Read Along
Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used with permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com
Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
Jesus has just said that. So why pray at all? Jesus doesn’t argue the point. He gives His listeners a prayer. “This, then, is how you should pray.”
It may be the best-known prayer in the world. Christians all over the world know it by heart. But here’s something most of them have never noticed. The prayer has six requests, or seven as some churches count them, and when Jesus finishes it, He goes back and explains just one of them. Not the bread. Not the kingdom. The one about forgiving.
For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
Why that one? And what is Jesus teaching people to want, when He puts these words in their mouths?
This is episode eight of twelve on the Sermon on the Mount. Last time, Jesus told His listeners to give, pray and fast in secret, for an audience of one. This time, Matthew six, verses nine to fifteen. One prayer, taken a line at a time.
First, the shape of the whole thing.
Here’s the prayer as Matthew gives it. “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.”
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