A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Steve Self is an MDiv student at Regent College in Vancouver.
How should we pray? Jesus taught his disciples a prayer that gives the important elements of praying to the Father (Matt. 6:9-13; Luke 11:2-4). This prayer is the only prayer the Lord himself gave. Moreover, the Lord’s Prayer is not only a prayer, but an expression of a whole way of life.
The purpose of this article is to explore the elements of the Lord’s Prayer with a view to strengthening our personal prayer lives. Before we begin to look at this prayer, we need to define what prayer is. Prayer is communication with our Holy and Personal God. Communication involves speech; articulating our thoughts and feelings to God. In the Psalms we have some excellent examples of prayer. The psalmist David not only explains his thoughts but pours out his heart to God. Another man of prayer, Daniel, would open the windows of his home toward Jerusalem, get down on his knees, and pray three times a day giving thanks to God (Dan. 6:10).
Anthony Bloom, in his book Living Prayer, says that the Lord’s Prayer displays the “image of gradual ascent of the soul from bondage to freedom” (A. Bloom, Living Prayer, London: Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd., p. 20). Just as the children of Israel found themselves enslaved in Egypt under the harsh rule of Pharaoh, we, too, may find ourselves in bondage to something, for example, materialism, or personal interests, etc. The Lord’s Prayer summons us to be free from bondage to our sins, even to our aspirations. We move from a state of fear to one of love and active cooperation.
Regarding Jesus’ teaching on prayer, we will investigate the purpose and outline the structure of the prayer. Our aim is to reveal the importance and potential of the Lord’s Prayer, as well as the practicality and authority of prayer.
The purpose of the prayer is to be a guide, and to provide a pattern for both corporate and individual prayer. The prayer intends to instruct us as to how to pray. It is not meant merely to be a rote, mechanical prayer. As one scholar puts it, the prayer “was designed to cover in brief both an outline and order for the matter of prayer and a form which might be used as a short comprehensive prayer in itself’ (C. W. Smith, The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, New York: Abingdon, 1962, p. 155).
The structure of the prayer is as follows: the address (Luke 11:2, Matt. 6:9); followed by five requests: the two Thou-petitions (Luke 11:2, Matt. 6:9-10a), the two We-petitions (Luke 11:3-4a; Matt. 6:10b-12), and the concluding request (Luke 11:4b; Matt. 6:13).
The address “our Father” indicates that we are praying to a personal God. As sons and daughters of God we can truly pray to God “our Father”. To know God as Father we must know the Son, for it is the Son who reveals the Father to us. We can move by analogy from knowing God as creator of all things to a creator who is merciful, loving, full of wisdom, to knowing God in terms of fatherhood. We can know him in a way that is similar to the way we know our human fathers.
The first of the Thou-petitions, “Hallowed be your name,” teaches us that we need to respect and revere God’s name. Hallowed means, “made holy”, or “revered”. We are to speak of God with “appropriate reverence and honour” (I. H. Marshall, and W. W. Gasque, The Gospel of Luke, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978, p. 456). Hubert van Zeller, in his book Prayer in Other Words, writes that “hallowing” means glorifying and worshipping. We start by giving praise to God before we ask for things. In Psalm 100:4, the psalmist calls us to “enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praises; give thanks to him and praise his name” (NIV). We learn to grow to “a mature filial relationship” (C. E. Simcox, Prayer: The Divine Dialog, Downers Grove: IVP, p.98) with God through thanking God from whom all blessings flow.
The second Thou-petition, “Your Kingdom Come” is closely related to the first. “Thy kingdom come” is what all disciples should pray. Carroll Simcox, in Prayer. The Divine Dialog, challenges us to think hard and count the cost before we utter these words. Aldous Huxley writes: “ ‘Our kingdom must go’ is the necessary and unavoidable corollary of ‘Thy Kingdom come’ ” (Simcox, p. 98). Van Zeller reminds us “that it is a kingdom and not a throne; there are people in it. So there is this notion of all being together in one prayer, under the one king, sharing the one love in charity with others” (quoted in Simcox, p. 98). In this section there is an element of having God’s ways over our ways. The first two petitions set the stage for the next three requests.
The third and fourth petitions, the We-petitions, are concerned with the personal needs of the worshippers. The prayer for God’s will on earth and in our lives precedes our praying for our own personal needs (Simcox, p. 99). The third request, “give us each day our daily bread,” encourages us to ask God to meet our basic daily needs. Before we get to this step, we have to learn what it is to do the will of God.
The fourth petition, “forgive us our sins. . .”, teaches us that forgiveness of sins is, for Christians, the first duty towards their fellow men and women, for it was God’s first gift to humanity through Christ. In learning how to forgive we learn to love as God loves.
The fifth and concluding request “and lead us not into temptation” is not saying, “save us from the time of trial” (Simcox, p. 101). Did Jesus ever run away from trials when he faced the devil in the wilderness (Matt. 4:1-11; Luke 4:1-13)? No. We, too, should ask God for strength for each trial that we face that God will “see us through by giving us the grace we need” (Simcox, p. 101).
As we have seen, the focus of the first two requests of the prayer is on God in heaven, whereas, the last three petitions concentrate on our needs on earth. The important elements of the Lord’s Prayer are: prayer is communication with a loving and personal God, who is to be revered and honoured, who enjoys our praise and expressions of thankfulness. Also, in prayer we learn we are to desire God’s will, ask that our personal needs be met, and seek his forgiveness for our sins and turn from them. These elements should be included in our personal prayers. Do we think of these things when we pray to God?
How often we repeat the words of the prayer and the words leave our lips flippantly and without meaning! How might the Lord’s Prayer change our lives? What makes the words live? Prayer demands our full involvement for it to be life-changing. The key of the prayer is in our commitment. As Christians, we no longer have to prove our worth to God. God wants to have a relationship with us, and prayer is the channel of the relationship. What often blocks the relationship is our own spiritual blindness. Just like Bartimaeus who sat outside the Jericho gate and begged (as recorded in Mark 10:46), we, too, are blind and need to receive our sight back. We may not be physically blind but we may be “blind” to our own weaknesses, pride, or apathy.
The Lord’s Prayer, as with every petition in the prayer, needs to be said from our heart. We must say the words honestly and carefully. The whole idea of the prayer is that we learn to become more like Christ, so that people can tell from our character that we are members of God’s family.