The first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer provide something of a puzzle for Reformed theologians. Why, for example, does Jesus instruct his disciples to pray that “God’s will be done”? Won’t God’s will be accomplished regardless of the prayers of mere humans? And while we’re at it, what about “thy Kingdom come”? The coming of God’s kingdom is a promise, not some hoped-for possibility that is somehow contingent on my prayer! These kinds of questions are not the impertinent musings of the theological malcontent — the kid in the back of the class who simply wants to expose his teacher as a fool. These are precisely the kinds of questions that Jesus wants His disciples to be asking, and it is for this reason that the Lord’s Prayer is really quite remarkable. Though many of us recite it at least weekly, it continually challenges the worshipper to consider anew the power and privilege of prayer. In the course of six short petitions, Jesus not only provides the church with, as the Westminster Larger Catechism describes it, “a special rule of direction ... as a pattern, according to which we are to make other prayers,” He at the same time challenges our assumptions about what prayer is and what it can accomplish. We have precisely this sort of challenge in the first three petitions, for here Jesus instructs us not only to pray to God, but also and preeminently to pray for God.
Godly Prayers are Prayers for God
Notice first of all that these three petitions, like the first portion of the Decalogue, are each radically God-centered in their subject matter. They are “vertical” petitions, in contrast to the more “horizontal” petitions that follow. Jesus opens in this way to remind us that all our prayers are ultimately not prayers for and about ourselves or our neighbors, but rather prayers for and about God. Those words are not my own; they come from the 17th-century pastor and theologian Herman Witsius. After considering the variety of privileges with which prayer endows the believer, Witsius concludes in his Sacred Dissertations on the Lord’s Prayer that:"The most wonderful of all, and one which almost exceeds belief, is that a man should be allowed to plead, not only for himself and for his neighbor, but for God,—that the kingdom of God and the glory of God should be the subject of his prayer,—as if God were unwilling to be glorious, or to exercise dominion except in answer to the prayers of believers."Jesus exhorts us to make the concerns of our heavenly Father — His glory, kingdom, and purposes — the first and preeminent concern of our own prayers. Even in our prayers we are to seek first the kingdom of God (Matthew 6:33); “to glorify God and to enjoy him forever” is also the chief end of prayer. We can go a bit further, in fact, and argue that every petition we bring to our Father, whether for the safety and success of missionaries, or the healing of a church member, or even the comparatively trivial and mundane pursuits of ordinary life, is ultimately subsumed under these petitions. The first three petitions remind us that the last three (for daily bread, forgiveness of sins and deliverance from evil) must also be God-centered and kingdom- oriented prayers; we only ask for bread rightly when we ask for it in a manner that hallows the name of God and is submissive to His will (James 4:15).
