The Lord's Prayer

 

As with most Christian families, the Lord’s Prayer was something I learned by rote  in childhood. It was the foundation of my classes in Sunday School, and an integral part of the liturgy later on in our church services.

We were seldom encouraged to probe beneath the surface to grasp the prayer’s spiritual depths, including its healing power, which suggests that it was not truly applied as a prayer at all.

As a result, you can imagine my delight at discovering  a book by Kevin DeYoung titled The Lord’s Prayer (Crossway, 2022), and appropriately subtitled “Learning from Jesus on What, Why, and How to Pray.”

DeYoung, who is Senior Pastor at Christ Covenant Church, in Matthews, North Carolina, writes with graceful simplicity and honesty, He suggests upfront that there are few activities more essential to the Christian life—yet more discouraging in the Christian’s life—than prayer.

He says: “We know we should pray. We want to pray (or at least we want to want to pray). We admire those who do pray. And yet when it comes to actually praying, most of us feel like failures.

“We wish we prayed more often . We wish we prayed longer. We wish we prayed better.”

But DeYoung is quick to point out that the Lord’s Prayer is different, and not just in the variations within the two versions—one in Luke, and the more familiar one in Matthew.

Unlike Jesus’ teaching in Luke, the Matthew version (from the Sermon on the Mount) is concerned not just with the what of prayer, but with the how of prayer. Jesus wants to make sure we are praying for the right reasons from the right heart.

DeYoung writes with unforced humor when he suggests, for example, that our prayer life would be like the iceberg in the ocean, with a great mass of spirituality no one can see under the surface. Our prayer life should be more than meets the eye.

“We don’t have to impress God with our formulas or our spontaneity. In prayer, we are not instructing God as much as we are instructing ourselves.

“You know that God already knows what you need. You don’t get extra credit for adding extra words. Jesus didn’t just tell us to pray, he gave us the perfect model for how we should pray.”

DeYoung discusses the simple structure of the prayer—an opening address followed by six petitions that ask God to do something.

The first set of three requests focuses on God’s glory—his name, his kingdom, and his will.  The second set focuses on our good—our provision, our forgiveness, and our protection. Although DeYoung observes that the sets can’t be separated, he says God is glorified as he gives us what we need; and when we ask for what we need, we must always do it with an eye to God’s glory and our good.

In dealing with the Our Father opening, DeYoung uses the heading A Family Affair. He writes: “To pray with intimacy to God as father is not a human right; it’s a spiritual privilege—a gift of the triune God. What we need when we pray is less awareness of ourselves, and more awareness of God.” DeYoung  puts the prayer into the most intimate family terms when he writes, “Come to [God] as a child, comforted that your father loves you, and confident that he wants to hear from you.

“Yet, even when we are praying alone, we are, in a sense, praying with the larger body of Christ.”

DeYoung concludes: “Get a better, truer, bigger, sweeter understanding of God, and see what that does to your prayer life. This is the request that shapes every other request. This is the petition that supersedes all other petitions:

“O God, may all the peoples praise you. Start with me, that I would know my heart, and multiply it around the world.”