Amen, while you're still standing, if you'll find a copy of God's word once again. We'll be looking at two texts. One is Matthew chapter six, and I'll be reading the entirety of the Lord's Prayer that will focus on the conclusion. It's page 811 in the Black Hardback Bibles. And then we'll look again at First Chronicles 2911 as our Old Testament reading. You can feel free to look on the sermon note section. We printed it there for you as well, if that's easier to just turn to one text. As I read the Matthew 6 passage, I don't usually do this, but I'm gonna read from this New King James Version. This was actually, I was looking up, 1995, my mom gave me this Bible. So I think it was my first Bible. And later we'll talk about why I'm reading from this version here, but I'll read the whole Lord's Prayer here in Matthew 6, and then I'll read 1 Chronicles 29 11. Let's receive this as it is, God's holy word. In this manner, therefore, pray. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen. In our Old Testament reading, 1 Chronicles 29 11, Amen. You may be seated. Let me pray for us. God, we pray for the reading and our preaching of your holy word. Lord, we would long to see Jesus, and so we pray that we would see him today, even in the preaching of the word. And I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. To whom you are speaking to matters, right? If you get a text from someone that says, hey, what do you want for your birthday? It really matters who's sending the text. If it's a friend, sort of a mutual friend, sort of your defenses kick in and you say, no, no, no, you don't need to get me anything. Don't worry about it. I just want to spend time with you. You're very polite. If it's your parents, your fingers start flying. If you have generous parents like mine, we get spoiled even as adults. So if it's them, you send them your Amazon wishlist, right? It matters to whom you are speaking, it changes everything. And when we come to the conclusion of the Lord's Prayer, in one sense, there's many amazing things about this conclusion, but one thing is it reminds us to whom we have been praying throughout the Lord's Prayer. Right? It reminds us that we're praying to the king of the universe. Yours is the kingdom, yours is the power, yours is the glory. It's only to a God like that that we would truly pray, expecting that he would answer both these big prayers, like, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and these small prayers, like, Lord, would you give me what I need for this next day? Or, would you forgive me my debts? Would you help me to forgive others? All of these prayers would just be speaking to the wall if we weren't addressing them to the one true and living God. And so as we come to a conclusion of our series in the Lord's Prayer, as we look at this conclusion, the title of the sermon then for you and for me is, Pray Always to Your All-Powerful King. We'll look at the conclusion itself and some of the background of it, but we'll also sort of apply the whole of the Lord's Prayer. And I pray after this whole series that one way or another, the Lord's Prayer would become more a part of even your daily prayer life. So let's look at the first question here. We'll look at three points. The first is the church's amen. The church's amen, if you're following along in your bulletins. And this first point, we have to address sort of the elephant in the room, an obvious question. I read from the New King James Version, and it read sort of right through the prayer, just as we pray it. If you were reading in your ESV, you might have noticed that the text stops after deliver us from evil, right? And you probably saw a footnote there. So we need to kind of wrestle with this together. Why does it end there in the NIV, or the ESV, certainly the NIV, some other modern translations as well? Well, let's look at some of the background. If you look at your footnote, it just notes that some manuscripts include, and then it writes out exactly how we pray it, yours is the kingdom, yours is the power and the glory forever. If you do a little bit of digging, and most of the information I'm gonna give you right now, you could find easily. So this isn't some sort of hidden knowledge. If you have a good study Bible, it's gonna have a good note about this. But let's think about what's going on here. What we find when we dig a little bit is the oldest manuscripts, the oldest Greek manuscripts, don't have this conclusion to the Lord's Prayer. Very interesting. Some of the later manuscripts do. So that even by the fourth century, there was a Latin version of the New Testament written by a man named Jerome. It's called the Latin Vulgate. You might have heard that term before. And even Jerome does not include it, and he cites the same evidence. He says, it's not in the earliest manuscripts, so I'm not going to include it. However, as time went on, it was included, and so that even by the time of the writing of the King James Version, which certainly the New King James Version comes from, it was assumed to be included. And so, other interesting evidence, it's not in Luke's Gospel, and there's not even conflicting manuscript evidence, it's just not in Luke's Gospel. But it is in a first century document called the Didache. It's not scripture, but it was written by the church at the time. You see a lot of, you get sort of an inside scoop on how the church was praying, how they were doing baptism, how they were worshiping. And in the Didache, it is included. Although even there, we only have later manuscripts from the Didache, so we're back to the manuscript question. Why would this matter? Why would we get into the weeds a little bit here? Well, in a minute, I want to sort of push against some ideas you'll get out in the world. If you start researching manuscript evidence, New Testament, you're going to find a lot of sites that will tell you that the New Testament is just a hodgepodge of broken manuscript here, a little bit here, a little bit there, and sort of the winners of history grabbed what they could and then they wrote the Bible that they wanted to write. That's sort of the narrative that you're going to hear out in the world. But that's certainly not true. You'll actually hear things, you know, like have you heard of the game telephone, right? You know, one person starts with a word and they pass it on to the next, and by the time you get to the end, it's something completely different, right? Starts as banana, ends up as elephant, rocket ship, or whatever it is. And you'll have sites online saying that's really all we have in the Bible. We can't get back to the original, so we're just trusting in this kind of broken line all the way back from these original manuscripts to what we have now. Well, is that true? Let's think of our theology for a minute. Is that how God would preserve his word for his people, right? Would he sort of just scatter a bunch of manuscripts and who knows how they fit together and which ones are legitimate and say, okay, people of God, you know, good luck. I hope you really come to the truth. Or, I hope you find the one person that can tell you the truth here. No. God really preserves his word for us. Much against that narrative, and even secular scholars will admit this, there are over 5,800 Greek manuscripts of the New Testament that we have. This blows away any other ancient text. The Iliad, for instance, Homer's Iliad, certainly a huge piece of respected ancient document, has about 1,700 manuscripts, most of them much, much later than its writing. We have some manuscripts of the New Testament from as early as the second century. So this starts to, and we have widespread manuscripts. In other words, it's not just one group from one place. We have manuscripts from all over the ancient world so you can compare and contrast them. And so what you find is, if you go to those sites that are sort of arguing against the New Testament, they'll say, oh, it's just littered with contradictions, littered with errors. In any given text, we don't even know that we have the right text. That's the narrative you'll hear. But actually, the question we're dealing with here, the conclusion of the Lord's Prayer, this is one of the bigger ones. This is one of the bigger sections of Scripture that there's some debate about the manuscript evidence. And as I hope you'll see in a minute, there's a very understandable historical reason why it is this way. And so if you're hearing those voices saying, we just can't trust this New Testament, no, this is one of the bigger ones. Most of, when people list out a certain number of errors, ask them to list out the errors. And you'll find that a lot of them are one word differences or simple differences where if you're reading the Gospel of Matthew and you're a scribe and you're writing and you accidentally add something from Luke that's not in Matthew, right? That's the majority of what we're talking about. And so when we think about this particular line, this conclusion of the Lord's Prayer, again, our goal is to get back to the original. Our Westminster Confession chapter one puts it this way. It says, the Old Testament in Hebrew, which was the native language of the people of God of old, and the New Testament in Greek, which at the time of the writing of it was most generally known to the nations, being immediately inspired by God, and by his singular care and providence kept pure in all ages, are therefore authentical, so as in all controversies of religion, the church is finally to appeal unto them. What's that saying? If something was added in the 8th century, even if it was well-meaning, no, we want to get back to what God originally said to His people. And yet the same confession of faith says, these scriptures should be translated into the vulgar languages of every nation, or the common tongues of every nation unto which they come, that the word of God, dwelling plentifully in all, they may worship Him in an acceptable manner, and through patience and comfort of the scriptures may have hope. And so you kind of see both ends of it. The goal is always to get back to the original, what God actually said, and yet we trust that God has preserved his word in such a way that even when we read our English translations, we truly are receiving the word of God. And so when we think of this particular issue of the conclusion of the Lord's Prayer, the evidence points to, sort of overwhelmingly, that the earliest manuscripts do not include this. Now we can't make 100% definitive either way. You might walk away today saying, no, I think we should include that in our Bible text like the New King James Version does. I would not argue with you there. But the evidence points to there being an absence in the early documents. And in text criticism, absences sort of speak louder than additions, if that makes sense. Just like in church life, it's always easier to add something than to take something away. If one Sunday we just didn't have the call to worship, you would notice. There would be a gaping hole there. And so the idea is, if this conclusion was original in the text, and then for some reason was taken out later, that would be a very obvious shift that maybe scribes elsewhere would say, wait a minute, why are you taking away something? Whereas if it wasn't there to begin with, but perhaps early on the church was praying the conclusion of the Lord's Prayer, in a similar way that we might read Psalm 23, but then we might end by saying, and we praise you, O Lord, for being our shepherd. There'd be nothing wrong with that. Perhaps early in the church, this was the church's doxology to the Lord's Prayer, and then it makes sense that scribes later, the church has been praying it for centuries, and so scribes just include it there in the text. And so even if it doesn't belong in our Bibles, although I won't make a definitive statement there, this is the well-attested historical amen of the church to the Lord's Prayer. And as we see from 1 Chronicles 29, 11, it's also biblical language, right? It's not something foreign to the biblical text. It's flowing right out of the pages of Scripture. And so one author puts it this way, trying to sum up our approach to the Lord's Prayer here. This author says, whether from the lips of Jesus or of his followers, the traditional conclusion to the Lord's Prayer both reiterates key themes in the prayer, like kingdom, but also points all the glory back to God. We have prayed for big things and small things. Now we respond in doxology to the one true and living God who is able to answer our prayers for his glory and the growth of his kingdom. And so this is the church's amen, and I commend it to you that we would continue to pray this conclusion to the Lord's prayer, this doxology. And so as we go to point number two then, praying the conclusion, let's look at the words themselves and even comparing with 1 Chronicles 29 11, I'll read that again. And let's think about these words and how they would affect our ending of the prayer here. First Chronicles 29, 11, again, yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all. Remember, in this conclusion, we're reminded to whom we have been praying, to whom we pray. And this makes all the difference. This makes the difference between even secular views of prayer. You likely have unbelieving friends who aren't offended that you pray, and they maybe have even said things like, if that's helpful to you, that's great, right? Because they think of it as sort of a self-help, it's something that happens internally within you, but to whom we pray makes all the difference. No, we are not praying to the wall, we are praying to the God of the universe. We say, yours is the kingdom. Yours is the kingdom. We pray to the king of the universe. Psalm 93, the Lord reigns. He is robed in majesty. The Lord is robed. He has put on strength as his belt. Yes, the world is established. It shall never be moved. Your throne is established from of old. You are from everlasting. He is the King, and it's only when we believe that He actually has sovereign reign that we will pray, that we will pray specifically, that we will pray honestly, that we'll pray big prayers, like that the gospel would go to the ends of the earth, or big prayers, that He would help us get through this next hour in the hospital bed. People often ask, if God is sovereign, why pray, right? And there's some legitimate things to wrestle with there. If God's gonna do whatever he wants to do anyway, I think is how the question is being asked, then why would I pray? God's gonna do what he's gonna do and I'll just submit to it. And yet God sovereignly has called us to pray as a means to bring about these things. But others have done it. I would like to flip the question. If God isn't sovereign, why pray? If God isn't king, Why pray? If he doesn't have authority to grant what we ask, then why pray? But indeed he is. We end by saying yours is the kingdom. It belongs to you. It being everything. And so we pray. And we pray to our all-powerful King. Next, yours is the power. Yours is the power. Psalm 135, whatever the Lord pleases, he does in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all the depths. One author says his actions are limited only by his own wisdom and glory. There are no outside constraints upon what God would do. What we see is that he is king, but he has authority as king, but he also has ability and power, right? We know in our world what it's like to have monarchs who have the title, they have some sort of authority, but they have no real power, right? But God is the king who is king and who has ability. Right? We don't pray simply to a, quote, higher power, but we pray to the highest power, the omnipotent one, all-powerful. Any power or strength that we have is derivative, is granted to us. This next breath that you have only comes because the all-powerful God has given you breath to breathe. And so again, this changes everything. This changes our view of prayer. We pray to a God who actually is able, which means we grapple with when we don't receive the answer that we would wanna see, when someone's not healed, when someone does die. We grapple with that, but we pray to a God who is able, powerful, all-powerful. And this gets to the heart of the gospel, the good news that we would have access like this. Friend, if you view God as either nonexistent, or perhaps you view him as one of many gods, or perhaps you view him as a higher power that has some power, some authority, I would pray that you would look to Jesus Christ, the great God and Savior, who is able Even Christ himself says, he's fully God, fully man, and yet he says, I have authority to lay down my life, and I have authority to raise it back up again. Right, no mere man can say that. But Christ says that. And that same Christ went to the cross, died for his people, cried out, it is finished, and rose again, just like he said. And it's only through him that we pray. And so I pray that you would know this Christ, Next, yours is the glory. Yours is the glory. The conclusion of the Lord prayer rightly lands us back on God's glory alone. We started the prayer praying, your kingdom come, your will be done, your name be made holy. And it's only when we pray that that we can get to the daily bread and the daily confession and the daily protection. And when we think of our Westminster Shorter Catechism, it also bookends well. Catechism question one says that our highest and chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. That's what we're made for. We're made for his glory. Remember in the Exodus, as God is preparing to and then leading his people out, all throughout, when you start underlining the phrase, do this so that they would know that I am the Lord. Right? It's because our chief end is only our chief end because it's God's chief end. God's chief end is to glorify himself. The only being in the universe who could do so unselfishly. Because he is also the highest good for all those who would come to him in faith. And so just as we began, we end, yours is the glory. And we say forever because God is never changing. Again, if God changes, then why would we pray? But God is unchanging in His character. He will always answer our prayers according to His character, His good purposes, His infinite wisdom. And we end, of course, by saying amen. And as our shorter catechism reminds us, this is for us to take encouragement in prayer. from God only. And in testimony of our desire and assurance to be heard, we say amen. Amen means so be it, right? Yes, amen, so be it. And the Heidelberg Catechism puts it this way. I love the very personal nature of the question here. What does that little word amen express? Amen means this shall truly and surely be. For it is much more certain that God has heard my prayer than that I feel it in my heart or that I desire such things from him. Do you notice the gospel in that answer? It is more sure that he has heard my prayer than that I feel it or even that I want the things that I prayed for. So even when we pray, and we all have times where we're praying because we know we should pray for something, and we want our heart to follow, but even in the meantime, God will answer according to his word. We can have assurance and encouragement in prayer. All because we're praying to our good father. As Jesus started this whole section, we were praying to our good father, who already knows what we need before we ask it, who longs to give his children good things. He's not stingy. He's not waiting for us to say the right incantation and words, but He's given us simple words to pray to Him as a Father, expecting, knowing that He will give us good things according to His will. And so, church, pray always to your all-powerful King. Thirdly, then, we pray the Lord's Prayer. As we think of the prayer, all in summary, As we've said, we pray big cosmic prayers, and I pray that you would continue to do so. I've added to some of my prayer lists some of these bigger prayers, because it's easy even for me to, my prayer list, and it's good to have these, but have very focused, kind of smaller prayers. But to add in big prayers, Lord, would you allow your kingdom to come to every tribe and tongue and nation? Is that on your prayer list somewhere? Now, praying the Lord's Prayer will often prompt you to pray this way, but put these big prayers into your prayer list. Pray the Lord's Prayer and pause on each of these points. Martin Luther is known to say that he would start the Lord's Prayer and sometimes he would just get hung up on, your kingdom come, or he would get hung up on, forgive us our debts, and he would encourage his students, if you're getting hung up on one of them, just continue to pray that petition, right? Don't just complete the Lord's Prayer and stay there for that morning. Pray these things. But also pray ordinary, daily, specific prayers for you and for others and with others. And so Christian, the simplest application from this whole series is to pray and to make a plan to pray. Have some sort of list, whether it's paper or digital or whatever it is, have some place so that if someone asks you to pray and you say, I'll pray for you, you have some sort of way that you know you're gonna pray for them. Some place that you can prioritize and say, I need to be praying for this regularly, daily. have some sort of way to be praying and praying specifically, and utilize the Lord's prayer within that. As you do this, the Christian spends his or her life praying this Lord's prayer, and it's not meant to be the extent of our prayer, it's meant to be a model and show us what to pray for. It's also supposed to shape our desires, right? Even if we only prayed it once a week on Sunday, 52 times a year, I pray that it's more, but 52 times of praying this prayer, what does that do to the heart of the Christian? Psalm 37 4 says, delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart. I believe this is what's happening, certainly in the Word, but as we pray, God is shaping our desires. I pray that the day that I draw my last breath, the petitions of the Lord's Prayer would be dearer to my heart, that there would be less inertia against me praying any of the petitions in the Lord's Prayer, but that they would come even more readily from my lips and from my heart. J.C. Ryle puts it this way, and now let us all examine ourselves and see whether we really desire to have the things which we are taught to ask for in the Lord's Prayer. Thousands may be feared, repeat these words daily as a form, but never consider what they are saying. They care not for the glory, the kingdom, or the will of God. They have no sense of dependence, sinfulness, weakness, or danger. They have no love or charity toward their enemies, and yet they repeat the Lord's Prayer. These things ought not to be. May we resolve that by God's help, our hearts shall go together with our lips. Happy is he who can really call God his Father through Jesus Christ his Savior and can therefore say a heartfelt amen to all that the Lord's prayer contains. And so people of God, pray always to your all-powerful King using even these words that he has taught us to pray. Let's pray together now. God, I thank you for your word. I thank you that it convicts us, it challenges us, it comforts us. I pray that in your word, by your spirit, we see Christ. We thank you that you have taught us to pray. And I ask that we would be a praying people, myself included, my family as well, that we would be prayerful, praying without ceasing for the needs of the saints here, for the community around us, for your kingdom coming. I pray that you'd be shaping our desires, that the delights of our heart more and more would be in line with what Christ has taught us to pray here. And so would you shape us in this way? We pray all of this in the name of Christ, indeed who taught us to pray, saying, Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen.