Many Christians have the Lord’s Prayer memorized, but few take the time to regularly meditate and prayer from it. Our familiarity can so easily become our peril. We cognitively know the prayer’s contents, but has it entwined itself into our very DNA? When considering this most excellent of all prayers, we should note three things.

First, although we most often think of Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, Luke’s Gospel records another version. That scenario sees Jesus returning from His regular private prayer to then be asked by His disciples to teach how to pray. Like the disciples, we too must approach the Lord’s Prayer with this prayer on our lips: Lord, teach us to pray. We must admit that our loftiest ideas of prayer are insufficient to lay before the throne of the almighty Creator of heaven and earth. We must come to Jesus’ model prayer with humility, ready to submit and pattern our own prayers after this prayer of prayers that He has gifted to us.

Second, Christ responded to His disciples by saying, “When you pray, say…” In Matthew, Jesus says plainly, “Pray then like this.” These words are not to be glossed over and taken as being purely advisory. Here Jesus is commanding us to use these words, for how we ought to pray. To neglect the Lord’s Prayer, therefore, is not simple foolishness; it is pride and disobedience. So, ask yourself when you last prayed from the Lord’s Prayer? When did you last let it guide and shape how you prayed?

Third, before presenting the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warns how we must not pray. Specifically, He tells us not to 1) pray to be seen as holy “like the hypocrites” or 2) “heap up empty phrases like the Gentiles do.” Even though our Lord then gives His prayer as a remedy to these false forms of prayer, we must beware that even our praying of the Lord’s Prayer can fall into these two categories. Indeed, Luther once lamented:

What a great pity that the prayer of such a master is prattled and chattered so irreverently all over the world! How many pray the Lord’s Prayer several thousand times in the course of a year, and if they were to keep on doing so for a thousand years they would not have tasted or prayer on iota, one dot, of it!

Much of our present disuse of the Lord’s Prayer stems, I believe, from fear of such legalistic usage. Yet legalism is not to be combatted by neglecting discipline, and just because the Lord’s Prayer can be used improperly does not mean that we have a right to ignore Jesus’ command and cease using it altogether. This prayer is the epitome and model of all prayer, but we are clearly not limited to use only these words. Indeed, we need not always recite the Lord’s Prayer word-for-word as a prayer, nor do we always need to pray through each of the six petitions. Rather, every petition that we make to the Father ought to be patterned around one of those given to us by Jesus Himself.

As Jesus’ disciples, we look to our Lord for instruction on how to pray.

He has answered.

We must now hear and obey.