Lords Prayer,
or Our Father, the principal Christian prayer that Jesus in the
New Testament (Mat. 6.9-13; Luke 11.2-4) taught his followers,
beginning, "Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name."
It summarizes Jesus' teaching and stresses the concern of honoring
God before that of meeting one's own needs. It also reveals Jesus'
sense of a filial relationship with God. After the Second Vatican
Council, Roman Catholics added a version of the doxology ( "For
thine is the kingdom," etc.) to prayer when used in the Mass;
the doxolgy was already current in Protestant liturgies and is
present in some manuscripts of Matthew. In Latin the prayer is
called Paternoster. It also occurs in the Didache. The first three
phrases of the prayer parallel the opening words of the ancient
Jewish Kaddish.
How many blessings are you and I missing out on because we have
never asked, because we never set out enough pots, or were too
scared to borrow pots from our neighbors? With God, nothing is
impossible (Luke 1:37). We control the blessings we receive by
our willingness to be obedient, to ask, to seek, to accept help
from others, to act on faith, and to prepare to receive. |
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