Dear God, give me your grace that I may rightly OF EASTER
understand your word, and more than that, do it. O most blessed Lord Jesus Christ, see to it that my search after knowledge leads me to glorify you alone. If not, let me not know a single letter. Give only what I, a poor sinner, need to glorify you. Amen.
FROM LUTHER’S SMALL CATECHISM:
The Lord’s Prayer: The Second Petition Your kingdom come.
What is this? In fact, God’s kingdom comes on its own without our prayer, but we ask in this prayer that it may also come to us.
How does this come about?
Whenever our heavenly Father gives us his Holy Spirit, so that through the Holy Spirit’s grace we believe God’s Holy Word and live godly lives here in time and hereafter in eternity.
Almighty and eternal God, your Son our Savior is
with you in eternal glory. Give us faith to see that, true to his promise, he is among us still, and will be with us to the end of time; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. GOSPEL: John 17:6-19 WHAT DOES THIS MEAN ? (Jesus prayed:) “I have made your name known to those Thine they were, and thou gavest them me; and they have whom you gave me from the world. They were yours kept thy word. and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word. John xvii. 6 7 Now they know that everything you have given me is from you; 8 for the words that you gave to me I have There is no argument about whether there is on earth given to them, and they have received them and know in a Church which man should obey. The battle begins when truth that I came from you; and they have believed that men must decide which is the true Church. As long as we you sent me. 9 I am asking on their behalf, I am not judge according to human words and understanding we asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those cannot settle this quarrel, nor can we find the true Church, whom you gave me, because they are yours. 10 All mine but we can reach certainty in the matter if we hear how are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified Christ our Lord Himself describes and portrays the Church. in them. 11 And now I am no longer in the world, but they Here He christens and depicts her as the little company are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, which loves Christ and keeps His Word (for thus is such protect them in your name that you have given me, so love known and felt), ‘My Word’, He says, ‘must remain that they may be one, as we are one. 12 While I was with and be kept, or there can be no Church’. The Word of Christ them, I protected them in your name that you have given is here the rule and test whereby one can find and know the me. I guarded them, and not one of them was lost except true Church, and by which she must set her course, for there the one destined to be lost, so that the scripture might be must be a rule and order according to which the Church fulfilled. 13 But now I am coming to you, and I speak shall preach and act. It is not right that any man speak and these things in the world so that they may have my joy act as he likes, and claim that the Church has spoken, and made complete in themselves. 14 I have given them your acted, by the Holy Spirit. word, and the world has hated them because they do not And that is why Christ binds His Church to His belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Word and gives it to her as a sign whereby men may enquire 15 I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I and test whether she possesses the Word, and teaches and ask you to protect them from the evil one. 16 They do not preaches in accordance with it and does everything for the belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. love of Christ. 17 Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. 18 As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the Sermon on Whitsunday, 1544. W.A. 21. 461. world. 19 And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.” Taken from the book:
SHCT 170 Ballor, Sytsma, Zuidema (Eds.) - Church and School in Early Modern Protestantism - Studies in Honor of Richard A. Muller On The Maturation of A Theological Tradition PDF