The disciples at first saw an empty grave, but not a Risen King. We can find ourselves doing the same.
Sin makes us sick over and over, yet we keep charging right back to the buffet—unlike food poisoning, which at least teaches us to stay away from the contaminated food. That’s the human struggle Jesus faces head-on when He teaches us to pray “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” in Matthew 6:13.
We often treat sin as a handful of inconsequential debts, so asking God for forgiveness—or forgiving someone else—can feel unnecessary. In Matthew 6:12, Jesus places both debts before us in a single petition: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Do we understand the balance we have run up?
When something’s keeping you up at night—an unexpected bill, a looming deadline, a need you can’t see your way through—it’s easy to wonder whether those worries are too ordinary to bring to God. Jesus is clear in the next part of the Lord’s Prayer that simply isn’t the case.
We’ve all looked at this world and thought, it just doesn’t seem like God’s will is being done. Underneath that thought is a deeper fear that God’s reserve of will and ability runs dry the way ours does. That fear is exactly what Jesus targets when He teaches us to pray “your will be done.”
Most of us pray “thy kingdom come” without stopping to ask whether the kingdom we’re actually building day to day is God’s—or our own. That tension sits at the heart of Matthew 6:10, and Daniel 4 shows just how far God will go to get our attention when we forget who’s really in charge.
How do we come before God when our prayers so easily become empty phrases, desperate demands, or distant formalities? In Matthew 6, Jesus says our Father knows what we need before we ask, then gives His disciples words for approaching Him: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.”
