The Lord's Prayer: The Kingdom, The Power, The Glory

We end the prayer by confessing that these three things—the kingdom, the power, and the glory—belong to the Father.

Everything we’ve said already is true because the kingdom, the power, and the glory all belong wholly to the Father.

The Kingdom

We have already prayed for his kingdom to rule over all the earth. Now, we emphasize that this kingdom we're looking for belongs solely to him.

He makes the rules. He decides all matters. He alone will say when.

We pray for the kingdom to come, but we don’t make it happen. We don’t bring it about by our own means—and certainly not on our own terms!

We get ideas about the way things should look, but we surrender them. We look to the Father and say, ‘Yours is the kingdom.'

The Power

The Father alone has the power both to provide the things he already knows we need, and to bring about the reign and rule of his kingdom.

While various earthly kingdoms stake claims to power, only the Father’s power sustains creation. Only the gospel holds the power for salvation.

When a person confesses the Lordship of Jesus, and believes that God—by his power—raised him from the dead, it doesn’t look like the coming of any earthly kingdom. It isn’t.

It’s the coming of a kingdom advanced by a wholly different sort of power, and that power belongs solely to our Father!

The Glory

As the Father alone has the power to establish his kingdom, so also does he alone deserve the credit. Giving him proper credit doesn’t encompass the meaning of glory. Glory is another thing we don’t yet truly understand. We understand it just about enough to know it belongs only to the Father.

Or, do we?

It’s easier to see that the kingdom and power are his, but surely some fraction of the glory belongs to us, right? We are, after all, bothering to pray—on top of everything we do outside the prayer closet for the church, for others, etc.

So we need his glory joined to the kingdom and the power—things we more easily understand are beyond our possession—in this confession.

And if this final thing we confess as belonging solely to the Father reminds us of Psalm 115:1 (Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory . . .), then we begin and end the Lord’s Prayer by hallowing the Father’s name.