When you know what you're really praying?

When you pray, Thy Kingdom come,

you know what you're really praying?

So move upon the church, oh God, that we reach the unreached tribes, peoples, tongues, and nations that the ransomed might be gathered in, that the sun might

come. When we pray thy kingdom come, what are we asking the Father to do? In this

episode of Light and Truth, John Piper turns to Matthew 6, 5 to 15, to show that the Lord's prayer is a call for God to gather people from every nation into the kingdom of Christ.

This sermon was originally preached at Bethlehem Baptist Church on November 4, 1984.

For 23 years of my life, I always said the Lord's prayer,

hallowed be thy name in the sense of,

hallowed be your name name like praise the Lord that's not right it is a

third person singular imperative asking God to do something.

Namely, see to it, O God, that your name be hallowed.

Do what you have to do in the world

to get your name hallowed. It is a request, not a declaration.

It's like another request. Matthew 938 is a great missionary text and I had never seen it before yesterday

in relation to the Lord's Prayer, but now I see a very close and amazing connection.

That text is a text that says to us farmhands

who work on God's farm and are responsible for gathering his harvest, it says to them,

ask the Lord of the harvest, that is the farm owner, that he would hire more hands and send them into the harvest.

And it always just blows my mind that Jesus would tell me to tell God who knows the harvest, hire more hands so we get this job done.

That just always blows my mind that I should tell God to do that.

But even though it's strange, it's just like what we have in the first petition of the Lord's prayer.

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