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Our Lord’s Sermon on the Mount is not a “three points and a poem” sermon. In fact, in the course of this single sermon, Jesus touches on more than twenty topics. All of these topics are worthy of our attention, but here our concern is with only one of these topics, namely the Lord’s instructions regarding prayer. To be more precise, our concern here is with one petition found within the Lord’s Prayer. When our Lord taught us the way in which we should address our heavenly Father, he taught us to pray: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). Many of us have prayed these words for years, but how many of us know what Jesus meant by these words?

In order to understand this petition of the Lord’s Prayer, it is necessary to understand something of the biblical concept of the “kingdom of God.” Pious Jews at the time of Christ were waiting for the kingdom of God to come (see Mark 15:43), but what gave rise to this hope? The first chapters of Genesis make it clear that God’s plan from the beginning has been to establish His kingdom on earth. Tragically, when the first man and woman listened to the words of the serpent, Satan became a usurper and established a reign of sin on earth (see John 12:31; 14:30; 2 Cor. 4:4). God, however, was not surprised by any of this, and He did not abandon His original plan. The remainder of Scripture is the history of God’s work of restoring that which had been corrupted by sin. It is the history of redemption.

The rest of the article can be found HERE.