How To Pray

             “This, then, is how you should pray:

‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
 your kingdom come,
your will be done,
    on earth as it is in heaven.
 Give us today our daily bread.
 And forgive us our debts,
    as we also have forgiven our debtors.
 And lead us not into temptation,
    but deliver us from the evil one.’

            For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.  But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.” (Matthew 6:9-13)

 

            First, a small challenge. Read the prayer above, taking a deep breath at the end of each line. My bet is that it sounds “normal” to you, because that’s the way it’s read and said in a group. Now, read it this way:

        Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us today our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.  And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one.’

 

            This prayer is one that people can’t seem to repeat as real sentences. They’ve been taught to break it into pieces that are grammatically incomplete. We do same thing to the pledge of allegiance and to almost anything we are asked to recite in groups. It’s not really an important factor unless reading it in a different way gives you a different response.

            If you were going to teach someone to pray, what would you say is the most important part? One way I was taught to pray was Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication. Some might say that worship is the most important thing.

            Putting this prayer into context, just before this passage, Jesus taught about not praying for public acclamation. Having taught how not to pray, He then tells u,s “this is how you should pray.” And when He finishes his example, He uses a conjunction – a word that ties what He had just said with what He said next. What follows is the reason or the point. And what He said is, “For if you forgive other people…”

            It may be that part of the reason He turned the spotlight one the one part of the example prayer is that it is the weak spot for us. When we pray, it’s easy to remember to ask for our daily bread. We can ramble through vague promises to obey, and invite God to be involved in our lives. It’s harder to live out those things. But the hardest thing is the forgiving bit. Oh, we want to be forgiven. Who wouldn’t? But to forgive? That’s not  as easy.

            But what if forgiving others is as important, or somehow more important than any of the other things Jesus taught us to pray? Looking at the whole prayer, what if half our prayer should be about our relationship with God, with the remaining half split evenly between our relationship with others and our own needs?