But how is it then that we do not find this actually
mentioned as an item of prayer? Or is it mentioned as an item of prayer? Well,
to my mind and to my knowledge, no one has actually ever connected the Lord’s
Prayer with the Beatitudes either. Yet, have you ever noticed how many items
there are in the Lord’s Prayer? Nine items. Coincidence? No. You see, here we
noticed, so far as I know no one has actually connected the fruit of the Spirit
with the Beatitudes. And we saw there is a very intimate and internal
connection between the two. But as I meditated and prayed about this thing I
realized suddenly there was an internal connection - an integral connection -
between the two. But as I meditated and prayed about this thing, I realized
suddenly that there is an internal connection between the Lord’s Prayer and the
Beatitudes, too.
Let us look at the connection. In some of the items, the
connections are so obvious that it is amazing that no one, to my knowledge, has
ever noticed it. For example, it says right there in the middle of the Lord’s
Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread”. Had we understood the meaning, we would
have immediately seen the connection with hungering and thirsting for
righteousness. Yet most people have thought of “daily bread” as the literal
physical bread. Quite a mistake, of course! Those of you who have heard our
exposition on the Lord’s Prayer would remember that we pointed out in that
exposition (made some three years ago) that the bread that the Lord is talking
about is not the physical bread but the bread of heaven. “I am the bread of
life”, the Lord Jesus says. [Jonn 6: 35, 41 & 48] “Labor
not for the bread that perishes but for the bread that endures to eternal
life”, the Lord Jesus says in Jonn 6:27.
Had we understood that point we would already have seen the internal connection
between the Beatitudes with the Lord’s Prayer but we did not.
Take the last two which are so obvious. “Lead us not into
temptation, but deliver us from evil.” What are the last two Beatitudes? The
last two are precisely concerned with persecution for righteousness’ sake
(which is where temptation comes from) and the last beatitude says, “And they
shall say all manner of evil....” “Deliver us from evil....” There we would
have seen the connection straightaway. But amazingly so far as I know no
expositor that I have heard of has ever seen the connection and yet the
connection seems to be staring at us all the time. This is precisely the point.
The Lord Jesus makes the Beatitudes the subject for prayer there in what we
call the Lord’s Prayer. It is the subject of prayer.
1) ADDRESSING HIM,
“OUR FATHER” AND BEING POOR IN SPIRIT
Let us trace the connection on the points which seem to be
less obvious. The first item says: “Our Father who art in heaven”. Our Father
in heaven - do you see the connection with being poor in spirit? If you were
somewhat more familiar with the Lord’s teaching, the connection would have
clicked very quickly. How? Take for example Matthewkingdom of God
Children are people who have no status in this world. They
are nobodies. “Unless,” the Lord said to His disciples, “you humble yourself
and become the nobodies of this world” (like these little kids running around
there that nobody looks at, nobody has any regard for because they are
nobodies. They have achieved nothing; they have attained nothing), “unless you
become like them, you will in no way enter the kingdom
of God
How is it that we missed the connection between the
Beatitudes and the Lord’s Prayer? “Our Father”! I think nobody can truly say
“Our Father” except the person who is truly poor in spirit, who has become a
child spiritually, a child in his spirit. In relation to God, he is simply a
child dependent upon Him. What does your child do? If you do not go out and
work, your child will starve to death because you child cannot earn a living.
Your child has not the strength nor the knowledge nor the understanding to do
anything. He cannot survive in this world. The child depends on the father so
long as he is a child. That is where we stand in relation to God. We become His
children. We have no spiritual self-confidence. We do not try to earn our
salvation any more than a child can earn his living. He will starve to death.
My little girl often talks to me and I would ask her, “What
would you do when you grow up?” Well, it is hard enough to think what job she
could do at this stage. She cannot even sweep the floor properly. What can you
do? What are you going to do to earn a living? A child has no means of survival
in this world apart from the pity and compassion of grownups, especially the
parents. There is no way to survive. In the same way we cannot survive
spiritually. We are totally dependent upon God for our spiritual survival.
Totally dependent! We have no other way. So only when we recognize our
dependence [can we call Him Father]. Sometimes a child does not even realize
his dependence. He thinks, “I can do it!” Just let him go ahead and try. You
will see what he will do. He cannot do it and yet sometimes the child imagines
it can. So when we realize our true state, our actual condition, and we become
poor in spirit before God, then and only then can we say, “Our Father, who is
in heaven....” The connection is so obvious, isn’t it? But obvious only when it
is expounded. So now what about the other points? All the other points follow
in the same way. In fact I can trace the connection through to so many places
but our time will not avail for this.
I can show you, for example, that the Beatitudes can be
found everywhere in Paul’s teaching. Paul’s teaching is simply saturated with every
item of the Beatitudes which shows how much the Beatitudes were in Paul’s
thinking. In fact his whole doctrine of salvation is based exactly on this
basis of poverty of spirit - that we cannot save ourselves through the keeping
of the law and through our own efforts, that we, like children, are completely
dependent upon God. It is the Spirit of God (Paul says) that is sent into our
hearts that enables us in our poverty of spirit to cry out, “Abba! Father!” [Galatians 4:6]
This is the whole foundation of Paul’s theology. It is all based right there.
Paul understood the Lord’s teaching so well and so perfectly. Everywhere, item
by item of the Beatitudes, you will find throughout Paul’s teaching. In fact
you can find it even in just one letter - in Paul’s biographical letter,
Philippians, the letter that I call the biographical letter. You can find every
item of the Beatitudes right in there. For example he speaks about having
suffered the loss of all things. When you have suffered the loss of all things,
you are poor. Paul counts them as rubbish. There is the poverty of spirit! He
regards all these things as not dear to himself that he may have Christ.
2) HALLOWING HIS NAME
AND BEING PURE IN HEART
Well, let us look at the second connection. Here I notice a
transposition, a change of order, and this is quite important. The second item
here is holy, “Hallowed be Thy name.” When I compared this to the Beatitudes, I
found that the only one that is likely to fit in with it is the item “pure in
heart”. Who is pure in heart but he who seeks to hallow God’s name, to make
God’s name holy both in my life and in the life of others, that God’s name is
exalted and glorified. The pure in heart! Now we will see a reason for this.
This is the only one of the later items in the Lord’s Prayer in which you find
this kind of transference: the sixth item (“pure in heart”) being transposed to
the first item of petition. That is very interesting. But you can see immediately
how “Blessed are the pure in heart” and “holy be your name” are internally
connected. That is very easy to see and requires no great exposition.
3) “YOUR KINGDOM
COME” AND “BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO MOURN”
Or take the next item, “Your kingdom come”. Again if you are
at all familiar with the scriptural teaching of the OT you will see how it
coincides immediately with those who mourn. Who are those who desire God’s
kingdom to come but those who mourn because of the present state of sin in the
world, who mourn because of sin in their own life, who mourn because of sin in
the church, who mourn because of sin generally. They long for “Thy kingdom
come”. If you do not mourn for sin, you cannot say from your heart, “Your
kingdom come” because you are very satisfied with things as they are. Sin does
not disturb you; it does not bother you. I do not see many Christians very
anxious that God’s kingdom should come, that the Lord Jesus should come again,
because I do not see that much concern for righteousness, for holiness. I do
not see that much grief over sin. I do not really see it. If we grieved so
intensely about sin, we would constantly be longing: “Your kingdom come”, your
salvation come, deliver us from this sin, this bondage of sin that we are in.
As Paul says, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of
death?” [Romans 7:24] Who shall deliver me? He knows of his sin. “Wretched man that I am!”
he says in Romans
7. And then he looks forward to God’s salvation, to the coming of God’s
kingdom: “Thanks be to God”. Christ will give us the victory. He longs with
earnest expectation, with outstretched neck for the coming of God’s kingdom.
That is what the Greek word means. “Thy kingdom come”. Paul longs for the
kingdom because he mourns over sin. He speaks of himself as wretched man - he
in this body is still under bondage to sin.
There the connection is clear. If you go into the OT, it is
equally clear. In Psalm 80:5 the psalmist speaks of tears, mourning over
sin. In v.2 he says, “Come to me! Oh, God! Save me! Let your salvation come!
Come and save us!” Or in Psalm 6:6&7 we see the same thing. We read of the mourning and
weeping over sin, of grief over sin. In v.4 we find there:
“Turn, O Lord”, and save us. Turn and save us. Turn back.
Come back to me. Save me. This longing for God to come. For the coming of the kingdom
of God
4) “THY WILL BE DONE”
AND “BLESSED ARE THE MEEK”
The next passage as we press forward is, “Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.” “Your will be done on earth” - who speaks of this
kind of a prayer but the meek? The meek shall inherit what? The earth. Your
will be done on earth as in heaven. In both cases you have there the word
‘earth’. Very interesting! Who desires that God’s will be done? Who says “Your
will be done” but the meek? The meek are those who desire God’s will to be
done. “Not my will, O Lord, but yours be done.” That is the language of the
meek. It is the proud who says, “My will be done. I want it this way.” The meek
says, “Thy will be done! As perfectly as it is done in heaven, so let Your will
be completely done on earth.”
5) "GIVEN US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD" AND "HUNGERING FOR RIGHTEOUSNESS"
The next parallel is already so obvious. “Give us this day
our daily bread.” Who would pray such a prayer but those who hunger and thirst
for righteousness? They are the ones who hunger for the bread of life. For
where is righteousness but in the bread of life? Everywhere the connection is
so obvious.
6) “FORGIVE US OUR
SINS” AND “BLESSED ARE THE MERCIFUL”
Notice the connection in the next item: “Forgive us our
sins.” Who are those who long for that forgiveness? Those who have their sins
forgiven! They are the merciful. In fact in the Lord’s teaching, mercy and
forgiveness of sins are parallel in meaning. What does it mean to be merciful?
It is to forgive sins. Why do we forgive sin? Because we ourselves have been
forgiven. The connection between mercy and forgiveness, the Lord Jesus has made
explicit in Matthew 18:32&33. In v.33
it speaks of having mercy and in v.32 it speaks of forgiveness. Mercy and
forgiveness are identical terms in the Lord’s teaching.
7) “AS WE FORGIVE”
AND “BLESSED ARE THE PEACEMAKERS”
Look at the next one in the same way. “As we forgive those
who trespass against us”. Who speaks such language but peacemakers? Only those
who desire peace, who make peace, readily forgive the offense against them. It
is the attitude of a peacemaker that he does not hold offense against you, that
does not bear a grudge. If you bear a grudge, if you refuse to forgive, how can
you be a peacemaker? A peacemaker is one who does not hold another person’s sin
against him. A peacemaker is one who immediately seeks a reconciliation. He
does not say, “We are not on speaking terms anymore. Forget it! If you say you
are a Christian, forget it. I am not talking to the likes of you again.” The
peacemaker is one who says, “Okay, okay. There is an offense against me but I
hold this not against you.” Freely forgive! In Ephessians 4:32 Paul
says, “as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you” [KJV], so you forgive one
another. Forgive one another! A peacemaker is the one who freely forgives
because he himself has been forgiven too. So you find there is an inseparable
connection between the merciful and the peacemaker. No wonder they follow each
other closely.
8) “LEAD US NOT INTO
TEMPTATION” AND “BLESSED ARE THE PERSECUTED”
Let us come to the eighth item: “lead us not into
temptation”. As we have already seen, there the connections are so obvious that
it hardly requires any kind of exposition. “Lead us not....” When do we face
the most severe temptation? Certainly under persecution for those who have
turned away from sin. Have you not often thought to yourself, “Will I be able
to survive under persecution?” Even those of you who are training in the Lord’s
work, how many times have you thought to yourself, “What would happen if I am
severely persecuted for the faith? Would I survive this test, this trial, this
temptation?” As you know, in Greek, the words ‘trial’ and ‘temptation’ are the
same word. There is no distinction in meaning. “Lead us not into temptation”.
Would I be able to survive it? By God’s grace!
But then here also we do not put ourselves in a position of
temptation. We do not seek temptation. Even though we love God, we do not go
and look for it. The prayer is a caution against looking for trouble. There is
enough trouble coming to you without your going to look for it. It reminds us
of early Christians. Some of them, in their untutored zeal, went and tempted
the Tempter. They looked for trouble. When the Roman emperor gave an edict of
persecution against Christians (as you know from church history, i.e., those of
you who have read some church history), the governor found a whole crowd of
Christians in front of his office saying, “Here I am.” The emperor had said
that Christians are to be persecuted. [So this group said,] “We are Christians.
Get on with it!” Do not look for trouble! “Lead us not into temptation.” He
will not lead us and you do not go and look for it. But temptations and trials
will come. And above all, of course, the greatest concern is the concern of the
temptation, the supreme temptation of apostasy, which we face under pressure.
That is, above all things, what we seek to be delivered from.
9) “DELIVER US FROM
EVIL” AND “BLESSED ARE YOU WHEN REVILED AND PERSECUTED”
Notice then also the last item in the Lord’s Prayer which is
so clear, so plain to us. What does the last beatitude say? Read the words very
carefully. “Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all
kinds of evil against you falsely on my own account” (notice the word evil against
you falsely) and “deliver us from evil.” That is exactly what we pray for -
“deliver us from evil.” There the internal connection is so obvious that it
hardly requires exposition.
THE LORD’S PRAYER
DRAWS OUT THE INTERNAL ESSENCE OF THE BEATITUDES
I would like you to bear in mind then that the Lord in His
supreme wisdom has shown us what He has done. He has taken the Beatitudes right
there, at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, and turned it into a
subject for prayer and yet turned it in such a way as to draw out the internal
essence of it. Oh, the Lord’s teaching is so supreme in its wonder, in the
beauty of its construction, in the depth of spiritual quality and insight. Can
you see now the connection? Do you now know what you are doing when you pray
the Lord’s Prayer? You are simply praying, in fact, the content of the
Beatitudes. I trust you will never again pray the Lord’s Prayer without
realizing what it is you are saying. When you say “Our Father”, you are
praying, “Lord, make me to be poor in spirit.” On the other hand, if you are
not poor in spirit, you cannot pray meaningfully the words “Our Father”. You
are not rightly using those words. You are using them without understanding and
you are just using the words in vain. You now realize how you should pray the
Lord’s Prayer. You pray the Lord’s Prayer in an attitude of poverty of spirit.
You realize what kind of people can say “Our Father”. Only the people who are
poor in spirit can rightfully say, “Our Father who art in heaven”. Then you
realize you need to be pure in heart in order to be able to truly say “hallowed
be Your name”, because if you are not pure in heart and you say, “hallowed be
Your name”, you are simply being hypocritical. You are being a hypocrite. How
can you say, “hallowed be Your name” when you are impure in heart? I shudder to
think of all these people who mumble [the Lord’s Prayer] every day, and in many
church services they finish the service by saying, “Our Father”. They do not
even know what they are saying. Do we know what we are saying?
I was brought up in a Roman Catholic school. One of the
first prayers I ever learned is “Our Father which art in heaven” and I did not
even know what I was saying. Everyday I knelt on my bed [and prayed this] until
the time when I finally finished with Christianity and no longer prayed and no
longer thought about church and Christians. Many years later the Lord brought
me back again and brought me into His eternal kingdom. Yet in that Catholic
school, like all other children, you simply repeat what you are told. I simply
knelt on my bed and said, “Our Father which art in heaven”, and mumbled and
mumbled. I would think, “That is a bit too fast.” So, I thought I had better go
through it a second time. So, I mumbled another “Our Father....” It is pathetic
to think that there are people in the churches today who use a rosary to count
how many times they say, “Our Father.” In fact, sometimes if you go to a priest
to confess your sins, the priest will say to you, “Okay, seeing that you have
confessed your sins, I pronounce on you absolution, but you will say 20 “Our
Fathers”. So the fellow goes there and he kneels down and says, “Our
Father...”. The faster you go, the quicker you get it over with.” (You press
one bead in the rosary and then the next one to keep count how many times you
have said it.) It is absolutely revolting! It is simply terrible that people
should be made to do things that they do not even know what they are doing. We
must pray these things if we are to pray rightly at all, only with the understanding
of the Beatitudes in our heart, i.e., only if we rightly understand what it is
we are doing.
PURITY OF HEART - A
MATTER OF SURVIVAL!
Finally I mentioned also that there is one significant
change in the order [of the Beatitudes]. So far only one change in the order
and that is, “Blessed are the pure in heart.” The sixth beatitude is moved
forward to become the first petition after “Our Father”. This is very
important. The Danish theologian-philosopher, Søren Kirkegaard wrote the book
with the title: Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing. He was quite right! He
rightly understood the Lord’s teaching on that point. Purity of heart means you
do not serve two masters. You do not serve God and mammon. Purity of heart is
that you will one thing, that is, you serve only God with your whole heart,
your whole being. Purity of heart means there is no impurity in it. There is no
other interest, no other master being served. You serve God and Him alone. It
is remarkable that this particular beatitude is moved forward. There is
certainly no coincidence that in the Lord’s Prayer it is moved forward. This
purity of heart is the single most important thing we must pray for in order to
remain faithful to God. In the next item of the Lord’s teaching, you will see
it becomes the matter of spiritual survival. That is very important in the
Lord’s Prayer - spiritual progress, but first spiritual survival. So from now
on I trust that you will be able to pray the Lord’s Prayer meaningfully, and
not just to repeat that prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer, as we mentioned when we were expounding
it, is a model prayer. That is to say that the Lord did not say, “Just repeat
these words”, but rather, “Make it the subject of your prayer, make it a
pattern for prayer. Model your prayer upon this model prayer.” That is, when
you pray other prayers, you make this, as it were, a starting point, a focal
point for each item of your prayer. And each time you go through the Lord’s
Prayer, you will have covered every beatitude. That truly is wonderful. May God
truly enable us to truly enter into the spirit of the Lord’s Prayer by
understanding ever more deeply and ever more clearly the Beatitudes. Keep
meditating on it. And as I said right at the beginning, make the Beatitudes an
item for prayer just as the Lord taught us to do in what we call the Lord’s
Prayer.
Written by Eric Chang: http://www.christiandc.org/content/10-beatitudes-and-lords-prayer
Edited by Bruce Lyon: thefaithofjesus.blogspot.com
Edited by Bruce Lyon: thefaithofjesus.blogspot.com
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