Andrea Bocelli - The Lord’s Prayer Song
The Lord’s Prayer also commonly called the Our Father prayer by Catholics was never meant to be something that was just memorized and prayed as some kind of mantra or magical prayer. It was meant to be a teaching on how to pray. In this series I am going to teach the Lord’s prayer and we are going to learn the meaning of the model prayer that Jesus gave and together maybe we will all learn better how to pray.
Let me give you just a little background. The disciples came to Jesus while He was praying and asked Him to teach them how to pray, so they wanted Jesus to teach them. Luke 11:1 I find this important because obviously it is implied that they wanted to learn to pray like Jesus prayed. So the Lord’s Prayer is not just the way we are to pray, but it is also the way Jesus prayed! Remember that Jesus is our model on how we are to live our Christian life.
Today I am going to look at the First sentence of the prayer of the Lord and we are going to see some key elements that we all must have. So wipe off the dust from your Bibles and turn to Luke Chapter 11. If you do not have a bible I recommend that you get the program at the bottom of this page called Glo by Zondervan. It is the best Bible program for computers out there.
The Lord’s Prayer Words
“Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us day by day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
For we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us.
And do not lead us into temptation,
But deliver us from the evil one.”
Our Father. This is probably the most important thing in the Lord’s prayer. It not only specifies who we are talking to, but it assumes that there is a relationship. I know that in our world of deadbeat dad’s and missing parents, not always is a father known, but in the time of Jesus and in the mindset of the people of that day, everyone knew who their father was. So the first thing to take out of this prayer is that Jesus was establishing that you personally had to have a relationship with the Heavenly Father. This is important because if you don’t then you are wasting your breath. You are talking to the ceiling. If you do not know if you have a personal relationship with God, if you are not confident of that, and wonder if God even knows you exist, then please go to the Meet Jesus page of this website and you can know for sure that you can call Almighty God, Our Father.
Hallowed Be Your Name. We do not use the word hallowed in common language anymore. The word means to honor and revere. To place it in a place of prominence. The names of God in the Bible were used to describe His character. For instance, Abraham called Him The Lord who Provides, and Moses Called Him The Lord our Healer. So to hallow the name of the Lord also means to respect and lift up all of who He is.
So this morning, as you start your prayers, begin by once again affirming your relationship with God, by calling Him your father and taking time to just meditate on the fact that He is your Heavenly Father, and that you are His child. Think about what it means to have a good relationship with a father, and how how precious that relationship can be and then apply it to your conversation with God. That is the definition of prayer by the way. Prayer is having a conversation with God. So apply how you would speak to a good father in your conversation with Him.
Then Honor and Revere His name. Thank Him for being the Lord who heals, the Lord who saves, the Lord who provides. Put His character and nature above what you see or feel. I will go into another teaching at a later date on all the names of God. But again with the software that Zondervan provides above, you can do that yourself.
Tomorrow we will look at praying for the Kingdom of God to be manifested here on earth.
Blessings to you all!
Pastor Duke
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About the Author:
Pastor Duke Taber has been a believer in Jesus for 33 years. He has been a pastor for over 20 years and was formerly the secretary treasurer of White Pine Ministerial Association. He is an alumnus of LIFE Bible College and Multnomah Biblical Seminary. He is a syndicated blogger at The Christian Post and Believe.com You can connect with Pastor Duke on Google+, Twitter, or on Facebook
PastorDuke – who has written 728 posts on Taber's Truths Christian Living Magazine.
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I have taught this series in church many times over the years, but I have never published it so I thought it would be a good idea since there are so many new people being exposed to this ministry.
I did a teaching on that very prayer and once I saw for myself what each verse meant and how detail it really is this is the prayer we should be saying.