Thy Kingdom Come Podcast Episode

What we’re doing is something more like tuning our hearts to his melody. We’re joining in the music that God is making in the universe. When we pray, we’re inviting God to shape the way we think. By praying to him, God’s inviting us into thinking his thoughts and God’s inviting us into the priorities that he has, and that is indeed the reviving of our souls. 

Welcome everyone to Breaking Bread, the podcast brought to you by Apostolic Christian Counseling and Family Services. Matt Kaufmann is my name, and I’m delighted to be with you here today. It’s that time of year when we sing these hymns and they are deep and meaningful. Joe Lehman is with me and I’m going to give a chance for Joe to introduce himself, but before we go to that introduction, Joe, such a powerful hymn. 

O come, o come Immanuel. I’m just curious how that strikes you as we enter this season of advent and hastening the coming of Christ. Yeah, thanks for having me on, Matt. I appreciate it and I love Breaking Bread. This is a beautiful hymn, and it’s always been a favorite of mine since I’ve been an adult and a Christian. 

It captures a sort of anticipation and an anxiety for the coming of Messiah that maybe we don’t always feel in a commercialized Christmas atmosphere, and so it’s beautiful. Anxiety. I see. I like that too. I think I know what you’re getting at, but not something that I naturally would say. 

Speak more to that anxiety part. Well, yeah, sure. Anxiety’s a bad word now, right? Maybe stress is giving us an appropriate awareness of something bad in our environment. There is no peace between God and man. And then the angel comes and says, peace on earth and goodwill to men. And so, the proper emotion before that pronouncement of peace is anxiety because truly there is no peace between God and man. 

A longing that speaks to, and I mean, the first verse captured it. And ransom captive Israel. Right? Which, in captivity, stress would be probably a very, very good word. Joe, thanks for coming on. Let me introduce you to our audience. I’m very glad to call Joe a friend, and we’ve been able to interact as our church agencies do. Joe works with the Elder Teaching Resource, and I really appreciate the work that you’re doing. Joe, say a little bit about yourself, where you live, share with the listeners a little bit of an introduction. Sure. Yeah. I grew up in the Bluffton area in the Apostolic Christian Church. I suppose most relevant; I have a wife and three children. Just before working for the ETR, 

Lisa, the kids, and I were abroad working in the Bible Translation Movement in Nepal. And now, yeah, I get a chance to live here in the United States and enrich the church and live with my grandparents and I’m having a blast. God is good.  

Thanks for that. You know, let me explain a little bit of why I have asked Joe to come on this podcast. Joe, we’re in what the historical Christian has called the advent season. It’s this time of anticipation, expectation, and celebration of the coming of Christ. And we do that in all manner of ways from the hymns that we sing, perhaps the messages that we listen to, the lights and the tinsel and the food that we eat. 

We are in a season right now that is so overladen with this celebration. You can feel it. You can see it. It’s very tangible and it’s a beautiful time in that way, isn’t it? I have a little bit of a love hate relationship coming into the Christmas season because I can’t say that I’m always able to keep up the emotional anticipation and joy for as long of a period as our culture gives us to do that. And so, it’d be nice to start Christmas a little bit later so that I personally can maintain that anticipation and excitement. But yeah, it always seems to start pretty early. But that maintenance, I think, is actually key. 

So, let that be somewhat of what we’re getting at with this podcast. You’re saying that we’re trying to discipline ourselves and encourage one another in joy. It’s maybe impossible for humans to maintain a focus on worship unless we encourage one another through Advent. Yes. So, I think Advent might have a place of instruction for us and teaching us how to be the type of people in waiting, because it does get exhausting. It does get difficult, and it’s like, okay, enough of that already. And here’s where I want to do. I want to introduce you, Joe, to the audience in this way. About a year ago Joe, I was privileged to hear some of your instructions on the Lord’s Prayer. Oh yeah, sure. And so now I want to weave in something else here in this conversation about Advent. So, we’re going to hold Advent in one hand, and I want to hold the Lord’s prayer in the other hand, which seem like very different things. 

And so, I want to pivot. We’re going to come back to Advent, waiting, maintaining, and all of these things. Let’s go to this concept of the Lord’s Prayer, which we all know. I think many of our listeners would be able to recite the Lord’s Prayer just verbatim. And it’s a beautiful prayer that Christ gives to us. 

Joe, I have included the Lord’s Prayer in a more daily rhythm in my life. Okay. And I have noticed that it is beginning to work on me. Oh, that’s cool. And it’s begun to work on me in a couple of ways, but I want you to help our audience understand. Let’s go back to the Lord’s Prayer, and I want you to share with the audience some of the architecture of the Lord’s Prayer. Take us to the disciples there who ask, Lord, teach us to pray like John taught his disciples. You get a sense that there’s some tradition there in terms of rabbi and prayer and students for sure. Oh, yeah. Can you bring our audience into that? 

I’d be glad to. So, I think maybe the first thing to do would be to distinguish prayer from prayer. There is prayer that we pray from our hearts, right? And there are prayers that we pray over a meal that should be off the cuff straight from our heart. But there is a different type of prayer, an office of prayer, a prayer that has to do with your commitment to daily worship and daily joining the mission of Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven. So, this is prayer that you do as sort of part of your occupation as a Christian. And I think it’s kind of fallen out of favor. We, of course, have Islam and Judaism who do a daily office of prayer, and it becomes monotony, right? 

So, we want to stay away from that monotony. But if you go to an early Christian writing called the Didache which is basically written within 50 years of most of our New Testament. These Christians were praying three times a day, the Lord’s Prayer and praying in the form of that. So that would be my first point, is that praying the Lord’s Prayer is not so constraining as to keep you from praying from your heart, but to join in sort of a communal daily prayer that connects you to what God and the Holy Spirit are doing in this world. There is a gift, in a sense, that he gives us with this prayer. Would that be a good way to, to say it? 

Sure. He is giving us something very dear. You can see the early Christians held this prayer in such high esteem that it was a friend to them, it was a guiding light. It was a compass for them. It was something that grounded them. Are those words at all accurate in how it would’ve been understood at that time? 

Yeah, for sure. So, we’re talking about a community of faith that had the writings of the Old Testament but didn’t have always the New Testament. Not everybody was literate, so praying was a way to connect to God. And we did that through memorization, right? We, as the church, had the Lord’s Prayer memorized and we would pray communally and individually in that template. So maybe this is a good time to say that the Lord’s Prayer can function as a poem that we say verbatim while also can function as a template of prayer. A poem that’s giving us boxes in which to inhabit a place of prayer.  

So, we can say, your kingdom come. And that is a box. And we could pray in that box for half an hour. You know what I mean? Yes. And just asking for God’s kingdom. So, there are six boxes in the Lord’s Prayer. Three and three. Three in the beginning. Hallowed be your name is one box. Your kingdom come is box two. Your will be done is box three. Those are three boxes that we can pray in. That’s part of the template. Those are prayers on to God on behalf of the cause of God in our world. So, we’re not asking for things other than to ask God to be glorified in his name for his kingdom to come, for his will to be done. It’s pure worship, in my opinion. 

So, 50% of the boxes, three out of six, are devoted to that. And those are lines that we can say in a poem, but we could also say that each of those lines encapsulates a small world of prayer that we can enter into. So just to close the loop, the next three boxes, the second half of the Lord’s Prayer, is give us this day our daily bread, as you know, provision. Forgive us our debts. So that’s confession and asking for forgiveness, and then prayers for protection. Protect us from the evil one and lead us not into temptation. So, there are the six boxes of the Lord’s Prayer divided into two larger halves. So, the Lord’s Prayer is instructive to me. 

Okay. And so, this is an aha for me, Joe, and I’d love your feedback on this. Very often when we think of prayer, we’re thinking of reaching out and affecting the heart of God through worship, through confession, through request, and so it is kind of pointing towards God out from ourselves and affecting the heart of God, however that happens. 

Yet this does that and more. It points back to us, and it is an instructive and guiding Christian artifact for the disciple. I am now molded by these six boxes. My worldview is, is crafted mm-hmm. Trained by these six boxes. Am I right about that? I can wholeheartedly agree with that experience myself. 

I think what we’re doing is something more like tuning our hearts to his melody so that we’re joining in the music that God is making in the universe when we pray. So, in a sense, we are reaching out to God. But also, the tuning of my heart metaphor is instructive to me because it’s also enacting a change in myself. 

I’m inviting God to shape the way I think by praying to him. God’s inviting us into thinking his thoughts, and God’s inviting us into the priorities that he has, and that is indeed the reviving of our souls. For a long time, you have had a rhythm of using the Lord’s Prayer, praying the Lord’s Prayer, and have taken the Lord’s Prayer very seriously in your own devotional life. I’m curious in what ways your heart has been tuned. Sometimes it’s hard to detect this, but I would love for you to share if there has been some tuning that has been because of this gift of prayer.  

Yeah. I have to say definitely it’s been true. It’s always hard to reflect on your own spiritual growth. One thing that I’m constrained by the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer is to pray a lot more for the cause of God than the cause of Joe, right? We said earlier that 50% of the prayer is devoted to prayer for God’s cause in our universe. May your name be hallowed, may your will be done. May your kingdom come God, you know? And so, my heart has been trained to prioritize God in my prayers, which helps me to think more about those things in my thought life, which helps me to live more in the space that I inhabit here on this earth and to live more into that. 

So just that ratio has been a powerful pressure on my life. So, by asking God for his glory in my life, I begin to want it more. And then I begin to do things that glorify God more. So, that’s been maybe one pattern, I guess. Oh, okay. Let’s just pause with that one thing because it’s Advent. 

I’m wondering if the Lord’s Prayer does bring about in disciples a holy longing. In some of the same ways that we celebrate Christmas for all of its glitter and all of its glamor and all of its exhaustion. Underneath it all, there is something truly holy here that the Lord’s Prayer calls us into, and that is thy kingdom come. 

O, come O come Immanuel. The third verse says this, o, come thou Dayspring, come and cheer our spirits by thine advent here and drive away the shades of night and pierce the clouds and bring us light. You can feel the anxiety, as you mentioned, right. That anticipation, that longing, that author who is intent to seek God’s kingdom. 

Yeah. I would love your perspective with that refrain in the Lord’s Prayer. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. This idea of the coming kingdom. Yeah, this is very instructive to me. Matt, I appreciate you drawing us into this. This thought built into the Lord’s Prayer is an instruction to desire God’s kingdom and built into the season of Advent is this anticipation for a new and beautiful future, a future of intimacy with God and the future of the advent of a merciful Savior and maybe the second advent of a ruling and wonderful Savior who will bring a new creation.  

And so, I’ve never thought of it this way, and I appreciate your willingness to sort of connect the theological dots and let that follow up with a rush of beautiful, worshipful emotion. We can worship with yearning; we can worship with desire. That desire can be worshiped. So, I appreciate that. Yes, and I think what we have at our advantage here if we live advent. Well, advent embodies the spirit of longing and hope in very tangible ways. So, you can ask somebody, are you looking forward? Are you preparing for the coming of Christmas? And they’re going to say, oh yeah, well I need to do this tonight. And we’ve just made plans for this and I’m going to pick up a turkey here. I’m going to be doing this. We’re going here. We have so many tangible things that speak to whether we are or are not longing for Christmas and making plans for it. 

Yeah. So, here’s my question. How do we tangibly long for the coming of Christ? You mentioned the second one. How should we as believers be asking for it, be living as those who are longing? Well, that is a good question, and I’m not entirely sure that I always long well, or that I inhabit that space of baggage. 

Well, let me just say I don’t have it figured out. That’s why I’m asking the question. So, the question is how can we jump into that space? How can we lead ourselves and our communities into that space? Having sort of mulled over and prayed a portion of Scripture for a decade of my life. That being the Lord’s Prayer, right? Yeah. The Lord’s Prayer. Having sort of inhabited the Lord’s Prayer for more than a decade, I feel like my tendency is to innovate a little bit so I can think of a certain segment of my life like my son and his spelling test. 

And I just want your kingdom to come and your will to be done within that tiny acreage of the universe that I inhabit. You know, just wishing for the incremental dawning of God’s goodness and his superabundance and his love in my son’s wrestling with spelling. 

That is very narrow, but I think that’s an important lesson. You can’t think too narrowly about the kingdom’s effect. His coming kingdom would affect my children. It would affect their growth. It would affect my marriage. It would affect my job. It would affect how I live in my house. It would affect how I spend my money. 

Am I getting to it? Does your kingdom come to these areas? Yeah. I think you are. There’s a lot of kingdom work right now. We have this notion that God’s at work in our world. And so, the kingdom is already, but not yet. It’s started; the revolution has started. But the conquest is not complete. And so, you and I and our children and our grandchildren get to sort of inhabit that incremental conquest of the Lord in the hearts of men and in the society of men. And so would you say it’s a celebration then of its presence and then a longing of its future completion?  

So, there are two aspects to it. Oh yeah, for sure. So, to pray your kingdom come can be a prayer for the second coming. And it can be a prayer for just an incremental change in a relationship that you’re thinking about right now. So, I think it can be as narrow and as broad as that at the same time. And perhaps maybe one should reflect upon the other, you know what I mean? 

The conquest of our Lord’s reign and his worthiness. As we think about that future conquest can basically inform our thoughts and our actions within a small increment of a specific conflict or a difficulty or even a growing pain that we experience with our families in life. So, I think it has that flexibility, but so incrementally. 

But I guess drawing this back to Advent, are you saying that would be a beautiful exercise to participate in Advent by praying the Lord’s Prayer? By a commitment to praying it once a day or praying at least in the form of it, just allowing its structure to guide our prayer. Is that what you’re thinking? I think that’s valid, but I’m actually going in the opposite direction. The Lord’s Prayer, I think, is allowing me to live Advent better because it is helping me, shaping me, as you had mentioned, towards this desire for the coming kingdom. Does that make sense? 

Yeah, it does. So, Advent provides for us practice. That’s my point. It’s like practice. All right, let’s practice this. We’ve set some time out here and we are going to long for the coming of Jesus and his kingdom, and we are going to focus on what comes by it, and we’re going to fall in love with the kingdom of God and our need for it. 

Like, all right, we’ve got a couple of weeks, let’s do this. Because we atrophy and we can only do it for so long. Back to your point of maintenance. Amen. Yeah. Sometimes the discipline of focusing our attention can give us as much joy as participating in something that grabs our attention, that we can be changed by that discipline of focus and that discipline. 

And I guess I’m abstracting it, but what I mean by focusing on wanting God, focusing on wanting Christmas, focusing on wanting the coming of a loving Savior who is worthy to rule this universe. Okay. So, I think you’re onto something here, Joe. You just talked about really wanting the coming of Christ and the Lord’s Prayer brings us to that. 

As often as we come to it, it will bring us to the wanting. Because here’s what I’ve noticed, Joe. Sometimes in my advent, I’ve just made it a verb. Adventing. Sometimes in my adventing, I actually celebrate more the waiting and I’m not as interested in the actual coming. Man, I love this season, right? I love the songs. I love this. I love that. All of it’s good. But I’m just simply saying, man, it’s kind of a dud that Christmas comes and then it’s over. You know? I would rather have the season than the day. You see that? Oh, of course. Yeah. And I can understand that. And you just talked about longing for the coming of Christ and as believers, we’re in this time of waiting and sometimes I do wonder if I’m really pining for the coming because I’m so used to living in the waiting. 

Do you follow me? Am I wanting it enough? Am I getting in the spirit of advent anticipation, have I caught it? Have I caught what the Lord’s Prayer is really bringing me into? Yeah. And this is the wanting of Christ. And so, my question to you, I guess, directly would be how do we mature a wanting for Christ’s return, a longing for it? 

And I realize that’s complex, right? Because we run a lot of scenarios that we don’t understand what it’s going to look like, and we wonder what this is going to mean. And so, there’s just this element of wanting Christ’s coming that I think is elusive to me. So, a spiritual discipline of advent or a spiritual discipline of prayer is simply sort of getting in the way of the great current that is God’s grace, turning men back into men, turning women back into women. 

So, it’s happening by God’s hand. We’re just reaching out and letting it hit us. I recall a memory of mine. I’ve been to a high peak in the Canadian Rockies twice, and there’s a very large waterfall there on Mount Robson, and it’s fed by a glacial lake. The first time I went, I refrained from going close to that waterfall because it was just so massive and it would require me to just get all wet. And when you’re backpacking, you just don’t have that many clothes. And I regretted that.  

So, five years later, on this second trip that I took, I just told my companions, there’s no way that I’m going to walk past that waterfall without going out there and touching it and just getting close enough to it. And so, I did. Yeah, I just got down to my boxer briefs and went out and touched the flow of this mighty waterfall and let it just soak me. And sometimes I feel like that’s a pattern of proper spiritual discipline. Not necessarily building your own self up but just putting yourself in the way of something mighty. And that is the work of the Spirit.  

I’m curious. Let’s go with thy kingdom come. We’re really focusing on this one box here. Thy kingdom come, which is so very central to advent, if that is the mighty waterfall. In what ways are you being formed by that and maybe perspectives that have changed, maybe ways that you’ve thought about his Kingdom. I’m just curious. Sure. Help us get closer to it. Yeah. I was personally extremely relieved to find out that the Christian walk was more than an exercise in refraining from sin or resisting sin. A portion of my walk with Christ has been marked by that view, that perception of being with God means you don’t do X, Y, Z. 

And so, to come into this awareness that God has established a beachhead in our world. And he is executing a plan through the ages to bring his super abundance to the world and to bring his blessing to the nations and to bring his glorious rule and that I can be a part of that was water to my very thirsty soul because I was tired of living the life of just resisting sin. 

So, an expansion of what God’s kingdom means. You had a very narrow view of it and the closer to that waterfall; you begin to see the expansive nature of it and a quite welcoming expansion. Yeah. Amen. And then too, we’ve already talked about this, but the Kingdom of Heaven is a vision of the future, but also a vision of what tomorrow can be. 

So, the Kingdom of Heaven is expanded to me in that I love living in God’s Kingdom now because it’s not a kingdom where I just refrain from sinning, but it’s a kingdom where God’s superabundance is. But I love living in God’s Kingdom because it is already happening and it is something glorious that has not yet happened. 

And so, I get the double joy of anticipating God’s Kingdom tomorrow in my life and its expansion in my life tomorrow. And I get the joy of anticipating that in a thousand, thousand years from now. I will be walking into God’s Kingdom, and it will be more than I can dream, a paradise of intimacy and abundance that I am growing in anticipation for and longing for. 

So, there is a present peace and there is a future hope. There’s a present and a future to the Kingdom. And I think this is really instructive. Thank you for that, Joe, because it helps us fall in love with it and those things that we fall in love with are those things that we really long for. 

And so, now let’s go back. I loved your opening confidence about being able to maintain. Sometimes Christmas season gets longer and longer, right? And things start happening. I’ve got some in my family who have no problem playing Christmas music in early October and others who have hard, fast rules about when you can and can’t. 

But I think your point of atrophy is something that we all understand. In this lesson of Christmas advent, it’s like, I can only do so much. Right? Right. It speaks to a very real part of us that actually has a Christian analogy. How do we maintain our longing for the coming Christ when one year rolls into another which rolls into another, which rolls into a decade, which rolls into a lifetime. Wow. This is a matter that we can’t atrophy over.  

Yeah, that’s a great question. I’m convinced that the reason I would grow cold in my pursuit of God is not because God isn’t good and praiseworthy and worthy of my attention, but because perhaps I’ve drifted into a pattern of behavior that doesn’t let God fall within my mental field of vision. And so, the spiritual disciplines perhaps are designed to keep God in your vision; to keep yourself near that waterfall, the torrent of the Spirit’s work in your life. 

The spiritual disciplines are there, but then there’s also just putting one foot in front of another. I guess it’s the commitment. I know God is good, so I’m going to say that he is, even though I don’t feel like it, and if I say it, my heart might hear my words and might be instructed. So, I don’t know, there’s a one foot in front of the other aspect to that. And then two, just a prayer of desire for God to give us what we can’t have. The Christian doctrine teaches that grace goes first, right? We are saved by grace through faith, and so it is God’s grace that gives us the faith that is a means to that grace. 

So, because of that priority of grace, we can ask God to give us what we don’t have. We can ask God to give us love to express to him and he is faithful and eager to give us that. So, this could be perhaps part of the intention of Christ giving this prayer as a daily office for his disciples to keep God in their vision, to be a one step in front of the other rhythm and to be that administration of grace. Am I on the right track? It certainly has been that for me. Yeah, and so that’s been my experience and there’s a lot of evidence in history that Christians have depended upon this for decades and for centuries. 

So, we can trust in that tradition and trust in the Scripture that God has given us instructions from the Lord’s lips and step into praying the Lord’s Prayer for sure. I think it won’t let us down. It might surprise us, but it won’t let us down. I like that. Being surprised but never let down is a good thing. I appreciate this conversation, Matt. This has really stretched me and reinvigorated me and I’m excited.  

O, come, O come Immanuel. John Mason Neil has been attributed to the translation of an 1851 hymn. It says translation because some early writings date back to the early 1700s that this hymn perhaps was translated from Latin, and some of those go back even 1200 years ago. 

There has been a long Christian history of disciples crying out for the coming of Christ. What’s your response to that, Joe, in 2025? Oh yeah, knowing that history gives me joy. I’s a joy to know that a song I hold dear is a song that men and women of God long ago, have held dear. 

And it’s a joy to be a part of that habitual and mutual affection for the nearness of Christ. The nearness of his radiant blessing and presence. Joe, thanks for your work for our church. Thanks for sharing on this topic of the Lord’s Prayer and for me personally helping to elevate that and provide color to our listeners. I think Joe’s helped us come close to a waterfall that we would do well to become wet by. 

You mentioned the grandeur of Christ and his kingdom. And maybe let’s invite us all in this season of Advent where we’re going to be celebrating the waiting and coming of Christmas in very tangible ways that we might longingly wait for and celebrate the coming of the kingdom, which is present and yet coming. 

God bless you all. Merry Christmas in this advent season.