fully obeyed on earth as it is in heaven.

But in the meantime, we live and pray eschatologically, with one eye on the present and one on the future. We strive to live in a way that demonstrates the presence of God’s kingdom now, envisioning ourselves as walking in the same direction that God is taking all of history, all of the world.

WHEN WE COME to the second part of the Lord’s Prayer, it’s easy to read it as a shift away from the big picture to the little one, from God’s grand concerns for the world to our concerns for ourselves. And there is some truth in that. As the saying goes, we don’t want to be so heavenly minded that we’re no earthly good, over-spiritualizing everything in a way that’s out of touch with the reality of everyday life and its challenges.

But as we’ll see, even the prayer for our daily bread can be an eschatological, big-picture prayer. The same goes for the petition about temptation and evil. And it’s particularly important to read the petition about forgiveness eschatologically. If we don’t, we’ll misread what Jesus says right after the Lord’s Prayer:

For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins. (vss. 14-15)

Is Jesus saying that if we mess up and forget to forgive someone who’s offended us, our salvation is forfeit? That God is waiting to see how well we do with other people before he decides whether we deserve his grace and forgiveness?

No. But we need a bit of big-picture thinking to understand that. So let’s explore how that might look, beginning even with the prayer for our daily bread.