“Pray, then, in this way:
‘Our Father, who is in heaven, Hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil’” (Matt 6:9-13).
Jesus gave this as a model prayer for his disciples. The first few lines of the prayer have to do with God. These are requests oriented around God’s name, God’s kingdom, and God’s will. At the beginning it is not about us, our kingdom, or our will. It’s about him.
Proper prayer begins with aligning our will to God’s will. This implies that we have been in the Scriptures learning his will. People often approach God as if he is unknowable, as if anyone’s guess has equal weight. Yet God has provided an extensive record of who he is and what he’s like on the pages of the Bible. On the vast majority of issues we face as humans, we do not have to guess at all. It is clear, in words, preserved in the Bible.
Our struggles in prayer are not because of a lack of information. They are because of a lack of investigation. We have often failed to get to know God because we have not investigated him. Perhaps many have sought God as if he will simply appear to them in a dream or a vision. It is not impossible that God might do this, but, in truth, he has laid himself out for all to see and understand on the pages of the Bible.
As humans we don’t always even know the right things to pray for. Sometimes we even come to prayer thinking that the goal is to get God to do our will. True breakthroughs in prayer come when we welcome God’s will to be positioned over any individual desires we might have. Once we know God’s will, we pray for God’s will to be done. In fact that’s where we start.
Our need comes into play in the second half of the prayer that Jesus handed down. Our need is characterized in at least three ways by Jesus. I call them the three Ds, dependence, depravity, and deliverance.
Dependence. We pray for our daily bread. Bread was a staple in the diet of Jesus’ day. It represents that which is necessary for survival. God is the Creator and Sustainer of our existence. The food in our refrigerators did not originate at the grocery store. They have come to us from the bounty of the earth which God created and sustains (not to mention things like gravity and oxygen). The first thing we pray for ourselves is that God would give us the means of survival day by day. We acknowledge our dependence on him.
Depravity. We ask God to forgive our debts (“sins,” Lk 11:4). As we approach God we find ourselves in need of forgiveness. All people are sinners and have done evil in God’s sight (Rom 3:23). In a word we are depraved. This depravity does not mean we are all as evil as we could be. We could be worse. It does mean that we are evil enough to deserve the judgment of God. So we acknowledge our depravity before God. We ask for his forgiveness. We also seek to forgive others as he has forgiven us.
Deliverance. We pray for God not to lead us into temptation. Now, God does not lead anyone into sin (Js 1:13). So this request is that God would give us the strength to walk away from temptation. Perhaps a recovering alcoholic asks for strength to just keep walking past a bar. The problem with temptation is that we are so tempted by it. We tend to want the things we are tempted by even though we know they are wrong. But when we are prayed up, in the word, in church, in fellowship, in worship, the Spirit within us gives us great strength to overcome.
There is another enemy besides our own sinful inclinations, Satan. Jesus instructs us to pray to be delivered from evil. The term “evil” can legitimately be translated as “evil one.” Many passages in the Bible teach us that there is a very real Satan along with his demonic armies (Eph 6:12; 1 Pet 5:8; 2 Cor 10:3-5). The evil one has at least two basic strategies, to blind the world from their need for Christ and to immobilize those who have turned to Christ. If you are immobilized in your walk of faith these days, there could truly be a spiritual issue at stake. Have you prayed, asking Jesus to deliver you from any spiritual forces oppressing you? So we ask God to deliver us from ourselves and from the spiritual forces of evil that come against us.