The Lord's Prayer

Jesus wants us to know and to speak to our Father God as he does himself and gives us a pattern to follow. The prayer is encompassed by warnings, one against hypocrisy and the other against bitterness. Prayer is too important to be flattened out and used for merely human use. And it is too valuable to be threatened by the unwillingness to forgive others.

Our Father wants to colonise earth with the life of heaven, as a witness to and anticipation of the world to come. Prayer is the way this happens. Jesus teaches us to pray for the Father's glory, rather than our own of course, and for the Father's reign to be established. This is praying for Christ to return ultimately, but then, we want the Father's will on earth, just as it is already in heaven. Jesus teaches us to entrust our daily needs, our sins, and our vulnerability in this world to our Father. God reveals his glory in the earth as he answers these prayers and pours his grace and strength into our needy days and barren world.