As It Is In Heaven - How Jesus Instructed Us to Pray

Welcome to our St. Pete Vineyard debut blog post. We're wanting to give our church family more Godly direction outside of Saturday and Sunday services, so you'll see us posting more and more here as we get this ramped up. Please ask any burning questions related to the post and we'll do our best to get answers to your comments. 

Post Written by Chris Cahall, Pastor

I've been thinking a lot about the kingdom lately. Ministry-wise, I actually think about the kingdom more than anything else. I would like to be mature enough someday that, ministry or not, I think about the kingdom more than anything else; more than food, sports, entertainment. So, I've been thinking a lot about the kingdom lately and what it is supposed to look like and I was reminded of what Jesus instructed us to do and how he instructed us to pray. 

Matthew 5-7 contains one of Jesus' classical sermons often referred to as "the sermon on the mount". At the heart of this message is what is often referred to as the Lord's prayer where Jesus says: "may your kingdom come and your will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven". So, I've been asking this question lately: what is true of Heaven that ought to be more true of what life looks like down here? And whatever that is, it seems as if what Jesus isn’t telling us is to just be content with all of the social, physical & spiritual brokenness all around us and to just wait until we get to Heaven when everything will be okay. 

Jesus is telling us that we should not grow content with what we see around us but to pray that his rule in his reign would advance and be established instead. This should be the heart of our prayer, our petition and what we ultimately long for and even fight for. If I'm honest, what is true of my personal inventory probably doesn't look very much like what is true of heaven's inventory. 

With that said, I believe prayer is that powerful agent that not only changes circumstances, but changes our hearts in the process. Sometimes it takes a true change of a heart before we see any results but sometimes God will break-in and radically change a situation and as a result of witnessing His handiwork our hearts cannot help but be changed. 

Change is a staple of the Kingdom, both in our hearts as well as our surroundings. Next time we will look into what some of those surroundings should look like when the rule and reign of God breaks in.

Here are the links to listen to the sermons from the 'As It Is In Heaven' series: 

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3