The Lord's Prayer

Chapter 12. Understanding God Time

For Thine Is The Kingdom, Power & Glory | Meaning

 
The Lord’s Prayer began by grounding us in our relationship with the Father, and it ends now by solidifying our faith in that kinship.1 We have already talked about how the kingdom, power, and the glory of God are played out within the living hour; but most of us are not satisfied with this “daily bread“. We want to know that there is a divine plan, with a definitive beginning and end, that’s been arranged by the Father.

Our desire to see the culmination of God’s plan is what led Jesus’s early Jewish followers to believe that he was an earthly messiah. And it fuels today such false beliefs as the rapture and Jesus’s second-coming out of the clouds. Without an end-game in place, we find our faith under assault,2 as we try to make sense of a world filled with horrors, suffering, and loss. Yet it is precisely this lack of knowledge in God’s final act (like our uncertainty in what happens to us after we die) that creates the condition which rewards those with the faith of but a mustard seed.

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If we are to acquire that life-giving faith, and get glimpses of the Father’s divine plan, we must take a “big picture” view of our lives and the history of the world. This means letting go of human time and entering God time. With human time we focus on beginnings and ends, and see time as a product that can be saved, lost, and spent. And we view morality within the limits of those human constraints. But with God time, we are dealing with a cyclical ebb and flow that cannot be pinned down — and where moral reckoning occurs on a timeline that far exceeds an individual lifetime.

Our life in Christ is beyond beginnings and ends — which is why Jesus says that he existed before Abraham3 and his words will live on even after heaven and earth pass away.4 The Holy Spirit constantly is in the process of rising and receding. This means that the crucifixion of our ego is not a one-time affair. We are called to repeatedly lay down our lives,5 as we rise ever closer toward our divinity.

Jesus imparts this teaching of recurring crucifixion when he says that we must pick up our crosses daily.6 And our repeated rising toward Christ is demonstrated in the gospel story by Jesus’s reappearance within the form of a person that his disciples do not recognize.7 When, during the course of our spiritual evolution, we shed our egos, even those closest to us often fail to recognize the new person we’ve become. The fact that Jesus chooses to crucify his ego yet again, having already risen in Christ and been able to teach the gospel, demonstrates that no matter how high we’ve risen, the ego continually builds new obstacles that need to be overcome.

When we pray “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever, amen,” we are thus confirming our faith in today’s living Christ;8 as well as God’s divine plan that we, his children, can feel only intimations of but never fully know.9 As the 19th century Unitarian Minister Theodore Parker once said: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I can calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see, I am sure it bends toward justice.”

  1. While the final line of the Lord’s Prayer is not included in the earliest manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew or the Gospel of Luke’s version, we have little doubt that Jesus would approve of this addition. []
  2. A violent squall came on, and the waves kept crashing into the boat, so that the boat was actually filling. 38 Jesus was in the stern asleep upon the cushion; and the disciples roused him and cried: “Teacher! Is it nothing to you that we are lost?” Mark 4:37—38 []
  3. “You are not fifty years old yet,” the Jews exclaimed, “and have you seen Abraham?” 58 “In truth I tell you,” replied Jesus, “before Abraham was, I am.” John 8:57—58 []
  4. I tell you that even the present generation will not pass away till all has taken place. 33 Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. — Luke 21:33 []
  5. This is why the Father loves me, because I lay down my life—to receive it again. 18 No one took it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to receive it again. John 10:17—18 []
  6. “If anyone wishes to walk in my steps, let them renounce self, and take up their cross daily, and follow me. — Luke 9:23 []
  7. After saying this, she turned round and looked at Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. 15 “Why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?” he asked. Supposing him to be the gardener, Mary answered: “If it was you, sir, who carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away myself.” John 20:14—15 []
  8. They could not find the body of the Lord Jesus. 4 While they were at a loss to account for this, all at once two men stood beside them, in dazzling clothing. 5 But, when in their fear the women bowed their faces to the ground, the men said to them: “Why are you looking among the dead for him who is living?” Luke 24:3-5 []
  9. The heavens and the earth will pass away, but my words shall never pass away. But about that day and hour, no one knows: not even the angels of heaven, nor yet the Son, but only the Father himself. Matthew 24:36 []


The Living Hour