The Lord’s Prayer. Make it your prayer.

When it comes to talking with God, Christians get tongue-tied. We don’t know what to say to him! And if we follow the examples of our fellow Christians, we’re gonna get weird about him. We’ll only address him formally, or think we’re only allowed to ask for certain things—or imagine God already predetermined everything, so there’s no point in asking for anything at all.

The people of Jesus’s day had all these same hangups, which is why his students asked him how to pray, Lk 11.1 and he responded with what we Christians call the Paternoster or Our Father (after its first two words—whether Latin or English), or the Lord’s Prayer. The gospels have two versions of it, in Matthew 6.9-13 and Luke 11.2-4. But the version most English-speaking Christians are most familiar with, actually comes from neither gospel. Comes from the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer, which is based on an ancient new-Christian instruction manual called the Didache. Goes like so.

Our Father, who art in heaven,

hallowed be thy name,

thy kingdom come,

thy will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive those who trespass against us.

And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,

for ever and ever. Amen.

The last two lines don’t come from the gospels, but from an idea in Daniel–

Daniel 7.14 KJV

And there was given him dominion, and glory, and a kingdom, that all people, nations, and languages, should serve him: his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom that which shall not be destroyed.

Swap “dominion” for “power,” mix ’em up appropriately, and tack ’em to Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. The editors of the Textus Receptus liked the Didache version so much, they inserted it back into Matthew, and that’s why the King James Version has “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” Mt 6.13 KJV Nope, it’s not what Matthew originally wrote. But relax; the idea does come from the bible.

Bad theology: When it’s not based on revelation.

The starting point of theology is revelation, the stuff God reveals to us.

Problem is, not everybody agrees. They think the starting point is us: We have questions about God, the universe, whether we can have a relationship with God (or at least get stuff out of him), death and the afterlife, good and evil and karma, and salvation. And people figure theology is when we seek answers to these questions, and get wise-sounding answers from the smartest gurus. Or even become a guru ourselves, ’cause guruing doesn’t look all that hard.

Yep, even Christians do it. Years ago, at another church, my pastors began to invite a lot of clever guest speakers to come preach to us. These guys would regularly tell us what they think they’ve figured out about God. Some ideas were based on actual personal experiences with God—which I’m not knocking, but I wanna remind you our God-experiences need to be confirmed long before we start developing ’em into theology. These guys were not so scrupulous. They felt these God-experiences were so profound, so emotional, they didn’t bother to ask the usual questions we oughta pose when such things happen. “God showed me,” they figured; they believed it, and that settles it.

Me, I know enough bible to seriously doubt God showed them a thing.

Problem is, most Christians don’t. And when they have their own God-experiences, they do the same thing as these preachers: They never have ’em properly confirmed. They’re so sure their personal insights are revelations; they certainly feel like revelations! And when someone else stands up, claims to have an insight, and present ’em with something which feels right to them… well, they had religion questions, here’s someone who purports to have answers, and the answers sound like stuff they oughta believe. Stuff they wanna believe. So they do.

But is this because the Holy Spirit tells ’em, “Yep, that came from me,” or because their flesh tells ’em, “Oh that sounds so much easier than holiness”? And should we really trust our inner impulses, urges, and desires when it comes to theological ideas? Most of us are pretty darned selfish, and that’s the deciding factor in our lives, not the Spirit. That’s what makes us feel these ideas are correct, not a lifestyle of actively following Jesus. We might imagine it’s the Spirit, but we still don’t know the difference between him, and the way the surprise ending of a clever mystery novel makes us feel.

So that’s how we practice bad theology: We’re not getting it from revelation, and therefore not getting it from God.

Do you know your bible quotes?

Generally if you’re gonna call yourself biblically literate, you oughta at least know these quotes from the bible. Probably already do; you just didn’t realize they were from the bible.

ALL HAVE SINNED AND FALL SHORT OF THE GLORY OF GOD. Or “come short” in the KJV. Comes from Romans 3.23, and means nobody measures up to God’s reasonable standard of perfection. But God graciously forgives us and grants eternal life. Ro 6.23

ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE. Or “all men” (KJV): Paul’s claim he adapted his circumstances so he can find common ground with everyone, and share Christ with them. 1Co 9.22 Y’know, “when in Rome.” Certain Christians are quick to point out Paul didn’t compromise his beliefs or behavior in so doing.

ALL THINGS WORK TOGETHER FOR GOOD. In context, “to them that love God, to them who are called according to his purpose.” Ro 8.28 Various Christians pull it out of context and claim everything always turns out for the best. I remind ’em to read Ecclesiastes sometime.

ALL WE, LIKE SHEEP, HAVE GONE ASTRAY. Isaiah’s warning to his people: They turned away from God, like sheep who disregard their shepherd. Is 53.6

AM I MY BROTHER’S KEEPER? Cain’s excuse to God for not knowing where Abel was, Ge 4.9 though in fact he just murdered him. The phrase gets used to claim we’re not responsible for one other. In reality we often are.

ASK AND IT’LL BE GIVEN YOU. Jesus’s teaching that the Father wants to give good gifts to his kids. Mt 7.7

BE FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLY. God’s directives to the animals after he first created them. Ge 1.22 Including to the first humans. Ge 1.28

BE SURE YOUR SIN WILL FIND YOU OUT. Moses’s warning to two Israeli tribes who promised they’d fight the Amorites alongside the other 11; that if they broke their promise they’d get caught. Nu 32.23 Christians sometimes use this verse to claim every sin eventually gets found out. And many do… and some don’t.

BEAT THEIR SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES. A prophecy about future peace—or not—found in multiple books of the prophets. Is 2.4, Mc 4.3, Jl 3.10

Don’t let God’s foreknowledge weird you out about prayer!

Matthew 6.8.

Jesus instructs his followers to not pad our prayers, to not stretch ’em out like pagans who think God won’t take ’em seriously unless they pray for a really long time. And then, in his Sermon on the Mount, he drops this comment about why it’s unnecessary: God’s foreknowledge.

Matthew 6.8 KWL

“So you ought not be like them!

For your Father knew what need you have

before your asking of him.”

In the New Testament, foreknow is our usual translation of the verb προγινώσκω/pro-yinósko, “pre-know.” Ro 8.29, 11.2 Paul used it to describe how God knows something before it happens. It doesn’t say how he knows it’ll happen, which is why Christians have largely come up with two theories about it:

• Determinists claim it’s because God decreed this stuff will happen. The universe is all irresistibly going according to his plan, and that’s the future he planned.
• The rest of us figure God is omnipresent—he exists at every point in space and time; there’s no place nor time where he’s not—so he knows the future because he’s at the future, observing it right now.

I figure the scriptures are the most consistent with omnipresence, so that’s how I describe God.

Various Christians incorrectly describe God as outside time, looking down upon it all at once. They got the idea from St. Augustine of Hippo, who most likely borrowed it from how Plato of Athens described his pagan gods. But that’d make God not omnipresent: He wouldn’t be everywhere within space and time, but somewhere else. So that’d be wrong. Space and time are the same thing anyway: God’s inside time and fills time, same as he does space. He’s here, aware of what’s going on. And 20 years ago, still here, still aware. And 20 years from now, still here, still aware. Simultaneously.

That’s a mind-bending idea to us Christians. Even us Christians who love to watch science fiction TV and movies where they monkey with time travel for fun and adventure. We’re time-based creatures, so we only experience now, the moving present instant. And even when we’re consciously aware, paying attention to now… we actually aren’t. ’Cause in the split second of time our senses require to take in the world around us, and our brains require to process it, and attach emotions and ideas and values to it… that instant is over. It’s past. We’re reacting to a memory. We move through time just that quick.

Whereas God doesn’t move. He’s still in that moment. And in every moment we also consider “now,” whenever we perceive it: The moment I write this, or the moment you read it. And all the moments before, and all the moments to come. Forever, in both directions.

That’s how God foreknows the future. From our human viewpoint the future doesn’t yet exist; from God’s, he’s looking right at it, and it’s a certainty to him. Because of this, we Christians can be confident everything God says about the future is guaranteed. He’s not making the universe’s greatest-educated guess; he’s not describing stuff that doesn’t exist to him either, but he has the almighty power to unstoppably make it happen, like the determinists and Open Theists insist. God’s speaking from experience—or to coin a word, foresperience. He foresees it, so he foreknows it. It’s real. Well, fore-real.

So we can confidently put our hope in God. Jesus is returning. We are getting raised from the dead. All things are gonna be made new. We are gonna inherit his kingdom. None of this is hypothetical. God’s already there.

And this is why Jesus can say his Father knows our needs before we ask. It’s not just because he’s always been able to read our hearts, so he knows our needs and desires before we request ’em. It’s also because he foresaw us praying for them. And in many cases, he’s answered them before we requested ’em.

The meaningless lifestyle of heritage.

1 Peter 1.17-21.

One of the odd things about Christianity is we’re meant to follow Jesus… but nearly every Christian, and nearly all our churches, act like we’re meant to follow Christian tradition.

I’m not knocking Christian tradition… well okay, I’m not knocking certain Christian traditions. There’s a whole lot of good stuff we’ve been given by previous generations of devout followers of Jesus. They made an effort to get to know our Lord, taught a lot of useful lessons, and gave us a lot of practical stuff we can use so we can get to know our Lord. Why reinvent the wheel when we pretty much have a forest of wheels available?

But of course too many Christians would have us fixate on the stuff instead of Jesus himself. Because we can manipulate the stuff. But Jesus doesn’t bend.

The ancients had a similar problem: Lots of traditions they inherited from their forebears. You had Pharisees, the devout Jews who established synagogues wherever they could throughout the Roman Empire—which the apostles regularly visited so they could tell the Jews about their Messiah, Jesus, and how his kingdom has come near. You also had Greco-Roman pagans (or in Africa, Greco-Egyptian pagans) who had their own national myths, which claimed they were a great people with great gods, and you’d better follow those gods lest they be displeased.

You have all these people-groups with all these great heritages. And Jesus disrupts all of that, and tells us nope; now we’re his people. Ditch that ethnic pride; his kingdom is multiethnic and excludes no one. Ditch that “noble history” …which, let’s be honest, consists of a lot of fabrications, mythology, and whitewashing. (True, the Old Testament tells ancient Israel’s story, warts ’n all, but if you ever read Flavius Josephus’s Antiquities, you can see a bunch of that whitewashing right there. Every ancient culture did that. And if you read any grade-school American history textbook, you’ll see we totally do it too.)

Simon Peter calls all that stuff ματαίας/mataías, “empty, profitless, meaningless.” That’s what the ancient Christians left behind. Rightly so! We’re not trying to establish a new great people, a mighty Christian nation, which needs its own traditions and myths and heritage. We point to Jesus. We just live out our lives as best we can, scattered throughout the kingdoms of this world like Diaspora Jews, and let him worry about empire-building. We just follow him.

And we beware anyone who tries to establish any “Christian kingdom” in which Jesus is not physically standing upon the earth to rule it himself.

1 Peter 1.17-21 KWL

17And if you call upon the Father,

who impartially judges each person by their work,

behave yourselves with reverent fear

during the time of your sojourn—

18knowing it’s not the perishable,

not silver nor gold,

by which you were ransomed

from your meaningless lifestyle of “heritage,”

19but precious blood,

like an unblemished lamb;

and spotless Christ.

20Foreknown even before the world’s founding,

and made known in the last times

because of you—

21because of believers in God,

who raised Jesus from the dead

and gives him glory

so your belief and hope are to be in God.

Pan-millennialists: “It’ll all pan out in the End.”

Back in seminary, the school catalog listed an End Times class. I was really interested in taking it—for the obvious reason that I wanted to understand the End Times apocalypses better.

But in the three years I spent there, none of the professors ever bothered to teach it. So I had to research it myself. Borrowed a big pile of books from a guy in my church who’d gone to a different seminary—books which, thankfully, didn’t only come from one End Times worldview. Too many people who “study” the End Times are happy to buy every Hal Lindsey book, read nothing else (including the book of Revelation!), and consider themselves an expert.

Years later I discovered why the professors avoided that End Times class: I taught a Sunday school class at my church on the book of Revelation. Good Lord. It was like herding cats. Nobody wanted to study the text! They just wanted to talk about what they were “discerning” in the present-day news: This or that was happening in global politics, and it’s a sign of the times! Most had grown up reading the Hal Lindsey stuff, and simply could not bring themselves to stop quoting his theories about how the End Times timeline would unfold. I ended the class after we finally got through Jesus’s letters to the seven churches; Rv 2-3 I was so tired of listening to the small group’s members interrupting to talk about crackpottery.

Hey, End Times stuff provokes people! Especially fearful people, who are terrified the great tribulation is gonna get activated by their political opponents, and force ’em into building an End Times bunker and hiding. Not all of ’em fully trust that Jesus will rapture them before tribulation starts. (Nor should they.) So they listen to the most worried prognostications of popular End Times “prophecy scholars” so they can be prepared for every eventuality. Knowledge is power, right?

But then there are the people who don’t wanna study this stuff.

Who roll their eyes every time End Times passages get quoted or referenced or alluded to. Who intentionally skip church services when they find out the preacher’s gonna talk about Revelation or the back half of Daniel. Who think Hal Lindsey’s a fearmongering charlatan. (And not just because Hal Lindsey was very much a fearmongering charlatan.)

Ask these people whether the Christian Era is gonna end and Jesus is gonna return, and for the most part they’re gonna say yes. Because he is; it’s orthodox, credal Christianity to believe so, and they’re not heretics. They do believe Jesus is returning for the living and the dead. It’s just… whenever Christians discuss the End Times, fearful Christians take over the discussion, exactly like they took over my Revelation class, and suck all the joy and hope and grace out of it with their paranoia and revenge fantasies. They make it suck.

So what do these people believe about the End? Well they accept God’s in control… so it’ll all pan out.

More than one of them have jokingly told me they’re “pan-millennialists” for this reason. The End will happen when it happens, however it happens. Till it does, they’re not gonna fret about it. Some of ’em like to quote Jesus on the subject:

Acts 1.6-7 CSB

6So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, are you restoring the kingdom to Israel at this time?”

7He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.”

Jesus’s apostles figured now that Jesus had returned from the dead, it’s time for the End, right? Everybody gets resurrected at the End, and Jesus is the first person to get resurrected, so it’s the End, isn’t it? Messiah would free Israel from the Romans and take over the world, so it’s the millennium, right?

And Jesus’s response was, “You don’t need to know when that’ll happen,” then get raptured. Ac 1.9 He’s coming back, Ac 1.11 but still: You don’t need to know when that’ll happen.

So these folks don’t worry about it. The End will come when God decides it’s time. The End will unfold however God unfolds it. We needn’t panic, worry, agitate, or flinch at “signs of the times.” We just need to keep following Jesus.

Do not pad your prayers.

Matthew 6.7-8.

Right after Jesus taught his followers, in his Sermon on the Mount, to keep our prayers private, he added,

Matthew 6.7-8 KWL

7“You who pray, ought not babble like the pagans,

for they think they will be listened to

because of their many words.

8So you ought not be like them!

For your Father knew what need you have

before your asking of him.”

“Babble” comes from the verb βαττολογέω/vattoloyéo, “to stammer [one’s] words.” It’s about padding one’s prayers by repeating ourselves too much.

I didn’t grow up Pentecostal; I became one as an adult. The first time I ever heard a Pentecostal pray, I was a teenager, and was not at all used to the way most of us pray. I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” ’Cause a whole lot of us have the embarrassingly bad habit of babbling.

Father God, LORD God, we thank you Lord Jesus, we thank you. Oh Abba Father, we just wanna thank you LORD God, and praise your name LORD God, because LORD God, Lord Jesus, your name is great LORD God Abba Father praise Jesus. Oh Lord God…

And so on. Most people when they’re at a loss for words, stammer a filler word like “uh” or “um.” We Pentecostals swapped that out for a “LORD God” or three. So let’s see… that’s eight LORD/Lords, seven Gods, three Fathers, three Jesuses, and two Abbas; and we haven’t even got to the request yet.

Yes this is what Jesus is talking about. I’ve heard plenty of Pentecostals try to claim it really isn’t; that Jesus is actually talking about hypocrisy. There’s a myth Ovid recorded in his Metamorphoses about the god Hermes and an old man named Váttos; Hermes swore him to secrecy, then approached him later in disguise and offered him a bribe to spill the secret. When Váttos ratted Hermes out, Hermes turned him into a rock. That’s a clear example of hypocrisy, isn’t it?

But we don’t derive the meaning of the Greek word βάττος/váttos from this myth; we get it from Hesychius of Alexandria and others, who say it means stammerer. Jesus is talking about stammering. If he meant hypocrisy he’d have said hypocrisy; Jesus is never shy about condemning hypocrisy!

The lesson therefore is do not pad your prayers. Get to the point. Jesus demonstrates in the very next passage with the Lord’s Prayer, which is not a long prayer, not a padded prayer, and gets to the point! Whereas we think, like the ancient pagans mistakenly did, that short prayers are not serious prayers; we gotta make ’em longer. And we do not. Jesus showed us we do not. Follow Jesus.