Luke 11:1–4

The disciples felt their need of prayer. John taught his disciples to pray, and that stirred them up. They were born of God; but for all that, they lacked power for prayer, their souls were feeble in it. No one prayed like Jesus, and no one depended on His God and Father as He did. No Gospel writer shows this as much as Luke, and so no one shows it in as many different situations.

If Mary suggests feeding upon the word of God at the feet of Jesus, this points to its effect — it leads to prayer. Our Lord's example in this stirs His disciples to ask to be taught to pray.

It is characteristic of the law that, with all its forms, no form of prayer was ever prescribed to the people. When the disciples ask for one, they point to John the Baptist as having taught his disciples, and not to Moses. God's people knew their need and had always expressed it, and of course the Old Testament is full of examples. That makes it all the more striking that the law prescribed nothing of the kind. The law was God's schoolmaster, teaching man his weakness, but it did this by demanding strength from him.

By asking, they admitted that the Lord's ministry had brought a great advance in spiritual teaching. The old forms of prayer no longer gave John's disciples a way to express all they desired. So he had taught them to pray. John's ministry stirred people up and dealt with the conscience. It did not minister grace as the Lord's ministry did, which spoke of the Father. This was a revelation by the Son, never entrusted to John. So old forms of prayer could not fit such fresh truth. In His answer the Lord agreed, and showed that prayer should match the revelation given to us.

They had not learnt the simple confidence in the Father that turns to Him and tells Him everything. They did not understand their place as children of the Father. He stoops to teach them in that condition and gives them this prayer. He teaches them to pray for the things His own heart was taken up with.

In Luke 11 the Lord answered their request, "Lord, teach us to pray," much as He did in Matthew 6, but with slightly different wording and in a shorter form. This prayer comes from the mouth of the Son of God, so it is perfect. Even so, these differences ought to warn us not to make a "fixed form of prayer" out of it. And yet the so-called "Lord's Prayer" has become the most repeated prayer in Christendom.

The Lord next insists on persistence, or perseverance, in prayer, with the blessing attached to earnestness with God. Then He touches on the gift of the Spirit: "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" He gives not merely good things, but the Holy Spirit, the best gift. They were really disciples; they were born of God, yet they still had to pray for the Holy Spirit to be given to them.

Our Lord then directs the disciples to their Father. This is the first and very significant word of the prayer. When believers today address God as Jehovah or Almighty God, do they not forget that they are Christians? People addressed God as Almighty with understanding in the days of Abraham and the patriarchs. They were the days of promise. Later, when God called out the nation of Israel and put it under law, they knew Him as Jehovah-God. Now it is as Father that the Christian knows Him.

It is true that the King James Bible has it in the matching passage of Luke. But everyone who knows this subject well knows there are strong reasons for cutting the clause there back to the single word "Father." My own conviction is that copyists took the longer form in the common text of Luke from Matthew.

It is the Spirit of God who has decided this. He gives an outline that matches the moral character of Luke's Gospel. But it is an outline, not meant for repeating word for word, since it has no closing sentence and no "Amen."

"Name" in Scripture always expresses what God is as revealed. So, joined to the Father, it is the truth of what God is in that relationship. So when we long for His name to be hallowed, we are asking that it be kept holy in us, by us, and by all who have the privilege of calling on God by this precious title. We are asking that there be in us an answering response to His holiness in this relationship.

It is not the kingdom of the Son of Man, the kingdom of Christ, that is spoken of here, but the Father's kingdom. It is not "my kingdom come," but "your kingdom come." The Father's kingdom is the sphere where the heavenly saints will shine like the sun. The Son of Man's kingdom is the sphere where all peoples, nations, and languages will serve Him. Heaven and earth will both come under the Lord Jesus when He comes, and both will make up the kingdom of God. But the Father's kingdom is the upper department, and the Son of Man's kingdom is the lower one.

For this kingdom of the Father we must look past every age of God's dealings to the sabbath rest of God Himself. To confuse it with the millennium would be a complete mistake, and would drag its character far down. The millennium, with all its blessedness, is only a step toward this glorious completion.

How often we put ourselves and our interests first in our prayers. It was not like this that the Lord taught His disciples. He taught them to put God first: to pray that His name might be hallowed, and then to stretch their desires out to the furthest bounds of the earth… Only then, when the heart has reached up to the sacred glory of God's name and has widened to take in every home of man, may we ask for our daily needs.

In a coming day of persecution and distress God's earthly people will cry this prayer from their anguished hearts, but how blessed if we are in the moral good and truth of it now.

Short, yet suggestive! Short, because it packs so much into a few sentences. Suggestive, because it reminds us that God's glory, and what concerns our Father, should have the first place in the heart. At the same time, we are perfectly free to make our wants known as well.

Then comes a petition expressing dependence on God for our ordinary need. "Give us our needed bread for each day." It takes up the pure and simple need of the body. The word "daily" is a very imperfect expression in English of the original term. The Greek word epiousios really means our "sufficient" bread. It seems to be a word made for this very idea, set against having more than we need. If we ask for more than enough, we slight the wisdom of the Lord.

Give us today our sufficient (or, necessary) bread. So the disciples are taught to begin by confessing dependence for ordinary wants, as the apostle called us to be content with food and clothing.

The believing Jews looked simply at the one day, it might be, before them. It was a definite request for the present need... But in Luke the Lord was teaching the Gentile believer — the one who is not a Jew. That believer shows a more constant spirit of dependence: "day by day" is the word. He was never to expect rest or a settled home on earth, as the Jewish believer might. His inheritance lay elsewhere; his portion here was to be always that of a stranger... The word for "give" is the same verb in both Gospels, but its form and force differ a little. In Matthew it implies a single passing act; in Luke it is the continuous habit, which naturally goes with the phrase "day by day."

It is not straining the request for daily bread to make it include a spiritual application too. With the Lord it would be simply impossible, while remembering the need of the body, to forget the immensely greater need of the soul. In both ways the supply must be continual. The manna had to be fresh every morning, and freshly gathered as the morning came: hoarded, it bred worms and went bad.

Often all we think of is having our need met; but how little a thing is that with God! It would cost Him nothing, we may say, to meet the need of a lifetime in a moment. A lesser love than His would supply it all at once and be rid of a constant burden. But that is not His way. To supply the need is a small thing. But He means to supply it in a way that makes us feel, in each supply that comes just in time, that the Father's eye is never turned away from us and the Father's heart is always taken up with us.

"Give us this day our daily bread." Many a believer would almost break his heart if he thought his income would come to an end in twelve months' time. But this prayer means we look to Him as our only resource for today's needs.

This is not a sinner's forgiveness, when he first comes to know the Lord. It is the forgiveness of the disciple living under the daily government of his Father. How misleading, then, to make an unconverted person ask forgiveness as if he were already a child of God! Under the gospel, the unconverted receive forgiveness of sins by faith in the blood of Jesus — by receiving the gospel itself. This passage speaks only of a child's forgiveness: the removal of whatever gets in the way of fellowship with God.

Does God make the forgiveness of an unconverted man depend, in any sort or degree, upon his forgiveness of others? By no means. That would demand a very high standard of conduct from a person in the lowest possible condition... In a word, it would ruin and deny the gospel, which would then be of works and no more grace.

If in Matthew it is said "debts" and in Luke "sins," there is a slight shade of difference that ought not to pass unnoticed. "Sin" says plainly how deep the soul's moral need is. The simplest non-Jew would understand the word "sin." A Jew would feel what a debt was in his responsibility to God. It assumes a known relationship — one he already stood in, and in which he had failed. To those who had never stood in that position, the idea of "debt" was not so clear... "Debt" is more of a picture, though a Jew understood it perfectly.

That means our attitude to others has a serious bearing on ourselves. No doubt this passage looks at forgiveness from the standpoint of God's government. And it is exactly on those lines of government that the matter becomes very serious. Do I forgive? Then I can call upon God to forgive me. Am I hard and unforgiving? I shall reap what I sow.

God counts no sin against us now; it is all put away. But will that make me hard when others fail? No. Seeing that Christ went through agony on the cross for me gives me a sense of my freedom, but not indifference about sin. Instead of hardness, it will give us tenderness and softness of spirit.

The disciples knew their own weakness, so they were right to ask God not to lead them into such severely testing circumstances. No prayer such as "Lead us not into sin" is or could be in the Bible, for that would charge God with moral evil. The temptation here means putting a person fully to the proof. If there is evil in the heart that has never been judged, the test brings it out to his shame.

Whoever knows himself will pray, "Lead us not into temptation." May the grace of God work in us so that Satan need not sift us to strip away our pretensions. When Jesus prayed for Peter, whom He knew to be self-confident, He did not ask that His disciple escape the enemy's sifting, but only that his faith should not fail.

The most ancient copies leave out "Deliver us from evil"... This is not taking anything away from Scripture; it is laying aside what is not Scripture. We still have these words, and rightly, in Matthew: leaving them out here is a gain, not a loss.