For thine is the kingdom, and glory, for the power, and ever, Amen.
Although the English Revised Version (1881), the American Standard Version (1901), and the Revised Standard Version (1946) relegate this concluding doxology of the Lord’s Prayer to the footnotes,* it has been in familiar use among Protestants since the Reformation, especially the Reformed.
The Heidelberg Catechism, ends with it, and so do the Larger and Shorter Catechisms of the Westminster Assembly. Indeed, so impressive are the lessons which this doxology teaches, and so fitting a climax does it form for the Prayer of prayers, that many scholars have proposed to retain it, no matter whether it be genuine or not.
Although the orthodox Christian may look upon this proposal with a certain sympathy, he cannot approve of it. He would rather sacrifice this precious doxology than retain it on these terms. For if it can be proved to be spurious, then it can have no place among the authentic portions of the Lord’s Prayer. If the body of the Lord’s Prayer truly proceeded from the lips of Christ, then no human conclusion, however edifying, can be fittingly put to it. To give scriptural authority to human words is, in the end, to deprive the Scriptures of all real authority.
On the other hand, if these familiar words of praise to God have been condemned on insufficient grounds, then the faithful believer is bound to stand by them and to defend them to the end against all those who would remove them from their place in holy Scripture.
Is the Conclusion of the Lord’s Prayer a Jewish Formula?
For many years, critics have maintained that the doxology for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever, Amen is an ancient Jewish prayer-formula which the early Christians took up and used to provide a more fitting termination for the Lord’s Prayer, which originally had ended abruptly with but deliver us from evil.

It is important for ministers of the gospel to, at one and the same time, avoid that theological dilution by which we fail to bring up children “until they are farther advanced” while rejecting that ecclesiastical elitism that refuses to “accommodate to the capacity” of those we are instructing.

“We keep our preaching basic because we have so many new believers. If we give them too much doctrine, they won’t be able to understand it.” I can’t remember how many times I’ve heard church planters and pastors say such things. Sadly, as their ministries begin to grow numerically, mature believers in the congregation are left to languish in spiritual malnourishment and discouragement.
Ministers need to learn how to break down, rather than water down, the truth of God’s word.
On the other hand, there are those churches (though significantly fewer in number) in which ministers seem to wear their academic interests on their sleeve in the pulpit. They burden the congregation with highly nuanced theological subjects or phraseology in the name of faithfulness. Whether it is compromising ministers diluting God’s word to the spiritual malnourishment of the congregation or ivory tower pastors caring little about bringing along new believers, one of the great needs of our day is for preachers to learn how to break down, rather than water down, the truth of God’s word.
We find this important principle at work in the ministry of the sixteenth-century theologian John Calvin. On the whole, Calvin tended to reserve his more academic prowess for his work The Institutes of the Christian Religion and his commentaries rather than for his sermons. In his essay, “Calvin’s Sermons on Ephesians: Expounding and Applying Scripture, ” Randall C. Zachman helpfully observes,

[Calvin’s] sermons differed from the commentaries both in terms of their audience and their objective. The commentaries have, as their audience, the future pastors…with the goal of revealing the mind of the author with lucid brevity. The sermons have, as their audience, ordinary Christians within a specific congregation with the goal of expounding the intention or meaning of the author, and of applying that meaning to their use, so that they might retain that meaning in their minds and hearts, and put it into practice in their lives.

Calvin sought to adjust himself in different ways to his readers and hearers, distinguishing between what he wrote for the academy and what he proclaimed from the pulpit. A brief comparison of his commentary on Genesis and his sermons on Genesis serve to demonstrate this difference of approach. To be sure, it is a task of no small difficulty.
Ministers must be careful to neither deny the sovereign working of the Spirit nor intellectually insult the congregation.
In our day, when ministers water down God’s word they almost always do so from behind a missiological smokescreen. Insisting that a robustly theological ministry is a detriment to reaching the unchurched, they introduce a number of serious problems.
First, ministers—perhaps inadvertently—give the impression that the ability to impart spiritual understanding lies within the power of the messenger rather than in the working of the Spirit and word of God. In essence, they suggest that the outcome of their teaching is commensurate with the supposed intellectual ability of the hearers. This not only denies the sovereign working of the Spirit of God through the word of God—it levels an intellectual insult at the people to whom they minister.
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We cannot spread our sin further than He can spread His grace. To meditate on this, to taste the waters of such a pure fountain, is surely to know “joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory” (1 Peter 1:9).

The New Testament’s most frequent, and indeed most basic, description of the believer is that he or she is a person “in Christ.” The expression and its variants overwhelmingly dominate the teaching of the Apostles. And one of the clues Scripture gives to help us understand what this means is to express our union with Christ in terms of what Owen calls “conjugal relations,” or, as we would say, “marriage.” Through the ministry of the Spirit and by faith, we become united to Christ, “one” with Christ, in the way a man and a woman “become one flesh” in the marriage bond. This picture, already present in the Old Testament, (Isa. 54:5; 61:10; 62:5; Ezek. 16:1–22; cf. the book of Hosea) comes to fulfillment in the New in the relationship between Christ and His church. Christ rejoiced in this prospect in eternity, and He has made it a reality in time, enduring the humiliation, pain, and anguish of the cross. Christ, in all His saving grace and personal attractiveness, is offered to us in the gospel. The Father brings to His Son the bride He has prepared for Him, and asks both parties if they will have each other—the Savior if He will have sinners to be His; sinners if they will embrace the Lord Jesus as their Savior, Husband, and Friend.
Like many of his contemporaries, Owen saw this spiritual union and communion between Christ and the believer foreshadowed and described in the Old Testament book the Song of Solomon. His exposition of the attractiveness of Christ to the Christian is heavily influenced by the descriptions of the Lover and the expressions of affection of the Beloved. Though his analysis was typical for his day, few commentators today would follow him in the details of his exegesis.
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