Devotional article for The Greybull Standard
and The Republican Rustler
The Promise of the Prayer
For our Lenten services this year at Grace we have been meditating on the sufferings of our Lord Jesus. We do that every year for Lent, as is the ancient practice of the Church of Christ.
We have also meditated on the prayer He taught His Christians to pray, and what our Catechism teaches about it. For it is also an old Lutheran practice to use weekday services during the Season up to Easter to meditate on the Catechism, that is: the basic teachings of the faith.
From meditating upon the Passion of the Christ in comparison to the prayer He taught His Christians, two realisations arises: First, that it is only because of what He suffered for us that we are in any way entitled to pray as He taught His Christians to pray. And secondly, that the prayer He taught His Christians to pray proclaims His salvation to us.
It is only because He has suffered for us that we can call upon God as Father; only because the Son of God has taken our sin upon Himself and paid the price and penalty have we been made to be children of God. By nature we are children of wrath, as the holy Apostle Paul writes it, and under judgement and damnation with God, who hates all evil and ungodliness. But the Son of God was baptised into us to take our sin upon Himself, and bear it for us. And being baptised into Him we are born anew, of water and the Spirit, as beloved children of God and heirs to His heavenly Kingdom.
And being that we are now His beloved children, it is God’s will to give us all things good, out of His goodness and love. And this means that we are set free from any need to earn anything with Him by our own goodness and godliness. Our prayer is not a struggle to convince Him that we should have this or that; rather, what our Lord Jesus has taught us to pray for is what God has already resolved that He will give us.
The prayer our Lord Jesus taught us teaches us that all things good are from God. He gives His Kingdom and His eternal life to us. And He Himself keeps us in the faith until His Son will come in glory to judge the living and the dead, and we shall be with Him forever. This is His promise – and the prayer He taught us.
Pastor Jais H. Tinglund
Grace Lutheran Church, Greybull/Zion Lutheran Church, Emblem