22. Another Look at the Lord's Prayer
The "Lord's Prayer" is a profound outline or guide for prayer. Although the guide Jesus gave his disciples is short, it provides a framework for every necessary topic of prayer. Beyond telling us WHAT to pray, the Lord's Prayer also shows us in at least three ways HOW to pray!
The prayer is found in two places in the gospels – in Matthew 6: 9-13 in its fuller form in the Sermon on the Mount, and in Luke 11: 2-4 in an abbreviated form. This fact alone seems to prove that the prayer is a guide on essential topics to pray about, rather than a prayer with specific words to be learned and repeated by rote as some believe.
Looking at the longer form of the prayer in Matthew, there are seven specific petitions or requests directed to God; but rather than looking at those petitions individually, as is often done, let's look at some of the overall aspects of the prayer outline Jesus included in his sermon that can be helpful in teaching us how to pray. The Prayer and the Commandments The overall structure of the Lord's Prayer is actually similar to the structure of the Ten Commandments. The first section relates more directly to our relationship with God, and the second section to our relationships with others. There are even some basic but noticeable points of similarity: "I am the Lord Your God …" - "Father in Heaven"; "You shall not take my name in vain" - "Hallowed be your name," etc. This is not surprising, of course, because in both the Commandments and the Lord's Prayer we are looking at the same things - our relationship with God and with others.
When we understand this, we begin to see that the Lord's Prayer is not about asking for the things that we think will make us happy or that we want, but for qualities that show our love for God and others. If the Ten Commandments show us how to love God and others (Matthew 22:37-40), the Lord's Prayer teaches us how to ask for help to do that properly.
Remembering this dual stress of the Commandments and the Lord's Prayer is truly important. Rather than seeing the prayer as an unrelated list of requests, we begin to see it as a prayerful "walk through" of key areas of our relationship with God and with others. That fact in itself gives us an important clue as to how Jesus' prayer outline can be expanded, as we use it, to include all kinds of things relating to our spiritual relationship with God and the rest of his family.
Humanly it may be easy to expand "Give us today our daily bread" by mentioning our many physical needs, but how much do we expand on requests such as "hallowed be your name"? Realizing the dual stress of the prayer helps us to better balance the things for which we pray. First Person Plural Another basic thing to remember as we look at the model we are given is that there isn't a single "I" or "my" in this prayer – only "us" and "our" in the plural. Considering how obvious this fact is, there seems to be a clear lesson – once again to focus our prayers on our relationship with God and with others.
Seen this way, the Lord's Prayer is very different from the individual list of personal wants and needs we are often tempted to offer given the problems of everyday life that we all face. There is certainly nothing wrong in praying for ourselves, and the prayer outline does not deny us the ability to ask for the needs we have. It just puts our personal requests in the context of "our" communal needs, helping us to keep our minds on the fact that the problems of others are just as real – and sometimes much more serious – than those we face.
Prayer Triage When we kneel before God dozens of things come into our minds – the many needs and concerns of our own lives and those of family, friends, and others. These many individual-level needs are in addition to things God shows us are even bigger needs – of worldwide scale. Sometimes it's hard to know where to start and where to end. That fact underscores one of the great purposes of the model we have been given – putting things in the right context and priority. Think of the Lord's Prayer as prayer triage.
Jesus' guide to communication with our Father sorts through all those clamoring thoughts and needs and puts our concerns and requests in the right order. Matthew 6:7-8 tells us that "your Father knows what you need before you ask him;" but even though God already knows what our most urgent needs are, the prayer outline puts things in perspective for us. Putting It All Together None of the recorded prayers of Jesus or the disciples after the time the outline was given follow the wording of the Lord's Prayer (showing again that it is not a prescribed set of specific words to be prayed), although each recorded prayer in the New Testament stresses some aspect found within the guide. Perhaps we could say that while spontaneous - and especially urgent - prayers will often take their own form, the Lord's Prayer provides a guide for those occasions when we wish to seek God in regular and more extensive prayer.
Although God is doubtless more concerned with the content rather than the form of our prayers, the guide Jesus gave us covers all the main aspects of our relationship with God and with others; it constantly directs our focus outward to include the needs of others; and it helps us to bring order and priority to the requests we make. Seeing these things helps us to keep in mind what regular prayer should be all about.