Teach Us to Pray: What the Lord’s Prayer Is Teaching Me About Following Jesus

There are certain passages of Scripture that familiarity can make more difficult to hear. The Lord’s Prayer is probably one of them. If you grew up in church, there is a decent chance you memorized some version of it. Maybe it was the King James: “Our Father which art in heaven.” Maybe you repeated it every Sunday. Even if you didn’t grow up in church, you’ve probably heard it somewhere. It is one of those passages that has escaped the boundaries of Christianity and found its way into movies, funerals, locker rooms, public ceremonies, and popular culture. Familiarity is a gift, but it can also trick us into believing that because we know the words, we understand what Jesus is saying.

This summer at Bella Vista Assembly of God, I spent five weeks preaching through the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11. What struck me by the end wasn’t simply how much Jesus packed into a few sentences. It was the order in which He packed it. The disciples came to Jesus with a simple request: teach us to pray. Jesus could have started almost anywhere, but He started with a Father.

“Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread, and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation.”

— Luke 11:2–4 ESV

Before Jesus tells us to ask for anything, He tells us who we’re talking to. That was where I began the series in Our Father. I think this matters because all of us bring something with us when we hear the word father. For some, it’s affection and safety. For others, it’s absence, disappointment, or pain. Our experiences with earthly fathers can shape what we assume about a heavenly one. But Jesus isn’t telling us that God is like whatever experience of fatherhood we happened to receive. He’s revealing what fatherhood was always supposed to point toward. A father imparts life and then commits himself to that life.

I think about this sometimes with my own kids. Almost every morning, my daughter will catch me as I’m leaving for work. There are mornings when she’d prefer that I stay. Frankly, there are mornings when I’d prefer it too. But part of loving my children is being committed to their lives in ways they don’t always see. I go to work in part because I love them. And if an imperfect earthly father can be committed to the lives of his children, how much more can we trust a perfect heavenly Father?

That changes prayer. Prayer isn’t trying to get the attention of a distant God. We aren’t submitting a request to someone who may or may not be interested. Jesus says we approach a Father who knows us and loves us. And not merely my Father, but our Father. Nobody has cornered the market on God’s ear. My prayers don’t matter more because I’m a pastor. There isn’t a spiritual VIP line where certain Christians get faster access. The same Father who hears me hears every one of His children.

Yet Jesus does something interesting. Having brought us close enough to call God Father, He immediately reminds us that this Father is holy.

“Father, hallowed be your name.”

There is intimacy, but there is also reverence. We tend to have trouble holding those things together. We can imagine God as near and make Him casual, or imagine Him as holy and make Him distant. Jesus refuses both choices. God is Father, and God is holy. Before the prayer ever gets around to our needs, Jesus teaches us to give Him first place.

That may be one of the most important things prayer does to us. We often approach prayer as a way of getting God’s attention concerning the things that matter to us. Jesus begins by directing our attention toward what matters to God. The first movement of prayer is not God adjusting Himself to me. It is me adjusting my perspective to Him.

That becomes even clearer with the next request, which became the focus of the second message in the series, The Kingdom.

“Your kingdom come.”

Most of us are pretty good at building kingdoms. We may not call them that. We call them careers, plans, goals, families, retirement accounts, ministries, reputations, or simply the picture in our heads of how life is supposed to go. None of those things are necessarily bad. The problem is that eventually one kingdom has to take precedence: mine or His.

When Jesus teaches us to pray for God’s kingdom to come, He isn’t giving us religious language to attach to our existing ambitions. He’s teaching us to surrender them. I like the way Matthew’s account continues the thought: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Those ideas belong together. Your kingdom come gets my attention. Your will be done requires my participation. On earth as it is in heaven gives me hope that God’s will can actually take root here.

Prayer, then, is not primarily an exercise in convincing God to endorse the life I’ve already decided to live. It is the regular surrender of my life to His. That’s considerably harder. Jesus Himself showed us what it looks like in Gethsemane. Faced with the cross, He prayed the prayer He had already taught His disciples: not my will, but Yours. There comes a point where praying for God’s will means being willing to trade ours for it. We cannot disobey our way into God’s will, and we cannot sincerely pray “Your kingdom come” while spending our lives protecting our own little kingdoms from His interference.

Sometimes, then, the most meaningful prayer we can pray is also one of the shortest: Your kingdom come. When life goes sideways, Your kingdom come. When I don’t know what to do, Your kingdom come. When what I want and what God wants appear to be moving in different directions, Your kingdom come. It is, in a very real sense, the biblical version of “Jesus, take the wheel,” although admittedly that doesn’t sound nearly as good in a country song.

Only after establishing the Father, His holiness, His kingdom, and His will does Jesus turn toward our needs. That became the third message, Our Daily Bread.

“Give us each day our daily bread.”

I’ve always found the word daily interesting because I’d prefer annual bread. Personally, I would find it reassuring if God would lay out everything I’m going to need for the next decade, place it neatly in front of me, explain every difficult season in advance, and perhaps provide an accompanying spreadsheet. Instead, Jesus teaches us to ask for today.

For the disciples, the language would have brought to mind Israel gathering manna in the wilderness. God could have provided a year’s worth at once. He didn’t. There was enough for the day, and tomorrow they would have to trust Him again. Daily provision became daily formation. The bread wasn’t only feeding them; dependence was forming them.

Most of us hear “daily bread” and think about survival. Just enough to make it. Enough money to pay the bills. Enough strength to get through another day. But bread isn’t the destination. We eat so that we can live. We rest so that we can work. We receive strength so that we can do something with it. If the beginning of the prayer is about hallowing God’s name, seeing His kingdom come, and doing His will, then daily bread is the provision necessary to participate in that purpose today. The prayer becomes: Father, give me what I need to faithfully live the life You’ve given me today.

Sometimes that bread is money. Sometimes it’s energy. Sometimes it’s wisdom, an open door, an encouraging conversation, or the strength to do something difficult. And sometimes our daily bread comes through another person. That is another detail that’s easy to miss because Jesus doesn’t teach us to pray, “Give me my daily bread.” He says, “Give us.”

In fact, the entire prayer is stubbornly plural: our Father, give us, forgive us, lead us. Christianity was never designed as a collection of self-sufficient individuals who happen to sit in the same room once a week. God provides for His people, and one of the ways He does that is through His people. Something God has placed in my hands may be part of your daily bread—my encouragement, my generosity, my experience, my time, my willingness to carry a burden with you. Provision carries responsibility.

Then the prayer moves into territory considerably more uncomfortable. In the fourth message, Forgiveness, I spent time thinking about the language Jesus chooses here: the language of debt.

“Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us.”

Everybody has an unpaid invoice somewhere. Someone owes you something: an apology, an explanation, justice, trust that was broken, years you cannot get back, a relationship they damaged. We don’t normally use the language of accounting when we talk about hurt, but debt is surprisingly accurate. When someone wounds us, something inside says, You owe me.

And sometimes we’re right. That’s one of the things I appreciate about Jesus’ treatment of forgiveness. He doesn’t pretend nothing happened. Forgiveness doesn’t require us to look at something genuinely evil and call it acceptable. There is a debt. The harder truth is that some debts can never be repaid. No apology restores a childhood. No check restores trust. No punishment brings someone you love back. There are losses for which no human being possesses enough currency to make the account whole again.

Eventually forgiveness becomes more than saying, “I forgive you.” It becomes surrendering my right to spend the rest of my life trying to collect what can never actually be repaid.

But notice the order Jesus gives us. First, forgive us our sins. Then, we forgive those indebted to us. That order matters. Christian forgiveness doesn’t begin with trying harder to be gracious toward terrible people. It begins by remembering that before I was ever offended, I was an offender. I have sinned against a holy God, and God forgave me—not because I deserved it, and not because I finally compensated Him for the damage. Jesus paid a debt I couldn’t pay.

Grace received becomes grace given. We don’t forgive because the other person deserves forgiveness. We forgive because we didn’t deserve ours either. That doesn’t make forgiveness easy, but it changes where forgiveness begins. It starts with receiving before it becomes releasing, and eventually we have to trust God with the balance.

Then Jesus ends His prayer in a place that feels surprisingly vulnerable. It became the final message of the series, Lead Us.

“And lead us not into temptation.”

There is something strange about temptation. I’ve never been tempted to eat a bowl of gravel. I can walk past landscaping rocks without exercising any spiritual discipline whatsoever. I don’t have to quote Scripture. I don’t need an accountability partner. Eating rocks simply isn’t an option in my mind.

Something becomes a temptation when an alternative I know I shouldn’t choose begins to look like an option. That’s what makes temptation dangerous. I can know something is wrong, know where it leads, know what God says about it, and still find myself considering it.

Jesus teaches us to pray about that. Not because God is the one tempting us—Scripture is clear that He isn’t—but because “lead us not into temptation” is an admission of dependence. Father, there are things coming today that I cannot see. Conversations I don’t know I’ll have. Opportunities I don’t know I’ll receive. Decisions I don’t yet know I’ll face. Lead me.

Temptation is tricky because it rarely advertises the destination. A mouse doesn’t want the trap; it wants the cheese. That’s how temptation works. It presents the immediate reward and hides the eventual price. Nobody wakes up and decides to destroy a healthy marriage. Nobody intentionally sets out to become consumed by bitterness. Nobody says, “I’d like to ruin my life today.” We choose the cheese. The trap comes with it.

If we aren’t careful, something else begins to happen. What was once unthinkable becomes familiar. What becomes familiar eventually becomes normal. And what becomes normal starts looking like an option. This is why the final movement of the prayer is so important: deliver us.

We sometimes talk about deliverance as though it’s something Christians needed once, when we first came to Jesus. Jesus places dependence on God’s leading in a daily prayer. There are situations I will not navigate successfully through willpower alone. There are currents stronger than I am. There are moments when even the person accustomed to rescuing others needs a rescue.

In Gethsemane, Jesus told His disciples to pray so they wouldn’t give in to temptation. He didn’t tell them to become tougher. He told them to pray. Temptation isn’t defeated by pretending we’re stronger than we are. It’s defeated through dependence upon a Father who is stronger than what is tempting us.

And that, I think, is why the Lord’s Prayer ends exactly where it should. It begins with Father and ends with lead us. We begin by acknowledging that we have a Father, and we finish by acknowledging that we still need Him. Everything in between describes a life lived in that relationship.

The prayer starts by turning our attention away from ourselves and toward God: Your name, Your kingdom, Your will. Then, having put those things in their proper order, Jesus teaches us to bring the very ordinary realities of being human to our Father: we need bread, we need forgiveness, and we need help. We need enough for today. We need grace for what we did yesterday. We need guidance for whatever waits for us tomorrow.

Maybe that is why the Lord’s Prayer has endured for two thousand years. It is remarkably short—you can pray the entire thing in less than a minute—but it manages to hold almost the whole human experience inside it. We want to know that someone loves us. We want our lives to matter. We worry about whether we will have enough. We hurt people and get hurt by people. We find ourselves drawn toward things we know will hurt us. And Jesus takes all of it and places it within a relationship with a Father.

The disciples asked Jesus a simple question:

“Lord, teach us to pray.”

He did.

But the more time I spend with His answer, the more I think Jesus gave them something larger than a prayer to recite. He gave them an orientation for an entire life. Know who your Father is. Give Him first place. Let His kingdom become more important than yours. Trust Him for what you need today. Receive forgiveness and release the debts of others. Admit that you are not strong enough or wise enough to navigate everything ahead of you alone.

The Lord’s Prayer takes less than a minute to say. Learning to live it will take the rest of our lives.