The Lord’s Prayer

 A few Thoughts about the Lord’s Prayer

Matthew ch6 v5-15

The words of the Lord’s Prayer are so familiar that their profundity is often overlooked.  We examine its words with the spirit of the young Christian who was thrilled that a book of over 100 pages was devoted to this pattern of prayer.

Hallowed be Thy Name

The full force of the phrase, ‘Hallowed be Thy name’ needs to be regained in an age when blasphemy trips so lightly off many tongues, without people fully realising what they are saying.

The name of God is so very special that it was never uttered by the ancient Israelites.  For God’s name to be truly hallowed, it is necessary to abandon all those thought processes that diminish the full majesty of God.

Give Us This Day

All we really need is our daily bread, yet a lifestyle that is conspicuous by its consumption makes a mockery of the beautiful simplicity of this request.

Forgive Us Our Sins

The forgiveness of an awesome, holy God for sinful humanity is on one level unjust.  It is simply undeserved, unmerited and therefore it behoves us not to cultivate an unforgiving spirit.

The life of Jesus is the perfect model of forgiveness.  His words, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” (Luke 23 v24) carry extra weight in the context of betrayal by one of His disciples and the travesty of a trial which resulted in Jesus being sentenced to death by crucifixion.

The phrase, ‘to err is human but to forgive is divine’ is not found in the Bible but it illustrates a profound truth.  When we meditate on the example of Jesus, we realise how truly trivial in many circumstances is our own lack of forgiveness.

We can only glory and wonder at the miracle of grace that is at the heart of the sacrifice of Jesus at Calvary.

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