Lent

“This is how you are to pray: ‘Our Father in heaven, may your name be held holy, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven.” Matthew 6:9-10

There is a mirror image of Jesus 40 days in the wilderness and our journey through lent. In addition to fasting, as we explored 2 days ago, the place of prayer was a crucial part of Jesus sojourn in the desert. Our text for today comes after the disciples came to Jesus with the earnest request, “teach us how to pray.”

Through their journey with Jesus the disciples would often have seen Jesus redraw to pray.

William Barclay, the great Scottish New Testament scholar says of this request, that Jesus pointed to two important facets of Prayer.  “He insists that all true prayer must be offered to God. The real fault of the people whom Jesus was criticising was that they were praying to men and not to God. A certain great preacher once described an ornate and elaborate prayer offered in a Boston Church as "the most eloquent prayer ever offered to a Boston audience." The preacher was much more concerned with impressing the congregation than with making contact with God. Whether in public or in private prayer, a man should have no thought in his mind and no desire in his heart but God.

He insists that we must always remember that the God to whom we pray is a God of love who is more ready to answer than we are to pray. His gifts and his grace have not to be unwillingly extracted from him. We do not come to a God who has to be coaxed, or pestered, or battered into answering our prayers. We come to one whose one wish is to give. When we remember that, it is surely sufficient to go to God with the sigh of desire in our hearts, and on our lips the words, "Thy will be done”.

A 4-year-old son Jonathan was trying to learn the Lord's Prayer. He learned by listening at church each Sunday.

His father recalled how on one Sunday as they were praying the Lord's Prayer, the boy could be heard above all the others, praying, "Our Father who art in Heaven, I know you know my name."

Praying the Lord’s Prayer in the knowledge that God know’s my name makes each word prayed an intimate conversation of unsurpassed love.

Prayer

Our Father in heaven,
let Your name remain holy.

Bring about Your kingdom.
Manifest Your will here on earth,
as it is manifest in heaven.

Give us each day that day’s bread

—no more, no less—

And forgive us our debts
as we forgive those who owe us something.

Lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
But let Your kingdom be,
and let it be powerful

and glorious forever. Amen.