6:10
“Your kingdom come ...” We were once rebels against God. Now we are still rebels, but this time rebels against the world. The Romans persecuted the Christians at various times ultimately because they would not say that Caesar is Lord, only that Christ is Lord. We are looking for the overthrow of the present world system. Of course, this is not a human rebellion, and certainly not a violent one, but we are most surely looking for the world to change, for rulers to be overthrown. We are looking for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. When the world goes down roads that are distinctly ungodly we must object. The sin affirming parts of the “church” are acting in disobedience to this prayer. Moreover, it is the Lord’s prayer that is truly radical, for it looks for the replacement of the whole world order with a new heaven and earth.
6:11
Later Jesus will say “seek first the kingdom of heaven and His righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you” (Matt 6:33). This pattern is modelled in the prayer, for only after saying “thy kingdom come ...” do we get the prayer for our daily provision. We seek God’s kingdom first. This verse can be taken as saying meet our needs each day. There is value in taking each day as it comes (Matt 6:34), but we should not get too hung up on this. God does sometimes provide several days (or even years) worth at once!
6:12
Next comes forgiveness. If we wanted we could take this as a command and almost treat it as a Law, but I do not believe this is helpful (this is not in anyway to belittle in anyway the seriousness of having an unforgiving heart). Rather we should look at the spirit of this, as Jesus has done with the Law as a whole. Forgiveness is the oil which keeps the church going. A car engine, no matter how good it is, will cease up if there is no oil. Likewise any relationship, any church will cease up if there is no forgiveness. The church is founded on forgiveness. If God had not forgiven us the church would never have started, neither you nor I would be allowed into the kingdom. In the same way we need to forgive each other. Every church leader, every husband or wife, every mother or father, so or daughter, church member will get some things wrong and do some things wrong. If there is no forgiveness then when this happens relationships or churches will break down. There does, of course, also need to be repentance when things go wrong as well.
6:13
We can be very tied up in debates about why would God even think of leading us into temptation. “Temptation” can also be translated as “testing”. Perhaps we should take a more practical approach. We need help, left to our own devices. We will fall into temptation at some point, especially if we become proud or over-confident. We also need to be delivered from the evil one. We do need to fear Satan, but we do need to be aware of him, his plans and his power. And we need to pray for God’s protection. The “for yours is the kingdom ...” is only found in later manuscripts and is probably an addition.
6:14,15
We then get a very stern warning about the consequences of not forgiving others. We can view this legalistically, or we can view it as showing how the kingdom works. It is interesting that this is the aspect of the prayer that Jesus highlights. This may be because the religious leaders focused on proving how “good” they were. In reality, the kingdom works in a very different way. So we are not to be looking for reasons to condemn someone.
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