Your kingdom come

This, then, is how you should pray …
your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Matthew 6:9,10 NIV

“Your Kingdom come”
Is not a dream of realms beyond the sun,
where angels sing
and all is good, and God’s will’s always done.
No! It’s a call for massive change –
“Your will be done on earth”
Let earth and heaven be rearranged;
Bring righteousness to birth.
It’s not a helpless cry to God
for him to spring to action;
It’s a willing offering of self
for our participation.
So now I say, “Your Kingdom come”
and mean just what I say.
And say the more, “Your will be done –
Lord, start the work in me.”

The kingdom prayer gets to the heart of what God wants us to pray. It gets to the core of everything that we are called to:

What’s the point of evangelism?
- To build the kingdom.
Why should we care for the poor and needy?
- To build the kingdom.
What’s the object of pastoral ministry?
- To build the kingdom.

We could go on asking questions like this and the answer would still be the same, because that’s the destination our faith is leading us to.

When we pray “your kingdom come” let’s pray it in self-commitment. Let’s not dreamily restrict this to a vague concept of something God might do in the future, but as something we are going to help bring about by our actions and our prayers. Jesus told us to pray “your kingdom come” because, inexplicably, in this ultimate project for the redemption of creation, God is depending on us to work with him.

The above article is a complete chapter from the book Still Digging: Scratching the surface and plumbing the depths of prayer. As book chapters go, it’s quite short – but that’s a characteristic of this book. Prayer is a big subject that can partly be taught but must mostly be learnt by experience.

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