The Lord’s Prayer
How do we pray? What is prayer? What is the purpose of prayer? There are a lot of different kinds of prayer, meditation, and contemplation, but Christian prayer is different, because our prayer starts fundamentally with a relationship, a relationship of growing intimacy, closeness and love with our Lord, King, Creator, and Saviour. A relationship ultimately given to us by Jesus. And in this singular relationship every hope, every need, every answer flows. Jesus teaches us everything we need to know about prayer in the short but profound prayer he teaches his disciples.
The prayer starts with “Our Father”. This is how we are meant to relate to God. He is the one in whom we have our being. He is the one that watches over us. Who lifts us up. He is the one who shows us the way. This is an intimate and close relationship, where we start as small and incapable and yet through God’s great parenting we become more and more until we become like him.
Yet, this relationship of being God’s children is not something we earn or something we are born into, it is something given to us. We were always meant to be God’s children and you can see this throughout the Old Testament, yet again and again, we as a society and individuals have disowned God, and we have never been able to live up to or live into the role as we should. We are given this title, this role, this relationship by Jesus Christ, the only one who has ever actually lived into that role. The only one who has shown himself to be a child of God. Our great brother Jesus adopts us into his family and reintroduces us to our great Father.
This is an amazing invitation that gives us a close and meaningful relationship with our creator, but it is also one where we are given purpose, place, authority, power, significance, and so much more. In Jesus's day and before the term son of God or child of God, was primarily reserved for Kings and Queens - Pharaohs, Caesars, emperors of Persia, Babylon, Assyria and more would all claim direct heritage with their God or Gods. Only the richest, most powerful and regal claimed that title and relationship. Someone claiming to be the son of God, would claim part of the authority and privilege of God, so calling God Father, could be seen as revolutionary in many ways. When Jesus tells us to call God Father, he is being a revolutionary. He is telling us that there is a better kingdom, government and family than the ones we are surrounded by. He is telling us that our primary identity is not founded in any of these things, but in our relationship with him. He is telling us that as his children he is giving us his authority, his will, his Kingdom. We are called to live into this new found relationship and that is what prayer is all about.
Yet, people have struggled with this term, calling God Father. Why don’t we call him mother? What about those that have very negative relationships with their fathers? These are real issues, and ones we should wrestle with. God does compare himself to mothers on occasion, but he primarily identifies himself as Our Father and so does Jesus. So we have to honour him as our Father. Yet, the ideal of a Father, does teach us a little about our relationship with God. Did you know that children when they are born think they are one entity with their mother? They often need to, in some very real ways, be connected to their mother. Fathers, myself included, are quite other. A lot of our role comes down to supporting the mother and building that relationship and trust, even if half of that child is us. In our lives, we don’t start off feeling like we are one with God, we often care more about other important relationships. We don’t usually see God for who he is. He can feel quite other and distant, but just like a good father, our Father God will slowly and purposefully show his love and strong arm, until one day, hopefully, we are willing to trust and lean on him. Then as we follow and listen he will guide us to become like him in our own way.
Yet, of course, “Our Father” God, is far greater than any father or mother, far greater than anything in creation, so we say, “Who art in heaven”. Here we acknowledge both God’s closeness and his distance, his immenseness and his imminance, his transcendence and his incarnation. We need both. He can’t be one more thing in this broken world or life, but he also can’t be completely other from it that he has no effect on it. God is our heavenly Father whose love, goodness and power is bigger than anything else and so the source of all others that then affects and changes this world.
“Hallowed be your name”. Prayer starts with our relationship with God and so worship becomes an essential part of this too. We don’t just pray to God because he is close to us, or bigger than us. We pray to God because we know how good he is and that he has the ultimate power to shape our lives and world for that good. We praise God, because this is the natural response to meeting or seeing something truly wonderful and nothing is more wonderful and beautiful than God. Yet, we know that we also need to be reminded of God’s praiseworthiness and that this praise cannot be ours alone, the world needs to be shaped by the powerful and meaningful encounter with the God of all goodness.
“Your Kingdom come”. Again, this should be a natural consequence to realizing how praiseworthy God is. If God is love, goodness, justice, mercy, joy, peace and so much more than we should want him to rule. We should want him to change the world and to have him as the one that guides everything. What would be better than the source of love being the guiding hand behind everything? As we say “your Kingdom come”, we are both asking for God to set up his Kingdom, but we are also trusting that it is coming and has come. We live in a funny reality where the Kingdom of God was already brought close through Jesus Christ, it is present, and is now being established more and more.
Yet, here we run up against another problem, because God being King and Lord, means that we can’t. Even if we are given authority and gifts, they must be under and follow our one king. We cannot all be building our own separate Kingdoms or else we are just rebel kings that aren’t being fed by God the source of goodness, love and justice. This seems to be far too prevalent in today’s world, everyone seems to be building their own island Kingdoms, their own versions of what is right, their own justice and we are more distant and hostile than ever before. This prayer is a cure to that. It is a reminder of how we come together, ultimately, we need to give our wills and desires over to God.
So, we pray, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. We want God’s will to shape everything, because even though we don’t always understand it, we know that God’s will, as the source of goodness, love and justice, is the will that actually accomplishes what is right. In heaven, as he sends his angels out to deliver messages, and work, we see that God’s Kingdom is being built even in the hardest times. We want God’s love to be known at all times, right, even when things are not what we want or wish, so we ask for God’s will to be done.
“Give us today our daily bread”. There is only one line in this prayer where we ask for our physical needs. Yet, if you notice it, we have actually been asking for and trusting God for our needs this whole time. His Fatherhood means closeness, belonging, shelter, intimacy, and more. His heavenliness, means that he is giving to us and entering in beyond our lack - which can often be too prevalent. His hallowedness, his glory means that there is joy, excitement, beauty and wonder in this relationship. His Kingdom means that there is peace, mercy, justice and more. His will means that love is being lived out, it means that we are given direction, purpose, and led to fruitfulness. Only a few verses from the Lord’s Prayer, in the section where he tells us not to worry, Jesus will remind us, “Seek first the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be given to you”. So all that is left is to ask God for our daily needs, because we have already heard and trust that he is leading us to our greater and lasting needs.
Up until now we have been grounded in the wonderful and beautiful relationship with God our Father, but we too often forget, turn away from or overstep in this relationship so we say, “Forgive us our sins”. The sins or wrongs we do, often feel very little to us, but the truth is that even the smallest step taken away from God creates a distance between us and life itself. And even the smallest step taken in perpetuity will take us very far away from God. I have to warn newly married couples about this. Because even really small things that wouldn’t bother you in a friend can become a source of division and working far apart without purposeful coming together will lead towards greater distance too. The same is sadly true in our relationship with God, but thanks be to his merciful nature, he is always willing to bridge the gap and so we trust and say, “Forgive us our sins”.
“As we forgive those who sin against us”. This should of course be a natural byproduct of us experiencing the forgiveness of God, but as we have already said we want God’s will to be done, which is forgiveness, we want his Kingdom to be built, which is a new invitation to meaningful community and purpose. We want everyone to be fed. We want to invite everyone to say this prayer as Jesus invited us, but it becomes very hard to invite someone into God’s family, or even to enter into God’s family when we are putting walls up against our brothers and sisters.
“Save us from the time of trial”. Or the time of testing. We often have the wrong relationship with the time of testing. We can think that God is tempting us or that God is leading us into something bad on purpose. Yet, a test is really our relationship with the moment and our proving ourselves to be trustworthy. An alcoholic walking into a bar might be a great test. A baseball fan walking into a bar might be a great opportunity to share joy. A baseball player experiencing loss might be a great test. A non-christian or caring work place might be a test, or the job search. Yet, in each of those, whether it feels like a struggle or not, we are given the opportunity to show God our faithfulness, trusting in his work and even more so we are given the opportunity to experience his love, joy and peace in the midst of it. God is gracious giving us more than we ever deserve, but sometimes to give us that next opportunity that can shape more lives we need to face a greater test. Abraham faced a great test of trust when he had to leave his home, but in this God saw a faithfulness that then he used to build a new family in God. Think about the great time of testing like taking the LSAT, we need to be strengthened, learn, understand and be able to communicate the hope and faithfulness of God if we hope to be given even greater responsibility.
But, of course, we will not always succeed in these times of testing, just like Abraham. So, we pray, “deliver us from evil”. Evil sadly always surrounds us in this broken world. Evil exists in the air, in our institutions and sadly in our hearts and acts. We do want this evil to be utterly vanquished and it is being destroyed, has been and will be (As God’s Kingdom takes root). In this life we pray that we are delivered from it. We are brought out of it, back into God’s Kingdom. The image of Psalm 23 is helpful here. God leads us through the darkest valleys, sets up a table for us, anointing our head with oil even while we are surrounded by our enemies. We ask to be delivered from evil, our sins to be forgiven, to be given what we need through God’s will, so that we can live in God’s Kingdom and know him as Father and see his glory.
Our whole lives and purpose are contained within this short prayer. Of course we will use other prayers, but everything we need is within this. It contains within it words that speak to our relationship with God, our hope, our desire, salvation and so much more. I would encourage you, if you don’t already have it memorized to do just that. Either way, I would encourage each of you to say the Lord’s prayer before bed, take it slowly dwelling on each sentence and allowing God to speak into your life and relationships through it. AMEN
