Waaayy back on Labour Day Weekend, I preached a sermon from the pulpit of St. Alban’s Anglican Church on the Lord’s Prayer. For those of you who made it, you’ve heard it all already. But some of you wanted to come but couldn’t. So here it is, tweaked a little, and ultimately in the form of multiple posts.
What Is Prayer?
If I’m going to talk about the Lord’s Prayer, we’ll have to consider first what prayer is. The New Bible Dictionary says:
In the Bible prayer is worship that includes all the attitudes of the human spirit in its approach to God. The Christian worships God when he adores, confesses, praises, and supplicates him in prayer.
Prayer is talking to God. It is basking in His presence. It is resting in His arms. It includes praising Him, making requests for ourselves and for others, seeking to be drawn further into His mystery—any sort of communicative action between us and God is prayer. And prayer is vitally important. In The Way of a Pilgrim, a 19th-century Russian devotional novel, the spiritual mentor of the pilgrim says:
Without frequent prayer it is not possible to find one’s way to God, to understand truth, and to crucify the lusts of the flesh. Only fidelity to prayer will lead a person to enlightenment and union with Christ.
Today we are going to take a look at the prayer par excellence.
Introduction to the “Our Father”
The Lord’s Prayer, or the Our Father, is a famous prayer prayed by Christians in almost every denomination — Anglican, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Free Methodist, Lutheran — for almost 2000 years. It is the prayer Jesus gave to His disciples when He was teaching about prayer. It is a prayer worth memorising and meditating on, for its words contain much truth about God and how we are to relate to Him. They teach us about how to pray even when we aren’t praying the Lord’s Prayer itself. Now, usually when we pray this prayer, we pray it in a worship context such as tonight, or at Holy Communion on Sunday morning. I remember praying it with my parents as a kid when we did family prayers. But what is the context for the Lord’s Prayer? What was going on when Jesus taught his disciples this most famous of prayers?
The whole of Matthew 6:1-18, tonight’s second reading, is about acts of piety. The three types of pious actions He discusses are giving to the poor, praying, and fasting. These are things we do in our relationship with God, how we are to bear ourselves before Him — for the Sermon on the Mount is nothing other than the code of life for the God’s children; and here we are in the Sermon on the Mount. Since God is everywhere, we needn’t appear holy before others. It is only the Lord God whom we need to consider in our prayers. And He looks at the heart, not the many words that we pile up. There is no glory in giving in secret. No glory in praying alone. No glory in fasting so that no one knows we are doing it. The only reward we can expect is something spiritual from God.
So Jesus says tells us how not to pray — don’t pray so as to draw attention to yourself. Don’t heap up words as though by their number God is more likely to hear them. Instead, He says, pray in secret. So, when we are praying to God in secret and avoiding the use of too many words, how are we to pray?
Pray, then, in this way:
Our father (who is) in heaven:
may your name be holy/hallowed/set apart;
may your kingdom come/arrive;
may your will/objective come to be/exist/occur, on earth as in heaven;
give us today our daily bread/bread for tomorrow;
and forgive us our debts, as also we forgive our debtors;
and do not bring us into a test/trial/temptation,
but rescue/deliver us from the evil one.
That’s my rough translation of the Lord’s Prayer. As I said, this is an extraordinary prayer. Martin Luther, instigator of the Protestant Reformation, said, “When a Christian rightly prayers the Lord’s Prayer at any time . . . his praying is more than adequate.â€
People have written entire books on the Lord’s Prayer. I do not imagine that my sermon that night or its posted form here will begin to unlock the treasures of this prayer and our Master. So, in the upcoming posts, I shall delve a little bit into each of the main petitions and bring out some main points, hoping to strengthen the prayer lives of all who read this.
