Thine is the Kingdom, Power, and Glory (Lord's Prayer, line by line 8)
The splintering pain at the core of every human being, and which today is felt more acutely than ever in the West, is precisely the pain of the square peg being bashed into the round hole.
We were designed and crafted to praise Jesus Christ with our bodies and souls. If Jesus is God’s Son, the beautiful Universal King and Saviour, then it’s impossible to conceive of a higher, happier, and more expansive purpose.
He is worthy of our praise, and it is a delight to give it.
Yet, we insist on battering ourselves into the cramped cavity of self-fulfilment. This leaves us bruised, brittle, and spiritually exhausted.
The traditional ending of the Lord’s Prayer is not found in the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament. A pious scribe, copying Matthew’s Gospel by hand, could not help adding his doxology after the Lord’s Prayer. It is not canonical, but it nonetheless a perfectly biblical and correct thing to pray.
For thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, for ever and ever, amen.
The Christian heart yearns to express all of this:
Thine is the Kingdom. We confess our treason and repent of our disobedience. We throw away our petty crowns, and bow before Christ alone as King of kings.
Thine is the Power. Christ is the wellspring of life and power, in him “everything lives and moves and has its being” (Acts 17:28). And, being dead in our sin, only he can grant us a living faith springing from a new heart, reborn and recreated at his command.
Thine is the Glory. We know that “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:9-11).
Rather than being forced to our knees moaning and scowling, aghast at the blinding truth, Christians willingly, reflexively, and joyfully cry out, like Thomas before the resurrected Christ, “My Lord and My God!”
The moment we bow the knee to Jesus, that ghastly spirit of self-fulfilment, which claws and gnaws at our souls, howling “Mine be the glory!” flees back to the hell from which it came. In its place comes sanity, joy, and a peace that transcends every pain and trial.
What a happy prayer to pray: “Lord Jesus, thine be the glory!”
Photo by Keith Luke on Unsplash