More on the Lord’s Prayer as a Statement of Faith in God’s Standing Order

The Lord’s Prayer as I noted earlier is less a prayer than an attitude of prayer. It is the utterance of faith and recognition of God’s Standing Order. The Lord’s Prayer is the attitude you strike when you are ready to pray. It is surrender!
 

When I was praying for the gift of tongues at Grace Bible Church in Honolulu, Hawaii, in 1975, which became my baptism in the Holy Spirit, I came to see that the life I had was God’s. I saw that I am mud animated by the gift of life given by God, and I had done whatsoever I had pleased with it. This was rebellion. I had never thanked God for making me alive, nor had I ever asked God for what purpose he had made me alive.

Think about it for a moment, please. We were mud, and God has infused us with life. He imbued us with the life we have lived up till now as “us.” For what? Why did he do it? He must have had a purpose. We might have wondered, but have we ever stopped and asked pointedly and waited until he answered?

In the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, I asked. “This is your life. You animated me with it by your grace. I belong to you. You are Glorious God. I am mud. You had a purpose for making me to live. Whatever you want me to do, I will do.” I cast self-lordship, my rebellion, out of myself – I went into free-fall, not even willing to hold myself up. With surrender as far as I could find it, I submitted myself utterly unto God. I shut up, and I waited.

If God never said another thing, I suppose they would have had to carry me out of the way for the next service. I knelt at the felled tree in silence. I sensed the glow of Almighty God’s glory spreading across the sky above me, and me, a lump of mud utterly submitted to him, utterly dependent upon him, below in utter surrender. After a minute in the silence, I heard the softest of voices, “Remember this, and it is all right.”

That I was elated over being forgiven and accepted by God is the greatest of all understatements. I entered an ecstasy. And here is a most important point often mentioned by Neville, “If it works, then you have found him.” It “worked”:  I had found God and the ecstasy of real life.

This is the Lord’s Prayer! “Your nature must be being hallowed! Your kingdom must be being restored! Your will must be being done! As in heaven, so also on earth!” We are surrendering to the purpose of Almighty God! “Whatever you want me to do, I will do.”

And you thought it was for bread. It is the recognition of the Standing Orders of God: “I have said, and I will do.”

“Bread” is what you are going to be doing tomorrow. “To do your will is my bread, O Lord.” That is what you are asking for today. “Let me see it – give me a desire in my heart to do whatever you purpose for this life you have graced me with. Would you have me scale a mountain, swim across an ocean?”

“No, but that bum at the off ramp, would you tell him that I love him and give him a twenty for me? Call and tell your mother that you love her nearly as much as I do? Offer to teach an illiterate how to read and write his own language?”

We ask God to let us in on the project. That life that he gave us is one with us now – the two have become one flesh. And it has the power to create, for it is his spirit. (Of all oddness, it is the one with the power of Mind and Speech, the consciousness we think with, Deity within us, yet inasmuch as it became us, it is us: the recipient of itself.)

It creates by imagining. “Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart. Commit thy way unto the LORD; trust also in him; and He shall bring it to pass” (Psalm 37: 4-5). We are asking to be given the desire to imagine. “That bum? Can I love him with the love you have for him? Can I think your thoughts for him; yearn your yearnings for him; see him the success your purpose for him is?”

The Lord’s Prayer is a weighing of our anchors. It is saying, “Okay, that is enough of me and my affairs, of my selfishness and of my fears and of my rebellion. You are Almighty God. You gave me life and animated me for your purpose. What is it? Let’s go!”

If it works, you have found him. Life is supposed to be an ecstasy! I hope we find our pace.