On Earth as It Is in Heaven

Since the Lord’s Prayer has been given to shape our praying, it also shapes our living as disciples of Christ. Today, Sinclair Ferguson expresses what it means for God’s kingdom and His will to be established in our lives.

When Luke records what we call the Lord’s Prayer, he tells us that Jesus taught it in response to a request, “Lord, teach us to pray.” In other words, it’s a kind of model prayer. “Pray like this,” says our Lord Jesus. I mentioned yesterday that the prayer has an additional function. Because it teaches us the shape of our praying, it also teaches us the shape of our living as disciples of the Lord. I don’t think I really need to remind you what that shape is. Our chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever, and we enjoy Him only when we live for Him, when we glorify Him.

The masters of the spiritual life, I think, have all recognized that our lives by nature are disordered. Our minds, our wills, our affections are all disordered, and they need to be regenerated and refashioned. That’s what Romans 12:1–2 is all about, isn’t it? The transformation of our life—its reconstruction, its reshaping, its reordering—takes place by the renewal of our minds.

And that’s actually one of the blessings of praying the Lord’s Prayer. It begins to renew our mind. It begins to shape how we think about life. It reorders our priorities. It recenters us on the Father. It sets our affections on the right things and in the right order. And that’s why we pray for God’s name to be holy, to be reverenced, to be treated with awe—to use Martin Luther’s words, to let God be God. And it follows that the heart that is centered on God’s glory in this way will want to see that glory manifested in the world. And so, Jesus now teaches us to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

The kingdom of God is His reign. In fact, it’s what Adam and Eve were commissioned to bring about in the world when they were given dominion. They were to extend the garden God had given them to the ends of the Earth. You remember that not all the Earth was garden, and so they were to extend it. And then, then the Earth would be full of the glory of God as the waters cover the sea. But they failed. But through Jesus Christ, the second Man, God is going to accomplish what they failed to do.

And Paul envisages this in 1 Corinthians 15:20–28. He looks forward to the end of history taking place, when everything is subjected to the Lord Jesus as the last Adam. On that day, He will present a renewed and reordered world, and even Himself as God’s vice-regent. He will present all this to His Father. And then he says, “God will be all in all.” That’s what we’re praying for when we say, “Thy kingdom come.”

But we know something that the disciples discovered only slowly. We know from the New Testament that the kingdom comes in stages. It was inaugurated by Jesus, and it’s now being extended in and through His people in the church, and it will be consummated when He returns in glory. So praying, “Your kingdom come,” presents a great, actually a thrilling vision, but it isn’t a vision of pie in the sky when you die.

Don’t get me wrong, there is pie in the sky when you die—a glorious future, a glorious future indeed. But we also need to see there’s pie now, as we might say, for this petition is part of a parallelism, like those we find in the Psalms. They go like this: the first line says one thing, and then the second line often explains it or develops it. So line one, “The Lord is my shepherd.” Line two, developing it, “I shall not want.” And it’s like that here, isn’t it? “Thy kingdom come,” is developed by the next statement, “Thy will be done, here on earth as it is perfectly in heaven.” In other words, what we’re praying for here is help to know and to do God’s will.

And that brings us right back to Romans 12:1–2 again, doesn’t it? Our lives are transformed by the renewing of our minds, and it’s in this way that we discover the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. And all this is rooted in us yielding ourselves to the Lord and not being conformed to the will and ways of the world.

So when we pray, “Thy will be done,” we are submitting to the Lord’s decretive will. That is, His sovereign purposes. But we’re also asking for the help we need to understand and pursue His revealed will, the pattern of life He has set before us in Scripture, together with its rich and varied and many individual applications to our own lives. So that’s why we need to pray today and every day, “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done.”