A Theology and Practice of the Lord’s Prayer
Prayer is presented as a grace-driven practice shaped by the structure and theology of the Lord’s Prayer. It begins with adoration, recognizing God’s holiness, transcendence, and fatherly nearness, which reorients the heart away from self toward divine character. Confession is described as honest acknowledgment of specific sins, not for shame but for healing and transformation. Thanksgiving arises from the reality that Christ’s reign is already inaugurated in heaven and awaited in fullness on earth, forming the foundation for gratitude. Supplication is framed through the request for “daily bread,” which challenges inflated ideas of need and calls for trust in God’s faithful provision. Throughout, prayer is portrayed as communion with God that shapes the whole life in humility, dependence, and hope.
TRANSCRIPT:
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): It’s Sunday. Welcome to episode 211. When it comes to the topic of prayer, over the years so many books were written on this wonderful and important topic. Some were written more on the practical aspect of prayer, some from an archeological aspect, yet not every book was written that would encompass and address both of these aspects of prayer to a regular church goer—how to grow in these aspects. But not when it comes to Pastor Anthony Delgado. He managed to encompass both of these aspects so we can learn theology of the Lord’s Prayer, but even more importantly, how to apply it, and even challenge us to maybe change the way we pray when it comes to our relationship with the Father through Jesus. So Pastor Anthony, thank you so much for finding time for myself and for the audience tonight. Welcome again. I think you’ve been my guest three or four times so far. Can you please reintroduce yourself again and tell us something about this wonderful book that you wrote and that we’ll be discussing tonight?
Anthony Delgado: Yeah, absolutely. So I’m Anthony Delgado. I’m the pastor of Palmdale Church in Southern California. I’ve been in ministry for the better part of 20 years, nearly 20 years now. I’ve worked in a number of different capacities and have a particular interest in biblical theology specifically, and in covenant theology. And so that has really framed a lot of what I’ve done in my writing and in my ministry, and also in an academic sphere as well, looking at how the narrative of Scripture comes together—not just to give us a way to think about the faith, but also a way to practice the faith.
And with my new book called God-Shaped Prayer, that’s what it is. The subtitle is A Theology and Practice of Prayer, and it’s really saying that if we think the right things, then that should motivate us to do the right things. Prayer seems cliche to say—everybody knows all Christians should pray—but on some level, prayer is an application of just about any Scripture. And so I wanted to put a book out. I wrote this book for my church; I’ll share it with you guys. But I wrote it for my church really as a discipleship tool to say, Here’s what we believe and therefore this is what we do.
And not just what we do, because I think a lot of people have different views of what prayer is—not just how it’s done. I think there are a lot of different views about what it even is. And then we have different views based on what we think it is, and we have different views about how to do it, and then our views on how to do it affect our views on what it accomplishes in the Christian life.
And so I think that the narrative of Scripture, specifically the gospel, gives us expectations about what prayer should accomplish—what the outcome of grace should be. And if that’s accurate, then that works into how we think about prayer on the level of Scripture. So that’s a brief intro to the book. The book looks specifically at the Lord’s Prayer, and it’s an analysis of the Lord’s Prayer in Genesis six, verses nine through 13, and it walks through the Lord’s Prayer stage by stage. It follows—you might be familiar, especially people in more of an evangelical context—the ACTS model of prayer: adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication. If you’re not, here’s an introduction to it that’s used in the book. But I actually think that sometimes I’m critical of things that are models because they oversimplify things that are profound in Scripture. But in this case, I’ve been teaching the ACTS model of prayer for a long time, way back to my youth pastor days at other churches, because I do think that it flows right from Scripture and that it’s modeled pretty clearly in the Lord’s Prayer.
So that’s the book. It’s a fairly short book, and I personally think—if I can say one more thing as an intro—the Apostle Paul refers to grace upon grace. He says that we receive in Christ grace upon grace, and I think that the first grace there is salvific grace, and the second grace is what we would call sanctifying grace, grace that makes us holy. We don’t make ourselves holy; God makes us holy. He calls us to practices that he promises to work through to produce holiness in us. And prayer is one of those things. And that’s why I say that there’s a sense in which, in every sermon I preach, I could make the application—or one of the applications—prayer, because prayer is always calling us back to who God is.
1. Encouragement: We are never alone!
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): That’s beautiful. And I also want to say to the audience that I have included Pastor Anthony’s Amazon page, Pastor Anthony’s website, as well as his podcast. So please subscribe to that. Buy some of his books. He has several so far. We dissected most of his books, I think. I think this is the third one so far on the channel. So please support his work. The books are affordable, the books have almost maximum reviews, and the books are not just to entertain your intellect, even though there’s nothing wrong with that, but all of his books are very practical. So it doesn’t matter if you’re a layman or a new beginner when it comes to being in Christ and being a Christian walking with the Lord, or if you’re a seasoned believer or even a pastor or a scholar, you can use all of his books when it comes to teaching and preaching. And hopefully this podcast will help you realize, when it comes to the decision of buying not just this book for yourself but also for others in your congregation as a wonderful Christmas gift.
Pastor Delgado, at the very beginning you made this very interesting cross-reference between Revelation eight and the Old Testament—the instances, the prayers of the saints. And this is a wonderful imagery that I was thinking about, because my mind immediately went to the Old Testament with the priesthood, with those that you even included here at this beautiful cover page of your book—with the incense as the smoke rising up to God. And these are our prayers. God takes them so seriously; they’re so precious to him. And sometimes, let’s be honest, we get discouraged: God, my prayers are not answered. Do you even hear my prayers? Theologically I know that you hear my prayers, but spiritually, emotionally, I feel like I’m just hitting the wall. Yet our prayers are rising and transcending through this realm, coming to God’s throne. He sees them. He knows them. Can we maybe start by encouraging and comforting the audience by saying these are the prayers that even maybe angels are carrying to God’s throne, and he sees them and they’re important to him—even if in seasons of our lives walking with God, we may feel alone and lonely, but we are actually never alone?
Anthony Delgado: Yeah. That’s a really great question because I think it points to one of the problems in how people think about prayer. I’m not sure anyone in particular is responsible for why people think this way, but we sometimes get this idea of prayer that makes it almost like magic—like you have to say the right things, do the right things, perhaps be the right thing. If I’m not holy enough or not living righteously enough, then God’s going to ignore me. And I’d like to reframe it a little bit because that picture you get in Revelation eight is the prayers of the saints coming up as incense from the earth into heaven, and then the angel takes that incense and brings it before the Father.
What we need to understand from that is the image of incense. And to be a little bit gross, in the ancient world people didn’t shower regularly, they didn’t have deodorant, and most people smelled bad all the time. Incense and perfumes were to cover up smell. We’re blessed to live in a day where we don’t have as much of that problem, but in that day that’s how it was. And so when we read in the Scriptures about incense coming up to God, it’s a sweet smell, a beautiful smell. Our words are always received with joy in God’s presence.
So then you go, “Wait a minute, then why aren’t my prayers being answered?” And that’s where it comes to this next stage. Perhaps he receives them and he wants us to talk to him, but we think we’re not doing something right. One of the big things I see is churches saying, “We’re going to have a prayer meeting, something’s got to change in our church, and we’re going to pray for three hours,” or, “We’re going to do an all-night prayer.” By the way, I think that would be a beautiful thing for a church to do, so don’t hear this as criticism. Some churches will do a 24-hours-of-prayer event where they have people taking 30-minute shifts so somebody in the church is praying for a full 24 hours. All of that is beautiful.
But here we have in Christian doctrine—and this is a very historical doctrine—the doctrine of divine impassibility. And what impassibility means, you can hear it there in the word “pass,” “impassibility,” it has to do with passions. People are impassioned people. On some level, everything we do is because of our passions. Hopefully you’ve been regenerated by the Holy Spirit and you’re being sanctified, and so you love what God loves, and your passions lead you to do what honors God and causes your life to flourish in a godly manner. Hopefully that’s what your passions are producing as a follower of Christ.
But God doesn’t have passions in the way we have passions. You might have a date night with your wife, or I might have a date night with my wife, or, if you’re a woman listening, you might have a date night with your husband, or a boyfriend, girlfriend, or whatever. Maybe even a child—you might say, “I’m having a date with my daughter,” or something like that. And you go out and have a great time and have this sense of love, and even when you’re not out on that date you know you love your spouse and your children, but you have this reinvigorated passion of love, that sensation of love, and you go, “Oh, I just love so-and-so so much.” Not because you had such a great time, but because that great time inspired that feeling of love in you.
Now, God doesn’t have that. God does not experience love. God is love. We love because God first loved us. God doesn’t love because we are lovable. So it doesn’t matter how lovable or unlovable you are; it does not change reality. The fundamental nature of God is love. His nature is not “to love.” His nature is not “to be loving.” His nature is itself fundamentally characteristic. To say “love” is to refer to God because God is love everywhere.
So this is why it matters for prayer: if God is impassable, then you cannot change God’s mind about what he is going to do in the world, in your church, in your life personally, or in your family. You can’t actually change what God is going to do because you pray more. Or—and here’s a weird thing I hear people say—you can figure out what this means for yourself, but have you ever heard somebody say, “Pray harder”? How do you pray hard? What does that even mean?
2. How should we think about having enough faith, and what would you say to people who are told their prayers fail because they don’t have enough faith?
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): When they try to guilt you, “Oh, you don’t have enough faith,” I really hate that saying. It’s not a cliche—it’s even worse than a cliche. You’re basically putting guilt and so much pressure on someone. Like, how can you even muster more faith? I’m, for example, not coming from a religious home. I never had a huge amount of faith. My faith was always like mustard seed. I want to have more faith, but it’s not like I can produce more faith. So when you say something like that to someone, as one of those horrible pieces of advice, I don’t even think it’s helpful. You can hurt someone or belittle them, or even discourage them from continuing to pray because they lack faith, you know? Right.
Anthony Delgado: Yeah. It’s very prosperity-gospel, really, to say that you have to somehow muster up more faith or more belief or more passion in your prayer. And we don’t accomplish grace. We don’t convince God. We don’t do something to earn God’s favor in any way. We are always the recipients of God’s generous outpouring of favor.
Now, here’s where fervency does come into play. I talk about fervency in the book. I point to several examples of fervency in the Bible and explain why we ought to understand them this way: times of fervency in the Bible have to do with how you have been changed by God. So if, in the gospel—to use John’s words—you have received the right to become children of God, then if God is a good Father and you are his child, you are going to want to hang out with Dad. I’m not a huge fan of referring to God as “Dad,” but I just want to make the point that that’s a reality, something you want to do.
So when my kids come in and tell me a story and tell me about their day and the things they did, it’s not because they’re trying to get something from me. It’s because they care what I think and want to hang out and have a conversation about whatever they did with their day. All my kids are creative in different ways and doing all kinds of things, but it’s not because they’re trying to earn my favor. My eldest daughter is married and in college, and she’s an art major. She brings her art home every weekend and wants to show it to me. She doesn’t need to earn my favor. What she’s doing is having a time of communion with her dad.
And that’s what we’re doing when we’re fervent in prayer. When I am up early every morning to pray—which I’m not always; I don’t want to be overly pious here—but if that’s my prayer habit, an hour of prayer every morning, then that fervency, that passion for prayer, has to do with how God has changed me to love him. Because he loved us first, therefore we love him. We only love because he first loved us. And so that fervency becomes an outpouring of that. But it is not in any way to change who God is. He is immutable—unable to change. He is impassable—unable to be changed by passions or inspired by passions. God is sovereign and at work to do what is in his will in the universe.
So I think that’s fundamental to how the rest of the book is framed, that we understand that doctrine of impassibility.
3. Why is grace so essential to prayer?
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): Yeah. Thank you for that encouragement, especially giving us as the example your kids and you. Because a lot of the time we emphasize work, work, work. And I think while work should always accompany faith—because we know that faith without works is dead—there are also so many limits when it comes to our works or even motives. I notice in my heart that my motives are not always pure and clean. I’m so limited in my own strength and ability to please God on my own. I can’t. So I don’t even know how we can emphasize grace enough without sounding like hyper-grace, because we don’t ever want to justify sin. We don’t want to excuse sin through emphasizing grace. But honestly, without God’s grace, we wouldn’t even be here talking about these things.
I don’t even know how to dive deep into the topic of grace without getting lost, because eventually it leaves you speechless. It’s like, God, who am I that you hear my prayers? God, who am I that you would pick someone from my tongue, from my race, from my tribe, and use me? Who am I that you would start a podcast or a ministry through me? And it’s so humbling. And while proper actions coming out of a sanctified relationship with Christ are inevitable and necessary, I don’t think we can stop thinking about grace being the most fundamental aspect of our faith, because it is God who has to do something.
And it holds me—just in the same way I’m envisioning, while I’m talking to you—how he upholds the whole universe by the power of his word. It’s not gravity; it is gravity in the scientific mind, but it’s him who holds all the planets and stars in their position. So he has to hold me there. Otherwise, if it depended on me, dude, I would be gone long ago. So if I have to think, “Man, I have to wake up at four or five just like my pastor, just like my brothers who have this network or WhatsApp groups and pray in the morning,” if I have to put all this pressure—“I must do this, I must do that, I must do this to be accepted, to be loved, to be rewarded”—I’m so grateful that God accepts our individuality and our difference and is willing to mold us more into Christlikeness and produce so much good despite how long you prayed, what language you prayed, did you speak in tongues, did you speak in your language, how honest was that prayer, how pure was that prayer, was it five minutes, was it thirty minutes.
I’m so grateful that while we are supposed to grow in Christ and his likeness and in this life of being sanctified, I’m also very thankful that when God was walking with Adam, it wasn’t like, “Yeah, we’ll meet at this time.” It’s not about that time, and it’s not about us always going the same route and always talking about the same topics. There’s so much flexibility with God because he is a living person. He is willing to talk about so many things and accept our imperfections. Because if we take our friends as imperfect and they take us, how much more God would? Before the foundation of the earth he knew in advance how many times I would fail him, and he never turned his head against me.
So this is why, like I said, I don’t think we can overemphasize grace because it’s so crucial even to this aspect of prayer.
Anthony Delgado: Yeah. It almost is a grace that we even are able to—well, not almost. It is grace upon grace that we are even able to pray. And it is one of the unique things about Christianity versus other religions. I’m not an expert in world religions, but my general impulse when it comes to most world religions is that not only are the gods of other religions passable—especially in shamanistic types of religions—the gods can be appeased. They wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and they need sacrifices to make them happy again so that they bring the rains and things of that sort. But even in higher religions, there is a tendency toward that—this sense in which the gods can be changed. And I don’t want to make specific claims there, because inevitably somebody will say in the comments, “That’s not what Islam” or whatever believes. But really, on some level, Christianity is the one religion in which God is completely impassable without getting into deism, where not only is God impassable but also God doesn’t really care about anything.
So when it comes to personal religions where gods are interacting with the people, that’s how I would understand it—that only in Christianity is God fully sovereign, impassable, immutable. And yet also in Christianity we have an intimate relationship with the Father. And that’s the grace upon grace: not only does he have the grace to accept us, but he has the grace to change and sanctify us and to mold us into the image of Christ, which is really the dominion that was given to Adam in the beginning. That’s what we’re getting back to.
4. How would you define the word ‘religion’ for the purposes of this discussion?
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): Thank you, Pastor Anthony. Maybe, if you want to address within a minute this question before we start attacking the first of your letters in the acronym ACTS—adoration—how would you define the term religion? I don’t even know if it’s a fair question to you because, if you just Google it, you get one way religion is defined, and scholars define it differently. So how would you, for the sake of tonight’s topic, define what religion is?
Anthony Delgado: Yeah. I would use a very—what you could call an academically low—definition of religion, where I would say that what you intuit religion to be is what it is. So in that, I would say we’re talking about general worldviews that engage supernatural realities. I think that would be a base definition. That’s what people expect. You get arguments about whether atheism is a religion, and some academic terminology would put atheism in a religious category because it is a worldview that shapes morality and things like that. Some of the academic higher-tier definitions do that.
But really, I’m concerned about something pretty basic when I use the word religion—like, what God and what holy book do you follow? So if you worship Allah and you follow the Qur’an, then you’re Muslim. If you read the Bible and you worship Yahweh the Almighty—or Jehovah for traditions that prefer that terminology—or just Jesus, then you’re a Christian. And perhaps if you reject Christianity but accept Tanakh and Torah, especially Torah, then perhaps you’re a Jew. There are all sorts of different ways to use the term religion. I’m not going to pretend to give a concise definition, but that’s how I tend to use the term. In general conversation, that’s what you would understand someone to mean when they say religion.
5. Can you explain what adoration means in prayer and why Jesus starts the Lord’s Prayer with it?
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): Yeah, thanks for that. The first chapter in your book deals with the first letter of the acronym ACTS, and that deals with adoration—God-centered prayers. And here you’re quoting the beginning of Jesus’ prayer, the Lord’s Prayer. Matthew six. You cite verses nine and thirteen, and then you basically say these two verses: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name… for yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.” And then you say our word pray comes from a Latin term meaning to ask earnestly, beg, or entreat. Jesus began his instruction not with asking but with adoration, and only later told his disciples how to ask. All prayer is God-centered and thus begins with adoration, providing context for everything else Jesus teaches us to accomplish in prayer. So maybe we can start dissecting this chapter by this very word. It’s honestly a lovely beginning because you are from the get-go teaching us, “Hey,” and you mention this also at the end of the book, “we are not going to the Father as to some genie from the bottle.” He’s not there just to hear our prayer and grant wishes. That’s not him. He’s a living, personal Father. We come to him and adore him: “Your majesty, I love you. I need you, but I also want to express gratitude for blessing me with A, B, C, and all these things.” Because what kind of a future husband or father would I want to be if someone from my family comes to me only because they want something—money or a favor? Would I feel loved, appreciated? Not necessarily. So yeah, maybe we can start dissecting from this passage.
Anthony Delgado: Yeah. You see that trope in film and literature and TV—the child who only calls Dad when they want something: “My car broke down,” “I need money,” something like that. We also see it with friends—“Dude, you never call me to hang out; you just call me when you need a ride somewhere, or you need help moving.” And you get that tension. I think we have an innate understanding that if there’s a true relationship, then there should be more. And yet we tend to—again, it’s built into the word pray itself. To pray means to ask. And so our tendency is to reduce prayer. I wouldn’t accuse every or even most Christians, but I would say a lot of Christians reduce the terminology down to, “Hey, this is a time of asking.” That when the Bible says to pray, they aren’t thinking about communion with God, thanksgiving, and adoration—they’re thinking, “I need to be asking God for things.” And that reduces our faith to a transactional exchange, which will inevitably lead to a theological leaning of works-righteousness: “If I pray, therefore God answers.” It becomes an exchange, as if the things of God are commodities.
So this first chapter—I think adoration is fundamental. Just to read those words again, there’s so much built into these first few words: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” And the very first word there is our. I want to point this out: a lot of people get offended—if they’re visiting a church, for example—and the preacher wants to talk about what prayer is. Prayer is so personal to people, and it should be, but they become defensive. As if you can’t challenge the way they think about prayer. People can get offended if you try to teach them. If you say, “We’re having a class to teach people how to pray,” some people bristle. And it’s wild.
You don’t want to tell someone they’re praying wrong. And yet if prayer is merely about asking, that’s a big problem. And so Jesus starts right here—he says our Father, reminding us that we are not Christians alone. Especially within a local church context, my faith is not my own. My faith belongs to my church family. As a pastor, I definitely see that with my congregants. There is something about their spiritual maturity and stamina that I feel responsible for—but also they should feel responsible for my faith, because it’s our faith. God is our Father.
When I see myself coming before the Father in prayer to commune with him, I should see myself coming with the saints. That’s why the book cover shows the prayers of the saints. We immediately categorize that and say, “In that incense burner are my prayers.” And yes, that’s true. But in that incense burner are our prayers. Christianity is a communal religion. It’s not “me and Jesus”; it’s “us and Jesus.” We need to understand it that way.
When we say in heaven, in this context we’re talking about who is your spiritual Father. For those who are not in Christ, their spiritual father is actually the devil. And for us who are in Christ, our spiritual Father is God himself. And so we commune with God when we pray. Now, I don’t think that means—and I talk about this in the book—I don’t think that means that someone who prays but is not a Christian thinks they’re praying to the devil, or that the devil is listening to that prayer. That’s not what I’m saying. I actually think it’s very likely that as God hears and knows the prayers of unbelievers, he answers those. But his responsibility to them, given his design, is different than it is to his children.
Like, I care if a kid comes to my door from the neighborhood and says, “Sir, I know I’ve never talked to you, but I need help. I ran my dog over with my bicycle,” or something like that. They run up to my house because there’s some kind of emergency. I care about that, but I’m going to be honest—not in the same way that I care about my flesh-and-blood children. It’s different. I still care. And I think that’s how God deals with prayer. There are those who are outside and have not been adopted as sons of God, and there are those who are inside, who have been adopted and are part of the family.
And so we have this special intimate access. In theological terminology we call it God’s imminence—that he is imminent, present with us. But he is imminent as Father, and he is Father in heaven. So he is imminent and yet transcendent. The Apostle Paul in Colossians one really places God outside creation when he says that Jesus is the image of the invisible Father. And there’s a huge theological conversation to be had there that I don’t really want to get into. But we need to understand God as “other,” as so other than creation that we’re not even thinking about God proper—which means God himself, who God is if there is no creation.
And so when we’re thinking about God proper as separate from creation, even then when we say “separate,” we’re creating space where space does not exist, because space and time are parts of the created order. So we struggle with this because God is not temporal, nor is he spatial. He is in every way and in every sense transcendent, though he comes in the Son to be imminent. And though our prayers are raised to heaven as incense to God and he receives them in all temporal and all spatial spaces—well, we don’t have a word to finish that sentence—but in a place and a way that is apart from all creation, he receives our prayers. So he is both Father imminent and God transcendent. And all of that is in this first line of the prayer. He is the community of the saints, for the community of the saints. He is the imminent Father, and he is the transcendent God in heaven.
And if that’s who he is, then the next line—“hallowed be your name”—makes sense. That is crazy, because there are no other gods who claim to be all of that. Even the Greek gods knew a God that transcendent needed to exist. It’s why at Mars Hill there’s the shrine to the unknown god. And you can see shadows of this in ancient Greek plays and in Greek philosophy—Gaia and Uranus, heaven and earth—there has to be something that created heaven and earth. There’s something we don’t know.
But only in Christianity does the God who exists—the almighty creator of all things—also exist personally with us. It’s a very unique thing about the Christian faith. And someone will say, “Allah in Islam is the same way.” And I’m just going to say—not exactly. Probably the closest second to what we’re talking about here, but not exactly.
So therefore we hallow his name. I want to give a caveat there. Hallowed is a very interesting Greek construct. It doesn’t translate well. It’s why we left it in English from the King James. The word hallowed shows up in the King James, and Bible translators haven’t gotten away from it because the word means—well, if you look at some paraphrased translations you’ll get “honor the Lord’s name as holy,” but that’s not exactly it. This is actually a supplication, which is chapter four. It means that I would, in my life outward and my heart inward, behold God’s name as holy. That’s how the Greek works. We don’t talk that way in English, so it’s hard to get into a translation and still stay close to the original.
But that’s what it means—that in my heart and in my life, this God who is so great that even though I’ve tried to explain it, I can’t fully comprehend what it means that he is that great and also imminent, I pray this prayer: that I would behold him as holy, glorious, mighty—in my heart and in my life, in the way I live my life.
So I would say that’s basically the first picture of the book. And then it gets into practicum.
Reflection on Hallowing
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): I was about to give a parallel when it comes to my language, Serbian, in this part of the Lord’s Prayer. When Jesus is praying, “May your name be hallowed,” we say something that, if literally translated, would be, “May your name be…”—a verb is used for holiness. “May your name be sanctified.” Not “be more holy”—it cannot be more holy. It’s very hard to translate, but when you pray in your native tongue, it resonates. It sounds different, but that’s the type of prayer. Basically, it doesn’t matter if it’s English or my language or any other language—you pray that prayer only if God is your Father. That’s the point. Because he’s your Father, you can approach him and say, “I praise you. Your name is holy, and may your name be holy in my life because I belong to you.” That’s the gist. That’s the message. This is the structure of the Lord’s Prayer from the very beginning. Yes, we adore God, but we also come saying, “Here I am, God. I’m not kicked out by you. I’m not banned by you. I’m not unloved by you. I’m here, and because I belong to you, may your name be holy in my life because you are God.”
You concluded this chapter with a wonderful subchapter titled Adoration Shapes Our Theology, and you said that adoration shapes our prayers in light of our covenant relationship with God. Our theology of prayer is therefore Christ-centered. Adoration also confronts our innate sense of self-centeredness. Our focus shifts from personal needs to God’s character. Prayer is fundamentally a God-centered act of worship and allegiance rather than a means of fulfilling our human desires. And I’m like, that’s a good reminder, because we don’t ever want to approach God lightly. Like, “God, I need my job, I need this—boom—done, goodnight.” And sometimes we act like that, which I don’t think is a reverent way of approaching God and dealing with prayer. Because we live and have breath again because of his grace. But thank God he is so patient with us. He’s not trying to be vengeful or mean because sometimes we’re having bad days or we’re tired or we may even sound disrespectful when we pray without thinking. Thank God he gently reminds us, and he can use people like you in your book to remind us: “Hey, I’m perfectly okay with you asking me things. I’m your good Father. I like giving good gifts to my children. But I also want to make our relationship deeper.”
And when you approach God, when you adore him because he’s the King of the universe sitting on his throne, there’s no way you can approach him on your own. There’s no way. So I like how you ended this chapter by saying that this is not about selfish self-centeredness and our selfish desires, but about shifting from personal needs to God’s character. That’s how we approach God. And then yes, later we give our needs to God.
6. How does a specific, honest confession lead to deeper healing and victory over sin?
Then in the following chapter, in your ACTS acronym, we’re dealing with C—confession—reflective prayer. Here you’re dealing with the next verses from the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew six. You quote Jesus: “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” And then you say that confession prayers are often the most difficult for us because a good confession is more than just listing sins. For many of us, the emotional weight of confession—being honest with ourselves about what we have done and why we have done it—makes it even harder. We fear shame or judgment even from God, yet without confession it is unlikely we will ever see victory over sins. And you said, “I would encourage you: when you confess your sins in prayer, be specific and regular.” And I found this convicting in my life. If I say, “God, forgive me for my arrogance,” or “for my lust,” these are general terms. What if God wants me to mention the specific situation where I was arrogant or proud in front of someone? What if God wants me to specifically mention that out loud in my prayer? No one has to hear it—just God and me. But you don’t want to go there, because for people dealing with PTSD or trauma, you don’t want to go there. But if you go there, I think that’s a faster way—not of receiving forgiveness necessarily, but of receiving healing from that sin and moving on in victories. Is this how you perceived the beginning of this chapter?
Anthony Delgado: Yeah. If we don’t mind, I do have the chat up and I’m seeing different things, and I wanted to address a word I used that might be helpful for people. The question was, “What does atemporal mean?” A- is a Greek prefix that means without, and temporal refers to time. So God is without time. And I also said aspatial, which means God doesn’t exist within physical space. So—without space and without time. That’s a really good question. I apologize; I should be careful about what words I use.
So this whole thing about being specific in your prayers—let me address that. I would say first that there is a relationship between adoration and confession. And that relationship is that if I see how high God is, then that will help me see how low I am. It’s going to help me avoid thinking I’ve ever arrived morally or theologically or anything else. There is always more I need to learn and more ways I need to be sanctified.
In many ways, praying the way I describe in this book is extremely dangerous, because you cannot pray this way and not be changed. You’ll either get frustrated with not changing and quit, or you will change. Those are your options. And I think prayer is designed to be a major—if not the primary—means God uses to sanctify us. And you might say, “No, it’s through preaching,” and that’s true—we have to know the truth to live the truth. But I think the practical effort toward sanctification flows from, “I want to be righteous as the saints are described in Scripture and as God says we should be. Therefore, I am going to practice prayer as the Lord demonstrated in the Lord’s Prayer so that I will be changed.”
And that’s why I think some amount of specificity is good. I don’t think reveling in your sin in prayer is good. As a pastor, sometimes when people come for counsel, it’s almost like they’re reveling in their sin as they describe it, and that’s a problem. We should never revel in our sin. So—be only as specific as it needs to be to challenge you. It should challenge you to see yourself as not yet where God’s righteousness calls you. And we won’t be there until the end when we are glorified, but we’re in the process of becoming that. And that’s what confession does. We want some amount of specificity so that it challenges us.
7. How do you understand the idea of praying with the ‘great cloud of witnesses’—and do the saints in glory pray with or for us?
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): Yeah. I don’t know if you want to briefly deal with Ember—she’s a dear friend and she helps on the podcast very often. She has a question: How do you see praying with the “great cloud of witnesses”—the saints living in some eternal state—praying with or for the living?
Anthony Delgado: Yeah, that sounds like a question that comes out of Orthodoxy to me. I don’t know, but first, I certainly don’t think that makes it wrong, so don’t hear me saying that. No. I definitely think—when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper, I often describe it this way, and then I’ll move to the question—that as a local congregation, we are stepping into eternal space with the saints. In heaven, time and space are not precisely what they are on earth. And if that’s true, then we can enter in almost as if every saint in all time is entering into the throne room at the same “lack of moment.” That’s what I mean by atemporality: the same lack of moment, we enter into a lack of space to commune together before God. So it’s like we are having a family dinner, and the whole family is present. That’s what I think is happening in the Lord’s Supper—something like that. I don’t know if I explained that well.
So I do think that when we think of the “great cloud of witnesses,” as the author of Hebrews refers to them, we are thinking about how, when we pray, the incense in that censer going up to the Father is not just my prayers, but all of our prayers coming before the Father. It’s our adoration. It’s even our confession. There is nothing—well, there are things sweeter—but a good father will recognize when a child confesses they’ve done something wrong; he will recognize that as a victory. When a kid comes to you and says, “Dad, I messed up,” I will recognize that as a victory, not as, “You did what?” And that’s how God is. He is ready to pour out his grace upon us. So even confession has a sweet smell to the Lord.
And then obviously our thanksgiving. And that prepares us for our supplication, where he says, “I know how much you love me—adoration. I know how much you grieve your sin—confession. I know how much you appreciate grace—thanksgiving. And therefore I want to pour out good gifts on my children”—supplication. So there’s a whole progression of thinking there with the great cloud of witnesses, that that’s what he is always doing for all his children, all the saints.
8. What does Jesus mean by ‘forgive us our debts’ and ‘lead us not into temptation’?
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): Okay, thank you. So we are almost one hour, so let’s finish the second chapter. Can you please help us understand, when it comes to this section of Jesus’s prayer, what he meant by saying, “Forgive us our debts,” because we are not supposed to take “debts” here as something financial, of course. And what would it mean? “And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” because some people throughout the history of the church have misunderstood that—it’s God who tempts us or puts us in a situation that may tempt us. So can you please help us understand what is that, and what is temptation, and is God leading us into temptation or not?
Anthony Delgado: Yeah. I’m going to be controversial here, and I don’t know where your audience is at, and I’m not a hundred percent sure where you’re at with this, but it has become extremely trendy to be what I call “PSA-only,” which refers to penal substitutionary atonement—anti-PSA, against penal substitutionary atonement, and nowhere in between. And what I find is that when the anti-PSA camp wants to talk about sin-debt, they flounder. I don’t understand the arguments being made. They don’t accord with biblical theology. They have to lean into systematics to try to leverage the way terminology functions, and it just doesn’t accord with sound biblical theology.
The PSA-only camp rejects 95% of biblical theology to make everything in Christianity about Jesus paying a debt for sins. And that’s perhaps a greater error. If I really had to pick, I think I would pick the anti-PSA position. But if you’ve read—and I think I know you’ve read it—The Gospel Is Bigger Than You Think, the only criticism I’ve ever gotten of that book is from people who said, “Amen, amen, amen,” all the way through, until they got to the chapter where I talked about debt. And they said, “If it wasn’t for this chapter, this would be my favorite book on the gospel.” And it’s like, well, I’m sorry, but I’m trying to be faithful to the Scriptures.
And I think that throughout the Old and New Testaments, and in the rabbinic writings and the church fathers, we have a concept of sin-debt: that when we sin, we enter into a legal sense of debt before the divine judge—before God. Kings are always judges in the ancient world. To say God is King is to say he is Judge. And when we sin, we are breaking his law, and therefore there is some sort of reparation—there is a legal issue that needs to take place. And so it puts us in debt.
Here’s what’s weird about sin: if you never sinned—which doesn’t happen—but if you never sinned, you would still not enter into heaven. Grace doesn’t actually have to do with sin alone, because you are born estranged from God. Adam left the presence of God, the garden, and you were born into the kingdom of the world. You were born a child—a citizen—of the kingdom of man, to use Augustine’s language. You were born estranged from God because you are a son of Adam, who is estranged from God.
So perhaps Jesus’s death—what we celebrate in the cup at the Lord’s Table—does deal with sin-debt on some level. But that’s not the only thing it needs to do. Sin-debt itself doesn’t guarantee adoption, doesn’t guarantee sanctification, doesn’t guarantee glorification, doesn’t guarantee eternal life anywhere I read those in the Bible. And yet we tend to flatten everything into sin-debt and say, “Jesus died, therefore your sins are forgiven, therefore you get the glory,” and you’re actually missing the beauty and the multifaceted nature of the atonement that takes place—that heals all parts of the person.
So then here he says, “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” And what he is talking about there is those who have sinned against us and therefore are indebted to us. Read Leviticus—this is how the law works. If I got hungry and went next door and stole my neighbor’s goat so I could feed my family, I now have reparations to make to that neighbor when I get caught. I do have a sin-debt with my neighbor. And so now, if my neighbor does that to me, I am called not to demand reparations. That’s not what Jesus says. I’m called to forgive.
And as I forgive—which is grace, because I’m forgiving without demanding reparation—now God forgives without demanding reparation. One of the fallacies of penal substitutionary atonement is that Jesus’ death is God enacting vengeance upon the Son. We don’t have time for the whole thing here, but there is a legal element to our faith—that’s the “penal.” Substitution is a very clear motif in Scripture. There is a penal nature. There is a pattern of substitution. There is not this caricature that God is angry, and we have all sinned, and he’s flying off the handle dumping wrath upon the world, because divine impassability does not allow us to believe that. In fact, what we have in the forgiveness God offers us is flowing from the love of God—the characteristic love of God—and the nature of God is within his character an absolute assurance that because God is impassable and immutable, he will always act according to his character. Which means that for those he loves, he will forgive the sin-debt.
So the legal issue—that we owe God reparations we cannot pay—exists. And here in the Lord’s Prayer we get an assurance that as we confess our sins, as John says, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and, grace upon grace, to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. We have purification in the process as well, which points to a different theological thread in the Scriptures.
So that’s what I think debts means there—it’s reparations. And I think the hard part of that, just on a practical note: this was worse when I was doing youth ministry with a lot of really troubled teens. Their families didn’t come to church; they came to church. They came to our youth group, and there was really bad stuff in a lot of these kids’ lives. I can’t tell you how many times I talked to a young man or young woman who would say to me after a sermon, “You don’t know what they did.”
So we can deal with what they did and how you’re processing that—if you want to set up some counseling time, we can do that. I’ll take you to lunch, whatever, we’ll hash that out. But don’t deny the depth of what our sin does to our relationship with God so that we want to restore relationship with fellow man because God has reached down to restore relationship with us. They go hand in hand. They’re one and the same.
And incidentally, I don’t think Jesus is saying, “Go forgive those who sin against you so that I will forgive you.” The grammar doesn’t demand that. And Paul twice says the same thing in the opposite construct. I really think this points to the duality—that the one who understands the forgiveness of God will want to, characteristically as a child of God, forgive others. They go hand in hand.
Yeah—Prodigal Son. The Father is willing in every way to pour out that forgiveness and to restore us to the family.
9. How should we correctly understand the phrase ‘lead us not into temptation’?
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): Thank you so much for that mini-sermon. And I say that without sarcasm. Thank you for that mini-sermon that gave us so much detail, background, and context regarding the PSA. And lastly, when it comes to chapter two—how are we to understand “lead us not into temptation”? That is not God who leads us into temptation. How should we understand that?
Anthony Delgado: Yeah. Well, I mean the next statement, “but deliver us from evil,” is actually the answer to that. And there’s a manuscript difference—if you look at the footnotes in your Bible, you’ll see that some manuscripts say, “deliver us from the evil one.” And I think that’s the key to understanding what it means: “lead us not into temptation.”
Again, it’s weird wording. I’m not suggesting—neither is Jesus—that unless you pray this prayer, God is the one leading you into temptation. That’s absolutely absurd. What we actually see in the biblical theology is the pattern we see in Genesis three: it is the tempter, the evil one, who leads into temptation. And there are debates—“Is this evil or the evil one?” which is it, etc.—but I think biblical theology teaches us that evil comes from the evil one, and that the evil one is the personification of evil. He is the tempter. And he exists as tempter because temptation exists, and temptation exists because he exists. Again, that gets into a metaphysical conversation entire books are written about.
But we don’t need to debate whether this says “evil” or “the evil one.” I actually think that thinking of it as the evil one—the devil, the Satan, the one who tempts, the one who tries, the one who distracts—is how we’re supposed to read this. And so we’re praying, “God, lead me away from where the devil is leading me.”
Do I want to talk about this? It gets into a conversation about possession and oppression. I would just say, on the topic of oppression—spiritual oppression—that while I don’t believe it’s realistic to think that a faithful follower of Christ could be demon-possessed, that doesn’t mean the devil isn’t going to say all kinds of things to you every moment he can. And when I say “the devil,” I mean the demonic more broadly. So we should be concerned as Christians about being led into temptation—absolutely.
10. The meaning of ‘Your kingdom come, Your will be done,’ especially in light of the already/not-yet
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): Yeah. Thank you for that clarification. So now we’re switching to the third letter of your acronym—T, Thanksgiving, Christocentric prayer. So Jesus here continues with the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew six where he says, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And then you said on page 55, “The thanksgiving or Eucharistic prayer is not a prayer of desperation. Indeed, it is a prayer of trust, faith. It’s a prayer that originates in our current experience of God’s salvation so that we have certainty, even hope, for things to come. ‘Your kingdom come’ is a prayer of anticipation for the things we know await faithful followers of Jesus Christ in eternal glory. Said another way, the faithful already participate in eternal things, even if only in part.”
And here you’re dealing with what Dr. Heiser and some other scholars talk about—the distinction between already and not yet. So I don’t know if you want to say something about that, and then help us understand the meaning of the words in this verse: “Your kingdom come” and “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Anthony Delgado: Great. So first we’re going to talk about what is called inaugurated eschatology, and second we’re going to talk about why “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” has to do with inaugurated eschatology—and being thankful for that as the archetype for thankfulness.
Instead of saying, “We should be thanking God for all the prayers he’s answered”—which, if you go back and find the old CRU curriculum or The Navigators curriculum that teaches the ACTS prayer model, that’s what they want you to do in Thanksgiving: catalog your supplication prayers and thank God every time he answers one of them. And I think that’s a great practice. I just think there is an archetype of our thanksgiving that we find first in Christ.
So let’s look at inaugurated eschatology. Jesus says to pray, “Your kingdom come.” So in his first advent—I'll say it this way because we’re in the time of Advent right now—in his first advent he teaches us to anticipate, to wait for, to advent the second advent, the second coming. And so when we pray, “Your kingdom come,” we want Christ to return.
Now, Christian, be careful with that. Don’t desire Christ to return because the world is so evil and you want people punished. That’s not the heart of God. In Peter, he wishes that all would come to repentance. So let’s be careful with that. We want Christ to come because in the judgment is the purification of all things, which returns—this is Isaiah 11—the land to the cosmic mountain of God, essentially the worldwide Eden. What Adam and Eve were supposed to build in the beginning, God brings down in Revelation 21 and 22 in the end. Isaiah 11 specifically teaches us to anticipate that coming.
So we want the kingdom to come to purify the earth, so that in what we call theosis and glorification—you could think of theosis as participation in the eternal Spirit of God, and glorification as the perfection of the body described in 1 Corinthians 15—it is the perfection of the entire self, the entire soul.
And that’s why we want God to return.
And here’s where inaugurated eschatology comes into play. Eschatology means the study of final things. Final isn’t the perfect word—eschaton means “the ends.” The end of an argument, the end of an era, etc. So eschatology is the study of the ends of things. And in this case, eschatology is the study of the end of this present age—this age of darkness.
Inauguration—we can think imperfectly of political inaugurations. Somebody is voted in as president or governor, but the consummation of that, when they actually take office, is later. So there’s a gap between inauguration and consummation. Between the inauguration of Christ—when he was crowned King, a past event—and the consummation, his return.
Anthony Delgado: This is everywhere in the Scriptures, Old Testament and New—that when the first advent arrives, the Messiah is kinged. And in the New Testament, we see very clearly, like in Daniel seven, that he is kinged at the right hand of the Father in heaven. And so Jesus is already inaugurated King, and yet it’s not until Revelation 21 and 22, when the New Jerusalem comes down upon the mountain of God and in the center of the city is the throne, and on the throne is Christ, and there’s no need for sun or moon or stars anymore because the light of the world comes from Christ’s throne—it comes from Christ himself. And so this is the idea of his consummation, where all things come under the light of Christ now and not under the powers of heaven. The consummation happens in the end.
So, “your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Jesus is telling us what all the Jews already believed—that heaven would be conquered first. Now, the Jews of Jesus’ day did not believe heaven had yet been conquered. So for them, this is where you get this thinking about Sheol, the grave. You can see it in David, where David says, “I know that you will not abandon my soul to Sheol”—I think that’s Psalm 16. “I know that you will not abandon me to Sheol.” He knows a time is coming when the grave will be cracked open and the saints will rise, but he does not see himself in the old covenant as achieving that or being under that.
And now Jesus is saying, “But the kingdom has been inaugurated in my coming.” That’s why he is always speaking to the Jews and the Pharisees as if he himself is the kingdom, because he is the King of the kingdom. Therefore, he is the kingdom, and the kingdom is he. He is talking about this inauguration, but he hasn’t taken the throne yet. And so he has taken his throne in heaven—he has conquered heaven but not yet conquered earth.
There is a very clear chapter in the Bible where we see Jesus conquering heaven—that’s Revelation 12. This describes what we call the fall of Satan. People go, “No, no, no—Milton says Satan fell before the garden of Eden, otherwise why would he be there tempting Adam and Eve?” To which I would say: stories that are not complicated are not worth reading. Satan can have an intuition to deceive—and even a practice of deceit—without yet being fallen. And yet he was a murderer from the beginning. He didn’t murder; he lied. But in his lie, his twisting—which is really a twisting of the truth—in his deceit, which is what the Satan does, he deceives, he tests. And in that deceit, he reveals the hearts of Adam and Eve. That’s what’s happening there.
So in Revelation 12 we’re looking at the fall of Satan, where he and a third of the angels with him are conquered by the archangel Michael and the hosts of heaven. And it’s very clear they are sent down to earth. They’re not chained in the abyss; they’re not put in Tartarus and utter darkness beneath the earth. They’re sent to the earth. And so it gives us an explanation for why there is a present sense of demonic, satanic darkness on the earth now, and yet Christ can reign perfectly in heaven.
Revelation 12 should make you go: “Can we have that too? Can we have on earth what you’ve already accomplished in heaven?” That’s a great prayer request. And so that’s what we are taught to pray: “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Okay—so that’s inaugurated eschatology. There is an “already” sense of Christ’s kingship that hasn’t come yet in its fullness. Christ is King in heaven, but he is not yet King on earth.
Now: Why is this thanksgiving? That’s the question I often get. It’s clear in the book, but from people who haven’t read the book, that’s the question: “Why is this thanksgiving?”
Thanksgiving is often a term—so in English, some high-church traditions call it “the Great Thanksgiving,” and they’re talking about the greatest thing we are thankful for, which is Christ, celebrated in the Lord’s Supper. The word “Eucharist,” which many use for the Lord’s Supper, is that word—Eucharist means thanksgiving. Evangelicals tend to use the word communion, because they are thankful for the communion we have between God and man and with each other. All the terms are good; they all point to a different facet of the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.
That great thanksgiving element is that we are celebrating—we are thankful—that Christ reigns in heaven, and we are thankful that Christ will reign on earth. Already, not yet.
What’s unique, I think, to the model of prayer I teach is that when we get to that point of thanksgiving, I’m asking you to spend some time reflecting on the work of Christ. Please don’t do what I’ve seen in every baptistic or evangelical church, where it becomes like: read a couple verses from 1 Corinthians 11, pray a prayer of confession, take the cup and the bread. Let’s be more profound about it. The Lord’s Supper is ten or twelve minutes of our liturgy as we go through a true remembrance. There is a memorial aspect as we enter into the real presence of Christ as a means of grace. All of that is present in the Lord’s Supper.
If that is a great thanksgiving we do in a church service, then on your own you can have—I think in the book I call it a “minor Eucharist”—a minor thanksgiving. We are a kingdom of priests; we all have a sense of priestliness. I don’t think it would be healthy to do this daily with bread and cup alone, because we would lose parts of it like communion. But we should spend time in a minor Eucharist, in thanksgiving for the work Christ has done.
Anthony Delgado: And that makes complete and logical sense for what Jesus is talking about in the prayer: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name”—God is this big, this holy, this high. “Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors”—we are this sinful, this low. But look what God has done—he is bringing heaven to earth. The great thanksgiving.
We start there. And then I think all of our other thanksgiving flows from that. As we start to talk about—again—grace upon grace, we say: not only did God rescue me out of darkness, out of the domain of the devil, and adopt me as a child of God, but not only did he do that—my grandma was really sick, and she’s now healed. And I thank God. As I understand the sovereignty of God, it doesn’t matter how many doctor’s appointments she went to—God did that. And that issue I was having financially—I got a promotion at work, and now that bill is covered. Thank God that he did that. Not only did he save me, but now he continues to pour out good gifts upon his children. So the great thanksgiving leads to other thanksgiving—thankfulness.
And I give some examples of prayers in here where I’m showing that adoration, confession, thanksgiving then even extends to thankfulness for meals, for general daily provision. I think all of that is extremely important.
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): Thank you so much for that, for all those explanations, and for giving us examples of how to pray, how to confess these things, and the difference between Eucharist and communion—yet both of them being fine and representing the Lord’s Table. The last chapter in your book is supplication, God-inspired asking, and I think this was my favorite chapter. You finish here citing Jesus’ prayer in Matthew six verses 10 and 11: “Your will be done… give us this day our daily bread.”
And here you go back in history, into the Old Testament as the necessary context for the prayer. You go to 1 Kings 17 when King Ahab was confronted—well, actually when Elijah the prophet confronted him. After this prophetic confrontation God sent Elijah into hiding in the wilderness. And of course, because he was isolated there, Elijah had to fully rely on God to provide meals. He was already there by a source of water—by a pool or a brook—so he had clean water, but he needed to rely fully on God for food. And here was the beautiful scene where God would use birds, ravens, to bring meat to the prophet so he’d be taken care of.
But even after that, the prophet continues being cared for—for example, when the widow in Zarephath was living there. And you give more examples of how God takes care of his people, including of course the number-one example in the Old Testament—Exodus. And this leads us to God-inspired asking. And then you say, “We make supplication when we ask God to supply what we need.”
11. What did ‘daily bread’ mean to Jesus’ original Jewish audience, and what imagery or expectations would they have associated with it?
Then you start dissecting what “daily bread” means. And of course we can’t talk about this without going back again to the Old Testament. So yeah, if you want to start with daily bread, or anything that leads into daily bread, and what imagery went through the Jewish mind of the first century when Jesus was teaching them to pray for daily bread—because as we know, and as you explained, God giving bread was not necessarily and not only bread. It had a deeper, wider meaning.
Anthony Delgado: Yeah. So I was just recently reading about how the lives of Americans specifically—but even in some ways Canadians, and in some ways Mexico and Australia—how we think all of the Western world is the same. But then if you actually go to Europe, people live very differently. They don’t actually—we’re like, “Ah, the economy,” right? But the way people have to live, the average person lives, even in England, is so much simpler than the excess that we have as Americans. We have this expectation that excess is normal.
And so our idea of daily bread as Americans is—really—insane. We think in ways that don’t align at all with ancient life. I will have somebody—just to be a little bit crass—show up to the church to ask for financial help with a Starbucks in their hand. That’s a real thing that happens.
We have to understand what’s happening in the ancient world. First of all, they don’t have refrigeration—not like we do now. I mean, they had an understanding: “Let’s keep our produce in a cooler spot, dig a hole,” and all of that. They weren’t dumb. But they didn’t have the technology we have to preserve food.
So going down to the marketplace for most people was a daily thing. They didn’t go to Costco and store their food. They went daily and got what they needed. They didn’t have preservatives in their bread—we shouldn’t either, by the way—but they baked bread every day to eat. Bread was a staple of ancient society.
And I don’t think they got tired of eating bread. Bread was life to them. In many ways, eating bread—who doesn’t love a good sourdough loaf right out of the oven?—I don’t think they were complaining. We’re not talking about Wonder Bread.
They were eating that, and that was life. Some people—many people—may have gone days or weeks eating nothing except bread and water. That was normal.
So you look at this and you go, okay:
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
Today, I’m not sure how I’m going to the marketplace to buy enough grain to make a loaf of bread so my children can eat. Lord, would you—like you produced manna in the wilderness daily, exactly what they needed to survive the day—build that trust in me by giving us this day our daily bread.
And that’s so hard. You know, you get paid every two weeks, or you get paid once a month, and it’s—you’re going to have people laugh at me saying this on this video—we live in such abundance that you can save for the month or for the two weeks. And still, in this great abundance, we live paycheck to paycheck. Most people live paycheck to paycheck and are, every month, dipping their finger into debt. And it’s because our expectation of what that word need means has become so great.
What Jesus is actually challenging us in this prayer to do is redefine need so that we don’t bring before him want. A lot of times when people are like, “Oh, I’ve been praying for this and that and the other thing,” they have become unsatisfied that God has already given them their daily bread. They want an American, Western, 21st-century definition of need. They want to be able to eat out once or twice a week. They want to pick up Starbucks. They don’t want to ride a bike to work—they want a car, and not just any car: “I want a reliable car so that if I want to go on a road trip on the weekend, I don’t have to be afraid of breaking down out of town.” And I’m super mean on this, I’m sorry, but: you don’t need to go out of town on the weekend. You want to go out of town. You don’t need to eat out. You want to eat out. You don’t need Starbucks. You want Starbucks.
And so we need to let the word of God become sufficient for us.
I’m going to be honest with you—I don’t usually say this on a public podcast—but it was only like four years ago that my family wasn’t officially under the poverty line according to the federal government. And those were simpler times when we had so much more sometimes—I mean, we try to be very careful about this and practice what I preach in this book—but those were simpler times where it was very easy to be satisfied in God. Because it’s just amazing: every meal is a miracle. You’re just like, “Man, I’m giving myself some—” You know, this was when I was in seminary and working full-time in ministry, not getting a full-time salary from ministry, and you’re doing these things, and God is just like: daily bread, daily bread.
And then you’re doing that and it’s like: daily bread. And you’re satisfied. And he’s like: “Oh, daily bread—and then some.” People are just like, “Hey, I wanted to bless you guys this week.” And so we’re still receiving, even in technical poverty, these great blessings that are far more than daily bread.
I just think that if we can be satisfied with daily bread, and be careful not to expect more from God, then we’ll be in a much better place to receive the abundance that is in the heart of God.
Let me say it this way: I’m afraid what’s happening in the Western church right now is that God is pouring out abundance on us, and we are complaining that we don’t have what we need because we have set our bar of what we will be satisfied with so high. And we have also set our hearts and minds on things that are not godly. We are idolizing entertainment and luxury. And because God isn’t giving us the things we idolize—the things we behold as greater than him—we are therefore unsatisfied with him.
And that gets to what you mentioned earlier: God’s not a genie in the bottle, where God gives you everything your sinful heart desires. He is reforming you. He is changing your affections to make your heart like his.
But I’m saying: if the things your flesh desires are excess and luxury, you will never be satisfied with those things. And the worst thing that God could do—and why he doesn’t do it—the worst thing that could happen is that he gives you all the desires of your flesh so that you can find out that that is a path that leads to destruction.
The path that leads to satisfaction, the path that leads to abundance, is actually to be satisfied in daily bread—and to experience that satisfaction—and to grow so that your heart begins to love what God loves. And listen: if your heart loves what God loves, then the immutable, unchangeable, only wise God will pour out what he sees as blessing upon you. And in every moment, you will be satisfied in him.
And that’s why we shouldn’t be praying for excess. We should be praying for daily bread.
Reflection on Prosperity
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): I just want to be very open and honest, just like you were. It’ll take me maybe two minutes to share everything that’s on my heart. This was my favorite chapter that you wrote—and this is why. You just perfectly explained it in the last five minutes, because we live in a society people call “another promised land,” right?
If Israel was—or Canaan was—one promised land, this is the promised land. The wealthiest country in the world, the best economy, things of that sort. And I’ve been noticing, without trying to be judgmental, that the global American church is made of the same mindset you see in the world. A lot of this… tons of ambitions. They’re not necessarily evil in themselves—they’re not—but they’re not necessarily God-led. It’s always more, more, more, and always comparing yourself. And always like: one new iPhone every year; I want a better car; I want… I have a two-bedroom apartment, maybe I want a three-bedroom or four-bedroom, or maybe even a house.
And this is becoming normative, even when it comes to dating or forming a family. And you often hear about these ambitions. If secular people ask you, I perfectly understand and I have no trouble with that. But when you see the same mindset and type of thinking and desiring—and like, “What are you ambitious for?”—many times I see that being ambitious spiritually, being ambitious theologically, being ambitious in ministry is simply not enough for many people who are godly people. They attend church, they give, they serve—wonderful people in many aspects, better people than me—yet there’s not enough ambition when it comes to spiritual things.
And I have noticed, just like you said, the difference between want and need. Yes, I would like to remodel the bathroom and kitchen. I don’t have them. Is my life changed or different? Not really. It can be a little more challenging or difficult to do something, but only slightly. I’m still not homeless. I’m still not in debt. You know, I can even use some money to bless others. I can cover all the podcast expenses even if people don’t donate. And even though I don’t even come close to the middle class.
But I see this urge, and I’ve been seeing it for years, that people who even make twice as much still want more. People who have something I don’t have, they still want more. And again, it’s not that ambition is evil in itself. It’s not. Money is not evil in itself. Possessions are not evil in themselves, because God can bless you with all of these things—he’s a good father. Yet: where is your heart? And how come your first ambition is ambition at work or finances, and not spiritual or theological ambition? Why is your ambition not reading a book per week? Or maybe writing your own book? Of course this is not for everyone, but I’m just saying, how come our ambition is not, “Hey, let’s start adult Bible classes in our church,” or, “Let’s start a poetry night,” or, “Let’s write essays for the glory of God once a month or once every six months.” We could meet people in the church who are artists. There are a gazillion things we can do.
You don’t necessarily see these things, but it’s always “more and more and more,” as if even Christians are competing among each other. And this is why I love that our head pastor sometimes has to remind people from the pulpit: “Hey, we are not pursuing the American Dream, and we don’t preach the American prosperity gospel.” Again, there’s nothing wrong with prosperity, but is this where your heart is?
I feel like many people skip parts where, for example, Paul mentions being content with what you have—roof over your head, food, clothing. But I feel like in the 21st century, especially in the Western church, that’s not enough, because more is expected. You should be fighting for that position; you should be a manager; you should be an entrepreneur; you should be all these things so that you can fit well, you can give more, you can attract a certain person because you have all of this.
But you don’t see this in the Old Testament. You don’t see this in the New Testament. You don’t see these expectations for a future husband or father. You don’t see these expectations for a minister. You don’t see these expectations for regular churchgoers or people who were meeting daily and breaking bread together. Do you think really, when they were escaping for their lives and feeding the poor and evangelizing and praying for others and trying not to be arrested and killed by both Roman and Jewish rulers, do you think they were really like, “Oh man, if my job has an open position maybe I should apply to become a manager”?
I see so much difference. And of course there must be difference—we live in different times, different cultures. Yet not everything can be perfectly copied from the Book of Acts or the lives of early Christians in the epistles. Yet if the spirit of the law is the same—because it’s not just the letter of the law—and we have the same Holy Spirit, I just wonder, many times, if we are reading the same Bible and applying the same things. Because many times I see that Christian expectations, desires, hobbies, “hunger” for things of this world match unsaved people. And this is not to speak from a judgmental level or as if I’m arrogant or better than others, because I notice my daily failures all the time. Again—wonderful people. Yet the mindset is always for more and more.
12. Final Conclusions
And this is why I love this last chapter of yours so much, because it speaks to my heart about what I’ve been noticing for years. And yeah, I’ll just leave you to, if you want, do the conclusion by commenting on what I said, and then give the overall conclusion of the episode.
Anthony Delgado: Yeah, absolutely. There’s a great book by James K. A. Smith called You Are What You Love. And that’s what I see playing out in what you’re saying right now—that if we love what God has given us instead of what the flesh desires, then we are going to become like God. But if we love what the flesh desires, then we are going to become like the world. And if we obey God, then we prove that we are children of God. And if we obey the world, then we prove that we are children of the devil.
This really does become an allegiance type of thing, and that’s where I do just want to really—it’s hard, it’s a hard teaching, and I don’t know that we should be teaching it super heavy in a second grade Sunday school class. But I do think we should be teaching people in how they pray to be pursuing satisfaction with God.
I often challenge my congregation, “Hey, if you want heaven—if you want, I don’t like to say heaven, if you want, if you love this description of the eternal kingdom of God where you become like God and therefore are satisfied in every way in him forever—that’s life forever. If you love that image, then the kingdom of God is for you, but you are what you love.” And so why wouldn’t we be pursuing that now?
I think a lot of people think heaven’s going to be boring, and so they want to go to Paris and they want to eat these rich foods and they want all these things. And the reason that we have somewhat vague and transparent images of heaven in the Bible is because it’s actually indescribably more than what we can imagine. And so love that. Love the vision of the mystery and pursue that. And don’t feel like you’re shortchanged if you never get to go to Paris or you never get to drive a Mercedes or whatever. You haven’t lost anything in this world. You’ve gained the entire world. You’ve gained the kingdom of God.
And so I guess that would be my final thing. The book concludes with a lot of practicum, a discussion on the Jesus Prayer and ways that the Jesus Prayer and the ACTS model of prayer can be used in various applications and different settings. One of the things that I do challenge people to do is to formulate a rule of prayer. A rule of prayer is like, I’m going to pray in this way, at this time, and for this long. And the book is packed—every single page has application on it.
I do encourage people to read the book, but I also put—this was a request from some folks in our congregation—that I made this journal. And it’s a bunch of blank pages inside that have a chart: adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and then there are two columns for supplication and intercession, so prayers for yourself and prayers for others. I kind of separated that into two because I know that’s the part that fills out. We love other people, we want them to be blessed, so we want to pray for them as well—for their daily bread.
I just want people to formulate a rule of prayer and to spend regular time of communion with God as Christ has instructed us to pray. And again, I really think this is going to be life-changing. There are 52 weeks in the journal, and if you’re not a journaler, okay, that’s fine too—you can do it without the journal. But use the model prayers that are in the book. There are tons of model prayers. I don’t think that’s weird or wrong. If you understand what the model prayers are teaching, then follow the model prayers and let them be your words when you don’t have the words. Because this is going to be new to a lot of people. The idea of spending any amount of time adoring God might be really weird to people and really difficult. And so it gives us some words until we get comfortable with the rhythm of it.
So use the model prayers. Formulate a rule of prayer. Don’t try to pray for three hours if you have a really weak prayer life right now. Start saying, “I’m going to pray a prayer of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication every morning for at least 10 minutes, and I’m going to base it on a passage of scripture,” or whatever. But start somewhere and grow from there. Don’t make it too ambitious.
And I think that in this next year, if you would do this—or if you already have a good habit of prayer, use this to grow, to take a next step and to grow in your life of prayer—because this is us coming before our Father to enjoy him. And really, there should be nothing more pleasant for us.
Outro
Myths, Mysteries, and Majesty (3M): Mr. Anthony, sorry for holding you 10 minutes longer. Also, I want to thank you for this wonderful podcast. I truly enjoy it because, for people who didn’t get it yet, this is a book that is pastoral, devotional, and deeply rooted in biblical theology.
So it’s a combination of so many things, yet very practical. Just like you said, on every page you have practical examples—how to approach God, how to thank him, what to confess or repent for, you know, just to come to him as he is and just for you coming as you are, and enjoy and nurture this relationship.
Pastor Delgado, may God bless you, your ministry, your home, your church, your job. And may we see so many more books and great material coming from you. It was really a pleasure talking with you.
Everyone, please subscribe. Next week we’ll talk about real—supposed real—events that inspired the Stranger Things TV show. And for next Sunday, I still don’t have a guest, so we’ll see who will be coming next Sunday.
And yeah, whoever you are, God loves you. Be encouraged, be safe, and be warm in this season. And I’ll see you Friday. Take care.
