Jubilee Plea

A family in Atlanta shivered in the cold as the mail came. It was December of 1932, the lowest pit of the Great Depression, and as a mother and her children took the mail, she began to cry. One was from her doctor, and it had to be a medical bill. She'd been long past due in paying. She just had nothing to pay with, pressed between a roof overhead, daily bread, and this looming debt. And here it was, the envelope from Dr. Brown's office with what surely was the final notice that they'd take everything. The doctor had been mighty patient, but even the famed George Thaddeus Brown – a prominent medical expert and former state legislator – had his limits. With tears and trepidation, the mother reluctantly opened the bill. Only... it wasn't a bill. It was a letter, signed at the bottom by Dr. Brown. And the mother couldn't believe what she was reading. In it, Dr. Brown said that he knew payment of his bills was an impossible hardship for many patients and their families. And so he'd been moved to do something drastic. On Saturday morning, he'd taken his account books – the record of all the bills he was due – and he'd hurled them into a bonfire. The records burnt to a crisp on the cold ground. And so, Dr. Brown wrote to all his patients, “Let's start all over.” Every debt was hereby forgiven. He asked them to forget he'd done them any service at all, but just to pass along “this message of good will, good hope, and good cheer.” Oh, can you imagine the transformation on a freezing family's countenance, to have their debt given over to flame? Many families in Atlanta that winter felt those tearful frowns flip to grins. Dr. George Thaddeus Brown had, in his drastic act, forgiven a total of $81,362 – the equivalent today of nearly $1.7 million – in medical debt he'd thus never collect on, converting years of past services into gifts for many.¹

In the prayer Jesus taught us, we're accustomed to ask God to “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” That's the conventional version, even though it's based on the words Jesus uses after the prayer more than those he uses in it. A 'trespass' here, in Greek, is more a 'defection' or a 'desertion' – it's a misstep that separates us from close companionship with God, something that leads us away from his side, all the way up to an abandonment or a betrayal. In the Gospel of Luke, we read the line starting as “Forgive us our sins” (Luke 11:4). And the word Luke chooses there has the sense of misfires that veer off target, missing the mark, like an arrow that gets nowhere near the bullseye. But Matthew gets us closest to what Jesus must have said, speaking to the crowds in Aramaic, by giving us literally, “Forgive us our debts” (Matthew 6:12).

Where the main images of sin in most of the Old Testament were of a stain that had to be washed clean or of a weight that had to be lifted away, the last few centuries before the birth of Christ saw a shift in the direction of a new mental picture of sin as a debt that needed to be paid.² Jesus frequently talks exactly that way, describing sin using stories around debtors and creditors to drive home his point. And as people reflected on that metaphor – sins as debts – they concluded that all humanity became debtors via Adam and Eve's original sin.³ That alone is devastating, because none of us has resources with which to pay off that debt and live. But as if that weren't enough, each of us builds upon the original debt of sin we've inherited by sinning further, getting deeper into the hole. It's as if we're employees whose boss has entrusted each of us with company resources and given us clear directions on what needs to be done. If you use everything you're given for legitimate business expenses and get all the tasks done by the deadline, great – you'll get a raise! But whenever you neglect certain tasks, failing to make the transactions he commissioned you to make, then that negligence puts you in debt to your boss for what was left undone. Likewise, whenever you dip into that trust for your own personal use, spending company money on what isn't company business, that's embezzlement, and embezzlement puts you in debt to your boss, too. Just so, God has entrusted each of us with company resources – the life you live, the breath you draw, the body you bear, the time that ticks down. To use them all legitimately for the purposes assigned to us would be to live a profitable life! But sin neglects tasks that we're commissioned to do – those are sins of omission – and embezzling our life, breath, body, and time for purposes contrary to his – those are sins of commission. And so, with each case of neglect or each act of embezzlement, we dig ourselves deeper into debt.⁴

The truth is that we today aren't sufficiently horrified by sin, most of us. It's obvious, of course, that the world around us has lost whatever basic grip on the very notion of sin we might have once assumed. But I'm talking, not of the world, but of the church. Do even we take sin truly seriously? Do we realize how much has been entrusted to us, and what a serious thing it is to embezzle from God and spend it on purposes hateful to him? If we had a true picture of the sins of our lifetimes, even our lifetimes where everybody around us calls us a good and decent person, the resultant picture would be scandalous, shocking – a portrait of criminality. In our hearts, each of us knows it's true. And so, already utterly in the red since Eden, and deepened by mismanagement of our own design, we stand before God with a deadly debt.

And all we can do, then, is cry out to God: “Forgive us our debts!” Or, literally, 'Release our debts.' The word both Matthew and Luke use here is an image is of letting the debt go, dropping it from his hand, cutting the tie of obligation between creditor and debtor, and so canceling it out. And it's entirely possible that, for the first people hearing Jesus teach them this prayer, it was also a request for actual financial freedom. Remember, the people first hearing Jesus teach this prayer are farmers who sometimes have to borrow to afford seed to sow, counting on a good harvest to pay it back – one serious crop failure could be their ruin. So too, Jesus is talking to village women who borrow routinely from one another's pantries, with nothing but a promise to return the favor one day. He's speaking in a Galilee drowning in oppressive taxes imposed without mercy by Rome. Debt is a constant feature of their lives, and debt was more dangerous in their world than ours. There were debtors' prisons where debtors could be tortured, with expectation that their families would be incentivized to pay up. There was debt slavery, where the debtor himself or his family members could be sold as slaves to work off the amount of their indebtedness. With threats like that hanging over their heads, these people were desperately yearning for God to act by somehow canceling out those financial debts and saving their livelihoods.⁵

But Jesus urges them to channel that yearning also to the moral debts we owe to God because of sin. We ask God to cut the ties of debt, the ties that call for payback. We're asking that the debt of our misdeeds be canceled out, that we may find ourselves free from the lurking danger of demand, be it our debt-slavery to sin and death or the prospect of an eternal debtors' prison called hell. We're crying out for God to let it go, to find some way of recompense that will satisfy our debts and let us live and recover. We're pleading for mercy.

And so Jesus came, and he went to the cross. Paul described how, because of Christ's death and resurrection, we've been made alive with Christ, with God “having forgiven us all our trespasses by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands: this he set aside, nailing it to the cross” (Colossians 2:13-15). And so “God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32). Any forgiveness that God offers us, any forgiveness that we receive from God, is all and always and only derived from one place: Christ on the cross, canceling the debt record, blanking out our bills with his blood. What comes next is how it gets applied to the life of the Church and to Christians who receive this gift of forgiveness into their life.

I remember, before I was a pastor, helping out with a Sunday School class at my old home church. And there was this one older lady who was utterly perplexed by the Lord's Prayer. She had the question, “Well, why should we be asking forgiveness now? Didn't Jesus already pay it all? If I'm saved, if I'm forgiven, why would I still need forgiveness? Isn't it once-and-for-all?” Those were the questions she was asking, and if we don't pause to question some of our assumptions, they're questions we might not be able to answer.

At baptism, all our debts are wiped away – the whole debt of Adam and Eve we've inherited, plus the debt of all our old life, is gone in its entirety. What does Peter say? “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38). The early church heard this and knew that “forgiveness of sins is absolutely assured to those who will enter the water,”⁶ that “the bath of rebirth washes away whatever sins it finds.”⁷ In other words, born again in baptism, all those old debts are reckoned as proper to a life that's no longer being lived. They're buried at sea with the old self. The account book is burned in its entirety, and the moment you walked away from the water, you were sinless, perfectly free of moral debt!

And that ought to be it, really! Ideally, from that new birth, we ought to have “ceased from sin” (1 Peter 4:1). “No one born of God,” says John, “makes a practice of sinning, for God's seed abides in him, and he cannot keep on sinning, because he has been born of God” (1 John 3:9). But the fact of the matter is that even the holiest Christian on earth still commits at least some sins going forward. “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8). And just as Dr. Brown's patients could start over but had could accrue new medical debt, so we're given a fresh start but can incur new moral debts, what St. Augustine called “debts... contracted in all the years after the water of salvation.”⁸ He added: “By going on living, we have contracted debts that need to be forgiven every day.”⁹ Some are bigger, like the bill for the treatment you'll need after throwing your soul in the path of a speeding freight train. Some are smaller, like the bill you'll get after hitting your soul with a hammer. Not the same size, but both yield debts. So we ask for forgiveness.

St. Augustine, one of the great teachers of the church who spent a lot of time reflecting on the nature of sin, saw why this prayer was so important. He knew that, for the bigger sins, Jesus had prescribed more intensive treatment – that's why Christ told his apostles, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld” (John 20:23). But the more everyday sins could be handled in this prayer itself, Augustine said. “On account of certain daily matters..., he has given us a daily remedy,”¹⁰ that we receive “the daily purification of this holy prayer.”¹¹ “As for the daily brief and unimportant sins without which it is impossible to lead this life, the daily prayer of the faithful makes satisfaction for them.... This prayer entirely cancels tiny daily sins. It also cancels those from which the faithful turn away in penance and reform.”¹² “After a certain fashion, you are cleansed every day from daily light and minor sins through your prayers, if you say from the heart, if you say truthfully, if you say in faith, 'Forgive us our debts as we too forgive our debtors.'”¹³ So said St. Augustine. And his picture dovetails with St. John's beautiful words of assurance: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

So far, so good! This prayer Jesus gave us is how we can petition God each day to show us mercy, to clear our debts away. Prayed daily, it's a daily remedy for our daily sins, bringing us daily back to the foot of the cross. But there is a catch here, a natural one. Jesus didn't just tell us to say, “Forgive us our debts.” He added a qualifier: “As we have also forgiven our debtors.” The condition of our daily forgiveness is our willingness to pass that forgiveness along, to imitate it, to mirror it. Forgiving others their debts to us is what makes us people capable of receiving God's forgiveness of our debts. And this idea isn't new to the Gospels. A couple centuries before, another Jewish teacher said: “Forgive your neighbor the wrong done to you; then, when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven. Does anyone nourish anger against another and expect healing from the Lord? Can one refuse mercy to a sinner like oneself, yet seek pardon for his own sins?” (Sirach 28:2-4). What Jesus does is, he bakes that question into the prayer itself. And it's implied already by the plural in the petition. We ask for God to “forgive us our debts” – well, who are we praying for? Not each of us for him- or herself alone. You're praying just as much, in many cases, for the person in your debt – the person who owes you, who sinned against you. And if you're necessarily praying for his or her forgiveness, you can't refuse to be a vessel of forgiveness.

On the one hand, this has real financial applications. As an ancient preacher asked: “If you remit the material debt, the bonds of your soul will also be loosened.”¹⁴ If somebody owes you money, that's an area God might be calling you to forgive, just like Dr. Brown. But, of course, this prayer has moral application. When people hurt us, mistreat us, deny us our dignity, their actions sign an IOU – an IOU for reparation and restitution for the hurt, an IOU for the dignity we were denied. But we have the power to release them from debt to us.

So what does it really mean for us to forgive other people? We can't go too in-depth on this, or we'll be here all day. But first, here's what forgiveness isn't. Forgiveness is not denying that the sin against you happened. It is not denying that what was done to you was wrong. Forgiveness is not coming to the conclusion that it didn't matter or wasn't a big deal. Forgiveness is not incompatible with seeking justice. Forgiveness is not just getting over it. Forgiveness is not the same thing as healing, even though it can both come from and enable healing. Forgiveness is definitely not the same thing as an automatic change in your feelings. That's because forgiveness isn't a feeling at all; forgiveness is a choice – and it's a choice you might have to recommit to, day after day or week after week, as lingering feelings of hurt and resentment continue to tempt you otherwise.¹⁵

Forgiveness is an action of the will, giving expression to that choice. It's an action of relinquishing your grip on that moral IOU, on those ties of indebtedness that bind the offender to you (and you to the offender). It's saying before God: “So-and-So really did owe me restitution for this particular harm they did me, that's true, and I had a right to pursue it, but I'm renouncing that right and letting it go. This person owed me repair to my dignity, but I'm clearing that slate. I reject my desire to hurt them, to get back at them, to teach them a lesson. If they face any consequences for what they did to me, I hope it's only for their good and for the good of others. Faced with what this person did, I would rather heal them and myself than cling to my inner posture toward them, no matter how justifying or consoling this bitter grievance may feel. So I give up my grievance. I let go of this IOU they wrote me by what they did. I drop it into the flames of God's love. And if I find photocopies of that IOU in my heart later, then I aim to burn those in the same bonfire, so help me God.”

That's what it means for us to forgive. And it means that you can forgive a person who hasn't repented. You can forgive a person who isn't sorry. You can forgive a person who won't apologize, or even who isn't still living or available to apologize. You can forgive a person just with your heart, between yourself and God, without the other person's input at all. It takes two to reconcile, yes, but only one to forgive.¹⁶ Reconciliation is usually the ideal, but even before Jesus taught this prayer, Israel knew that forgiveness could be given where repentance or apology were lacking. A Jewish writer before Jesus put it like this, and these words are beautiful:

Love one another from the heart, therefore, and if anyone sins against you, speak to him in peace. … If anyone confesses and repents, forgive him. If anyone denies his guilt, don't be contentious with him – otherwise, he may start cursing, and you'd be sinning doubly. Even if he denies it and acts disgracefully out of a sense of guilt, be quiet and don't become upset, for he who denies will repent and avoid offending you again; indeed, he'll honor you, respect you, and be at peace. But even if he's devoid of shame and persists in his wickedness, forgive him from the heart and leave vengeance to God.¹⁷

Now, that may sound like a tall order, this forgiving business. But Jesus told a parable, and I've yet to see the commentary on the Lord's Prayer that doesn't call in this parable to flesh out this petition. Jesus told a story of a royal servant who, in the course of his duties, had managed to dig himself into debt, to the tune of ten thousand talents. Now, to us, that's just a number. But in today's money, 10,000 talents is about four billion dollars. Can you imagine a person, a private individual, with four billion dollars in debt to somebody? There's absolutely no way out! So in desperation, he begs the king for more time, and promises to pay up. But that's an impossible promise to keep. The only way for the king to even begin to recoup those losses is for the servant's household to be totally liquidated and for him and his family to be sold into debt-slavery for life, perhaps for generations to come, toiling to work off the debt. But to this impossible request for more time, the king makes an astounding announcement: he'll write off the $4,000,000,000 as just a gift. He tells the servant, “I'm not going to collect on this from you. Consider yourself released. The weight and dread are over your head no more. Be free!” That's the position we can be in again with respect to God, if only we ask for this mercy (Matthew 18:23-27)!

Jesus goes on, adding a new character: a second servant. The second servant owes the first servant something. How much could it be? Certainly no four billion dollars! A few thousand at most. Whatever exchanges have gone on between Servants 1 and 2, nothing could have put Servant 2 in as much debt to Servant 1 as Servant 1 has just been released from by the king (Matthew 18:28a). So it is with us. The harshest moral debts we can incur toward each other, horrifying as they can be, all pale next to the amount God has already forgiven us for in Christ. And that's why Jesus says what he says after the Lord's Prayer: “If you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” (Matthew 6:14-15). We're told, plain as can be, that if we want the debts we incur by our day-to-day missteps, our lapses in companionship with God, to be discharged and resolved, then God expects us to forgive the lesser debts incurred to us by those around us, even those who abandon or betray us, even those who've offended the same way hundreds of times already (cf. Matthew 18:22). In Jesus' parable, Servant 1 – you know, the one forgiven a fortune the size of a small country's national debt – meets Servant 2 – who owes Servant 1 a modest and manageable debt – and responds the very opposite way the king did. Servant 1 offers no grace, no mercy, no patience – only violence. Refusing to pass along the blessing of forgiveness, he has Servant 2 handed over to torturers at a debtors' prison (Matthew 18:28-30). In doing so, he implicitly makes the king out to be a fool. Just so, if we Christians, baptized into the body of Christ the Great Forgiver, refuse to forgive others as God forgave us, then we make God out to be a fool. (God forbid!) Jesus ends the parable with the king re-instituting Servant 1's debt and sending him to prison. “So also my heavenly Father will do to every one of you,” Jesus adds, “if you do not forgive your brother from your heart” (Matthew 18:31-35).

That makes forgiveness a must. It's a choice, but there's only one safe choice, one sane choice, one right choice. Jesus describes a world where nothing but forgiveness makes sense. The debtor who owes you? Forgive. The parent who was cruel? Forgive. The spouse who cheated and divorced? Forgive. The child who ran away? Forgive. The boss who fired you? Forgive. The worker who swindled you? Forgive. The friend who scorned you? Forgive. The relative who cut ties? Forgive. The politician who lied? Forgive. The mugger in the alley? Forgive. The world gone mad? Forgive. Again, that doesn't mean condone, that doesn't mean excuse, that doesn't mean restore to intimacy, that doesn't mean forswear justice, that doesn't mean the hurt is gone, that doesn't mean go back to the way things were. It means the account books ultimately get burnt.

And a world where the account books burn up looks like the world of the jubilee. In God's ancient Law, once or twice in a lifetime, there came a jubilee year – a holy time when debts got canceled, slaves went free, all things once lost were restored (Leviticus 25:8-18). And already, by the time of Jesus, the jubilee was seen as covering not just financial realities but moral ones – the hope of freedom from the debt and slavery of sin. People were looking for a Savior to “proclaim to them the jubilee, thereby releasing them from the debt of all their sins.”¹⁸ That's who Jesus came to be (Luke 4:18-19; cf. Isaiah 61:1-2), and the world he came to bring – in part, through us. What are we asking, then, when we pray the Lord's Prayer here? We pray for the perfect jubilee to begin in our lives and in the lives of everyone around us. We pray to step into Jesus' jubilee world, and to bring mercy back here from eternity's door. Taking sin seriously, we should desperately crave forgiveness. So we pray for the jubilee's forgiveness and reconciliation with God. And in the interest of our jubilee plea, we ask the grace to keep these forgiveness wheels in motion, that every debt might be canceled in Jesus' name. Let it be so! Amen.

Breadwinner

Jacob sat, his wife Elisabetha and assorted children huddled around him, writing a desperate letter to a friend in America. These were no days for pride or diffidence. It was late July 1933. Jacob Rusch was the schoolmaster in the village of Dönhof, not far southwest from Saratov, a city on the west bank of Russia's Volga River. Jacob wasn't Russian, nor were his neighbors – their ancestors were Germans who'd been invited to settle the region in the 1760s. Generation after generation, they'd endured their hard times. But never quite like this. Oh, the 1870s were no fun – when the Russian government reneged on its word, many German settler families near the Volga fled for better lands like America. (Mine was among them.) The 1890s – agonizing. The Bolshevik Revolution was hardly a walk in the park. Then came 1921, a year of famine. Jacob watched that year as 129 of his neighbors died from hunger and disease before the Russian government and American aid stepped in.¹ The next decade saw a great rebuilding, though life remained expensive. But now it was the 1930s. Stalin ruled in terror. Famine again stalked the land. In the first half of 1933, between gifts of $5 here, $10 there, Jacob and his family had been staying afloat. But hundreds were dying – including his teenage son Konstantin, sick with kidney failure. At least, said Jacob, “he will no longer hunger or thirst.” Unlike those left behind.²

Now summer was in full swing. Supplies had run out. Another son had died. They hadn't had real food since Christmas 1932. By July, “there is nothing left here to sink one's teeth into.” He'd scavenged for anything to keep his family alive, however barely – roots and mushrooms, crows and toads. By the time he sat to write this letter, they'd been eating nothing but ants for five days. There was nothing left. His wife, his kids – they were barely skin and bones, starving before his eyes. It was the worst of times. Unsurprisingly, church attendance was plummeting – too many had died, others simply gave up.³ Across the river from Jacob Rusch lived a boy named Reinhold whose childhood was marked by those same kinds of horrors. He survived the famine – I don't know if Jacob or his family did – and then Reinhold went to college. But in 1941, he was deported to a labor camp in Siberia. Looking back, he wrote a poem: “Our Father, are you still in heaven? Then listen to how your name is abused as a curse, how your will is spurned in Stalin's hell on earth. The tyrant and his henchmen have power over life and death, and they take from us our daily bread and let us die like dogs from hunger.”⁴

Lurking behind that lament is the prayer Jesus taught us. But when Jesus taught it, he knew he was teaching it to people with a deep background in food and famine. For where did it all begin but in a garden where no one had to ask for daily fruit? It was just there, ripe for the picking. God had filled the garden with “every tree that is... good for food” (Genesis 2:9), encouraged humans to “eat of every tree of the garden” minus one (Genesis 2:16), and offered us all this for only the easy and playful work of tending the garden, keeping it growing this lush bounty (Genesis 2:15). Alas, for finding a way to be dissatisfied with the free gift of every perfect food, we were cursed. Outside the garden, we'd find our bread difficult to acquire, requiring sweaty labor against earth's resistant firmness (Genesis 3:19). Our diet expanded with our appetites (Genesis 9:3), and the patriarchs had to acquire large numbers of livestock to insure themselves against going hungry. Even so, each of them faced the trial of a famine in the land of Canaan, fleeing for their bread to the refuge of foreign powers (Genesis 12:10 [Abraham, to Egypt]; 26:1 [Isaac, to the Philistines]; 41:53—47:12 [Jacob and his sons, to Egypt]). In time, the Egyptians made slaves of the Hebrews (Exodus 1:13-14), but in exchange for the backbreaking sweat of their brows, they at least “sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full” (Exodus 16:3) – they could fish with ease in the Nile and had space to grow their cucumbers, melons, leeks, onions, and garlic (Numbers 11:5).⁵

It was from this life of slavery and oppression that God used Moses to free Israel. But once they were out in the desert, they began to feel serious anxiety about where their food would come from. Any food supplies they may have brought from Egypt ran out by the time they left the oasis of Elim. In the deeper desert, they had nowhere to fish, they had nowhere to grow home garden plots, they were out of bread. And rather than turn to prayer, the Israelites turned to grumbling, accusing Moses and Aaron of having “brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger” (Exodus 16:3). They saw no prospect of their basic needs being met. They allowed their understandable concern with food become a source of panic and division. Surely Moses, though, brought the people's situation to God in prayer. And the LORD promised “to rain bread from heaven for you, and the people shall go out and gather a day's portion every day” (Exodus 16:4). Six days a week, with double portions on Fridays, the mysterious manna was left on the ground by the morning dew, in abundance enough that each could gather about two quarts of the stuff (Exodus 16:5, 16). Except for the double portion, it kept good no longer than a day (Exodus 16:20). Each gathered however much he could eat (Exodus 16:21). They “ground it in handmills or beat it in mortars and boiled it in pots and made cakes of it” (Numbers 11:8), and then they baked those cakes as their bread (Exodus 16:23).

That became the staple of their diet for the next forty years in the desert (Exodus 16:35), right up until their first Passover in the Promised Land, after which they made bread from the grains they found growing there (Joshua 5:11-12). That's what they'd been looking forward to all this time. The manna was the daily bread of their desert life, but that desert life was aimed toward getting them to “a land of wheat and barley..., a land in which you will eat bread without scarcity, in which you will lack nothing” (Deuteronomy 8:8-9), where “you shall eat your bread to the full and dwell in your land securely” (Leviticus 26:5). Obedient to God in his land, “he will bless... your grain... in the land that he swore to your fathers to give you” (Deuteronomy 7:13), so that “blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl” (Deuteronomy 28:5) – they'd have all the bread they want. When all would go well, they'd be able to say, “He fills [us] with the finest of wheat” (Psalm 147:14). And the LORD said to them: “When you come into the land to which I bring you and when you eat of the bread of the land, you shall present a contribution to the LORD. … Some of the first of your dough you shall give to the LORD as a contribution throughout your generations” (Numbers 15:18-21).

That was the plan. Of course, things proved a lot bumpier. In the desert, people's taste buds got bored with the free manna – daily bread wasn't good enough to sustain them on life's journey, they thought (Numbers 11:6). Later they got thirsty and complained not only of the lack of water but of the absence of grain, pomegranates, figs, and grapevines (Numbers 20:5). And they were warned that if they disobeyed God once they got into his land, then “cursed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl” (Deuteronomy 28:17). God would have to afflict them with famine to get their attention (Amos 4:6). Perhaps even invaders would come and “not leave you grain” with which to make that all-important daily bread (Deuteronomy 28:51). And so “they shall be wasted with hunger” (Deuteronomy 32:24). And so it came to pass: when Jerusalem was under siege, behold, “there is no bread left in the city” (Jeremiah 38:9), and even children “faint for hunger at the head of every street” (Lamentations 2:19) – “victims of hunger who wasted away, pierced by lack of the fruits of the field” (Lamentations 4:9). But the prophets dreamed of a day when things would be right again, when “they shall feed along the ways..., they shall not hunger or thirst” (Isaiah 49:9-10), when “they shall no more be consumed with hunger in the land” (Ezekiel 34:29).

And we're waiting to see that come to fruition. The New Testament sees us Christians in this life as positioned not so differently from Israel in the desert: we've passed through the sea, we're making our way to the promised rest of heaven and the promised land of a new creation, and in the meantime our task is to trust and not grumble, lest we fall short of our promised land (1 Corinthians 10:10). To that end, Jesus teaches us in this prayer to pray to our Father, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11) – a prayer that, had the ancient Israelites used it and meant it, could've saved them a great deal of trouble! I wonder, though, whether we're hungry enough – whether we have a deep enough awareness of our needs to know for what we pray, to crave for what we ask.

So what do we mean? What are we asking for? We're asking for “bread.” And before we add on any extended meanings, I mean, bread is bread! 'Bread' isn't an especially hard concept to get our heads around! When Jesus preached his Sermon on the Mount in Galilee, most of the people in his audience probably farmed for at least part of their livelihood, and much of the land around him was farmland.⁶ Every family baked bread at home each day, and bread was part of every meal – and for poor peasant families, the evening meal might be the only one they could afford to have.⁷ Once a day (save for on the Sabbath), a family would bake fresh bread, and at least once a day (preferably more) they'd eat that day's bread. In a slightly broader sense, 'bread' here is all food – because in Jesus' world, if you didn't have bread, you didn't have anything else either. To pray for bread is to ask to be fed, to ask for that hunger inside you to be satisfied, to ask for the stuff from which your body and brain can draw nutrition and strength to sustain life. It's like the prayer in Proverbs: “Feed me with the food that is needful for me” (Proverbs 30:8). But in an even broader sense, “in these words are all our physical needs covered.”⁸ When we pray this, we're asking God to meet our needs to sustain life.⁹

It's astounding that, after such sweeping requests as the holiness of God's name, the arrival of God's kingdom, the performance of God's will as perfectly on earth as among the angels and saints of heaven, we pivot to such a seemingly small request – a piece of bread! It's so ordinary, so commonplace. Until, as Jacob Rusch found out, it isn't. But our needs are important to God, because our lives are important to God. We have things to do here. And so long as God sees fit to extend our lives, we need enough in a day's time to ensure we'll wake up the next day in more or less the same condition as we were the day before. That's what we're asking for, at heart. We're not asking for luxuries. We're not asking for the pricy stuff. This is not 'Give us this day our daily filet mignon.' This is not 'Give us this day our ice cream sundae.' We dare not be like the Israelites who got bored of manna (Numbers 11:6)! We're asking for our basic needs to be met. If God chooses to meet them in ways that add lots of pleasure and flavor and spice, that's his right. But if we find simple bread instead, we mustn't grumble about it. This is maybe a hard one for us to get our minds around, because we live in a world of plenty. Each of us has bread at home, I'd imagine, and we know we can afford it at the grocery store. We have racks of spices that would've been unimaginable to the Israelites. And there's nothing wrong with having that! There's nothing bad in diverse foods and vivid flavors. But all we ask of God is our basic needs. Like Paul said: “If we have food and clothing, with these we will be content” (1 Timothy 6:8). Food, water, clothing, shelter, health – our needs.

When do we want our bread, our food, our necessities? “This day,” today. Daily bread is a daily need. And we don't want it to come too late. That's what famine is about: waiting for the bread that doesn't come, at least not until it's too late. We're dependent children, and we can't wait on bread. If our needs aren't met when we have those needs, if we run out, we're sunk, we're goners. We're calling out to a “Lord [who] is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness” (2 Peter 3:9). Now, you and I, we can go a day without new bread – we've got our stockpiles and our pantries, and if push comes to shove, we're well-fed enough that we can go a day sans bread if we have to. We usually have what the psalmist asked for: “May our granaries be full, providing all kinds of produce” (Psalm 144:13). But think of Jacob Rusch praying for bread after five days of the anteater life. He can't wait around forever. He needs bread, and he needs it this day, right now. In the Gospel of Luke, there's a different twist on what we're asking: bread not “this day,” but “each day” (Luke 11:3). And that's implied here, too. Let no day go by, we ask, where bread is off the table, where there isn't enough to go around.

How do we want to get our bread? “Give us!” we cry. In Jesus' world, it's perfectly normal for a child to ask his father for bread. So how could God our Father be any different? He's a generous provider. When we ask for bread, he won't leave us with stones (Matthew 7:9). And he provides for his whole creation: “These all look to you, to give them their food in due season. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things” (Psalm 104:27-28). Even animals that hunt and scavenge ultimately get their food as their Creator's gift. And so, if our Father feeds birds who “neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns,” won't he feed his children (Matthew 6:26)? Like Nehemiah said, God “gave [the Israelites] bread from heaven for their hunger” (Nehemiah 9:15) – he “gave them bread from heaven in abundance” (Psalm 105:40).

That's not to say we're unwilling to work toward that bread! “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat” (2 Thessalonians 3:10).  Even scooping up manna and grinding it and boiling it and baking it is some real work anyway, even in the case that most stuck in Israel's memory as the season of God's direct provision. But even at the most sweat-of-your-brow, we never earn our bread – not strictly. We put in our work, but the growth of the grain is always God's gift, and it's beyond what we deserve. As sinners in a broken world, we don't deserve the bread God gives us, don't deserve to have our needs met. But it's all grace. And because we're asking for a gift from a Father who loves us, we don't need to be tied in knots by anxiety – “What shall we eat? or What shall we drink? or What shall we wear?” (Matthew 6:31). “Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all” – food, water, clothing – “but seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (Matthew 6:32-33). Unlike anxiously grumbling Israel in the desert, we pray first for God's kingdom, then for our needs.

So what kind of bread are we asking for? “That's easy,” you say: “Daily bread!” But it's not quite that easy. It says 'daily' in our Bibles, but that's a guess – because the word Matthew and Luke both have here is a Greek word found literally nowhere else in all of Greek literature! It's not gibberish, but it's a word they invented, and there are different theories about the parts they cobbled together for it. In the first place, it's totally possible that it means 'present,' as in the present day, or daily. That's how your Bible translation probably takes it. And that right there is a marvel. Some other Jews in this time prayed for good harvests year by year.¹⁰ But Jesus wants us to pray for bread a day at a time. All we're asking is for our needs to be supplied for the current 24 hours. We aren't being “anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself” (Matthew 6:34). We also aren't asking for extravagantly much. Gone here is the psalmist's plea for full granaries. That's a luxury, and a good one, but we don't ask for a week's worth of bread – just a day's. We aren't asking for a few acres and a white picket fence – just warmth and shelter through today's storms and tonight's chill. All we ask is that it be enough, that it meet our needs so as to strengthen us to serve God tomorrow as we hope to serve him today.

Your Bible might also have a footnote that suggests, instead of 'daily bread,' it might read 'bread for tomorrow' – literally, bread that's coming, bread that's on its way. In the morning, it makes sense to pray for today's bread. But later on, especially in the evening, it makes sense to pray to already have in hand the bread we'll eat the next day, the shelter we'll need the next day, so we can better resist temptation to worry about tomorrow. Perhaps we sleep better at night having already glimpsed God's provision for morning – and we ask tomorrow's bread today.

But so does it ask for the bread of the ultimate tomorrow, the bread of God's kingdom, bread that's like no other bread we can get. Because another way to understand this word is as 'supersubstantial' – that is, bread that's far beyond what bread can be of its own nature. Some of the earliest Christians who prayed the Lord's Prayer gave a prayer of thanksgiving to God that he “gave both food and drink to people for their enjoyment that they could give thanks.” But they were especially thankful, they said, that “on us you bestowed spiritual food and drink.”¹¹ And they were talking about what we call Communion – but which they called Eucharist. After all, how could they not read the prayer for bread, based on Israel's experience with God's gift of bread from heaven, except in light of Jesus' announcement: “I am the Living Bread that came down from heaven: if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh. … For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink” (John 6:51, 55)? There is no point, diving back to the roots of church history, where I find people explaining the Lord's Prayer without saying that this line is ultimately about the Eucharist.¹²

For that, too, then, are we praying: to be able to really receive the Bread of Life when we approach the altar in the church, in hopes of being given the body and blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. To early Christians, learning from the apostles, this bread being broken at the altar for them was “the bread of God” and “the medicine of immortality.”¹³ They refused to regard it as “common food and common drink,” but insisted that this food was, beyond the substance of mere bread and wine, “the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”¹⁴ But I wonder if we believe what they believed. We love to talk about reading the Bible literally until Jesus starts preaching his flesh and his blood! The early church took him very simply and very seriously. They were in awe of this gift, really treated it as spiritual food and spiritual drink, and desperately hungered and thirsted for it – so much so, they received weekly or daily this supersubstantial bread of life. They hungered for the Bread of Life far more than for the bread of this world.

How about today? Our Evangelical churches are not like the early church. Our churches reduce the bread of life lower than a symbol. After we celebrate our communion, what do we do with the grape juice we substituted for wine and then called the blood of Christ? Do we pour it back into the bottle as common grape juice again? What do we do with the leftover pieces of bread? Do we throw them away like garbage? But the early church was insistent that the supersubstantial bread, the superessential cup, were holy gifts for the holy people, were as holy as any ancient temple sacrifice. “Everybody should be concerned,” they said, “that one who is not of the faithful, nor a mouse nor any other animal, should eat of the eucharist, and that none of it should fall and be altogether lost – for it is the body of Christ to be eaten by the faithful, and not to be despised.”¹⁵

Likewise, they aimed to “receive his eucharist daily as the food of salvation.”¹⁶ But where the early church craved supersubstantial bread weekly or even daily (as the Lord's Prayer said), we have to admit that we don't seem to want it daily, nor even weekly. Many of our churches don't want it monthly. What we do, we do quarterly. And I have to wonder what that says about our relative hungers. Would we bear a world in which we only fed on the world's bread four times a year? But how unquestioningly we bear that scarcity when it comes to God's living bread! So why is it that we crave supersubstantial bread so much less than ordinary bread? Why is it that the food of salvation matters less than food that can't save eternally? Why are we so slow to beg for the medicine of immortality? Or do we perhaps simply not understand what God means to offer us?

But back to ordinary bread, our daily bread, all the things that meet our thisworldly physical needs day by day. For whom are we asking them? “Give us,” we pray. There is no begging my bread or your bread here without begging bread for all the Father's children, indeed, all the Father's creation. There is no asking to ourselves be warmed and sheltered without equally asking and desiring the same for everyone else. When I pray this prayer, I ask God to have given Jacob Rusch his daily bread, and for God to give you now your daily bread, and for God to give people in Africa and China, in Ukraine and Russia, also their daily bread, without exception, on the same terms as myself. What that means is that I can't pray this prayer and then go out trying to get my bread in a way that'll take it off somebody else's plate. I can't honestly ask to get my bread by cheating somebody else, by keeping wages too low for my neighbor to get his. I can't ask my bread through the hands of a system that impoverishes others. I ask my bread the way God gave the manna: such that everyone else gets all they can eat.

Likewise, I can't honestly pray this prayer if I don't so desire that others get their daily bread, that others get the necessities of their lives, that I'm willing to be used by God to answer my own prayer. What did James tell us? “If a brother or sister is poorly clothed and lacking in daily food, and one of you says to them, 'Go in peace, be warmed and filled,' without giving them the things needed for the body, what good is that?” (James 2:15-16). If we pray the Lord's Prayer and then pass by the man or woman or child begging for bread or shelter or security or peace, and we do nothing to help when we can, then we nullify our prayer – worse, turn it into a poison on our tongues. To ask God for our daily bread, we must work to meet the needs of our brothers and sisters.

But we do ask God for our daily bread. We ask for him to meet all our physical needs, day by day, as we need them, not extravagantly or insufficiently but just enough that we can serve him again tomorrow; and we ask for the bread that meets our spiritual and eternal needs as well, by fitting our souls and bodies for the new creation. In the meantime, we ask for all this bread, and we trust in a generous Father. But we know there are times we might go hungry, might go thirsty, might be cold and shivering, might struggle to keep a roof over our head. St. Paul prayed this prayer, but even so he admitted that he prayed it “through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure” (2 Corinthians 11:27), “poorly dressed and homeless” (1 Corinthians 4:11). So was Jesus' promise void for Paul? No – our Father is still in heaven! Paul never died of starvation, dehydration, exposure. He died losing his head as a witness to Christ in Rome. Despite the hunger, thirst, sleeplessness, cold, and exposure, then, he must have ultimately had his prayers – and the prayers of others for him – answered with God's gracious provision. Each day, Paul got up to serve him. May we also, as we await the day when “they shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more” (Revelation 7:16), through Jesus our Breadwinner. Amen!

Pleasing as Angels

We've covered “Hallowed be thy name.” We've heard much about “Thy kingdom come.” Now, Jesus invites us to add one more phrase, this time with a qualifier. The phrase? “Thy will be done.” The qualifier? “On earth as it is in heaven” – that is, using heaven as the benchmark, matching earth to how it's done in heaven. And if heaven is the benchmark for what we're asking, we ought to know more about how God's will is done in heaven – otherwise, we can't know what we're asking! So who in heaven is there for God's will to be done by?

Thankfully, the author of Hebrews fills us in. First, in heaven we would find “God, the Judge of all” (Hebrews 12:23). Hopefully, we already knew that. We recently spent a Sunday meditating on what it means to pray to “our Father who art in heaven,” after all (Matthew 6:9). So God, who is everywhere, is most especially, and in the relevant way, in heaven. Second, if we could look into heaven, we'd see there “Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant” (Hebrews 12:24). After all, when Stephen was about to die, he “gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55). But we've meditated on the ascension before, and we confess this truth in our creed every Sunday. I trust we share an understanding here.

Third, the author of Hebrews reminds us we'll meet “myriad angels in festal gathering” (Hebrews 12:22). See into heaven, and you'll meet more angels than you can count without a very fancy calculator! A prophet named Micaiah had a vision of “the LORD sitting on his throne, and all the host of heaven standing beside him on his right hand and on his left” (1 Kings 22:19). Jesus referred to “the angels of heaven” (Matthew 24:36) and to “angels in heaven” (Mark 12:25). Luke calls them “the heavenly host” (Luke 2:13), while John saw in heaven “many angels, numbering myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands” (Revelation 5:11). From references to different sorts of heavenly beings in the Bible, later Christians assembled the clues and recognized nine distinct choirs of angels in heaven: seraphim, cherubim, thrones, dominions, virtues, powers, principalities, archangels, and angels.¹ These all dwell in heaven, pure spirits created there by God for his supreme purposes.

But heaven isn't just for God and his angels any more. Fourth, the author of Hebrews reminds us that there we find “the church of the firstborn enrolled in heaven..., the spirits of the righteous made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23). “Rejoice, O heaven..., and you saints and apostles and prophets!” (Revelation 18:20). The patriarchs and matriarchs, the judges and prophets, righteous kings and priests, Joseph and Mary, Peter and Paul and the apostles, and on and on – they're there. Spirits of the martyrs, of the confessors, of the blessed – untold spirits have, through Jesus Christ, been welcomed there. In this life and on this earth, many have lived by great faith; and now, being received into heaven, they've been “made perfect” (Hebrews 12:23), having received the fullness of sanctification. If even on earth the Bible refers to Christians as 'saints,' as 'holy ones,' in spite of our holiness still being mixed with our vulnerability to sin, how much more is it appropriate to celebrate humans in heaven, the Church Triumphant, as truly and fully saints – those who are perfected in holiness for good?

So now we know: heaven is where God is, where Jesus is, where angels are, where the victorious saints are. So how is it we say God's will is done in heaven? Because heaven has to be our starting point for this prayer.

First, in heaven, God acts directly and sovereignly without restriction: “Our God is in the heavens: he does all that he pleases” (Psalm 115:3). “He does according to his will among the host of heaven... and none can stay his hand or say to him, 'What have you done?'” (Daniel 4:35). Some actions, God directly wills and so causes. God causes a seraph to exist and ignites its flaming love. God communicates to a cherub, acting on its profound intellect. Other actions, even in heaven, God permissively and concurrently wills. An archangel decides to move from one place to another – but that couldn't happen unless God not only allowed it but enabled it, by causing the archangel's good capacity to move. All things in heaven happen purely by God's pleasure.

But in our earth, this rebellious realm, God is less pleased but still acts in the same kinds of ways. “He does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth... All the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing” (Daniel 4:35). “Whatever is willed in heaven will be done” on earth (1 Maccabees 3:60). In some things, God directly wills and causes, as when he wills water to become wine. There are other actions God permissively and concurrently wills. I stand up and preach this morning, but that could not happen without God sustaining me in existence, having the air carry the vibrations made by my vocal cords to your ear drums, having your brains process the vibrations as intelligible language, and so on. And that's true whether I'm preaching a good sermon or a very bad sermon – God could break the chains of secondary cause-and-effect, could withhold his concurrence, but he wills not to. Insofar as he allows it, he wills it.

And whether we're talking heaven or earth, all things that happen fall into one of those two camps – either God wills to cause them, or God wills to permit them and so concurs to enable created beings to act successfully. In this regard, when we pray to God, “Thy will be done,” we're voicing our relief that, in this sense, God does do what he wills; and we're asking his involvement in all things to be made clearer to us.

Second, in heaven, God's desires are cherished by all, because God is their First Love. From the highest seraph to the lowliest saint there, all those in heaven love God more than anything else, including themselves. No angel in heaven, no saint in heaven, fails to love God before everything else. For all of them, their highest wish is that God's desires be fulfilled. Why? Because in loving God, they can see that God is supremely lovely and loving, and so in loving God, they love all things according to how God loves them. To hear that angels rejoice when sinners repent is no different than knowing that God desires sinners to repent – because no angel would rejoice except in what he can see that God desires (Luke 15:10). No saint in heaven does otherwise, either.

On earth, things are more messy. The psalmist tells us that “the heavens are the LORD's heavens, but the earth he has given to the children of man” (Psalm 115:16). Part of what that means is that on earth, it's possible for us to prefer our own desires over God's desires. We struggle to attach ourselves to God. Instead, we harbor disordered attachments to created goods. Maybe we're unduly attached to the rightness of our ideas, or the pride we take in our view of ourselves, or the appetites we long to satisfy. Maybe we're inordinately fond of coffee or chocolate or cheese or comfort or control. But for God's will to be done on earth, that has to stop. To repent and to become heavenly minded is the same thing, one early Christian said, as “taking pleasure in the will of God.”² And that is who we need to be, even here on earth. We need to take pleasure in what God loves.

So when we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we're asking God for the grace to change our disordered attachments and to deepen our love for him. We're begging to wish what he wishes, to want what he wants. We pray for him to stoke the flames of our desire in the ways that please him. And we know that whatever is “good and acceptable and perfect,” that's what God desires, that's “the will of God,” so we only have to discern the value in order to discern God's mind and heart (Romans 12:2). Everything else we do, everything else we wish, everything else we ask – it's all downstream from this.

Third, in heaven, God's decisions are embraced in submission and joy. Suppose God decides that, in heaven, the principalities rank beneath the cherubim. Does a principality complain? Does a principality try to take a bit more honor than God wishes to give? Hardly! No, the principalities embrace, in submission and joy, God's decision. So too, not one saint looks back over life's scars and doesn't thank God for how his will worked out in it all. All in heaven accept what God decides, seeing themselves that God's decisions are perfectly wise, perfectly just, perfectly perfect. Heaven is at no risk of rebellion, no risk of resentment, no risk of resistance.

Earth? Not so much. And partly that's because, where in heaven God has no need to will adverse judgment or affliction on those there, here on earth things get messy. On earth, God must be father to imperfect children, and must be the judge also of heinous sin. So, for instance, we know Peter's right when he tells us how the Lord “is not wishing that any should perish but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:9) – that's what God antecedently wills. But despite that wish, since he's willed to give us free will ourselves, it sometimes happens that people perish. When the priest Eli's sons became hopelessly corrupt, we read that “it was the will of the LORD to put them to death” (1 Samuel 2:25). In a world of sin, God's will being done entails judgment.

There are also times on earth where we haven't sinned and aren't being judged, and yet God decides – again, out of love – to discipline us on earth in ways not needed for those in heaven: “He disciplines us for our good,” we read, “that we may share his holiness. For the moment, all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Hebrews 12:10-11). God permits much to happen in our lives, and sometimes it's a reminder that this is a world we're not supposed to be content with, because it's broken, and he'd be doing us a disservice by letting us get so comfortable here that we mistake it for home. And in some cases, he allows innocents to suffer, because he wills to reserve a more abundant reward for them in heaven. Peter holds out the possibility that “God's will” is for us to “suffer for doing good” (1 Peter 3:17). That's one way to “lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven” (Matthew 6:20).

Whether in heaven or on earth, God's will is done when his decisions are accepted with submission. What does that look like here? It looks like when people, even though they don't understand the reason, nevertheless trust that God means it for good, even if he has to get that good out of sins that others commit against us. It looks like when people, even though the discipline is painful in the moment, nevertheless seize it as an opportunity to learn and grow. It looks like when people, even though their sin is being judged, nevertheless agree with the Judge and repent. It looks like Mary telling the angel, “Be it done to me in accordance with your word” (Luke 1:38). It looks like Jesus in the garden, his ears haunted by Isaiah's prophecy that “it was the will of the LORD to crush him” (Isaiah 53:10), and yet he declares, “Nevertheless, not as I will but as you will... If this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done” (Matthew 26:39-42).

In praying this prayer, then, we're asking God to soften every heart to his work. We're asking him to help people be responsive to his judgments. We're asking him to give all people a trust in what he's doing. We're asking him to give all people a receptivity toward what he allows into our lives, including opportunities not just to patiently endure but to inventively overcome. Wouldn't the earth be a vastly different place if people did as Peter said: “Let those who suffer according to God's will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Peter 4:19)? For by learning to do this, we on earth would gain the same acceptance of God's will that the angels and saints have. That's what we ask. And we're asking God to move people to “give thanks in all circumstances,” knowing that such thankfulness is “the will of God” for us (1 Thessalonians 5:18).

Fourth, in heaven, God's design is revealed and understood. There's a reason prophets like Daniel, Zechariah, and John had angels filling them in on what the visions meant – it's because angels already had the inside scoop. That's the situation in heaven more generally. Even the lowliest and newest saint in heaven understands God's design a far sight better than I do! It's easy to see so much more from heaven. Correspondingly, it's harder to see from earth. But we do know some, because that was the Father's “gracious will” to reveal it (Matthew 11:25-26). In the Old Testament, to “do [God's] will” was to keep Israel “unstained by the world” (Ezra 10:11; James 1:27), preserving her mission to bring Christ into the world so that the world could be fulfilled and saved. When Christ came, he announced: “This is the will of my Father: that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (John 6:40) – God's will is his design for the salvation of the world, that the world would share in his own life. Paul added that God's will is a great mystery we're unpacking: “the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him – things in heaven and things on earth” (Ephesians 1:9-10). To the extent we've heard this mystery of God's grand design for his whole creation, Peter calls us to “live the rest of the time in the flesh... for the will of God,” that is, for the sake of that design (1 Peter 4:2).

So when we pray to God, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” we're asking Christ to open up to us his Scriptures by the voice of his Spirit and his Bride, and to unpack for us more and more of the Father's plan to unite all things, heavenly and earthly, in Christ. And we're asking God to fit our lives to that grand design and to help us live in the midst of the mystery that's unfolding.

Fifth, in heaven, God's demands are obeyed and God's decrees are carried out. Rather famously, angels are absolutely and perfectly responsive to God's demands and decrees. That's what they're for – that's what 'angel' means. It's coded into their definition. “Bless the LORD, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word, obeying the voice of his word! Bless the LORD, all his hosts, his ministers who do his will!” (Psalm 103:20-21). If you're reading through the Bible, and a sentence starts with “The LORD commanded the angel, and...,” you don't need three guesses to figure out how the sentence is going to finish (1 Chronicles 21:27). Peter's disciple urged Christians to “consider the whole multitude of angels, how they stand and minister to his will.”³ And the same is no less true of humans in heaven. None of them ever reject God's demands. None of them ever ignore God's decrees. Whatever God speaks to them, they don't hesitate to do. I think a medieval bishop of Paris said it best: “Good people, in heaven the will of God is done perfectly, for angels, archangels, principalities, powers, virtues, thrones and dominions, cherubim and seraphim, patriarchs and prophets, apostles and martyrs, confessors and virgins, and all the chosen souls who are in heaven before God are obedient to him. They do his will and commandment perfectly; but there are many on earth who do such things as God does not want at all.”⁴

Sadly, he's right about the last part, too. On earth, God's demands are often rejected and God's decrees are often ignored. God tells us, “Hey, that fruit isn't yours,” and we start nibbling away. God tells us, “Worship just like this,” and we sculpt golden calves and dance with strange fire. God tells us, “I want you in Nineveh,” and we set sail for Tarshish. But even on earth, it doesn't have to be that way! We read how “Noah did all that the LORD commanded him” (Genesis 7:5), how “Abraham obeyed [God's] voice and kept [God's] commandments” (Genesis 26:5), how Moses and Aaron “did just as the LORD commanded them” (Exodus 7:6), how Jeremiah spoke “all that the LORD had commanded him to speak” (Jeremiah 26:8), and so on. Those are triumphant stories of God's will being done on earth. Above all, God's will was perfectly done by Jesus Christ, who said it was the very reason he'd come from heaven, to show heavenly obedience on earth (John 6:38). Jesus said it was what sustained him: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work” (John 4:34).

And so too, for us and for all on the earth, when people do what God says, then we're doing his will. When God says “to visit orphans and widows in their affliction” (James 1:27), and then we do it, his will is being done on earth. When God tells us to “flee from idolatry” (1 Corinthians 10:4) and to “flee from sexual immorality” (1 Corinthians 6:18), and then we obey, his will is being done on earth. And when God tells us to “pursue what makes for peace” (Romans 14:19) and, where possible, to “live peaceably with all” (Romans 12:18), and then people actually do that, there too is his will being done on earth.

So what here are we asking when we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”? We're wanting that people in this world – ourselves included – would all just do what God says. We're applying worldwide the prayer of the psalmist: “Teach me to do your will, for you are my God!” (Psalm 143:10). We're praying that no one on earth, least of all us, would refuse or hesitate God's commands. For God doesn't hide what he wants us to do. He speaks plainly enough already to fill a lifetime with obedience. We're praying that I'd do what he told us to do, that you'd do what he told us to do, that your neighbor would do what he told us to do, that Putin would do what he told us to do, that everybody'd do what he told us all to do. If that happened, the world would find peace. The world would find love. The world would find Christ. But every step toward responsiveness to God's demands and decrees, is God's will being done on earth, and so is earth becoming more like heaven.

Sixth and lastly, in heaven, God is worshipped face-to-face by the perfectly holy – and that's what he ultimately wishes and wills. As Nehemiah prays: “You are the LORD, you alone..., and the host of heaven worships you” (Nehemiah 9:6). Jesus calls them “the holy angels” (Luke 9:26), and John sees that “all the angels were standing around the throne, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshipped God” (Revelation 7:11). Nor is it different with the saints in heaven, the holy ones who “sing a new song before the throne” (Revelation 14:3), “a great multitude..., clothed in white robes..., crying out” in worship (Revelation 7:9-10). For “they are before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple” (Revelation 7:15).

That's what heaven is like, that's what heaven's all about. The perfectly holy will perfectly worship the perfect God while perfectly face-to-face with him. That's what God wants! That's what God designs! God ultimately wills to be surrounded by those who, in perfect holiness, never cease knowing him and never cease surrendering to his love in them and through them. That's the society of heaven, where knowledge and love can be made perfect for the perfect worship of God, from the holy ones to the Holy One.

And in praying for God's will to be done on earth just as in heaven, we're asking for God even now to empower our worship and our lives. We're asking him to sanctify us so that we may be truly and fully saints like those in heaven are. “For this is the will of God: your sanctification,” your being made truly and fully saints – that, and nothing less, is what God wants for you (1 Thessalonians 4:3)! And we're asking the Holy Spirit to join our earthly worship more and more to heaven's worship, and to make of them one thing, one act that unites things in heaven and things on earth in Christ. We're asking our Father to reveal himself to all the earth, unveiled and unobscured, just as he's seen in heaven. And we're asking God to help us serve him day and night on earth, and for his presence here to be no less than his presence in heaven.

The trouble is that, everywhere we go on earth, things fall short. We ask to worship God face-to-face, but he says, “Man shall not see me and live” (Exodus 33:20). We ask to be holy, but we're still vulnerable to change and sin. We ask to serve him day and night, but hours and days go by when our thoughts detach from God, so our service is interrupted. Sincere and successful as we can be, our worship yet has limits.

But what if it didn't? What if God could be worshipped on earth the same as he is in heaven? What would it look like if everyone on earth were a saint confirmed eternally in holiness, and if everyone on earth worshipped God as strongly as do the angels and saints in heaven, and if even here we could see God and live eternal life? What would you call that? What would you call heaven on earth? I'd call it the new creation! “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man! He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be their God” (Revelation 21:3). Heaven and earth will be a single seamless reality, open to all who dwell with God. And in that day, those living eternal life will be, as Jesus said, “equal to angels and will be sons of God” (Luke 20:36). Never again will one fall away or turn aside, not even a moment, from God's will.

That, ultimately, is what this is a prayer for. To pray that God's will be done on earth as in heaven is to pray that earth be perfectly conformed to heaven – to pray that earth be as healthy as heaven, as happy as heaven, as holy as heaven. That, after all, is God's ultimate design for his creation: to make it new and unite it all as one in Christ for eternity. And what prayer, then, could be more important than this prayer? For “the world is passing away with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever” (1 John 2:17). Amen!