Jesus' Model



Prayer: In holy conversation We speak to God in prayer
And at His invitation Our deepest thoughts we share
We come, His will obeying As children bringing needs
And to support our praying His Spirit intercedes
©2004 Gregory J. Wismar. Used by permission. Hymn License.Net #100012090

Read: Matthew 6:5–15
http://www.esvbible.org/Matthew 6:5-15

Think about It: As we read in the Gospels the story of Jesus and the training of His disciples, we find that those 12 guys struggled to understand the plan of God. They made mistakes and regularly seemed to misunderstand what Jesus was all about. But the one thing the disciples knew about Jesus was that He was completely connected to the Father in prayer. They witnessed Him regularly slip away to spend time with His Father. And they were jealous of that        relationship! They wanted to know how to pray like He did. So, He graciously teaches them what has become known to us as the Lord’s Prayer.

Because we recite this prayer with such frequency and regularity sometimes we tend to say the words but think about something else. We lose focus. That doesn’t have to be the case though. Martin Luther broke the Lord’s Prayer down into 7 petitions and that makes for a very easy way to meditate through exactly what we are praying in this model prayer. An excellent devotional tool is to say the Lord’s Prayer very slowly, thinking about and expanding upon each of the 7 petitions making your own personal applications.

1. After addressing God as our Father, we call Him “hallowed”. That is a word of pure praise for it declares His holiness. This is a time to think of other words that declare the greatness of God and speak of His love and power in Your life.

2. When we tell God we want His Kingdom to come we are asking that the Holy Spirit come into every part of our lives and make God’s Kingdom a part of our everyday life. What parts of your life need to be surrendered to the Lord?

3. Asking that God’s will be accomplished in our lives also points to surrender; the surrender of our own will. That can often be a painful process, as we tend to want our own way most of the time.

4. As we ask God to provide for our daily bread, we are asking Him to fulfill our need, not our greed. In our particular culture, it is difficult sometimes to see that God still provides all that we need but is not obligated to give us all the luxuries to which we have become accustomed (although they are also from His hand).

5. Recognition of ourselves as sinners is pivotal to the prayer. We are in constant need of God’s forgiveness and we are also supposed to model that same forgiveness to others as well. This is an excellent time to spend a few moment in repentance and self-examination.

6. God never leads any of us into the temptation to sin. In this petition, we are asking Him to protect us from the ways of the evil one, the world, and our own flesh as all three seek to drag us into sin.

7. This final petition is connected to the last, as we ask God to protect us from all that would seek to drag us away from Him.

As you pray through this prayer, give it some time. Allow your mind to grasp each petition separately and make application to your own life. Expanding this prayer to embrace your own life will bring incredible blessings and could easily take up the next several months of devotional time!



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