Pray This Way: A Radical Take on the Lord’s Prayer

The Lord’s Prayer is the most popular prayer in the Christian community. It is sung or prayed at most of our important faith-based gatherings and many of us can even recite it from memory. But is this prayer to be recited? Is it to be prayed verbatim? When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray was he giving them a formula to chant mindlessly line by line? The answer is NO.

The author makes the case that the Lord’s Prayer is really like a Table of Contents in a book with each sentence as a chapter heading and proves it by asking and answering the following questions:

•What is the importance of knowing God as Our Father (as opposed to him being My Father), and is it not obvious that he is in heaven?

• What do we expect when we pray for his kingdom to come and how do we expect this to happen?
• How can we know his will in heaven so it can be done on earth and who do we expect to execute this will?
• Do we really understand that forgiveness from God for sins is directly proportional to our forgiveness of others for their wrongdoings?
• Why do we pray for daily bread when most of us have more than enough to eat?
• Why should we ask God to ‘lead us not into temptation’ when Jesus himself was led by the Spirit to be tempted of the devil?

The purpose of this booklet is to go beyond the surface of each line of the prayer, to fathom its depths and mine its treasures for a more rewarding life.