The Chosen + BibleProject | Season 2 Reading PlanExemplo

Heaven Comes to Earth

“Prayer is the first step to get the mind and the heart right,” Jesus says in this clip from The Chosen. Many would tend to agree, but if we’re honest, many of our popular prayer practices revolve around some version of asking God for help, for resources, or for solutions to our problems. We’re taught to go to God for our needs, and that’s good, but this posture can cause us to miss the primary point of prayer.

Through his most famous prayer, often called the “Lord’s Prayer,” Jesus helps us recalibrate our approach to prayer. He teaches that prayer is less about getting what we want and more about becoming new kinds of people, free and alive in Christ.

Jesus teaches us that we should pray to “our Father,” not “my personal Lord.” He reminds us about God’s total otherness; he is in the skies, or in the heavens, while we are not. And he is holy—different, perfectly wise, and able and willing to do what is right for us. Those are good things to begin with when approaching God.

Perhaps the biggest revelation in Jesus’ prayer is his kingdom request: “May your kingdom come, may your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). Jesus is telling us that God’s good Kingdom is coming to earth, and his will is going to be accomplished on Earth. This is different from Jesus saying that we need to escape from this earth to get “up” to God and some heavenly utopia. He’s telling us that his desire, which is also the Father’s desire, is to rejoin Heaven and Earth.

If we pray like Jesus in order to get our minds and hearts right, we will see his world and his plan for restoration more clearly. Our prayer practice can form us into peaceful people who trust the ways of God, understanding that we are safe with God, our Father. When we are formed in Christ this way, we end up helping God’s Kingdom take root everywhere, even to the ends of the Earth.

Reflection Questions

1. In your experience, is it more common to think of going to Heaven after we die, or Heaven coming to Earth to become one unified space where humans and God dwell together? How does believing one or the other affect the way we feel about our day-to-day lives right now? How does believing one or the other change the way we feel about the natural world and creation as a whole?
2. What part of the Lord’s Prayer stands out most to you right now? Why?
3. Why do you think we tend to consider prayer as a time for requesting rather than orienting our hearts and minds to God’s reality?