The Lord’s Prayer (part 8): Understanding Prayer as Spiritual Life

Reading: Gospel of Luke 11:1-4

And it happened as He was praying in a certain place, when He ceased, one of His disciples said to Him, Lord teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples. (2) And He said to them: When you pray, say, Our Father who is in Heaven, hallowed be Your name, let Your kingdom come, let Your will be done on earth as it also is in Heaven. (3) Give us our needed bread day by day; (4) and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil.

SERMON

Having dealt now with each part of the Lord’s Prayer separately it’s important that we are able to take the ideas we have explored and bring them together so that their application to living the spiritual life can be seen as a whole. Hopefully you have seen that the prayer, or any prayer for that matter, is not a matter of the lips, but of the heart or life. When we speak of something being of the heart we understand what is of the affections or will. The idea of the things of the heart being a matter of affection is something we easily grasp, but we don’t so easily grasp that when we speak of the affections we are speaking of the will and intention. In fact in the teachings for Spiritual Christianity heart, intention and will, i.e. what we actually do or how we actually live are inseparable – they are the same thing. So when giving our attention to the heart and its affections from a spiritual perspective we need to cut through any sense of sentimentality we carry in our understanding of what these things refer to. Our culture emphasises feel good sentimentality or emotion with matters of the heart; and while these are related they are merely a surface manifestation which often gets confused with the idea of love. In the spiritual life, love is our commitment to living the truth as we understand it, love is taking responsibility for our life, reorganising our values so that in spite of how we feel we make spiritual principles a priority in our dealings with others, and it often involves compelling ourselves to live and act in ways we don’t necessarily feel overly excited about.

We attach a sentimental kind of love to our idea of the Lord when we think of the Lord in terms of being a person just like us. Sentimental love needs an external object of devotion and depending on the state of mind, in the area of religion and spirituality, this could be a physical form of stone or wood or some metal fashioned into an object of focus – this is of course what we understand by idolatry – but idolatry isn’t limited to or dependent upon a material or physical form as its point of focus. It can also take on a more internalised form as an image created or fashioned within the imagination around with a person builds a world in which all their needs and desires are met, their actions are justified and their interactions with other people are assessed and reinterpreted to fit in with their world view or perspective of life. We are all prone to this kind of fantasy building to a greater or lesser degree because it is what the lower mind spends most of its time and energy doing and we buy into it to the degree that we seek to avoid having to face the things in our life we really need to face. For those who are attracted to spiritual or religious matters within a Christian context there is a phase in which the natural mind creates and offers us an idealised image of the Lord that is sense based where He is seen as a person who has all the attributes of a finite being or person just like us. There is nothing wrong with this as a starting point; indeed our state of mind is so immersed in natural ideas that any deeper view is impossible. However there will come a time when this sensual view of the Lord will have to die if we are to find a deeper more fulfilling sense of spiritual life.

One of the main characteristics to a natural faith that regards the Lord as to His person first and essence second is that spiritual things are externalised. For example, prayer becomes something verbal or of the lips directed to a God “out there” somewhere who hears our verbal utterances. But we know that the Lord isn’t “out there” in space and time in the sense that the person next to you is perceived “out there” and you can talk to. Yet on another level we see that our actions, which in this case is our prayers, are often performed as if we believed that this were in fact where the Lord is. A natural understanding of the Lord as a person sees the emphasis, as far as prayer is concerned, on its external verbalisation or at least it’s being brought to consciousness as inner talk in the thought of the mind. When God is seen as “out there” in sensual terms He is approached as one who can bring about what we want or desire, all we have to do is pray long enough or hard enough or with enough force demonstrating our faith and in so doing we will be able to move Him to act because of our many words. Thus prayer becomes something more like a magical incantation that can get us what we want rather than a means by which we can align our thoughts and affections with the will and purposes of the Lord for our life.

The Lord Himself commented on this state of life in the gospels just before He gave us the Lord’s Payer when He said;

When you pray, don’t use vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think they will be heard for their much speaking…

This is often understood to mean we are not to use mantras and the like as forms of prayer, but we need to recognise that while we may use many different forms and constructions of words in our prayers, we are often using different words in repeatedly asking for basically the same thing…this is useless work or what are termed here “vain repetitions” that arises from a misunderstanding of the true use of prayer, due to a misunderstanding of who the Lord is, where He is to be found and how He operates in our lives.

What the teachings of Spiritual Christianity draw our attention to is that we are to think of the Lord from essence first and from that essence to His person. If we are to understand was this means we need to know what the Lord as essence refers to. When we understand this, then, how best to think of the Lord as to person can be grasped more clearly. Essence refers to the Lord’s essential nature which is divine love and divine wisdom. Now both love and wisdom are spiritual, or mental, or psychological qualities for love is of the affections and wisdom belongs to the understanding and finds its place there as truth. Love as affection and wisdom as true ideas don’t exist outside human minds, they are what generate mental states of life, and if the Divine is love and wisdom itself then the Divine must be a Divine Human. We know that a person is not their body; that to truly know a person is to know the quality of their affections and the ideas, beliefs, values and aspirations they hold. The quality of these inner things are what define and make a person a human being, and it is the kind of connection we are able to make with these aspects of a person that constitutes a relationship with them. Having a body enables these inner aspects to come forth to view and, if good and true, they find their form in the infinite variety of useful services that support human beings to live and so support creating opportunities for their spiritual awakening or salvation. Anything that takes its form from love and wisdom must contain love and wisdom and as love and wisdom is only attributable to minds in a human form any genuine manifestation of these things through uses that support spiritual ends is a manifestation of the Lord as to His person.

Wherever uses are performed that support the life of people what is genuinely human takes form and it is this that is the Lord in our midst. Now the quality of the love and wisdom that manifests itself through any particular use, and so the degree of clarity with which we can see the Lord in our midst, has a direct relationship to the degree to which our own minds have been recreated in the Lord’s image. How are our minds recreated? They are recreated through taking into our life spiritual ideas from the Lord and looking to sincerely live from them. Where do we find these ideas? We find them in the Sacred Scriptures or the Word understood in the light of the Heavenly Doctrines. If the Sacred Scriptures are the source of love and wisdom accommodated to finite human minds then the ideas found there must be divine because the Lord alone is the source of all love and wisdom. The ideas the Word conveys are love and wisdom in a human form, so must, and can only be, the Lord Himself for this is what the Lord is. This then is the Lord as to His person; the Word is the Divine Human of the Lord. We need to get out of seeing the Lord as to person in terms of a historical character and get a hold of the message of Spiritual Christianity that He is now present in all His fullness in the Word, this is the meaning behind the idea of the second coming.

So we see now how it is that the Lord is within. What implications are there in this for our understanding of prayer and the Lord’s Prayer in particular? Getting a handle on the actual word translated “prayer” can help us here. It literally means “to speak a wish or desire or intention”. To speak is to give expression to the thought and so carries the idea of bringing something into being, giving it expression, so spiritually speaking prayer means to give expression to a wish, desire or intention. Now these words don’t have a lot of force in them, a wish is something vague that more often than not applies to an outside possibility. We use it in the phrase “wishful thinking” and mean whatever is thought of is unlikely to come about. The term desire is also something largely regarded in terms of “maybe”, I have a desire but that’s as far as it goes, and finally the word intention, we often associate with the word the idea of intending to do something but just not managing to get around to it.

The weak meaning associated with these words in our culture is unfortunate, for, from a spiritual perspective, there is nothing vague or weak in these terms, they carry force, for spiritually they relate to the will and so to pray is to give expression to the desires of the heart, not in terms of speech but in terms of ones life. There is no distinction in the Lord between what is said and what is done, what the Lord speaks comes into being; neither is there a distinction drawn in the spiritual world where no one is permitted to say one thing and live another. Similarly, in the Word, to pray means to live. When the Lord said to pray after this manner in regard to the Lord’s Prayer He was laying down how our lives are to be lived, He was not giving us a formula of what we were to say, as stated in AC 7884;

The worship of the lips without the worship of the life avails nothing…

What is essential is what is internal, which is living the life as it is this gives meaning to what is spoken or external. To take the Lord’s Prayer as something to be recited repetitively reduces it to the very practice of vain repetition the Lord had just spoken against. This prayer is a blueprint for living a genuine spiritual life and we need to approach it fresh every time we contemplate it looking to the Lord for new meanings and applications for our life.

Sincere prayer is an acknowledgement that all good is from the Lord, and that the Lord alone knows what we need, and that we desire to have this done in and for us. DP 119.

So then, if we look to live the prayer so that our lives embody it, so our lives will become a living prayer and then will these final words have their fulfilment in us…

Mat 6:13 …for Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.

Amen.

Apocalypse Revealed 611.
…think of God from His essence, and from that of His Person, and not from His Person, and from this of His essence, for to think of His essence from Person, is to think materially of His essence also; but to think of His Person from essence, is to think spiritually even of His Person. The ancient Gentiles, because as they thought materially of God, and also of the attributes of God, not only imagined three gods, but many even to the number of a hundred. Know then that the material does not flow into the spiritual, but the spiritual into the material. It is similar when the neighbour is thought about from how they appear externally, rather than from their inner qualities, and when heaven is thought as a place first, and not from the love and wisdom which heaven is. It is similar with each and everything in the Word. Therefore, he who cherishes a material idea of God, and likewise of the neighbour and of heaven, cannot understand anything in it. The Word is to a person who thinks materially a dead letter…

Apocalypse Explained 48
“For thine is the kingdom” signifies that the Divine Truth is from the Lord alone; it is also said “power” and “glory” because to the Divine Truth belong all power and glory.

Works quoted above by Emanuel Swedenborg

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