The older Christian tradition had a category for the appetite Jesus is diagnosing here, though we rarely use it today. Medieval theologians described gluttony not merely as an excessive appetite for food but as any appetite that has lost its proper measure, any desire...
Matthew 6 is a carefully constructed literary unit. Three disciplines, giving, prayer, and fasting, are each addressed in exactly the same pattern: the hypocrite’s corrupt motive, the disciple’s right practice, and a two-sided verdict. By the time Jesus...
Look back over the week. The Lord’s Prayer began with our Father and ends with deliverance. In between, every petition has trained us to be the kind of person Jesus called blessed at the start of His sermon: the poor in spirit. The poor in spirit are not those...
After the God-centered petitions, the prayer turns to our needs. The first is bread, and the petition is striking in its smallness: not a year’s supply, not a five-year plan, but today’s bread. Craig Keener notes that for the traveling disciples in...
Notice the order of the Lord’s Prayer. The first three petitions are entirely God-centered: His name, His kingdom, His will. Only after that do our own needs appear. Grant Osborne points out that the prayer’s structure itself is a corrective to the...
