Hey everybody, this episode of the 10-Minute Bible Hour Podcast is brought to you by Dwell Audio Bible app. We've been working with them for a while. I know the people who run this thing. It's brilliant. I love the thinking behind it. I love the interface and the design of it. And frankly, I just like having the Bible read to me. It's weird. This is how Christians, since forever, have encountered the text before the age of widespread literacy. And it is kind of a different experience to pick up the text and read it with your eyes versus having somebody read it to you. And I have come to really value doing both. And right now, the people at Dwell, understanding that things are weird and we're doing a pandemic and understanding that it's kind of an important time to have the Bible just be in front of people because it speaks to a lot of the stuff that we're worried about. They've opened up their church licensing system. So if you work at a church or know somebody who does and want to get a hold of them, they can get a hold of Dwell. The link is down below in the show notes, and sign up for a church-wide license and then distribute that to their people. And I don't know how long they're going to do it for free, but for right now, it's just something they're giving away. So that's a big call to action. There's a free thing, and you can go get it if you work at church or know somebody who does and want to have them reach out. So thanks to Dwell for being on the same page in terms of how interesting and awesome and important the Bible is, and also for getting behind this program. And thanks to you for supporting them. Because when you do that, you support this as well. All right, let's get after it. Hey everybody from the United Kingdom who listens to this, I have a high five for you. Because your island hasn't been successfully invaded since 1066 AD. Are you kidding me? I know some of you are listening and you're like, wait a minute, what about World War II and the Battle of Britain? Mm-mm, wasn't successful. There were no ground troops, blew some stuff up, and the Brits took it, and they were like, we don't care about your stupid bombs. We're gonna build our things back and then we're gonna counterinvade you and we're gonna totally win. Seriously, nice job. It is a very impressive achievement. Props to your people. But the last time that happened, which is going on a thousand years ago, the conqueror was a guy who actually had conqueror in the name, was William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy. And at this time there was kind of a weird relationship between France and England. Both kind of felt like they had holdings that were sort of theirs in one place or the other. And when William, Duke of Normandy, not the King of France, mind you, a Duke who had sworn loyalty to the King of France, was the one to topple the island of Great Britain at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. That made things even politically more confusing. I mean, the battle plan and everything, that was really impressive. It's depicted on this really cool tapestry. You've probably seen the art of this battle before. But maybe the real battle was in pacifying all of the local nobles and lords and straightening out who had sworn loyalty to whom. And so a little bit after the Battle of Hastings, there is this oath that gets taken in 1086. So it's not really a little while, it's 20 years later. So what William the Conqueror eventually figures out is it's really difficult to govern this gigantic island of Great Britain from across the English Channel on the European mainland in Normandy. And so he starts to lean on local lords and pull them together to be like, we got to straighten out what oaths are outstanding and clarify that your oath of loyalty is to me. Now, the problem was the problem is in quotes, of course, because we're talking about bloodshed and conquest and all kinds of things that really aren't that cool. But the issue, we'll say it that way, was that people were thinking in terms of local landholdings, local loyalties to a pyramid scheme, a hierarchy of authority. We call this feudalism. And William was trying to picture, frankly, a much bigger kingdom. You're already picturing the likewise. And this much bigger kingdom could only be achieved if there was ultimate loyalty to a single king and a single kingdom. So again, about 20 years after the Battle of Hastings, William calls together all the nobles to what we now call Salisbury, which is an amazing town. But back then I think it was called Sarum or Old Sarum. There was an old Roman fort there. It's a really fascinating place. And he had them all take this gigantic oath of fealty. I think it's called the Oath of Sarum, in front of all the other nobles to be like, I am the king, I'm William. There is now one great big kingdom, and all of you are subservient to that, and agents and participants in that. And that oath of fealty that created this relationship was not a new concept, super old concept. And pretty much it's how all of monarchy was held together in all parts of the world is promises to more powerful people who make promises to more powerful people, and ultimately everyone's promises end at a king or an emperor or pharaoh or whatever. I don't know. Actually, the Egyptians, I don't think, did feudalism, but whatever. You get what I mean. And so these oaths of loyalty would include things that went both directions. The person who was swearing the oath of fealty would be like, I'm going to provide a certain amount of men during campaign season to come and fight for you. I'm going to carry out the agenda of the king. I am going to enforce the laws of the king and live by the laws of the king. I'm going to pay taxes to the king. So you get like my resources and part of my essence here. But then the oath, the other way would be from the king to the subject, it would be provision, protection, justice, security, stability, vision for the whole big thing, and clarity of leadership. So it really was a pretty good deal. And it isn't until whatever it is, 17th century and then on into the 18th that you get into the Western liberal Enlightenment and things like the American Revolution and the French Revolution start to happen, and ultimately all of these mechanisms of feudalism and oaths of fealty that had dominated European social and political structure forever, those things finally get replaced around 1800. So this really had staying power. It was pretty effective. But you know what didn't work very well about these oaths of loyalty? Is that they all kind of hinged on the quality of the king. And if you had a really good king that you swore loyalty to and you happened to live out your whole life with that guy being in charge, stuff was pretty great. But if you had a series of dumb kings and undertrained firstborn sons who ascended to a throne they didn't earn and couldn't handle, ah, stuff was a nightmare. Because by nature of the feudalistic system, you had to ascribe all authority to the person in charge, to the king. And that's a high risk, high reward proposition, right? Because if they're great, things are going to go great. And if they're not, well, they're totally in charge enough to wreck everything as well. All of that stuff is something that has been in the mind of people who live around monarchy, who have experienced monarchy, whose parents have experienced monarchy for all of history. And of course, all the people on the hillside who Jesus is talking to about prayer and giving and other spiritual disciplines, they would have understood the concept of feudalism as well. So when Jesus is teaching on prayer, and he starts by blowing up common superstitious notions of prayer that are focused on people using insurance buzzwords to leverage God so that he gives them the things they want. Jesus detonates that stuff, he disposes with that orientation toward prayer and communication with God, and he replaces it with something that starts out by saying, Your father is sovereign over everything. He knows what you need before you even ask. So this then is how you should pray. How many times when you have gone to church, seen stuff on the interwebs or whatever, or had somebody just read the Lord's Prayer to you, do they start with, This then is how you should pray? With no description of what happens before. Well, I guess there's, you know, time crunches and everything. And now it is time to break everything down the way we have the opportunity to break things down here. But wow, this is one of the advantages of doing it the way that we do it, because we have thought carefully about this then is how you should pray. You should pray the Lord's Prayer the way the Lord's Prayer is, in contrast to these dumb, self-centered approaches to prayer that we just discounted. And you should pray the Lord's Prayer the way it's written out, in proactive response to the nature of God, the fact that he is king and sovereign and master over all of this stuff and provider and capable and knower of all things. And frankly, he's never going to die. Which means that swearing an unending oath of fealty, of loyalty as a subject before a king of a kingdom to a perfectly benevolent king who will never die and have to hand it off to his idiot kid is like the best possible system of government that one could ever imagine. It's the best possible relationship that could ever exist between a subject and a king. And that, then, is what's being held out here. And that is exactly what the Lord's Prayer is. And if I sound excited about this, it's because I'm excited about this, because I think it is absolutely central to understanding these words of Jesus that we've probably repeated more than any other words of Jesus ever. And what happens when you do that? Stuff just starts to wash over you like a gold sluice where the riffles are arranged incorrectly and the gold just washes right on down and back out into the river. And if you don't do much gold mining, it doesn't matter because I think you understood what I meant with that analogy anyway. These words will just wash over us with no vortices or places in our mind for it to spin around and stick and deposit the important stuff. It'll just wash right downstream as we say things. Unless we pump the brakes and we think in context a little bit and we understand what imagery Jesus is drawing on here with these most repeatable words that people throw out. If we think about it this way, we might even have a sense of should we actually pray these words in this order just like this, or is it just a concept? Something that people have debated for some time. So here's what I think it is. I think that what we get in the Lord's Prayer is very simply an oath of fealty from subjects to a king. Let me put it another way. Somewhere over the last couple hundred years, Protestants in particular have kind of invented a sinner's prayer, a prayer that you pray to become a Christian. I think it works, but it's it's the Frankenstein of a bunch of different verses and concepts from around the Bible. You know, I got problems, Jesus, you are the king and forgiver. You asked, maybe the phrases you asked Jesus to come into your heart or whatever, and all that. I mean, it's totally valid. That's the kind of stuff I prayed when I became a Christian. Cool. But I think the actual sinner's prayer is the Lord's Prayer, and I think it's right here in the Bible, and I think it's ordained by Jesus, and I think it's supposed to be hardwired into the mind of the Christian. This isn't just a recitation of vaguely sounding Christian things that fill up a moment in a church service every week. This is a verbal declaration in front of God and everyone, much like the oath of serum that says, You are king, you are calling me to picture a much bigger kingdom. What I provide to you is my loyalty to your kingdom and to your authority and my willingness to give of my resources and myself. I died a self to you, the king. What you give to me is, well, surprise, provision, justice, security, protection from enemies. Wow. And what I think he's doing here is drawing on a very familiar, from across all ages style of oath that is effectively the front door of Christianity. Not saying it's magic, and then if you say this, like then you're a Christian. But if you can say this, I guess that means you've decided that you're gonna be a citizen of this kingdom and a subject of this king, and that this is where your ultimate loyalty is gonna lie. So I'm gonna read it now, and we're just gonna I'm gonna literally quit the second I'm done reading it, and then tomorrow we'll go through the thing bit by bit and break it down. Here we go. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread, forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.