The Prayer He Gave Us Is Plural All the Way Through

A woman wrote out her own prayers for a month because somebody suggested it, and she nearly stopped after week two.

Not because of anything she found in them that was wrong. Everything in there was honest and everything in there mattered. Her husband's work. A daughter who was not sleeping. Her own back. A friend's scan. A decision about a car.

What stopped her was that she read four weeks of it in one sitting and noticed there was nothing in it that was more than about a mile from her front door.

She told me she sat there feeling something she could not name, and then named it, and the name was small. She said: I have become a small person and I did not feel myself doing it.

I want to say straight away that she has not. A woman praying daily for her household through a hard year is not small and nothing here is going to suggest otherwise. But she had noticed something real, and it is worth looking at, because the prayer Jesus taught has a shape and her prayers had lost it.

Count the pronouns

Go through the prayer He taught and count. It takes about twenty seconds and it changes how the thing reads.

Our Father. Our daily bread. Our debts. Our debtors. Lead us. Deliver us.

There is not one I in it. Not one my. Every single request is made in the plural, by a person who was almost certainly praying it alone.

That is not an accident of style. He could have taught it either way and He taught it this way, which means that a person praying by themselves in a kitchen is being handed language that includes people who are not in the room.

You have been given a prayer that will not let you pray alone even when you are alone, and Matthew 6 is plural in every clause of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person actually mean a word like our rather than simply pronouncing it.

And the second petition is the widest thing in the whole prayer.

Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. (Matthew 6:10, King James Version)

In earth, as it is in heaven. That is the standard being asked for, and the standard is not modest. Whatever obedience looks like in heaven, ask for that here.

What is already true and what is still coming

There are two things Scripture says about this kingdom and holding both is what keeps a person from praying nonsense.

The first is that it is already here, and it is hidden.

Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you. (Luke 17:21)

Not a location on a map. A reign, operating now, in people, mostly unspectacular from outside.

The second is that it is coming, and when it comes it will not be hidden at all.

And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed. (Daniel 2:44)

Never be destroyed. That is not a description of anything currently visible in any street I have ever walked down.

So the petition sits across both. A person asking thy kingdom come is asking for the hidden reign to show up in real places now, and asking for the day it stops being hidden. Both at once, in three words.

You have been asking for something enormous every time you said that line, whether or not you knew what you were saying, and Daniel 2:44 describes the kingdom that never ends and Luke 17 describes it already at work. The same Spirit is the one who makes a person mean a sentence they have recited for years.

You are already inside a reign that has not finished arriving, and being inside it is what makes the asking natural rather than presumptuous (Luke 17:21), and it is the Spirit who is the actual presence of that reign in a person right now.

How a prayer life narrows

I want to describe the narrowing properly, because if a person thinks it happened through neglect they will try to fix it with effort, and effort is not the repair.

Prayers narrow under weight. That is the whole mechanism. A household in a hard year generates more real, urgent, legitimate material than any prayer can hold, and the wide things get crowded out by the near things, and nobody chooses that.

Then a second thing happens. A person who has prayed nothing but near things for two years loses the vocabulary for the far ones, and the loss of vocabulary feels like a loss of caring, and they conclude something about their own heart that is not true.

You have not become a small person, and a narrowed prayer is a symptom of load rather than a diagnosis of a heart, and Matthew 6:10 was given to people carrying occupations and debts and sick children, and the Spirit is the one who widens what a person cannot widen by trying harder.

And the widening does not cost the near things anything. That is worth saying because it is the fear underneath. Praying one sentence for a city does not take a sentence away from a daughter who is not sleeping.

Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. (Psalm 2:8)

The invitation is not rationed. Nobody is being asked to choose.