The Lord's Prayer

“When you pray, pray like this…”

The Lord’s Prayer, this prayer given by our Lord Jesus to his disciples and through them to us, can be the beginning and the end of our conversation with our Father each day. I grew up thinking my time of prayer and Scripture reading was a way to win favor with God–and man! Then for a time I gave over the practice almost entirely because pride and self-satisfaction had grown up around it, and I didn’t know how to weed them out. Later I was given, and by God’s grace took, this advice: begin and end your days with the Lord’s Prayer, as a way of beginning or beginning again to grow in this discipline of daily prayer. The words, like those of all Scripture, are as infinite as the Word who gave them to us, so that no matter how many days we have left to us we can never plumb the depths of them. And on the days when we have no words in us, when we are groping in the dark, they can be our lifeline, our Father’s hand lifting our heads that we might see our Way.


And so we pray:

Our Father, who is in heaven, hallowed by your name,

Our Father is in heaven! In vain the nations rage, our hearts turn to that which does not satisfy–Yahweh is seated on his throne, let all cry holy!

your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

In our minds, in our mouths, in our hearts.

Give us this day our daily bread.

May we never be satisfied with anything less than the Bread who came down from heaven, and may we daily feed on Him.

And forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.

Covered in your blood, from the foot of your cross we see our enemies and say with our Savior, “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

Save us from the time of trial

Lift up our heads that we may see the Way you have provided out of every trial, trouble, and temptation!

and deliver us from evil.

From every evil thought, desire, and inclination of each of our hearts; and from all attacks of the evil one, the powers and principalities of this world–Father, deliver us! Fight for us, hold us that we may stand fast, encamp your heavenly armies, your horsemen and chariots around us.

For we are yours, and

Yours is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory for ever and ever, amen.

Rebekah