Friday 28 August 2026
A Meditation On The Lord's Prayer
It’s amazing how the Lord’s Prayer, so short, so simple and so old, just keeps on giving. Just tonight I was half-dozing, praying it and thinking about it and seeing from new angles.
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
I have to confess I often fall into the pattern of thinking that God is aloof — that he watches and judges and answers some prayers, but fundamentally leaves us to ourselves; the world is our kingdom. But these lines convict me; our vision is for this to be God’s kingdom, not in some indefinable future, but increasingly now. And what is God’s kingdom? That’s a deep theological question in itself, but the prayer gives us a good answer: where God’s will is done. Where God’s righteousness, love, justice and mercy prevail.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins,
as we forgive those who sin against us.
A perennial tension in Christian thought: should those of us who follow Christ expect to no longer sin? Of course we don’t want to sin, but if we do sin, does that mean our profession of faith is illegitimate and Jesus will say to us, “I never knew you”?
Often people answer this in the negative quoting 1 John 1:8-9, but actually I think the Lord’s Prayer here is even clearer: Jesus expects us to continue to need forgiveness for our ongoing sins. The context suggests so strongly this is not one-time forgiveness for old pre-conversion sins: “give us today our daily bread” is clearly ongoing prayer for an ongoing need, and of course forgiving those who sin against us is too.
Lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
“Deliver us from evil” on its own reads naturally as a plea to deliver us from evil inflicted on us from without, and surely it includes that. But it’s so easy to self-righteously assume that’s the whole focus — that we saints beg for protection from unrighteous “others”. Jesus powerfully undermines such thinking by reminding us we are prone to sinning: we ask God to deliver us not only from the sins of others, but our own sinful nature as well.