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Matthew 6:9-10 vs. “Build Your Kingdom Here”

Rend Collective · checked 2026-08-02

What we checked

PassageMatthew 6:9-10 chapter ↗ 2 more proofs on Matthew 6 →
Translation shownBSB (Berean Standard Bible)
Presents itself asinspired-by
Categorynot a quote
AlbumHomemade Worship by Handmade People · 2012
Words addressed toGod, person unspecified
Teaching or experiencemixed

Graded against the standard

Quotation criteria not graded: this song never presents its words as scripture

Applies to every song the Name held holy · God shown holy · true of God · the standard

✓Reverent treatment

✓ What's good

  • Every request in the chorus is addressed to God. The song asks God to build his kingdom. It does not commit the singers to building it, which is the opposite of how the title is often read
  • The words I, me and my do not appear anywhere in the song. Across four published texts of the lyric the count is zero, against twenty-six occurrences of we, us and our. It is corporate prayer throughout
  • It says outright that it is praying. The phrase "we pray" occurs three times, so nobody has to guess whether the imperatives are requests or declarations
  • The listings index the song honestly. Worship Together gives Colossians 3:14-16, Hymnary gives Psalm 146, Isaiah 61, Matthew 5:6, Matthew 6:33 and Luke 4:18-19. No one points at the Lord's Prayer
  • Verse three reaches past the singers' own setting to God's kingdom power going far as well as near, which is the one place the song looks beyond what it can see
  • Published under CCLI 6186078 with the writers named on the licensed sheet, so the words are easy for anyone to look up and check

⚠ Cautions

  • The measure clause is not there. "As it is in heaven" appears zero times across four published texts of the lyric, including the rights holder's own licensed sheet. Heaven appears once in the whole song, and not as a standard
  • The petitions name their deliverables. Matthew 6:10 names none: it asks for the kingdom and the will and then points at heaven. A singer who only has the song has a list of hoped-for outcomes where the text has a yardstick
  • "This nation" is a scale Matthew 6:9-10 does not supply. The petition there is measured against heaven rather than against a country. Nothing false is said, but the frame is the song's rather than the text's
  • The only occurrence of "on earth" in the song is in a line calling the church the hope on earth. One published review objects to that line specifically, arguing that hope belongs to Christ rather than to believers. Worth knowing before it is sung a hundred times
  • The publishers point this song at Matthew 6:33, not at 6:9-10. Reading it as a Lord's Prayer song is our comparison, not something the song says
  • The writer credit differs by source. The CCLI licensed sheet names Chris Llewellyn, Gareth Gilkeson and William Herron. Worship Together, PraiseCharts and the chord charts credit the band collectively

Verse Proof

Matthew 6:9-10

The text in BSB (Berean Standard Bible)

“So then, this is how you should pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Jesus is teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew chapters 5 to 7, with his disciples in front of him and crowds listening. The prayer sits inside a passage on how not to pray: not for an audience (6:5-6), and not by piling up words (6:7). Verse 9 introduces it as a pattern rather than a formula. Verse 10 holds two petitions and then a clause that measures them. The kingdom is asked for, the will is asked for, and "on earth as it is in heaven" says what it would mean for either request to be answered. The asking is directed at God, and the standard named is a place where God's will is already done.

What the song says, described not quoted

The song is a prayer in the plural. Its four-line chorus is four requests made of God: build your kingdom in this place, show your power and heal the streets around us, set this church alight and win this nation back, change the atmosphere. Each is an imperative addressed to God, not a resolution the singers make about themselves. Verse one asks God to rule in the singers' hearts again, to set their hearts and souls burning, and calls on the Holy Spirit by name to come. Verse two turns to what the singers do: seek God's kingdom first, refuse to waste their lives, lay their lives down for the cause of heaven, and ask that the poor and sick and captive be met. Verse three widens out to God's kingdom power reaching far and near, and says that nothing can stop it. Each verse ends by naming the singers as God's church.

Across four independently published texts of the lyric, including the rights holder's own CCLI SongSelect sheet, the phrase "we pray" occurs three times and the words I, me and my occur zero times. The words we, us and our occur twenty-six times between them. Nothing in the song is presented as a quotation, no verse is cited in it, and the official upload's description credits the video's director and production company rather than any scripture.

Nothing was taken from Matthew 6:9-10, and the song never says it was. The listings index it elsewhere. Worship Together lists Colossians 3:14-16. Hymnary lists Psalm 146:5-9, Isaiah 61:1-3, Matthew 5:6, Matthew 6:33 and Luke 4:18-19. Word to Worship lists more than twenty references, including 2 Chronicles 7:13-22 and Matthew 6:33. Matthew 6:9-10 appears on none of those lists. Matthew 6:33, which does appear on two of them, is a different sentence in the same sermon: seek first the kingdom, twenty-three verses later. The comparison is still worth making, because the song asks for the thing verse 10 asks for. Both put the kingdom in God's hands and ask him to bring it. The song's title reads like a job the singers have taken on until you notice the grammar: build is an imperative aimed at God, the same mood as "Your kingdom come." What does not carry across is the last clause. In the text, "on earth as it is in heaven" is the measure. It tells the one praying what an answered petition would look like, and it fixes the standard somewhere outside the room. The song supplies its own answer instead. It names the deliverables: a church on fire, a nation won back, streets healed, an atmosphere changed. In four published texts of the lyric, "as it is in heaven" appears zero times. The word heaven appears once, naming a cause worth dying for. The phrase "on earth" appears once, in a line about the church being the hope on earth. The word earth appears twice in total, once there and once in a request that this earth be revived. So the scope does not shrink. It runs hearts, then church, then nation, then earth. What moves is the yardstick. Matthew measures the kingdom's coming against heaven. The song measures it against a list.

· Not a quote: The song cites no verse, names no translation and frames nothing as scripture. Its central petition asks God for what Matthew 6:10 asks God for. But the clause that supplies the text's measure, on earth as it is in heaven, appears nowhere in it.

▸ Official upload. Now listen with the proof in mind.

The song asks God to build it, exactly as the prayer does. What it does not carry is the yardstick: as it is in heaven.

Why it matters

A petition and a plan look alike on the page. The difference is who does the work, and this song keeps that straight: the verbs are God's. That is worth saying plainly, because the title alone has been read the other way.

The measure matters for a different reason. "On earth as it is in heaven" is what keeps the petition from being filled in by whoever is praying it. Left in, it means the singer is asking for something they cannot fully picture. Left out, the kingdom's arrival gets described by the outcomes the song happens to name, and those outcomes then become what the singer is expecting God to produce. Every item on the song's list is a good thing to want. None of them is the standard Jesus gave.

Is it safe to dwell on?

Sung on repeat, this song fixes your attention on God.

What repeats here is the chorus, and the chorus is four things asked of God. Looping it plants the habit of asking rather than resolving, which is not the direction most repeated lines run. The tag is God because the grammar is God's: across the song, roughly eleven clauses have God as the one acting, against seven where the singers do. The chorus, which comes around most, is entirely the former.

The second thing repetition plants is the word here. The song keeps pointing at the ground under the singers, and that is a real answer to a real danger, which is treating the kingdom as somewhere else and later. Held next to verse 10, though, "here" is only half of it. The text pairs earth with heaven and makes heaven the measure of what earth should become. A singer who has the song and not the clause ends up with a strong sense of the place and a weaker sense of the standard.

The third is the line at the end of each verse, where the singers name themselves as God's church and, once, as the hope on earth. Sung enough times, that settles into an identity. Whether it settles as a commission or as a weight depends on whether the chorus is still doing its work, because the chorus is the part that says who is actually building.

Helpful comparison

Put the two next to each other and the difference is one clause long.

Matthew 6:9-10 goes: address, then name, then kingdom, then will, then measure. Five moves, and the last one is the only one that describes an outcome, and it describes it by pointing somewhere the one praying has never been.

The song goes: hearts, church, nation, earth. Four scales, widening, and every one of them somewhere the singers have been. That is not a smaller song than the text. In some respects it reaches further than verse 10 does on its own. But every destination on the list is checkable by looking around, and the text's destination is not. That is the whole point of the clause. It is what keeps the prayer from becoming a description of the answer the one praying already has in mind.

Site note: this is the second proof on Matthew chapter 6 verse 9. The other covers the whole prayer through verse 13 and turns on a manuscript question at the end of it. This one turns on the clause in the middle.

Sources

Corrections

  1. This entry argued from "the publisher" when it meant worshiptogether.com. That site is the song-resource platform Capitol CMG Publishing runs, not the song's publisher, and it carries songs Capitol CMG does not publish, so a scripture list on it is the platform's rather than the songwriters'. The site had already corrected this wording on the Ephesians 2:4-6 entry on 2026-08-07. The finding is unchanged; only who published the reference.

Think we got something wrong? Tell us what and where, and we will check it against the text. Real errors get fixed here, dated, in public. Every correction on the site →

Where the text survives the song

Not a ranking, and not a swap. If what you came for is the passage sung whole, these proofs found it kept: word-for-word verified, or paraphrase that says so and names its source.

~ FAITHFUL “Jesus, Strong and Kind” CityAlight feat. Colin Buchanan Matthew 11:28 Sing it, including with children. It says what Jesus said without pretending to be quoting him, and the invitation it reports is really his. It just never tells you where to look it up.

✓ The song never puts a sentence in Jesus' mouth. Every attribution is reported in the third person, so nothing is offered as a quotation that would then have to be checked against a translation

⚠ No reference and no translation anywhere: not on the recording, not on the official chord chart, and not on CityAlight's own page for the song. Four reports of what Jesus said, and no address for any of them

 ~ FAITHFUL “The Lord's Prayer” JJ Heller Matthew 6:9-13 Sing it. It is the Lord's Prayer in King James English, unaltered. The closing line about the kingdom and the power is in the King James and footnoted in most modern Bibles, for reasons older than either.

✓ The words are the prayer and only the prayer, with no verses of the songwriter's own attached and nothing inserted between the petitions

⚠ No translation is named on the recording or in its description, so the King James has to be recognised rather than verified

 ~ FAITHFUL “Seek Ye First” Karen Lafferty Matthew 6:31-33 Sing it. Stanza one is Matthew 6:33 almost exactly, in King James wording. Just know that the later stanzas were added by other people from other chapters, and no translation is ever named.

✓ Stanza one follows Matthew 6:33 in the King James wording, with nothing altered or reordered

⚠ No translation is named, so the King James wording has to be recognised rather than checked

More songs like this

NOT A QUOTE “Come, Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy” Sovereign Grace Music, Bob Kauflin Matthew 9:12-13 Sing it. It quotes nothing and never says it is scripture, and its reasoning is the passage's own: the sick are who the doctor came for. Just know the refrain is not Hart's.

✓ The hymn's central argument is the passage's. Matthew 9:12 says the sick are the ones who need a doctor, and the third verse says that waiting to be better first means never coming

⚠ The refrain is not Hart's and not from this passage. It came out of Caleb Jarvis Taylor's 1804 collection, where the lines belonged to another hymn's first stanza, and became a chorus in 1806. Its opening echoes Luke 15:18

 NOT A QUOTE “Christ Arose (Low in the Grave He Lay)” Robert Lowry (recorded live by First Baptist Atlanta) Matthew 28:5-6 Sing it. Nothing here is offered as a verse, and what it says about the risen Christ is what the gospels say. The tomb it opens in is Matthew's. The announcement it echoes is Luke's.

✓ Never says it is quoting: no verse is cited in the sung words, and the publisher's own listing of the hymn cites none either, so nothing is offered as scripture

⚠ The sung words name no passage. Lowry's first printing carried a Luke heading, and hymnal editors have since attached at least four different texts to it, including Mark 16:6, Matthew 28:2, Acts 2:24 and Matthew 28:1-6. A singer looking for the verse behind it will not find one verse

 NOT A QUOTE “Good Good Father” Housefires (feat. Pat Barrett) Matthew 7:9-11 Sing it. It quotes nothing, never says it is scripture, and its paired declarations are ones the text makes: a good Father who gives, children who are loved. Jesus reasons his way to that conclusion in Matthew 7. The song starts there.

✓ Never says it is quoting, and both of its paired declarations are ones scripture makes: the Father gives good things to those who ask (Matthew 7:11), and believers are loved children of God (1 John 3:1, the publisher's own cross-reference)

⚠ The passage argues and the song declares. Jesus proves the Father's goodness from the giving of fathers who are evil, and the how-much-more is the persuasive part. The song carries the conclusion without the engine

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