Thursday, September 27, 2012, Part 1

“In this manner, therefore, pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come” (Matthew 6:9).

IDEA: We usually pray for Christ’s kingdom to come without thinking much about our view of history.

PURPOSE: To help listeners understand what they are praying for when they ask that God’s kingdom may come.

Do you think much about history?

When you studied history in school, what did it involve?

Do you think Christians have a view of history?

I. What do we pray for when we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy kingdom come”?

What is a “kingdom”?

In current English it refers to “a place or group of people under a common rule.”

In the Scriptures it refers more to where the king reigns. It is “God in Strength,” “the rule of Christ.” The kingdom is where the King is.

When we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” we reveal our view of history.

Is history going anywhere? Not everyone believes that it is.

Some people believe that history is like a wheel that goes round and round but goes nowhere. It’s merely a series of events going to oblivion.

Edward Gibbon, the historian, dismissed history as “little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.”

Someone else described history as a tale told by an idiot, scrawled on the walls of an insane asylum.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote off history as “the biographies of a few great men.”

Henry Ford shrugged it off as “bunk.”

Does it matter much what your view of history is? Why?

II. In the witness of the Bible, history is “His story.” History is headed toward the return of Jesus Christ.

What do you think is the story line of the Bible? Does it make any difference what we think it is?