The King Of The Kingdom Series

The King of the Kingdom Part 1

Text: Matthew 6:9-13

6:9 After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

6:10 Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

6:11 Give us this day our daily bread.

6:12 And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

6:13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.

That is what has become in the orthodox setting, Our Lord’s prayer, but scripturally speaking, it is just a pattern, a simple guide to effective praying. It captures the principle of prayer as you come unto God and begin to relate with Him and make requests. These are just parameters for asking according to divine order.

We see that after exaltation, the first request we make in terms of God to ``do something`` or ``give something`` is in Verse 10, and it says: Thine kingdom come. And Verse 13 begins by saying ‘and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil:’ Notice the full colon after evil. I have said at different times that as you read a piece of literature, it is in the interest of getting the right interpretation for you to observe punctuation marks.

If you put a ‘full stop’ or ‘period’ where the writer did not put one, you could distort the message. It is important that we know why some of these punctuation marks are placed there. In this context, we find a full colon and I have come to know over the years that when you see a full colon in the middle of a sentence, it simply tells you to pay close attention to what is to follow because that is what carries the real message that the sentence sets out to communicate. The thought of the author is expressed by various punctuation marks. Where there is an exclamation, if you do not exclaim, you miss out on the feel of the message. Where there is a pause, if you do not pause, you miss out the emotion that drives the message. Note, after it said lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil, there is a colon. The full colon simply tells us to pay closer attention to what is to follow because that is essentially what He wants to bring out. Every other thing is trying to introduce that important matter which comes after the colon.

After the full colon, we find the following: “for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever, amen. That’s where our theme comes from: The Kingdom and the Power.

The interesting thing I see here is this: when it says lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: That request is predicated on the fact that the kingdom, the power, and the glory belong to our God. That is to say that if the Lord is going to deliver us from evil; if He is going to help us get around temptation and not to fall into temptation, it will be because His are the kingdom, the power and the glory. Put in another way, if He has no grip on the kingdom, the power and the glory, He would not be positioned to lead us not into temptation; He would not have the capability to deliver us from evil. He is able to answer our prayers in that regard because the kingdom is His own, the power is His own and the glory is His own. It means, therefore, that it is the strength of the kingdom that gives Him a placement; a positioning that would deliver the believer from evil and from temptation.

It is on the ground that our father has the kingdom, the power and the glory that we are can be sure to get delivered from evil. This is a good reason for us to launch into the realm of the kingdom. First, it says as we pray, we should say: thy kingdom come.

Beginning from the Old Testament certain scriptures provide specific encouragement in regard to our topic.

Psalm 145:11-13 All thy works shall praise thee O Lord, and thy saints shall bless thee. They shall speak of the glory of thy kingdom and talk of thy power, to make known to the sons of men his mighty acts and the glorious majesty of His kingdom. Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom and thy dominion endureth throughout all generations.

One thing is beginning to flow into our conscious awareness and that is, the Church is graduating into maturation state. Considering that sow many things that had arrested our attention in the year’s gone bye, no longer hold an appeal. Things that kept us excited, jumping and sweating over the years seem to have lost their hold on us. Put in another way, a lot of the things that kept people in the Church in the past, no longer keep them in the Church. I’m very much aware that majority of believers who are ten years old and above in the Lord, are getting tired of this issue of blowing the anointing and then people falling on the ground and giving the laundry guys some good money to clean up their clothes. We’ve also realized that the fashion of having to seize people’s neck and really put pressure on the carotid artery and causing them to faint all in the name of falling under the power of the Holy Ghost is no longer fashionable. People seem to be looking for something different; something deeper and what that implies is that there is a hunger in the Church for the teaching anointing. They want to know where they are going to and why they are where they are and why God is behaving the way He is behaving. Folks want to be properly instructed and that comes through the ministry of the latter rain.