The Lord’s Prayer Revisited

The Lord's Prayer is one of the most recited prayers in churches all over the world. Discovering the meanings of the sentences will bring our utterance to greater fruitfulness and hopefully it will help an individual to reconcile the mind with the lips. Our Father - Jesus addressed God as our Father. Reminding the people that God has considered His people not just as property but as His dearly loved children. (Hosea 11:1) Which art in heaven - This sentence was never meant to denote that God is somewhere far away in a remote place call heaven as we commonly understood it. The Jewish believed that there are several levels of heaven (including the atmospheric layer as one of the layers). The meaning of God in heaven is not about Him being detached from creation but in all creation or simply God being everywhere. This God has sovereignty, power, and dominion over all His creation. Hallowed be thy name - A prayer for all creation to revere and respect God's Holy name. Thy kingdom come - This is an acknowledgment rather than a request. For Jesus had declared that the Kingdom of heaven is already in our midst in Luke 17:21. What then shall the believer do? The following sentence reveals it all. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven - Imagine living out the kingdom on earth as it should be like in heaven. Removing what that is temporal and do not belong in the kingdom of God like hate, killing, lies, stealing, the list goes on and on. Instead, living a life full of forgiveness, love, kindness, joy, and many more things that are permanent in a realm that rules by God. This statement Jesus taught us to pray for such living right here right now, not sometime somewhere in the future. Give us this day our daily bread - this prayer helps us remember to seek God for as little as bread. Today we ask for big things. We ignore God for small things that we deem we can handle. This sentence brings us back to acknowledge God in every single little detail of our life. A true reflection of our dependence on God for EVERYTHING. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors - this is an active prayer statement of the act of our forgiveness. Jesus told a parable of an unforgiving servant which reminded us to actively live out forgiveness. Jesus immediately added these sentences after the Lord's Prayer to stress the importance of forgiving others. "For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses" (Matt. 6:14,15) And lead us not into temptation - Jesus was led into the wilderness to be tested by the Devil. In our walk with God, temptations will come. 1 Corinthians 10:13 stated that temptation is common to men. The point is we pray not to be drawn into it and lose our foothold but to be delivered from as the next part of the prayer goes. but deliver us from evil - We tend to pray about deliverance from trouble. How many times do we pray that we can be delivered from evil? Deliverance from evil happens before we take the wrong step. Deliverance from trouble usually happens after we take the wrong steps. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever - Giving back the authority (the rise and fall of the kingdom are all decided by God), the power of God helps us recall that God is not restricted by anything including thoughts, time, life, death and many more things which men could not control and finally glory belongs to Him and Him alone for eternity. Amen - is more than so be it. It is rooted in the Hebrew trilateral to be firm, confirmed, reliable, faithful, have faith, believe. Wikipedia.

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