The Lord's Prayer: if it trips off the tongue, it'll probably trip you up

We’re making our way through the Lord’s Prayer on Sunday evenings at Hope. We may as well be passing hand grenades round the congregation. The words we know so well, the words which trip off the tongue, are searching us and exposing us. Some nights I wonder if I’ve ever actually prayed this prayer at all. And many nights I gasp at the ignorance, and the real hypocrisy which have followed my words to the Throne of Grace. But I think, too, that these sermons are exploding our false religion, and showing us what it really means to pray, and to follow.

Our comfort is that the Lord Jesus loves learners far more than He loves the learned. He came to call us to learn to follow Him, and trust Him and serve His Kingdom. The only cause for despair is when we no longer want to learn, or feel that we’ve arrived. As long as the Holy Spirit is searching us and showing us the narrow way, then we are people of hope, and of godly ambition. The Lord’s Prayer may trip us up, but the Lord wants to establish us as servants of His Will. To understand the Lord’s Prayer – perhaps, to begin to understand the Prayer – is the firm foundation we need for trusting and confident Christian lives.

J.I. Packer puts it like this:

‘To pray ‘Thy Kingdom Come’ is searching and demanding, for one must be ready to add, ‘and start with me; make me Your fully obedient subject. Show me my place among ‘workers for the Kingdom of God’ (Colossians 4.11), and use me, so far as may be, to extend the kingdom and so be Your means of answering my prayer.’
 Made sincerely, this is a prayer that the Saviour Who calls us to self-denial and cross-bearing and consent that one’s life be lost, one way or another, in serving the Gospel may have His way with us completely. Do we really seek this? Have we faced it? Let every man examine himself, and so – and only so – let him say the Lord’s Prayer.’

J.I. Packer, ‘Praying the Lord’s Prayer’, p.53