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...
Two words from Jesus correct both the hypocrite and the pagan. Our Father. Donald Hagner and other commentators on Matthew note how radical this address was in first-century Judaism. Jewish prayers of the period leaned hard on God’s transcendence, His holiness,...
The Gentiles’ error was different from the hypocrites’ but came from the same diseased root. The hypocrite had the wrong audience; the pagan had the wrong God. The word Jesus uses for their babbling describes a noisy flow of sound without meaning, and...
