Matthew 6:10

There are six petitions. The first three have to do with God; His name, His kingdom, His will. The second three have to do with us; our bread, our debts, our deliverance. The heavenly Father and His claims must be first, and our needs second. The blessing of men on earth depends upon His will being done on earth, and that will only come to pass when His kingdom is established.

"Your kingdom come." It is not exactly Christ's kingdom, but the Father's. Read Matthew's Gospel with care, and you see the Father's kingdom marked off in Scripture from the kingdom of the Son of Man. So in Matthew 13:41-43 the Son of Man sends out His angels. They gather out of His kingdom everything that causes sin and all law-breakers… then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. At the end of this age the Lord will take the world as His kingdom, and must have evil purged from it, sooner or later, by His judicial power. But the Father's kingdom is another and heavenly sphere where only the righteous shine.

But it does not satisfy the heart that the Father's will should be done in heaven only. So the third petition runs: "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." When the Father's kingdom comes, this will be the moral answer to it, if I may put it that way, though in a lower sphere. Instead of meeting contempt and resistance, the Father's will is yet to be the guide and guarantee of all blessing in what was still a rebellious province. The disciples were to pray that it might be done on earth. Nothing like it was there yet, except in the ways of Him who was turning their desires toward God.

"Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven" goes further still in its full accomplishment. Only once has earth seen this, in the life and death of the Lord Jesus. He alone could say, "I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do" (John 17:4). He alone on earth has done the Father's will perfectly. Nor will it be done in the Millennium, except by Himself as the King who will reign in righteousness.

This petition reaches beyond the Millennium. The Father's kingdom will not be fully established until the new heavens and the new earth appear… and the Son of Man will not deliver up the kingdom to Him who is God and Father until He has subdued every enemy, so that God may be all in all (1 Corinthians 15:21-28). Everything here below is as wrong as it could be. We know it, so we long for this blessed outcome and pray for it.

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. They were to pray that His name might be hallowed. Then their desires were to stretch to the furthest bounds of the earth: that every evil imagination might be overthrown, every evil work judged, every will subdued to God's will, and the whole earth filled with the glory of God. Then the heart has reached up to the sacred glory of God's name and widened to take in every home of man. Then we may ask for our daily needs… with a sense of the blessedness of His will — a will we ourselves have determined to live under. Otherwise our prayer that His will might be done on earth would be glaring hypocrisy.