Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. In our prayers we should demonstrate a desire for God's kingdom to rule. What does this mean?
There is a day coming when Jesus Christ will return and establish his kingdom on the earth. Every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. That day is coming. It may be today. Every Christian's desire should be for that kingdom to come. And so we pray, "Your kingdom come."
There is also a sense in which Christ's kingdom is here now in the lives of individual Christians. We swear allegiance to God our king. We desire his will to be accomplished in our lives as we live each day for his glory. That is what we should be asking for in our prayers. Do we really want this? Do we really want God's will to be done or would we rather have our own will to be accomplished. Shouldn't our will and his will be gradually becoming one and the same? It seems so often that there is a fairly large gap between my will and his. What Jesus is telling us here is to pray that God's will be done here on earth, in our lives the same way that God's will is done in heaven.
How is God's will done in heaven? We have a glimpse of this in Psalm 103:20-21 where we read, "Bless the Lord, you His angels, who excel in strength, who do His word, heeding the voice of His word. Bless the Lord, all you His hosts, you ministers of His who do His pleasure." In heaven, God's will is accomplished faithfully and joyfully by all of those who serve Him. There is no rebellion, there is no reluctant obedience. It should be our prayer that God's will would be done here on earth, particularly in our own lives in the same way as it is in heaven. And then it should be our desire to see God's will accomplished in our families, churches and nations.
Is this request part of our normal prayer life? It should be.
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