We pray the Lord’s Prayer anticipating God’s work, but a lot of times His glory and power feels quite distant. Is that the bad news that cancels out the good news that He cares?
Sin makes us sick over and over, yet we keep charging right back to the buffet—unlike food poisoning, which at least teaches us to stay away from the contaminated food. That’s the human struggle Jesus faces head-on when He teaches us to pray “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” in Matthew 6:13.
Reflecting on Jesus's Sacrifice and Celebrating His Love
Over Lent, we have been studying the Lord’s Prayer in a series entitled “Our Prayer.” During Holy Week, we will look at the closing sections of that prayer and see how they give us insight into God’s work that Jesus accomplished for all of us through His death and resurrection.
We often treat sin as a handful of inconsequential debts, so asking God for forgiveness—or forgiving someone else—can feel unnecessary. In Matthew 6:12, Jesus places both debts before us in a single petition: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Do we understand the balance we have run up?
Pastor Tim takes us to the question “Are all people, just as they were lost through Adam, saved through Christ?” from the New City Catechism. What do we need to do to be saved?
Methuselah lived 969 years — longer than anyone else recorded in Scripture. Does that mark success or remind us of failure that creeps around even that long of life?
When something’s keeping you up at night—an unexpected bill, a looming deadline, a need you can’t see your way through—it’s easy to wonder whether those worries are too ordinary to bring to God. Jesus is clear in the next part of the Lord’s Prayer that simply isn’t the case.
