Old paths to a new faith: The Lord’s Prayer

Feb 1

by Amber Hannaford | published 1 Feb, 2024

An invitation

There’s a well trodden prayer that has been a guide to my faith these last few years. I stumble easily into it, feeling its familiarity like feet finding their way to the kitchen to quench a mid-night thirst. The prayer is short and simple, wise and sharp. It’s rhythmic and it’s easy — although some days when I pray it, I find myself halted abruptly, part way through its cadence.

It’s most likely you already know this prayer. Even if your praying days have petered to a quiet memory, listen to the first few words, and the lines might just tumble from your lips like lyrics from an old song.

‘Our Father in heaven’.
Hallowed be thy name.

I don’t think I’ve ever used ‘hallowed’ or ‘thy’ in day-to-day conversation, but out those ancient words come.

‘Your kingdom come,
your will be done’

The prayer we’re both now recalling is of course known by christians as The Lords Prayer. It didn’t come pre-wrapped this way, but history has recognised its significance and enamoured it with this title. Jesus — true to form — simply slotted it into a long conversation with his gaggle of followers, in support of his main point: that they shouldn’t make a show of their religious practices. Almost as an aside, he instructed them with these words:

“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’”

Matthew 6.9-13 (NIV, quoted throughout in italics)

Some ancient manuscripts include another sentence — a rousing verse of exaltation — but I find it interesting that the earliest texts are limited to these quick, unadorned lines. ‘Do not keep on babbling’, Jesus had just remarked, ‘for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him’ (Matthew 6.7-8, NIV).

Sometimes, prayer fades. Like the slow creep of unfamiliarity in a long-distance friendship, something once vital can suddenly leave us feeling blank. It may slip away for one of so many reasons, and by the time we’ve realised it, our attempts to rekindle a connection to prayer can feel clumsy and strange.

If you have a few minutes spare, and the tiniest spark of desire to commune again with God, may I be so bold as to offer my rediscovery of an old, pre-written prayer, as an invitation to a new beginning.

From Doubt to Rest: The Evolution of a Prayer Life

My early years of faith were filled with long prayers — long walks for long, private conversations with Jesus. These experiences were sweet and their memory is precious, but they soon became overshadowed by a predictably teenage mix of doubt and intensity. My long prayers became more like long wonderings about my standing before God.

I matured through this, shaking off the need for constant assurances and rigid routine. As an adult, prayer was worshipful, woven into normality as a time of tenderness and refreshment. Answered prayers became a part of life. I knew God’s provision to be commonplace and his peace to fall often. But as life often goes, years later I found myself again struggling with prayer. I’d been turning over some aspects of my absorbed version of christianity, examining them closely and dusting away the parts that wisdom now taught me were unnecessary or inaccurate. I had grown up, and with that came a deeper appreciation for the world outside of my own tiny corner. It was in this frame of mind that prayer began to feel uneasy. It felt so odd to ask God to intervene in my life, when a long list of more important things were going on in the world, and with much more urgency attached to them.

My faith was eventually gifted with a nudge; a gentle suggestion to pray The Lords Prayer daily. A short talk on the spiritual disciplines was the simple starting point for my new beginning. The talk wasn’t trying to be revolutionary — it was heavier on the value of discipline than the re-discovery of prayer — but the idea of a practice that didn’t rest on my own ingenuity or even on the mustering of my belief was a shift, and one that my flailing faith was drawn to. That night I scheduled intently, and the words ‘The Lords Prayer’ appeared on my home screen at 7am, 12pm and 3pm everyday for months. This was sometimes helpful and mostly unrealistic, and I soon settled into a more natural routine of reciting it just once, around the middle of the day.

What I found in repeating those simple lines, was an upward tilt of the heart; a bleary-eyed emergence from introspection, into the light of God’s sheer size, wisdom and focus. I had begun to bind myself to a confession. A trusting, open, laying-down-of-self kind of confession that marks — and patiently re-trains — a maturing christian faith.

A grounding in the things that matter most

The thing I appreciate about The Lords Prayer is its frankness. It’s evocative and beautiful yes, but it won’t let the praying person get far without honesty. Like a scan of the heart and mind, I find it tapping its finger decisively on a fresh bruise or stubborn callus: here, it whispers, this needs your attention. Try rolling through it after an argument and not flinching as you accidentally whisper ‘as we have also forgiven our debtors’. Or see if you can keep cradling a triviality when uttering the words ‘your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven’. It is so matter of fact in its forgiveness, its trust, and its humility, that it urges the praying person to adopt those same qualities, and quickly.

This is obviously a balm for the endless introspective. Instead of becoming tangled in bashful requests or mental self-flagellation, my new habit of prayer had me praying for the world that exists outside of my own head. Not that the Lords Prayer doesn’t ask for self-reflection — but it places us in the context of grander themes before it guides us there.

It’s these themes of the prayer that help firm up its power for those who pray it. Tenets of the Christian faith are laid out as the stepping stones of its recitation, course-correcting our prayers in real time where we may otherwise tend to wander inward. The prayer makes clear the things we should hold onto for dear life, touching one by one on ancient treasures — treasures fast-replaced in our cultural bubble of privilege and self-sufficiency, and out-shone in an era of mega-everything. It makes plain the posture we should have towards our fellow humans — friend or foe — placing us shoulder to shoulder on level earth, as we start again in pursuit of friendship with God.

Reverence

Let’s begin again at the top. The first confession this prayer leads us in, is one of reverence. ‘Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name’, or in the more familiar language of the New English Translation ‘may your name be honoured’ (Matthew 6:9, NET). In simply making a start and pointing our prayers toward some one, we confess our belief in a holy Other, and ascent to our dependance on the God of our faith. For some that faith may have grown so complicated and entangled with disillusionment, that it’s been a while since we’ve beheld one of its wild wonders: the God of our faith is not an unknowable deity living on a distant cloud; Jesus invites us to call our God ‘Abba’ — Father in ancient Aramaic — a title vibing with the love and honour of family warmth (1).

In a culture like ours where independence and individual freedoms are prized, the concept of reverence for God might be considered outdated at best. But for the Christian, a shift has happened. We believe that God is, and we believe Him to be the gracious spark of our very life and breath. We’ve accepted our lowly state, and lifted our eyes upward in recognition of God’s reality; God’s place and power. Reverence, for us, is intrinsic to life. And so it is in prayer, that we don’t make a move towards ourselves or towards others, before stopping to acknowledge that God precedes and sustains it all.

This confession can be liberating. In exalting God, we remind ourselves that we are not God (thank God). We are relieved of the load that we may have tried to carry on our own. Instead, we have our God to call on for help, like a child whose parent is just a whisper away.

Kingdom

If you’ve been re-evaluating your faith in the last few years, chances are you’ve found yourself pondering the form and nature of ‘the kingdom of God’. It’s another term that can seem so foreign in our collective now. But in the midst of wading through these terms, I have found the concept of kingdom pivotal in re-shaping a robust theology of hope, even as uncertainty has become a friend to my faith.

Put simply, and in the helpful phrasing of Michael Frost in his book Surprise the World, the kingdom that we pray will arrive in our midst can be understood as ‘God’s reign through Jesus’ (2). It’s all of the wonder and beauty that Jesus made possible for this weary world through his incarnation, life, death and resurrection. It’s the personal pivots we’ve experienced, brought on by God’s love — his slow and sure power ebbing through our inner lives — kindling faith in others. It’s the inch-by-inch flow of changed communities: unity that doesn’t add up, redemption that no one saw coming, servant-love that defies the times, forgiveness that re-wires families. It’s a bold belief in the deathly blow to sin and its power, even if we’re happy to admit that we can’t grasp the full meaning of that claim. God’s kingdom is here and now, and its also — mysteriously, agonisingly — futuristic in its completed form.

And so we pray ‘may your kingdom come’; that God’s reign would continue to grow, like a grand old tree whose branches stretch slowly outward, making room for every lonely creature needing refuge and rest. And we engage in a practice that feels weird in our culture: we surrender to God and to His infinite wisdom, rather than resting on our own ideas. ‘May your will be done’ — here and now as we also hope it’s being done in ways and realms beyond our sight and understanding.

Trust

The belly of the prayer is more familiar territory; we barely need instruction on how to ask God for the things we need. And typical of Jesus, this part is succinct. Yes, we should feel comfortable asking God for food, help, intervention, grace, strength, and patience — along with our entire list of daily needs — but it seems that Jesus doesn’t want us to get stuck there, focussed on ourselves.

‘Give us today our daily bread’. The phrasing seems both poetic and straightforward, and it is — but there are a couple of little treasures in this short line that can help us renew the most earthen form of our prayers.

One of the lessons that I’ve drawn from these next few lines, comes from Jesus’ choice to use the collective language of plural rather than singular pronouns. The whole prayer began that way, but it was easy to miss; now, when we are starting to pray about matters more personal, the language is louder. Jesus places the praying person within the tangle of community, instructing them to ask not just for their own portions, but communally, for our bread. In some forms of today’s christianity, busy with its quiet times and private prayer journals, the practice of standing before God as an us and not an I, is strangely unusual. But reflecting these little shifts of language in our prayers could help us to counter that inward pull, keeping our eyes looking up and out; acknowledging our need, but in the context of a multiplicity of need, both mundane and desperate, gathered and tethered together under the care of our loving God.

There’s another surprising quality to this one-line request. It is so confident, so matter-of-fact, that to our ears it almost reads as demanding. There’s no ‘please’, no social courtesies, and no painful, meandering lead-in of gushing thanks. Just straight up, bordering-on-obnoxious, belief for the bread. And this of course is the crux of this little confession: trust. Trust that may at first seem brazen, but is in reality so exhausted by self-reliance, it has finally come to God in unpolished humility, knowing that our needs are best met by Him after all.

Forgiveness and Humility

It’s striking that the next — most confronting — section of the prayer, follows a simple and confident request for food, one of our most basic human needs.

‘Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts,’

Here we come to that feet-shifting, throat-clearing moment of confessing our failures, and surprisingly, this prayer doesn’t pause for effect. In fact, it boldly asks forgiveness, and keeps rolling on. I think there is something to be learnt by this rhythmic treatment of bread and debts: that just as surely as our God gives us something as everyday and miraculous as bread, He offers us something as everyday and miraculous as forgiveness. Our need for it, and its availability to us, is part of daily human life. There’s no need to deny our debt of sin, and no need to get stuck in it; but there’s unseen value in confessing it, and deep, heart-healing beauty in it being forgiven.

What this line rolls into is, for me, the real clincher: the inescapable ‘as we also have forgiven our debtors.’ Offering forgiveness is by far the more gruelling task, but Jesus doesn’t seem to present it as an optional extra. For him, being forgiven, and offering forgiveness, go hand-in-hand. And as we’ve seen, this is all meant to be a very matter-of-fact, often-repeated part of daily life.

The next line isn’t much easier, as he instructs us to end our prayer with a final confession:

‘And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.’

Acknowledging our susceptibility to temptation doesn’t present as very adult. We’d rather see ourselves as beyond that struggle: living by conviction, firmly in control of our actions, sure of who we are; people of discernment who can see the truth with clarity; early adopters of what is good and right. But according to the wisdom of Jesus, the need for a moment of honest humility is taken for granted. And despite the discomfort, I have come to learn that calling out for help where our power is limited, amidst the regular rhythm of mending through forgiveness, can gently re-form the path of our days, and months, and years.

A practice leading to faith

For many of us — good, passionate Protestant-shaped christians, fretfully avoiding works-without-faith — scripted prayer has a ring of insincerity to it. We’ve been shaped by what we’ve seen, desperate prayers from the heart that unleash in a torrent of words; prayers that leave us standing out in the cold if our faith falls weary, or wobbles under a scare, and we can no longer find our phrasing. And for those who feel unsure about one (or two, or three) of the founding stones of their faith, how can they continue to pray — or give, or serve, or minister, or worship — from a sincere heart? Should we accept that this is the fate of maturity, laying down the notion of earnest prayer, and relegating it to the memory of our younger years?

Meanwhile, across the big wide world of church history and christian belief, borrowed practices have fuelled and fanned the faith of countless followers of Jesus, without drama. It’s likely a simple issue of exposure; of perhaps being too far removed from our roots — both Christian and Jewish — and the praying people who have penned prayers of behalf of others, and prayed the penned prayers of others their whole lives long.

For me, embracing a pre-composed prayer has created a fall-back for my faith. Now, on the days where words escape me and my faith is more neglected pot-plant than giant, breezy-limbed tree, I have words of deep power to draw on. Words that have been right under our nose in the gospels this whole time.

If your faith has shifted, and you haven’t yet landed on steady earth, my hope is that in sharing this rediscovery of prayer, these words would be an encouragement to you: start again with something as elementary as The Lords Prayer. Let its confessions steer your heart and mind towards wonders worth holding to. And if you can suspend your gnawing disbelief and lean on the faith of countless others for a moment, may you also rediscover in its rhythms and confessions, the nearness of God.

References:

Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People 2016, Navpress, p.21

PrayerGrowing FaithLong Read

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