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Prayer

For

The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory

February 2002

Lord, the prayer Jesus taught us closes with the words, "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever." This is a beautiful benediction. It is also a powerful affirmation of your greatness.

Lord, we can hardly conceive of your greatness. We have only the barest notion of what we are talking about when we speak of the creative power of the universe. We find it difficult to imagine the universe with its millions of star furnaces and its billions of light-years of distance. How then can we imagine anything that created the universe? But the good news of the gospel is that we can know you, and know something of your power and majesty and glory.

But Lord, any inkling we have of your glory is almost too much for us. When we perceive you truly, a sense of awe and wonder sweeps over our souls. We see this same thing in the Bible. In the Bible, when people had intimate contact with you, O Lord, they were totally overwhelmed by your majesty. Their impulse was to bow low, to worship, to lift up their voices in praise and adoration. This is what the conclusion of the Lord's Prayer instructs us to do.

In our eagerness to get things from you, O Lord, we forget that praise is an important part of prayer. Because we want not you but what we can get from you, we neglect to praise you. This is our ignorance. When we begin to grasp something of your power and of your graciousness in dealing with us, then there springs up in our innermost spirit a clear stream of praise and gratitude that flows toward you.

When a child comes softly and sincerely to a parent, with endearing expressions of gratitude for what the parent is or has done, it unlocks that parent's heart in a magical way, and that parent is more than ever disposed to lavish love and care upon that child. So, there exists between child and parent a two-way communication of blessing upon blessing, benefit upon benefit. So it is with us and you, O Lord. You made us to be part of your family so that you could bless us and so that we could be a blessing to you. All this we affirm when we say, "Thine is the glory forever. Amen."

 

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