Why Do Christians Pray, “For Thine Is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, For Ever”?
Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning Beautiful Christian Life LLC may get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through its links, at no cost to you.
Editor’s note: This is the ninth and final installment of a series on the Lord’s Prayer, line by line. The Rev. Campbell Markham is a Presbyterian minister in Perth, Australia.
“For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.” — Matthew 6:13 (KJV)
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 Savior, 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-fulfillment. This leaves us bruised, brittle, and spiritually exhausted.
The doxology after the Lord’s Prayer is a perfectly biblical and correct thing to pray.
The traditional ending of the Lord’s Prayer is not found in the earliest manuscripts of the New Testament.[1] A pious scribe, copying Matthew’s Gospel by hand, perhaps could not help adding the doxology after the Lord’s Prayer. It is generally accepted that it is taken from David’s prayer to God in 1 Chronicles 29 where David says similar words:
Yours, O Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the victory and the majesty, for all that is in the heavens and in the earth is yours. Yours is the kingdom, O Lord, and you are exalted as head above all. (1 Chron. 29:11)
While it is not canonical, the doxology is nonetheless a perfectly biblical and correct thing to pray: “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever. 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, for “in him we live and move and have our 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 “Therefore 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” (Phil. 2:9-11).
Bowing the knee to Jesus brings a peace that transcends every pain and trial.
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!” (John 20:28).
The moment we bow the knee to Jesus, that ghastly spirit of self-fulfillment, 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!”
1. The King James and New King James translations include this phrase in Matthew 6:13; other translations such as the English Standard Version and New International Version do not. According to gotquestions.org, “The phrase “for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever,” as part of the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:13), is absent from the early Greek manuscripts like Sinaiticus (א) and Vaticanus (B), both fourth-century manuscripts; Bezae (D) from the fifth century; and Dublinensis (Z) from the sixth century.”
