The Lord's Prayer: Yours is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory (Matthew 6.9-13)
This sermon was preached on August 18th, 2024.
There’s a great moment in the third Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indiana Jones and his dad are trying to escape the Nazi authorities who are chasing them. They're on a huge zeppelin, and are fleeing down to the emergency airplane attached to the bottom of the zeppelin. They get in the plane, unhitch it from the zeppelin and take off flying.
His dad says: “Junior, I didn’t know you knew how to fly a plane!”
“Fly? Yes.” Indiana Jones says “Land? No.”
This is a good description of me in prayer. I’m good with words. I spend time thinking about words. And I can absolutely say my fair share of words. Fly? Yeah, I have that.
But when it comes to landing that prayer—meaning when it comes to moving beyond words to propel me out of mere words and into action—that’s where I’m not so skilled. I need a little help. Which is what we get right here in the last sentences of the Lord’s Prayer. Not simply the last sentence to pray, but a bridge to lead into our lives. Yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever
Before I dive into what this means, I have to address something you’re maybe seeing in the notes or margins of your Bibles—the earliest copies of the gospel of Matthew that we have do not have this verse. Some scholars maintain that it wasn’t part of the original prayer that Jesus taught his disciples, and was later added because it was a fitting conclusion to the prayer—and it reflects how the early Christians actually prayed as people learned the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus taught.
In truth, this verse is almost a direct quote from the OT, a prayer that King David prayed after he had gathered all the materials for the building of the temple. And it’s something that Christians have been praying from the earliest days of the church. So either 1) this was part of the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples or 2) it was an Old Testament verse that was added by some of the earliest Christians to end that prayer. Either way, it’s an entirely appropriate thing for us in 2024 to pray what we call the Lord's prayer this way.
With that said: what does it mean to pray and live Yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever?
Yours is the Kingdom
To pray this is to remind our hearts of our calling. We live as those belong to God’s kingdom, not our own. And this truth should give us the greatest hope that what we do in this life matters—because who we are is not limited to our lifetimes.
If you think through history, you can consider all the ways we tend to measure someone’s life being important. Like from history…an Alexander the Great. We don’t call him “Alexander the Pretty Good.” No, the GREAT. And why was he called that? Because he was able to conquer his entire known world, and leave his fingerprint from India to Egypt. He never lost a battle, to the point that he considered himself a god.
That was a life that mattered, right? Yet as soon as Alexander died at 32 years old, his kingdom shattered and split, his kingdom lasting barely past his final breath. He conquered and it was lost. We know his name, but what does that mean in the end?
Or think of someone like an Elon Musk, the richest person in the world. He’s worth over 200 billion dollars (do you know how much money that is? That’s 200k million!) He can do pretty much anything he wants. But as we talked about a few weeks ago when we learned what it means to pray for our daily bread—money is just numbers. Cars are rubber, plastic, and metal joined together. Gold is just shiny rocks. All of them rot and rust and fade away, no matter how much of it you have.
Or think of a politician is able to get every piece of legislation they want passed done. They’re able to shape things exactly how they think it ought to be. All the right laws, all the regulations and rid of all the wrong ones. It can almost entirely be undone in 4 years.
When we try to build our own kingdoms, we will inevitably build a temporary one. No matter our intentions. You die and that kingdom, that power, that glory, dies with you.
It is only in God’s kingdom that the things we do have eternal significance. It is only in God’s kingdom that your labor is not in vain. It is only when your individual life is woven into the bigger tapestry of God’s work that it’s more than us making up our own purpose that dies when we do.
I can’t help but think of Coco, one of my favorite animated movies. The entire movie’s plot turns on the idea that in the afterlife people stop existing altogether when they are no longer remembered by those who are alive—meaning in a very real sense your security rests on 1) you having done something big enough to be remembered and 2) your family remembering you, even generations later.
The good news of the gospel is that when we are united to Jesus by faith and brought into his kingdom, we are never forgotten. And those things that have been done for his glory, in his name—those deeds of love and service of others, even when other’s may forget them, are not forgotten by God.
God sees when you forgive and no one appreciates it. He sees when you give sacrificially and get no benefit from it. He sees when you do the right thing at work, even though cutting corners or doing the wrong thing would earn you money or praise. He sees you, parents, when you’re waist deep in laundry and changing diapers. He sees you, kids, when you treat the kid who doesn't have friends with kindness. He sees you, caretakers, when you are exhausted from pouring yourself out taking care of someone else. He sees you in your sickness and disability when you do not give up but allow yourself to rest. God remembers and keeps you, and you are not forgotten.
And because we have belong to the kingdom of God—a kingdom without end—these deeds are, in a sense, collected by God and rewarded by grace (always by grace!) Which means we can live our lives and do good works not trying to worry that we’re getting enough credit or that people are seeing what we’ve done, but we can entrust that God will not fail to reward that which is done in faith.
That’s just a part of what it means to pray “Yours is the kingdom.” But it’s a big part. To dethrone ourselves (we weren’t really on the throne anyway!) and let the true king reign in our hearts. So that when the rubber meets the road and we enter into the reality of our ordinary lives, we are doing so working and living for something bigger than just ourselves.
Yours is the Power
We’ve prayed a lot of things in the Lord’s Prayer: that God’s name would be hallowed, that his kingdom will come, that we will receive our daily bread, that we will forgive others as we’ve been forgiven, that God will protect us from temptation and the schemes of the Evil One. It’s a daunting list.
And if we’re trying to find the power to do this in ourselves, it’s mission impossible. I can do all of this! Neither can you. Even if we combine all of our strength, there remains a gap between our ability and what we’re praying for. So the question we’re faced with is this: what will we do when we see this gap?
What a lot of people do is try to find a motivation to push them into action. Some will try to make sure they keep the depth of the need in front of them all the time—maybe if they never take their eyes off of the ugliness, then they’ll be motivated enough to really get at it. But trying to do this as motivation and power to live as God’s children in this world is to lay the groundwork for burnout and bitterness.
Some people will try other motivations. I remember years ago being at a leadership conference and hearing a speaker talking about how to be a good leader that cares for those following you. He was widely seen as successful in the corporate world—he even had a TV show called The Profit, where he would invest in and help small business owners.
He was teaching about finding motivation as a leader. How does he as a CEO find the motivation to lead his company in pursuing their vision? And he said his secret was this—every morning he would get up and while he was getting ready for the day, he’d look at himself in the mirror, right in his own eyes, and say SHAME ON YOU. Shame on how you’ve treated people before. Shame on you for when you’ve messed up.”
I remember laughing when he said it, until I realized he wasn’t joking. He was telling the thousands of people listening that his core motivation is shame. And then it hit me—this was a Christian leadership conference, put on not just for pastors, but put on by Christians, bringing in non-Christian leaders to speak and share their wisdom. And this CEO, who is not a Christian, through that this would resonate with his mostly Christian audience. That what he thought he knew was that Christians would agree with him, that shame is a worthy motivator to live a good life. That shame is the Christian’s power.
There’s a big danger for us when we start talking about good works—it’s that we’ll look out to the lives we live, see the great need to that has to be addressed, and try to motivate ourselves by guilt or shame. But I’ve never done a single good thing in my life motivated from a place of guilt or shame and neither have you. Trying to use it as fuel is like trying to run a marathon with sewer water in your water bottle. It’ll destroy you.
All of this is why we end our prayer with “yours is the power.” It’s a recognition that we are poor in spirit, but we are children of he who does not slumber and does not sleep. That we are given the Holy Spirit of God, who empowers us to walk into this broken world without being swallowed up and burned up in the process. Why? Because the Holy Spirit leads us back time and time again to the love of God for us in Christ, and his love is the true motivation that will not eat us up and wear us out.
When we rest on the power of his love, we are banking on the fact that our place in God’s heart is not dependent on our works or our mixed motives. We are recognizing that the most important stuff about who we are is already taken care of and already set, and that there’s nothing left to earn.
At the cross of Jesus our guilt, the source of our shame, was done away with—judged and gutted of it’s power. Meaning we can toss it off like a old jacket that we don’t need any more. And we can walk in the power of God. It’s what Jesus leads us in in teaching us to pray the Lord’s Prayer: learning the type of person we are called to be—and are being lead in wanting to be. IN a very real sense, we become what we pray for.
Yours is the Glory
Glory is a big word. It’s one of the most common words of praise in Scripture—it carries with it the idea of heaviness and importance. For something to be glorified is for it to be lifted up. For a name to glorified is for it to be hallowed and lifted up. Something we pray for earlier in the Lord’s Prayer.
Here we pray again that the glory will be God’s. His is the kingdom that is coming, the only kingdom that will last. His is the power, the only way that his kingdom will arrive. And to him belongs the praise for this. The glory is his.
This is good news for us. We aren't in competition with God over glory. His glory is our good. It’s the source of our greatest delight. Scripture calls humanity the image of God. Image. Meaning that we are made to find our purpose by being turned outward to God, reflecting him like mirrors.
The reality of sin means that we are shattered mirrors—turned away from him and only reflecting God in partial and broken ways. And the redemption that Jesus brings to us is one that turns us back to God and begins piecing those broken parts of the mirror back together.
So we can turn toward our glorious God, and the shining light of his glory be reflected off of us in a way that our hearts long for. And we can pray what Jesus has taught us to pray with confidence: for his named to be hallowed, for his will to be done, for provision and forgiveness and protection—we can pray with confidence because his is the kingdom that is coming, not ours. His is the power in which it will happen, not ours. And to him belongs the glory (which is our good!), forever.
Recently I had the honor to officiate a simple graveside service. The Scripture passage I read beside the grave was Psalm 23, maybe the most well known passage in all the Bible.
“Surely goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” It hit me as I was reflecting on Psalm 23 that that line is what we can say with confidence when we’ve learned to pray “yours is the kingdom, power, and glory.” For to pray this to our God is to also know that God’s goodness and mercy will chase after us no matter where we go, all the days that lay ahead of us.
Because it will. He will.