Obviously I’ve discussed the Lord’s Prayer before (you are praying it, right?) and some of those ideas bear repeating.
The Lord’s Prayer shows up twice in the bible: in Matthew in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, and in Luke after His students ask Him how to pray. So the Matthew version is in the middle of a larger teaching; right after He’s told people to keep our prayers private and to not pad them unnecessarily; and right before He explained forgiveness and fasting. Previously I quoted the King James Version; now here’s the New Living Translation.
Pray like this:
Our Father in heaven,
may Your name be kept holy.
May Your Kingdom come soon.
May Your will be done on earth,
as it is in heaven.
Give us today the food we need,
and forgive us our sins,
as we have forgiven those who sin against us.
And don’t let us yield to temptation,
but rescue us from the evil one. —Jesus, Matthew 6.9-13 NLT
The
Because there are two different versions of the Lord’s Prayer, it’s a fair guess that Jesus originally composed it to teach His students how to pray, and later put it in the Sermon on the Mount to teach everyone how to pray. (Of course, knowing students, it could very well be the other way round: He taught it in the Sermon on the Mount, and the students, who weren’t paying attention at the time, asked Him later how to pray, so He trotted out this prayer again.)
As I mentioned previously, it’s all requests. Some teachers like to say the first bits—“Your name be holy, Your Kingdom come, Your will be done”—are praise, and they teach that when we pray to God we need to start with praise. I’m sure their motives are good—they recognize that we need to appreciate God, instead of just think of Him as a wish-granting genie. Trouble is, the way people implement this teaching is to start their prayers with a lot of sucking up to God: “Oh God… oh You are so big… so absolutely huge… gosh we’re all really impressed down here I can tell You.” Then, after they figure they’ve done enough of it to merit having a prayer request or two answered, they make one.
Merit nothing. Prayer requests are about grace. They’re about God giving us what God wants to give us because He loves us. There’s nothing at all wrong with praising God for the sake of praising Him, and if you want to do so, I direct you to the Psalms. The Lord’s Prayer, however, is about making requests. “Your name be holy” is not praise; it’s a request that God make His name holy. “Your Kingdom come” is not praise; it’s a request that God bring us the Kingdom. “Your will be done” is not praise; it’s a request that God do as He wants in our lives. Treating these statements as praise means we don’t understand them, and it’s entirely possible that we don’t even want them. But part of the reason Jesus taught the Lord’s Prayer was because He’s teaching us to want them.
“Give us daily bread” has been interpreted as a request for food, of course. Since Jesus elsewhere quoted Moses, “People do not live by bread alone; rather, we live by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD,” (Dt 8.3) preachers assume that “daily bread” can also imply daily instruction from God; spiritual food, like Jesus spoke of in John 4.31-34—
These are all interesting exercises in making a parable out of something Jesus meant literally. You see, our culture has a huge disconnect between the culture of first-century Israel. In Jesus’s culture, daily food was a struggle for the poor: If you couldn’t farm it, glean it, forage it, or hunt it, you starved. Whereas we have an overabundance of food, even in lean years. We live in a culture where farms are so productive that we need price controls on produce and dairy products just to keep the farmers from going broke. Our supermarkets not only didn’t exist a century ago; they couldn’t have existed. Even the poor in our country have obesity problems. We are so blessed that we don’t realize what a struggle it is for some people in many countries to get daily food. For some in this country it’s a struggle… but many just can’t imagine it. (And we should. We need to find those people who are struggling, and help them.)
“Forgive our sins” is sometimes rendered “Forgive our trespasses” (as in KJV) or “Forgive our debts” (as in ESV). Really, “sins” is too narrow an idea. The original word is ofílima, meaning something we owe; and the question is obviously, “What do I owe God?” The easy answer is “Everything,” but don’t go with that; get specific. What things do we owe God? What actions? What attitudes? What behaviors? What promises have we made that we still need to fulfill? What money ought we contribute to the Kingdom that we haven’t? And are we paying God’s grace forward—are we forgiving others for what they owe us, or are we holding grudges?
Lastly, “Get us out of temptation” is one that isn’t discussed a lot. The assumption is that it means “Protect us from the devil.” It actually doesn’t. The word for “temptation” and “tribulation” is the same. Jesus doesn’t say, as the NLT puts it, “rescue us from the evil one,” but “rescue us from evil.” This is about God keeping us away from rough times.
Jesus warns us that difficult times are simply part of being human, and particularly part of being Christian. But just because life is suffering doesn’t mean we should fatalistically accept that. We must fight that. We must join with God in His quest to make life better than that. We should pray that God steer us away from it; and if His will is otherwise, that He should steer us through it. Either way, we want His rescue.
For His is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.