Dear Friends
In our Tuesday Home Group, we are looking anew at Great Prayers of the Bible. Our first session ‘Regular Prayer’ asks us to consider afresh the Lord‘s Prayer.
As a model for everyday prayer, the Lord‘s Prayer is certainly unsurpassable. However, our group agreed that its language may become somewhat too familiar and formulaic, perhaps even inappropriate in certain situations. With this in mind, we would like to share with you excerpts from more accessible versions which clarify meaning and reflect different situations.
In one primary school version, ‘Our Father’ is introduced as ‘God, you are awesome’. That certainly sums up our God in kids‘ speak. Quite an accolade!
In a New Zealand Lord‘s Prayer, God is asked to ‘sustain a commonwealth of peace and freedom’.
The First Nations’ version of the Lord‘s Prayer asks the Great Spirit that ‘the ways of the spirit-world above may be reflected in the earth below’, vividly clarifying ‘Thy Kingdom come’.
In Luke 11, we read that the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. In response Jesus gave them the words which have become known as the Lord‘s Prayer, in Aramaic, which was the common language of Judea in the first century AD. Jesus probably spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic.
Thus we can use the Lord‘s Prayer as a template for our own private prayers, taking each phrase in context and introducing the particular thanks, needs and desires which we want to bring to the Lord.
There can be few Christians who feel they pray often enough. This may therefore be a good time to re-assess and re-adjust our prayer priorities, perhaps by considering the Lord‘s Prayer as a pattern to use on a regular basis.
Enjoy the summer break. God bless.
The Tuesday Home Group