Most of us learned the Lord’s Prayer the way we learned the Pledge of Allegiance. Standing up, with a room full of other people, in a rhythm our mouths could run without our minds coming along.
That is not a criticism of reciting it. I recite it. But it does explain why so many believers can say all fifty-two words from memory and have never once used the thing for what it was built for.
Because Jesus did not hand His disciples a text to memorize. He handed them a frame to build on. And before He gave it to them, He spent four verses knocking down the two structures they already had.
The Actor and the Machine
The first bad model has an audience.
And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men.
Matthew 6:5 NKJV
The word behind hypocrite is hupokritēs (ὑποκριτής), Strong’s G5273, and in ordinary Greek it was not a moral term at all. It was a job. A hupokritēs was a stage actor, the man who spoke from behind a mask. Jesus takes a word from the theater and lays it over a man at prayer, and the charge is not that the man is lying about his beliefs. The charge is that he has an audience, and the audience is not God.
Every man who has ever prayed out loud in a room knows this temptation from the inside. You can hear yourself building a sentence for the people listening. Jesus prescribes a room and a closed door, which is not a rule against public prayer. It is a cure. Go somewhere the performance is impossible and find out what is left.
The second bad model has no audience at all, only a mechanism.
And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words.
Matthew 6:7 NKJV
Vain repetitions is battalogeō (βατταλογέω), Strong’s G945, and it is a rare word, possibly one Jesus or Matthew coined for the occasion. It carries the sense of stammering, of babbling, of piling up syllables. The theology underneath it is simple. Volume is leverage. Say the name enough times, list enough attributes, hold out long enough, and the deity will finally be worn into cooperation. Watch the prophets of Baal on Carmel from morning until noon and you are watching the whole system.
Then Jesus says the sentence that should have ended prayer as a technique forever.
For your Father knows the things you have need of before you ask Him.
Matthew 6:8 NKJV
He already knows. Which raises a question worth sitting with. If He already knows, why ask at all? Hold that. We will come back to it in the post on persistence, and the answer is better than the one you are expecting.
One Small Word Changes the Assignment
Now comes the model, and it opens with a word we skate right over.
In this manner, therefore, pray.
Matthew 6:9 NKJV
In this manner is houtōs (οὕτως), Strong’s G3779. It is an adverb of manner. It means thus, in this way, after this fashion. He is not saying, here are the words. He is saying, here is the shape.
Think of what a father does when he teaches a boy to swing a hammer. He does not hand him a script. He puts the boy’s hands on the handle, moves the elbow, and says, like this. The specific nail does not matter. The motion transfers.
Fifty-two words in English. Six requests. And every prayer you will ever pray fits into one of them.
The Six Rooms
The model splits cleanly down the middle. The first three requests are about God. The last three are about us. That order is the whole lesson, and it is the exact reverse of how most of us pray.
Hallowed be Your name. The verb is hagiazō (ἁγιάζω), G37, to set apart as holy. It is a request, not a compliment. You are asking that the name of God be treated as weighty in the earth, starting with the man saying the sentence. In Hebrew thought a name is not a label, it is the character of the person compressed into a word, and this is why I will not use a casual substitute for the divine name. Jehovah told Moses His name because He intended to be known by it.
Your kingdom come. You are asking for the government of God to break into ground currently held by somebody else. This is not a passive wish for the sweet by and by. It is a request for territory.
Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Here is the standard. Not as it is in my church, not as it is in my denomination. As it is in heaven, where the will of God meets no resistance at all. You are asking for that condition to spread down here.
Give us this day our daily bread. The word translated daily is epiousios (ἐπιούσιος), G1967, and it is one of the strangest words in the New Testament. It appears here and in Luke’s version and effectively nowhere else in surviving Greek literature. The best sense is bread for the coming day, or bread sufficient for existence. Not a warehouse. Today’s portion. Every Jew who prayed it heard manna underneath it, which came down in the amount needed and rotted if you hoarded it.
Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. Opheilēma (ὀφείλημα), G3783, is a commercial word. It means what is owed. Sin as an outstanding balance. And Jesus attaches the only clause in the entire prayer that comes with a condition, then doubles back after the amen to underline it in verses 14 and 15. He knew we would try to skip it.
Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. The Greek permits, and the context favors, a person rather than an abstraction. Deliver is rhuomai (ὥομαι), G4506, to drag someone out of danger. The prayer ends with a man asking to be pulled out of a fight he cannot win on his own.
Count the Pronouns
There is one more thing in this prayer and almost nobody notices it.
Our Father. Give us. Forgive us. Deliver us.
Not one first-person singular pronoun appears in it. Not one. The model prayer Jesus gave His church cannot be prayed alone in the grammatical sense, even when you pray it alone in a room. Every time you ask for bread you are asking for the man across town who has none. Every time you ask to be forgiven you are standing in a line of debtors.
We flattened the plural out of our English Bibles when thou and ye collapsed into you, and we have been reading the New Testament as a private letter ever since. The model prayer is one more place where the loss shows.
How to Use It This Week
Try this. Take the six requests as six headings and pray your own life into them, out loud, one at a time.
Hallowed be Your name, and here is where I have handled it cheaply this week. Your kingdom come, and here is the piece of ground I am asking for, the house on my street, the department where I work. Your will be done, and here is where I want my own way instead. Give us this day, and here is what my family actually needs before Friday. Forgive us, and here is the name of the person I have not forgiven. Deliver us, and here is the thing that keeps getting me.
That takes about fifteen minutes the first time you do it, and you will find you have prayed with more specificity than you have in months.
The words were never the point. The motion was.
Going Deeper
Read Matthew 6:5-15 and Luke 11:1-4 side by side. Luke’s version is shorter and the differences are not errors. Two accounts of a teacher who taught the same lesson more than once, and the shape holds in both.
Next in the series, the one word that explains why a man is allowed to open his mouth in that throne room at all.
Leave a Reply