A Complicated Way to Pray

The Lord’s prayer follows the pattern of the commandment to love God with heart, soul, strength, and mind, and our neighbors as ourselves. After three petitions involving love for God’s name, kingdom, and will, we move to requests that reflect our personal needs, our relationships with our neighbors, and the struggles of our own souls. A famously simple prayer, but so comprehensive!

Martin Luther’s book “A Simple Way to Pray” teaches people how to use the Lord’s prayer as a structure for praying through our various intercessions. Others use it as a model for a prayer bracelet, with a different bead for Praise, Hope, Ask, Forgive, Protect, and Thank - categories that encompass everything you want to tell the Father. 

While I find relief after a good brain-dump session with God, I actually think it’s more powerful to use the Lord’s prayer to pray through the different layers or levels of one particular issue at a time. It’s a structure for making each of our intercessions more complete, because the issues facing us are often complex. In this one short prayer, we move from the spiritual (God), to the personal (bread), the interpersonal (forgiveness), the systemic (trial), all the way to the moral (evil). Efficient but deep, it’s meant to empower us to become completely free.

For example, if you are praying about racism, you could use the Lord’s prayer to help you confess the sins of racism that you see in our culture, in interpersonal relationships, in our institutions, and within our own hearts. The trials, temptations, and evils facing us are complex - our religion must be too. Christ’s genius in teaching us this prayer helps us go deeper in our prayers, so our transformation can be deep as well.

with love, Pastor Chelsea