Kingdom: Missional Prayer

We've all been there. You commit to eating healthier and exercising regularly. You resolve to be more present with your family. You promise yourself you'll finally stop procrastinating on that important project. You decide to read the Bible and pray every single day.

And then, somehow, you get off track. Again.

It's a frustrating cycle that seems to repeat itself in all our lives. We set intentions, make commitments, and genuinely want to change—but something always seems to pull us away from our goals. The question that haunts us is simple yet profound: Why is it so easy to get off track?

The Hidden Damage
Consider what happens after a car accident. From the outside, everything might look fine. The paint might be intact, there might not even be a scratch visible to the naked eye. But when you start driving, you immediately notice something is terribly wrong. The steering wheel points one direction while the car veers another. What you can't see from the outside is that underneath, a tie rod has been bent, throwing the entire front end out of alignment.

This is a perfect picture of our spiritual condition. We live in a wrecked world, inhabiting wrecked bodies, navigating a wrecked society, carrying wrecked hearts that constantly drift out of sync with God and His purposes. We may look fine on the outside—going to church, maintaining our responsibilities, keeping up appearances—but on the inside, we're misaligned. And we often don't realize it until we're already heading down the road in the wrong direction.

The Prayer for Alignment
When Jesus taught His disciples to pray, He gave them words that address this fundamental human problem. In Matthew 6:10, He instructed us to pray: "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

This isn't just a nice religious phrase to recite. It's a missional prayer—a prayer specifically designed to realign our hearts with God's purposes. It acknowledges two critical areas where we need constant recalibration: God's kingdom and God's will.

Understanding the Kingdom
What exactly is the kingdom of God? One helpful definition describes it as "God's people in God's place under God's rule."

God's people are all who have been called by faith into the covenant community—everyone who has put their trust in Jesus Christ, along with the faithful throughout history who looked forward to the coming Messiah.

God's place is the space God gives His people to live and flourish. Originally, this was the Garden of Eden. Later, it was the land of Israel. But when Jesus came, He expanded the kingdom to encompass the entire earth. The meek shall inherit not a small plot in the Middle East, but the earth itself. There is no square inch of this planet over which God has not declared, "Mine."

God's rule means submitting every area of life to Christ's authority—our entertainment choices, our sexuality, our politics, our family relationships, our work, everything. Wherever God's people go, we're called to submit to His reign.

When Jesus began His ministry, He announced in Mark 1:15: "The time has come, the kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news." The King had arrived. He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, the traditional mount of a king entering his domain. After His resurrection, Jesus declared that all authority in heaven and on earth had been given to Him.

We now live in a unique period of history—the kingdom has been initiated but not yet fully consummated. It has come, but it hasn't completely arrived. We're living in the "already but not yet" era, waiting for Christ's return when He will establish His eternal kingdom on a renewed earth.

How to Pray for the Kingdom
The kingdom doesn't advance through military might or political power. It doesn't spread through armies or nuclear weapons. Instead, it grows through making disciples, through sharing the good news of Jesus, through people willing to lay down their lives in service—not to take others' lives, but to give their own.

We can pray for the kingdom's advancement in three concentric circles:

Locally – Pray for the spread of the gospel in your immediate community. Pray for your neighbors, the children on your street, the families struggling around you. Pray that you would be part of the work, actively making disciples rather than passively watching.

Nationally – Pray for churches and ministries throughout your country. Pray for church plants, for ministries to refugees and immigrants, for disaster relief efforts, for the work of God in communities far from your own.

Globally – Pray for missionaries around the world. Pray for the gospel to reach unreached people groups. Pray for God's people everywhere, across all denominations, who are faithfully proclaiming Christ.

Understanding God's Will
While the kingdom represents how wide God calls us, His will represents how deep He calls us. God's will is His intended purpose and desire for our lives.

Scripture reveals two aspects of God's will: the secret and the revealed.

Deuteronomy 29:29 teaches us: "The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law."

The secret will includes all those things we desperately want to know but can't: What job will I get? Who will I marry? Will my business succeed? Will I be healed? These belong to God alone. We cannot know them until they happen, and God doesn't intend for us to know them in advance.

The revealed will is what God has made known in His Word. The Bible is the written-down revelation of God's will, inspired by the Holy Spirit and given to us. If you want to know God's will, read the Bible. Meditate on Scripture. The revealed will is for us and for our children.

When asked about the most important commandment, Jesus summarized God's will simply: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:37-39).

That's it. God's will is that we love Him completely and love others genuinely. The rest of Scripture fleshes out what that looks like in practical terms.

The Apostle Paul put it even more succinctly: "It is God's will that you should be sanctified" (1 Thessalonians 4:3). God wants us to become holy, to become more like Christ, to grow in love for Him and others.

Stop Chasing Secrets, Start Embracing Revelation
We waste enormous amounts of time and energy trying to discern God's secret will. We want blueprints and guarantees. We want to know exactly how everything will turn out before we take the next step.

But God invites us to something different: to trust Him with the secret things while devoting ourselves to the revealed things. A life devoted to God's revealed will—loving Him, loving others, pursuing holiness, making disciples—is a good life, regardless of what happens with the secret will. Even if everything falls apart around us, a life aligned with God's purposes is meaningful and worthwhile.

The Only Perfect Alignment
Here's the sobering truth: we cannot perfectly align ourselves with God's kingdom and will. Our sinful nature constantly pulls us off course. We feel the tug, the resistance, the drift.

But there's good news. There is one person who was perfectly aligned with the Father: Jesus Christ. He is the only one who ever fully aligned with God's law, God's kingdom, and God's will. He is the only one who ever loved the Lord His God with all His heart, soul, mind, and strength, and loved His neighbor as Himself perfectly.

This is why we're called Christians. Our faith isn't in what we can do—we'll keep spinning our wheels, trying to steer straight while everything pulls us off course. Our faith is in what Jesus has done. Through faith in Him, He brings us into alignment with God the Father.

Jesus said all power had been given to Him, and then He promised to give us that same power to advance His kingdom. When we pray "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven," we're praying in Jesus' name—resting in His perfect alignment, His finished work, His life pulsing through our veins.

Coming to the Mechanic
If your life is out of sync, if you're constantly frustrated, if you keep veering off course no matter how hard you try to steer straight, come to Jesus. He wants to lift you up and begin the work of realignment. By His grace, He can bend the broken pieces of your life back into the order He created.

This prayer—"Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven"—is an invitation to stop trying to fix ourselves and instead to rest in the One who can truly make us whole. It's a prayer of surrender, of trust, of faith that the same power that raised Jesus from the dead can realign our wandering hearts.

The kingdom is spreading. The will of God is being done. And through Christ, we get to be part of it all—not through our own strength, but through His perfect alignment working in and through our broken lives.